In the morning, after just a few hours of sleep, he drove his children to school, and from there continued to his job at the Ministry of Environmental Protection in Jerusalem, where he told his two secretaries about the opera in the desert, including the grains of sand that sabotaged the voice of the famous star who needed to be replaced with a local Carmen. At noon he went to the compliance department to find out if anyone was dealing with the trash that was building up at the foot of Masada. That night’s performance would be the third and last, and before the opera’s producers took off for Tel Aviv, profits in hand, it was worth making sure Masada didn’t turn into a garbage dump. Nor could he stop thinking that his former wife would again be an extra on the stage, and he goes to the equipment storage room of the department and signs out a pair of field binoculars. Do I have the strength for this? he asks himself, cutting his workday short, getting home before the children do, taking off his clothes and trying to catch a bit of sleep.
He wakes up at four p.m. to find a bustling household and his wife walking around red-eyed and yawning. He immediately takes charge, and after dinner he steers her to bed to make up for her lost sleep, and promises that for next year’s opera at Masada they will stay overnight at a hotel. “No,” declares his wife, “the next opera, if we go, will be in a hall and not under the sky.”
Uriah has mustered his nerve and decides to go to the desert. He says he has an evening meeting of senior staff with the minister of environmental protection. He will set his cell phone on vibrate and keep it in his shirt pocket, by his heart, so he can feel every jitter.
As darkness falls, Uriah heads east, gliding toward Jericho and a half-moon flanked by a trio of twinkling stars. At the Beit HaArava junction he turns south, and in less than an hour he can see the beam of light sweeping across the mountain of the ancient suicides. He has no admission ticket, and no intention of spending more money on this opera, so before reaching the main parking lot he swerves onto a dirt road and bounces along, circling the opera venue until he is blocked by large rocks. He switches off the headlights and engine and walks past the stage, planning to hide behind one of its adjacent little hills, natural or artificial, he can’t quite tell. From there, he will train his binoculars on the woman who refused, despite her love for him, to give birth to a child.
As a former combat officer in the Israeli army, he strides with confidence, and the tragic mountain of Masada helps him navigate accurately. He can hear the musicians tuning their instruments. But will the security guards, if there are any, know that this man with a bit of gray in his hair isn’t trying to sneak into an opera he saw last night and whose tunes he can hum, but just wants to look at one extra, with whom he has an unsettled score?
Silently he approaches the northern hill and the sound of laughing women. Now a hush, and then the audience of thousands explodes in applause for the conductor. Within a few seconds, ethereal music drifts in his direction. He inches closer, chooses an observation point and kneels down, and through the binoculars of the Ministry of Environmental Protection he observes the country girls of Seville, one of whom stands by a donkey hitched to a cart containing two little children, who wave to the crowd they are supposed to be unaware of. His heart pounds as he recognizes his former wife gripping the halter, out of context in peasant costume but still the same woman who could not be persuaded to have children with him, despite his undying love for her.
The music pulls her and the cart across the stage toward the opposite hill, and so as not to lose her, he advances slightly, careful not to enter the field of vision of thousands of eyes focusing on the stage, and thinks he has succeeded.
But from the commanding heights of the podium, the tall conductor is stupefied to spot a gray-haired man not connected with the plot, and as he dictates the tempo with crisp, stormy movements, and crouches and leaps to bring Bizet’s music to life, he also threatens the foreign invader with his baton, tries to shoo him away. But Uriah does not budge. Rock solid at the edge of the stage, he tracks the country girl who crosses paths with another cart and vanishes behind the second hill. And as he is considering whether to follow her, he is seized by two young security guards and removed from the area.
“Please, sir,” says one of the guards, not unkindly, “if you have no money for a ticket, then listen to Carmen at home. Don’t spoil the magic for others.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
For a moment the guards conspire to confiscate the fine-looking binoculars, but after the man introduces himself as a supervisor of environmental protection who has come to make sure Masada doesn’t turn into a garbage dump, they drop the idea.
Before the end of act one he heads back toward Ma’aleh Adumim. On the uphill road from Jericho the cell phone vibrates close to his heart, and he says gently to his wife, “Go back to sleep. I’m almost home.”
Thirty
THE PREVIOUS MORNING, before the mother and son drove back to Tel Aviv, the three sat together on the hotel terrace, watching people float in the salty waters of the Dead Sea. They spoke about the grains of sand that had prevented the prima donna from playing Carmen after act one, and how those same grains of sand had only improved the singing of the Israeli understudy, who was showered with bravas and became a star overnight. Noga yawned and said, “Grains of sand appeared to me once in a dream. I don’t remember why.” Her brother and mother looked at her affectionately. She’ll have to take a nap in the afternoon, or she won’t have the strength to pull the donkey, who sometimes stops and will not move.
“Honestly,” she asks her mother and brother, “you could actually tell it was me?”
“I tried not to lose sight of you,” says Honi. “After all, I came more for you than the opera.”
And the mother says, “I’m not sure I identified you, but it was nice to feel again like a young mother coming to see her daughter in a sweet costume at a kindergarten party. When you were little, before Honi was born, Abba and I didn’t miss a single one of your performances, even if you had only two words to speak.”
“Two words? For example?”
“Peas and beans.”
“That’s all?”
“And for that Abba took off time from work. But I’m not feeling young only because of you, Noga,” she continues cheerfully. “It’s Honi too. We haven’t slept in the same room since he was ten, and last night we went out together and even slept in the same bed, so I’m asking myself why you’d want to imprison such a young mother in an old-age home.”
Grimacing, Honi turns to his sister, but she smiles indifferently. He says to her, “Ima is waiting for me to have a heart attack like Abba, to be rid of my nagging.”
“You won’t have a heart attack,” says his sister. “If, as you said, my heart is made of stone, yours is made of rubber.”
“Children, enough,” says the mother. “I apologize.”
They resume discussing the change of singers and try to understand why the character is more important than the person who portrays it. “At one point,” relates Noga, “I found myself near the understudy. I looked at her face, and though she was different in every way from the star who dropped out, I didn’t really feel the difference between her and the original.”
The mother, who knows her son, anticipates that he is on the verge of telling Noga about the encounter with Uriah, and she places a finger on her lips to signal him that he shouldn’t. But Honi pointedly ignores her, and tells his sister about the hasty meeting and the physical resemblance between her and the second wife.