When We Danced on Water (3 page)

Chapter 6

T
eo is writing a letter on heavy paper the color of sand. He uses a thick pen he does not like; it bleeds dark blue onto the page if left in place for even a second too long, but since it is relatively easy for him to grasp he has little choice. He has written the date and “Dear Margot” at the top. Soon the rest of the page will be filled with his tiny, precise handwriting, perfectly straight row upon perfectly straight row marching across the paper like troops on a march across the desert. A Polish dictionary lies open at his side.

There was a long period of time, maybe sixty years depending on how you figure it, with one or two significant exceptions, that Teo did not think about his early years as a dancer, when every minute in the studio brought the promise of a great career, a career of the most immense dimensions imaginable. At first, during the war, he forced himself to forget how close he had come, realizing that to save himself, his sanity, he would need to distance himself from those cruel memories. Then forgetfulness became habit, or perhaps it was the fact that his life was busy, filled to the last second with teaching and choreographing and events and worries so that when he tumbled into bed each evening for four hours of restorative slumber he was so spent that he could barely make it through even a few pages of the ballet journals that piled up on the nightstand; certainly there was no time for reflection, for reminiscing, for wondering how different things would have been without a war.

So now, as he approaches his eighty-fifth birthday, he is surprised to discover himself visiting the past more and more. There he is, dancing with that charming partner of his, a freckle-faced girl who stayed her whole life at the Royal Danish Ballet, all the way into retirement; he cannot recall her name, only that her own mother, an Austrian, had been a dancer in Vienna. There he is, too, lifting his dear Sofie high in the air on a warm summer evening, her thin skirt fluttering in his face. There he is again during his first winter in Copenhagen, performing in
The Nutcracker
along with the whole student body of the ballet school on the old stage at the Royal Theater. And here he is in a Bournonville ballet,
The Konservatoriet
, on stage at the Berlin Staatsoper on a beautiful, ominous Friday evening in 1939, so young and unaware. It is this dance he visits most often now, after having expunged it, he thought, from his memory over half a century ago.

He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot re-create, could not re-create it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever.

Dear Margot,

Your last letter amused us greatly. Nelly and I agreed that your eye for the smallest detail brings a priceless richness and humor to your stories. We could not help but admire the mice of the convent for their tenacity and sheer cleverness, but woe to the hapless exterminator! And the postulant with such notions of God and the world, how lively you made her questions sound! We could picture the young woman in question so clearly and accurately. Please do continue to regale us with even the tiniest details of your life.

We are underoccupied here, or at least I am underoccupied so causing our Nelly to work harder than ever. I still spend several days a week in the studio—in fact, my time there has been unusually productive lately, as the Tel Aviv municipality has commissioned a restaging of one of my ballets and I am serving as an advisor—but this “extra” work causes Nelly to worry about me incessantly, can you imagine? Turning eighty-five is not something I am looking forward to, in spite of all your exhortations to the contrary, but I suppose the alternative is still worse …

His hand aches too much to continue. With difficulty he caps the pen and places it next to the paper, planning to finish the letter in the late afternoon or perhaps even tomorrow. What does it matter? His news will not change, Margot will still be where she is another day and then another after that and so on until she dies; so what is the hurry?

His mind flits and wanders. To a snippet of ballet, an appointment later in the week, his mother's face. There is no longer any logic to the meanderings of his mind's eye. It crosses decades and continents without pause. Still, he is surprised when it settles on the girl from the coffee shop. Vivi: this name he can recall. That look on her face—the shock, the dismay, the mortification—comes to him in intimate detail. What had possessed him to speak so frankly and upset her?

There they are again, the first two chords of his solo. He is dancing it in the old Bournonville studio at the top of the Royal Theater, oblivious to the noise of the busy square below him. The half-moon windows near the floor remind him of the jellied candies covered with sugar that he and his mother would buy from a street vendor just outside the Saski Park in Warsaw. The bust of Auguste Bournonville looks down at him as he poses to begin: tendu croisé, arms in third position.

They are dancing the pas d'ecole. A Danish boy, Niels, has finished partnering the andante maestoso and first allegretto with that half-Austrian girl—what
is
her name?—who is now dancing a short andante solo. Teo will dance the second allegretto with her, moving her deftly to the corps de ballet posed along the back wall in preparation for his own solo, the moderato and final allegretto.

The music is fast and frilly. His dancing, too, is frilly, but still it sparkles. If only he had danced it thus, in Berlin. Pirouette, pirouette, chassé, grand jeté. Repeat to the left. A series of grand jetés to the back of the stage, where he brushes up against clusters of his fellow dancers, knocking into them if he overshoots. A skipping run so fast he can feel the breeze he is making. High, turning leaps ending in arabesques. A masculine dance full of height and sharp lines, the role that of a student at the Paris Conservatory dancing to impress his teachers.

And impress them he does, far beyond what is prudent.

Chapter 7

“I
'm wondering,” Vivi says one morning as she places his water and coffee in front of him, more careful than usual not to spill on his pile of paperwork, “if you could let me come and watch you teach sometime.”

At once, Teo frowns, feeling put upon, and so does she, angry with herself for expecting a favor from this man. “You see, I'm doing this glassblowing workshop—”

“Yes, glassblowing, I remember,” he says, interrupting her. “I'd been thinking you'd given it up since you're often mooning around here with a camera.”

“You know me,” she says. “A little of everything.” She breathes in sharply to steady herself, then says, with clarity, her voice a bit louder now and defiant, “I'm doing this glassblowing workshop, and I'd like to watch your dancers. To try and capture their movement in glass.”

His gaze floats out toward the shopping arcade but lands on nothing. When he looks up at her his blue-green eyes seem glassy with fever, his complexion sallow. She wonders if she should ask about his health.

“That's impossible,” he says at last.

“I didn't think you'd agree, but—”

“I'm not talking about a visit. You're welcome to visit whenever you like. I'm talking about capturing the movement of a dancer.”

“Oh,” she says.

“People keep trying it, but it cannot be done. Oh, something or other will come out of it, something even rather pretty. But it won't be dance, that's for certain.”

“I didn't say, I mean I want to capture—”

“It's ethereal, you know,” he says, brightening. “Dance is fleeting, it exists in a moment. Once you capture it, it is no longer dance.”

“But … you're willing for me to come. To try.”

“Willing, yes. But I have a price.”

She crosses her arms, listens.

“You have to sit down here, across from me, for five minutes and tell me about yourself.”

She laughs. “That's ridiculous,” she says, but she pulls out the chair and falls into it. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Everything. Whatever comes to mind.” He moves his pile of papers to the side.

“Well,” she says with a coy smile, “I'm an artist. But of course you know that already.”

“Not that I've had the privilege of seeing any of your artwork yet, but all right, that will serve as our point of departure.”

“I waitress to pay the bills. But I've had lots of other jobs. Which won't surprise you. I live with a gorgeous gay man. He comes from one of those right-wing religious families that had to be pulled out of their homes in the Gaza Strip during the Disengagement. I'd fix you up but—”

Teo scowls, he stares into Vivi's eyes. “What makes you think … ? Not all male dancers are gay,” he says.

“Of course not. I just thought … never mind, sorry, back to your question: I was born in Haifa and came to Tel Aviv when I returned—when I was twenty-one or twenty-two.”

“Never lived abroad?” he asks, picking up on her self-correction.

“I did, after the army,” she says, diverting her attention to a toothpick she has plucked from the table. “In Berlin.”

“Berlin,” he repeats, coughing lightly. He spits into a crumpled tissue.

“I don't really want to talk about that,” she says. “I didn't love it there, that city wasn't for me.”

“So you returned to Israel to begin your adult life.”

“You could say that. But it didn't really begin, not for a long time.”

“Why not?”

“I was … damaged. It's not a period I like to …”

He is looking intently into her face, but his eyes carry kindness and understanding, so she answers.

“I left a man there, in Berlin. When I came back to Haifa I just couldn't … I wasn't going anywhere. I didn't go out to work, I wasn't studying. I barely left the house for months. At some point I started dating. Dating! I don't think you can call it that exactly. My mother, who's a real pusher, got the mothers of all the nice religious boys in Haifa to ask me out. There was no telling her I wasn't interested, I was simply forced to accept. So I made a game out of scaring them off.”

“How? You're hardly frightening.”

“I became a predator,” she says, looking down at her knees. “I used them, devoured them. I made a name for myself. Haifa is really just a great big village. Soon, everyone knew. The nice boys and their mothers disappeared but there was a line around the block of bad boys waiting for me.”

“I'm sorry. To hear that.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, taking a deep breath. “After that I came to Tel Aviv and started over. No men, lots of jobs. It suits me.”

“No men? I thought you said you'd started over.”

“Not on that account. It's easier without them. Without you.”

“Ah yes, ease. I see that's quite important to you.”

“Are you going to give me another lecture now? How I should have stuck to one art and one man?”

“No lectures. I certainly don't have all the answers. Funny though, my fate was also determined by a man in Berlin. And when I finally made it to Israel, I shut down as well.”

“So … you've never … been in love … ?”

He takes so long to answer, and his expression is so blank, that he appears not to have heard the question. But after a spell, he responds. “I suppose I have,” he says. “Twice. Neither of them in the last sixty years. I've kept away from love. Devoted myself to my art.”

“At least you have something to show for it,” she says.

“Yes. Something. I do have something to show for it. But there is a lot missing, too. A lot I failed to accomplish.”

“Vivi!” Yossi shouts from behind the bar. Vivi rises from her chair, her eyes still on Teo.

“So, you really don't mind if I come watch you teach?” she asks.

“I'm afraid I don't teach anymore,” he says. “But the company will be performing one of my own ballets soon and I'm working with them in an advisory capacity. I invite you to attend a rehearsal.”

“Okay, then I'll come by on Friday afternoon when I finish work.”

He nods and puts his hands on the pile of papers, then watches her as she moves away from him.

Chapter 8

I
t is raining lightly as Vivi walks to work early Friday morning. She will be staying later than usual, since Yossi has plans to head north to the Galilee on his motorcycle around noon, but she is happy for the diversion. She is both eager and reticent about the ballet class she will observe later in the afternoon, her first in more than thirty years.

She pauses at a newly renovated apartment building with a curved Bauhaus verandah and porthole windows, and puts one hand on the low, pale yellow wall surrounding the property. The other she stretches out to her side, then lifts her leg into an arabesque, bringing it around to the side before planting it in what she thinks she remembers is third position. She curves her arms into a wide loop, and remains in that position for a moment, feeling her muscles stretch and bend under her skin.

The ballet teachers of her childhood in Haifa in the early 1970s were all elegant, fading refugees, European
ladies
whose Hebrew was soaked through and bloated by heavy accents—Polish, Czech, or, like her mother's, Hungarian—and speckled with French. She had had three such teachers, all with tight black buns pulled severely from their faces. They all clucked and shook their heads with her mother, a hopeless case this little Vivi.
Avec charme,
they would call out to her;
Slowly, gracefully,
they would remind her; but Vivi's heavy limbs always seemed to betray her, finding the floor far more quickly than she had intended. Her meaty leg would land with a thud, provoking nervous giggles from the other girls, that flock of startled doves. Even Madame Irma, the Polish ballet teacher, had tried once to help her find the “airy lightness” that filled her bones, but Vivi could not help but think of the thick marrow her uncle Tibor sucked from the soup chicken at the Sabbath table.

It was not merely anatomy, she knows now, that separated her from the other girls in leotards and ballet slippers, a tiny, heartless regiment lined up at the barre, primping in the mirror at every occasion.

“Glissade, assemblé, glissade, assemblé, glissade, assemblé, pause. Now left!” Madame Irma's voice exploded in Vivi's ears, the sharp clap of her hands like gunshots in the small studio. Silk and satin flowed from her mouth when talking to parents, but alone with the girls in the studio her voice was all metal. “Glissade, assemblé, glissade, assemblé, glissade, assemblé, bras bas!”

“Stop, stop!” Madame shouted. Mademoiselle Rena, Irma's spinster sister, lifted her hands from the piano; the room fell silent. The girls cowered together, all except Sharona, who knew Madame Irma would never shout at her. She was the star of the class; her father was the mayor's right-hand man.

“Sharona,” Madame Irma said in a tone of mock sweetness, “would you show Vivi our short, simple routine from the beginning, please? Vivi dear, watch Sharona's every move and commit it to heart.” Mademoiselle Rena played and Sharona danced and Vivi knew every move as though it were the path she followed each morning to school. When her turn came to perform, Madame Irma shook her head at the piano, so Vivi was forced to perform in silence. Glissade, assemblé, glissade, assemblé, somehow her arms and legs could not grasp what her brain was telling her. Should she plié? When should her leg shoot to the right? She knew her arms should rise to second position, but when exactly? On her second assemblé she tumbled sideways, falling onto her shoulder. Through her tears, through the noise of the girls laughing, she could see herself in this studio, lying in a puddle of light dumped there by a tired late-afternoon autumn sun. Madame's foot tapped impatiently near her head. “Girls!” she shouted, not soon enough. The tittering ceased immediately. “Vivi, you'll never be able to perform in our recital if you can't remember which movement is which. Go home and practice, practice, practice. I don't want to see you here again until you know this routine perfectly!”

Maybe, she muses now, it was an actual disability, a chemical imbalance. Maybe the wiring between her brain and her legs was faulty, little jolts of electricity that could not make the leap from one nerve-ending to the next. Chronic immobilia, they could call it, or physiological discordancia
.
She should not have been expected to dance like the other girls, perhaps not even permitted to try. If only they had known about her disability they could have exempted her, or taken special measures on her behalf like they do nowadays for dyslexic students sitting for matriculation exams. They could have given her her own dance at the recital so she would not have had to keep time with the other girls. Or, she thinks, they could have told her that ballet was simply not for her, that the “pleasure” of taking part was not worth the torture of humiliation, the sacrifice of self-esteem.

Later that day she was going to observe, not take part in, a ballet class. Would he make her feel like that all over again? She cannot be sure either way; with him she feels off-balance, teetering between his concern and his indifference.

She notices that a little girl has been watching her from an upstairs window in the Bauhaus building. She waves and the little girl disappears.