by Batya Gur
Gabriel van Gelden, as concertmaster, again stood with his back to the audience and drew his bow over his violin. He listened to the tuning of the violas, the cellos, and finally the violins. On his elevated seat the first clarinetist again and again repeated the recurring main theme—the idée fixe—of the entire symphony. The stage rang with loud cacophony as the hall filled with the noise of instruments being tuned. Gabriel van Gelden kept his head turned toward the side entrance.
Theo van Gelden bowed briefly to the audience, and the old man in front of Michael fell silent and again took hold of the young woman’s long-nailed hand. Again Michael noticed Nita’s dark eyebrows arching as her eyes focused on the empty chair next to him. Their father had not arrived, and this was apparently a concert he would not hear, thought Michael as the music began. How could he have forgotten the soft woodwind opening and the gradual entrance of the strings? The audience’s coughing almost drowned out the pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets. The coughing continued the whole time the music remained pianissimo. Michael thought of Becky Pomeranz’s full, smooth, brown arms, and of the day when she had played the recording of the Fantastique for him, and the seductive tone in which she had told him that its hero imagines murdering his beloved and his consequent ascent to the scaffold, with bells ringing in the distance. He clearly remembered her explaining to him that the trombones suggest the ugliness of the execution with low, sustained notes, and that the idée fixe, the theme of the beloved, only returns, from the distance, at the moment the head rolls. And that the witches then appear, with the beloved among them, ugly as they are, dangerous as they are. Her theme, which had been so celestial, so gentle, reappears in a grotesque form, shrilly played by piccolo and clarinet.
Suddenly the beloved’s theme now sounded in the hall for the first time. It aroused in him a strong mixture of joy at this encounter with the familiar and great sorrow at the passage of time. At what was no more and could never again be. Becky Pomeranz’s brown eyes, shining with intelligence and seductiveness, the frank innocence with which he desired her, and his fear of himself and his lust.
The audience again was spellbound. Stealing a sidelong glance at the music critic, Michael saw him holding his pen up over his program, as if he was waiting to assess the entrance of the strings. But after they entered he wrote nothing, and he put his arm down again. Throughout the first movement nobody around Michael stirred. The air in the hall was still. There was no more coughing. The dark-haired young woman in front of him sat upright, and in the soft passages he thought that he could hear the old man’s heavy breathing. Theo van Gelden raised and lowered his hands and the orchestra played as if bewitched. Sound pursued sound, and when he heard the phrases that soared in extended crescendos, Michael allowed himself to be carried away and follow them in the futile hope that they were leading somewhere.
When it was over there was thunderous rhythmic applause, calling Theo van Gelden back to the stage several times. He signaled the orchestra to their feet, and he received flowers from a little girl whom he kissed on the cheeks. Only after the audience was persuaded that there would be no more, and the young woman in front of him said to the old man with surprise, “I actually liked it!” did the lights go on and the audience, many of them smiling, slowly leave the hall. Nita came up to the edge of the stage and motioned Michael to approach. He made his way to her. She looked down on him with her head bowed and her knees slightly bent. He began to tell her how beautifully she had played the solo in the Rossini, but she interrupted him: “My father isn’t here. I don’t understand it, there’s no answer at his house. I phoned during intermission. Theo tried, too.”
After repeating several times that her father wasn’t here, she quickly added that they would have to go to his apartment to see if anything had happened to him. “But first,” she said despairingly, “there’s this gala reception, and all three of us have to be there. Only after that . . .”
Hesitantly she asked him if he would like to come to the reception, and he immediately said that he thought he should hurry back to the babies, which brought a certain relief to her face. But it soon clouded over again, and again she said: “I don’t understand it. He’s always so punctual. I don’t know what to think. We even phoned the dentist. There’s no answer at his office or at his home. Only the answering machines. He must have been here himself, he’s crazy about music and has a subscription.”
Michael tried to find something reassuring to say, speculating about aftereffects on her father of the dentistry. But Nita repeated that there was no answer at his house, and then she said: “Gabriel’s completely hysterical. We have to keep him here almost by force, because if he suddenly disappears it’ll give rise to gossip. All kinds of people will have something to say about why he wasn’t at the reception. It would really be best, if you agree, that is, whatever you prefer. . . .”
Michael nodded, patted her shoulder reassuringly, and walked quickly out into the fresh air and to his car, which by now stood nearly alone in the parking lot.
The simple, routine actions—talking to the babysitter and paying her, tucking in Ido, who had thrown off his blanket, feeding the baby girl, who woke up the moment the babysitter shut the door behind her—soon dispelled the emotions aroused by the concert. Unwilling to return her to her cradle, he left the baby lying on his chest for a long time after feeding her. He breathed in her delicate smell and gently touched her cheek with his finger. At moments like these he felt engulfed by a wave of warmth and compassion, feelings he thought he had lost long ago. There was no struggle here, only her simple need of him, which needed no defenses. When he looked at her he could believe that in her life everything was still possible. He put her back into the little cradle, and since he was so exhausted, he fell asleep on Nita’s small sofa in the living room, which was far too short for him. Yet he slept soundly and deeply, secure in the knowledge that both babies were asleep in the next room. And it was from this sleep that he was startled by the ringing of the phone.
Theo van Gelden was on the other end of the line. It was he who told him about the break-in, and that they had found the old man bound and gagged and dead. Speaking in a monotonous whisper, he explained that Nita was talking to the police now, and that she was “in a terrible state. The doctor here has given her a pill. There’s nothing to be done.” He suddenly groaned. “Our father is dead. He’s dead and that’s it.” Sniffling, he said that Nita had asked if Michael would stay in her apartment until she returned. Without ever talking about it, they had agreed to spend their nights apart, and every evening, after the babies’ last feeding of the day, he would wrap the little one in the pink blanket Tzilla had brought her, take her downstairs, and put her to bed in the wicker cradle he carried from room to room.
And since he understood at once that he was in the midst of a catastrophe that would disrupt everything, and because of Theo’s alienated tone, Michael asked if he could have a few words with Nita. There was a brief pause. Then Theo van Gelden said: “It’s not a good idea right now We’ve got the police here and an ambulance and so on.”
“Precisely because of that . . .” Michael was about to say, and then thought better of it. He had intended to ask her if she wanted him to come to her father’s house, if she needed him there, but he realized that he couldn’t leave the babies alone and, what was more, he suddenly also realized that if the person responsible for the investigation was someone he knew, everything about the baby would be revealed. And so, curbing his panic, he only asked when the break-in and the death had taken place.
“They don’t know yet for sure,” replied Theo van Gelden. “They’re talking about this evening or late this afternoon. They haven’t yet worked out . . .” he mumbled, and then swallowed and sighed. “They haven’t worked out the connection between the room temperature and the . . . the rigor mortis.”
“Can you talk freely?” asked Michael.
“I’m in the kitchen,” said Theo, showing no surprise at the question.
“Do you know the names of the policemen there?”
“There are two of them—no, three. And also a woman from . . . from the forensics laboratory. And a doctor and some other people. I don’t know exactly.”
“But is there someone in charge? The one who’s giving the orders?”
“Yes,” said Theo van Gelden impatiently. “One of them talks all the time. A man with a big belly. But I don’t remember his name.”
For a moment Michael wondered whether to ask him to go and find out, but this would already give rise to suspicion. If the son who had just seen his dead father returned to the scene of the crime to ask the name of the policeman in charge, they would ask him why he wanted to know. Michael couldn’t tell him not to mention his name. Something in Michael protested at being left out of the picture. For a moment he wondered if he should try to find a babysitter, or even take the babies with him. How could he possibly be left out of this situation?
“Why do you want to know that? Do you know someone there?” asked Theo van Gelden with some irritation. Michael remembered that the conductor didn’t know anything about him. Certainly nothing about his being on the police force. It would be better, he decided, not to say anything about it to him now. Suddenly he heard a smoker’s cough in the background, and then a loud and very familiar voice said: “Mister van Gelden . . . we need you over here for a minute.”
The phone picked up Theo van Gelden’s reply: “I’ll be through in a moment, it’s about my sister’s baby—”
“Okay, no problem, as soon as you’re through,” grunted the familiar voice.
There was no doubt about it, and yet Michael whispered into the phone: “Danny Balilty? Is that his name?”
“I think so,” said Theo, “but now I have to . . . You heard for yourself. Can I tell her that everything’s all right? You’ll stay there with the baby?”
“Tell her I won’t move until she gets here,” promised Michael. “And tell her to phone me here when she can talk, and not to mention my name,” he added uncomfortably. “But tell her that quietly.” He was astonished by his own words. It’s Balilty I’m dealing with here, he reflected. From my own world.
Theo van Gelden muttered something noncommittal and unreassuring.
Michael sat listening to his heartbeat. It was stupid of him to think that he could keep the baby a secret. That he had managed it up to now was a miracle. But now that Danny Balilty was in the game, pervasively present in Nita’s life for the immediate future, there wasn’t a hope in hell of keeping any secrets. And that being the case, what on earth was keeping him here, among babies and dirty dishes? Something in him refused to believe that he was standing here at the kitchen sink instead of rushing to the place where he was needed.
He washed and dried the dishes. Then he prepared bottles for Ido and for his baby. By the time the telephone rang again he could count five cigarette stubs in the ashtray. Nita spoke in a hollow voice: “My father’s dead. He died today. Now I don’t have a father or a mother.”
He didn’t know what to say.
“Your parents are both dead, too.”
“For a long time now.”
“We’re orphans,” she said, weeping into the phone. “We’re all orphans.”
He couldn’t find any words.
“Now they’re concentrating on the painting again. They’ve already determined that jewelry was taken, but we can’t find the photograph of the painting. They took it right out of the frame. I don’t know if Father died before . . .” She fell silent and steadied her breath. “He had a rag stuffed into his mouth, and tape stuck over it. He suffocated. I don’t know how long . . .”
Michael said nothing. He couldn’t find a way to say that her father hadn’t suffered, that he must have died instantly. It’s not murder, he said to himself, just armed robbery. I don’t have to be there.
As if she had heard his thoughts she said, in the same hollow tone as before: “They wouldn’t let me see him. Gabriel found him. He was in the bedroom. He was dragged there. Theo saw him, too. But they wouldn’t let me in. So I don’t know if he was terrified, and for how long he was terrified. It’s horrible. Horrible!”
Michael murmured something. Then he roused himself and asked: “Isn’t it enough for your two brothers to be there? Can’t they let you go home?” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. He was talking like an ignoramus. Like someone who had no idea of police procedures. As if he were two separate people.
“I’ve only just finished describing the jewelry. None of us remembers exactly what there was. All three of us also had to tell them about the painting.”
“What painting?”
“I told you,” she replied in the hollow voice, without her customary impatience. “It all happened because of the painting. They must have known it was here. And it’s worth . . . I don’t know, maybe half a million dollars.”
“What painting is it, exactly?”
Suddenly a trace of emotion invaded her voice: “Didn’t I tell you? I told you. I told you that my father had a painting called Vanitas in his house. By a seventeenth-century Dutch painter named Hendrik van Steenwijk. Anyway, they removed it from the frame. It’s not here anymore. They turned the whole house upside down. And we . . .” she said in a choked voice, “were angry with him for not coming to the concert! When I think of the hours he spent here while we—”
“It definitely wasn’t hours. It’s a matter of minutes, if not seconds,” he said authoritatively.
“Is that true? Or are you just saying it?”
“It’s true. I know.”
“It’s horrible anyway. I don’t know . . . how I’ll . . . Well, is Ido all right?”
“He’s fine. Sleeping soundly. You don’t have to worry about him now.”
“They’ve taken him away. Away from here. Now it’s only us here with the policeman who’s waiting for us to go so he can . . . can seal the apartment, he says.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be with you there.”
She ignored his appeal. Her hollow voice trembled now: “Because they haven’t finished their examination. We’re not allowed to touch anything except in the kitchen until they’ve finished.”
“What do you mean they haven’t finished?!” He was astounded. “They left before completing their examination?”
“He’s still here, the one who doesn’t stop talking.”
“Balilty?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Listen,” she said tremulously, “I know that you don’t want me to say I know you. And I didn’t say anything, but wouldn’t it be better . . . if—”
“No,” he said firmly. “I’ll explain it to you, trust me. He’s a first-class man, believe me, he’ll do everything that has to be done even without your mentioning my name.”
She was silent.
“Ask him when you can go home.”
“I’ve already asked. He didn’t answer. He talks a lot but he never answers a single question.”
“It won’t be much longer,” he promised.
“As if it makes any difference now,” she mumbled. “Now everything, everything’s absolutely . . .” Her voice took on the hollow tone again. In the background he heard men’s voices. “They want me to go look at the list of jewelry,” she said. “As if it makes any difference now.”
He didn’t go back to sleep. Ido woke up only once, the baby girl twice. But he couldn’t fall asleep in between. He lay on his back and put her on his chest. Her feet reached his waist, her face was buried in his neck. From time to time she took a deep breath, shuddered, and changed the position of her head. Finally he returned her to her cradle. He couldn’t read, either. He lay in the dark and smoked, staring at the red glow at the tip of the cigarette and listening attentively to the sounds coming from the street, even though he knew very well that he would not hear the engine of the car bringing Nita home. They would stop on the other side of the building, the side overlooked not by the French windows but by the kitchen balcony. At last he we
nt and stood on the kitchen balcony and smoked next to the balustrade, tapping his ash into an empty flowerpot standing in the corner. And thus in the first pale, milky light of morning, he saw Gabriel van Gelden holding Nita’s arm as he helped her out of a big car and led her into the building.
3
Vanitas
Who could have imagined it!” cried Theo van Gelden, stopping at the bedroom door in Nita’s apartment. He stared at the closed door and went on pacing slowly up and down the narrow corridor. His hands were in his pockets. From time to time, at regular intervals, he stamped on the floor, as if in obedience to some rhythm dictated to him from outside. “After everything he went through in his life,” he said when he approached the living room, where Nita and Gabriel were sitting. “A man reaches the age of eighty-two, having lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland, having been rescued time and again, and ends up robbed and killed in his own home here in the State of Israel!”
By now, at six o’clock in the morning, the avocado had already begun to turn dark on the sandwiches Gabriel had prepared. Gabriel was the only one to eat a slice and drink two cups of coffee. Theo only pinched off a piece of the soft part of the white bread and nibbled it abstractedly, and Nita didn’t even look at the copper serving table upon which the plate of food reposed. From the moment Michael put the phone down after the first conversation with Theo, he knew that his sense of oppression would not lift. He dismissed from his mind any explicit thoughts about the question of what would happen to the baby from the moment he found out that Danny Balilty was the head of the Special Investigation Team on the Felix van Gelden case. At that moment, brief and clear as lightning, he knew that the matter of the baby could no longer be kept secret. When Danny Balilty was involved in a case, he was sure—in his own unique, sloppy way, as if with a kind of casual nonchalance—to uncover any scrap of information his sense of smell led him to. When Michael saw Nita in the doorway, in her stocking feet, high-heeled shoes in hand, and still in her black evening gown, with her face hollow and staring, he was filled with guilt at his preoccupation with secrecy, with his own concerns, with the question of how he was going to keep the baby. What was supposed to be the framework in which they would both be protected had in one moment been destroyed. What had seemed a safe place had collapsed like a house of cards. And as had been happening to him lately, in fact ever since he found the baby, came the thought of losing her. And the feeling of the threat of something irretrievable, a loss for which there could be no consolation, overwhelmed him. He would abandon the thought and let the anxiety float like a twig on the current of a general unease, and try to think of Nita.