Murder Duet: A Musical Case Read online

  Dedication

  To the memory of my father, Zvi Mann

  The remarks attributed to Theo van Gelden in chapter 13 derive from a lecture given by Ariel Hirshfeld in July 1995 in the Music Center at Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: Brahms’s First

  2: Rossini, Vivaldi, and Nurse Nehama

  3: Vanitas

  4: The Way of the World Makes Sense

  5: Morendo Cantabile—Dying Away, Singing

  6: His Majesty Sent for Me

  7: The Three Faces of Evil

  8: Anyone Who Wants to Live Outside Life

  9: Better, I Think

  10: You Don’t Find Babies in the Street

  11: We’ve Never Had Anything Like This Before

  12: The Right Distance

  13: Et Homo Factus Est

  14: A Torso

  15: A Matter of the Dynamics

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Brahms’s First

  As he put the compact disc into the player and pressed the button, it seemed to Michael Ohayon that he heard a tiny cry. It hovered in the air and went away. He didn’t pay too much attention to it, but went on standing where he was, next to the bookcase, looking at but not yet actually reading the liner notes accompanying the recording. He wondered absently whether to shatter, with the ominous opening chord for full orchestra with pounding timpani, the holiday-eve calm. It was the twilight hour at summer’s end, when the air was beginning to cool and clear. He reflected that it was a moot point whether a man called on music to wake sleeping worlds within him. Or whether he sought in it a great echo for his conscious feelings or listened to it in order to create a particular mood when he himself was steeped in fog and emptiness, when it only seemed that this holiday-eve calm embraced him, too. If that was so, he thought, he wouldn’t have chosen this particular work, which was worlds removed from the holiday-eve quiet in Jerusalem.

  The city had changed greatly since he had come here as a boy to attend a boarding school for gifted pupils. He had seen it transformed from a closed, withdrawn, austere, provincial place into a city pretending to be a metropolis. Its narrow streets were jammed with lines of cars, their impatient drivers shouting and impotently shaking their fists. Yet he was moved time and again to see how even now, on every holiday eve (especially Rosh Hashanah, Passover, and Shavuoth, but also on Friday evenings, and if only for a few hours, until darkness fell), sudden peace and quiet would reign, utter calm after all the commotion and vociferousness.

  So complete was the calm before the music spread through the room, so absolute the stillness, that it was as if someone had taken a deep breath before that first note, held up a baton, and imposed silence on the world. Instantly the nervous, darting, driven looks of the people in the long lines at the ringing supermarket cash registers vanished from his mind. He forgot the anxious expressions on the faces of the harried people hurrying across Jaffa Road with plastic bags and carefully clasping gift baskets. They had to make their way between rows of cars with engines running, whose drivers stuck their heads out the windows to see what was holding up traffic this time. All this was now silenced and effaced.

  At about four o’clock the car horns and the roar of the engines fell silent. The world grew calm and tranquil, reminding Michael of his childhood, of his mother’s house and of the Friday evenings when he came home from boarding school.

  When the stillness descended on holiday eves, he again saw before him his mother’s shining face. He saw her biting her lower lip to disguise her agitation as she stood at the window waiting for her youngest child. She had allowed him, despite her husband’s death and although he was last of her children still with her, to leave home. He returned only every other week for a short weekend, and for holidays. On Friday evenings and holiday eves, he made his way by foot along the path at the back of the hill from the last stop of the last bus to the street at the edge of the village. People, bathed and dressed in clean clothes, relaxed in their houses secure in anticipation of the holiday. The stillness of the hour would hold out its gentle arms to him as he climbed the narrow street toward the gray house on the fringes of the little neighborhood.

  Outside the ground-floor apartment Michael had been living in for some years now, all was quiet, too. You had to go down a few steps to enter it, and to stand in the living room and look through the big glass doors leading to the narrow balcony in order to discover the hills opposite and the religious women’s teachers college curving like a white snake in order to realize that it wasn’t a basement apartment but had been built on the steep slope of a hill.

  The voices of the apartment building’s children who had been called inside died down. Even the cello up above, which for several days now he had been hearing playing scales at length and then in a Bach suite, was silent. Only a few cars drove past on the winding street at which he now looked, as he unthinkingly pressed the CD player’s button. His hands had preceded his conscious mind and doubts. His act caused the loud unison opening of Brahms’s First Symphony to fill the room. In a moment what now appeared to be the illusion of peaceful harmony which he imagined he had succeeded in achieving within himself after long days of restless disorientation had disappeared.

  For with the very first tense orchestral sound, a great new disquiet began to awaken and well up inside him. Streams of small anxieties, forgotten distresses, made their way from his stomach to his throat. He looked up at the damp stains on the kitchen ceiling. They were growing bigger from day to day, and changing from a dirty white to a gray-black wetness. From this sight, which pressed down on him like a lump of lead, it was a short way to thought and words. For these stains required an urgent appeal to his upstairs neighbors, a talk with the tall, bleary-eyed, carelessly dressed woman.

  Two weeks ago he had knocked on her door. She had a squirming, screaming baby in her arms, and she gently patted its back and rocked it as she stood in the doorway facing Michael. Her curly light brown hair covered her face when she lowered her head to the baby’s. Behind her, on the big, bright, shabby carpet, music scores and compact discs outside their boxes lay scattered, and in a big, open case padded with green felt lay the cello, a gleaming red-brown, with a music stand beside it. When he had looked into her light eyes, pale-lashed and sunken, with the dark semicircles underneath them emphasizing their helpless expression, he had felt guilty for disturbing her. He looked inquiringly over her shoulder, waiting for the bearded man he had once seen in the house entrance. Michael had heard him opening the door of the apartment above him, and thinking he was her husband, assumed that he would be talking to him, relieving her of this additional burden. But she, as if in answer to his look, said with pursed lips and lowered eyes that she would only be able to take care of the problem in a few days’ time, when the baby recovered from his ear infection. Moreover, the stains had been caused not by her but by the previous tenants.

  She had a low voice, pleasant and familiar, yet Michael suddenly felt as if his body was too tall and overbearing. She seemed to shrink and strain, as if wanting to look up at him from below. Her hand moved nervously from the light blanket wrapped around the baby to the curls covering her shoulders, and he therefore slumped his shoulders, trying to make himself seem shorter as hastened to agree to wait.

  That was the first time he talked to her. In all the places where he had lived, and especially since his divorce, he had deliberately avoided contact with the neighbors. In this tallish building, too, he confined himself to reading the announcements on the cork bulletin board in the lobby He quietl
y dropped his checks for heat, garden upkeep, stairwell cleaning, and emergency repairs into the mailbox of the Zamir family, who lived on the third floor and none of whom he had ever seen. He did suspect, though, from the inquiring and preoccupied looks he got from the short and balding elderly man he occasionally encountered in the stairwell, that he was the building treasurer and also the author of the dunning notices and lists of names of the tenants who were in arrears.

  His hesitant knock on his upstairs neighbors’ door, which bore a printed card with the name VAN GELDEN on it, for him signaled the beginning of the very thing he had conscientiously avoided all these years. In the building he had lived in before, when Yuval as a hungry adolescent had discovered that there was no sugar in the house and suggested borrowing some from the neighbors, Michael had been horrified.

  “No neighbors,” he had stated firmly. “It begins with asking for sugar and ends with being coopted onto the Tenants Committee.”

  “You’ll have to do it anyway,” promised Yuval. “Your turn will come. Mama’s the same way, but Grandpa takes care of that for her.”

  “If I don’t exist, I don’t have to do it,” Michael insisted.

  “What do you mean, if you don’t exist? You do exist!” Yuval protested in the didactic tone he adopted whenever his father sounded out of touch with reality. He inclined his head with a critical expression, demanding an end to this nonsense.

  “If I appear not to exist,” said Michael. “Especially if I don’t knock on doors asking for cups of sugar and flour. It’s the only thing, it seems to me, or one of the only things, that your mother and I agreed on from the start.”

  Yuval, as if afraid of hearing any more about the agreements and disagreements of his parents, hurried to put an end to the conversation, saying: “Okay, never mind, I’ll drink cocoa, it’s already got sugar in it.”

  Michael dreaded the troublesome conversation with his neighbor, which he would not be able to avoid because the spreading stains were depressingly redolent of neglect and poverty. The thought of plumbers, ripped-up tiles, hammering, commotion, and general upset, together with the awareness that he had forgotten to buy fresh coffee for the holiday, grew more powerful as the symphony’s opening theme continued to build up tension. In order to calm himself, he began to read the little booklet accompanying the disc. He pulled it out of the transparent flat plastic box, looked at Carlo Maria Giulini’s handsome face and his shining mane, which failed to hide the conductor’s reflective brow, and wondered how an Italian got along with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic.

  He listened attentively to the music, trying to close his heart to it, to listen to the work for once with his mind alone. Only then did he begin to leaf slowly through the booklet, pausing at the biographical notes in French—of the three languages in the booklet the one the Moroccan-born Michael knew best—and read, not for the first time, about the genesis of this symphony, Brahms’s first but completed relatively late in his life, and soon after its premiere dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Brahms would work on it, on and off, for some fifteen years after writing the ominous and suspenseful opening. In September 1868, years before he finished it, in the midst of a painful rift with Clara Schumann, he sent her a greeting on her birthday, writing from Switzerland, “Thus blew the Alp-horn today,” and below that the notes of the horn theme that would finally ring out years later in the last movement of his symphony. The prosaic words of the booklet, describing chromaticism and what it called the “seal of doom” of the flutes, and analyzing the tension between rising and falling melodic lines, failed to inhibit the overwhelming effect of the music. At first it seemed to him that it filled the physical space around him, and he tried to separate the music-saturated air from his skin, stubbornly concentrating on identifying the various wind instruments and their battles with one another and the other instruments.

  For a long moment he stood there actually trembling, wondering at and mocking himself for this surrender to the spellbinding power of the familiar sounds, and telling himself to switch them off or to listen to something else.

  But something stronger in him responded to the emotion that was cutting short his breath. The music was full of foreboding, threatening, dark and gloomy, but so beautiful, calling him to follow it, to respond to its ominous gloom.

  Michael sat down and put the booklet on the arm of the chair. He thought that one of the ways to dispel oppressive feelings, to put them to sleep and retrieve some kind of peace, was simply to distract yourself from them. Although some people thought that if you did that, the feelings would return and pounce on you from behind, like thieves in the night. (“Just when you’re not ready, everything you’ve run away from stabs you,” Maya used to say. The memory of her slender, warning finger landing gently on his cheek, a half-smile on her lips and her eyes looking at him sternly, brought back an ancient pang.) And yet, he thought that it made sense to transfer the source of the emotion from the pit of the stomach to the head.

  What was needed was to study the subject, to confront it from the right distance, and especially not to let it engulf you. To fill the void inside, but to understand how it operated.

  One could silence the music, and one could also persevere and listen to the CD again from the beginning, paying attention to the nuances, to the softness of the forte in this performance, the entrance of the second theme, and even to isolate the transitional passages between the themes.

  He went into the kitchen and looked at the ceiling, hoping to discover that the stains had shrunk or at least hadn’t got worse. But they clearly had spread since he had last examined them closely, two days ago.

  Why did he care about the stains? he wondered with irritation as he stood in the kitchen doorway with the sounds filling the entire apartment. It was the upstairs neighbors’ problem, they would have to see to it, and as for the greenish-black patch on his ceiling, a quick coat of paint would soon take care of that.

  He looked again at the booklet lying on the armchair, went over to the bookshelf, and pressed the CD player’s button. The silence was absolute. The telephone cord, pulled out of its socket and neatly folded, seemed to offer a refuge.

  If he reconnected it, maybe the phone would ring. And then? He wondered, Say it does ring, what then? If he let the world in, it might offer him dinner at Shorer’s house, or a visit at Tzilla and Eli’s, or even an evening at Balilty’s, even though Michael had already told him, untruthfully, that he was going to his sister’s for dinner tonight.

  He had told him this in order to avoid a repetition of the evening of the Passover seder the year before. Danny Balilty had shown up at Michael’s door in a festive white shirt, sweating as usual, as if he had covered the distance from the west to the north of Jerusalem at a run. He stood there with his vast belly swaying in front of him as he rattled his car keys in his hand, and with a childish, ingratiating smile, which was not innocent of a certain triumph, said: “We decided that phoning wouldn’t work. We couldn’t start the seder without you.” He had narrowed his small eyes as they focused on the brown armchair in the corner and the yellow circle of light shed by the reading lamp on the green book jacket, and exclaimed in a tone of suspicious bemusement: “So you really are alone on the seder night, and reading Russian literature besides!” The upper half of his body leaned toward the bedroom, and his eyes darted in the same direction, as if he expected the closed door to open and a glamorous blonde to appear wrapped in a pink towel.

  “If you had someone here with you at least,” he said, scratching his head, “I’d understand. But even then, she’d certainly feel better to be at a seder with a big family and all the fantastic food we’ve prepared.” In recent years Balilty had become an ardent cook. Now he had described in detail how he had acquired half of a lamb, and what exactly he had done with it, and how his wife had made her special meat soup and the vegetables and the salads and the Greek eggplants. He had stood there, looking at Michael with pleading eyes and complaining like a child: “If Yu
val weren’t in South America you’d certainly come. Matty’ll kill me if I come back without you.”

  And in a moment of weakness Michael allowed himself to be dragged away from the quiet evening he had been eagerly looking forward to all month.

  “Why is this night different from all other nights?” he had said to Balilty, who was still standing next to the armchair, and Balilty waved the volume of Chekhov at him (his finger keeping the place) and announced: “Never mind the philosophy. It’s forbidden to be alone on holidays. It leads a person to despair. It’s well known that for people without families holidays are a disaster.”

  Michael looked at intelligence officer Balilty’s swollen face. He had intended to say something about the threat felt by those who conformed to convention when confronted by deviancy, and that this invitation, which he could not find a way of refusing, had nothing to do with his own welfare. Maybe it could even be seen as the ruthless revenge of the family against a man who lived alone and enjoyed his solitude. He had almost uttered the word “extortion,” but instead he heard himself saying, with a little smile: “It’s under duress, Balilty.”

  “Call it what you like,” said Balilty firmly, “in my eyes it’s a mitzvah.”

  Then he returned the book carefully to the armchair, and added in a pleading tone: “Why make a big deal of it? It’s only one evening in your life. Do it for Matty’s sake.” Michael held back the words on the tip of his tongue: Why should I do anything for your wife? You’re the one who’s supposed to make her happy. And if you stopped running after every pair of tits you saw she’d have been happy a long time ago. He went into the bedroom, despising himself for his weakness as he looked for his long-sleeved white shirt. As he felt his rough cheek and wondered whether to shave, he told his face in the mirror not to take itself so seriously. What, in fact, was so terrible about spending one more meaningless evening? When he was young he hadn’t been so pompous and pedantic about the way he spent his time.