The audience, weary from the long wait, hurries back to its seats, but the mother is delayed, and Honi is afraid she may be having trouble unlocking her stall, though he’s not sure which one it is. The loudspeaker issues the final call, and the unabating wind carries the sounds of instruments being tuned, as Honi rushes back and forth by the toilets calling quietly, like a little boy, “Ima, Ima, what’s going on?” and tapping on doors, trying to guess where she is hidden. At last she emerges, her face washed and powdered, her hair newly combed. Her stall had a mirror that inspired her to freshen up and look pretty in honor of the new Carmen.
On the way to their seats Honi tells her about Uriah’s wife and marvels at his mother’s perceptiveness, but she remains blasé: “It’s only natural that Uriah would find a woman who looked like the lover he left. But what did you talk about? What did you tell him?”
“Nothing, it was very quick, just a few words about our experiment—I mean yours.”
“Why did you have to tell him? It’s none of his business.”
“No reason.”
“There’s never no reason.”
“Yes there is. No reason.”
“I just hope you didn’t tell him Noga is on the stage.”
“I did or I didn’t,” he says angrily. “I can’t remember my every word. I told you, it was a brief conversation, and Uriah was the one who cut it off. Anyhow, good God, they separated nine years ago, so who cares anymore?”
Twenty-Nine
THE NEWS THAT HIS FORMER WIFE will soon appear on the stage has greatly unsettled Uriah, but he is careful not to betray any hint of the news to his spouse. Although their seats are in the middle section, close to the stage, he looks around for binoculars. “Why binoculars?” asks his wife. “We’re not far away.” “Be that as it may,” he replies, “it was sometimes hard for me in the first act to tell who Carmen was, so at least I’ll know in the second act who her replacement is.” He asks the man sitting in front of him if he can borrow his binoculars for a moment, and as the first notes are sounded he lifts them to his eyes and doesn’t put them down until the man asks for them.
He’s not sure if he has managed to pick out Noga. He thought he spotted her among the smugglers who moved between the hills, dressed for the road carrying a sack of stolen goods on her back. After the binoculars were taken from him, he began to peer at a different woman. His wife was getting angry: “What’s the problem? What are you looking for?”
“I want to see the understudy clearly.”
“What do you care? By the way, what did her brother tell you?”
“Nothing. Their mother is moving to assisted living, that’s all.”
The singing of the chorus does not drown out their whispers, and they are venomously silenced from all sides.
Since they live in Ma’aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem, and their children are at a neighbor’s, they leave at midnight for home, an hour’s drive. His wife, noticing his gloomy mood, tried again to find out what he was told during intermission, but Uriah denied he was told anything at all.
In the morning, after just a few hours of sleep, he drove his children to school, and from there continued to his job at the Ministry of Environmental Protection in Jerusalem, where he told his two secretaries about the opera in the desert, including the grains of sand that sabotaged the voice of the famous star who needed to be replaced with a local Carmen. At noon he went to the compliance department to find out if anyone was dealing with the trash that was building up at the foot of Masada. That night’s performance would be the third and last, and before the opera’s producers took off for Tel Aviv, profits in hand, it was worth making sure Masada didn’t turn into a garbage dump. Nor could he stop thinking that his former wife would again be an extra on the stage, and he goes to the equipment storage room of the department and signs out a pair of field binoculars. Do I have the strength for this? he asks himself, cutting his workday short, getting home before the children do, taking off his clothes and trying to catch a bit of sleep.
He wakes up at four p.m. to find a bustling household and his wife walking around red-eyed and yawning. He immediately takes charge, and after dinner he steers her to bed to make up for her lost sleep, and promises that for next year’s opera at Masada they will stay overnight at a hotel. “No,” declares his wife, “the next opera, if we go, will be in a hall and not under the sky.”
Uriah has mustered his nerve and decides to go to the desert. He says he has an evening meeting of senior staff with the minister of environmental protection. He will set his cell phone on vibrate and keep it in his shirt pocket, by his heart, so he can feel every jitter.
As darkness falls, Uriah heads east, gliding toward Jericho and a half-moon flanked by a trio of twinkling stars. At the Beit HaArava junction he turns south, and in less than an hour he can see the beam of light sweeping across the mountain of the ancient suicides. He has no admission ticket, and no intention of spending more money on this opera, so before reaching the main parking lot he swerves onto a dirt road and bounces along, circling the opera venue until he is blocked by large rocks. He switches off the headlights and engine and walks past the stage, planning to hide behind one of its adjacent little hills, natural or artificial, he can’t quite tell. From there, he will train his binoculars on the woman who refused, despite her love for him, to give birth to a child.
As a former combat officer in the Israeli army, he strides with confidence, and the tragic mountain of Masada helps him navigate accurately. He can hear the musicians tuning their instruments. But will the security guards, if there are any, know that this man with a bit of gray in his hair isn’t trying to sneak into an opera he saw last night and whose tunes he can hum, but just wants to look at one extra, with whom he has an unsettled score?
Silently he approaches the northern hill and the sound of laughing women. Now a hush, and then the audience of thousands explodes in applause for the conductor. Within a few seconds, ethereal music drifts in his direction. He inches closer, chooses an observation point and kneels down, and through the binoculars of the Ministry of Environmental Protection he observes the country girls of Seville, one of whom stands by a donkey hitched to a cart containing two little children, who wave to the crowd they are supposed to be unaware of. His heart pounds as he recognizes his former wife gripping the halter, out of context in peasant costume but still the same woman who could not be persuaded to have children with him, despite his undying love for her.
The music pulls her and the cart across the stage toward the opposite hill, and so as not to lose her, he advances slightly, careful not to enter the field of vision of thousands of eyes focusing on the stage, and thinks he has succeeded.
But from the commanding heights of the podium, the tall conductor is stupefied to spot a gray-haired man not connected with the plot, and as he dictates the tempo with crisp, stormy movements, and crouches and leaps to bring Bizet’s music to life, he also threatens the foreign invader with his baton, tries to shoo him away. But Uriah does not budge. Rock solid at the edge of the stage, he tracks the country girl who crosses paths with another cart and vanishes behind the second hill. And as he is considering whether to follow her, he is seized by two young security guards and removed from the area.
“Please, sir,” says one of the guards, not unkindly, “if you have no money for a ticket, then listen to Carmen at home. Don’t spoil the magic for others.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
For a moment the guards conspire to confiscate the fine-looking binoculars, but after the man introduces himself as a supervisor of environmental protection who has come to make sure Masada doesn’t turn into a garbage dump, they drop the idea.
Before the end of act one he heads back toward Ma’aleh Adumim. On the uphill road from Jericho the cell phone vibrates close to his heart, and he says gently to his wife, “Go back to sleep. I’m almost home.”
Thirty
THE PREVIOUS MORNING, before the mother and son drove b
ack to Tel Aviv, the three sat together on the hotel terrace, watching people float in the salty waters of the Dead Sea. They spoke about the grains of sand that had prevented the prima donna from playing Carmen after act one, and how those same grains of sand had only improved the singing of the Israeli understudy, who was showered with bravas and became a star overnight. Noga yawned and said, “Grains of sand appeared to me once in a dream. I don’t remember why.” Her brother and mother looked at her affectionately. She’ll have to take a nap in the afternoon, or she won’t have the strength to pull the donkey, who sometimes stops and will not move.
“Honestly,” she asks her mother and brother, “you could actually tell it was me?”
“I tried not to lose sight of you,” says Honi. “After all, I came more for you than the opera.”
And the mother says, “I’m not sure I identified you, but it was nice to feel again like a young mother coming to see her daughter in a sweet costume at a kindergarten party. When you were little, before Honi was born, Abba and I didn’t miss a single one of your performances, even if you had only two words to speak.”
“Two words? For example?”
“Peas and beans.”
“That’s all?”
“And for that Abba took off time from work. But I’m not feeling young only because of you, Noga,” she continues cheerfully. “It’s Honi too. We haven’t slept in the same room since he was ten, and last night we went out together and even slept in the same bed, so I’m asking myself why you’d want to imprison such a young mother in an old-age home.”
Grimacing, Honi turns to his sister, but she smiles indifferently. He says to her, “Ima is waiting for me to have a heart attack like Abba, to be rid of my nagging.”
“You won’t have a heart attack,” says his sister. “If, as you said, my heart is made of stone, yours is made of rubber.”
“Children, enough,” says the mother. “I apologize.”
They resume discussing the change of singers and try to understand why the character is more important than the person who portrays it. “At one point,” relates Noga, “I found myself near the understudy. I looked at her face, and though she was different in every way from the star who dropped out, I didn’t really feel the difference between her and the original.”
The mother, who knows her son, anticipates that he is on the verge of telling Noga about the encounter with Uriah, and she places a finger on her lips to signal him that he shouldn’t. But Honi pointedly ignores her, and tells his sister about the hasty meeting and the physical resemblance between her and the second wife.
Noga listens calmly, drinks what’s left of her coffee and says, “I just hope you didn’t tell him I was in the vicinity.”
When the mother suddenly stands up irritably, as if trying to forestall the answer, Honi keeps calm and disregards the truth: “I didn’t tell him a thing. Why should I even mention you? You split up a long time ago. Who cares anymore?”
Thirty-One
“MAYBE FIREWORKS, THE BEST EVER in Jerusalem, can convince you not to run away so fast from the city.” A pair of old friends, both flutists who had studied with Noga at the music academy, insisted she come to a party on the eve of Jerusalem Day.
It was held on the roof of a monstrous high-rise erected on the ruins of the old Holyland Hotel, offering a fine view of the pyrotechnic bouquets launched in rapid succession from the hilltops of the capital. Many on the roof were strangers to each other and even to the hosts, who wished to prove by their generosity that they were innocent of the municipal corruption entailed in the demolition of the hotel and the construction of these hideous buildings. But in the Israeli fashion, the guests rapidly set about establishing their connections, if not from childhood or military service, at least through mutual acquaintances.
Noga stood near the rooftop railing, sipping wine, scanning silent skies tinged by a foggy, pinkish residue of fireworks. Soon enough, as always, someone would be attracted by her solitude, and on this anniversary of Jerusalem’s real or imaginary reunification would expect her to reveal her connection and talk about herself. She would surely be asked why she had no children, and why she didn’t live in Israel. Would she be teased if along with her music she described her work as an extra, and threw in the strolling donkey that dropped its aromatic turds at the foot of Masada to the strains of grand opera?
The unfamiliarity on the roof has given way to the singing of old Israeli folksongs that clash with the music she carries in her heart. She decides to say good night to her friends, declining offers of a ride home. Insisting on her independence, she orders a taxi.
On Rashi Street, near her mother’s building, stands a man. Can it be that even close to midnight an elderly lawyer will take the trouble to stalk her? But no, it’s the neighbor, Mr. Pomerantz, in a baggy white shirt, skullcap on his head, wreathed in cigarette smoke.
“At last I run into you, Mr. Pomerantz,” she says, warmly greeting a man whose beard has grown white over the years but who remains handsome. “Ever since I got here I’ve been asking myself where you are.”
“Here I am,” he says with a chuckle.
“Eight weeks I’ve been living in my mother’s place,” she persists, “and I haven’t seen you. And you’re not sick, after all, like your poor wife.”
“No, thank God, I’m not sick, and I haven’t hidden from you, Noga,” he says fondly, “but most weekdays I’m not in Jerusalem, but in Judea.”
“Our Judea or the Palestinians’ Judea?” she asks contentiously.
“God’s Judea,” he answers softly. “For the past year I’ve been teaching five days a week at the yeshiva in Tekoah so I can help our son Shaya, who has many children.”
Yes, she wants to say, and I met one of them and even threatened him with a whip. But she doesn’t complain.
Meanwhile, the cigarette is burning down, almost singeing Pomerantz’s lips, and he quickly takes out another and lights it with the butt, which he then tramples with his shoe.
“Your father too, may he rest in peace,” he says by way of apology, “liked to stand here with me by the fence at night and enjoy a cigarette, male friendship which resulted from your mother’s and my wife’s fear of smoke.”
“Yes, you were good friends, even though my father was incurably secular.”
“Enough just to say secular,” he gently chides. “Only somebody in the grave is incurable. Speaking of which, Noga, have you visited your father’s grave on this trip?”
“By myself?”
“What’s the problem?”
“How would I ever find it? I was there only at the funeral and not at the unveiling of the gravestone.”
“I’ll help you find it.”
“It hasn’t been a year yet, and they say that after the thirty days, one must not visit the grave until the end of the first year.”
“It doesn’t matter what they say,” he says with mild annoyance. “It’s not about how much time has passed. A person who loves his father visits the grave to strengthen that love.”
“True,” she whispers.
“And so?”
“So?”
“If you are willing, we’ll go to the cemetery tomorrow morning, before you return to your exile.”
“Tomorrow?” She tries to put him off. “Tomorrow’s Jerusalem Day, a parade.”
“What’s the connection?”
“You’re right, it’s irrelevant.”
“So tomorrow morning early I’ll take you to the cemetery,” he says, and flips the burning cigarette into the air like tiny private fireworks and goes back to his apartment.
This Hasid has trapped me, she says to herself, not with irritation but marveling at how quickly he persuaded her to set the alarm on her mobile phone, so she could wait, half asleep, wrapped in her mother’s black shawl, for two knocks on the door, like those of his grandson.
He stands at the door in the early morning, wearing a solemn expression, a black kapota overcoat and a huge hat that covers h
is sidelocks. Silently he leads her to a bus stop, and when a small bus arrives, perhaps public, perhaps private, they get on board, and it turns out that this special bus takes mourners not only to the entrance of the cemetery, but also to various sectors of graves, stopping on request.
“I would never have found this place. You’re apparently an expert.”
Mr. Pomerantz bids her to stand opposite the headstone that her brother and mother had erected at the grave. A simple stone of grayish marble, and under the dates of birth and death is engraved one line: “A beloved man who gladdened every heart.”
“Lovely,” she says. “Very appropriate. How come they never told me about this line?”
Mr. Pomerantz does not reply. He stands facing the grave, surveys it with approval. No one nearby. The delicate scent of flowering bushes.
“Good that you enticed me to come here,” she says, immediately correcting herself. “I mean, suggested . . .”
He says nothing, nods in agreement and studies the inscription on the stone as if it were some complex text.
“Perhaps you remember,” she ventures, “that none of the three of us cried much at my father’s funeral. Maybe you asked yourself why.”
“No,” he says, startled. “I didn’t ask myself.”
“Because Abba died in his sleep, lying beside Ima. An unconscious death, with no fear and no suffering, and we felt that was what he wanted, and it was a good thing, and so we mourned, but we didn’t cry.”
He looks at her kindly but doesn’t respond. He picks up a pebble and places it on the headstone, then glances at his watch, but the harpist, reunited with her lost father, seeks the good graces of her unusual escort.
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