Five Seasons (19 page)

The waiter stood to take his order. “No, thank you,” Molkho said, “nothing for me,” but the legal adviser insisted. “Come now, you have to have something. The beer here is first-rate. I won't let you pass it up.” “All right,” he said, “just a small glass of beer, but nothing to eat; really, I'm not hungry,” because if he ate anything he would have to pay for her meal too, which had obviously been a large one. “But you must be hungry. Please, eat something,” she repeated—rather oddly, he thought, so that, wondering whether she was concerned for him or merely exhibiting a new truculence, he gave in again, looking for inspiration at the diners around him until his eyes fell on a pungent-looking plate of blood-red sausage, and he asked the waiter for the same. Immediately, though, he regretted it. “But not such a big portion,” he said in Hebrew to the legal adviser. “One sausage is enough; tell him one's enough,” and signaling to the waiter, he called out,
“Eins,”
while she stifled an embarrassed smile. Suddenly she seemed her old self again, the self-assured senior official attending international conferences at the public's expense. No longer were they just two lonely people making contact on neutral territory, and so, seeking to recoup his position, he said, first of all, “Tell me how your ankle is.” The question appeared to surprise her. “It's fine,” she murmured with a sharp glance at him, sounding rather irritated, perhaps because she sensed that he would have liked to bend down and examine it beneath the table. “I was worried about you,” he continued quietly, though slightly indignantly, realizing that she and the errant foot were again on good terms. “I really was.” “Yes, I know,” she said, her, eyes zeroing in on him, “I could feel it.” There was a sudden distance between them, as though all that had happened that day had happened to someone else.

“So how was
Don Giovanni?”
she asked, wanting, he felt uneasily, to smoke him out. “It wasn't,” he replied, managing to stay calm and keep smiling, perhaps because she still sounded tentative, as he told her about the last-minute switch to
Orpheus and Eurydice.
Had she ever heard of it or of a composer named Gluck? Without waiting for an answer, he handed her a program that he had found on one of the seats after the curtain calls. She took it with an air of bemusement and absently leafed through it while he reached into his pocket for her ticket and explained at great length why he hadn't sold it, there having been no demand and the box office having been closed, though he was sure she could get a refund through her brother's travel agency, since it wasn't her fault that the opera was changed. Yet, far from being interested in a refund, she only seemed annoyed by his advice. “It's really of no importance,” she murmured rather formally, tearing up the ticket and dumping the pieces in the ashtray. “You still haven't told me about the opera.” None too exactly, he began to describe it for her, aggrievedly expressing his amazement that Orpheus had been played by a woman. “But why should that bother you?” she asked. Because, he explained, it annoyed him to see a big fat woman with a little harp singing about her love for Eurydice. True, he got used to it after a while, but why bring in a woman in the first place? Was it just someone's idea of being contemporary and feminist? She looked at him pityingly. “I suppose,” she said, still turning the pages of the program, “that the part was originally written for an alto and that you can't find men with such high voices anymore.”

The waiter arrived with a stein of beer and a single sausage so grotesquely huge that it made Molkho shudder. “That's not what I had in mind,” he smiled. “I wanted one of those smaller ones.” “Never mind,” said the legal adviser. “They won't take it back, so you might as well eat it—it looks quite juicy. This is a famous beer cellar.” Rising to bring him a jar of mustard from the next table while ordering coffee and cake for herself, she deftly arranged his napkin and handed him his knife and fork, seeking perhaps to repay him for all his care. Meanwhile, the men at the next table broke off their loud talk to crack some joke about the steaming knockwurst, their coarse laughter making him regret having ordered it even more, especially as he wasn't even hungry, just tired and slightly cowed, or perhaps simply sorry that she wasn't still silently sleeping in her soft hotel bed, with the snow blowing against the window. Why, what a magical time that was, he thought longingly, remembering the feeling of tunneling toward her, though it now seemed rather doubtful whether he had gotten anywhere.

Listlessly, in the orange gloom of the barnlike space, with its walls of dirty green velvet, amid the noise and the raucous music, he began cutting his sausage, eating it with the sleepy self-discipline learned long ago as a child when his mother had always made sure he left his plate clean. The reassuring little stool now felt like an interrogation seat, and her beady eyes, like a squirrel's catching sight of a nut, bored steadily into him, the target verified and ready to be pounced on. Running a hand through her short, girlish hair, she began to question him about the day, as if to ascertain whether there had really been such a thing or whether they simply had gone from night to night. Who, she asked, suddenly catching him off guard, had changed her sheet? He flushed, playing for time by pretending to think, only to break down and confess: the sheet had been sweaty and damp, and she had been too weak to change it herself. He was sorry if it had been indiscreet of him.

For a moment she said nothing, concentrating on her cigarette; then, as if the time had come to talk frankly, she asked to be told about his wife, about the kind of woman she was. “My wife?” said Molkho, at a loss. “Why my wife?” “But why not?” asked the legal adviser. “I'm terribly curious.” “I would have thought that by now you'd have heard all about her,” he said. “Yes,” she replied, “I have. But now I want to hear it from you.” But he felt this was not the place to discuss his dead wife, this huge bam into which more and more people kept pouring as the movies and theaters let out, apparently because it was known for its capacity, which was, however, fast becoming exhausted.

“She was an intellectual,” said Molkho, seizing on the first word that came to mind while looking at the legal adviser, who returned his gaze steadily. “She was very honest ... I mean, very critical ... of herself too. An intellectual. Nothing was ever good enough for her. She never felt fulfilled or happy. And maybe she never even wanted to be. Although...”

He stopped in midsentence because just then there came a sound of thumping from upstairs, followed by such loud singing that he couldn't hear himself think. “And I'm not an intellectual at all,” he concluded, though it wasn't what he'd started out to say. “Yes, I've noticed that,” she said gently, regarding him with a newborn affection that only made him feel more certain that the coup de grace was imminent. Despairingly he glanced toward the entrance, through which new customers were still elbowing, checking their coats and plunging into the crowd. Suddenly he missed his wife so badly that it hurt. The legal adviser bent toward him, leaning so far across the table that he felt her hair brush his face, in her eyes a cold, intellectual glitter. “And so,” she whispered, “you killed her little by little—I only realized that today....” For a second he felt his blood curdle; yet at once, as if a soft quilt were thrown over him, he felt a warm, rich happiness in his veins. Slowly his eyes met hers. The thought was not new. “You're killing me,” his wife used to say to him, although it was odd that the two women should think the same thing when they had never met. Wearily he smiled, feeling his near-naked scalp beneath his crew cut. What else, faced with such a verdict, could he do? He had no wish or way to defend himself and was tired of arguing. Indeed, he had stopped arguing completely during the past year. “You should know,” he said brightly, “that I did my best to take care of her.” “Yes, I do know,” she answered with compassion. “I know everything. I want you to try to understand...”

The waiter deftly slipped two checks, his and hers, under their plates and disappeared. Molkho made up his mind to pay only his; she would get her share back from the office anyhow. “Try to understand,” she persisted, not wanting to hurt him yet intent on pursuing her insight. “I don't mean that you did it consciously, but I felt today that you were trying to kill me too.” He blinked happily, deliciously drunk; the German beer had gone to his Levantine head, and the juicy sausage, seemingly reconstituted there, was now crawling through his stomach. Feeling slightly seasick, as though he were on board a big, throbbing ship pitching in the waves, he struggled to stay calm and take his time answering. And she, too, was silent now, perhaps shocked by her own words. “To kill you too?” His big brown eyes opened wide. “But why?” “That's what I'd like to know,” she said. Slowly he drained the last drops of beer from his glass. The men at the next table had suddenly stopped talking, as though aware that something significant was going on between the two foreigners.

But Molkho was tired of arguments and would have gladly postponed this one, too, until they were home, if ever they met there again. It's a lucky thing we're not on the same flight tomorrow, he told himself, looking at her eyes, whose feverish glitter repelled him, the gleeful, intellectual glitter of her clever, twist-all mind. “In that case, you must have killed your husband too,” he said with a curt laugh. “Perhaps I did,” she answered candidly, “though not in the same way as you.” He shivered, wanting to put an end to it. The noise level was unbearable and he had been on his feet since six o'clock that morning. “Shall we?” he asked, laying a warm hand on hers, which let itself be held like an old bird.

He followed her quietly to the entrance, glancing over her shoulder at her wristwatch, whose hands said almost midnight, before planting a light kiss on her dry forehead, which had a slightly sweetish taste. Mechanically he apologized for his tiredness and for having to catch a plane in the morning, and she urged him to go to bed, though she herself, she said, was not ready to turn in yet. And so they parted, and he stepped out into the frigid night, thinking of the shabby man at the opera, from whose strange, contorted movements the music had seemed to flow. Still, I enjoyed it, he thought, that's one opera I'll never forget, even if I can't sing a note of it. In the hotel, which he found unaided, all the lights were already out; the bar in the corner was shut, and the only keys still in their cubbyholes were his and hers.
“Sechs,”
said Molkho with the last of his strength, his hand held out as though to salute the student with the book, who was on the night shift again; then, recalling that the young man spoke English, he asked to be awakened at five. The student wrote it down, though just to be on the safe side, he gave Molkho an alarm clock as well.

 

 

 

 

 

Part III

 

SPRING

 

 

 

 

D
URING THE THREE-HOUR WAIT
at Orly for his flight to Tel Aviv, Molkho bought some perfume for his mother-in-law and a large bar of chocolate for his mother while trying every half-hour to phone his cousin, whose home didn't answer. Once in the air, above the Alps, dinner having already been served, he took out a large sheet of paper, wrote “Paris” on one side and “Berlin” on the other, extracted the receipts he had saved from his wallet, and began to calculate his expenses, racking his memory for every cup of coffee, piece of cake, gift, or taxi he had paid for while thinking of his days abroad, which now seemed to have passed with a sort of muddled intensity. Yet though the Berlin figures tallied to the mark, he was unable to account for three hundred and thirty francs spent in Paris. No matter how hard he shut his eyes and tried reliving every moment in the French capital, the missing sum continued to elude him, until finally, somewhere over the Aegean, he gave it up and went for a stroll in the aisles to see if there were any passengers he knew.

In Israel, stepping out of the terminal, he was assailed at once by a hot, dry wind that heralded the onset of spring, and noticed that the rows of oleanders were already in bloom. The winter, he saw, was gone for good, though the harassed-looking Israelis running back and forth seemed not to have realized it yet and might take several weeks to do so. He telephoned his mother to inform her of his arrival and then looked around for a cab, half-hoping that the college student would be there to meet him, although he had expressly told him not to bother. And indeed, the young man did not.

At the taxi stand Molkho was approached by a woman who asked if he wished to share a cab to Haifa, and he agreed. The woman, who had just returned from a shopping spree in London, was in the best of spirits, having managed to slip through customs without paying a cent of duty. Unabashedly she told Molkho about all the money she had saved and about the weakness of the British pound, and all the while, their driver, who had never been abroad at all, listened to her recite the bargain prices in London with resentful amazement, all but ready to set out for there himself. Molkho listened sleepily, glancing now and then at his vivacious fellow passenger surrounded by her bundles and feeling thankful he hadn't surrendered his single status in Berlin. Halfway to Haifa, after they had heard the 11
P.M.
news, he made a few discreet inquiries about her own status, only to find out that she had a husband who was very much alive, a Sephardi from Jerusalem, like him. “There's no place like Jerusalem,” she exclaimed, telling him how she and her husband missed it. “Don't you?” she asked. “Not especially,” answered Molkho. And whenever he did, a single visit was enough to cure him.