Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  This thought had never occurred to him before. Until this very minute, when he heard the knock at the door, and then again less hesitant, and again, insistent. He knew only that he had to keep her a secret. Maybe he should ignore the knocking. But because of the anxiety to which it gave rise, he stood up and looked through the peephole in the door. Complete darkness. Without thinking he heard himself fearfully ask: “Who’s there?”

  “Me, Nita, from upstairs,” said a low voice. Now he knew her given name, too.

  “Just a minute,” he muttered, and he looked around. He made haste to shut the bedroom door so that she wouldn’t see the cardboard box in which the baby had been brought to him as if she were a day-old puppy. Now she had a name, the tall woman in the dark tights and a purple man’s shirt, and the dark, plump baby in her arms, its brown eyes gazing at him solemnly. They stood opposite each other in the living room, each holding a baby. Nita’s protruding lower lip trembled. She stroked her baby’s smooth brown hair, carefully straightened the collar of his one-piece outfit, raised her eyes to Michael, and smiled shyly.

  “I only came to bring you a few things you might need,” she said, holding out a bag. “Baby soap and cleansing cream and protective cream for her bottom, and a little blanket. I just wanted to see how you were getting along. I hope I’m not disturbing you. . . .”

  “It’s quite all right, thank you very much,” said Michael. They stood in silence.

  “Look at us,” Nita said with a bemused, ironic smile, “each of us with a baby. What a sight we must make!” Then she came very close to him and leaned over to look at the little girl.

  “She’s exquisite,” Nita said with awe as she raised her eyes. They weren’t the same height, and yet her eyes looked right into his. “I see that she finished the bottle. She looks very contented,” she said, surprised. “You really managed very well. She’s five weeks old?”

  Michael nodded.

  “You haven’t dressed her yet. What’s her name?” Nita ran her finger lightly over the naked foot sticking out of the pink towel.

  For a moment he froze. “Noa,” he found himself suddenly saying out loud, and he bowed his head over the flaxen down as if to apologize for the hasty, arbitrary choice.. He took a deep breath and raised his face to the woman, feeling the blood rush into it.

  “Ido,” Nita announced to her baby, whose eyelids fluttered as if they were about to close, “you have a little friend. This is Noa. Noa was born in the fields.” Michael recoiled in alarm, but then she began to hum the tune, and he remembered the popular song she was quoting.

  Ido rested his head in the hollow between his mother’s neck and shoulder. “I haven’t dressed her yet,” Michael apologized. “I wanted to feed her first. That seemed more urgent.”

  “But you don’t have to hold her all the time. You can put her down when she’s quiet. You can even have a cup of coffee in the evening, especially if you’re not breastfeeding,” Nita said with a shy smile.

  Michael sat down. His arms were trembling. Where, in fact, was he going to lay her down to sleep? He hadn’t thought about that yet. He wasn’t prepared to return her to the cardboard box. He looked at the tall woman’s thin, harried face, at the eyes, which seemed to him at that moment steeped in a kind of blue-green gravity, at the dimple he suddenly discovered not at the middle but at the top of her cheek. He cleared his throat loudly. Anyway, he would need a partner. He couldn’t do it alone, he said to himself. Even if only for the next couple of days. He didn’t want to think now about the future. But then he wondered what future he was thinking about. Had he taken leave of his senses, or what? What did he want? He stifled these questions and went back to concentrating on whether he should apply to her for help. But what about her husband? “Your husband . . .” he said hesitantly. Her smile disappeared instantly.

  “I don’t have a husband.” Her lips protruded in what was almost an expression of defiance.

  “You don’t?” he said, confused. He had been sure it was the bearded man.

  “I’m not married,” she said, this time calmly. “It’s not so unusual. You yourself said that your niece is a single mother. It appears to be in fashion, if not an epidemic,” she added, and the dimple, which had disappeared, reappeared for a moment.

  “Yes,” he apologized. “I just thought . . . I saw . . . it seemed to me . . . I saw a man with a beard . . ..”

  “A short beard or just unshaven? If he had a beard it was the younger of my brothers, but if he was unshaven it was my elder one. You would probably have recognized him, but he’s only been here twice.” She said all this rapidly, as if to dispel the sense of oppression that had begun to gather in the room.

  “A short beard, or unshaven. I don’t exactly remember. Why should I recognize your elder brother?”

  “He doesn’t have a real beard, he’s just not shaved. It’s in fashion now. Look, you yourself—”

  “I’m on vacation, that’s all,” he corrected her and slid his hand over the three-day stubble. “I didn’t recognize him. Do I know him?”

  “My big brother, Theo, is famous. You’ve never heard of Theo van Gelden?”

  “The conductor?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s your brother?”

  “My elder brother.”

  “Van Gelden is a Dutch name.”

  “Our parents are from Holland.”

  “And you have another brother? Also a musician? Is he the violinist?” He was searching his memory.

  “Yes. Gabriel is a musician, too. Gabi is the one with the beard.” Nita sighed. “Anyway, you never saw any husband here,” she said with a smile, and added, with embarrassment: “I’ve come to invite you up to my place. I thought that maybe the babies could sleep and we could have a cup of coffee in honor of a good New Year. Oh, excuse me,” she said with a giggle, “what’s your name?”

  “Michael. Why aren’t you at some family meal for the holiday?”

  “Neither of my brothers is in Israel at the moment. My father’s been alone for some years now. He’s too old and ill, and he’s not interested in such things anymore. I’ve already seen him today. We paid him a visit earlier,” she said defensively. “And going somewhere just for the sake of going out . . . I didn’t feel like it. But I just thought that you . . . I just meant . . .” She fell silent and put both her arms around the baby.

  Michael looked at the baby girl. He couldn’t really call her Noa, not yet. “We really are quite a funny sight, with both these babies,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I don’t want to press you. I just want you to know that I thought how hard it must be with a five-week-old baby and I . . .” Suddenly he felt that it would be nice to spend the evening with her. She held out the promise of a contact that was neither threatening nor meaningless. Suddenly he felt an impulse to tell her that, and in order to stop himself he said: “First I have to dress her. You can stay down here.”

  “I’ll be more comfortable at home. I won’t feel as if I’m imposing myself.” Nita smiled with an effort and tugged at the edges of her purple shirt. “And besides, your baby is still easily moved. Ido needs his bed at night, and it’s already half past seven.” She looked around. “I’ll leave this here and go upstairs,” she said. She put the plastic bag down at her feet and quickly, furtively, looked around the room again. “Are you coming up when you’re ready?”

  Michael nodded firmly. Suddenly he wasn’t sure. What if she turned out to be a self-righteous busybody? What if she felt a hysterical compulsion to notify the authorities at once? And how was he going to explain his own incomprehensible, embarrassing, and perhaps also shameful compulsion to keep the baby for himself? She might even want to interpret his behavior, to explain his impulse to him, and he would really rather not think about it. What was wrong with acting on impulse for a change? he said to himself. But then a kind of shame for wanting this baby to be his floated up to the forefront of his consciousness and gave rise to a feeling of oppression.

  Th
e baby went on sleeping while he was dressing her in the little blue outfit he fished out of the bag the neighbor had brought. Once she shuddered, and once, when he touched her chin, she even twisted her lips, with eyes closed, in a grimace that looked like a smile. He remembered that babies don’t smile at this age, that it was nothing but a reflex.

  By the time Nita opened the door she had managed to tidy up a little. The pile of wash had disappeared. The cello, shut in its case, was leaning close to the folded playpen against the wall in the corner. On a round copper serving table, in a big Armenian pottery dish, she had laid slices of apple in a ring around a small saucer of honey.

  “Come, put her down here,” she said, pulling up a baby stroller. “The top part comes off,” she explained, “and you can take her home in it later.” Because she was standing and looking at him as he laid the baby in the stroller, his movements were clumsy. He was too shy even to breathe in the baby’s smell, or lay his cheek openly against the folds of her tender neck. There was something helpless about the way he tucked her in, under what seemed to him the penetrating, suspicious scrutiny of Nita’s eyes. When he looked up, he discovered that it was a warm, open look. Now it seemed to him that her eyes were gray and full of an unresentful sadness.

  He sat down on the little sofa under the oil painting, and looked at the wall opposite. A large print hung there, a pastel drawing of a stout, bearded man with a thick cigar in his mouth playing the piano. The figure looked very familiar to him. “Brahms,” said Nita, who was following his eyes.

  “He died in 1897,” Michael reflected aloud. “I just learned that today. I always thought he lived a long time before that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When he died he was only in his early sixties.”

  “He had liver cancer, but only spoke of his jaundice.’ Do you know what Dvorák said about him when he was dying?”

  “What?”

  “Dvorák was his protégé, Brahms had brought him to his own publisher, and Dvorák was very much influenced by him. He loved and admired him even before he was helped by him. When Brahms was on his deathbed Dvorák came to see him.” Nita looked at the drawing and smiled. “Dvorák was a pious man, and when he came out of Brahms’s bedroom he said, with wonder: ‘Such a noble soul, yet he believes in nothing.’ That he had no relation to God. Which isn’t quite right.”

  “What isn’t quite right?”

  “That Brahms had no relation to God. Of course he did, only not to Dvorák’s God,” she said in a low voice and inclined her head as if to examine the short legs at the piano pedals in the drawing. “So it was you who was playing Brahms’s First? It isn’t healthy for babies, that music. It’s music of anxiety.”

  Michael was astonished. “Is that common? To see it like that? Is that the standard opinion?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just see it that way.”

  “I wonder,” he said hesitantly, “if music can give rise to anxiety. Suddenly, when I heard it, I really did remember the stain on the ceiling and all kinds of things like that, which normally never bother me. Could it have been the music?”

  “Of course it could. It gives rise to feelings, no?”

  “What makes Brahms’s symphony give rise to anxiety?”

  “Well, there are all kinds of things, I think it’s there from the very opening.” She gathered up her curls. “And also the orchestration and the minor key itself, you know.” She didn’t wait for his response. “C Minor especially almost has a tradition. It’s the key of Beethoven’s Fifth and his Third Piano Concerto, and of a particularly somber Mozart concerto.”

  “The key gives rise to anxiety?” he reflected with surprise. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Well, not only the key. It depends on what you do with it. At the beginning of the Brahms it’s the way the string instruments ascend and the wind instruments descend at the same time, and the tension between them, and those pounding drumbeats.”

  “Mozart’s C Minor Piano Concerto doesn’t give rise to any anxiety in me.”

  “Well, okay, it’s become background music to all kinds of things. But in a good performance it can give rise to a lot of sadness even today.”

  “But not anxiety. Brahms’s symphony . . . I just want to understand if these things have . . . some kind of objective correlative,” he said apologetically.

  “It’s not so much a matter of keys or harmony as it is a matter of a sound space,” she mused as if to herself. “And of Brahms’s volume of sound. The opening is forte, not fortissimo. And the forte is muffled and there’s something nerve-wracking about it. The drumbeats create a tension that isn’t resolved for quite a while, and then, when the music gets fast, there’s even more drama. The symphony is filled with frightening events.”

  “What are ‘frightening events’ in music? How can you talk about it like that? Frightening events in a musical composition with no words?”

  “Of course there are such events,” she exclaimed. “You’ve just heard them yourself. All the transitions and themes, when and how they end, all the dialogue among the instruments—all these things are events, and they can be frightening.”

  He looked at the cello. “Do you play professionally?” he ventured.

  She nodded, drew in her protruding lower lip, and went into the kitchen. “Choose a disc,” she called from there. “They’re in the cabinet.” The only cabinet in the room was a heavy brown piece of furniture, tall and narrow, standing in the corner between the sofa and the wall with the French windows that opened onto the balcony. He got up and stood in front of them, looking out for a moment at the wide street and the hills as if he was surprised to discover that the view was the same as the one from his own apartment. On the cabinet’s heavy wooden doors was a relief carving of two angels hovering over a gilt harp. Two bronze hands, one holding the other, joined the doors to each other. He separated them and stood before the crammed shelves. “Like a child in a candy store,” said Nita. He turned around and saw her smiling on the threshold to the kitchen.

  “Are these in any kind of order?” he heard himself ask. He wouldn’t be able to tell her. He didn’t know anything about her. He took a pack of Noblesse cigarettes and a box of matches out of his pocket and looked at her for permission. She pointed to the blue glass ashtray next to the telephone and said: “Maybe I should move her into Ido’s room. You can also open the door to the balcony, or would you wait until I bring the coffee?”

  He put the pack down on the copper serving table and went back to the cabinet. The top shelves were crammed with LP records. The others held compact discs standing in two rows, one behind the other. He pulled out two of them. One was Haydn’s Andante and Variations for Piano, a work he didn’t know. He put it down on the copper serving table, as if to go back to it later, and looked at the other one. On it was a picture of Nita in a black, low-cut evening dress, looking very attractive and holding a cello in her left hand and a bow in her right. Next to her was an elderly bald man sitting at a piano. And then the words “Nita van Gelden and Benjamin Thorpe play the Arpeggione Sonata by Franz Schubert.” He removed the disc he found in the CD player, glanced at the label, and put it carefully into its box, which held the two other discs of Rossini’s opera William Tell—a work he also didn’t know, except for its famous overture. He replaced it in the player with the Schubert sonata. The sounds that filled the room awakened the hope in him that he would be able to tell her. But after a few moments Nita was standing in the room, her face frozen. She bit her lip and pointed at the CD player. “Do me a favor,” she said quietly. “Please turn that off.”

  He nodded quickly and stopped the flow of sound.

  “Where did you find that?” she asked, putting the disc back into its box. He looked at her and stammered: “It was there, in the cabinet. I picked it up by chance.”

  Her lips relaxed. Now she was embarrassed. “I haven’t heard it for ages, nearly two years. Today I’d do it completely differently,” she apologized, but this did no
t seem enough to explain her behavior. “I’ll bring the coffee,” she said, and she returned to the kitchen and came back quickly, holding a big wooden tray with a glass coffee pot, two cups, milk, and sugar. She put the tray down on the copper serving table and surveyed it intently, but he had a strong feeling that she was somewhere else, that she saw nothing.

  “Teaspoons, there aren’t any teaspoons,” he said.

  She smiled as if she had just awakened. “I knew I’d forgotten something,” she said, and she returned to the kitchen. The baby in the stroller moved. It let out a weak whimper, and then was silent. Nita stood over her, two teaspoons in one hand, the other hovering over the stroller handle as if ready to rock it. How could he confide in her? She was a total stranger, he knew nothing about her. Even the cello told him nothing. The Arpeggione Sonata wasn’t a sign of anything. “You have to catch it when it’s just starting. Don’t let it get stronger,” she announced.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The crying. Sometimes, if you rock them right away, they go back to sleep. Sometimes it doesn’t help.” Nita sighed. And yet, he did know something about her, he thought. Maybe the fact that she was a stranger would be helpful. He looked at the deliberate movements of her hands as she poured. It amazed him that these hands, which had cut apples into thin slices, were the hands that had played the first notes of the Arpeggione on that disc. These hands, big and white, which poured milk and pulled a cigarette out of his pack, were hands that could play a Schubert sonata.