Authors: A. B. Yehoshua
Though he did his best to seem disappointed, he felt a surge of relief. Indeed, with an almost hysterical adamance she insisted that he go without her, even asking for her purse and handing him his ticket like a mother sending her son to the movies, assuring him, as she lay propped up by the pillow with her eyes wide open now, that he needn't worry and that she would soon get out of bed and have a meal sent up. It was her first day of real rest in ages; God knew how long her fatigue had been building up! She would, she promised, wait up for him and meanwhile read a book or listen to music on the radio. “Good, I'll try it,” she said when told about Volume II of
Anna Karenina
that his daughter had given him by mistake. “The second half is fine because I read the book long ago and still remember a bit.” And so, having gone through the motions of protesting, he went downstairs to fetch the book, which she hurriedly took from him at the door as if anxious to be rid of him. It was all he could do to persuade her to bring him her ticket too, since perhaps he could manage to sell it.
T
OWARD EVENING
the hotel came festively alive. Previously concealed light bulbs helped brighten the little lobby, so that the swords gleamed in their glass cases and the blue seas reddened on the old nautical maps. The desk was now staffed by the grandfather of the family, a genial, immaculately dressed man who sat reading a newspaper while now and then helping his grandchildren in the apartment with their homework. In one corner stood several valises, sure proof of fresh guests. Self-conscious of his new crew cut, Molkho checked his key and stepped out into the street, which, too, was lit by numerous lamps whose warm, bubbly glow created a holiday feeling. People were doing their last-minute shopping and crowding into the bars, and the night, with its clear skies above and last patches of snow on the sidewalk, had a special magic. Entering his little working-class restaurant, which was nearly empty at this hour, Molkho ordered the usual, substituting coffee for beer. But afterward, looking for a taxi while glancing up at the still-reddish sky, he cursed his loneliness under his breath. How could you have left me all alone like this? he asked, picturing his wife back in Haifa, making supper for their daughter while he wandered, a stranger in a strange land.
The crowd in front of the opera house was unexpectedly small. Indeed, it was clear from the outset that he stood no chance of selling his extra ticket, for even before he began climbing the steps, tickets were being offered to him. The audience was different too: instead of the intense-looking young people of the night before, he was now surrounded by the most bourgeois of audiences. Over the posters by the entrance, large red stickers announcing some change in the program had been affixed diagonally. Could the performance have been canceled? Sure enough, inquiring of a couple standing there, he was told that the man who was to play Don Giovanni was sick and that, to his astonishment, the opera tonight would be Gluck's
Orpheus and Eurydice.
How could they go and change operas just like that? And who was this Gluck, whom he had never even heard of? The thought that he was to be deprived of
Don Giovanni
after all he had been through was thoroughly unacceptable. “Who ever heard of changing operas?” he asked the couple loudly. “Why, I came a long way to see
Don Giovanni
/” “You did? Where from?” “From Israel.” “From Israel? Just to see an opera?” “Yes,” he said, telling them about the special
Voles Opera
while they listened in amazement. “Why isn't there an understudy?” he asked. “I can't believe no one else can sing the part!” But the sympathetic couple merely shrugged and went inside, not knowing the answer themselves, leaving Molkho debating whether he shouldn't perhaps go to the movies or a nightclub instead. In the end, however, the ticket being paid for, he decided to see
Orpheus and Eurydice
and let himself be swept by the crowd into the familiar lobby, which now seemed to him dreary and plain. And there was nowhere even to lodge a complaint, for every single office was locked! That's the sort of people they are, he thought bitterly, going off to relieve himself in the men's room, whose four huge white walls seemed one big urinal. Just look where I've landed, he told himself, choking on his loneliness, as if his wife's death were a spring whose action had flung him to the far ends of the earth.
He was one of the first to take his seat, which was in the center of a front row. The audience kept drifting in, but the hall was still far from full. He felt indescribably weary, and the people around him looked gray and listless too. A row in front of him sat a couple that drew his attention, especially the man, who sat with his head hunched between his shoulders: tall and fortyish, he had a pocked red face whose sad, suspicious eyes darted nervously and a shabby black suit over which was thrown a dirty white scarf. The seat on Molkho's right, on the other hand, was occupied by a well-dressed, elderly German holding a large, fancy program that was partly in English. Yet though Molkho asked to borrow it, he was feeling too tired and dispirited to make head or tails of it, even of the cast, which listed a female alto in the role of Orpheus. Bewildered, he asked his neighbor if it wasn't a misprint, to which the man replied in broken English that he hadn't the slightest idea, since he came from a small provincial town where they didn't have opera at all.
The orchestra began tuning up, and as if he were accompanying it, the man in the next row grew suddenly tense and emitted a series of small grunts that made his wife look worriedly about. Slowly the huge overhead lights were dimmed, the conductor strode forward, and the overture struck up, quick and forceful, while the pockmarked man swayed back and forth in time to it. Evidently he knew the score well, in fact, by heart, for he paused slightly before each transition, as if anticipating a new theme, so that Molkho wondered if he was perhaps an unemployed musician, possibly even a down-and-out conductor. Even when the music reached a crescendo, with new instruments joining in all the time, the man did not look up; head down, he kept listening intensely, conducting with his hands, springing up with the horns and kettledrums, and swaying rhythmically again with the strings in preparation for the next bars, which he telegraphed with his body as if convinced that the orchestra was following him, only suddenly to freeze and cast such a haughty glance around him that the audience began to whisper. His wife alone remained perfectly quiet, her hand resting soothingly on his knee as though to keep him under control.
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.
O
N 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 herâa 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.