by Batya Gur
“You’re cunning,” said Nita without a hint of condemnation after listening to him talking to the chief Child Welfare officer on the phone. “I’m naive and quite stupid.” The moment she said the word “stupid” her face fell, and he knew immediately what she was thinking. But he agreed with her that he was far more cunning than she, and that it would be better if he were to stay home. “I feel as if anyone can see through me. Everyone seems to know everything there is to know about me, so I give up in advance. The urge to be frank is so great!” she lamented.
The nurse’s visit was supposed to come as a surprise. They didn’t even know the day for sure. This was also what gave it the air of an ambush, a trap. And it was also what gave rise to his anger now, as he felt the presence of the nurse behind his back. Even though Tzilla, who had connections both with people at the Child Welfare Bureau and with the nurses at the Social Services Department, had told him that he shouldn’t take any of it personally, that he and Nita would easily pass muster as a foster family. Especially since they had one baby already, and the baby girl was so robust. Tzilla had been present at the pediatrician’s examination. The doctor had bent over the baby and said with satisfaction: “A real little minx!” Michael looked offended, but the pediatrician laughed and explained that this was his affectionate term for girl babies who were one hundred percent healthy. Michael looked over his shoulder as the doctor pulled her legs and let them drop, testing the resistance of her leg muscles. She had screamed as she lay naked on Ido’s chest of drawers. The doctor wrote a report for the Child Welfare Bureau. Tzilla had managed to organize things so that a close friend of hers, a Sergeant Malka, was placed in charge of the search for the missing mother. She promised not to say a word to anyone, and she had kept her promise.
Sergeant Malka talked mainly with Nita. Since she had moved to Jerusalem from Kiryat Gat only the year before, she didn’t know Michael. This was the situation at the moment (from time to time the words “at the moment” cut through him like a knife). None of his colleagues on the police force, not even Shorer, knew what his frequent disappearances and his sudden rushing off home were about. His absences were received without comment, since everyone knew that although he was back at work he had not yet been given anything serious to do. Shorer kept saying, “after the holidays,” smiling at the cliché but repeating it nonetheless.
All kinds of things Michael feared had worked out in a reassuring way. Tzilla, who had worked with him for years as the secretary of his Special Investigation Team, had come to an understanding with Nita at their very first meeting, the kind that arises between women when they know that there are truly important matters at stake, with no time to waste on irrelevancies. Not by so much as a hint did Tzilla betray the faintest suspicion that there might be anything more between Michael and Nita than the connection he had described to her. “It’s a close friendship/’ he said. A new one, but close. There’s nothing more to it than that. Don’t make anything more of it. Tzilla looked offended at this, and she opened her mouth to say something, but he gave her no chance to. “I just want to make it clear in advance,” he had told her, so you don’t get any wrong ideas, what we have is a temporary business arrangement based on a common interest. Tzilla expressed no surprise at his desire to keep the baby, nor did she rebuke him for his absences from work. She covered for him in the days after the holiday, when he slipped away early to go to Nita’s apartment. And she found a babysitter who made it possible for Nita to practice and go to rehearsals.
Precisely because of the babies the relation between them was practical, free of any romantic innuendoes. We’re a baby nursery, Nita had said. He never touched her, aside from pats on the arm, kisses on the cheek. Innocent gestures of affection. And sometimes, when they stood close to each another, when they were bathing the babies, for example, he was careful to avoid touching her by accident, as if he felt that any contact would be almost dangerous for her now. Apart from this, he had a strong sense that he was exploiting her. By chance, she had been there at the right moment and suited his needs. And although she repeatedly told him how much being with him helped her, even though he knew that she meant it, and although he was very fond of her and was never bored in her company, nothing dispelled the feeling that he was exploiting her. Besides, there was something in her thinness, in the brittleness of her tall, austere figure, that kept thoughts of sex at bay. If he felt an urge to touch her, it was to put his arm around her shoulder, to stroke her face, to protect her from the moments of dread and self-hatred, from her compulsive tendency to relive scenes from the past, from things that people had said to her and she had believed implicitly and that she resurrected now in order to verify them in the light of the present. She would suddenly tremble with rage and hurt. He learned to identify and guess what was behind these moments even when they manifested themselves in vague, general statements, baffling to the untutored ear, such as: “All that matters is what people do. Words are bullshit.” Or: “Promises of eternal commitment between people aren’t worth a damn. Nothing lasts.” Or: “There’s no such thing as love. It’s all sex or lust, and it’s soon over. Friendship without passion is much better; at least it isn’t doomed in advance to be empty.”
At times like these he tried to distract her and turn her attention to simple everyday questions. Such as the exact dates for the babies’ vaccinations or how early Ido was with his teething, and how many hours she could expect to sleep that night. Privately he wondered at the forces that impelled her constantly to return to thoughts of past humiliation and pain. Once he even said as much to her. He meant to do so tactfully, but it burst out with a bluntness he had not intended: “I don’t know, but if I had been humiliated, if I had felt so betrayed, I would try to put it behind me, and not keep reliving it all the time. Anyhow, you’re not in love now, so why keep harping on it? It’s plain masochism.”
“I’m the first to believe anything bad anyone says about me, never mind who,” she had replied, pursing her lips. But the moment Ido fell asleep she resumed work on the solo cello part of the Double Concerto, and played better than ever. And there was the evening when he stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, on his way to his own apartment, and listened to her play the first movement straight through. It seemed to him that he had never heard it played with such depth and perfection before. Moved to the core, he went down to his apartment with the baby girl in his arms. In the last analysis, he said to himself, standing at his French windows and listening to the sounds coming from above, this chance to be in close contact with an artist is a blessing in itself, though his happiest hours were those he spent alone with his baby, looking at her and imagining the life he could give her.
The nurse from the Social Services Department had a double chin. When he saw her face he knew exactly how he should talk to her. Even before this he had some idea, but when he saw the heavy, exhausted face, he was sure. For this was a face totally lacking in charm or grace. It was the face of a middle-aged woman whom life had not treated too badly, but not particularly well either. A woman with hair set in yellow-red curls and a stomach sticking out in front of her. Her legs looked too thin to support the upper half of her body. She was wearing orthopedic sandals, and her toenails were painted a saccharine pink underneath a wide, long skirt. She seemed unsteady on her feet, maybe because of the thinness of her legs. When he saw her weary and suspicious little eyes, he was glad that he had stayed home. She would have had Nita for breakfast, he thought then. She might even have dragged a confession out of her.
“Do you know the sign on your mailbox is unclear?” she admonished him while she was still standing at the door, panting as if she had climbed four flights of stairs. He apologized and promised to remedy this right away. But she wasn’t satisfied. “It can lead to misunderstandings. If I weren’t so determined I wouldn’t be here now,” she said in the hoarse voice of a chronic smoker. But she looked as if she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. He repeated that he would ta
ke care of it that very day. She fell silent and looked around with a weary, sullen expression, as if she were searching for something else to vent her resentment on. But then her eyes fell on his face. She looked at him and suddenly smiled. A small, would-be flirtatious smile. His facial muscles immediately went into action to return her smile. Filled with goodwill and trying to appear calm, he asked if she wanted to see the baby. Nurse Nehama narrowed her eyes until they were almost closed, then sat down, spread her legs, patted her thighs as if to encourage herself, smoothed out her skirt, took a sheaf of forms and some carbon paper out of her bag, and said: “Could I have a glass of water before we begin and before I see the baby? It’s so hot out. A little girl, right?”
He went into the kitchen and hurried back with a pitcher of water and a spotless glass. She studied the glass intently before pouring water into it. He had known in advance that all she would really care about would be cleanliness, even though she might pretend otherwise. She drank the water, looking at him with interest.
“Yes,” she said at last, pulling her chair up to the round dining table, “so what have we here?” She licked her finger, leafed through the forms, rummaged in a big black bag with shabby handles, and raised her head: “Have you got a ballpoint? I can’t find mine.”
“Here you are,” Michael said, quickly offering her the pen in his shirt pocket.
She examined it carefully, but it was just an ordinary ballpoint. Then she put on the small eyeglasses that hung on a thick gold chain above a longer necklace of green beads, which wobbled between her double chin and the expanse of her bosom with every move she made. “What have we here?” she said again and sighed. And then—with her head tilted to one side and her eyes open wide as if to give a semblance of life to the dull, vacant gaze—she asked him to tell her the facts again, even though she had already been informed of them by the Child Welfare Bureau. He recited the version he had agreed upon with Nita: They had found the little girl in a cardboard box on the second morning of Rosh Hashanah, and because of the holiday they had waited until that evening before having her examined by a doctor, and had only reported the incident to the police the day after, since he himself knew that on a holiday personnel would be lacking to begin looking for the baby’s mother.
Even now, while the flutist—North Korean and French-educated, according to the program—swayed her body to and fro and produced tender sounds filled with feeling and the harpsichordist struck repeated notes in the fourth movement of the concerto La notte, he could still hear the suspicious, ugly tone with which the nurse said: “But you didn’t take her to the hospital to make sure that she was all right.”
Very patiently he explained to her that the pediatrician had said there was no need to take her to the hospital, that she would only pick up an infection there, and that for the time being they could leave things as they were.
“But there are procedures!” the nurse protested and energetically wrote something in the margin of the first page of the form. She moistened her lips as she bent over the paper. Although the visit had gone well, and she had even smiled at the sight of the babies and remarked: “They seem happy here,” and although she had looked at him kindly and said as she left: “It’ll be all right, I’m not supposed to say anything to you, but I can tell you that it’ll be all right,” it had been clear to him then, as it was clear to him now, that it wouldn’t be all right. A wave of coughing broke out in the audience between movements. Four of the concerto’s six movements, two largo and two presto, had already gone by, and he hadn’t even noticed. After the first entrance of the flute, which the North Korean had played with such virtuosity, he had stopped listening, as if he weren’t there at all.
It was clear to him that nothing would be all right, because in the end either they would find the mother, or the baby would be given to some childless couple who had been waiting for years. Nurse Nehama had mentioned such couples several times during her visit. Or else they wouldn’t find the mother, and the court would declare her eligible for adoption, and he would lose her anyway. It would have been better if he hadn’t grown so attached to her. The whole idea was insane. If only he could understand what had dictated his movements at that moment, when he had decided to keep the baby. If it had been a conscious decision at all. Most of the time it seemed to him that some strange force had decided it for him. If only he could understand, he would be able to exert more control over his situation. But he didn’t understand. The one time he had followed his instincts without thinking, he had been shown how dangerous it was. And how right he had always been not to act with utter spontaneity. But then he immediately said to himself: Let’s say you had taken her to the hospital and she was there now. In the infants’ ward nobody would have picked her up and held her, especially not you. So why can’t you just enjoy what you have now and not worry about the future? Nothing lasts forever. Look at Yuval, he was once just like this baby, and now he’s not yours anymore in anything like the way he was. He sighed. From the glare directed at him by the bearded man on his right, he realized that he had sighed too loud.
Three times the audience called her back to the stage, and then she played an encore. She had apparently played beautifully, but he hadn’t been able to be there fully, and none of the beauty had touched him. The lights in the hall went on, the bearded man hurried out before anyone else had a chance to get up, and the stage emptied. He wondered if he should go and see Nita during the intermission, and he wondered how upset she was by her father’s absence. Instead he found himself standing next to a pay phone, his breath coming fast. Only after he had spoken to the babysitter, who reassured him, did he light a cigarette and look in the direction of the line at the coffee counter. Without thinking he joined the people crowding in front of the counter. As if in a trance he felt them touching and pushing him. Women in high heels and elegant clothes elbowed their way past him. Finally someone asked him what he wanted. After that he stood with his lighted cigarette and his cup of coffee, nibbling at the edge of the Styrofoam cup.
He should have felt excited in anticipation of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which Becky Pomeranz had loved so much. It had been years had since he had last heard it. At that time with Becky, he had heard it over and over again, and he knew every note by heart. He knew that Theo van Gelden’s interpretation of it was famous. People said he had brilliantly taken over the best of Bernstein’s approach to the piece, and when he had an orchestra worthy of him, Nita had read aloud to him from an interview, he was particularly renowned for his ability to produce the tumult of contradictory, stormy feelings in it and to stress the dramatic elements in Berlioz’s autobiographical story of a lovesick musician.
Nita quoted this common opinion and then remarked dryly that Theo should be the last one capable of it, since he had never been lovesick in his life, only the cause of it in others. “Maybe that’s precisely why he can,” Michael had replied, and she had looked at him thoughtfully and said: “Sometimes you can be really banal.” She had immediately apologized. But none of this interested him now. He was so restless, in part a result of sitting in front of the Social Services nurse, in part from accumulated sleeplessness—the baby still woke up every two hours at night—and also from the constant anxiety he felt, with differing degrees of intensity, a readiness of his whole body for impending and certain catastrophe. This restlessness made him think, almost with revulsion, of the sounds he knew so well and had once loved so much.
On his way back into the hall, after dismissing the possibility of going home right away, Michael imagined the bells of the symphony’s “March to the Scaffold” and the shrill discords of the “Witches’ Sabbath” ringing in his ears. He stifled a great sigh as he sat down next to the bearded man, who tensely and rhythmically, but also with infinite boredom, jiggled his crossed leg. Michael opened his program booklet so as to look again at the headings of the “Episodes of an Artist’s Life.” The grandiloquent words themselves—Rêveries, Un bal, Scène aux champs, Marche au supp
lice, Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat—wearied him. And the thought of the despairing lover and the fateful beloved, the jealous quarrels, the hero’s wish for death, the execution scene, the witches and rattling skeletons—all this now seemed to him ridiculous and childish. Like a strange and exotic scrap of something he had once heard about but he himself had never tasted.
I’d rather have Rossini, he said to himself as the oboist stood up to play the A from which the musicians tuned their instruments. Again the stage filled up; again they were many. He tried to count them. There were about thirty violins, twenty violas, and eight cellos. On the elevated seats at stage right, behind six double basses, there were six trombones, and on the left, near the second violins, the kettledrums, cymbals, and bass drum, fluttered the hands of two harpists. In the rows behind the cellos, the woodwind players were crowded, and behind them the trumpets. Over the conductor’s podium hung the microphones for the live radio broadcast of the entire concert, now joined by blinding TV lights and two cameramen running around on the stage dragging cables, changing angles, moving a woman oboe player closer to a clarinetist. The second half of the concert was going to be televised. A stir went through the audience as light flooded the first rows and dazzled their occupants. Michael lowered his head as the light hit his face, and he dismissed the thought that if he hadn’t wanted to accompany Nita here, he could have stayed home and watched and listened from his armchair. And then he reminded himself of the unique pleasure of experiencing with his own eyes and ears what was impossible to broadcast, music being made here and now.