Sex and Stravinsky (10 page)

And now, on this particular morning, she stirs around 5 a.m. to hear the minuet from the end of Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella
ballet; that slowed-up, seductive version of the Pergolesi music that Stravinsky ‘recomposed’, as he put it – except that her friend Josh Silver from way back once told her that chunks of it were not, in fact, composed by Pergolesi. They were written by somebody else. Stravinsky wrote that he felt ‘a sensory and mental kinship’ with Pergolesi and also how lucky he’d been that, when he went on the trip to Naples with Picasso, he had found these precious Pergolesi fragments, which had so far eluded the academics. So, maybe, had they not eluded the academics, the misattributions would have been detected before Stravinsky got to recompose them? But, in the event, so what?

As Josh had gone on to observe, inspired people’s mistakes are usually in themselves inspiring. That’s why he liked it that, when Jesus said whatever it was that he’d said to Mary Magdalene in Aramaic, he hadn’t said, ‘
Noli me tangere
.’ He hadn’t meant, ‘Touch me not.’ It was a mistranslation that had inspired a hundred Old Master paintings. And Moses, Josh said, was probably not even Jewish. That’s what he’d read in Freud. He was very likely a prince of Egypt with an adoption fantasy. Or had the Egyptian princess and her maidens been stringing Pharaoh along? Look what we found floating down the Nile in a basket. Yeah. Right. A handy story when you’d got yourself in trouble.

The Pergolesi business merely served to underline that the whole, brilliant ballet was about things being not what they seem; about layers of illusion; masks, disguises and deceptions. If you’re performing in a mask, as Hattie knows from her dancing days, then your face can’t show any emotion. All emotion is gesture. Emotion equals movement. I love: I pull. I hate: I push. Touch me. Touch me not.
Noli me tangere
.

Josh was so passionate about that
Pulcinella
time in Paris, when all the talent of the modern world seemed to be right in there, throwing itself at the Russian Ballet. Hattie knew that he was there in spirit, on the gad with Picasso and Stravinsky as they set out for Naples to find the perfect Neapolitan comedy on which to base their ballet. He was with them in the hole-and-corner junk shops and when they were watching the acrobats in the street. ‘Who is the third that walks always beside you?’ Funny how Josh, with his secular, left-wing parents, could always quote more of the Bible than she ever could, even after a decade of regular attendance at the St Thomas’s Anglican Church Sunday School.

Now she’s back, drowsing again, as the recomposed Pergolesi is turning from pastoral yearning into those rasping Stravinsky discords and dark dance rhythms. And, through her sleep, she’s hearing this one word from the text that sounds a bit like ‘screw-gender’, but it isn’t, of course, because the songs are in Italian. Hattie is no good at foreign languages and her knowledge of Italian is confined to the odd tourist-phrase-book item. ‘
A che ora arriva il treno
?’ That kind of thing. And, until she met Josh, she’d never heard of a ballet with songs.

The second time Hattie wakes, it’s after a surprising two-second dream, and just before the six o’clock news. The dream hasn’t got any narrative; just a flash of audio-visual clarity. Josh Silver is offering her his glasses; those goggly little glasses that he always used to wear. Maybe still does? He’s holding them out to her. ‘Take them,’ he’s saying, right out loud, so that she can hear his voice quite distinctly. ‘Go on.’ The connection will be Stravinsky. For a couple of weeks in his final year, Josh spent time carrying around an autobiography of Stravinsky. It had a photograph of the composer on the dust jacket. One day he’d come with a story about how, at supper the previous night, his mother had cast her eye over the dust jacket and had seen fit to remark that Stravinsky was ‘obviously Jewish’.

‘No, he isn’t,’ Josh said to his mother. ‘What you mean is you think he looks Jewish. But it’s just because he’s Russian.’

Josh suspected his mother – adoptive mother – of wishing to claim various persons of distinction for her own ethnic birth-group, even though she believed religion to be the opium of the people and she’d taught him the words of ‘The Internationale’.

In the daytime Josh’s mother was a human rights lawyer. She operated in a man’s world, taking on all manner of bully-boy white-racist employers, which half the time meant incurring the wrath of the bully-boy white-racist state. But once she was home, she turned into this person who grated raw potatoes for latkes and who liked to make her own sauerkraut. She made her own cream cheese as well, which is why, the one time Hattie went there for supper, there was this oozy little bag of milk curds hanging over one of the taps at the Silvers’ kitchen sink. There was also this cute little Afro kid who was going mad for Mrs Silver’s cream cheese on rye and he loved the potato latkes. He probably liked chicken soup with barley as well.

‘This is Jack,’ Josh said to Hattie.

The child belonged to the housemaid, but the family often had him to stay over in the house on Saturdays and Sundays, because his mother had the weekends off. Hattie had never heard of a black child sleeping over in a white person’s house, which was surely against the law? The place was quite alarming for Hattie, but it was also, in its way, a breath of fresh air. And she was especially impressed that Mrs Silver, on top of all her professional obligations, found the energy to start arguments at the supper table.

So she was always entertained when Josh regaled her with his family’s mealtime talk, because at her own parents’ dining table, all through her growing up, the four of them sat in glum silence listening to the shuffling feet of the maid who moved in and out with the dishes, sort of like a serf. And then there was the ticking of the grandfather clock – the same pretty clock that still ticks and bongs in the selfsame hall, even though its time-keeping drives Herman up the wall.

They would be eating that dreary boarding-house food in the room that Herman, since those days, has opened up into a big, bright space, all in one with the kitchen. Then he’s added those two glass prisms that run down each side of the house, like Toblerone boxes for giants. Herman’s fern-and-orchid houses. Her parents’ carpets have all gone, except for one large Baluchi rug, because Herman right away called them ‘mould green’ and ‘disgusting’ and he said they stank of old mutton fat and pipe smoke and cabbage. Instead, he exposed and waxed the beautiful wide floorboards – indigenous old hardwood, he said – that had been lurking, all through Hattie’s childhood, under two layers of cracked lino, which, in turn, had been lurking under the mould-green carpets.

Meanwhile, back to Josh, who was setting the dinner-table scene for her, in which old Prof Silver was busy providing instruction for his wife. There was no such thing as ‘looking Jewish’, he said. Italian Jews looked Italian and Iraqi Jews looked Iraqi. And Polish Jews looked Polish. And those Eastern European Ashkenazi settlers in Israel – well, they looked like Eastern Europeans. And those Jews who had always been there from before the biblical diaspora – well, they were indistinguishable from Palestinian Arabs, he said, except for their beard and hats.

‘But the Arabs have got nicer hats,’ Josh observed in an aside to Hattie. ‘Don’t you think so?’

Hattie hadn’t a clue about the hats, but by the time he had recounted the episode they had covered the distance between the admin block and the student-union café, where, though she wasn’t a student there, but a young working ballet teacher, she was his frequent guest.

She remembered him placing the Stravinsky book on the table while he unwound a Chelsea bun. Both of them were nineteen.

‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Does Stravinsky look Jewish then, or what?’

‘Well,’ Hattie said, ‘I think his glasses maybe look quite Jewish. Actually, Josh, they’re just like your glasses.’

She knew Josh wasn’t really Jewish, because he’d told her he was adopted. His parents took him in, aged three, when his mother went round the bend. He had this wild story about being got by a crooked Greek upon a Lebanese convent girl in a mining town called Boksburg. He couldn’t remember his time in Boksburg. He was too young. He couldn’t remember a thing about his mother, except that she’d been dead since nearly for ever. But he could remember a little bit about Dora the teenage housemaid and a lot more about Dora’s mother Pru, who had taken him to her own outdoor church, where they did trance states and sang gospel songs and people got baptised by total immersion. He thought he could maybe remember the rattly long-distance bus, designated for black persons, that had taken him from Boksburg to Durban, where Dora’s mother lived, but he knew that, in reality, it was probably because Pru had told him about it. He knew that it was little Dora who had saved his life.

‘I don’t remember very much from before I became a white person,’ Josh said.

Hattie had never been to Boksburg. She only knew it from a joke she’d once heard, about a man who kept on missing the train to it.

Josh seemed quite pleased about Stravinsky’s glasses.

‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Does he look sexy then, or what?’

Hattie knew that Josh was really keen on her, but even though he was her absolutely best friend – the nicest person she’d ever known; the person with whom she felt ‘a sensory and mental kinship’ – was she in love with him? She wasn’t sure how you could tell. And was it all right to fall for a person of dubious provenance, with dangerous adoptive parents? I mean, what would her own parents have thought? A man who made jokes about being white? Well he
was
white, of course. Lebanese people and Greeks counted as white. Sort of.

That was when Herman had suddenly come up and joined them in the student café. Six foot five and powerfully built; shaking sunlight from his thick blond hair; the hair that didn’t last. Final-year star student at the architectural school. Blue eyes. White teeth. Penetrating stare. Very in-your-face.

‘Hey, Josh,’ he said. ‘So are you going to introduce me to your friend?’

Suddenly Hattie is properly awake – wide awake and bolt upright – because the six o’clock news is on the BBC and will be happening at eight o’clock – of course – given that she’s in a different hemisphere and she’s two hours ahead of GMT. And right now she can hear her sixteen-year-old daughter Cat beginning to bang about in the kitchen the way she does these days.

‘Crumbs!’ Hattie says to herself. ‘The time!’ She gets up and pulls on a thin kimono over her nakedness. ‘Please God,’ she says, somewhat fervently. ‘Let me please not fight with Cat today.’

In the passage, on her way to the kitchen, she takes down
The Oxford Companion to Music
and enters the kitchen, where she leans the book on the dresser. Stravinsky. There is the photograph – the very same dust-jacket photograph – reproduced on the page. So does Stravinsky look sexy then, or what? Well, yes, she decides, he does, even though he looks quite a lot like Papa Mouse in
Mouse Tales
by Arnold Lobel. Papa Mouse is ‘obviously Jewish’; a mouse patriarch in braces. Hattie once wrote a fan letter to Arnold Lobel, but he died before she’d posted it.
Mouse Tales
is a book that she can still recite by heart because she used to read it ten times a day to Cat, who loved all the stories, but especially the one about the mouse who buys himself new feet. That was a decade ago, when Cat was six; when Cat was sweet. Hattie tries not to brood about Cat too much these days, which is maybe why she’s concentrating so hard on Stravinsky’s glasses.

‘Hey, what you doing, Ma?’ Cat says, in that single-volume shout voice she has recourse to these days whenever she talks to her mother.

‘Hi, Cat,’ Hattie says, hating the sound of her own voice; that slightly fake-cheerful,
Children’s Hour
tone.

‘So what are you doing?’ Cat says again. Her consonants are fuzzy and she’s dribbling breakfast cereal from her mouth as she speaks.

Hattie can tell at once that it’s the horrible chocolate-flavoured stuff, because brown milk is leaking down her chin. Cat may be sixteen, but she still has an infant’s sweet tooth. She’ll add extra sugar to Coco Pops and she’ll sprinkle sugar on those already cloyingly sweet pink yogurts. Cat sometimes talks with her mouth full these days, which is pretty hard to take. She does it because, while she munches and stuffs, she seldom swallows anything, as far as Hattie can see, so her mouth is always full.

Hattie would rather Cat didn’t pretend to be eating, but she clearly likes the taste of food too much not to put it in her mouth. So for the past few weeks she’s been pursuing a policy of shovelling spoonloads into her mouth, one after the other, without pausing to swallow. She stores the spoonloads hamsterwise in the pouches of her cheeks. That’s until congestion causes bits to start falling out. Then Cat will do one of three things. The first is she’ll feign a choking fit and spew the chewed pile on to her plate.

She’ll follow this with some bogus accusation that she directs at her mother.

‘I nearly choked because of you,’ she’ll shriek. ‘There are bones in this. There are peppercorns in this. What are these disgusting leaf things?’

The second thing is, she’ll dash for the bathroom, where Hattie is pretty certain that Cat is disgorging the hamster hoard into the lavatory bowl. This is because she hears the cistern flush, not once, but twice. And thirdly, just occasionally, Cat will actually swallow. When she swallows, most of the hoard goes down in one huge gulp. She’ll jerk her head like a turkey, then there’ll be a bobbing in her throat and her eyes will start to water. Sometimes a coughing fit ensues. Yet Cat isn’t exactly skin and bones – not yet – though she has got slightly thinner. She’s still got quite big boobs and that pretty, little-girlish round face. Cat comes off the same production line as Herman’s tribe of rosy blonde sisters. Except that, whereas they are always smiling their dimpled smiles, poor old Cat looks a constant crosspatch these days.