Act I was drawing to a close: Orpheus was told he could set forth for Hades, while the orchestra, faultlessly led by the man in the next row, broke into a strong, sweeping melody. The applause that broke out as the curtain fell was prolonged and patient, though not particularly loud, causing the man in black to bow his head modestly. He did not seem to notice the irate looks of his neighbors, who rose in protest as soon as the lights came on; rather, his head still bowed, he busily blew his nose while conversing quietly with his wife. Something about the couple, especially the deep serenity of the woman, made Molkho like them both. Was the man mentally ill? Or perhaps a concentration camp survivor who now haunted operas? But no, he looked too young for that.
Molkho went to the buffet, where he ate a piece of chocolate cake and drank a small glass of juice. From somewhere came the sound of voices speaking Hebrew, and he spun around to look for them, yet already they had vanished into thin air. Could it have been simply his homesick imagination? Tomorrow night he would be back in Haifa with his children; the countdown had already begun. On his way back to his seat, he met the couple from the lobby, who inquired how he was enjoying the performance. “It’s not bad, not bad at all,” he replied, wanting to ask them if they knew when Gluck lived. Quite a few people, he noticed, had changed places to get away from the man in black. Not his elderly neighbor, though, who collapsed heavily into his seat; bored though he was, he appeared to be highly pleased with the culture it took to spend the evening at an opera rather than a brothel.
The lights dimmed slowly, casting a bluish white pallor over the audience. The music began again, and the man in the next row braced himself and clenched his fists. He signaled to the wind section, cautioned the violins, grunted, and swayed; but this time, determined to stop him, his wife scolded him savagely until hushed by a chorus of furious hisses from around her. The man winced like a stricken animal, and Molkho, feeling a deep sorrow, cast a sympathetic glance in his direction just as Orpheus and Eurydice began their slow ascent from Hades. Molkho knew that Orpheus musn’t look back as he led Eurydice after him, but he also knew, anxiously waiting for it to happen, that Orpheus would forget. And so he did, in Act III: with a loud cry, Eurydice disappeared down an opening while Orpheus, or rather the fat woman playing him, burst into a lovely, truly moving aria. The audience adored it, breaking into stormy applause, and the man in black, still waving his fists, threw his head back uncontrollably and stared slack-jawed into space as if swallowing the music, tears running down his cheeks. A green spotlight lit the stage, a little Greek temple, columns and all, descended from the ceiling, and Molkho knew with an inner pang that the man was crying for him too. Even the German on his right was sitting on the edge of his seat.
ON HIS WAY BACK from the opera, he felt the full weight of the long day, which lay in his chest like a sleeping giant that kept pulling him down. And yet he felt stirred, the music, the performers, the orchestra, the audience, all churning wildly inside him. At first, he thought he had entered the wrong hotel, for the lobby was full of people, mostly tall, elegant Scandinavians gathered in a corner where the paterfamilias and his wife stood pouring drinks in full evening dress. Surprised, Molkho made his way through the crowd, took his key off its hook, and hurried up to the legal adviser’s room, determined to do something for their romance, which was still stalled at the starting line, even if it took a little foreplay (though a kiss on her sprained ankle, after removing the bandage, might be enough), after which he could crawl into bed and sleep next to her—a noncommittal move in itself, to be sure, but one sufficient to keep her hopes alive. Yet, no matter how loudly he knocked on her door, almost shouting her name, there was no answer from within.
As he was returning to his room, however, the elevator door opened and a chambermaid handed him a note with the address of a restaurant at which the legal adviser was dining and a request to join her there. Though so tired he could barely stand, he stepped back out into the cold night air, following the chambermaid through the slushy remains of the snow and down deserted little streets beneath a star-strewn sky until they arrived at a huge, crowded, smoke-filled establishment with old green velvet wall-hangings and loud music; there, he wove his way down to a cellar that was twice the size of the upstairs, an immense, poorly lit, barnlike place with big barrels of beer along the walls and endless tables of noisy customers. He noticed her at once, sitting by herself in her short fur coat, squeezed in at a little table covered with a checked cloth on which were an empty half-bottle of wine and a plate of several well-gnawed bones. She was lively and bright-eyed, despite the great crush, puffing on a cigarette and chatting with three men at the next table. There was no doubt about it, he told himself, feeling his spirits flag at once: she had been resurrected. Yet, though he wanted only to get away, she had already spied him and was nodding to him casually, quite indifferent to his attempts to fight his way through the boisterous crowd. At last, he reached her table and stood there wordlessly, feeling tired and bewildered, while she regarded him with wide-open eyes beneath her heavy mascara, not a trace left of her great sleep. There was not even a chair for him to sit on. The three men at the next table bowed to him, appraised him with a glance, said something to or about him in German, and broke out laughing, to which he replied with a feeble grin while a red-vested waiter with a witty, intellectual air deftly emptied the plate and ashtray and produced a small stool, on which he sat Molkho, who huddled there uncomfortably, a head shorter than everyone, the butt of a spate of jokes that seemed part of the general atmosphere. But somehow he did not mind his low perch, which at least made him feel out of harm’s way.
The waiter stood to take his order. “No, thank you,” Molkho said, “nothing for me,” but the legal adviser insisted. “Come now, you have to have something. The beer here is first-rate. I won’t let you pass it up.” “All right,” he said, “just a small glass of beer, but nothing to eat; really, I’m not hungry,” because if he ate anything he would have to pay for her meal too, which had obviously been a large one. “But you must be hungry. Please, eat something,” she repeated—rather oddly, he thought, so that, wondering whether she was concerned for him or merely exhibiting a new truculence, he gave in again, looking for inspiration at the diners around him until his eyes fell on a pungent-looking plate of blood-red sausage, and he asked the waiter for the same. Immediately, though, he regretted it. “But not such a big portion,” he said in Hebrew to the legal adviser. “One sausage is enough; tell him one’s enough,” and signaling to the waiter, he called out, “Eins,” while she stifled an embarrassed smile. Suddenly she seemed her old self again, the self-assured senior official attending international conferences at the public’s expense. No longer were they just two lonely people making contact on neutral territory, and so, seeking to recoup his position, he said, first of all, “Tell me how your ankle is.” The question appeared to surprise her. “It’s fine,” she murmured with a sharp glance at him, sounding rather irritated, perhaps because she sensed that he would have liked to bend down and examine it beneath the table. “I was worried about you,” he continued quietly, though slightly indignantly, realizing that she and the errant foot were again on good terms. “I really was.” “Yes, I know,” she said, her, eyes zeroing in on him, “I could feel it.” There was a sudden distance between them, as though all that had happened that day had happened to someone else.