When We Danced on Water (11 page)

Chapter 19

T
eo and Vivi make their way from the theater quickly, shunning well-wishers, sycophants and journalists. He leans heavily on her arm, slightly dragging one foot. They emerge from the front of the Suzanne Dellal Center, skirt the diamond-shaped fountain, and navigate the stone walkway carefully, turning left when they reach the street and ducking into the new restaurant that has just opened there. The foyer is crowded, and their reserved table is not quite ready. A sympathetic hostess provides a chair for Teo, which he lowers himself into with caution. He is flushed and slightly rumpled, but on their way out of the theater, when Vivi asked if he preferred to go straight home, he refused, insisting that they keep their dinner plans in spite of proving himself to be “sad and speechless” as predicted.

Eventually they are seated in two plush velvet armchairs facing one another over a shiny gold table toward the back of the restaurant. The lighting is low, the music is a little loud and the conversation around them a lot louder, but it is the best that can be expected on a busy Saturday night in the Neve Tzedek section of Tel Aviv. Teo does not open his menu. Vivi tries to catch his gaze, to ask him what he might like, but she sees he is elsewhere in his thoughts. When the waiter arrives, she has barely managed to read through the appetizers, so she orders a bottle of the house red and the pâté de campagne for starters and randomly, halfheartedly, agrees to two of the evening's special dishes rattled off by the waiter and prepared with a whole slew of ingredients she has never heard of.

Teo makes several stabs at conversation, gets as far as clearing his throat, but says nothing. Vivi makes encouraging faces, unsure whether to carry the conversation on her own or let them be silent together. When the wine arrives it revives Teo and he is finally able to speak.

“Did I mention how ravishingly beautiful you look this evening?” he says, his voice deep and clouded from disuse.

“You did!” she says, nearly barking from relief that he has returned from wherever his mind had led him. “You made quite a fuss when the taxi picked me up.” Indeed, she is wearing a new and elegant little black dress with a cinched waist, and heels higher than she is accustomed to, and a gold chain with a simple diamond pendant. She bought makeup to replace the caked and dried receptacles she found in her bathroom and washed her hair and left it down so that it hangs to the middle of her back, thick and glossy. His own dapper appearance has not escaped her attention, either: the pressed suit and tie, the starched shirt, the shiny shoes and the wild white hair tamed for once into submission.

“Yes, of course. Of course I did.” He fumbles with his napkin. “Well, just so. You still look lovely, just as radiant at the end of the evening as the beginning.”

A different server brings their appetizer and sets it in the middle of the table. When she has left, Vivi says, “For me, this has been a very special evening. I … you may not want to talk about it, but I thought the performance was astonishing. The ballet itself was astonishing, and the dancers did a phenomenal job with it.”

He nods, first lightly then with vigor. “They did a very fine job with it indeed,” he says.

“Did you … were you watching? I mean, I noticed you had your eyes closed for, well, a good part of the time.”

He smiles for the first time this evening. “You don't miss much, do you?”

“Ah, but you already know that about me.”

“Yes, I do.”

“So?”

“From what I saw, they were just fine. But I told you, I can't really watch that ballet.”

“I still don't understand. You created it.”

He does not touch the pâté but after a long, slow slip of his wine he levels his gaze at her. “What do you think that ballet is … about?”

She sets her own wineglass on the table. “I was hoping … we could talk about that,” she says. “I've been thinking about it ever since I saw the rehearsal. And now of course I've seen the whole ballet.” She shakes her head. “Look, I don't really understand how it all works. I mean, there are ballets with clear stories, like
Swan Lake
, so the dancers' movements have something to do with the progression of the story itself. That much is clear. But with a ballet like
Obsession
, I'm just not sure. I did some homework, I read a few reviews that appeared when the ballet premiered, and one of them said it ‘dispenses with narration while at the same time evoking it.' Tonight I was watching to see if I could find a story there.”

“And did you?”

Two couples at an adjacent table burst into laughter at a joke one of the men has just told. Teo and Vivi shrug off the interruption.

“Well,” she says, sitting up a little higher in her chair, “what I understood was that the beautiful young male dancer was kind of a rising star. He seems to be featured or favored from among the dancers of the corps de ballet. You certainly gave him the most exciting choreography.”

“Go on,” he says.

“And then when the older male dancer appears I guess he's jealous and tries to ruin him. His dance is full of anger, even though he's quite tender toward the younger dancer at the beginning. Almost like an older brother.”

“For years critics wrote that the ballet was about me,” he says, “bitter that my career as a dancer was over. Some reviewer even came up with a theory that I was depicting Nureyev and some young Swedish dancer whose career he was thought to have destroyed.”

There is a constant flow of traffic next to their table, but Vivi and Teo are pleasantly unaware of it. They have barely touched their appetizer and the waiter stops by twice to make sure they are satisfied.

“But that's not it,” she says.

“If it were, I should have called the ballet
Jealousy
and the whole work would have been obvious and dull.”

There is a sharp, bitter tone to his voice now. She has heard this tone before, though only briefly.

“Obsession,” he continues, “is so much subtler than jealousy, so much more complex. And so much more interesting. You know, the origin of the word is Latin, it means ‘siege' or ‘blockade.' As if one's senses are besieged by the object of one's desires.”

“So an obsession can be destructive or constructive,” she says.

“Exactly. The dancers in my ballet strive obsessively for perfection.”

“Ah, that explains the repetitive movements at the beginning …”

“Mmmm, yes. What you saw me working on at rehearsal that day was exactly those subtleties of movement and stance, how in the early stages of learning a dance a dancer can simply perform what he is supposed to without thinking too much about all the little touches that will make it perfect. But those touches gain importance, in fact they make the difference between a mediocre performance and a superb one. And the only way to get from one to the other is by obsessively focusing on every tiny little aspect.”

“So that's the positive side of obsession,” she says. “But the older dancer in your ballet—he's the negative, isn't he?”

Teo nods. The waiter appears with two large plates filled with artful, unidentifiable food. Vivi indicates that he can place them wherever he wishes.

“Sometimes,” Teo says, more to the plate than to Vivi, “someone can think so highly of your talents that instead of nurturing them he destroys them.”

For a few moments they pick at their food in silence. While he is lost in unshared reveries, she imagines tapping his head like a coconut so that the memories will gush forth, a river of milk that would douse them both. There are so many things to ask now, but it is clear that anything too direct will be rebuffed. The waiter comes by to refill their wineglasses. The noisy couples at the next table knock into them as they sling coats and purses over their arms on their way to the door.

Vivi lays down her knife and fork and looks up at Teo as he slowly chews. “If obsession can be plotted on a continuum, like we've said, between positive effects and negative, what role do you think it has played in your own life?”

He looks past her, then responds. “Working obsessively has enabled me to create ballets and train dancers to a highly professional degree. At the same time, it's kept me from enjoying some of the simpler pleasures of life. So there's no clear answer to your question. Which makes it a damned good metaphor for life in general.”

She nods, eager to add something, but she sees something brewing in his eyes and remains silent.

“You know, this continuum you just mentioned. It makes me think. I've been telling whole generations of dancers to reach for the stars, which would mean pushing to the very end of that continuum. But if I am completely honest with myself I can't say that's what I myself have done.”

“How not? Haven't you sacrificed everything for dance?”

“That's what I like to believe. And certainly that's what a lot of people believe about me. But ultimately, it isn't true. Those years in New York … I came back to Israel because I just couldn't share Mr. Balanchine's religiosity about ballet, not after living through the war in Europe. Ballet, which is all order and precision, was my answer to the chaos that was Europe. But it still didn't provide all the answers. That's why my ballets are more chaotic than his. Less generous of spirit. They contain evil and treachery.”

“Which makes them more true to life.”

“Perhaps.”

The two fall silent, each in contemplation.

Finally Teo says, “Here is the truth for you: I wish I could go back to a time before language, when I was one with my surroundings. That business about color and heat I was telling you about, when my body could absorb everything around me and turn it into something beautiful. When I could
feel
the bright pink of a falling leaf or the flow of the Vistula or the hiss of the radiator and I could express them through movement. When I could dance water, or heat, or even love.”

He is wide-eyed now, as lucid as glass. “It was heaven. My body was heaven. It was omnipotent, with its own language. I would give anything to get back there. Just to feel the sensation again. Everything I've done since, all this teaching and creating and dancing, they're all just approximations.”

“You're lucky, even if you don't know it. At least you've experienced it. Most of us never get the chance.”

He nods.

“I hope you don't mind me getting you to talk like this,” she says. “It's partly to know you better, and partly to help me figure my own self out. I've always run away from obsession because my mother is obsessive and I didn't want to go that route, but these talks of ours make me realize I'm also missing something by not letting myself get fully absorbed. Without obsession, there's no passion. No getting carried away.”

“Why do you call your mother obsessive?”

“She gets on kicks about things and can't let them go. Sometimes it's about my getting married and having children and sometimes it's about her experiences in the Holocaust, but everything she does or thinks she carries out with obsessive zeal. She was already a crusader in the fifties, even before the Eichmann trial woke everyone up. She ran around telling her story everywhere she could, to anyone who would listen. Now it seems wonderful and amazing, but believe me, it was freaky back then, as a child, to have a mother who could talk about the Nazi who—funny how this is still hard for me—the Nazi who stuck his fingers up inside her. My classmates couldn't look at me for days after hearing her tell that story. I was tainted, probably for years. Bizarre, no?”

“Not really. And it explains a lot about you. But I'm an artist, not a psychologist, so I'll spare you an analysis.”

“I thank you for that,” she says.

They eat in silence while life hums noisily around them. A middle-aged woman in a sequined jacket stops by the table to tell Teo how much she enjoyed the performance. When he does not respond, Vivi thanks her, and the woman, flustered, teeters back to her waiting husband.

“I'm quite certain,” he says, as if the disruption had never occurred, “that that is the last time I'll see
Obsession
.” He cuts Vivi off with a wave of his hand before she can protest. “And that's perfectly fine with me. I have my own version of it in my head, so I can watch it whenever I like. What I'm more worried about is its legacy. What will become of it when I'm no longer around to grant or deny permission to stage it.”

“I suppose you hand it over to someone you trust. Your lawyer or some such person, no? It can't be very complicated.”

“On the contrary, it's exceedingly complicated. Dance is the most fragile of art forms. My ballet master, Tom—who has actually danced in earlier productions of
Obsession
—did a fine job of recreating the ballet you saw this evening. But already when I was invited in to polish it I found quite a few distortions and misinterpretations. I call it an erosion. An erosion of the original. And if there is such erosion when someone as close to the ballet as Tom directs it, what will be left of it when it's handed over to others? Do you see, Vivi? Do you understand? This is my legacy, it's all I have to hand on to the world. No canvases, no books, no sculptures. No buildings. No children. Just a series of poses and movements strung together and performed for others, where fragments may or may not remain for an hour or a lifetime.”

Vivi fingers the gold chain around her neck. “Maybe it's not important. Compared to your legacy, mine's, well, nonexistent. But does it matter? Who says we have to leave something behind. Maybe we should exist, make the best of it, and bow out.
C'est tout
.”

Teo's lips curl into a noiseless laugh, his old man's teeth yellow and decaying. “That's youth talking. You're too young to worry about such things. But at my age, legacy is all that's left.”