The Third Day

by Chochana Boukhobza, Alison Anderson, Alison Anderson

Genres: Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

A leading Israeli musician and her protégé return to Jerusalem for three days to perform with the Philharmonic Orchestra. Both women - one a gifted young cellist, one a Holocaust survivor saved by her extraordinary musical talent - have been in America for some time, are quickly caught up in tangled threads from former lives. Elisheva is reunited with her godson, Daniel; Rachel must face both her distant father and Erytan, a former lover, whose lingering power over her now threatens all she has worked for. Elisheva is coaching Rachel for the solo performance, but something else has drawn her to Jerusalem. Another old friend has lured a Nazi eugenicist, the Butcher of Majdanek, to Israel from Venezuela. The Butcher performed torturous experiments on Elisheva, determining not only her fate but also that of her closest friends. On the third day of her stay, the day of the concert, she will take her revenge. Set in the late 1980s, The Third Day is a vivid portrait of life in Jerusalem and a sensitive meditation on the power of music and the sacrifices it demands. And at its heart is a gripping narrative of retribution that brings the novel's many moving strands towards a tense and shattering conclusion.

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 336

Sample

I did not stay to unpack my suitcase. I went into Elisheva’s room and told her I was going out. My professor went on hanging up her dresses, then she said in a neutral voice, “The rehearsal starts at 7 p.m. sharp.”

I chose to ignore her warning.

“And you? What are you going to do?”

“Rest. Make a few calls.”

“And the cellos?”

“I’ll take care of them.”

“But I can help you . . .”

“No. Leave it.”

Elisheva handed me three tickets for the concert, and I put them in my pocket with a smile.

“They won’t come,” I said, thinking to myself that this woman was a witch. She knew where I was going without even asking.

“Invite them. That’s what matters.”

I picked up my jacket from the back of a chair and left without even stopping to slip on the other sleeve.

Blocking the hallway were two obese American women, decked in diamonds that shimmered against their pale skin. The fatter of the two was saying, raising the tone each time she repeated it, “Oh my God!” while her companion echoed, “Yes, yes!”

I hugged the wall and they went by, dressed in pastel chiffon that quivered with each jiggle of fat. I thought how glad I was to be me – poor, young and beautiful. I may not have the means to pay for a luxury hotel, but my body does what I tell it to do.

I took the elevator and walked through the hotel lobby as if I were in a dream.

Each step cost me a considerable effort. Jetlag and my night on the plane were beginning to get the better of me. If I did not want to screw up my solos during rehearsal, the best thing would be to go and get some sleep. But I needed to walk through the city, discover it street by street.

“I call you a taxi, miss?”

“I’ll take the bus . . . Thanks.”

The doorman in his brown livery, who must come here every morning in a collective taxi from a village in the territories, looked at me with surprise as if I were heading to my doom. I gave him a smile and ducked into the revolving door; its glass panes sparkled with sunlight.

And the hot breath of the sharav assailed me as I went out on the terrace ringed with oleanders.

I had not gone more than a few steps before I was drenched in sweat and sorry I had not listened to the doorman. The heat poured from the sky like a woollen blanket and there was not a single refuge of shade in sight. The trees were electrified by sunlight and offered no protection. The air was crackling with sounds from out of nowhere – crickets, birds chirping, engines purring.

I crossed the Plazza gardens, went around Kikar Tzion and down Rehavia. I felt like having a falafel and did not dare. How could I subject my stomach, at nine o’clock in the morning, to a pita bread stuffed with slices of onion, greasy eggplant and fried chickpea balls, all dripping in harissa?

But the more I thought about it, the more my mouth watered.

And I was about to buy one when I saw the 26 bus coming around the corner. I began to run like crazy to reach the stop. A soldier and a middle-aged woman also made a dash for it. The woman raised her arms, shouting, “Atzor, atzor!” and her chest was bouncing to the rhythm of her steps. The soldier sped on in silence. His kippa was pinned to his hair and was flapping up and down like a little lid on top of his head.

The driver had seen us. He waited until we had boarded and then the woman, clinging to a rail, blessed him in a strong Moroccan accent: Ti-ye bari, adoni! I found a seat, wondering how to translate that expression – “Good health to you, sir” – then my mind went blank. At the intersection the driver accelerated abruptly to merge at breakneck speed on to the road to Givat Tzarfatit.

I clung to my seat and looked out of the dusty window at the dry, red landscape, the fields of olive groves, the roadside displays of earthenware jugs and pottery that had been in the same place for a decade or more.

Nothing had changed; and yet . . .

They were building a completely absurd new roundabout, and the Arab workers who were pouring the cement did not even look up at the bus as it roared around the bend.

How many more stops until mine? Two? Three?

I wondered how my parents would react when they saw me. I was looking forward to seeing them again, but I was apprehensive all the same. Our relationship is complicated, even if we do love each other.

I pushed the button for the stop. On the radio the speaker was announcing a record drought for the region. Then came the first bars of a song by Shlomo Artzi, and the rubber-lined doors closed behind me with a whoosh.

I walked down the gallery carved into the mountainside.

The heat was suffocating.

This suburb, eight hundred metres above sea level, sprang up in the 1970s. In the summer, it is cool at dawn, then the sun comes up and the heat settles in. At noon the furnace is at its hottest. Then the temperature goes shooting down again at night, and under a wine-red sky the mist wafts along the narrow streets in long white icy scarves.

My parents moved into the neighbourhood when I was six. They occupied an apartment on the third floor of the first building to be completed, and we began our life there among the ditches and the cranes, to the noise of pneumatic drills wielded by masons hired from the West Bank.

The buildings grew, the roads took shape, schools and grocery stores opened, but the hills seemed so vast that no-one thought they would ever be able to fill them.

Twice a month we went for walks on the slopes with my class. We would walk among the olive trees and thyme bushes; we went through Arab villages that lived off the fleeces of their sheep. Sometimes we would run into an Arab working the land with a horse and ploughshare. His plot spread over two terraces. He grew wheat and a few vines. Our teacher pointed out the low walls of dry stone, simple piles to combat erosion. He would caress the trunk of an olive tree and explain the secret labour of its roots as they branched out to create an immense latticework that would retain every particle of clay during the rainy season. The teacher swept the class with his gaze. We listened attentively. And we felt like crying when he added that we were like the olive trees. Our roots had saved us from destruction. Through books and prayer the land of Israel had spread its roots ineradicably into our thoughts.

The hills of my childhood had disappeared.

The cranes had been working relentlessly. Concrete had spread everywhere. Apartments were cheap, and the view over Jerusalem was incomparable. The mountain was covered with high-rise blocks. Beyond the blocks were the villas with red-tiled roofs, lovely houses without terraces, because they were Palestinian.

My parents live on a neglected little street. Six years ago the property manager ran off with the co-owners’ funds, and the inhabitants no longer wanted to chip in to buy plants or heating oil. So the shared space is not well maintained and looks the worse for wear. In the winter everyone heats as best they can, which means poorly. When it gets very cold and the wind blows down the mountain, oil stoves and space heaters are not enough to heat the icy walls and you have to wrap up in shawls and down jackets. The people who are always cold even wear gloves. The year I left, my fingers got so cold that I could no longer play my cello.

Now it was mid-May.

I climbed the stairs, urging myself to be patient.

And I made the mistake of not knocking at the door, because it was slightly ajar.

I pushed it gently, a huge smile on my lips. I was coming home and, yes, I was happy to be there.

My father was all alone in the dining room with his ear next to the transistor radio. He was listening to a religious station that repeated year round that God loved Israel in spite of the errors of its people, that He had given this land on both sides of the River Jordan, and that one day the Messiah would rise to restore to us our heritage.

My father immerses himself in this commentary because it helps him to confront the harsh reality of life in Israel. There was a time when he would praise these programmes to me, and he wanted me to listen. He thought they would fill me with knowledge and wisdom, that they would put some sense into me. But it was not my thing. Any more than religious traditions were. My brother Avner was cleverer. He never refused my father anything, but he made him wait. My father would get a grip, keep a hold on himself, then he would completely lose it, calling us ungrateful and reciting the verse from Isaiah: “I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.” He gave us everything, but we did not show any gratitude. That is the way it goes, hatati, hatati ya Rabi, “I have sinned, I have sinned, my God” and with a sigh he would slap his thighs.

When we were children, Avner and I, his sorrow was terrifying.

At the time, we did not know anything about the discovery of the Book of Isaiah in the caves of Qumran, which made the prophet world-famous, and the sect of the Essenes along with him. The Hebrew manuscript, written in fifty-four columns on seventeen leather scrolls, sewn together, prophesied the return of the “Master of Justice”: for us it boiled down to the verse about the rebellious children.

I went to live in New York.

Avner paid the price of my departure by staying at home after his stint in the army. He supported my father and studied agronomy.

To complete his master’s degree, he inventoried the diseases specific to wheat. In his conclusion he proposed fighting them by modifying the plant’s genome.

Avner had already enrolled for a Ph.D. when he suddenly dropped his studies. He confessed to me over the phone that he was tired of hanging around the labs in the university and the kibbutzim. He wanted to earn a living, he did not want to have to keep track of every penny. My father was in despair when he signed a contract to be a truck driver, shuttling tomatoes and cucumbers from one end of the country to another.

If I had gone into the room ten minutes later my father might have blessed me. But I had shown up right in the middle of the news bulletin, worse luck. And for my father the news is as sacred as the prayer at Yom Kippur.

He motioned to me, his fingers together, to say ashtana, wait.

I had not seen him for five years.

In Arabic, French or deaf-mute sign language, that is the kind of greeting that will turn your blood to ice.

I had just spent an entire night on the plane, not counting the time in traffic jams to get to J.F.K. and the hour from Lod to Jerusalem. I had been dreaming of tears and tenderness. Nyet.

I collapsed on a chair and waited.

Finally my father turned the knob on the transistor and the radio fell silent.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, hi. Talk about a surprise! How are you?”

“Fine, and you?”

“Your mother’s not here. But she won’t be long.”

My father got up, tugging on his shirt and clearing his throat. In the old days that clearing sound warned us when he was coming. Avner and I figured we had one minute before he would open the door, and we would hurry to put away anything that might irritate him.

“How long are you here for?”

“Three days.”

“Three . . .”

He was choking with indignation.

“How much was your ticket?”

I named a sum.

“You’re wasting your money.”

“I’m here for a concert, Pa. My ticket is paid for.”

He smiled, relieved, then looked anxious again.

“Where is your suitcase?”

“At the hotel.”

“Home isn’t good enough for you?”

“It’s just easier, Pa.”

“We’re not royalty, we don’t live in luxury.”

I shrugged.

“It’s none of my business, after all. Besides, you never asked me! You just do what you feel like!”

“I do what people ask me to do.”

“And who are those ‘people’?” my father said.

“The organizers of the concert.”

“Do they know you have a family in Jerusalem? A father and a mother?”

“I suppose they do . . .”

“And they keep you from your family? Some nice people you hang around with.”

I thought he might use the opportunity to recite the verse from Isaiah, my childhood refrain, but he went off to the kitchen. I could hear the door of a cupboard squeaking, then the rush of the tap. Despite my absence, the sounds of home remained familiar.

My father came back into the living room with a glass of water.

“Easier for who?”

“What?”

“Easier to be at the hotel . . . Why?”

“For the rehearsals, for moving the instruments around.”

I put the three comp tickets on the table. He picked one up and read it attentively.

“A masterpiece of exile,” he murmured.

“It’s the name of the event.”

“You’re only getting one concert?”

“Yes, on the third day.”

“All this fuss for two hours of music?”

“Well . . .”

“What a waste! Why? Don’t we have any talent in this country?”

“Elisheva . . .”

“She came with you?”

“She’s my impresario, Papa . . . She arranges my contracts and she plays.”

“And she came for free, too?”

My eyelids were getting heavy. I would have loved to sleep for an hour or so on the terrace or in my old room.

“Are you working a lot?”

I started, looked at my father, not understanding. How long had I been asleep? A second? A minute? My ears were buzzing and I could not move my hands any more. My father repeated his question. I was moved by the sight of his white hair.

“Are you earning a living?”

“I give concerts on a regular basis.”

“But has your career taken off?”

“Not yet.”

“And yet they invited you to Jerusalem?”

“Because I’m a local girl. And I’m following in Elisheva’s wake. She’s well-known here. They haven’t forgotten her, even though she left.”

“I see.”

His head lowered, he registered the information. The last time I saw him we had quarrelled, and for over a year he had refused to speak to me on the telephone when I rang my mother from New York. We had a lot of catching up to do.

“You left so you could become famous. And you’ve failed,” he said, sitting down across from me.

“I’m twenty-three years old. It’s not too late, Papa.”

I had promised myself I would stay calm and answer all his questions, even the ones that hurt the most.

“A few concerts. To live so far away from us for just a few concerts!”

“I have to play in Tokyo next year.”

“In Japan?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Don’t they have enough of their own cellists over there? They have to go and hire a musician who lives in New York? What’s so special about you?”

I smiled.

My craving for a falafel had returned. Why hadn’t I bought one? Why had I been in such a hurry to run after the 26 bus with my lungs fit to burst? Honestly, I could have waited for the next one.

My father picked up a ballpoint from the table, removed the cap, then put it back again.

“Incidentally,” he said, avoiding my eyes, “I’m going to buy a studio for your brother.”

“Ah!”

“Forty square metres . . . But to invest any more than that . . . I don’t have the money!”

“That’s already not bad.”

“Get married! I’ll do the same for you.”

“Why, did Avner get married?”

“It’s not the same.”

“What’s the difference?”

“He’s a boy.”

“You’re right. Girls are worthless.”

“If he moves away from home, people won’t gossip about him.”

“I don’t live in Israel any more.”

“Against my will! And anyway, whether you are here or elsewhere doesn’t change anything. There’s always someone who knows someone, my girl. They know who you’re seeing, who you speak to, and how much you earn.”

The conversation was beginning to take a dangerous turn, when my mother came through the door. She saw me and dropped what she was carrying. Boxes of medication fell from her bag and scattered over the tiles.

“Rachel?”

“Mama,” I said, getting to my feet.

In a flash I could see the ravages of these last five years. Her face had withered. She was wearing glasses with heavy frames and she had put on weight.

She spread her arms and held me close.

“You should have told me you were coming. I would have come to meet you at the airport.”

“I arrived during the night.”

“Oh! I am happy! I am happy!”

My father cleared his throat to contain his emotion. He wandered around the room without looking at us then, soundlessly, he picked up the boxes of medication and went to put them in the medicine cabinet.

“Have you eaten?” said my mother.

“Yes, on the plane.”

“I know all about their aluminum containers. They give you a little bit of omelette and a cake. You must be starving. I’ll heat you up a plate of couscous.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You don’t need to be hungry for couscous.”

She tossed her jacket over the back of an armchair and pushed me into the kitchen.

She rolled up her sleeves and drank a glass of water.

“It’s hot out. What’s the weather like in New York?”

“It’s springtime.”

She got busy, silently. She plugged in the electric kettle and opened the fridge. There was a sudden putrid smell. My mother went on rummaging among the shelves and brought out an assortment of plastic containers.

I lit a cigarette. My mother turned to me and said, “You still smoke? And your lungs?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t start, Ma.”

“I’m begging you, my girl,” she said, pouring a thick red magma, where bits of potato and carrot were floating, into a saucepan. “How many do you smoke a day?”

She put her nose into the saucepan to make sure the broth had not gone off.

I watched her reheating the couscous in a scratched non-stick frying pan. She took a chipped plate from the dresser, put it on the crumb-strewn table, went over to the sink, grabbed a sponge, picked up the plate and wiped the table.

I was watching her movements with considerable interest, because I could understand why I too do everything backwards: I start off by painting a wall before I decide to protect the floor, I show up at a concert without rehearsing, but once I’ve greeted everyone, I attack the score and work like a maniac.

“Do you want a slice of bread?”

“Bread with couscous?”

“You can dip it in the broth.”

“No, thanks.”

“Just a crust?”

I did not answer.

When I am at my parents’ house, I am no longer the same. I can no longer move or think or act. I go soft, empty. I no longer know my name, or whether I should crawl, or run away. Or whether I should shoot myself.

In the living room, my father switched on the transistor and the same shrill voice went on questioning the future of Israel, with quotations to illustrate his every point. I realized I had been there for an hour. I had just lost an hour of my life, but where was my life?

I ate four spoonfuls of couscous at ten o’clock in the morning to please my mother, who finally sat down by my side.

To encourage me to open my heart to her, she started telling me all about her life, a monologue punctuated with baruh ashem, “praise God”, but when you are used to it, you no longer pay any attention.

Here’s roughly how it goes: “I go to Bible class every Tuesday evening, baruh ashem. There are a lot of women who come, rain or shine, and baruh ashem, they are all friends of mine. I get along with everybody. After class, baruh ashem, we sit down, we eat, and we talk. There’s a good atmosphere, baruh ashem, that’s what you need, right? There was a pipe that burst and it flooded the neighbour’s living room but, baruh ashem, the plumber found the leak, and he made a hole in the wall and repaired the damage. Oh, do you remember your friend Hanna? No? Well, she had her third child last week, baruh ashem. . . a fine boy. Akbak lilak, my girl, Shallah, may I sing at your wedding, amen and amen, may I ululate so loud they’ll hear it all the way to New York, the day you marry an upright, kind, respectful, halal sort of guy . . .”

And then she raised her eyes and hands to the ceiling, to take the God of Abraham and Moses as her witness, then fervently kissed her fingers.

“Amen, amen, amen. Say amen.”

I said amen.

She took me by the neck and kissed me on the cheek as if she were biting me.

“Of course, amen! Why shouldn’t you have the right to happiness, too? He’ll come, your fiancé, he’ll come, don’t worry. Even if you’re already twenty-three years old, he’ll come.”

I let go of my fork. I could not swallow another bite. And the little I had eaten was stuck in my throat like a stone.

I said to myself, I don’t believe it, is it like this in every family? There must be some logic to what she’s saying, but what is it? I must have lost the operating instructions at birth, or someone forgot to give me the decoder.

“Finish your plate.”

“No, thanks.”

“Some fruit?”

She opened the fridge and the same smell wafted out into the kitchen. I closed the door.

“What’s in there?”

“Why?”

“It smells like dead cat in the fridge.”

“A cat?” she said, so astonished that I could hear my heart begin to pound. “Oh! I must have forgotten the beetroot salad from Friday.”

“Only the beetroot salad?”

“You’re right, I’ll clean it out. I haven’t had time, I’ve been running around non-stop.”

“Running where?”

“In town.”

“What for?”

“I can’t keep my head straight, my girl. I go to market, I take the bus to come home and can you imagine, once I get here, I see I’ve forgotten the noodles or the rice. So I dump my shopping bags and out I go again.”

“You’ve got a grocery across the street.”

“It’s more expensive.”

“And the ticket for the bus each way?”

“I don’t pay for the bus,” she replied triumphantly. “With my green card I can ride for free.”

Basically, she needs the crowd, the people, the noise.

She puts on her lipstick, does her hair, takes her bag, and off she goes on the 26 bus, anywhere, wherever it happens to be going.

She moves, radiant, to the back of the bus. As she moves along the aisle she always runs into someone she knows with whom she can exchange a few words. She talks about the weather, baruh ashem, it rained this week, the level of the Kinnereth is going to rise. And they’ve been building some more, baruh ashem, housing sites between Talpiot and Mahane Yehuda, they say there are Jewish families about to immigrate to flee anti-Semitism. Baruh ashem, baruh ashem, the Jews are starting to realize that Israel is their refuge. Economic problems in the country, the price of milk has skyrocketed again, oh those poor people, and the ones with big families, pray God help the poor. And she adds, we’ve suffered too, we’ve been counting our money too, but, baruh ashem, we’ve brought up our children and made them into honest people.

Stop after stop, as the bus fills and empties again, my mother offers complete strangers her considerations on the future of the country, on the future of the Jewish nation, on the hardship of life.

When she gets home again she is drained.

She has to hang out the laundry, prepare the evening meal, tidy up a bit, wash the dishes.

My father refuses to pitch in and help. Housework is not his job. If he started, God only knows where it would lead.

She did everything she could to shake off her yoke, shouting, screaming, citing the example of dozens of families where the husband gave a hand, out of love for his wife, or just to have some peace around the house. My father would not budge.

He is prepared to accept weeks of silence, weeks of conflict, he would sooner leave altogether than stoop so low as to peel a vegetable or sweep the floor. “You think I’m some sort of female, or what?” he would shout in her face when we were little. “Each man to his own trade.”

He relented on two points only: he would take out the garbage and go to the market.

As for the garbage, he still grumbles, but he loves going to the market.

He comes back loaded down like a donkey, fingers sawn through from the weight of the shopping bags. He buys everything – too much of everything – after squeezing the melons, to the annoyance of the vendors, and sticking his fingers into the pears, and lifting the apples to feel their weight, and pinching the ends of the cucumbers, and tasting a kilo of olives to buy a hundred grams, and asking for his receipt to check the total, and stopping in the middle of the crowd just to add up the purchases once again in his head.

He comes through the door all happy. No one has ripped him off. He has made some fine purchases for a price that defies all the competition.

The piano bar is lit by perforated metal wall lights, the décor is blue, and the atmosphere is hushed by a thick wall-to-wall carpet that stifles the sound of footsteps. Elisheva takes the measure of the place as she walks in; it is vast, full of cosy little corners, and behind a zinc bar counter a blonde is bustling about. There is a black piano right in the middle of the room in full view.

Elisheva, as a musician, is drawn to the Yamaha, fascinated. She lifts the lid, examines the shining keys. Her fingers glide silently over the keyboard. Suddenly she cannot help it, she needs to give birth to sound, to hear the soul of the instrument. She plays a few chords, discovers the instrument’s clear timbre; she frowns, then decides to go ahead, plays a phrase from Chopin’s Impromptu, the fragment where the melody is like a murmur.

The blonde looks up, attentive.

Their eyes meet. Elisheva’s hands lift from the keyboard.

“That was beautiful,” the blonde says, encouraging her.

“It’s a good piano.”

“I would so like to have learned!”

“You still have time,” says Elisheva with a smile, closing the lid.

“Play some more. There’s no-one here.”

“I’ve forgotten the rest,” says Elisheva. “That passage is all I remember.”

The blonde does not insist. Elisheva heads for an isolated table over by a pot plant. The blonde does not come to take her order. She has started cleaning the mirrors.

Daniel arrives at last, ten minutes late.

He pauses on the threshold and raises his dark glasses to the top of his brow, big mirrored Ray-Bans reflecting the world. He is heavy, hairy, massive, wearing jeans, a white short-sleeved shirt, and a black jacket. He is the sort of man who electrifies people and who knows it. A man who likes to eat, drink and pursue his pleasure.

Daniel is drawn not so much to the piano as to the young woman busy behind the bar: he sizes her up like a connoisseur.

Finally he looks around the room.

He sees Elisheva.

Of course she is already here.

More’s the pity.

He forces a smile and heads over to her, swinging a leather briefcase.

“Hello,” he says simply, without apologizing.

“Hi,” Elisheva says.

Daniel leans the briefcase against the table leg and sprawls on the chair. Then he removes his glasses, folds the side-pieces and hooks them into his shirt . . .