“Yes yes. Say as much as you like, but not…” She dropped her voice even more. “But not that.” A tear glistened in each eye. “He was such a unique man. There are not many people like him… Well, maybe Mr. Klein.”
“He was unique,” I said. “I can’t believe the bond we formed in just three meetings.” And at once I saw Jiri before me, which prompted the thought: What did he want to tell me in the hospital? And via his pen?
“If Jiri sent you to Yossi and me,” I heard Eva saying over my momentary reverie, “he had a special affection for you.”
Just then the phone rang. Eva answered and had a short conversation in Czech.
“That was my singer,” she said when she cradled the phone. “She sings and I play piano for the old people at the Jewish Home. She’s coming over tomorrow so we can start rehearsing for our Hanuka program.”
“But isn’t Hanuka…?”
“Yes, I know it’s weeks away, but we want to prepare carefully these old Jewish folk songs.”
“I love old Jewish folk songs. Would you mind playing some for me?”
Eva brightened. “Why, happily. Come into the living room…” Then she stopped and turned to me. “But please know I am not professional pianist. I’m just a volunteer in the Jewish Home who plays for the old folks twice a week.”
Old folks, I said to myself. She’s no youngster either and calls the residents of the Jewish old-age home “old folks.” How old could she be? Her hair was absolutely white, but there wasn’t a wrinkle on her round, ruddy cheeks. Yet Yossi said Eva was older than he. Was she in her mid-seventies? If she had been in the Resistance in 1943, let’s say at twenty-four, now fifty years later she would be seventy-four or seventy-five.
As Eva played these traditional songs I thought: What can one expect from an old lady who probably took lessons sixty or sixty-five years ago. It was commendable — a perfect word: commendable— that she played these homey tunes at her age and made the men and women at the Jewish Home happy. I felt that my effusive praise, “How nice, Eva, how beautiful!” was patronizing, but I couldn’t help it. That’s how we were raised, to be polite, to make people feel good, especially the old and the young.
I knew all the songs but one.
“That last song, Eva, it’s new for me. Quite enchanting.”
“I learned it from some Jewish villagers during the war. It’s been sung in the countryside for generations during Hanuka.”
“Can you play it again?”
She sang along as she played. The song, Eva explained, celebrated the power of light over darkness, faith over evil. I heard the rhymes but of course couldn’t understand the words. In its folk simplicity and captivating rhythms, it might have been a melody Dvořák could have used in one of his Slavonic Dances.
I looked at Eva as she played. She wore a fine, white, long-sleeved sweater over a nicely cut flowered blue dress. I closed my eyes, took in in memory her round, affecting, grandmotherly appearance and imagined she was the grandmother I never knew.
This too has to be filmed, I decided. A previously unknown and traditional Czech Jewish countryside Hanuka song.
Besides the old Bösendorfer upright piano, the living room contained several four-foot-high bookcases. Atop their shelves were little vases, a pair of glass elephants, the caboose of an electric train, a half-dozen typical wine-colored Bohemian glasses and bowls, and a brass Hanuka menorah. Two thick Sarouk carpets lay on the floor. The old leather sofa was cracked like an old woman’s wrinkled cheeks. Two plush easy chairs with crocheted ivory-colored armrest covers that Eva or her mother had crocheted years ago stood on either side of the sofa.
The sunshine from the window cheered the room, covered the dusky old furniture with light. I looked out the window into the big backyard with its flowerbeds along the rear fence. The Charles River sparkled and the grey-green hills danced in the distance.
In a moment of silence, when time was suspended and I felt myself motionless, like the golems in my Metro car, I thought again of Jiri. I should have filmed him too, it dawned on me. But now, now, alas, it was too late.
Then, a Bach melody on the piano, the opening notes to his English Suite No. 2, overtook my reverie. Who could be playing? At first I thought it might be Eva. But she was standing next to me. So how could she be playing the piano if she wasn’t at the piano?
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Bach.”
“I know it’s Bach. The English Suite. But who’s playing? I know it isn’t me and I’m sure it isn’t you.”
“Don’t be so sure.” And she made some fingering motions in the air on a make-believe keyboard. Smiling, she said, “It’s Mr. Klein.”
“He also plays?”
“Yes.” And that naughty look in her eyes, the color rising on her cheeks.
“He too has a piano in his room?”
“No.” She laughed. “A gramophone.”
I marveled at the use of that old word.
“And I do mean gramophone, not phonograph.”
Eva walked back to the piano and sat on the bench. The English Suite continued. Eva held her hands over the keyboard like a concert pianist about to begin. Her fingers hovered inches away from the keys. Her head ticked to Bach’s melody. She closed her eyes. From Klein’s room, again silence. The end of a dance. Eva looked at me with a smile that grazed the borders of shrewd and sly. In a minute, I’m going to surprise you, her smile said. Eva’s expression seemed so wise and all-knowing I felt like blurting: If you know everything, where’s the girl in the blue beret?
A second later, Eva’s hands lunged forward in attack and her fingers began to move, as if miming playing the Bach piece. What’s going on? It seemed to me I was hearing the gigue in stereo. Now I saw what I had only imagined before: she was playing along with whoever the pianist was, probably Glenn Gould, note for note, trill for trill, arpeggio for arpeggio. Until she, he, both stopped at the same time at the end of the gigue.
I applauded. “This is incredible…. You rehearsed this.”
“No. But we have done this a number of times.”
Showing off for visitors, I kept myself from saying.
And this too, somehow, will have to go into my film.
Everything will go into my film, I thought.
9. To Mr. Klein’s Room
I looked around Eva’s living room. Why did Jiri send me here? Jiri to Yossi, Yossi to Eva. Tara pilus. Was it for her I was too young? Did Jiri or Betty actually presume some kind of match between Eva and me? Impossible. One mismatch — Jiri and Betty — was enough, thank you. They were quirky at times, but not mad. So maybe Mr. Klein was the final stop. I recalled the line both Jiri and Yossi did not complete: The old man will sh—
Then the double notes of that Bach gigue came back to me, that enchanting duet Eva had played along with Mr. Klein’s gramophone. And I had judged her playing commendable. It was either a musical tour de force she had perfected, or some kind of acoustical sleight of hand. What kind of magic potion was in effect here that permitted an elderly woman who at first played like a solid amateur to replicate Glenn Gould’s English Suite as though she were lip-syncing? Did she have another recording in her piano that made me think she was actually playing? Was it a player piano? Or was Arthur Rubinstein in there performing, like he had done many times, years ago, inside Vladimir Horowitz’s concert grand, when the ailing Horowitz went on tour — remember, Horowitz always traveled with his own Steinway — Rubinstein playing a smaller piano of his own inside his friend Horowitz’s while Horowitz just went through the dramatic hand and finger motions?