My Nine Lives

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  A year or two after his first meeting with her, Yakuv moved into the brownstone where Kitty lived. His rooms on the top floor were even smaller than hers on the second and just as untidy. But I have seen Yakuv get much angrier than my mother at the mess in Kitty’s rooms, kicking things around the floor in a fury and sweeping crockery off her table. Then she would fly at him, and a dreadful quarrel break out. These were the first passionate fights I ever witnessed, for between my parents there was only a slight tightening of the lips to indicate one of their rare differences of opinion. Kitty’s fights with Yakuv frightened and thrilled me by their violence. They always ended the same way, with Yakuv going upstairs to his own den as though nothing had happened—he might even have been smiling—while she was left quivering, prostrate on the floor. But soon she would get up and rush to the door to scream up the stairs—uselessly, for by that time he was back at the piano and she could not be heard above his playing.

  At the time we first knew him, in the early 1940s, there was a surfeit of talented refugee pianists, so Yakuv had to struggle to make ends meet. He played for a ballet class and gave piano lessons to untalented students, of whom I became one. At six, my eager parents had sent me for piano lessons to a little old Russian lady, who spent most of her time with me writing appeals for visas to consular officials. But when I was twelve, my parents decided that I should take lessons from Yakuv. I was very reluctant, for I had often seen his pupils coming down from their lessons in tears. I knew this would be my fate too—and deservedly, for he was a great musician and I had very little talent. He made no attempt to disguise his despair, putting his hands over his ears and imploring to be struck deaf. He begged me never to come back again, never to think of the piano again, and of course I would have liked nothing better; but however much we swore an eternal farewell when I left, I always returned on time for my next lesson. I knew—we all knew, including himself—that he needed the money, and since he had driven most other pupils away, it seemed up to me to stick it out, however painful this might be for both of us.

  And actually, apart from my playing, I liked being with him. He had three little rooms, and the one in which he gave lessons was only just big enough to hold his piano. The window faced the back yard which was wild and overgrown since the first-floor tenant had no money to keep it up. At that time the mammoth apartment buildings had not yet been built, so the house was surrounded by other brownstones with similarly untended gardens and trees growing tall enough to fill his window. Yakuv, in a shabby jacket and rimless glasses, filled the room with smoke from his little black cigars. A cup of coffee stood on the piano, and since I never saw him make a new one, it must have been stone cold; but he kept sipping at it, and dipping a doughnut into it. Although coffee, doughnuts, and cigars appeared to be all he lived on, he was full of energy. He roared, stamped, heaped me with his sarcasms. Sometimes I got so mad, I banged down the piano lid, and that always seemed to amuse him: “I see you have inherited your aunt’s sweet temper.” But then he pinched my cheek, almost with affection, and walked me out the door with his arm around my shoulders.

  I was not the only one in the family to take lessons from him. I don’t know whether my father did this because he really wanted to learn or to contribute to Yakuv’s income. He came not to play the piano but to sing Lieder; he loved music but was unfortunately as unmusical as I am. I have heard Yakuv tell Kitty that the entire neighborhood was trilling Die Schöne Müllerin while my father was still struggling with the first bars. Poor Rudy—he must have endured the same sarcasms as I did, but all he would say was that Yakuv had the typical artistic temperament. Then Kitty said: “So artistic temperament gives one the right to be a swine?” She spoke bitterly because he fought with her, wouldn’t marry her, wouldn’t let her have a child with him. This last always came up in their quarrels: “All right, so don’t marry, leave it, forget it—but a child, why not a child!” He wouldn’t hear of it; and it really was impossible to think of him as a father, a gentle comforting presence like Rudy.

  Yet he and Kitty had their tender moments together. Sometimes on my visits to her I found them in bed together. They were not at all shy but invited me to sit on the side of the bed. We played games of scissors, paper, stone, with the two of them quickly changing to scissors if they saw the other being paper; or he would teach us card games and didn’t contradict when she told me that he could have made a living as a card sharper. “Better than the piano,” he said cheerfully. Without his glasses, he looked almost gentle, probably because he was so nearsighted; and it was always a surprise to see that his eyes were not dark but light grey.

  Then there were the times when he was a guest at one of my parents’ dinner parties. On those evenings Leonora sparkled in a low-cut evening gown and the sapphire and ruby necklace she had inherited from her mother-in-law. Her successful dinners were her personal triumph, so that she was entitled to the little glow that made two red patches of excitement appear on her cheeks. But at that time, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I was embarrassed by what I thought of as her smug materialism. It seemed to me that she cared only for appearances, for her silver, her crystal and china, and for nice behavior (she even tried to make me curtsey when I greeted her guests). She was in her middle thirties, in wonderful shape, radiant with health and the exercise and massage she regularly took: but I thought of her as sunk in hopeless middle age with no ideals left, if ever she had any, which I doubted.

  Except for me, everyone appreciated her dinner parties, including Yakuv whenever he was invited. In his crumpled, rumpled evening suit, he ate and drank like a person who is really hungry: which he probably was, and certainly Leonora’s exquisite dishes must have been a wonderful change from his stale coffee and doughnuts. After dinner he was persuaded to sit down at the piano, and this my parents made out to be a special favor to them, though before he left Rudy’s check had been tactfully slipped into his pocket. He played the way he ate—voraciously, flinging himself all over the keys, swaying, even singing under his breath and sometimes cursing in Polish. All this made him perspire profusely, so that afterward he could hardly respond to the applause because he was so busy wiping his face and the back of his neck. The enthusiasm was genuine—even unmusical people realized that they were in the presence of a true artist; and I could well imagine how Kitty had been so carried away the first time she heard him that she knelt at his feet.

  Kitty resented the fact that Yakuv performed for my parents’ guests, that he had to do so in order to earn money; and also that he himself didn’t resent it enough. He never complained, as she did constantly, about his lack of reputation and success. He probably didn’t think it worth complaining about. A bitter sardonic person by nature, he expected nothing better from fate, which he accepted as being terrible for everyone. When Kitty tried to make him say that he only went to Leonora’s parties because of Rudy’s check, he said, “Oh no, I go for the food—where else would I get veal in a cream sauce like Leonora’s?” And never losing an opportunity to provoke her, he added, “If only you learned to cook—just a few little dishes, one isn’t even expecting miracles—”

  “Oh yes, now you want me to be your cook-housekeeper! How you would hate it, hate it!”

  He laughed and said that on the contrary, a cook-housekeeper was just what he needed; but we both knew that he didn’t mean it because the three of us were on the same side—what I thought of as the artistic, the anti-bourgeois side.

  This was the way things stood with us when I went away to college and then, two years later, on my own quest—which I won’t go into now except to say that I may have been influenced by Yakuv’s view of life. I mean by his pessimism, his assumption that no hopes were ever fulfilled in this life; and while he left it at that, it may have been the reason why I, and others like myself, Jewish and secular, turned to Buddhism. For a while I wanted to be a Buddhist nun—it seemed a practical way out of the impasse of human life. But then I dropped the idea and got married instead.


  With all this happening, I became detached from my family in New York. I skimmed through their letters only to satisfy myself that everything was as it always had been with them. It was difficult to tell my parents’ letters apart: they had the same handwriting with traces of the spiky Germanic script in which they had first learned to write. The facts they presented were also the same—the concerts and plays they had liked or disliked, an additional maid to help Lina who had got old and suffered with her knees. Kitty in her scrawl did not report facts: only excitement at a painting or a flowering tree, anguished longing for a child, Yakuv’s impossible behavior. He of course did not write to me. I don’t suppose he wrote any letters; to whom would he write? Apart from our family, he seemed to have no personal connection with anyone.

  The only change they reported was that the brownstone in which Kitty and Yakuv had been renting was torn down. That whole midtown area was being built up with apartment blocks where only people with substantial incomes could afford to live. Kitty gave me a new address, downtown and in a part of the city that had once been commercial but had been moribund for years. When I went to see her on my return to New York, I found the warehouses and workshops still boarded up; the streets were deserted except for a few bundled-up figures hurrying along close to the walls. This made them look like conspirators, though they may only have been sheltering against the wind, which was blowing shreds of paper and other rubbish out of neglected trash cans. But some of the disused warehouses were in process of being revived, one floor at a time. In Kitty’s building there were two such conversions, and to get to hers I had to operate the pulleys of an elevator designed for crates and other large objects. Kitty’s loft, as she called it, seemed too large for domestic living though it had a makeshift kitchen with a sink and an old gas stove. Kitty’s own few pieces of furniture looked forlorn in all this space; even Yakuv’s piano—for his furniture too had come adrift here—seemed to be bobbing around as on an empty sea. He himself wasn’t there; he was on tour, things were better for him now and he was getting engagements around the country. And Kitty’s career also seemed to have taken off: she had rigged up a dark room in one corner of her space, and in the middle of the floor was a platform with two tree-stumps on it, surrounded by arc-lights and a camera on a tripod.

  Instead of going to my parents, I had come straight to her from the airport. I felt it would be easier to tell her about what I saw as the dead end of my youthful life—I had abandoned both my Buddhist studies and my marriage—and it was a relief to unburden myself to her. She listened to me in silence, which was really quite uncharacteristic of her. There were other changes: the floor had been swept, there were no dishes in the sink. After I had finished telling her whatever I had to tell, she murmured to me and stroked my hair. How right I had been to come to her first, I felt; I knew I could not expect the same understanding from my parents, whose lives had been so calm, stable, and fulfilled.

  My parents’ building and all its neighbors stood the way they had through all the past decades, as stately as the mansions that they had themselves displaced. The doormen were the same I had known throughout my childhood; so was the elevator man who took me up to where Leonora was waiting for me in the doorway. She held me to her bosom where I remembered to avoid the sharp edges of her diamond brooch. “But now it’s my turn!” Rudy clamored, caring nothing about having his good suit crumpled as I pressed myself against him, inhaling his after-shave and breath-freshener.

  But “No not here, darling,” Leonora said when I started to go into my room. My father cleared his throat—always a sign of embarrassment with him. But Leonora exuded a triumphant confidence: “Because of the piano,” she said, ushering me into the guest bedroom, which was considerably smaller than mine. I didn’t understand her: the piano had always been in the drawing room and was still there. “The other piano,” she said. “His.” She spoke as if we had already had a long conversation on the subject. But we had not, and it took me some time to realize that this other piano was Yakuv’s new one that Rudy had bought for him.

  Again skipping intermediate explanations—“It’s so noisy at Kitty’s,” Leonora said. “Could someone tell me why she has to live in a warehouse? He needs peace and quiet; naturally—an artist.”

  So there had been changes, and principally, I noticed, in Leonora. Her coiled hair was newly touched with blonde; her cheeks had those two spots of excitement I knew from her dinner parties. She kept taking deep breaths as if to contain some elation inside her.

  Rudy took me for a walk in Central Park. As usual on his walks, my father wore a three-piece herringbone suit, a Homburg hat, and carried a rolled umbrella like an Englishman. From time to time he pointed this umbrella in the direction of a tree, an ornamental bridge, ducks on a pond: “Beautiful,” he breathed, loving Nature in its formal aspect. Around us towered the hotels and apartment blocks of Central Park South and West, which he also loved—for the same decorative solidity that had formed the background of his Berlin youth and his courtship of my mother.

  “It’s a privilege for us to give him what he has never had. A quiet orderly home, meals on time—yes yes, this sounds very—what do you call it? Stuffy? Square? But even artists,” he smiled, “have to eat and sleep.”

  “What about Kitty?” I said.

  “Kitty. Exactly. They’re too much alike, you see; artistic temperaments. Sometimes he needs—they both need—a rest from the storm and stress. Nothing has changed. Leonora and I are what we have always been.”

  “Mother looks wonderful.”

  “You know how she has always adored music above everything.” Then he exclaimed: “Dear heaven, who says we’re not sensible grown-up people! We’ve learned how to behave. You’re still a child, lambkin.” He squeezed my arm, in token of my misery and failure. “One day you too will learn that everything turns out the way it has to, for good; for our good.” He pointed his umbrella—at the sky this time, inviting me to look upward with him toward the immense perfection that was always with us, encompassing our small mismanaged lives.

  A week or two after my arrival, Yakuv returned from his tour. He had not changed. He at once went into what used to be my bedroom—without apology, probably he didn’t realize that it had been mine, or simply took it for granted that it was now his. He greeted me with a comradely clap on the shoulder, not as if I had been away for several years but as if I had showed up as usual for my weekly lesson. Leonora followed him into the room; she had to unpack his bag, she said, because if she didn’t it would stand there for weeks. But this was said with a smile, not in the reproachful way she used for Kitty’s and my untidiness. After a while, during which Rudy went for another of his walks, she emerged with an armful of Yakuv’s laundry. Soon came the sound of his piano, and every day after that it seemed to fill, to appropriate the apartment. If I moved around or shut a door a little too loudly, she or Rudy, or both, laid a finger on their lips.

  Leonora did everything possible to create the best conditions for his work. She arranged his schedule with his agent, whom he often fired so that she had to find a new one; and since it infuriated him to have anyone disarrange his music sheets, she cleaned his room herself. Otherwise he was calm, immersed in his work. He rarely asked for anything and good-naturedly accepted even what he didn’t want—Leonora once gave him a dark blue velvet smoking jacket, and though he mildly protested (“So now I must look like a monkey”), he let her coax him into it. He also smoked the better brand of cigars she bought him to replace the little black ones he was used to. He had personal habits but was not entrenched in them, and if it made no difference to him, he gladly obliged her in everything.

  That was during the day. But during the evening meal, he would push his plate back and without waiting for the rest of us to finish—he still ate in the same rapid, ravenous way—he went out, banging the front door behind him. He never said that he was going, or where; he was not expected to, and anyway, we knew. But there were times when he did not return for sever
al days, and while I had no idea what transpired between him and Kitty during those days, I was very much aware of the effect his absence had on Leonora. She behaved like a sick person. She stayed in her bedroom with the curtains drawn, and “Leave me alone,” was all she ever said to Rudy’s and my efforts to rally her. It was not until Yakuv returned that she got up, bathed and dressed and tried to return to her normal self. But this was not possible for her; she appeared to have suffered a collapse—even physically she had lost weight and her splendid breasts sagged within her large bra. I don’t think Yakuv noticed any of this; anyway, it did not affect him since in his presence she made a brave attempt to pull herself together and go about her household duties as usual, especially her duties to him. She would not have known how to stage the sort of confrontations that he was used to with Kitty; and since these were lacking, he probably assumed that everything was fine with Leonora—that is, insofar as he thought of her at all.

  Rudy wanted to take her on a Mediterranean cruise. A few years earlier they had enjoyed sailing around the Greek Islands, but now Leonora was reluctant to leave. She said she couldn’t; Lina was too old and cranky to look after the house properly, everything would be topsy-turvy. I could hear my parents arguing in their bedroom at night, Rudy as usual calm and reasonable, but she not at all her usual self. In the mornings Rudy would emerge alone from their bedroom, and he and I would discuss ways of persuading her. We laid stress on her health—“Look at you,” I said, making her stand before her bedroom mirror.