A Dove of the East (16 page)

She walked slowly, for she was troubled. She did not know if she should believe in her husband the painter and all the flowing idealisms, all the times when he could not paint, the times when everything she held precious and passionate seemed to vanish. That was part of life, she guessed, and only guessed although she was young and part of life she was young enough not to know it too well.

They had wanted to go to a tropical place, perhaps Tahiti, or South America, or even to a non-tropical place like Japan. And then she was reading and had come across the quotation: “New skies the exile finds but the heart is still the same,” and said, “Let's stay in Virginia, for in Virginia as everywhere else we can find fragments of what is good.”

Dammit, she thought, winding her way through incredible fields that only a writer would write about, the plague of my generation is the plague of all generations, is that we are searching for essences. She, the woman, the young woman of the painting, was now riding a wide-backed courageous horse in sight of a long row of trees, riding and deciding what she would do. Roads there were through this part of the country, dirt roads of brown like the leather of her boots. My husband the painter, his abandonment and the death in his painting, wild, colorful, risk, risk of a thousand men and the courage of a thousand—or the feminine sight of fields in early summer which I see, she thought, what is it—the horse cleared a stream by jumping—what is it, the torrent or the spread green?

A separation was not impossible. He was not a success, but she understood what he was doing enough to occasionally fill her full of love. They had expected a paradise, being from so rich a time. But he had given her great conflict and the burning which can be likened to a prairie fire in the sun. Was it this she wanted or something else? The irresponsible wild crazy burning or a tight set-in shattered life? The burning she would take, like the crashing of the sea against the shore, no craft to that, no skill, just what was artfully raw.

She crossed another stream and started to gallop home, home to a small house, to a husband who painted in falsetto, an intent madman afflicted with the beauty of color.

She spurred the horse across green plains and luxuriant powerful summer fields, summer fields of summer rain and a gray sky which told her that life was short and everything in the simple stroke of a painter's brush. Her husband was a painter. It was part of her choice. What else, she thought, is there in this sober life that makes us good?

She was committed to this man who traded all for essences and captured everything in color. She spurred her horse, over fields, across woods, in the mockingbird spring of Virginia, Virginia of a new world untried and untested like a young woman in white with garland of young hair. Virginia, to her from then on the symbol of courage, the symbol of bravery, the very center of her soul, the first essence she had ever got, true love for the painter.

Everything was a flat field of green bright in the sun, and she rode fast, devoted, decided. She was for him, all throughout. He painted and she loved him, loved him, loved him, as much as he loved her, for the gentle arching of her eyebrows and her mortality made him a man.

B
OSTON IS
a city of libraries and darkness, winter darkness, when lights shine through a cold mist or the clear air. If the wind has come from New Hampshire it is possible to see every star from every street and in the day the blue of the sky is absolute. But if the wind is off the sea the entire city is dark and close, the sparkling crystals not faraway stars but luminous white ice and snow. You can see the snow fall even in the dark, and though there is complete silence each descending particle has its own sound. Libraries shelter students and give the impression that strong fires burn in adjoining rooms. Of course there are no fires but the impression remains as one takes
off
coat and scarf. At night the windows of reading rooms are black and astonishingly cold.

Victoria had not been named after the Queen but rather her mother's sister who was not, as Victoria said, drowned on the
Lusitania
but killed as a child in a great fire which took most of the town and left the rest in despair. It happened one January night in Vermont before the First World War, and the father of the first Victoria had gone over the border into Canada to find laborers to build him a new house. It made no difference; she had been his hope, the little girl who when burned to death had been clothed in flannel the color of flame.

Victoria played the piano and was taught by a man named Andreyev. He kept his studio in a building devoted to music on Massachusetts Avenue near Symphony Hall, near enough anyway so that when Victoria caught a glimpse of it on her way to the lesson she thought how she always thought of playing to a mythical audience of professors and music critics. There were thousands of music critics. They came from every publication ever published, even Turkish technical journals and African joke magazines. And there were friends, all the friends she had ever known, especially the ones who had slighted her, the ones who had somehow gained on her in competition at remote and remembered times, and the front row was reserved for those she had loved who were no longer in her life.

Leaning over the piano, Andreyev looked out his window and saw a golden dome on a hill of brick houses, and a white dome on buildings grayer than Westminster. He knew that Victoria often took a long tour around the hill before her lesson. A magnificent pianist, she was his best pupil. She did not always practice as much as she might have, and was not as disciplined as many others, but she had so much love for what she played that she could not help but play it well. She knew she was good and her career in the literal sense was fast and musical, forward without hesitation; she enjoyed even the strain.

They always talked while her hands warmed. Sometimes when it was very cold it took fifteen or twenty minutes for the frost to pass so that she was dexterous. He wanted to warm her hands in his hands. He might have done it. She wanted him to, but instead they talked about his silver medals. They were won in his twenties and they impressed her greatly. He thought she knew she was going to win gold medals, but she knew neither that nor that at thirty-five he believed himself to be not good any more as a pianist, only passable as a teacher, and too old for girls of their early twenties—girls like Victoria, whose diversionary walks around Beacon Hill were so that her face might be red and the cold would cling to her coat and refresh the room.

Ascending the staircase she progressed faster and faster, gliding up like a rising angel to the sound of strings from the many rooms all about her. She felt like heat itself rising and when she entered to find serious Andreyev there came to her a sudden reddening which reminded him of all the Provençal and early Italian poetry he had been forced to read, which in Victoria suddenly seemed quite real.

She walked to the window and looked at the vanishing light, at the gold-rimmed snow on buildings, at the flat white basin of the Charles River—not a river because it does not flow—and her heart danced. The sun glinted off her glasses, and her black hair came near the thick white edge of the lens. She had bad eyes but they were large and brown. Her hair was as black as if she had been Chinese, and her face was long and fine. She knew that when she left her lesson it would be dark and she would ride the green-sided trolley back to Cambridge.

After his five o'clock lesson with Victoria, Andreyev usually walked to his small house in Brookline, a house with white rooms and two pianos, a house where there were never any women. In summer when Boston was hot, and Victoria went back to Vermont to swim in the Baker Rivers rapids, when he was most lonely, when the city seemed quiet and green as if a dream of the Middle East, in summer he thought of departed students and played better than winter ever heard because there was no one to listen.

Andreyev found that his convictions backed him into corners. At first it had been welcome, since he was sure he would eventually triumph. He was all right until his confidence began to erode, after many meetings with other great pianists who in truth were failures. He was at a rime in his life when he could not accept failure and yet did not have success. Enough strength remained in him to keep away the comfort of being only a man, blessed with a trade but completely mortal. He was still bent upon being a great pianist—but so feebly and passively that it became just a thought to have on the trolley as he sped across a landscape of gray rain and wet trees. The less he thought of breaking into public life like a long overdue baby bird cracking its shell, the more he delighted in things he had not noticed in years and years since the beginnings of his ambition, and the less he wanted to be alone. He began to be proud of his fierce black eyes, his height, and his Russianness—things which for so many years he had considered only for their effect on concert audiences. He bought himself a suit and new glasses, for the old ones were heavy and contradicted his face. He found that when he abandoned his ambition he regained strength enough to become again ambitious. Meanwhile Boston passed him on all sides and above, and he lamented that his students were like clouds going to sea as he remained rooted firmly on the barest place of land. There had been a time when he might have given up his dreams, but he had kept them and it soon was too late ever to release them. He felt the twenty years. He was already old enough to dream of abandoning his dreams. He imagined that his girl students were loved by his boy students and that they danced together. Victoria was the kindest of them all, and unfortunately the most beautiful.

With the sun making her gold glasses shine she turned to him and smiled. Her hands were warm, she said, they could begin. She was to play a piece he had adapted from guitar music by Gianocelli. The timing was difficult but he had arranged it well and she had practiced for many hours the day it snowed. She played while he counted time, coming down doubly hard on the stresses he had indicated in red pencil. They went through it three times. Then she played at smooth pace without him. There were mistakes and she once hesitated. She became as red as when she had come in from the cold. Again, he said. She played with no mistakes.

While doing it once more, simply because she liked it, she told him at intervals in the long rests that ... she was going to stay ... in Boston for the summer ... she was glad ... and she planned mainly to practice. She wondered if he too were going to be in Boston and if he would have time to continue the lessons.

He walked to the brown marble mantel where his medals were framed on black felt, silver medals all. She was playing with great speed and energy.

“I am going to be in Boston this summer,” he said, turning down the frames one by one, “and although I myself must practice I will have time for you. As you know, or perhaps you don't, I haven't performed in eight or nine years. If the summer goes well I plan to give a concert in the fall.”

She stopped playing and turned to look at h‹m. “Keep playing,” he said, and she returned to play faster and almost as if in anger. “I know it's difficult to play when someone is talking, but people always talk. Gianocelli is especially beautiful. No one knows him and he wrote little but I think he is among the best.” There was a silence. “Most of my students are absent in the summer.” He looked at her, at her black dress and gold chain necklace. “If you want you can practice here. The windows are open in the summer and the light is better.”

She stopped playing and looked out at the blackness of the night which had descended. She was confused, and although she saw like silver on jeweler's felt a thousand white lights of cars moving on the long bridge from Cambridge, she was frightened and could only say, as if she were older than he, Andreyev, Andreyev, Andreyev. But she did not feel older. She couldn't have.

T
HEY RODE
up to the Golan every week on Friday or Saturday, in an old army truck with two rows of hard wooden seats. In summer the heights were cooler than the Bet Shan Valley, which like a white strip of ivory is set into mountains as if they had been wounded, and cartilage exposed. Nothing is hotter than an afternoon by the Jordan, neither chilly nor deep but green and rapid like an African river.

When Israel took the Golan she found it to be dry and wasted, brush fire slopes gold only to God and pilots, so she put cattle there, since anyway she had few elsewhere. The price of meat was high; the grass had gone uneaten. Men had to watch the cattle and tend them otherwise. They stumble and cannot get up. They fall in gullies. They become trapped in labyrinthine ravines. Ticks make mockery of them, since they have no hands. They step on mines and must be shot. They lose themselves in reverie and cannot find grass to eat. They easily get lost, and at night they are frightened, like primitive men.

The farmers of Kfar Yanina, a settlement in the Bet Shan Valley, sent a proportion of their number to take care of their steers. There had been economic trouble, crops not coming in with all good speed, a shortage of labor as the young left the settlement for the pains of city life, dry years, and fires set by artillery. In a memorandum entitled
What Is to Be Done?
the secretary suggested allocation of loan capital to build a herd of cattle to roam about the hills in the north, where the mountains had snow.

A herd was created. In the first year it numbered four hundred, in the second, six hundred, and in the fourth, one thousand, at which it stabilized for lack of further resource. The farmers already knew how to make fences and enclosures, and how to deal with the animals and encourage their health and reproduction—since at the settlement cows had been in residence from 1936 onwards, the same family, remarkably content to give all that milk and end up as roasts in the ovens; and that is by no means funny, for if you look into the eyes of a cow you see a gentle being, perplexed and confused, and although they are hardly full of grace and beauty they order pity in a human heart for their very thickness and incapacity.