The next morning it was a few degrees colder and the city was cloaked in a chill white mist, though the promised snowstorm had not yet arrived. For three hours he stood in front of the box office, kept there only by the stubborn enthusiasm of those on line with him, some of them tourists like himself. Apparently that night’s production, which was of Mozart’s Magic Flute, was supposed to be especially good. When he finally reached the window, he saw that the prices were indeed outrageous, but he did not have the heart to walk away. The first snowflakes had begun falling outside. It was getting still colder. He thought of buying the children their presents, but the blow to his pocket was so great that he resolved to go straight back to the apartment to recuperate.
That evening they ate early and prepared the children for bed. The doctor arrived at the last minute, straight from a difficult operation, and barely had time to change his clothes. At seven the babysitter, a gorgeous teenager, arrived. It was snowing heavily, and in a gay and animated mood they decided to take the metro instead of their car.
THE OPERA WAS VERY LONG, lasting for some three hours. Parts of it were tiresome and difficult to follow, but there were others so superb and moving that he felt as if long-dead cells within him were thawing out and coming back to life. Whenever Papagano and Papagana appeared, a fresh, burgeoning breeze seemed to blow from onstage. The doctor, however, was too exhausted to sit through it; as early as the first act he began to doze, while eventually, seated between the two of them, he fell into a deep sleep, his head alternately falling on his wife’s and Molkho’s shoulders. Smiling, gently whispering, “How can you waste all that money,” they tried in vain to wake him.
It was almost midnight when they left the opera house. Unexpectedly, the sky was clear and the city was covered with a thick, white blanket of glistening snow, the public statues, the iron banisters, and the gargoyles of the houses all artfully draped with festive white bunting. Molkho had never seen Paris in the snow; suddenly he felt an inexplicable fear, worried by the thought that the flight he was scheduled to leave on in two days’ time might be canceled. From all around them came the merry shouts of surprised Parisians unable to find a cab. The metro was as crowded as during rush hour, but the snow had put everyone in a good mood. Arriving home, they found the children wide awake and excited, and after briefly debating whether it was possible to take the baby-sitter home, they decided to put her up in the children’s room for the night. A great commotion of blankets and linens ensued, and it was 2 A.M. before they were all in bed. Molkho could not fall asleep. Initially aroused by the nearby presence of the beautiful French girl, he soon found himself obsessed by the music of the opera. As on the night of his wife’s death, he turned from side to side, unable to get the themes, already confused with others, out of his head, the music of Mozart now fused with that of Mahler, so that, hearing the throbbing horns, he rose from his broad bed and tormentedly lit the small lamp. His anguish must have been felt by his wife’s cousin, who, appearing by his side with a sleeping pill and a glass of water, offered them to him with a tenderness that, he felt, he had been deprived of for many long years.
He slept late the next morning and awoke to find the house empty and an indecipherable note in French on the table. Last night’s snow shone through the window with a purplish gray gleam. He had no key to the apartment and so took his time about leaving, knowing he could not return until evening, walking aimlessly about the rooms and then leafing through magazines and picture albums until he found an old photograph of his mother-in-law, standing in a strange European city with a small baby in her arms who did not at all look like his wife. Perhaps it was his wife’s cousin, perhaps someone else. He kept on poking through closets and inspected the medicine cabinet, surprised by the paucity of its contents, which included only a few bottles of cough syrup and some agent against hemorrhoids.
Finally, he put on his coat and made up his mind to go out. His first stop was a travel agency whose address he had, where he confirmed his flight to West Berlin. The agency was on the second floor of a large office building, next door to a ticket office for shows and tours that was filled with sightseers from all over the world, especially from India and the Far East. After confirming his flight he asked what the weather was like in Berlin, but no one was able to tell him, and so he went back outside and walked about the city, among drifts of snow that grew slushier as the clearing blue sky grew brighter. In the side streets behind the opera house, he sternly eyed some women in large fur coats whom he took to be prostitutes intent on his business, but none of them made a move in his direction. All at once he felt anxious about Berlin. Should he perhaps call the trip off and fly straight back to Israel? His left arm, he thought, was beginning to hurt, and more depressing yet were the huge throngs of shoppers who burst out of the department stores at noontime, congesting the streets. The air was warming, filling the gutters with rivulets of melted snow. He bought a few presents and sat down to wait for his wife’s cousin in a little café opposite the nursery. For some reason, she was late, and so he decided on his own to pick up the tot, who went with him quite willingly with no questions asked, standing on the street in his winter clothes like a little red bear until his mother came running, all out of breath and wearing a most becoming shawl. She gave Molkho a grateful kiss, and noting for the first time that she looked like his wife, he felt a twinge in his heart.
When the doctor came home, they ate a delicious hot dinner while Molkho told them about his flight to Berlin, to which, he said, his office in Israel was sending him, and about his return flight via Paris, where he would only be changing planes at the airport. They seemed genuinely sorry that he would be leaving. “We’ve gotten used to you. The children are wild about you. Couldn’t you stop over for a few days on your way back?” “I’ve put you out enough as it is,” he replied, thanking them with emotion.
It was not without sorrow that he said good-bye in the morning to the comfortable bed that he had spent the last five nights in. His wife’s cousin, who had grown attached to him during the visit and found their parting difficult, insisted on taking him to the airport. She drove slowly, carelessly, in the heavy traffic, talking about his wife and about her own problems and worries. At the airport, instead of simply dropping him off at his terminal, she parked in the underground lot and came with him. At first, they had trouble finding the check-in counter. No one at the information desk had heard of the line he was flying. The two of them ran from one wing of the building to the other until at last, in the charter-flights section, they found a small counter with the airline’s name and a piece of colored cardboard on which was handwritten Voles Opera. His wife’s cousin was first amused, then angered, and finally shocked. “Why, how could they have stuck you on a flight like this? It’s meant for opera-goers! Did you sign up for an opera too?” Caught red-handed, he turned pale under questioning. It must have come with the ticket, he stammered, pretending to know nothing about it. But when he checked his suitcase and received a boarding pass made to look like a sheet of music with a violin drawn on it, she regarded him with sudden suspicion. Overcome with guilt, he went to the cafeteria and bought a large bar of chocolate for her children.