Though he did his best to seem disappointed, he felt a surge of relief. Indeed, with an almost hysterical adamance she insisted that he go without her, even asking for her purse and handing him his ticket like a mother sending her son to the movies, assuring him, as she lay propped up by the pillow with her eyes wide open now, that he needn’t worry and that she would soon get out of bed and have a meal sent up. It was her first day of real rest in ages; God knew how long her fatigue had been building up! She would, she promised, wait up for him and meanwhile read a book or listen to music on the radio. “Good, I’ll try it,” she said when told about Volume II of Anna Karenina that his daughter had given him by mistake. “The second half is fine because I read the book long ago and still remember a bit.” And so, having gone through the motions of protesting, he went downstairs to fetch the book, which she hurriedly took from him at the door as if anxious to be rid of him. It was all he could do to persuade her to bring him her ticket too, since perhaps he could manage to sell it.
TOWARD EVENING the hotel came festively alive. Previously concealed light bulbs helped brighten the little lobby, so that the swords gleamed in their glass cases and the blue seas reddened on the old nautical maps. The desk was now staffed by the grandfather of the family, a genial, immaculately dressed man who sat reading a newspaper while now and then helping his grandchildren in the apartment with their homework. In one corner stood several valises, sure proof of fresh guests. Self-conscious of his new crew cut, Molkho checked his key and stepped out into the street, which, too, was lit by numerous lamps whose warm, bubbly glow created a holiday feeling. People were doing their last-minute shopping and crowding into the bars, and the night, with its clear skies above and last patches of snow on the sidewalk, had a special magic. Entering his little working-class restaurant, which was nearly empty at this hour, Molkho ordered the usual, substituting coffee for beer. But afterward, looking for a taxi while glancing up at the still-reddish sky, he cursed his loneliness under his breath. How could you have left me all alone like this? he asked, picturing his wife back in Haifa, making supper for their daughter while he wandered, a stranger in a strange land.
The crowd in front of the opera house was unexpectedly small. Indeed, it was clear from the outset that he stood no chance of selling his extra ticket, for even before he began climbing the steps, tickets were being offered to him. The audience was different too: instead of the intense-looking young people of the night before, he was now surrounded by the most bourgeois of audiences. Over the posters by the entrance, large red stickers announcing some change in the program had been affixed diagonally. Could the performance have been canceled? Sure enough, inquiring of a couple standing there, he was told that the man who was to play Don Giovanni was sick and that, to his astonishment, the opera tonight would be Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. How could they go and change operas just like that? And who was this Gluck, whom he had never even heard of? The thought that he was to be deprived of Don Giovanni after all he had been through was thoroughly unacceptable. “Who ever heard of changing operas?” he asked the couple loudly. “Why, I came a long way to see Don Giovanni/” “You did? Where from?” “From Israel.” “From Israel? Just to see an opera?” “Yes,” he said, telling them about the special Voles Opera while they listened in amazement. “Why isn’t there an understudy?” he asked. “I can’t believe no one else can sing the part!” But the sympathetic couple merely shrugged and went inside, not knowing the answer themselves, leaving Molkho debating whether he shouldn’t perhaps go to the movies or a nightclub instead. In the end, however, the ticket being paid for, he decided to see Orpheus and Eurydice and let himself be swept by the crowd into the familiar lobby, which now seemed to him dreary and plain. And there was nowhere even to lodge a complaint, for every single office was locked! That’s the sort of people they are, he thought bitterly, going off to relieve himself in the men’s room, whose four huge white walls seemed one big urinal. Just look where I’ve landed, he told himself, choking on his loneliness, as if his wife’s death were a spring whose action had flung him to the far ends of the earth.
He was one of the first to take his seat, which was in the center of a front row. The audience kept drifting in, but the hall was still far from full. He felt indescribably weary, and the people around him looked gray and listless too. A row in front of him sat a couple that drew his attention, especially the man, who sat with his head hunched between his shoulders: tall and fortyish, he had a pocked red face whose sad, suspicious eyes darted nervously and a shabby black suit over which was thrown a dirty white scarf. The seat on Molkho’s right, on the other hand, was occupied by a well-dressed, elderly German holding a large, fancy program that was partly in English. Yet though Molkho asked to borrow it, he was feeling too tired and dispirited to make head or tails of it, even of the cast, which listed a female alto in the role of Orpheus. Bewildered, he asked his neighbor if it wasn’t a misprint, to which the man replied in broken English that he hadn’t the slightest idea, since he came from a small provincial town where they didn’t have opera at all.
The orchestra began tuning up, and as if he were accompanying it, the man in the next row grew suddenly tense and emitted a series of small grunts that made his wife look worriedly about. Slowly the huge overhead lights were dimmed, the conductor strode forward, and the overture struck up, quick and forceful, while the pockmarked man swayed back and forth in time to it. Evidently he knew the score well, in fact, by heart, for he paused slightly before each transition, as if anticipating a new theme, so that Molkho wondered if he was perhaps an unemployed musician, possibly even a down-and-out conductor. Even when the music reached a crescendo, with new instruments joining in all the time, the man did not look up; head down, he kept listening intensely, conducting with his hands, springing up with the horns and kettledrums, and swaying rhythmically again with the strings in preparation for the next bars, which he telegraphed with his body as if convinced that the orchestra was following him, only suddenly to freeze and cast such a haughty glance around him that the audience began to whisper. His wife alone remained perfectly quiet, her hand resting soothingly on his knee as though to keep him under control.
All at once the music stopped. The curtain rose, revealing a minimal, almost symbolic set that Molkho stared at resentfully. It seemed ugly to him, and as the music resumed again, dusky and constrained, he grieved inwardly for his lost Don Giovanni. The stage was apparently meant to represent a large hall, or perhaps something else, a street, city, or even world, through which a coffin was being carried by a singing entourage. Soon it was laid down, however, and a woman leaped out of it and fled like the wind. Next Orpheus appeared; he was indeed a heavyset young woman with a small harp in one hand, at which Molkho stared with profound hostility. The whole opera seemed to him a punishment. No, it isn’t a misprint after all, he whispered to the fat German sitting next to him, who nodded back smilingly. Their tones clear and pure, the voices of the singers rose and clashed; what little action there was took place almost in slow motion to an excruciatingly slow poetic aria. Though he would have liked to doze off, Molkho felt it was out of the question. Ahead of him the man in black began to tremble, shaking his head so violently that his neighbors, roused from their theatrical spell, began to stare at him with mirth and revulsion, or even, like the middle-aged woman sitting next to him, with open horror. Yet the man seemed quite used to all this, which he dealt with by growing perfectly still for a while and glancing innocently around him. Before long, however, the music got the better of him again, and clenching his fists, he ordered the obedient orchestra to play on. The elderly German on Molkho’s right seemed transfixed by the spectacle too, yet apparently not unpleasurably, for he stared at the man with a good-natured smile. Meanwhile, onstage, Orpheus was searching for Eurydice in her thick alto voice, which clashed with the other singers in long, complicated arpeggios that seemed inscrutably modern and harmonically elementary at once, making Molkho borrow the program again to see when the piece had been written. Unable to find the information anywhere, he felt more indignant than ever.