by Batya Gur
“Theo?” she exclaimed with surprise. “Oh, well, Theo. Theo is completely different. Completely,” she assured him. “A great talent,” she added.
“Who?” asked Michael.
For a moment she seemed confused. “Gabi,” she said, and she immediately added: “And Theo, too. But Theo is different.”
“In what sense?”
“Gabi was with me from seven to eighteen. Then he went to New York, to Juilliard. Theo stopped studying with me at fourteen or fifteen, and then presto!—straight to New York.”
“And you’ve kept in touch with him all these years.”
“With Gabi? Of course, all the time. In very close touch. He always wrote to me, phoned, came when he was in Israel. I have many pupils who keep in touch, but Gabi was especially good about it.”
“And Theo?”
“Theo is completely different,” she insisted. “A great talent, but not for the violin. He did not have enough patience. He had to be pushed to work. Unlike Gabi, who worked too much. You know Theo, yes?”
He nodded. “Is it impossible to be a great violinist and a conductor at the same time?” he asked.
“It is certainly possible,” she said, surprised at the question. “A pianist, too. Barenboim, for instance, has developed very well as a pianist, and he is a great conductor, too. No question, it is possible,” she said reluctantly. “Sometimes. There are other examples.”
“But not Theo?”
“And you? You are a policeman, yes?” A sudden cloud veiled her brow and her eyes. “Terrible, terrible! So much work and so much talent. And suddenly—gone!”
“You liked him very much?”
“Liked!” she said dismissing the word. “Liked? I loved him very much. My pupils,” she said, looking out the window, “are children to me. So many hours, so many years. Ah!” she said sorrowfully. “What is there to say?”
He asked her to tell him about Gabriel’s personality.
She opened and closed her mouth once or twice, and then she said: “It is impossible to describe a human being. If you know the person it is even more impossible. He began with me at age seven. Even then he was a pedant, a perfectionist, but with very much talent. So serious. Also naive. With ideals. He was special. Quiet but special.”
“Was he already interested in early music when he was young?”
“Gabi?”
Michael nodded.
“Yes,” she said, hesitating. “Not as much as in recent years, but yes, you could say so. Even as child he liked Baroque music best.”
“And Theo?” For a moment he thought that she would say again that Theo was completely different. But she said nothing, only tightened her lips, and suddenly wrinkles he had not seen before appeared on her chin. She thought for a moment, and then she said: “I am thinking of Thomas Mann when I think of Theo and Gabi, because of the great difference between them.”
Michael was silent. It seemed to him that she could hear the tape recorder running in his pocket. But she had withdrawn into herself: “Gabriel was more interested in the inner side of things. He, not Theo, was a kind of Adrian Leverkühn.”
“Who?” whispered Michael.
“Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. You haven’t read it?”
“I tried once, a long time ago,” he admitted.
“It is a difficult book if you don’t know much about music,” she said forgivingly. “Do you know much about music?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” said Michael. “I only love it.”
“Loving it is the most important,” she assured him. “Not for an artist, not for a musician,” she added quickly. “For him love is not enough. Sometimes it even gets in the way. An artist has to be rather cold. An artist has to be almost a monster,” she said, smiling. “He has to send everything off to hell, even love, when he is playing. He must play with feeling without feeling it. Do you understand? He needs—how should I say it?—distance, the right distance,” she said finally with an expression of relief at having found the satisfactory words. “But for life he needs . . .” she spread out her arms, tilted her head, and examined his face alertly. “You studied at the university?”
He nodded. “History and law. But I haven’t graduated yet.”
“What kind of history? Art history?”
“No, medieval history mainly,” he said uneasily, and his discomfort increased when he saw her nodding politely.
“Is that related to the police?” The question was polite, but it contained a note of surprise.
“That was before . . . before I knew that I was going to join the police force,” he tried to explain briefly. It was hard for him to tell how much interest, if any, she retained in him from the moment she realized that he was neither a musician nor knowledgeable about music. If only he could tell her his life story, tell her the combination of circumstances that had caused him to find himself in the police rather than pursuing his historical studies, if he could make her understand that he wasn’t just another policeman, that he, too, longed for things of the spirit. He felt a childish need to be valued at his true worth. How could he penetrate the barrier erected by a person who was simply incapable of understanding the point of a life that was not filled with music, and who therefore found him of no interest at all? If only she knew about his relationship with Nita, about how moved he was by her playing, maybe she would value him more. Maybe she would even like him. Something about him would get through to her. He felt much respect for her, and a deep desire for her to feel a little respect for him, too. At the same time he was ashamed of this very desire. He suppressed the urge to explain himself and said nothing.
“What were we talking about? This old head!” she said, tapping her forehead. “Ah yes, Doctor Faustus. Yes, there is a composer in it who sells himself to the Devil. Gabriel didn’t sell himself, but he felt as if he had sold his soul. He was not a composer, but he always wanted purity, purity—he was crazy for purity. I asked him, when he was still a boy: ‘What is so impure about Mendelssohn?’ Even Mendelssohn he didn’t like.” She smiled sadly and lightly slapped her hands on her thighs.
At first he hesitated a bit, but when he looked into her eyes he decided there was nothing to fear. “Did you know that he was a homosexual?”
She didn’t even blink. “I thought so. It is too early between twelve and eighteen to know for sure. The person himself doesn’t always know at this age. But I always thought he might be. Then he married, and I thought I had been wrong. But as the years went by, when he came to see me, I saw that it was so. I also heard things.”
“But you didn’t talk to him about it?”
“Never,” she said, shaking her head and biting her lip like a young girl.
“And he always came to see you alone?”
“Always alone.”
“And he came to see you a few weeks ago?”
“Is it a few weeks already?” she said, surprised. “I cannot remember when exactly. It was very hot. I think it was in August. The beginning of August. Yes, it is a month and a half already since he was here.”
“Was there anything special about the visit?”
She seemed to be straining to remember. “No, the father was still alive. Gabi was very excited, very happy. He had a surprise for me, he said, but he would not tell me what it was. He would tell me in a couple of months.”
“And there was no hint? Nothing out of the ordinary that he said?” She thought for a moment, and then she murmured: “He was happy, but there was also a lot of—what is the word?—tension.”
“And that’s it?”
“Well,” she said, seeming to lose patience, “he was here only for an hour. He brought me presents from Europe. He always came with little presents. Chocolate, cheese from Holland, where he had just been, a pretty scarf. I am still happy with LP records,” she said with a childlike smile. “I said to him I will go to the next world without such things, and yet he brought me a CD player and some Heifetz CDs. He did not always like Heifetz’
s playing, but he brought them for me. Sometimes he brought me his own recordings. Bach’s B Minor Mass, which he conducted three or four years ago in Jerusalem. I did not like the way he did it, but it was interesting.”
“Did you have the feeling that he had come to ask your advice about something? That he was in some sort of crisis?”
She hesitated. “He always came for advice. Before an important concert, when he was working on something new. We would talk for hours, talking and thinking. He was very clever, Gabriel, a true musician. We spoke a lot about interpretation. For example, how to reconstruct Baroque music. We did not always agree.”
“You’ve known him since he was a child,” Michael pressed her. “Wasn’t there anything special, out of the ordinary, about that last visit?”
“Well,” she said with evident uneasiness, and a profound sorrow welled up in her eyes. “Of course we did not know that it was the last visit. We also did not know that he would go before me. And in such a way.”
Michael was silent.
Again her face looked strained. “I do not know anymore if it was really that way or if it is because I want to help,” she said apologetically. “But maybe . . . I remember that we talked about Vivaldi. He always talked about Vivaldi in recent years. This time even more than usual. And there was something that seemed particularly . . . yes, happy in him about it.”
“What about Vivaldi?”
“He asked me,” and again she smiled, “if I believed that Vivaldi wrote a requiem.” Now she laughed aloud, a brief, low, mirthless laugh. “That is funny,” she said.
“What’s funny about it?” asked Michael.
“That there could be a requiem by Vivaldi is funny! It is impossible! It is absurd! Do you know Vivaldi’s music?”
“Everybody knows Vivaldi. The Four Seasons, a lot of concertos you hear all the time. But I don’t really know—”
“Vivaldi did not write funeral music. He wrote maybe the most cheerful music in the world, in all of human history. Vivaldi never wrote a requiem. It is a paradox to say that he did. Do you understand?”
“When Gabi said that, did he mean that Vivaldi wrote one that’s been lost? Like a lot of Greek tragedies?”
“It is well known,” she said dismissively, “that many of his compositions are lost.”
“And have some of them been found?” asked Michael alertly.
“They find things all the time,” she said. “Including pieces by Vivaldi. A few, and not recently.”
“So he asked you if you believed that Vivaldi had written a requiem?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “And I laughed. I said: ‘I believe it the way I believe Brahms wrote an opera.’ The same likelihood.”
He felt that if he asked for an explanation of the analogy she would despise him utterly. And so he asked her if she would be willing to listen to a passage from a musical composition and identify it. So that no one would hear anything they shouldn’t, he had located in the car the exact spot on the tape, the seconds when Herzl had sung the snatch of music during his conversation with Theo.
She asked to hear it again and again. She frowned. “It is hard to tell what this is,” she finally said and fell silent.
“Could it be Baroque?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Could it be Vivaldi?”
She hesitated. “It is hard to say. It is not anything I ever heard before. And it is very brief.”
“But it could be Vivaldi?”
“It could,” she reflected aloud, “but what is so important about it? It is brief, and the tape does not give us any chords—the harmony—so it is hard to say what it is. It could also be Scarlatti or Corelli. It could even come from a Classical or Romantic piece. It could be anything, maybe even just an ordinary song.”
“What do you make of Gabi’s question about Vivaldi?”
She pursed her lips in puzzlement. “I really don’t understand it,” she confessed.
“And there’s no requiem by Vivaldi?”
“None,” she declared.
“And if one had been found?” he ventured.
“We would know about it,” she said dryly. “Such a thing would not be overlooked as if it were nothing.”
It seemed to him that he had reached a dead end. “I understand that there was some jealousy between Theo and Gabriel even when they were children.”
“And how!”
“Theo was jealous of Gabriel?”
She hesitated. “And vice versa,” she finally said. “When they were children—two brothers, two violinists. It was very difficult. And there is a sister, too. Named Nita after a member of the very musical Bentwich family. Do you know any of this?” She glanced at him and he nodded. “Beit-Daniel belonged to the Bentwich family,” she explained with satisfaction. “The sister is a good cellist. She also studied at Juilliard. The van Geldens are also a very musical family.” She fell silent and withdrew into herself.
“But at a certain stage Theo stopped studying with you. He stopped before Gabriel did.”
“He thought I did not appreciate him enough.” Her eyes narrowed reflectively. “That is . . . I am not an easy person,” she said apologetically.
“He told me that it was you who suggested he stop.”
“I do not remember anymore,” she apologized again. “It is more than thirty years ago. But it could have happened that way. Why waste time with something that was not working?”
“Was working with Theo a waste of time for you?”
Again she hesitated. “That is a brutal way to say it. A large part of being a good violinist—or any instrumentalist, but maybe it is hardest for violinists—is the matter of character. It is a matter of strength. It is also important what the strength is used for. It is not only talent. There can be much talent and nothing is done with it. Or something bad is done with it. With me pupils do not learn to be international successes. I teach only how to work. International success is not really interesting.”
“Mrs. Zackheim,” said Michael delicately “The greatest violinists in the world today studied with you. Names known all over the world.”
She looked at him angrily. “Known all over the world?” she seemed to spit the words out, and she breathed heavily. “Fame? Success? What does it matter?” She was silent and she glared at him. “Nonsense!” she suddenly shouted, and she removed her feet from the stool and waved her arms furiously. “It is an accident! They learned to work! To work! And to work more! Day and night, summer and winter. All the rest is nonsense. So someone is famous. It means nothing, nothing!” She breathed hard, composed herself, smiled, and said quietly: “To tell the truth, success does no harm if it does not corrupt. Sometimes it goes to the head. What can you do?” The last words were spoken in a murmur. She averted her eyes and stared at the wall with a sad, stubborn look.
“And Theo?”
“Theo had no patience. He was talented. Very talented. But he immediately wanted to be a conductor. If he was not a violinist like Heifetz, then he would be a conductor like Bernstein. That was Theo. You know, he is also an important analyst of music. I heard him on television talking about Romantic music. It was first class. But Theo, with all his talent, had too little patience, too much appetite for everything. For international fame, for money. Also, I hear, for women,” she said smiling, and her eyes twinkled mischievously. “But the strength to work and patience with the violin?” She shook her head and clucked her tongue loudly, rattling her teeth. “You saw Yuval?” Her breathing quieted, subsiding slowly as if she were reminding herself of where she was. Her chest rose and fell as if with a great effort. “He has discipline and patience. The potential of being a great artist. You need a strong ego. Lots of ego. There are people with endless appetite. Never satisfied with what they have. Artists,” she said, leaning forward, “need a great appetite, an appetite for perfection and discipline. But they also need a sense of humility.”
“And Gabriel had it, this sense of humility?”
“Yes, he did,” she said. “Two children in the same family. Such a difference—day and night. You don’t know if genetics or psychology is behind it. People are born with personalities, they have them before there can be any outside influence. One like this and the other like that. Gabriel was very close to his father. Theo was the mother’s favorite. She was a good pianist.”
“Do you know if there was anyone who hated Gabriel?”
Again she shook her head violently. “Certainly not,” she said in a choked voice. “You do not know Gabriel. He was hard, but hard on himself. He was also at a new high point of his career in rethinking Baroque music. He was starting a historical performance ensemble in Israel.”
“Did you ever meet his companion?”
“Never,” she said sadly. “Some pupils talk about their life, family, everything. Gabriel was discreet about his private life. We were very close, but we did not talk about such things. I never even met his wife. Theo, on the other hand, was like a child. Very open. For Theo it is very important that people like him. He has a lot of libido, as they say.”
“Wagner,” Michael reflected aloud.
“Wagner,” she agreed. “I hear Theo wants to make a Bayreuth festival here in Israel. It is maybe a move, I think, also against his father.”
“Well,” Michael reminded her, “his father is no longer with us.”
She sighed and shuddered. “So brutal,” she said, “so frightening. For a painting? It is better to have nothing. Look,” she spread out her arms, “I lack nothing. But also there is nothing worth stealing here.” “Would you say there was a difficult relationship between Theo and his father?”
“No,” she said confidently. “I knew Felix van Gelden for many years. He was a very good father to Theo. And Theo also loved his father, but he was not the favorite. And Theo, if I understand him correctly,” she said with hesitation, “did not give way easily. There was tension.”
“Could he have killed him?”
“Who?” she asked astonished.
“Theo, his father?”
“Ah!” she dismissed the question contemptuously. “Certainly not! Impossible!” She put her feet back on the stool, and gave him a penetrating look.