Eleven
HONI DROVE HIS SISTER to the bus station, but when he found out there’d be a long wait for the next bus, he offered to drive her to Jerusalem.
“What’s going on?” she again protested. “Go back to your wife and children. You’re addicted to this experiment. You’ve fallen in love with it.”
“So don’t ruin it.”
“Why would I ruin it?”
He took out a few bills from his wallet.
“Here, for the time being, just for now.”
“Don’t you dare…”
“But you won’t be able to last for three months without additional income. That way you’ll trip me up with your stubbornness and pride. Ima is also worried.”
“I have my own money, and if I run out, you said you could find me work.”
“Very good. So what I’m giving you now is an advance on your first paycheck. Please don’t say no. I won’t be able to rest easy if I know you’re going back to Jerusalem without enough money.”
She hesitates. In the evening darkness, by the desolate bus station, her brother grows older by the minute. His hair has gone gray, and though no one ever said he resembled his late father, the old man’s look has begun to flicker in his eyes.
She sighs and strokes his arm.
“It’s strange to come back home and be an extra. Where do I go, anyway? Who do I talk to?”
“Nobody. I’ll take care of everything. They’ll be in touch with you and work it out. I heard about a movie about foreign workers or refugees, and they need a lot of extras there. I’ll handle it all.”
Aboard the bus, racing along the highway to Jerusalem, her anxiety surfaces: the orchestra will perform the Mozart double concerto without her. I should have asked for clearer assurance that they will not forget me, she says to herself, gently extending her arms to the seat in front, as if it were the harp she will clasp to her breast when the conductor gives her the sign.
A taxi takes her to Rashi Street, but the driver seems hesitant. “You sure this is your address?”
“For now,” she says blithely, and hurries out.
The hour is late, there are few cars in the street, a human presence prevails. People exit and enter the apartment buildings.
By the gate of their building an old man stands in the dark, waving to her with his hat.
“Are you Noga?”
He pronounces her name softly, though they have never met. She reckons this is the lawyer who lies in wait to liberate the apartment.
“For now,” she answers cheerfully.
“But you live abroad, in Holland.”
“For now,” she repeats, liking the sound of it.
“Because even if you came back to Israel,” the man continues, “you should know that your mother cannot transfer the apartment to you, and you may not even rent it from her.”
“Why is that?”
“Because this is a key-money flat with only your father’s name on the contract. After his death, your mother was granted, out of pure kindness, the rights of a protected tenant, but not the right to rent it out.”
“You’re the owner?”
“I am their emissary. I am their legal eagle.”
“How nice.”
“The neighbors say your mother left, went into a home.”
“For now.”
“So please tell her Attorney Stoller sends his regards. I had good relations with your late father. He would bring me the piddling rent money twice a year. As long as he was alive, we expected nothing. But now, tell her from me that to live in a home near her son and grandchildren is wonderful and important. Why should she live alone among people whose poverty turns them into strange fanatics? Also, we want to get rid of this apartment, and we have buyers. So give your mother my very best regards. If I were able to get into assisted living in Tel Aviv, I would have done it a long time ago.”
“Are you Orthodox?”
“I can be Orthodox when I want, but so far I haven’t found the Orthodoxy that suits me.”
“And if I decide to stay here as the daughter of the family?”
“Without your mother, you can’t. You have no legal standing for tenant protection. Besides, what do you want with an apartment like this? It needs a lot of repairs. You don’t want to go back to your Dutch orchestra?”
“You’ve even heard about that?”
“I know a lot about your family. Your father, of blessed memory, used to jabber in my ear about you all. What do you do in the orchestra? A drummer?”
“A harpist.”
“That’s better. More dignified.”
“Every musical instrument has its own dignity.”
“If you say so. You undoubtedly know.”
And he tips his hat and bids her farewell.
The apartment’s bathroom light was left on by mistake, though the window is closed.
She undresses, but before deciding in which bed to start the night, she sits in front of the TV, watching a concert with the orchestra on a stage in the middle of a forest, and a crowd of twenty thousand enthusiastic Germans sitting on the grassy ground, listening to popular classics. The camera lovingly caresses the bare shoulders of the women musicians. Until two years ago, she too performed with her shoulders bare, but they grew thicker, and compared with the magnificent shoulders of other female players, they suddenly seemed to her ungainly. So she decided to cover them, though Manfred, the first flutist, found no fault with them and kissed them with passion and joy.
Twelve
IN THE MORNING Noga phones Manfred in Arnhem and asks him to nail down the promise given her regarding the Mozart concerto. “Not to worry,” he assures her, “the Concerto for Flute and Harp is meant for the two of us, and I will not play it with any other harpist.” Meanwhile, as the keeper of the key to her little flat in Arnhem, he casually mentions a faucet left running in her bathroom, a result no doubt of her hasty departure, but promises all will be dry by the time she returns.
She wonders if he is only looking after the apartment or also using it, but the distance between the Middle East and Europe dims her concern, and when Honi calls about tomorrow’s work as an extra, she makes jokes as she jots down the details in her father’s old notebook, where he would faithfully record every errand assigned him by his wife or children.
At lunchtime she cooks herself a real meal, then enters her parents’ darkened bedroom, takes off her clothes and adjusts the electric bed, but her sleep is soon punctured by footsteps scurrying up and down the stairs and an occasional wild, piercing scream, as if a small predatory animal were fighting for its life.
Silence finally returns, a breeze compels the dozing woman to rearrange her blanket, and as sleep takes its time to settle in, there are two soft taps on the apartment door.
Noga smiles. These must be my mother’s TV children, she thinks, doing her best to ignore them. But the tapping, soft and rhythmic, goes on. To hell with them, she says to herself, and waits, and it stops, permission now granted for blessed sleep, for Noga to burrow into the pillow and be carried to a place she’s never been, a crowded city street in a ghetto, where someone is giving a speech in a faint but familiar voice full of eloquent indignation. Can she have traveled so far in her dream only to hear that voice again? She flings off her blanket, wraps herself in a bathrobe and silently opens the living room door.
The TV is on at low volume. Sitting cozily in the two faded armchairs that survived her mother and brother’s purge are two boys with sidelocks, clad in black, hats perched on their laps, the tzitzit fringes of their ritual undershirts dangling on their thighs. The older boy senses her presence and looks up at her seriously, brazenly, with a tinge of supplication. In the other armchair nestles a beautiful, golden child, twisting his right sidelock into a curl as his light blue eyes stare at the speaking prime minister.