Five Seasons (12 page)

 

 

 

 

 

Part II

 

WINTER

 

 

 

 

M
OLKHO'S WIFE DIED
in early autumn, toward the end of September, and at the beginning of January he left for Paris. They had been together in that city three times, each time reconfirming their special love for it. Now, the fourth time, he arrived by himself. His wife's cousin, who was ten years her junior, and her husband, a non-Jewish doctor, hugged him hard at the airport and bundled him off to their home, where they so insisted he stay with them that he abandoned his original plan of putting up at his old hotel. As if feeling guilty for merely sending him a telegram instead of coming to the funeral, they showered him with warmth. On the first night they did not go out at all. Once more Molkho told the story of his wife's death, describing the days before and after it, enjoying sharing all its details with his two eager listeners. The doctor asked professional questions and Molkho did his best to answer them, though he did not know many of the medical terms in French or how to pronounce the names of the drugs. It was late when they turned in. His hosts lived in four small rooms, one of which belonged to their eight-year-old daughter and year-old son, and though at first they had planned to put him up in it, the mess there was so great that over his loud protests they gave him their own room and spent the night in the living room. After sleeping for a year in a single bed, it was hard to get used to the width of a double one.

It was still dark out when, crawling into bed with him and babbling in French, the baby woke Molkho in the morning. Though the little fellow seemed not at all disturbed to find a stranger in his parents' place, his mother soon appeared in a flimsy nightgown and gathered him up with an apologetic smile. Molkho, however, saw no need to apologize. After months of waking up to silence, he was greatly pleased by the morning bustle of the French family. They all left the apartment together, and after driving the girl to school and the baby to his nursery, the doctor and his wife dropped Molkho off in the Latin Quarter, where beneath a gray sky he walked the long boulevards past places he already knew and loved. As soon as the department stores opened he began to go from floor to floor, checking prices and looking for gifts.

That evening the three of them had dinner at a little neighborhood restaurant, during which the doctor and his wife questioned Molkho about Israel and its prospects. “Are you trying to commit national suicide?” the doctor kept asking with an anger of obscure origin, forcing Molkho, who explained things as best he could, onto the defensive. “I really don't know much about politics,” Molkho confessed at last.

The next day was windy; the temperature dropped sharply and the weather forecasts on the radio had a menacing tone. Molkho joined a small bus tour to Versailles, listening to the guide's pedantic descriptions while slowly traipsing with the other sightseers from one coldly ornate room to another. Rigidly symmetrical, the elaborate gardens of Louis XIV could be glimpsed through the windows.

Once back in Paris, he huddled in a café to warm up, waiting for his wife's cousin, who worked as a technician in a research institute. Lively discussions of the weather went on at the surrounding tables. When the cousin arrived, they drove to pick up her daughter from school and then her son from his nursery. The children took a liking to Molkho, who was playfully physical with them. Clearly, though it did not spend much time together, the family was a boisterous one that lived in great disorder, even filth. Beneath his bed Molkho discovered some underpants and socks of ancient vintage, while, half-crawling on all fours and half-tottering on two, the baby took his food everywhere, smearing and dropping it in secret places. And yet Molkho felt at home, and his hosts did their best to feed him well and keep him in good spirits. Indeed, he ate a great deal, the cold weather doing wonders for his appetite.

On the third night of his visit they had planned to go to a small theater, but the doctor came home late from the hospital and they ended up watching television instead. Much of the news program was devoted to the weather. The announcers showed maps and diagrams, even satellite photographs, and predicted snow for the next day. Afterward, his wife's cousin decided to call Molkho's mother-in-law in Israel. She spoke to her in German, and at first, the old woman kept confusedly talking the same language when Molkho got on the phone. He inquired about his children, told her about Paris and the snow, and asked about the weather in Israel. His mother-in-law, however, had trouble following his questions and answered him a bit crossly, her voice slow and groping, as if his trip abroad had caused a sudden deterioration in her condition. Then he and his hosts discussed the next day, and Molkho suggested they all go to the opera; he had never been to one, he said, and had heard it was all the rage. Though the doctor and his wife, who felt bad about the missed night of theater, seemed to welcome the idea, Molkho noticed a hesitation in their voices. Opera tickets, apparently, were very expensive, and for tomorrow only the best seats would be left. Well, then, he insisted, let them be his guests! Hadn't they saved him the cost of a hotel?

The next morning it was a few degrees colder and the city was cloaked in a chill white mist, though the promised snowstorm had not yet arrived. For three hours he stood in front of the box office, kept there only by the stubborn enthusiasm of those on line with him, some of them tourists like himself. Apparently that night's production, which was of Mozart's
Magic Flute,
was supposed to be especially good. When he finally reached the window, he saw that the prices were indeed outrageous, but he did not have the heart to walk away. The first snowflakes had begun falling outside. It was getting still colder. He thought of buying the children their presents, but the blow to his pocket was so great that he resolved to go straight back to the apartment to recuperate.

That evening they ate early and prepared the children for bed. The doctor arrived at the last minute, straight from a difficult operation, and barely had time to change his clothes. At seven the babysitter, a gorgeous teenager, arrived. It was snowing heavily, and in a gay and animated mood they decided to take the metro instead of their car.

T
HE OPERA WAS VERY LONG
, lasting for some three hours. Parts of it were tiresome and difficult to follow, but there were others so superb and moving that he felt as if long-dead cells within him were thawing out and coming back to life. Whenever Papagano and Papagana appeared, a fresh, burgeoning breeze seemed to blow from onstage. The doctor, however, was too exhausted to sit through it; as early as the first act he began to doze, while eventually, seated between the two of them, he fell into a deep sleep, his head alternately falling on his wife's and Molkho's shoulders. Smiling, gently whispering, “How can you waste all that money,” they tried in vain to wake him.

It was almost midnight when they left the opera house. Unexpectedly, the sky was clear and the city was covered with a thick, white blanket of glistening snow, the public statues, the iron banisters, and the gargoyles of the houses all artfully draped with festive white bunting. Molkho had never seen Paris in the snow; suddenly he felt an inexplicable fear, worried by the thought that the flight he was scheduled to leave on in two days' time might be canceled. From all around them came the merry shouts of surprised Parisians unable to find a cab. The metro was as crowded as during rush hour, but the snow had put everyone in a good mood. Arriving home, they found the children wide awake and excited, and after briefly debating whether it was possible to take the baby-sitter home, they decided to put her up in the children's room for the night. A great commotion of blankets and linens ensued, and it was 2
A.M.
before they were all in bed. Molkho could not fall asleep. Initially aroused by the nearby presence of the beautiful French girl, he soon found himself obsessed by the music of the opera. As on the night of his wife's death, he turned from side to side, unable to get the themes, already confused with others, out of his head, the music of Mozart now fused with that of Mahler, so that, hearing the throbbing horns, he rose from his broad bed and tormentedly lit the small lamp. His anguish must have been felt by his wife's cousin, who, appearing by his side with a sleeping pill and a glass of water, offered them to him with a tenderness that, he felt, he had been deprived of for many long years.

He slept late the next morning and awoke to find the house empty and an indecipherable note in French on the table. Last night's snow shone through the window with a purplish gray gleam. He had no key to the apartment and so took his time about leaving, knowing he could not return until evening, walking aimlessly about the rooms and then leafing through magazines and picture albums until he found an old photograph of his mother-in-law, standing in a strange European city with a small baby in her arms who did not at all look like his wife. Perhaps it was his wife's cousin, perhaps someone else. He kept on poking through closets and inspected the medicine cabinet, surprised by the paucity of its contents, which included only a few bottles of cough syrup and some agent against hemorrhoids.

Finally, he put on his coat and made up his mind to go out. His first stop was a travel agency whose address he had, where he confirmed his flight to West Berlin. The agency was on the second floor of a large office building, next door to a ticket office for shows and tours that was filled with sightseers from all over the world, especially from India and the Far East. After confirming his flight he asked what the weather was like in Berlin, but no one was able to tell him, and so he went back outside and walked about the city, among drifts of snow that grew slushier as the clearing blue sky grew brighter. In the side streets behind the opera house, he sternly eyed some women in large fur coats whom he took to be prostitutes intent on his business, but none of them made a move in his direction. All at once he felt anxious about Berlin. Should he perhaps call the trip off and fly straight back to Israel? His left arm, he thought, was beginning to hurt, and more depressing yet were the huge throngs of shoppers who burst out of the department stores at noontime, congesting the streets. The air was warming, filling the gutters with rivulets of melted snow. He bought a few presents and sat down to wait for his wife's cousin in a little café opposite the nursery. For some reason, she was late, and so he decided on his own to pick up the tot, who went with him quite willingly with no questions asked, standing on the street in his winter clothes like a little red bear until his mother came running, all out of breath and wearing a most becoming shawl. She gave Molkho a grateful kiss, and noting for the first time that she looked like his wife, he felt a twinge in his heart.

When the doctor came home, they ate a delicious hot dinner while Molkho told them about his flight to Berlin, to which, he said, his office in Israel was sending him, and about his return flight via Paris, where he would only be changing planes at the airport. They seemed genuinely sorry that he would be leaving. “We've gotten used to you. The children are wild about you. Couldn't you stop over for a few days on your way back?” “I've put you out enough as it is,” he replied, thanking them with emotion.

It was not without sorrow that he said good-bye in the morning to the comfortable bed that he had spent the last five nights in. His wife's cousin, who had grown attached to him during the visit and found their parting difficult, insisted on taking him to the airport. She drove slowly, carelessly, in the heavy traffic, talking about his wife and about her own problems and worries. At the airport, instead of simply dropping him off at his terminal, she parked in the underground lot and came with him. At first, they had trouble finding the check-in counter. No one at the information desk had heard of the line he was flying. The two of them ran from one wing of the building to the other until at last, in the charter-flights section, they found a small counter with the airline's name and a piece of colored cardboard on which was handwritten
Voles Opera.
His wife's cousin was first amused, then angered, and finally shocked. “Why, how could they have stuck you on a flight like this? It's meant for opera-goers! Did you sign up for an opera too?” Caught red-handed, he turned pale under questioning. It must have come with the ticket, he stammered, pretending to know nothing about it. But when he checked his suitcase and received a boarding pass made to look like a sheet of music with a violin drawn on it, she regarded him with sudden suspicion. Overcome with guilt, he went to the cafeteria and bought a large bar of chocolate for her children.

T
HE PLANE WAS A SMALL FIFTY-SEATER
that belonged to an airline he had never heard of before. Its passengers were mostly middle-aged Indians, Japanese, and Koreans, with a smattering of Italians and South Americans. Some of them, having apparently flown together to Paris, were already acquainted, and a number passed the time on the flight studying musical scores. It was an oddity, Molkho thought, that such a plane and flight should exist at all. Soon after takeoff they climbed above the clouds into a deep blue sky and the stewardesses served peanuts and wine. After about half an hour, as they were descending again into a cloud bank, stormy music that everyone identified at once was broadcast over the sound system. “Wagner!” several passengers cried out, immediately beginning to argue among themselves about what opera it came from. In the front seat a flushed and tipsy passenger rose to his feet and began ardently singing the words to the music while everyone broke into laughter and applause. The plane was pitching slightly, immersed in a milky fog that pinkened now and then while droplets of water streamed down the windows. As if his wife's death had only now become final, Molkho was stricken by a frightening feeling of freedom. If the plane should crash, he thought as it battled the wind and the strains of Wagner grew fainter, no one would even know what had happened to him; he should never have kept this part of his trip a secret. But at last they emerged from the clouds and stopped jouncing, flying over a flat brown terrain checked with fields, villages, and a surprising number of graveyards. Although the ground looked damp, there were no traces of snow on it. It's insane to be traveling so far to meet when we live two kilometers apart, he thought—but somehow, beginning like this in a distant and neutral place seemed the right thing to do. Soon they landed in a small airport and were immediately driven in a quiet bus to a downtown terminal. Hearing Hebrew, he spun around instinctively, but it only turned out to be a rather noisy Israeli family burdened with many suitcases and trunks. Were they emigres? he wondered, glancing at them idly while chatting with two women standing next to him by the conveyor belt that would be bringing their luggage. They were Romanians from Bucharest, they told him, opera singers themselves, who had come for the opera in Berlin. Could it be as good as all that? marveled Molkho.