Authors: Lesley Thomas
Scheherazade,
the first soliloquy anyway, sounds better on a mouth organ I think. I once heard a man play it like that at Plymouth when some sailors were doing a concert, the thin, erotic theme of the lonely girl and the thousand and one nights.
'There's the United Nations,' I suggested unconvincingly, half turning to Metzer.
He gave a little spit. "The United Nations Force,' he said, making the final word an irony. 'This force was removed from the Strait of Tiran because the Egyptians wanted it moved.'
'Where's that ?' The violins had really taken hold of it now and were folding the story in their thick sweetness. The musky dope that Rimsky-Korsakov planted, secreted, in his little suite was escaping into the heavy air.
'The strait?' Metzer said. 'It guards the entrance to the Gulf of Eilat in the south. The Egyptians have pushed the cork into the bottle, Mr Hollings, and we are in the bottle.'
We left it there. I went back to my dressing-room and exercised my fingers on the glass table. I wondered where Shoshana was. That day I had telephoned the newspaper office but they said briskly that she was away on an assignment and they did not know when she was likely to return. I thought of her face and her eyes and I heard Metzer saying again that there would be no survivors. Survivors. In the way that some races have hill-people, and plainsmen, and other categories of inhabitants, the Jews always seem to have survivors.
I went on to the platform, into the lights, and the applause was like a fury. Never had I known such a reception. Igor, on the stand, raised his Russian eyebrows at me and I grinned at him.
We took Beethoven's First Piano Concerto with a great verve; a beautiful enthusiasm, that came from the guts of the orchestra, caught me, and left engine driver Igor, at its conclusion, limp with sweat and round-eyed with exhaustion and elation. His locomotive had almost run away. He had only just held it. It had needed all his power and he could not understand.
Nor did I at the beginning. Playing with an orchestra is like riding a horse. Sometimes it is sluggish, constipated; it wallows and rolls. You drag along with it, glad when the last note is touched and the whole exercise is finished. I have known even something like
The Emperor
crawl along like a cartload of shit. But at other times the stallion gallops, goes joyously so that it runs above the ground, carrying the soloist like a breathless rider.
This is how it was. We plunged into it, my heart caught with its lyric bravery, my fingers making it a fine thing. The orchestra flew, Igor hanging on to his driver's cab, and I went, too, laughing with excitement, resting and then leaping upon its back again like some mad cowboy jumping from horse to runaway railroad train. I felt more like Roy Rogers than Christopher Hollings. My God it was hot. Falls of sweat rolled all over me, getting into my ears and my eyes, turning my hands to dishmops and yet not for a moment preventing or impeding the unstoppable running of the thing.
At the first pause I kept my head directly over the keys looking down at their smooth smile. I was panting with the effort and the realization, feeling the bursting of the emotional people who were listening in the hot dark. At the second break I allowed myself to look up and saw how much the musicians had been taken by it too.
Their wet faces under the lights worked over strings and brass with the dedication of men using guns.
Then it was finished. Done. I thought they were going to rush the stage. Igor clutched the brass rail on the podium, head bent forward, baton limp in hanging fingers, colour like pulp, face like running fat. I had almost collapsed across the piano, knowing that I had reached for something high and caught it. Christ, I thought, that was so bloody marvellous.
The people exploded in the auditorium, their shouts, their noisy stamping like all the sounds of a marauding army. I could feel them rising. Igor glanced my way as we took our bows with an expression that told me I had played far above anything he had considered possible from an English soloist. To me he was the celestial engine driver. The violins were standing, dumb and wet, some blankly grinning, others shakily looking down, examining their bows. The brass and the woodwind puffed out their cheeks as though eager to play it again, and the timpani player, the great fat exuberant Zoo Baby, bent across his drums like a man who has lost something invaluable down a well.
There was a party after the concert at a house on the beach at Herzliya, a long-spined villa, its rooms spread out like padded feet each side of its main body. It belonged to a man called Nicolas Tobin, a patron of the arts in Israel. Igor and I travelled from Tel Aviv in the same car, both relaxed now. His English is good, but we talked only a little. We went from the concert hall along the wide, white street called Dezingov, all lights and traffic and people in the hot, bright night. The people were thick at the pavement tables and promenading, processing each way before the fringes of cafes. In the car we had the windows down and we felt the heavy summer air coming in to us with the strong lights of the street and the broken voices of the people.
They moved like a long reel of fragmented film passing us as the car went slowly among the traffic along Dezingov. There were hundreds of Jews there, drinking at those arranged tables, greeting friends, and prodigiously shaking hands. There was overwhelming talking and some laughter. We stopped at traffic lights. A woman was howling in argument with a taxi driver. People at the cafe tables watched and laughed and called raucous advice. The taxi driver climbed from his seat and began disputing with the woman. He was a mound of a man: fat and white, his sleeves rolled, his forearms like large fish. His face sweated and he glared in exasperation at the scolding woman, and then threw out his thick arms to the spectators appealing for help or judgement. They laughed. Some girls in fawn uniforms, their shoulder-bags slung like guns, were wrangling lightly with young, green soldiers, cockily sitting at a corner table, faces upturned, grinning, sub-machine-guns lying like pets across their legs. A man was scraping at a dead violin at one corner and a juke box cried from a hamburger bar. Everyone was out in the bright lights of that street.
'You were excellent tonight,' said Igor looking out of the window, away from me.
I returned: 'You were also.'
'A gregarious people, the Israelis,' said Igor nodding his head benignly as though acknowledging a salute from the street.
'Anything for a night out,' I replied quietly. 'Perhaps there won't be many more.'
'It is nothing,' he shrugged. 'Nobody is happy unless they have something to fear.'
I did not talk to him about it because just then I did not want to. In any case I was fascinated by that silver ribbon of street. It was like all avenues of the world, all the warm streets I had ever known; Paris, Rome, Budapest, Rio, brimming with sounds and moving people.
Eventually, as we drove, the lights dimmed and decreased, almost as they do in an auditorium, and then it was quieter and the tepid air that came into us turned dark; we left the resounding street behind and drove away from the city. We made a turn into a subdued road and then approached a wooden bridge across a creek. There were soldiers guarding both ends of the bridge. They stopped each vehicle and examined it. Our driver told them who we were, but immediately a young dark, damp face was at the window staring at us in our tailed suits and white bows. The soldier had brown eyes, wide and cautious like an animal at night. But his boy's voice was firm and calm and he looked us over carefully before moving our driver away with the snub of his rifle.
The car bumped woodenly across the bridge which must
have been a strategic strongpoint because on the farther flank of the river a pair of armoured cars crouched like
moles in the night, beside the skeletal shape of a settled
helicopter. The guards looked in at us again, this time a
small-faced soldier and a fat girl with chocolate eyes and a
rifle. They let us go on. We could hear the sea ruffling the
night beyond the road and the camel-backed sand dunes. It was very dark and the car rattled irritably. Then we
were on a good road again, well lit and moving behind
two medium tanks which coughed, roared and squealed
along the tarmac surface until ponderously swinging into a gap in the dunes and sniffing away towards the sea.
'It is nothing,' repeated Igor defensively from his darkness. 'They make loud noises, and the Arabs also. It is just as the Russians and the Americans. Noise, noise, bang, bang, squeak, and then silence. Some day I maybe would write a Cold War Symphony, only I think that the theme would become too monotonous. Always the same sounds.'
'There will be more than noises between this bunch and the Arabs,' I said. 'This time.'
'Just noise,' he grunted. 'Symbols and cymbals.'
He obviously thought that was good because he went to some trouble to separate the two words for me. I muttered an acknowledgement. We were travelling very fast now along the black coast, away from the lights, with a small wind stirring in the sand dunes. The road bent and we emerged on to a clear horizon with Tel Aviv lying luminously on the sea to our left. There were some isolated houses at this place, bulky houses with terrace windows open to the Mediterranean and the lights at their windows and porches making rich ovals on the beach. The driver turned up a drive cut through the hilly sand and we arrived under a stone arch and turned into a courtyard.
All the people at the party were full of congratulations
over the concert. Tobin, the host, a slight man with a
surprising cushion of tight-curled black hair supported by a
stick of a face, talked to me by a door opening out to the beach. The sea was breathing without fuss and the city lay like a pile of diamonds on the distant cape. Behind us the
room was crowded, but subdued so that some music which
should have been in the background became much louder
and played above the people. I did not recognize it.
'Yarom Nathan,' Tobin said. 'A young Israeli. This is his
Ruth and Boaz in the Fields.
I think he has much promise.'
Tobin held his glass at a slope and moved bis head at about the same angle. His hair was extraordinary. Slim grey hair would have suited him for he was spare and neat. The black bush was a worry because he continually pressed it back and a sigh clouded his face as inevitably each time it sprang forward again. He was listening to the music. There was a vivacious little bridge piece which folded over on itself a few times towards the middle of the work, and unrolled sweetly to the conclusion.
'He says that he felt unhappy about the conclusion, you know,' said Tobin moving his head towards the music in a manner which suggested that Yarom Nathan was drinking in the lighted room.
'He goes out on his own,' I said. 'It is most original.' There was an aeroplane moping about in the night, high but insistent. The strings dropped quietly and the plane's engines were heavy. But then it went out over the dulled ocean and the sound whittled away.
Tobin said: 'He was unhappy about many things when he wrote it, but they were usually less to worry about than he thought.'
'We all do that,' I said.
'Do you think we will be fighting soon?' he said anxiously turning from the sea.
'So everybody tells me,' I answered cautiously. 'I am the one least likely to know. I am a stranger, remember.'
He shook his head across the top of his glass as though testing the drink by smell. I thought again how his hair was odd and unfortunate.
'A stranger maybe can see such things better than us,' he said. 'Sometimes it is better to look into an unfamiliar room from a window.'
'Well I would say there will be no war,' I answered. I said
it firmly, not because I believed it firmly but in some way to reassure him when he needed reassurance. 'Symbols and cymbals. Signs and noises.'