The Extra

Forty-Six

IN THE MORNING SHE GOES to the music library, where she finds a score of Debussy’s Sacred and Profane Dances. She makes a photocopy and gives it to Herman, who says not a word and places it in a drawer. In the evening, the orchestra members gather at the concert hall for a briefing about the trip to Kyoto. In fluent English, the cultural attaché of the Japanese embassy in The Hague provides information about their lodging near Doshisha University in Kyoto, and shows impressive slides of the auditorium and the temples of the holy city and environs. Four concerts are scheduled for orchestra subscribers, and three more are planned in two southern cities — Kumamoto and Hiroshima. Finally, since the musical director has not yet arrived, the administrative director of the Arnhem orchestra goes over the specifics of the repertoire, which will include Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto; a rotation of Haydn symphonies 26, 92 and 94; the Melancholy Arabesques by Van den Broek, for it is important to include a contemporary Dutch composition; and, of course, as requested by the Japanese, the orchestra will perform La Mer. The Japanese pianist who broke her arm playing tennis in Berlin has recovered, and will make her own way to Japan, where there will be two rehearsals of the Emperor, a piece both she and the orchestra know well. The orchestra has also played the Haydn works in recent years, so four rehearsals in the coming week should suffice. The focus will be on Debussy and the Arabesques, which is a complex and difficult piece, but is fortunately only eight minutes long.

The principal conductor and musical director, Dennis van Zwol, strides into the room, straight from the airport, and is greeted with polite applause. He is a bald, chubby man of about sixty, with blue, froglike eyes, a strict and erudite musician whose ample sense of humor softens his pedantic demeanor. He ascends the stage in jeans and a red sweater and sits down beside Herman, surveying his musicians with amusement. When he spots the harpist, he waves to her warmly. So, she whispers to herself, why not, he’s friendly, likes a good joke, and they say he also loves receiving gifts.

The next morning the rehearsals begin. There are no parts for the harp in the Haydn symphonies, so she sits in the hall and watches. After a short break, some of the strings leave the stage, and their places are taken by percussionists, including a few playing strange instruments. The conductor calls for a young composer, a man of around thirty with a ponytail, to take his place on the podium, to lead the first encounter with his provocative cacophony.

Van Zwol chooses to sit next to Noga in the auditorium and inquires about her vacation.

Blushing, she insists on repeating what she said to Herman: “It was not exactly a vacation.”

“Then what was it?”

“Something complicated and surprising. I myself still don’t understand what it was.”

“And your mother?”

“She decided to stay in Jerusalem.”

“And you are satisfied with her choice?”

The question reflects an unexpected sensitivity, and she tries to offer an appropriate response.

“From this distance, what good would my worrying do her?”

The conductor nods sympathetically, and she elaborates.

“My father died nine months ago. He and my mother were inseparable, dependent on one another, and who knows if they enjoyed that or whether their devotion had become oppressive. I think the sudden freedom my father granted my mother is exciting for her, and she may be afraid to curtail that freedom with the rules and activities of a retirement home.”

Van Zwol nods gravely even as he winces at the wild sounds emanating from the stage, which are interrupted by the tapping of the baton as the young composer attempts to explain to the players ideas that gave birth to his music. Although it is Van Zwol who will conduct this piece in concert, he does not intervene, in order to give the musicians the chance to experience the new composition through the passion of the composer himself.

He meanwhile drums with his fingers on his knee a different, hidden melody that enters his mind. And she again says to herself, Really, why not?

She turns to him, blood rushing to her face. “Maestro, I brought you an unusual gift from Jerusalem, something you might find useful.”

“A gift?” He is surprised. “Oh, my dear Venus, I do have a weakness for gifts, but on condition they are inexpensive and small and just symbolic, because that way I am not obligated to give gifts in return.”

A quake of anxiety seizes her as she leans over and produces the whip from her bag, wrapped in a shawl of her mother’s and tied with string.

He recoils. “What is this?” he asks. “It doesn’t look like a small gift.” But his lust for gifts overcomes his resistance, and he carefully undoes the string and shawl, releasing the strong scent of leather that has whipped the bodies of many beasts.

“What is this?” The conductor is shocked.

“It’s a whip I bought from a Bedouin in the Old City, a whip that tamed and drove camels in the desert, and I thought, Maestro, that it might also be good for taming and driving us musicians.”

The froggy blue eyes of the Dutchman light up with great amusement, and he raises the whip to his nostrils.

“I don’t believe it… You thought about me all the way in Israel.”

“Why not? I’m a musician in your orchestra.”

“True. And you thought I need to strengthen my conducting not only with a baton but a whip?”

“In a symbolic way, Maestro. Only symbolic. It’s a symbolic gift, the kind you like.”

“Marvelous,” he murmurs, and extends the whip along the empty seats to measure its length, apparently tempted to whip something or somebody.

“But why symbolic?” he asks, studying the pretty harpist warily. “Why only symbolic? Why not whip someone who ruins the tempo or misses notes or comes in at the wrong place?”

She is alarmed.

“No, no, Maestro, it’s a symbolic whip, only symbolic, otherwise the musicians will blame me.”

But the maestro continues to marvel.

“Where did you get the idea to bring me a whip?”

“As it happened, I bought it for myself, to protect myself from the neighborhood children who were breaking into my mother’s apartment to watch television, which was forbidden in their homes.”

“Television is forbidden? Why?”

“Because according to our religious people, it corrupts values and draws the children away from Torah studies.”

“Yes,” rhapsodizes the Dutchman, “your religious people have it exactly right. Television is evil and corruptive, and you did well to whip their children.”

He clasps the Bedouin whip to his breast like a beloved infant.

“Symbolic… symbolic,” he mutters, “and I have the urge to whip this young man on the podium who is driving our orchestra crazy with his music.”

She laughs. “No, no.”

With great feeling he takes her hand and lifts it to his lips, gathers up the whip, takes it with him to the podium and embraces the young composer, who has just concluded his Melancholy Arabesques with a blast.

“Bravo,” he says, “but it still needs polishing.”

The percussion players vacate the front of the stage for the string players arriving from the wings. The two harpists take their positions behind the harps, the timpanists tune their drumheads, the other percussionists strategically arrange their instruments, the French horn players remove their slides and shake out the spit, the oboists and bassoonists choose the right reeds and adjust them. Gradually they all finish leafing through the scores, and quiet descends on the stage.

The conductor taps the music stand with his baton and begins the little lecture he likes to deliver when starting a new piece.

“At the end of the nineteenth century, France lost a war to Germany but won the culture war. Paris became the capital of the European artistic avant-garde, the city where the painters Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas created Impressionism, while French poetry thrived in the Symbolist vein.

“Claude Debussy, born in the year 1862, was revolutionary in his style and became the greatest painter of music and a leader in the Impressionism of sound, though he complained that ‘imbeciles,’ as he called them, categorized his music as Impressionist, confusing painting and music. Debussy established a new concept of tonality in European music. With his fertile imagination he rebelled against the strong German influence in classical music and turned to exotic areas of influence, taking non-European scales and musical colors from the Far East, also borrowing from Spanish dance, and experimented boldly with instruments that seldom had central roles in classical music, writing, for example, complex parts for the harp.”

Van Zwol points his baton at the two harpists and smiles broadly.

“Symbolism in literature also influenced Debussy,” continues the conductor, “and he wrote program music, giving symbolic and literary titles to his compositions, and strove with elegance and sensitivity to evoke the complexity of nature and humans, first and foremost to fathom the soul of woman.”

“We would like to have more specific details,” says Ingrid, a beautiful French horn player. “Also personal ones if possible.”

Laughter and applause.

The conductor raps his baton.

“If we start recounting Debussy’s romantic adventures, we won’t get to the first notes of the piece today, nor do I wish to be responsible for corrupting decent Dutch men and women with racy French anecdotes. That’s what the Internet is for, answerable to no one. So suffice it to say that he was quite the adventurer, and that his tonal instability may have derived from romantic instability. He switched women easily, cheated on them unconscionably, and one of his wives shot herself in despair in the Place de la Concorde and survived only by a miracle. But all this proves that for him, woman was the ultimate creation, an eternal grail of love and desire, even when no longer young and pretty. She is the purpose of art.”

The musicians, women and men, nod in agreement.

“Debussy died at the age of only fifty-five, at the end of the First World War, as German cannons battered Paris with their last remaining shells. And so his funeral procession took place in empty streets, although he was, in my view and that of many others, the most important French composer of the twentieth century, whose influence continues to be felt to this day.”

“How, exactly?” demands a white-haired cellist.

The maestro laughs. “I see you don’t want to play today, just talk.”

“We want to have a better understanding of what we’re playing,” several voices chime in.

“Fine, fine, you’re right, because in recent years this orchestra has not played Debussy, and this is music that requires particular precision. It’s not easy or simple. A complex and dreamlike harmonic world, scales of whole tones, atonal passages, glittering transitions. His repetitiveness is unsettling. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we are not lounging in a beach chair and looking at the sea, but entering the depths, and the Japanese want an answer from us — what to do in the next tsunami.”

“Just so it doesn’t swallow us too,” interjects a veteran oboist, and everyone laughs.

“No,” the humorless first violinist assures her, “we shall not perform on the east coast of Japan but on the west coast, the one not exposed to the Pacific Ocean that still yearns for the moon that was born from it.”

The conductor silences them with a tap of his baton.

“Now let’s get to work. And since this is a serious and difficult piece, I will be more of a taskmaster and less of a comedian, nor will I limit myself to mere criticism. Rather, I’ll do some whipping, since I just got a whip as a gift.”

He picks up the Bedouin whip, extends it and waves it cautiously above his head.

Pandemonium. The orchestra goes wild. Shouts from every corner. “Not fair!” howl the string players. “Your whip only reaches us and not the winds and percussion!”

“Why won’t it reach them?” asks the conductor. “It will. I’ll step down from the podium and whip any faraway offenders.”

A bold cellist asks, “Where did you get the whip?” She rises from her chair and comes over to inspect it.

I hope he doesn’t give me away, Noga thinks, cringing. Damn, what a mistake I made.

But Dennis van Zwol, the incorrigible joker, cannot conceal the provenance of the gift. “Beware, friends,” he declares, “the whip arrived from the Holy Land. Our Venus gave it to me as a gift, to strengthen my standing with you. You know the Israelis, don’t you? They are new Jews, swift and strong, who don’t hang up the whip as a wall decoration, like us cowardly Europeans, but use it to straighten out anyone who angers them. So beware — from now on, I too am a new tough Jew.”

The Bedouin whip merits an enthusiastic reception, as bows, trumpets and woodwinds are waved at the harpist, who reddens with emotion. Finally the musicians calm down, and deep silence engulfs the hall.

Van Zwol closes his eyes, presses his palms together. After prolonged introspection he lifts the baton delicately, as if all musical wisdom were hidden within it, bids the timpani to beat the first sounds, then signals the two harpists, their hands poised on the strings. Christine is to strike the first note with the left hand, and immediately thereafter, Noga, the first harpist, is to enter with her left hand, and though both are playing the same melody, they are to remain an eighth note apart, in strict time. But the conductor quickly stops them, for it turns out that Christine is unaware that her harp, not the other, is supposed to stress every note in the opening bars.

“Pay attention,” he warns her in French. “Sharpen your accents.”

He gives a sign to start over, then again stops. He feels the accents are not emphatic enough.

Noga studies Christine’s face as she groans under the weight of the conductor’s reprimands. Her face is pale and severe; luminous golden hair streams to her shoulders. From time to time she veils her face with her hand, as if banishing a painful thought. She has come to the rehearsal in a long, baggy dress that covers her long body, and the little bulge, which at their first meeting seemed to Noga to hint at pregnancy, has vanished. Over and over Christine stresses the accents requested by the conductor, but she cannot seem to satisfy him. Noga hides her head behind her harp, fearing that the conductor will move her from first harp to second, to achieve the sound he insists upon. Finally he resigns himself and motions to the orchestra to play a few more bars, then harangues the clarinets and bassoons to produce exactly the soft sound his inner ear is seeking.

“How can you not feel,” he says, by way of explaining his mood, “that here the composer has planted the melody of a mysterious sea nymph, the song of a melancholy mermaid, which from now on will evolve as a motif in the depths of the music.” It is clear to the orchestra that they are in for a rough patch, and although the piece is not long, merely twenty-eight minutes, they will spend many hours rehearsing picky nuances, to realize the vision of a conductor who has decided to turn The Sea into his new flagship.

When the rehearsal is over, Manfred is quick to complain to Noga: “That whip you gave him drove him out of his mind.”

She grins. “It’s okay. He’s still got enough mind left over.”

Manfred invites her to dinner, and she declines. She’s still recovering from the sojourn in her homeland, but not to worry, they’ll have ample opportunity in Japan.

“We’ll have to wait till Japan?”

“Why not?” she says, and asks about Christine — who she is, how well she played the Mozart, why she looks tormented.

The flutist doesn’t know much. In the Mozart double concerto she played with precision, but the notes lacked luster and emotion. He hasn’t noticed her distress, just her reticence, maybe because her French is hostile to Flemish and English, and her accent is funny. He hasn’t really delved into her story. He’s not interested in silent married women, only in unattached and talkative ones, like the one who stands before him.

“Christine is married?”

“It’s hard to say. More or less. In any case there is a man in her life. He was at all the concerts, sat in the front row, apparently not out of love for music but out of concern for her. He would arrive from Antwerp, sometimes in his work clothes — a dockworker, or immigrant, or refugee seeking asylum.”

“Where’s he from?”

“I didn’t ask — it’s none of my business. The world today is intermingled. We even have an exotic woman from the Middle East, where people still ride innocent camels and prod them with whips, who became the first harpist of a civilized orchestra.”

He puts his hand on her shoulder and says, “By the way, you got prettier in Israel. You have color. What do you people eat there?”

“Fruit. Beautiful, juicy fruit.”