The Diamond Setter

by Moshe Sakal

  Uri was also not pleased. Not with my progress, and not with the number of hours I devoted to practice every day. He reminded me that I should appreciate the fact that he’d chosen me from among all my peers, that he’d turned down students older than me and no less talented. He promised again that if I only practiced enough, I could be a professional pianist and play overseas. The potential contained in the word “overseas” made me sit down and practice for three hours every day for a whole week.

  A few years earlier, my parents had gone on a tour of “Classical Europe.” My father was thirty and my mother twenty-seven. They deposited the three of us with my grandparents and set off for France, England, Holland, and Belgium.

  On the first day, I cut my finger with a utility knife. Grandma, who had seen a thing or two in her life, let out a curse and quickly bandaged my finger. The cut was deep and quite long, and all the frustration, despair, and anger at my parents for going overseas were embodied in my screams of pain. Grandma complained about the noise. “You’re the oldest son,” she said. “You have to be a role model for your siblings. How will they learn an example from you?”

  I gritted my teeth. The blood oozed out of my finger and pooled in the bandage, until it finally clotted. The bandaged cut kept pulsating like a little heart in the middle of my finger. I went back to my room, sat down on my bed, and held a shoe box pierced with holes. I carefully lifted the lid and peeked inside. I was hit by the smell of silkworms and gnawed mulberry leaves, and the faint odor of a couple of pupae that had already formed in the corners of the box.

  I shut my eyes and tried to imagine “overseas” and the silent, wild expanses that were engulfing my parents at that very moment. I knew they were very far away, but it was hard for me to envision the vastness of the distance. Farther than their workplaces, farther than Grandma and Grandpa’s house, farther even than Haifa or Metula. They had taken their passports and crossed the border, and were now wandering amid a frightening overseas territory that was the very opposite of everything I knew.

  When it was finally time for them to come home, I drove to the airport with Grandma and Grandpa. A large, silent glass wall stood between the passengers returning from overseas and the welcomers. And there — beyond the glass pane that towered from floor to ceiling — I saw them and I stuck up my still-bandaged finger so that they would be alarmed when they saw me and feel sorry for their firstborn. They blew kisses and smiled guiltily.

  In those faraway days of my late childhood, all of Uri’s talk about overseas and his promises of the international concert halls where I would perform aroused in me mostly dim fear. Eventually the inevitable moment arrived. When it did, I was sitting at the piano, as always. To my left was the metronome, whose single arm was clasped like a stuck zipper. Again Uri said that Hermine asked that I lift the seat before urinating. I told him I’d decided to stop taking piano lessons.

  The room fell silent, and after a moment he lifted the piano lid and played a Chopin prelude.

  When I got home, I sat down with my parents and told them what I’d done.

  “But Uri says you have a gift!” Dad exclaimed.

  “But we just bought you a piano with all your bar mitzvah money!” Mom said.

  I looked at them and thought about Uri. I imagined Hermine yelling at him because his pupil wouldn’t lift the toilet seat. Why had I done that? When I think about it today, I suppose it was my sheepish way of leaving tracks in that apartment. A territorial marking aimed at Hermine. I disobeyed her. I created tension between my piano teacher and his invisible, imperious lover. And perhaps there was another explanation, too: In those faraway days when I was saying farewell to my childhood and beginning life as a young male, my refusal to obey Hermine’s will was also an act of resistance against that simple yet critical demand made of every man: that he put up the toilet seat.

  In the end, nothing could change my mind. I held steadfast in my decision, and I never went to Uri’s apartment again.

  * * *

  A month later, The Little Prince was performed in front of two hundred people. The audience cheered for the blond boy who traveled across the stage wearing white and silver, with a golden crown perched on his head. All the other actors were two or three years older than me. A lanky boy whose face was covered with acne played the part of the rose, and I held a watering can and watered him. The audience laughed and cheered for several minutes. That same day, in his room in Ramat Aviv, in the shade of the ficus trees, with birds chirping in the background, Uri put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Blood spurted on the Chopin scores and on the metronome. The birds startled at the sound and fled the garden with a terrified flutter of wings.

  2

  All these years the same memory has always come back to me: Uri sits in his room at the piano with one of his students next to him. His ears are pricked up. When the door slams, he knows Hermine has come home.

  He met Hermine shortly after she enlisted in the army. He was ten years older than her, and his career as a pianist was already over. At first they met every week, then twice a week, until one day she turned up at his apartment with a white rose between her teeth and a letter in her hand. Uri read the letter Hermine had written him and realized he was lost.

  The ten years stood between them like an abyss. He was in love with her like an adolescent but resented her for the age difference. And more than resentment, he felt that those years were his fault, that they were his mark of disgrace. Over and over again he thought back to himself as a ten-year-old boy sitting at the piano, when she was just being born. He thought about his bar mitzvah, when she was a three-year-old toddler. About his first kiss, the first time he fell in love — all these had happened when she was a little girl.

  But as their relationship deepened, Hermine told him about her adventures and the affairs she’d had with older men before she met him, and it gradually dawned on Uri that in fact she was far more experienced than he was. His own boyhood had been devoted entirely to music, and even later he was no Don Juan. From then on the tables were turned: Uri thought about her first kiss when he’d traveled to give his first concert in Vienna. About her desperate crush on her math teacher while Uri sat alone in his room practicing Satie’s “Gymnopédies.” About the twenty-six-year-old basketball player who was her first “official” boyfriend just as Uri was rehearsing with a Greek contralto he would accompany on Schubert’s Winterreise.

  And then the jealousy started. She put on her military uniform every morning and went to her office in the Tel Aviv base, where she was surrounded by male soldiers. Her officers were twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Sometimes she stayed on the base for night shifts. She went on excursions and field assignments up north and down south, and who knew how many burly officers surrounded her then? And worst of all: She began planning her post-army trip.

  Hermine talked to Uri a lot about “overseas.” In the evenings she waited tables and saved every shekel for her trip. She was planning to visit a high school friend who had already finished her army service and was working in Germany with a Ministry of Defense delegation. Uri could not leave his work for more than a couple of weeks, and they agreed that after Hermine visited her friend in Germany, they would meet in Madrid and travel together. Uri had dreamed for years of seeing Velázquez’s portraits of dwarves at the Prado Museum, and Hermine had no particular preference for where they should meet — as long as it was in Europe.

  Hermine was still officially living with her parents in Kfar Saba, but in reality she slept at Uri’s place every night. She would come to his apartment after her army shift, always careful to be quiet and not disturb his lessons. She held a special grudge against her lover’s youngest pupil, who never put the seat up when he peed.

  Since I never saw her, I began to wonder if Hermine even existed at all. Perhaps she was a cover story for something, or perhaps a ghost, a figment of the piano teacher’s imagination? But no, it was clear that Hermine was flesh-and-blood, one hundred percent
woman. The evidence was that she was driving Uri insane. He became restless almost all the time. The musical pieces that had been his support and comfort lost their purpose. He played less well, taught less well, and his thoughts were mired in the space between him and Hermine, or rather between Hermine and the world.

  Uri soon began developing an aversion to “overseas” — any overseas. He imagined that his beloved was about to conquer all these new grounds without him, and he almost forgot that he himself had visited the same destinations several times and had even performed in them, conquering a few hearts. All that was no longer relevant to Uri. He was filled with anxiety about the future. Once he tried to talk to Hermine and tell her honestly how jealous he was, how her past adventures drove him mad, but she brushed him off. After that, he said nothing. But the future, all the experiences and discoveries awaiting her — how could he live with them?

  Her army discharge was approaching. The wagtails had departed for autumn lands a few months earlier, new birds had arrived, the trees were blossoming, their fruits blushed and fell to the ground, the metronome slammed its arm from side to side with a precision that was somehow desperate. Uri turned over another page in the calendar and found that Hermine’s trip was imminent.

  During the two weeks preceding their temporary separation, Uri’s anxiety grew so great as to overshadow everything. But he maintained his composure in Hermine’s presence. When they stood together at the airport, he looked at her cute suitcase, at the backpack strapped to her shoulders, and scratched his head. Then he leaned over and planted a long kiss deep in her neck.

  An hour later, when he sat in his car and looked up at the sky, he saw a plane take off over the clouds. He thought it was her plane but wasn’t sure. Only then did he understand that he hadn’t dared talk with Hermine about the things she would or would not do while she was far away from him. He went home and got into bed. He waited for a long time until she phoned to say she’d landed safely in Berlin, her friend had picked her up at the airport, and they were now drinking tea in the friend’s apartment. In the evening they were going out to a party.

  Uri did not sleep all night, or the next night. Three days after she left, he sat down at dawn and wrote her a letter, and that afternoon he sent it to her friend’s address in Berlin.

  My Love,

  I’m trying to write this letter partly to formulate and understand myself what I feel and what I’m going through. After you left, I realized that it bothers me that we didn’t have a face-to-face talk about your trip, in terms of the Topic, which is taboo between us. That conversation didn’t happen, and in the end I gave up on the idea and convinced myself that maybe it was better that way. But now I think that it could have been better if we had talked. By the way, I have no idea now what I would say to you if we had the talk. It’s a complicated subject, after all, and it’s hard for me to imagine what the conversation would bring up.

  Anyway, now you’re there. And I’m telling you again how happy I am that you went and that you’re having fun. I certainly know how exciting the city you’re in can be — Berlin is such a fascinating place in so many ways. And when you think about it, it won’t be that long before we meet — in fact, we’ll be together in Spain in less than four weeks!

  Yet still I’m writing to you because I feel there is some sort of situation here that I am part of, but it’s a given, it was handed to me this way, and I have to deal with it and that’s it. And while sometimes I’m completely at peace with this story, there are times when I really lose my mind. My imagination works overtime. And then I get upset and I invest unbelievable efforts to calm myself.

  Is that despicable? Maybe. I would like to be able to be indifferent (and in many ways I really am), but I can’t help the fact that sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. And then I feel bad about this difficulty I have, and then I can hate myself in a really horrifying way, and eventually, even if I manage to get through these hard feelings, I feel completely exhausted, after clawing myself out…

  Now I’m getting a bit startled by what I’ve written to you here. But I think it’s natural. There is something frightening about opening up like this. But I feel close enough to you to write these words.

  I love you,

  Uri

  Hermine wrote back immediately:

  Sweetheart,

  First thing, I want you to know that nothing you feel could be despicable to me, and I’m trying to take your feelings very seriously.

  I do try to be attentive to what you’re going through, but I realize now that I wasn’t sensitive enough about this subject, and that’s okay, because we love each other and we’re learning how to communicate.

  And if that is the case, then I apologize.

  The truth is, I feel that we gave each other a lot of messages even without having a direct conversation about “Will I or won’t I sleep with other men?” But maybe that’s the convenient way of looking at things for me. Either way, it’s important for me to let you know that I didn’t consciously avoid talking about the subject. I guess I just thought that kind of conversation was a little unnecessary. I will even say that I would prefer to talk to you about it directly, but I thought there were things better left unsaid. Because like you, I also don’t know what that conversation would look like — and I’m also a little afraid to hurt you and to get hurt myself.

  Anyway, I don’t expect you to protect me from things that are hurtful or difficult for you — quite the opposite. There are things about our relationship that are so special and moving (and boundary pushing!) and it naturally also invites things that are difficult and sometimes unpleasant, for each of us. And so it’s important that we talk. And just as I’m not asking you to suppress anything, I also hope I can learn to ask when I need to.

  You have to remember that we have the space and time (at least until we die — after that, who knows?) to do anything we feel like, to expand and take off (in both senses…), because love is not dependent on anything and it’s only really good when it’s unexpected and uncompromising.

  It’s important for me that you also know that what you are describing is not alien to me, and of course I feel those things inside myself, but maybe in slightly different ways.

  All I ask, and on this matter I think it’s mainly your decision, is that you decide how you would like us to discuss the matter, what we’re talking about and what we’re not, about who and why, and that you be very clear with me, otherwise I don’t know if I can take it.

  Kisses, my love,

  I love you very much, and I miss you,

  This city is awaiting our shared visit.

  Hermine

  Uri read the letter over and over again. His thoughts stopped on “there were things better left unsaid” and wandered along a curvy line to the cosmic declaration concerning time and space. His eyes then roamed farther down and halted at the parentheses after “expand and take off (in both senses…),” as he murmured to himself over and over again her words about “love is only really good when it’s unexpected and uncompromising.”

  In some respects Uri found Hermine’s response very moving, and in others it provoked an anxiety he had never known before. He had read what Baudelaire had written about love in his journal: “Love greatly resembles an application of torture or a surgical operation. For even when two lovers love passionately and are full of mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler or less self-abandoned than the other. He or she is the surgeon or the executioner; the other, the patient or victim. Do you hear these sighs — preludes to a shameful tragedy — these groans, these screams, these rattling gasps? Who has not uttered them, who has not inexorably wrung them forth? What worse sights than these could you encounter at an inquisition conducted by adept torturers? These eyes, rolled back like the sleepwalker’s, these limbs whose muscles burst and stiffen as though subject to the action of a galvanic battery — such frightful, such curious phenomena are undoubtedly never obtained from even the most extreme cases of into
xication, of delirium, of opium-taking. The human face, which Ovid believed fashioned to reflect the stars, speaks here only of an insane ferocity, relaxing into a kind of death.”

  3

  “How’s the book coming along?” Menashe asked me about two weeks after he got the letter. Honi was in the shop with us, as he was almost every day before I left work with him. My uncle looked dejected, and perhaps he hoped a conversation with me would lift his spirits. He held a torch in one hand and a sawed ring with a tiny piece of gold on it in the other.

  “Very well,” I answered. “I’m writing about a piano teacher and his girlfriend at the moment.”

  “A piano teacher?” Menashe raised his eyebrows. “I had a customer once who was a piano teacher. A very impressive young man, but no self-confidence. It was something…” He was lost in thought for a moment. “But didn’t you say you were writing about a jeweler?”

  “That, too.”

  “I don’t understand.” He pressed a pedal with his foot, and the torch spat fire on the ring. “Who’s your protagonist, then?”

  “The jeweler is one of the protagonists. But there are lots of others.”

  “Why? Isn’t the jeweler enough?”

  “Yes and no. My jeweler is a slightly problematic character. He’s an emotional cripple.”

  “Then you should write his character based on people you know in real life. Me, for example. Maybe I could be your inspiration? I want you to know that I have no problem with that. On the contrary.”

  “I do get inspiration from you, Menashe.” I examined his expression carefully.

  “Then maybe you should get more. I can teach you a lot: about jewelry and about human beings. Then you can sit down at home with all the things you learn from me, take what interests you, piece things together from here and there — the way I weld a piece of jewelry — and then you’ll have a book.”