She bent forward so her hair hung down in front of her forehead as she fastened the chain round her neck. He recalled the red star on the newspaper she had given back to him when they talked together for the first time. Was the golden star to be the route to their first caress? Her neck was slimmer and more delicate than he had thought, and he was about to bend forward and kiss it when she raised her head again, so her hair flopped freely around her. She smoothed it, pink in the face, and he didn’t know whether it was bending down that had brought the blood to her cheeks or his intention, which must have been written in large letters on his forehead.
Nonplussed, he grabbed at the first subject that came to mind and asked her to tell him about her grandmother. She had disappeared during the war, in one of the camps. Ana paused, looking at him to see the effect of her words on him and judge if he was worthy of hearing the story. Again she made him feel stupid and boorish. There was a sombre tone in her voice as she spoke and he shuddered as tourists do when, in shorts and T-shirts, they come in out of the sun to the cool vaults of a sanctuary, not so much because they feel like it but because they think they should. Her grandmother had left her small son with a farming family in the country. They saved him, but they also became his only family. Several months before he left them her father had decided to join the partisans. No one knew where or when he died, or how. Ana’s grandmother was deported a few weeks after she had kissed her son goodbye and hidden the gold chain with the little star of David under a loose paving stone in the pigsty.
Ana often went back to the story or talked in more general terms about her Jewish background. She had read everything she knew. Apparently her father had repressed his origins or lost any interest in them. He did not like Ana wearing the star of David although he had given it to her himself when she was a little girl. But the more he evaded her questions the more she questioned him and read from the piles of books in her room on Judaism and Jewish history. Robert discovered that she had cultivated her identity as half-Jewish or quarter-Jewish, according to how exact she wanted to be, for a long time. By his interest in the star on her neck he had unintentionally led their conversations onto a track they could not get away from again. When she held her monologues on the cabbalists and the Talmud, on the diaspora and the twelve tribes of Israel and how many great artists had been Jews, he cursed himself because he had not had the courage to kiss her bare neck.
Her passion for everything Jewish was quite different from the passion for music she shared with her father. It did not make him feel any closer to her, on the contrary it made him feel she removed herself to a world from which he was excluded. A world where he had no chance because measured against it he must seem so ordinary and anonymous. He suffered more than ever from his secret love, sure it could not stay hidden any longer, and that in her thoughts she mocked him for his cowardice. He dreamed of assailing her with a sudden embrace, literally pulling her down to earth and waking her to life away from what he came to see as a ghostly passion. When he attentively listened to her stories of the intellectual superiority of the Jews, he tried to suppress the anger that welled up in him and also made him feel ashamed. Sometimes he was about to forget that it was she and not the Jews he was angry with. But he was jealous of her Jews, both living and dead, and when she dwelt on her grandmother’s death yet again, he felt paralysed.
It was not only that he had to stop on the threshold of something neither of them would ever come to comprehend. It was also because he dared not say what he was thinking. For in contrast to him she did not allow herself to be paralysed, she persisted in entering the forbidden darkness of history, as if it was not only the story of her grandparents she told, but her own as well. He felt he began to understand why her father creased his brow every time he saw the little star on her neck. In fact she wore it not as a symbol but as an ornament. She had surfeited on the tragedy of her unknown grandmother, and on her father’s, although she had had no part in them, born as she had been in safety on the right side of the war and the Iron Curtain that separated her father from his homeland, where she had never set foot.
One evening at the beginning of winter he sat in their kitchen while she cooked, and as usual he was the one who listened, bursting with lust as she spoke of the Jewish respect for the written word. She described how it was forbidden to throw away old Torah scrolls, and how the worn-out scrolls were kept in the synagogue attics. Suddenly he interrupted her and asked if she regretted that her mother had not been Jewish so she could regard herself as a valid member of the chosen people. He did not know if it was the sarcasm in his tone or the reference to her mother that made her fall silent. He felt immediately he had broken a tacit agreement, but he had only become aware at the moment he violated it. He tried to continue the conversation and asked, peaceably he thought, how there could be room for all those Torah scrolls in the attics of the synagogues, and how you could stop the mice eating them. She did not reply, merely went on peeling potatoes with unrelenting accuracy.
At the table her father asked her why she was so quiet. It’s nothing, she said, avoiding his glance, painfully distressed at being so directly confronted in the presence of Robert. Her eyes settled on a distant point between them, and she sat like that, withdrawn and unmoving, with her head raised a little, so Robert could see the full length of her throat, that throat he should have kissed long ago. She had taken off the star of David. Robert was sure she had been wearing it when he arrived, but he didn’t feel he could put that down to a victory. She stayed unconquered with her dreaming eyes and her way of holding her face, as if weighed down by the luxuriant hair, absorbed in a secret thought. Her arrogant expression made him forget his remorse in the kitchen when she stood staring silently down at the peel sliding off the yellow potatoes in curved strips and falling into the sink with a soft sound like heavy drops. He felt she obliterated him with her silence and her absent gaze, and he felt the urge to wound her still more.
He thought of an article he had read in the newspaper about the Israeli expropriation of Palestinian property. He started to describe what he had read, and the clarinettist listened, interested. He agreed with Robert, the Jewish treatment of the Palestinians showed that Zionism was not a whit better than any other form of nationalism, on the contrary it was serious treachery against the Jewish people’s experience as a persecuted minority. Robert watched Ana as her father spoke. Her eyes were still distant, but slightly softer and darker, he felt, as if they grew larger. He was surprised at his luck, but was not allowed to enjoy it, before Ana dropped her cutlery with a crash. The clarinettist gave her a surprised look through his horn-rimmed spectacles as she left the dining room. The door of her own room slammed. He put down his napkin on the cloth and rose. Robert stayed at the table, listening to him as he talked quietly to her through the door in their foreign language.
She had glanced at him as she stood up, and it was not anger he read in her shining eyes, nor was it self-pity. She had merely looked at him through her tears as if to make quite sure. She looked at him as if she had known all the time that he would betray her, and had only herself to blame for letting herself be carried away by his sympathetic air. As he sat alone at the table, he felt the treachery burn his cheeks, but many years would pass before he completely understood what had happened. In fact he had not wounded her. That at least would have been a warmer gesture. Instead he had revealed the coldness in his young, fumbling desire. He had held a hard mirror up to her and shown her what she already knew.