The orchestra fell silent. Having run out of both patience and emotion, the Russian violinist attacked the cadenza with a coldly calculated technique, as if wishing to have done with it as quickly as possible. Now that the musicians seated next to him were idle, Rivlin studied them for a clue to what they thought of the young soloist. Yet he could not tell whether they were even listening. The members of the wind section, busy cleaning their instruments, were whispering and smiling to each other with an old rapport. No doubt they had heard and would hear this concerto dozens of times, and this performance did not appear to have been one of the more impressive. From time to time they glanced at the conductor, whose limp, motionless stance, head down and hands at his sides, cleared the way for the yearning husband to search once more for his wife — only to look away in confusion upon discovering that he was staring at the wrong woman.
“You have to respect his bounds. You have no right to trespass, not even in your thoughts.”
“Not even in my thoughts? What’s wrong with you? How can anyone control such painful thoughts?”
“You can if you want to. And if you can’t, at least keep them to yourself. Be careful. Ofer isn’t you. You don’t own him. You have no right to interfere in what happened between them. It can’t do any good.”
“But time is passing…. ”
“Don’t exaggerate. It’s only four years.”
“Five! Five! What makes you say four?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’ll find someone. A woman who suits him better. Stop conjuring up old ghosts. Let him breathe.”
Several months after Ofer’s sudden divorce, their son had stored his possessions in their apartment and gone to Paris to study hotel and restaurant design, a field he had become interested in after his marriage. That was more than four years ago. He had worked as an apprentice, without pay, for various architects, most of them Jews, while auditing classes at a cooking academy in order to “get the feel,” as he put it, of the relationship between a kitchen and its diners. Meanwhile, he supported himself by working as a night security guard at the Jewish Agency in the 17th arrondissement — a situation shortened by his parents, in response to casual inquiries, to “Ofer works for the Jewish Agency in Paris.”
The conductor lifted his baton and spurred the orchestra, as if it were a pack of hunting dogs, to race to the end of the movement. Rivlin did not join in the applause. Aloof, he watched the flustered soloist take his curtain call and vanish into the wings. Near the exit, by the kettledrum, were some empty seats. Rivlin decided to move to one of these, so as to improve his view of both the soloists and his wife.
The two sisters were chatting happily. Hagit, noticing his new location, seemed pleased that he would be visible for the rest of the concert. She waved, then signaled him with a smile to comb his hair.
The Tchaikovsky interpreter was followed by a parade of young female performers, most of them daughters of Philharmonic musicians. The first was a pianist with eyeglasses. Her long silver dress trailed past him across the floor while he read about her, her studies, and her accomplishments in the program, which announced that she was to play Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. Alas, now all he could see, from his vantage point by the bald kettledrummer, were two bare shoulders and a white back with silver ribbons. What, he wondered, was the musical significance of such décolletage? Was there a connection between the low-necked dress and the rhapsody? Were this pianist and the tender young soloists who followed her — bare of shoulder, flowing of hair, alluring of bosom, slyly slit at the leg — offering their carnal bodies in compensation for possible lapses in their renditions, for notes misplayed or omitted, or was this their consolation prize to a sense of sight forced to play second fiddle to the sense of hearing? And what, then, of the performers with pimples and bad complexions? Of what use were they to an audience promised visual as well as audial pleasures?
As the father of two sons, he had been deprived, once the wife of the elder one left him, of paternal access to young maidenhood. Now, as a steady procession of it passed before him, nubile, fluid, and flushed with excitement, a violin, clarinet, oboe, cello, or flute in its bravely vestal hands, he could not listen to the second concerto of Karl Maria Von Weber or to Ravel’s Les Tsiganes or Chausson’s Poeme, without an old sorrow welling up in him. Borne on the alternating waves of the music, his fictional confession in the hotel garden throbbed in him like a real disease.
This time the applause found him ready to join in, and he exchanged smiles with the bald kettledrummer, who had crossed his sticks in the symphonic gesture of approval for a job well done. Yet as he sought to leave the hall at the concert’s end, the Orientalist’s way was blocked by the ushers, who had shut the doors to prevent the early-to-bed-and-to-rise Haifaites from rushing for the exits.
There was a surprise finale. Never since he and Hagit had taken out their Philharmonic subscription could Rivlin remember such a thing. At the special request of the conductor, a musician rose and asked the audience to remain seated. As much as he loved the local musical scene, the Indian maestro had not forgotten his native land — which, poor, vast, and suffering, had young talents, too, who deserved a hearing. With a sharp wave of the baton, an Indian lad was thrust upon the stage. A fat, bespectacled ten-year-old in a baggy black suit, he stepped forward with a little violin that reminded Rivlin of the instrument once bought for him by his mother, who had dreamed of raising another Yehudi Menuhin.
The solemn boy, looking more like a despondent dwarf than a child prodigy, paid no attention to the applauding audience. Like a well-trained baby elephant, he took his place beside the smiling maestro, who patted him lovingly, as if reminded of his own self fifty years earlier. Leaving the orchestra to its own devices, the big Indian put the little one through his paces, leading him gently and attentively down the enchanted paths of Mendelssohn’s First Violin Concerto — paths that would take him assuredly Westward if only he remained a true son of the East.
13.
YO’EL, UNLIKE HIS WIFE, chose to arrive on a Saturday, thus giving the judge the pleasure of an airport reunion. Invoking recent precedent, the Rivlins decided to detour first to Jerusalem, where Hagit and Ofra’s old aunt was impatiently awaiting a visit from her nieces — especially from the fragile émigré, whose Third World peregrinations she had faithfully followed from the inner sanctum of her little room in a geriatric institution. And as long as they would be in the capital anyway, Hagit said, why not recoup the chance, lost the week before, to succor that dubious invalid Professor Tedeschi, now home from the hospital? The judge was never averse to the lavish praise that the illustrious polymath was sure to bestow on her.
Since family meetings in Jerusalem had a way of unfolding with an inner rhythm of their own that made their outcome difficult to foresee — especially when they involved two sisters eager to reminisce about their dead parents with an old aunt who was hard to stop once she got started — it was decided to put the sick call first, which would make it possible to cut short the visit to the aunt with the imperative of setting out for the airport. And so, on a crisp, sky blue Saturday morning, the three travelers were admitted to the Tedeschis’ apartment by the translator of Jahaliya poetry, who shook a stern head at them as if to say: “Although you may find us at home and not in the hospital, don’t delude yourselves for a moment that our afflictions have passed, much less that they are — the thought of it! — imaginary. On the contrary, the doctors’ refusal to face the facts only makes matters worse.” Introduced to Ofra, she gave her a bitter smile, satisfied with this new addition to the anxious circle of her husband’s well-wishers, before leading them into the old living room into which, thirty-two years previously, a young instructor had brought his girlfriend, then in the army, for the approval of his academic mentor, the sound of whose slippers was now heard as he came padding from an inner room.