Five Seasons Read online

  All at once the music stopped. The curtain rose, revealing a minimal, almost symbolic set that Molkho stared at resentfully. It seemed ugly to him, and as the music resumed again, dusky and constrained, he grieved inwardly for his lost Don Giovanni. The stage was apparently meant to represent a large hall, or perhaps something else, a street, city, or even world, through which a coffin was being carried by a singing entourage. Soon it was laid down, however, and a woman leaped out of it and fled like the wind. Next Orpheus appeared; he was indeed a heavyset young woman with a small harp in one hand, at which Molkho stared with profound hostility. The whole opera seemed to him a punishment. No, it isn’t a misprint after all, he whispered to the fat German sitting next to him, who nodded back smilingly. Their tones clear and pure, the voices of the singers rose and clashed; what little action there was took place almost in slow motion to an excruciatingly slow poetic aria. Though he would have liked to doze off, Molkho felt it was out of the question. Ahead of him the man in black began to tremble, shaking his head so violently that his neighbors, roused from their theatrical spell, began to stare at him with mirth and revulsion, or even, like the middle-aged woman sitting next to him, with open horror. Yet the man seemed quite used to all this, which he dealt with by growing perfectly still for a while and glancing innocently around him. Before long, however, the music got the better of him again, and clenching his fists, he ordered the obedient orchestra to play on. The elderly German on Molkho’s right seemed transfixed by the spectacle too, yet apparently not unpleasurably, for he stared at the man with a good-natured smile. Meanwhile, onstage, Orpheus was searching for Eurydice in her thick alto voice, which clashed with the other singers in long, complicated arpeggios that seemed inscrutably modern and harmonically elementary at once, making Molkho borrow the program again to see when the piece had been written. Unable to find the information anywhere, he felt more indignant than ever.

  Act I was drawing to a close: Orpheus was told he could set forth for Hades, while the orchestra, faultlessly led by the man in the next row, broke into a strong, sweeping melody. The applause that broke out as the curtain fell was prolonged and patient, though not particularly loud, causing the man in black to bow his head modestly. He did not seem to notice the irate looks of his neighbors, who rose in protest as soon as the lights came on; rather, his head still bowed, he busily blew his nose while conversing quietly with his wife. Something about the couple, especially the deep serenity of the woman, made Molkho like them both. Was the man mentally ill? Or perhaps a concentration camp survivor who now haunted operas? But no, he looked too young for that.

  Molkho went to the buffet, where he ate a piece of chocolate cake and drank a small glass of juice. From somewhere came the sound of voices speaking Hebrew, and he spun around to look for them, yet already they had vanished into thin air. Could it have been simply his homesick imagination? Tomorrow night he would be back in Haifa with his children; the countdown had already begun. On his way back to his seat, he met the couple from the lobby, who inquired how he was enjoying the performance. “It’s not bad, not bad at all,” he replied, wanting to ask them if they knew when Gluck lived. Quite a few people, he noticed, had changed places to get away from the man in black. Not his elderly neighbor, though, who collapsed heavily into his seat; bored though he was, he appeared to be highly pleased with the culture it took to spend the evening at an opera rather than a brothel.

  The lights dimmed slowly, casting a bluish white pallor over the audience. The music began again, and the man in the next row braced himself and clenched his fists. He signaled to the wind section, cautioned the violins, grunted, and swayed; but this time, determined to stop him, his wife scolded him savagely until hushed by a chorus of furious hisses from around her. The man winced like a stricken animal, and Molkho, feeling a deep sorrow, cast a sympathetic glance in his direction just as Orpheus and Eurydice began their slow ascent from Hades. Molkho knew that Orpheus musn’t look back as he led Eurydice after him, but he also knew, anxiously waiting for it to happen, that Orpheus would forget. And so he did, in Act III: with a loud cry, Eurydice disappeared down an opening while Orpheus, or rather the fat woman playing him, burst into a lovely, truly moving aria. The audience adored it, breaking into stormy applause, and the man in black, still waving his fists, threw his head back uncontrollably and stared slack-jawed into space as if swallowing the music, tears running down his cheeks. A green spotlight lit the stage, a little Greek temple, columns and all, descended from the ceiling, and Molkho knew with an inner pang that the man was crying for him too. Even the German on his right was sitting on the edge of his seat.

  12

  ON HIS WAY BACK from the opera, he felt the full weight of the long day, which lay in his chest like a sleeping giant that kept pulling him down. And yet he felt stirred, the music, the performers, the orchestra, the audience, all churning wildly inside him. At first, he thought he had entered the wrong hotel, for the lobby was full of people, mostly tall, elegant Scandinavians gathered in a corner where the paterfamilias and his wife stood pouring drinks in full evening dress. Surprised, Molkho made his way through the crowd, took his key off its hook, and hurried up to the legal adviser’s room, determined to do something for their romance, which was still stalled at the starting line, even if it took a little foreplay (though a kiss on her sprained ankle, after removing the bandage, might be enough), after which he could crawl into bed and sleep next to her—a noncommittal move in itself, to be sure, but one sufficient to keep her hopes alive. Yet, no matter how loudly he knocked on her door, almost shouting her name, there was no answer from within.

  As he was returning to his room, however, the elevator door opened and a chambermaid handed him a note with the address of a restaurant at which the legal adviser was dining and a request to join her there. Though so tired he could barely stand, he stepped back out into the cold night air, following the chambermaid through the slushy remains of the snow and down deserted little streets beneath a star-strewn sky until they arrived at a huge, crowded, smoke-filled establishment with old green velvet wall-hangings and loud music; there, he wove his way down to a cellar that was twice the size of the upstairs, an immense, poorly lit, barnlike place with big barrels of beer along the walls and endless tables of noisy customers. He noticed her at once, sitting by herself in her short fur coat, squeezed in at a little table covered with a checked cloth on which were an empty half-bottle of wine and a plate of several well-gnawed bones. She was lively and bright-eyed, despite the great crush, puffing on a cigarette and chatting with three men at the next table. There was no doubt about it, he told himself, feeling his spirits flag at once: she had been resurrected. Yet, though he wanted only to get away, she had already spied him and was nodding to him casually, quite indifferent to his attempts to fight his way through the boisterous crowd. At last, he reached her table and stood there wordlessly, feeling tired and bewildered, while she regarded him with wide-open eyes beneath her heavy mascara, not a trace left of her great sleep. There was not even a chair for him to sit on. The three men at the next table bowed to him, appraised him with a glance, said something to or about him in German, and broke out laughing, to which he replied with a feeble grin while a red-vested waiter with a witty, intellectual air deftly emptied the plate and ashtray and produced a small stool, on which he sat Molkho, who huddled there uncomfortably, a head shorter than everyone, the butt of a spate of jokes that seemed part of the general atmosphere. But somehow he did not mind his low perch, which at least made him feel out of harm’s way.

  The waiter stood to take his order. “No, thank you,” Molkho said, “nothing for me,” but the legal adviser insisted. “Come now, you have to have something. The beer here is first-rate. I won’t let you pass it up.” “All right,” he said, “just a small glass of beer, but nothing to eat; really, I’m not hungry,” because if he ate anything he would have to pay for her meal too, which had obviously been a large one. “But you must be hungry. Please, eat someth
ing,” she repeated—rather oddly, he thought, so that, wondering whether she was concerned for him or merely exhibiting a new truculence, he gave in again, looking for inspiration at the diners around him until his eyes fell on a pungent-looking plate of blood-red sausage, and he asked the waiter for the same. Immediately, though, he regretted it. “But not such a big portion,” he said in Hebrew to the legal adviser. “One sausage is enough; tell him one’s enough,” and signaling to the waiter, he called out, “Eins,” while she stifled an embarrassed smile. Suddenly she seemed her old self again, the self-assured senior official attending international conferences at the public’s expense. No longer were they just two lonely people making contact on neutral territory, and so, seeking to recoup his position, he said, first of all, “Tell me how your ankle is.” The question appeared to surprise her. “It’s fine,” she murmured with a sharp glance at him, sounding rather irritated, perhaps because she sensed that he would have liked to bend down and examine it beneath the table. “I was worried about you,” he continued quietly, though slightly indignantly, realizing that she and the errant foot were again on good terms. “I really was.” “Yes, I know,” she said, her, eyes zeroing in on him, “I could feel it.” There was a sudden distance between them, as though all that had happened that day had happened to someone else.

  “So how was Don Giovanni?” she asked, wanting, he felt uneasily, to smoke him out. “It wasn’t,” he replied, managing to stay calm and keep smiling, perhaps because she still sounded tentative, as he told her about the last-minute switch to Orpheus and Eurydice. Had she ever heard of it or of a composer named Gluck? Without waiting for an answer, he handed her a program that he had found on one of the seats after the curtain calls. She took it with an air of bemusement and absently leafed through it while he reached into his pocket for her ticket and explained at great length why he hadn’t sold it, there having been no demand and the box office having been closed, though he was sure she could get a refund through her brother’s travel agency, since it wasn’t her fault that the opera was changed. Yet, far from being interested in a refund, she only seemed annoyed by his advice. “It’s really of no importance,” she murmured rather formally, tearing up the ticket and dumping the pieces in the ashtray. “You still haven’t told me about the opera.” None too exactly, he began to describe it for her, aggrievedly expressing his amazement that Orpheus had been played by a woman. “But why should that bother you?” she asked. Because, he explained, it annoyed him to see a big fat woman with a little harp singing about her love for Eurydice. True, he got used to it after a while, but why bring in a woman in the first place? Was it just someone’s idea of being contemporary and feminist? She looked at him pityingly. “I suppose,” she said, still turning the pages of the program, “that the part was originally written for an alto and that you can’t find men with such high voices anymore.”

  The waiter arrived with a stein of beer and a single sausage so grotesquely huge that it made Molkho shudder. “That’s not what I had in mind,” he smiled. “I wanted one of those smaller ones.” “Never mind,” said the legal adviser. “They won’t take it back, so you might as well eat it—it looks quite juicy. This is a famous beer cellar.” Rising to bring him a jar of mustard from the next table while ordering coffee and cake for herself, she deftly arranged his napkin and handed him his knife and fork, seeking perhaps to repay him for all his care. Meanwhile, the men at the next table broke off their loud talk to crack some joke about the steaming knockwurst, their coarse laughter making him regret having ordered it even more, especially as he wasn’t even hungry, just tired and slightly cowed, or perhaps simply sorry that she wasn’t still silently sleeping in her soft hotel bed, with the snow blowing against the window. Why, what a magical time that was, he thought longingly, remembering the feeling of tunneling toward her, though it now seemed rather doubtful whether he had gotten anywhere.

  Listlessly, in the orange gloom of the barnlike space, with its walls of dirty green velvet, amid the noise and the raucous music, he began cutting his sausage, eating it with the sleepy self-discipline learned long ago as a child when his mother had always made sure he left his plate clean. The reassuring little stool now felt like an interrogation seat, and her beady eyes, like a squirrel’s catching sight of a nut, bored steadily into him, the target verified and ready to be pounced on. Running a hand through her short, girlish hair, she began to question him about the day, as if to ascertain whether there had really been such a thing or whether they simply had gone from night to night. Who, she asked, suddenly catching him off guard, had changed her sheet? He flushed, playing for time by pretending to think, only to break down and confess: the sheet had been sweaty and damp, and she had been too weak to change it herself. He was sorry if it had been indiscreet of him.

  For a moment she said nothing, concentrating on her cigarette; then, as if the time had come to talk frankly, she asked to be told about his wife, about the kind of woman she was. “My wife?” said Molkho, at a loss. “Why my wife?” “But why not?” asked the legal adviser. “I’m terribly curious.” “I would have thought that by now you’d have heard all about her,” he said. “Yes,” she replied, “I have. But now I want to hear it from you.” But he felt this was not the place to discuss his dead wife, this huge bam into which more and more people kept pouring as the movies and theaters let out, apparently because it was known for its capacity, which was, however, fast becoming exhausted.

  “She was an intellectual,” said Molkho, seizing on the first word that came to mind while looking at the legal adviser, who returned his gaze steadily. “She was very honest ... I mean, very critical ... of herself too. An intellectual. Nothing was ever good enough for her. She never felt fulfilled or happy. And maybe she never even wanted to be. Although...”

  He stopped in midsentence because just then there came a sound of thumping from upstairs, followed by such loud singing that he couldn’t hear himself think. “And I’m not an intellectual at all,” he concluded, though it wasn’t what he’d started out to say. “Yes, I’ve noticed that,” she said gently, regarding him with a newborn affection that only made him feel more certain that the coup de grace was imminent. Despairingly he glanced toward the entrance, through which new customers were still elbowing, checking their coats and plunging into the crowd. Suddenly he missed his wife so badly that it hurt. The legal adviser bent toward him, leaning so far across the table that he felt her hair brush his face, in her eyes a cold, intellectual glitter. “And so,” she whispered, “you killed her little by little—I only realized that today....” For a second he felt his blood curdle; yet at once, as if a soft quilt were thrown over him, he felt a warm, rich happiness in his veins. Slowly his eyes met hers. The thought was not new. “You’re killing me,” his wife used to say to him, although it was odd that the two women should think the same thing when they had never met. Wearily he smiled, feeling his near-naked scalp beneath his crew cut. What else, faced with such a verdict, could he do? He had no wish or way to defend himself and was tired of arguing. Indeed, he had stopped arguing completely during the past year. “You should know,” he said brightly, “that I did my best to take care of her.” “Yes, I do know,” she answered with compassion. “I know everything. I want you to try to understand...”

  The waiter deftly slipped two checks, his and hers, under their plates and disappeared. Molkho made up his mind to pay only his; she would get her share back from the office anyhow. “Try to understand,” she persisted, not wanting to hurt him yet intent on pursuing her insight. “I don’t mean that you did it consciously, but I felt today that you were trying to kill me too.” He blinked happily, deliciously drunk; the German beer had gone to his Levantine head, and the juicy sausage, seemingly reconstituted there, was now crawling through his stomach. Feeling slightly seasick, as though he were on board a big, throbbing ship pitching in the waves, he struggled to stay calm and take his time answering. And she, too, was silent now, perhaps shocked by her own words. “T
o kill you too?” His big brown eyes opened wide. “But why?” “That’s what I’d like to know,” she said. Slowly he drained the last drops of beer from his glass. The men at the next table had suddenly stopped talking, as though aware that something significant was going on between the two foreigners.

  But Molkho was tired of arguments and would have gladly postponed this one, too, until they were home, if ever they met there again. It’s a lucky thing we’re not on the same flight tomorrow, he told himself, looking at her eyes, whose feverish glitter repelled him, the gleeful, intellectual glitter of her clever, twist-all mind. “In that case, you must have killed your husband too,” he said with a curt laugh. “Perhaps I did,” she answered candidly, “though not in the same way as you.” He shivered, wanting to put an end to it. The noise level was unbearable and he had been on his feet since six o’clock that morning. “Shall we?” he asked, laying a warm hand on hers, which let itself be held like an old bird.

  He followed her quietly to the entrance, glancing over her shoulder at her wristwatch, whose hands said almost midnight, before planting a light kiss on her dry forehead, which had a slightly sweetish taste. Mechanically he apologized for his tiredness and for having to catch a plane in the morning, and she urged him to go to bed, though she herself, she said, was not ready to turn in yet. And so they parted, and he stepped out into the frigid night, thinking of the shabby man at the opera, from whose strange, contorted movements the music had seemed to flow. Still, I enjoyed it, he thought, that’s one opera I’ll never forget, even if I can’t sing a note of it. In the hotel, which he found unaided, all the lights were already out; the bar in the corner was shut, and the only keys still in their cubbyholes were his and hers. “Sechs,” said Molkho with the last of his strength, his hand held out as though to salute the student with the book, who was on the night shift again; then, recalling that the young man spoke English, he asked to be awakened at five. The student wrote it down, though just to be on the safe side, he gave Molkho an alarm clock as well.