Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  She pushed the baby stroller gently, maneuvering it through the narrow corridor into the next room, where her son was sleeping, sat down heavily on the little armchair, and lit the cigarette.

  “And I asked you if you were a professional musician!” He shook his head.

  She inhaled and waved her hand dismissively. “Anyone can make a recording,” she said hoarsely.

  He asked hesitantly if that was her only record.

  “There were a few more,” she said softly, with downcast eyes. “don’t be so impressed. What’s past is past,” she pronounced as she raised her eyes to him. There was a firm vertical line between her dark eyebrows. “It doesn’t mean anything about the future. It’s been a year since I’ve played or performed.”

  “Because of the baby?”

  She didn’t answer. He didn’t dare ask her about herself with his usual freedom. He looked at her, wondering what he could possibly say. She put the cigarette down in the groove of the ashtray and held the cup in both hands. The tips of her long fingers touched each other. “After Yom Kippur I have a concert, the first in over a year,” she suddenly blurted out. Her eyes stared at the big French windows opposite her. Her armchair seemed too small for her. Nita crossed her legs and leaned her elbows on the chair’s narrow arms. It looked to him as if she were contracting her whole body, tightening her muscles to control her trembling. Suddenly she looked at him, opened her eyes wide with an effort, and whispered: “I’m terrified. Maybe I don’t have it anymore.”

  He might have asked her what “it” was, but since he understood what she meant, he only asked: “What will you be playing?”

  “All kinds of things. There are two concerts actually. In the first I have a short solo, as principal cello in the William Tell Overture. My brother Theo will be conducting and my younger brother will be in the orchestra, too, as concertmaster—principal violinist—for the occasion, the opening concert of the season.” She put the cup down. “And about two weeks later, in the second concert, I’ll be playing the cello in his Double Concerto,” she said, turning her head in the direction of the drawing of Brahms on the wall. “The other soloist in the concerto was going to be a great young violinist discovered by my brother Theo. Theo is good at discovering young geniuses. Pianists from Italy and violinists from South Korea, sometimes even musicians from here. But the genius got sick and can’t come. So Gabi will play the violin solo. It’ll be a very heavy, big concert—Mahler’s Fourth is on the program, too.”

  “When I heard you practice before, it wasn’t Brahms, but it sounded familiar. What was it?” he asked hesitantly, afraid of sounding ignorant.

  “Rossini, the solo from the William Tell Overture. Do you know the piece?”

  “I don’t really know anything about music,” he was quick to say. “I’m just a music lover.”

  “Loving it is quite a lot. You can always learn about it if you want to,” she said, picking up her cup again.

  “The music you played sounded familiar, but I couldn’t identify it.”

  “Are there pieces you can identify immediately?”

  “Yes, of course. When you played the Double Concerto and the Bach suite yesterday.”

  She nodded.

  “How wonderful for you that you play the cello. It’s such a sad instrument . . .” he heard himself say to his surprise. “I really love it. It seems to me that if you haven’t imbibed music with your mother’s milk, if you haven’t been educated to it from the beginning, or have unusual talent, you can never fully understand it.”

  “You don’t have to understand it,” Nita said. “It’s enough to love it and need it. Especially to need it.”

  “With you it’s different, you grew up with it. Is the van Gelden music shop your family’s, too?”

  She nodded.

  “I went past there a few days ago and it was closed. Is that permanent?”

  “It closed six months ago. There was no one to keep it going. My father’s too old and my brothers are busy, of course. And me, too. None of us can drop everything to travel around looking for historical instruments and rare scores and recordings. The shop also needed further investment. There was no alternative. Meanwhile . . . anyhow, my father didn’t sell it, even though he had some offers. There was no suitable buyer. . . . No one’s good enough for him,” she said with a chuckle.

  “But you gave up the cello,” he ventured.

  He had to know more about her. If he had known where this sentence would lead, he would have thought twice. Or maybe not.

  She didn’t answer at once. And when she did, she said: “I didn’t give it up.” And immediately she added: “What do you mean, I gave it up?” She stood up and went into the kitchen.

  Minutes passed and nothing happened. He looked around, stood up, and then looked at the wall above the sofa and at the kitchen door. He opened the French windows to the balcony, stretched, and breathed in the autumn air. Then he got up the courage to follow her into the kitchen. Nita stood at the sink. It was piled high with plates, pots, and overturned coffee cups. On the gas stove there were circles of burn, as if milk had boiled over a dozen times and never been cleaned up. The floor was sticky, and the faucet dripping.

  She was standing with her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. She heard his footsteps and took her hands away from her face. It was dry and very pale. Her eyes narrowed. “Forgive me, please,” she whispered. “I’m terribly tired.”

  “We’re leaving,” he said quickly. How could he have imposed himself on her?

  “No, no, I didn’t mean for you to go. On the contrary, please stay, that is, if you want to. I feel as if I haven’t spoken to anyone for a long time. Excuse me for saying so, but I like talking to you. I just don’t want to dump my troubles on you. Forgive me for being this way, but . . .” She fell silent and seemed to withdraw into herself. There was something so lonely about the way she was standing there at the sink holding back her tears that for a moment he wanted to take her in his arms and put his hand on her brown curls. But he didn’t dare cross the distance from the door to her.

  “Forgive me,” she said again. “I didn’t want you to see this mess.” She gave him a half-smile and wiped her eyes. “Now that the babies are quiet, I had to start wailing.”

  Michael looked around. The place hadn’t been cleaned for days, or weeks. “Don’t you have any help?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you had anything to eat today?”

  She looked thoughtful, ran her fingers through her hair, and sniffled. “Just a bit,” she confessed. “But I drank a lot of fluids.”

  “And you’re breastfeeding!” he rebuked her.

  She bowed her head.

  “Maybe we should fix ourselves something to eat. We could go down to my place . . .” he suggested after another look around.

  “I can’t take Ido out of bed now. We could eat here, there are all kinds of—”

  “If you like . . .” he hesitated. “We could also try to tidy up a bit here. I could help you, if you like,” he said, and he listened with one ear to the sounds from the next room.

  “They’re asleep,” she said.

  “Should we get to work?” he asked.

  Maybe he would tell her and maybe not. The hardest thing would be to explain it, to himself and to her.

  “I don’t know if I can eat,” she said later, watching him stirring eggs.

  “You don’t have to,” he reassured her. “Just cut up the vegetables we rescued from your refrigerator,” he added with a smile. “Then we’ll see. While you’re cutting and peeling, you can tell me things.”

  “Tell you things?”

  “Why not?”

  “Tell you about what?”

  “About whatever you like. Maybe even about why you haven’t played for a year.”

  From a bottom drawer in the kitchen cabinet she fished out a vegetable peeler and rapidly peeled a cucumber. “There isn’t much to tell. It’s a very banal story. I loved so
meone, I thought he loved me, too. It turned out that he didn’t. I got pregnant. He was married. Everything took place in secret. After I got pregnant,” she choked, swallowed, coughed, “after I got pregnant, he left me. And I just can’t get over it. I can’t pull myself together. I told you, nothing special, a banal little story. Cheap melodrama. An Egyptian movie. A soap opera.”

  “Anything can be described in those terms. You can forgive yourself a little for being so cut up. A lot of people can’t allow themselves to give way to their feelings.” He scrubbed the frying pan he had fished from the bottom of the sink.

  “I didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I’m sorry.”

  He raised his head from the sink. “I’m glad you can talk to me so openly.”

  “For a couple of years I lived inside a bubble, even with my music I didn’t do as much as I could have. And then the baby came. When that man told me I had to choose between the baby and him, I couldn’t get rid of it. I simply couldn’t. . . . Maybe I even wanted to bring him up by myself. I’d always done what others considered right. I was the spoiled child of elderly parents with two brothers. You know all that pop psychology.” She diced a cucumber.

  “It sounds like a happy childhood,” said Michael from his place at the gas stove. “You’ll find someone else.”

  “Or I won’t,” she said, looking at him expectantly.

  He looked at her and smiled. There was a certain sweetness in her pouting lips and in the serious determination of her voice, as opposed to the appeal for confirmation in her eyes. “Or you won’t,” he agreed.

  “It’s possible to live without love—romantic love, I mean,” she announced.

  “It’s possible.” He sighed. “Difficult, but possible.”

  “Lots of people live like that,” she insisted, and she began to slice a tomato.

  “Lots.”

  “And they live and work and so on.”

  “Definitely. And you’re even playing again.”

  She tossed a diced tomato into a glass dish. “The hardest thing of all,” she said reflectively, “is to find a reason to go on living, a meaning.” She hesitated, then smiled again. “Sometimes I think I wanted the baby so that it would force me to live responsibly, and then it seems to me that I did something terribly selfish. To bring him up without a father and all that, just so I would have a reason . . .” The dimple appeared, and then disappeared again.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so judgmental and critical. Maybe it’s better perhaps simply to accept your own limitations. Why do you think married people have children?”

  “Why?” she said coldly. “With them it’s the natural, obvious thing to do. But I kept this baby even when I lost all my faith in someone I’d trusted absolutely.”

  “Trusted absolutely? You should never trust anyone absolutely,” said Michael, turning the omelet over and lowering the flame. “Trusting somebody else absolutely is like turning yourself into a baby in a certain sense. There isn’t a person in the world without weaknesses. You have to take those weaknesses into account, and deciding to trust someone absolutely means ignoring those weaknesses.” He turned off the gas. “What’s the situation with the salad?”

  She raised her eyes from the bowl. “It’s ready, I just have to season it. So what’s it all for, what’s the point of anything, if you can’t trust anyone? What’s love without trust?”

  “I didn’t say ‘trust,’ I said ‘absolute trust.’ There’s a difference. Do you have any olive oil?”

  Nita nodded. “We’ll eat over there. It’s too dirty here,” she said in a brisk, practical tone. She took the plates and cutlery and the salad into the other room. He followed her, waited for her to sit down, and carefully placed half the omelet on her plate. He moved the sliced apples, which were brown by now, to make room for the challah he had sliced. Before he sat down himself he went into the room where the babies were and peeped at the stroller. The baby girl lay motionless on her back. Alarmed, he bent down and put his cheek next to her button nose. Only when he felt the quiet, rhythmic breathing on his skin did he straighten up and return to the living room.

  “It doesn’t go away,” said Nita. “The fear that the baby will die doesn’t go away. Even when it’s five months old you check to see if It’s still breathing when It’s too quiet.”

  “Is it normal for her to sleep so long without waking? I don’t remember my son sleeping for more than an hour at a time at that age.”

  “She’s apparently content. She ate enough and nothing’s bothering her now. She’s a good baby.” Nita stared at her plate, and with a slow, lazy movement stuck her fork into the omelet.

  “They’re the only ones who can give their trust absolutely. But even that’s not always sure,” said Michael, thinking of the cardboard box. “Only if they’re lucky.”

  “I can’t,” she said in a choked voice and pushed her plate away. “I can’t get it down.”

  “That too is a matter of decision and choice,” said Michael.

  “Everything makes me anxious or offends me or hurts me,” she said with revulsion. A tear made its way from the corner of her eye to her nose. “I’m sorry. I’m apparently not fit for human company. People in my condition should retire to a convent.”

  “Not if they have a five-month-old baby who trusts them absolutely.”

  She smiled, wiped her eyes, and slowly put the plate back on her knees. He looked at her, and it was already clear to him that he would tell her. But not this evening.

  “How much time has it been?”

  “Since we separated? Since the beginning of the pregnancy. Make the calculation yourself!” Nita said, her voice breaking. “It’s disgusting the way I talk. I’m full of self-pity, incapable of accepting my mistake and my stupidity.” She fell silent. He ate a piece of cheese.

  “I lived in an illusion. I deceived myself. I believed him. I was completely wrong about him,” she said. “He said that he couldn’t live without me, and I believed him. Maybe I was brought up wrong,” she said reflectively.

  “What is he, a politician? Who says a thing like that seriously except for salesmen and insurance agents? And politicians. Is he a politician?”

  “He’s in the insurance business,” said Nita, and she burst out laughing.

  “I’m not talking about the people who believe such declarations, who take them seriously.” Michael gave her a cautious look and put some salad on her plate.

  She stuck her fork into a bit of cucumber. “I believed him. Maybe my parents did spoil me.” Again her eyes filled with tears.

  “It usually works the opposite way,” murmured Michael. If they were to let him keep the baby, he could prove that, too, he suddenly thought, he could really give her . . . “Maybe things aren’t exactly the way you describe them,” he reflected aloud. “Anyone who plays the way you do shouldn’t hate herself so much, or, if you’ll forgive me, feel so sorry for herself. Don’t you think you’re very lucky, to have such a gift?”

  Nita opened her mouth, closed it, nodded, and said: “When you live with it you forget that it’s something special. It becomes a part of you, you forget that It’s—”

  “And you have a concert. When exactly?”

  “The first one right after Yom Kippur, and the second during the week of Succoth.”

  “In two weeks? So you’ve got your work cut out for you, and then there’s the baby. The world is full of all kinds of things, you only have to be aware of them.”

  She nodded resolutely and the trace of a smile parted her lips.

  “How long have you been mourning him? More than a year? Isn’t that enough? You’ve done your mourning, and now you can begin to live again. After you start living you’ll be able to see things in proportion and not be so critical of yourself.” He paused. “I want to tell you, too . . .” She looked at him expectantly. “But never mind.”

  “Go on, tell me!”

  “I don’t know all the details, but
I can tell you that I’ve experienced this kind of thing before.”

  She stiffened. “What kind of thing?”

  “People—that is, mainly women, because men don’t talk about it so openly—have cried over disappointed love. They all thought their lives were over, that nothing would ever happen to them again. And after a relatively short time the whole thing was no longer relevant. I seem to have remembered their broken hearts longer than they did. That’s made me very ironic about broken hearts. Besides, you need a bit of fatalism: What happened is a sign that he wasn’t the right man for you. He doesn’t sound as if he deserved you, if you’ll forgive my for saying so.”

  “Really? Is that how it always is?” she said bitterly. “And what about Callas?”

  “What Callas? Maria Callas? What’s she got to do with it?”

  “Don’t you know about Callas?” She sounded disappointed. “Don’t you know that she was madly in love with that nothing, Onassis? A multimillionaire, but a total nothing? He’d fall asleep at the opera when she was singing. Can you imagine?” And she added skeptically: “Have you ever heard her sing?”

  He nodded.

  “So I ask you, is it possible to sleep when she’s singing?!”

  He shook his head firmly. She went on looking at him demandingly. “It’s impossible,” he said finally, overcoming his resistance to the way in which she was dictating his answer. Even if he meant what he said, his words were thereby robbed of his intention. “I can’t, anyway.”

  “What have you heard her in?”

  He overcame his resistance to being tested in this way. “A few things. Norma, Traviata. But what makes you think of her in this connection at all?”

  “Because she became pregnant by him when she was no longer young. She wanted the child very much, but he insisted that she get rid of it. And she did what he asked in order to keep him. And then he left her anyway, for Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas was left alone, a completely broken woman, and then she died of a broken heart. You can die of a broken heart, you know.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t,” he said defensively.

  “Not only in books and movies.”