When We Danced on Water (5 page)

“And so you walk them through it?”

“Yes, it's quite tedious, I'm afraid. The pianist keeps playing those same bars over and over, the dancers—I keep sending them back again and again until I get what I was looking for, or a close approximation at least. No, that's not true: I push them to achieve what I want but I listen to what they say. I watch for what their bodies are saying. I correct myself.”

“I still don't understand, though, this business of color and heat.”

“They are a manifestation of something else, something ancient …” he says. He seems about to float away from her, into his own memories, but suddenly he returns, looking eager to make her understand. He speaks slowly, with great deliberation. “I was born with a rare and precious gift, in fact I have never found another soul with such a gift, never read a word about this … phenomenon. Maybe there is information today, I don't know. Do you know what perfect pitch is?”

“More or less,” she says.

“To a person with perfect pitch each note is an entity. A thing. Unalterable. It has weight, and a shape. It exists in space. Well, I was born with perfect pitch of movement.”

“Perfect pitch of movement,” she says, trying out the phrase.

“From earliest childhood all my sensual experiences filtered through me into movement. I was very nonverbal. I didn't really speak properly until nearly the age of five because what I absorbed, all the sights and smells and sounds and tastes, came back to me as gesture. I translated, as it were, all of my experience into my own language of movement. For example, walking once with my mother along the Vistula River when I was a very small child, no more than three or four, we saw a group of workers slowly rolling an enormous cement sewage pipe, big enough for a man to stand in, toward the embankment. I can still feel the roll of my shoulders, the curve of my neck, the turn of my hands.” His eyes shut and his body approximates the description. “The rolling of that pipe will always and only be that series of movements, that precise combination.”

“Can you give me another example?”

His eyes open. He shakes his head. He cannot—or will not.

“And when did you lose it, that language?” she asks.

He gazes evenly at her. “I did not lose it. It was cut out of me. Those are war stories,” he says with artificial nonchalance.

“I'm not afraid of those,” she says. “I grew up on them.”

He looks at her as if he is weighing several possibilities. Then he surprises them both by answering. “It was mid-morning,” he says blankly, “on my nineteenth birthday. The sky was white with clouds, or one single huge cloud like a blanket. Everything around me was still, so still it didn't seem like I was in a city at all. I could have been anywhere: a village, a farm. I was drinking a cup of tea but in my head I was dancing, as usual. Only a year and a half had passed since … I'd been forced to stop dancing but I'd danced that dance in my head already a thousand times. When I could, in my confined quarters, I even danced it for real. But then one day, my nineteenth birthday, I just couldn't bear it anymore. Those memories and those desires, all those years of dancing, of working so incredibly hard, they all just seemed like smoke, like mist. Like nothing. I suddenly didn't want the reality or the dream of it, I was sick of longing for something I realized I would never have again. So I let it go. I stood up and poured my tea down the drain and with it, all those years of ambition and longing. It deadened me for a long time, years in fact, but eventually that act helped me save myself. I was able to return to life as someone else, wanting different things and eventually attaining them.”

Vivi nods. “So you traded one dream for another.”

“One life for another,” he says. They are quiet together for a while, like old friends who feel no need to fill up silences.

“You know,” he says, “I'm actually glad you came here today.”

“Why is that?”

“I don't know, really. Maybe because you're a witness. Someone to share … ideas and memories with. Pleasant to talk to.”

“That's nice, I like that. And I'm hoping some of your creative energy will rub off on me.”

“Have you given some thought to what I said that time? About not letting people who have hurt you have power over you? About using your hurt and your anger in your art?”

She turns her attention to the mirrored walls, where she spies an old man in a chair and a woman of indeterminate middle age leaning her elbows on splayed knees. She tries to gather her resolve, the defenses she has constructed and reinforced over twenty years, but she can muster no feeling at all. She says, “I've thought about it,” but that is all she can bear to tell him. It isn't fair, she knows; he has told her private things about himself while she is holding back.

The magic of the rehearsal has evaporated. She feels trapped, and deprived of air. “I'm sorry, it's late,” she says lamely, and in no time she is out on the dark street greedily gulping down night air and heading nowhere, especially not home.

Chapter 11

S
he walks, mumbling to herself, for nearly an hour, till she begins to tire. Only when she steps in front of a taxi and is nearly plowed down does she realize that she has ambled in a roundabout manner all the way to Jaffa. Her stride is slower now, but determined still. She climbs up stairs into the Old City, past the stacked-stone houses and over the Wishing Bridge to the little park, where she makes her way to one particular bench as if this whole walk had been planned for this very purpose. Suddenly fatigued and lonely, Vivi breathes deeply to stave off sadness. She lights a cigarette and calms herself by looking out at the night-blackened sea, then toward the sparkling towers and bright, bustling streets of Tel Aviv. Her mind fills with memories she has not allowed to visit her for years and years. She sits with them, her stories, her history, on a bench in a park in Old Jaffa, and for once she does not run away.

His name was Martin. She had met him during her military service in army intelligence at an outpost just south of the Dead Sea, where she monitored radio broadcasts from Jordan, a job she was able to land thanks to her serious study of Arabic and the Middle East.

She was surprised to find she adored the desert heat, the feeling of wading through electricity. She loved the muted colors and jagged textures, the lack of gentility. There was no polish here, no artifice. Scorpions stung and plants pricked; everything alive was engaged in a fierce battle for the paltry food and water the desert had to offer. As often as possible Vivi tagged along after guides from the field school at Ein Gedi to learn more.

That was where, at the beginning of her second year at the Dead Sea, she met Martin, a volunteer from Germany. Tall and sedate, Martin worked mornings picking dates and studied in a Hebrew-language
ulpan
with other volunteers in the afternoons. Already after a single month in Israel he could hold a short and simple conversation, even if he consistently reversed the masculine and feminine pronouns and verb forms.

“In Europe the sky is never this color,” he told Vivi in Hebrew on their first mutual excursion. “And certainly we don't have creatures like those,” he said, pointing to a dry and cracked lizard making its way slowly past them. Switching to English he asked how to say “dinosaur” in Hebrew.

“They do look like dinosaurs in miniature,” Vivi said, laughing. She made polite conversation, curious about a man who had put his medical studies on hold to spend a year doing onerous physical labor under a malevolent sun, but at the same time she could not escape the thought of her mother's inevitable disapproval for associating with a German.

Vivi and Martin met again the following weekend and after that Vivi found herself thinking about him during the week, hoping the tall, friendly German would not miss a trek. On their third outing he asked her to meet him at the Ein Gedi spa, right on the Dead Sea, the next afternoon.

He jogged up to the spa, bright red and puffing, five minutes after the appointed hour. “I'm so sorry,” he said, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “The usual shuttle from the kibbutz wasn't running, so I jogged down here.” She motioned to a stone bench and they sat together while he settled back to normal and drank from her water bottle. When he had recovered he said, “It's nice to see you for once not in uniform.”

Vivi smiled but did not look him in the eye. In the spa they tried out the hot and cold mineral baths and the solarium. On plastic lounge chairs she stole glances at his smooth lankiness, his flat stomach, his muscled thighs. She watched as he dozed lightly, fatigued from the early start to his day, the hard work, the run to the spa. He awakened suddenly, caught her staring, and smiled, first with caution and then with abandon.

“Mud,” he said mockingly stern, practically shouting, “we need mud!” In one swift motion he pulled her from the lounge chair and led her in a jog out the back of the spa and down to the Dead Sea itself. He thrust both hands into a trough of mud on the pebbly beach and grabbed Vivi's shoulders, smearing downward toward her hands. His grip was strong and the mud was warm; the feeling was so sensual that Vivi could feel her whole body responding. She wondered if he noticed her erect nipples, then realized he could not possibly miss them. Martin covered her in the black mud, rubbed her back, her legs, high up on the inside of her thighs. Another second and she would have to make him stop but how wonderful it felt, as he applied more just above the top of her bathing suit, to her neck—which he massaged—and then, with gentle motions of his fingers, to her cheeks and forehead and finally a daub on her nose. He stood back to observe his work.

“A black goddess you are, the Queen of Sheba,” he said, clearly pleased with himself. “Now my turn. Make me the
King
of Sheba.”

She was timid at first and coated him with huge handfuls of mud to create a barrier between his body and her hands. The mud slid downward, dripped to his scanty bathing trunks. She stood close behind him at first, reaching to his shoulders and the nape of his neck, then moved a step away to coat his back and the backs of his legs. He stood silent and still. She gathered more mud from the trough and came around to his front side. His erection nearly reached her stomach, she had to stand away from him and lean into his body to continue smearing his face, his chest, his stomach. When it was time to squat down to finish the fronts of his legs she considered stopping, having him smear himself. But she was embarrassed to acknowledge the problem, and more than a little curious. She squatted low, daubed the tops of his feet, his shins, his knees, did everything to avoid his shiny black bathing suit, though she felt a terrible urge to pass her hand over it, lightly, lightly, no more than a breeze. Instead she stood too quickly, swooning. He caught her.

“Are you all right?” he asked. There was a catch in his voice.

“Fine,” she said without conviction. “It's the sun, or maybe the smell of all these minerals.” He pulled her closer and she could feel the mingling heat from his mud-covered body and her own, perhaps even the cloth of his bulging trunks just below her navel, she was not sure. She breathed deeply, hoping for composure, waiting for logic and sanity to kick in. He breathed with her.

After a moment she leaned away from him and he let go, cautiously, testing to make sure she would not fall. She took in a deep breath, let it out, and said, “Let's go wash off in the water.”

Vivi tried to stay away from Martin after that, skipped the next desert trek and the one following, but all she could think about was his soft voice, his tender attention, his warm and lovely body. By the time he phoned, after the second missed outing, she was ready for him.

It was a chore to keep their relationship a secret from her fellow soldiers, less so from her mother. She was no longer in Leah's orbit. When she came home for Shabbat every other weekend her parents knew she could not answer their questions, was forbidden from giving even the slightest details of her work in the army, and so, by extension, they refrained from asking her about her life at all. Vivi volunteered little, kept them informed about her high school friends and mentioned her two best army girlfriends and even a boy or two; Leah was most attentive then, though Vivi assured her they were only friends. In the meantime she and Martin hiked Thursday afternoons or Friday mornings whether there was an organized group going or not, and Vivi hitchhiked to Kibbutz Ein Gedi to see Martin every evening she could. Often she stayed over, sleeping with Martin on a small mattress in a gardener's shed to which he had the keys, slipping back to her base before dawn. She loved to drift off to sleep in his arms in their tiny self-contained world, loved to wake up with her head on his chest, rising and falling with his measured breaths. She had never felt so much at peace, and the guilt she felt vanished entirely from the moment she saw him until the moment they parted.

By Passover Vivi and Martin had been together for half a year. He had told her eight times that he loved her; she had refrained more times than that from telling him that she loved him in return. Her friends at the base knew Martin, his friends at Ein Gedi knew her. Martin was intrigued by Jewish tradition and Vivi was desperate to invite him to her house for the Seder meal, but she knew the obstacles were overwhelming. Instead she volunteered to spend the holiday on the base and planned to sneak Martin in for the Seder; there would be only a slim crew and they all knew him, so she was sure nobody would mind. Her mother was devastated that she would not be joining them, had offered to call her commanding officer to argue for her release. In the end Leah acquiesced and sent Vivi a package of Passover supplies.

On the morning after the holiday, as the soldiers returned to the base, Vivi was summoned to the office of the commander, an affable captain named Hezi.

“Close the door behind you,” he said without looking up as she stepped into his office. He was sitting at the head of his T-shaped table under a photograph of Israel's current president, Chaim Herzog.

“I understand that you have a boyfriend, a gentile kibbutz volunteer from Germany, and that he spent the Seder night with you here on the base.”

Vivi was too shocked to respond, did not even nod or indicate in any fashion that she had heard what Hezi was saying.

“That's grounds for court-martial, you could have breached the security of this entire base, or worse. You've been a good soldier and excellent at your job so I'll spare you a dishonorable discharge. Still, you leave me no choice but to use my authority as base commander and sentence you immediately to twenty-one days in prison, the bare minimum for such an infraction. Incidentally, the guard on duty that night will also be going to jail, for letting you talk him into allowing your friend onto the base.”

Vivi burst out crying, but Hezi was unsympathetic. He let her cry herself out, nonchalantly completing some paperwork as she sobbed. When she had finished crying she realized she would be forced to tell her parents where she was and why she would not be coming home. The thought frightened her beyond measure. Terrified, she appealed to Hezi.

“I'm sorry this will get you into trouble at home, but you should be glad I'm not going to make this any worse than it is. I can't believe a girl as smart as you could do something so incredibly stupid.” He leaned back in his chair. “Anyway, maybe you'll be surprised, maybe they'll be more understanding than you think.”

With that, Vivi began to cry again, harder than last time. Hezi called to her through her tears. “Vivi.” He tried again, louder and with less patience. “Vivi, pull yourself together and get yourself organized. I've contacted military police and they'll be here soon to pick you up. Get yourself ready.”

On her way out of the office he called to her from his desk. “I just want you to know,” he said evenly, “that when you come back it'll be fine between us. No hard feelings either way, I hope.”

Vivi fled the office in tears.

Late that evening, the events of her long and traumatic day just barely behind her, Vivi sat to write a letter from the large cell she shared with five other female soldiers. The others were asleep, so Vivi wrote in a corner, where orange light from the hall shone weakly in a small square.

Dear Mother and Father,

I am writing to you from Prison 400, the prison for women soldiers at Zrifin. I was sentenced to three weeks and brought here this morning. How ironic that this should happen on the second day of Passover, our celebration of freedom.

I am here because I invited a friend, a Christian kibbutz volunteer from Germany, to the Seder on our base, thus violating regulations and breaching security. You probably understand that Martin is more than just a friend, and I am certain this will cause you more grief than my imprisonment.

We are allowed visitors every afternoon between six and seven o'clock. I will understand if you do not wish to see me under these circumstances, but I hope nonetheless that you will see fit to write to me.

I remain, as always, your loving daughter,

Vivi

Sealing the letter she felt surprisingly strong, as if a burden had been lifted and she had recovered her energy. She sat to write another.

Dear Martin,

I am in prison for breaking the rules and breaching security. I realize now that I never should have invited you to the Seder at our base, but I'm not sorry you got your wish and enjoyed yourself so much. It really was a special evening.

I am certain when you read this you will feel horribly guilty, but please don't. The decision was mine and the action was my responsibility. Besides, the girls here are nice and I'll only be here for twenty more days.

The only bad part is not being able to see you. I miss you already. From this safe distance I can tell you the truth: I love you, too.

Please wait for me with patience,

Vivi

Three days later Martin showed up at prison, disheveled and in tears. The trip had taken most of the day, nearly making him too late for a visit. Vivi comforted him, held his hands under the careful stares of several guards. She wondered if they thought of her like the girls she would glimpse at the Haifa port whenever a big ship docked, on the arm of a beefy Scandinavian or a boisterous American.

Vivi begged Martin to return to the kibbutz, but he rented a cheap room in Tel Aviv and came back the next day and the next to sit with her for the allotted hour. There was no response from her parents. Martin returned to Ein Gedi but rented a room again the next weekend and visited Vivi on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. At first his attentions were awkward, but the longer he stayed, the more grateful for his company she became. By the third and last week of her imprisonment she was dependent on his visits.

Four days before her release her parents arrived during the visiting hours. Vivi was startled to find them waiting for her, and even more apprehensive that Martin was due to show up at any minute. She sat facing Leah and Amatzia on brown plastic chairs. No one spoke, and Vivi kept one eye on the door at all times.