When We Danced on Water (4 page)

Chapter 9

M
argot has been using the same stationery for the entire fifty-five years of their correspondence, so her letters, some six hundred in all, form remarkably uniform stacks in the antique roll-top desk next to his bed. The handwriting on the oldest among them, written shortly after a traumatic and unplanned meeting in 1947—their first in nearly a decade—was almost identical to the last, though the later letters retain the scent of soap and candles he has come to associate with his sister.

These three neat stacks of identical sheets of paper are the first thing Teo notices each morning, and they comfort him, evidence of his longest relationship. He and his sister write to one another about their everyday existence, and he craves the keen and precise observations Margot makes of her quiet, contained world. He is certain he would recognize Sister Beatrice by her triple chins, Sister Agnes by her winking left eye, Sister Anne by the way her ears turn red when she is angry. And the convent cats, as quiet and contained as their surroundings. And the caretakers, first Josep and then Josep Junior, one family of Polish peasants maintaining the convent for nearly seventy years. How little that world has changed from year to year, from season to season.

There was once a break in the letters, a rupture swallowed up by time, by the envelopes that began to reach him again sometime later. He looks for the gap in the orderly piles of letters, guesses it must be somewhere in the second stack, but of course there is no evidence. It came after a brief reunion in Warsaw in the early 1980s. Both Teo and Margot were out of their element, the elegant hotel at which they met felt natural to neither of them, and their conversation was awkward and distant. Without ever mentioning it, each resolved never to meet again, preferring instead their glorious epistolary relationship. Several times Teo has mentioned the possibility of publishing their correspondence, that scholars and even the general public would find their letters engaging and perhaps important on several levels, but his sister, in her calm, powerful manner, much like a subtle force of nature—a persistent wind that bends trees, rushing water that carves holes in rocks—was adamant about this: not now, not after their deaths, not ever; it would be unseemly and improper, and it was the one thing that could cause her, with enormous sadness and regret, to refrain from communicating with him ever again. So since neither of them could bear this possibility, the idea has always, after being mentioned, been dropped immediately.

Teo keeps copies of his own side of their correspondence in satchels bound with ribbon stashed on a high shelf in his bedroom. They are less accessible to him than Margot's letters, but he feels the need to revisit them far less often. Still, lately he has been drawn more and more to both sides of their correspondence, their combined half century of letters: to the elegant, prewar Polish by which they stand loyally, to the chunk of history to which they give witness, to the sheer volume of it all; and to their ability, so lost in the world now, to suggest so much, to tuck meanings into words, to crouch emotions behind mellifluous phrasing, to crunch a mountain of feelings into a mound of pure gold, without ever using an explicit, naked word. They are masters of inference, experts of the long, sly wink.

There were letters from his side, he remembers, that described and detailed the dances he was creating better than he had done anywhere else, letters from which choreographers and dancers alike would profit greatly. There were letters from her side on the role of the convent in modern life that would serve the Church and its adherents brilliantly, if only one Church scholar were given permission to read them. World events march through their letters as if their correspondence were an immense stage in a theater with only two seats. Teo and Margot observe, they comment. Sometimes they rage, sometimes they weep; occasionally they disagree, but always courteously. On the rare occasion they are in open conflict, both are miserable and seek to resolve their differences quickly.

More than anything, they are respectful of one another. Although they held forth on theological issues in the mid–1950s and again thirty-five years later, Teo has never questioned Margot's abandonment of Judaism in favor of Catholicism and life in a convent. Margot has never asked her brother about the war. She has noted, with wry amusement, that their collective contribution to populating the world has been abysmal, “and we should both be chided for that,” but nothing more. In the late 1950s, when it seemed that a virulent strain of anti-Semitism was about to swallow Poland whole, they argued about the Polish national character. On the other hand, they mostly agree about Israel's two periods of intifada and the need for territorial compromise, though Teo surprised even himself with a few comments that bordered on national pride.

He picks up the uncomfortable pen again and wraps his hand around it.

I have been thinking lately about Mother. I have been wondering if she wanted to marry Father or whether she felt obligated, when her sister Anna died in childbirth and left him so bereft. Was it her family who decided she should marry Oskar, or was it her own decision? She always seemed headstrong to me, soft but stubborn—much like you! She had a way of getting Father to agree to her every whim without ever raising her voice or crying or pleading. I remember her almost as a pampered daughter to Father, do you, too? After all she was quite a bit younger, and of course gay and frivolous compared to his serious nature.

He remembers how he and Mother would sit apart from the nannies and their charges at the park, how they went to puppet shows, the public library, the vegetable market, the train station, their favorite spot on a bank of the Vistula River—wherever young Teodor would be entertained, wherever he would find sights and sounds of interest. She sat by quietly as he hopped after a passing butterfly or rolled down a grassy hill. She spied as he imitated a trotting dog or a fat nanny chasing her charge, not in jest but as a way of learning their bodies, their movement. He was very nearly speechless, rarely asked questions, preferring to construct his own truth from his own kaleidoscopic imagination. Neither he nor his mother was ever, ever bored together and their daytime world was solid and complete.

On the very day that the American stock market plummeted, pulling the European bourses along for the ride, Rosa gave birth to a girl, Margot. Small and pinched, Margot did not elicit the nurses' loving attention as her brother had seven and a half years earlier. She was red and unlovely compared to the other babies, and though tinier than the rest she could squeal and wail like the most robust.

Teodor had been expecting a playmate, a fan and a foil to keep him interested on long, dreary winter afternoons, and so he was profoundly disappointed when this wrinkled, good-for-nothing baby took up permanent residence in their house. She could neither walk nor talk, she knew no songs, and Nanny would not let him dress her up for skits or games. She was often rheumy, or feverish, or chilled, so Rosa would cancel their afternoon outings, condemning Teodor to the confines of the small apartment. Worst of all, baby Margot had a deformity that both frightened and intrigued him: one eyelid did not fully open, so she constantly gave the impression of peering out at the world from a secret hiding place.

When Margot was still an infant, even before her first birthday, she was hospitalized for several months with complications following ill-advised and unsuccessful surgery on her damaged eyelid. Rosa ran frantically back and forth to the hospital, leaving Teodor with the nanny for longer and longer stretches. Oskar tried to compensate, taking his son to the park and the puppet theater, but he lacked his wife's gaiety and her infinite patience, and so father and son often returned from their excursions ill-tempered and offended with one another.

It was a sympathetic neighbor, Mrs. Zabrinski, who first suggested that the Levins enroll Teodor at the ballet school that stood just one block down on Szara Street. He could, she reasoned, reach the school on his own, or at the very least with the help of his nanny. He was naturally graceful and would certainly have no trouble executing any movement demanded of him. And, she gently hinted, ballet lessons would provide him with much needed discipline, respect for authority, and a framework for the strange leaps and twirls he was always performing as he walked down the street. Teodor was a boy who could never simply walk from one place to the next by placing one foot in front of the other, a trait Mrs. Zabrinski suggested would brand him as odd by the children in school, and cause him to suffer.

So subtle was her suggestion that Rosa almost missed it.

“He … he …” she stammered, “do you think he is really, I mean, do you think there's something wrong with him?”

“No dear, not at all. He's just high-spirited and very clever and full of energy.” Mrs. Zabrinski had brought four boys of her own to manhood and knew the pitfalls. “Take my word for it, ballet will do him a world of good.”

And so, in the spring of his eighth year, Teodor began to dance.

Those early years of dancing, Teodor recalls, were sweet years of discovery, years of blissfully losing himself to the beautiful world of movement. He found himself there, knew just who he was and what he wanted. At first it was the thrill of being better than everyone else, and so effortlessly, but after a while it became the thrill of pushing the limits of his body, the sheer physicality of stretching that much farther, reaching that much higher, turning that much faster. And feeling so strong and stuffed with muscles that seemed to burgeon under every inch of his skin.

But finally, ultimately, in the years that followed, the excitement of creativity surpassed all the other elements. Teodor was progressing rapidly beyond what he was being taught, inventing new steps and feeling the music course through him, shooting through his blood to every extremity like mercury, until his body had no choice but to move and move and move, always something new and completely his own. He began to feel as though his body were a comet; each time he danced he pushed past another planet, another star, another galaxy. He felt he brought light and color to where nothing had existed before, spinning faster, leaping higher, his body creating new hinges and pivots and axles. He had no patience for anything but dance, and searched wearily for someone who could understand; he wanted to find another human being who knew how it felt to have the stars cheer him on each time he stepped into ballet slippers, how the planets shook themselves out of their slumber and the galaxies flicked their sparkling tails and the sun shot great bolts of heat and light through the cold universe each time he pirouetted across the floor. He had moved beyond conceit and pride to the humility of a great and endless discovery, but found no one with whom to share it.

And he was only fourteen years old.

Chapter 10

O
nce Vivi has wiped down the tables and the bar and stacked all the chairs, she locks up and steps into the empty shopping arcade. Normally she loves walking home at this hour on a Friday afternoon, when the citizens of Tel Aviv have finished their leisurely brunches and are resting before an evening of fun or prayer. But today she walks deeper into the arcade and down a flight of stairs to the door of the Tel Aviv Ballet company studio. She takes a deep breath and pushes it open.

Inside, the air is thick and musty. She walks forward, past a darkened office or two, until she reaches the studio itself, a large, spacious, well-lit room with three mirrored walls. At the entrance she finds an easel with the day's schedule posted. She sees that the dancers had a class in the morning, then a break, and since twelve o'clock they have been rehearsing Teo's ballet
Obsession
.

Teo is sitting on a chair in the middle of the studio with his back to her, his thick white hair more of a mess than usual. He is surrounded by more than a dozen sweat-stained young dancers. No one appears to be having a very good time.

“We're in rehearsal, sweetheart,” a male dancer calls out to her.

She waits for Teo to explain but he is engrossed in conversation with one of the female dancers, whose forearm he is holding and tapping vigorously.

“I'm … he's …” Vivi sputters. She is at a loss to explain her presence there, uncertain even how to address her coffee-shop customer, but she draws herself in and says with a nod of her head, “I'm his guest.”

Teo turns his whole body around in his chair, bows stiffly in her direction, and says, “Welcome.”

She seats herself on a stool in the corner, her coat folded on her lap, and watches.

“All right, boys and girls,” Teo says. “Let's try it once again. Lighter. Firmer. With precision, everyone. Pre-ci-sion. Mrs. Nudel,” he calls out to the air, “back to the beginning of that section, please.”

A heavy-set platinum blonde at the piano licks her fingers, turns the music back several pages, and begins to play. Vivi winces as the dancers throw themselves into bone-crunching positions. Teo is dissatisfied and stops them almost at once.

A tense silence falls on the room as the dancers wait and Teo sits slumped in his chair, his head bent. They begin to throw worried looks to one another, and Vivi herself wonders if something hasn't happened to him.

Then suddenly his head rises, his back straightens, and he is all at once on his feet, as though he has floated there. Slowly he rotates his body so that his back is now to his dancers, his face turned toward Vivi. His arms spread grandly to the sides, his chest expands, his legs pivot. Everything about him is taut and lean and sculpted, his shoulders beautifully squared. He no longer seems his age, or even old at all. Vivi shifts in her seat, uncomfortable at how aroused she is by this man who could be her grandfather. His muscles are remarkably firm, his stomach flat, and there is no way to describe him as anything but sexy. After a long moment taking him in, fully, she wills her gaze to drop to the floor.

“Épaulement,” he cries. “Épaulement. Épaulement. Épaulement. Épaulement. Shall I say it a few more times? Will it help?” He drops the pose, turns back to them. “You are beautiful, talented dancers,” he tells them. “You have mastered these complicated steps in a very short period of time and will dance them at the gala in less than two weeks from now. Your ballet master has trained you impeccably. But without these touches you may as well be doing aerobics. In this particular ballet, which is about the very nature of obsession itself, one of the obsessions explored is that of art, in this case dance. This ballet must reek of obsession, which the viewer understands through precision. What did Monsieur Balanchine used to say about precision?” he asks in a way that makes it sound like a rhetorical question.

The male dancer who had first noticed Vivi answers him. “ ‘If it is not precise it falls to pieces,' ” he quotes, clearly not for the first time.

“ ‘Nobody criticizes the sun or moon or the earth for being precise, and that is why they have life,' ” Teo adds. He spends the next twenty minutes moving from dancer to dancer, making individual suggestions and demonstrating, as far as his ancient body will allow, what he wants from them. Vivi watches as their muscles extend and they reshape themselves, responding to their teacher's instructions and pushing to their limits. When they try the dance again they are focused and precise and serious, and the results are discernibly different. She can feel it, and she sees by the expressions on their faces that they can, too. She watches as toes and fingers curl as they should and a lift that fails several times suddenly rises to miraculous perfection and the timing of a double pirouette is halved to fit the music. She is riveted, sweating along with these beautiful, lithe creatures in constant, frantic motion, their bodies often split vertically, down the spine, the right side moving against the left. She recognizes patterns: a pas de deux full of off-balance extensions and surprising shifts of weight reappears in a larger group of dancers; movements are reversed, inverted, performed upside down or with new rhythms; they expand into complex shapes or contract to the simplest gestures. The dancers twist and bend and collapse, and she breathes with them, feeling the floor as it slides around beneath them. When it is over she suppresses the urge to run to each and every dancer and to Mrs. Nudel and embrace them.

She smiles at them as they file out alone or in pairs. After the last of them has left she rises from her seat and approaches Teo, who is toweling dry his upper body.

“It was breathtaking,” she says.

“My breath was certainly taken,” he says, “but not in the way you mean. I find this both invigorating and exhausting.” He disappears for a moment behind a partition and reemerges with a bottle of cold water and two glasses. He passes the glasses to her, but when he begins to pour his hand wobbles and water spills on the floor.

“May I?” she says, offering to switch roles so that she can pour.

He ignores her, glaring at his own hand until it is perfectly still. Then he pours for them both without spilling another drop. When both glasses are full he raises his eyes to meet hers, flashing her a blue-green look of defiance.

“So, mademoiselle,” he says as she places a chair near his own, “did you find what you came looking for?”

“I think I got more than I came looking for,” she says.

“Tell me.”

“Well, certainly for my glassblowing I saw some wonderful, fluid lines I hope I can use. But it was just a pleasure watching them, and watching you teach them.”

“A pleasure?” he asks, his eyebrows raised. “That's not a word that gets used here very much.” He pulls his chair closer to hers. Once again, his ageless good looks and the fierce intelligence in his mismatched eyes draw her attention momentarily away from his words. “Young lady, do you have any idea whatsoever what it takes to be truly outstanding at something? I mean, original, creative, inspiring: the best. Can you even begin to conceive what that means?”

She sighs heavily, avoids the intensity of his gaze for a moment, then meets it again. “Look,” she says, “I know what you see when you look at me is a waitress. Somebody who just has to manage to get your coffee on the table while it's still hot. But can you even conceive that that's not all I am? That maybe I'm an artist, too, but a different kind?”

“What does that mean, a different kind?” he asks, now irritated. “All artists—true artists—know that their art must become their passion.” He settles back in his chair.

“But there's so much out there,” she says. “So many ways to create. I don't like cutting off my options.”

“Ah, but then you cut off your chances of creating something important. You're only left with mediocrity, and mediocrity is the true enemy.”

She frowns.

“Mark my words, my dear: mediocrity is the true evil, in all its banality. I have always pushed myself and my dancers to strive for the best.
Ad astra
, reach for the stars, I always tell them. Otherwise what is the point? If you don't seize opportunities and take risks you get to my age with too many questions and too few answers. In life you regret what you have
not
tried, not what you have tried and failed. You know,” he says after sipping water from his glass, “when I arrived in Israel the place was a wasteland in terms of dance. Classical ballet was the ugly stepsister of modern in this country, did you know that? All that awful German expressionist nonsense, all those ridiculous methods, they all got dumped on this country and grew like weeds, long after they had died in Germany! Classical ballet was too bourgeois for a new country, the hearty pioneers wanted to leave their good manners back home in Europe. No more ties and hats and suits. No more ‘please' and ‘thank you.' They wanted to work up a good healthy sweat here in the Near East. Well, we sweated, too, my dancers and me. We worked so hard, almost as hard as Balanchine's dancers back in New York. Because we were building something, too, something new and exciting. And while the pioneers sneered at us, despised us even, the people who were not afraid of beauty and art and grace and form, those people loved us, loved what we were trying to bring to this country. If I hadn't pursued it, devoted my life to it, there would still be no classical ballet in Israel. In the end, the best of my students—the ones who understood the devotion necessary to succeed—have actually reached the stars. These were the dancers who knew mediocrity would never do, not in ballet, and now they are dancing in Copenhagen and New York and London and Paris and San Francisco and Monte Carlo.”

“And you yourself have never done anything mediocre?” she asks.

“Not until old age brought me down,” he says dryly.

“While I was sitting here watching you, watching them,” she says, pursuing a different agenda, “I started thinking about my own creative process. When I get an idea in mind, something new I want to work on, it feels like a tickle, a kind of tingling in my nose and the back of my head. I don't know if that makes sense, and I've never tried to describe it before, but that's what it's like.”

He nods.

“When that happens, I know I have to pursue it. I get really caught up in whatever it is. But somewhere along the line, I lose my sense of purpose. I start telling myself it doesn't matter if I finish the project because nobody really cares. That even I don't care. And that's when I rush ahead and just complete it, and put it away. I keep doing that, I've been doing that for, well, too many years now. I guess that leads to the mediocrity you're talking about. But I can't even worry about creating something mediocre, I'm left behind at the frustration stage. I want to learn how to carry through. And I'm hoping if you can tell me how you do it then somehow I'll learn.”

“Vivi,” he says, and she starts, unaccustomed as she is to hearing him use her name, “I will tell you how I work, how I create. But let's get this clear from the start: it's not the work methods that really count, it's the seriousness of purpose. Things only matter in life because we invest meaning in them. Does the world really need another ballet? No. That is, until you create that ballet and cause the world to realize that it was actually lacking something that only this ballet can provide. But that cannot happen until you convince yourself that what you are doing is good and necessary. Or perhaps you never ask yourself that question, and there are many artists who don't. They simply create and send their creation out into the world without worrying the issue. One way or the other, it cannot be a preoccupation or it will paralyze you. It has paralyzed you.”

“Yes, it has,” she says.

“My own creative process always begins with the music,” he says. “Sometimes I had music foisted on me, something someone was requesting. That's less pleasurable than finding one's own perfect score. I have probably gone through thousands of scores in my life looking for music that begs me to create a ballet for it. Much of it, most of it in fact, is danceable. But it rarely possesses the mix I crave.”

“Which is?” she asks.

“Certainly hard to describe. A lovely melody, interesting rhythms and syncopations, variety, a certain emotional statement, but then something else. An element that speaks to me on another level entirely. I know it when I see it, I feel it immediately but it isn't something … usual.”

“Go on. Please,” she says.

He gathers himself, calls in various parts of himself to help answer. There is an intake of breath, a rise in posture, his hands flutter and his eyes narrow, all conspiring to turn what they already know into an answer. Both he and she understand this is not an answer he is usually willing to give. Then, in a whisper, he says, “Color.”

She leans in close and cocks her head to catch his feathery words as they float forward so lightly from his mouth. “Excuse me?” she says.

“And heat,” he says.

“Color and heat?” she asks. “Reminds me of the Dead Sea …”

“Color and heat,” he repeats, ignoring her, his eyes now closed. “When I listen to music, some music, I see it. See the music, I mean, I see it in colors and varying degrees of hot and cold. Sometimes it turns into shapes, but most often not … I …”

“Are you looking at them now?” she asks.

His eyes open. “There is no music in my head now. Just noise.”

“So, once you've found the music, what happens then?” she asks.

“I devour it. I read the score, listen to it if I can obtain a good recording, or ask my pianist to play it for me. I let it seep into my brain, my heart, my legs. After a while, not long at all really, I start to feel it in my body, as though I have absorbed it into my bloodstream. That is when the movements become almost inevitable. The phrase I hear translates into a very specific movement. Which is not to say it doesn't change; it certainly does, once I begin working with the dancers. The ideas are set by the time I hold my first rehearsal. The changes are usually only variations, not alterations, or perhaps adaptations would be a better word, since you are adapting what you thought would work to the strengths and weaknesses of your dancers.”