My Nine Lives. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I had one or two stories published in little magazines, and these made my father so proud that he bought up copies to give to everyone he knew.

      Yakuv also came and went. He was often on tour, for his reputation was now established and he had engagements all over the country. It did not improve his temper—on the contrary, he became more difficult. He was still firing his agents so that Leonora had to find new ones and also secretaries to attend him on his tours. Usually these secretaries returned without him; either he had fired them or they couldn’t stand him another day. He would cable urgently for a replacement, but by then everyone had heard about him and no one was willing to go. He blamed us for this failure—what could he do, he said, if we sent him nothing but blockheads and idiots, and meanwhile how was he to manage, again he had missed a plane and left the suitcase with his tails in a hotel? Twice Leonora went herself to take care of him, but when they came back, they were not on speaking terms and Rudy had to make peace between them. Leonora refused to undertake another tour with him; and after a barrage of urgent messages from Kansas City, Kitty was dispatched to him—with misgivings that turned out to be justified, for he sent her back within a week.

      Sometimes I suspected that his tantrums were not entirely genuine. I have seen him turn away, suppressing a smile—exactly as he had done in earlier years after some wild fight with Kitty. The music we heard him play after one of these upheavals was invariably tranquil, romantic, filling everyone with good feelings. “With me, too, his manner had never changed from the time I was a child and he my teacher. He gave me books he thought I ought to read, and when he wanted to relax, he called me to play some game with him—dominoes usually, to my relief, never chess at which I suspected him to be a master. When he wanted to be affectionate, he still pinched my cheek; and when he was angry with me, it was not as with the others but as with a child, wagging his finger in my face. This made me laugh, and then he laughed too. Eventually it happened that when he was in one of his moods, Leonora and Kitty would send me to calm him down. It was as though I were free of the web that entangled them—by this I suppose I mean their intense sexual involvement with him. I felt nothing like that; how could I? For me he was just an elderly little man, almost a dwarf with a huge head and a mass of grey hair. His teeth were reduced to little stumps stained brown with tobacco.

      When another crisis arose with another secretary fired in mid-tour, it was natural for someone—was it Leonora, was it Kitty?—to suggest that I should take my turn with the job at which they had already failed. It was my father who objected; he said he had higher expectations for me, and hoped I had for myself too, than to be handmaid and servant to Yakuv on his travels. Leonora and Kitty reared up as one person—it was strange how united they were nowadays; they said it would be a rich experience for me as well as a privilege to be in close contact with an artist like Yakuv. Rudy made a face as though saying—perhaps he actually did say—hadn’t we had enough of this privilege over the past ten years? But he gave me money for the trip and told me to wire for more when I needed it, especially if I needed it for my ticket home.

      Almost the first thing Yakuv said to me was, “You’ll need some money.” This was in a cab on our way from the airport—unexpectedly, he had been standing there waiting for me. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a fistful of notes: “Is this enough?” He put his hand in his other pocket and drew out some more. From then on it was the way we carried out all our financial transactions: he didn’t pay me a salary but just offered me everything in his pockets to pick out as much as I needed. This was not very much, since my hotel room and plane tickets and cab rides were all included in his, paid for by the sponsors. I lasted longer than anyone else had done, traveling with him from one city to another. We always checked into the same kind of hotel, I in a small single room and he in a suite that had often to be changed, due to his complaints about noise and other inconveniences. During the day, if I didn’t go to his rehearsals, I stayed in the hotel by myself; I wasn’t interested in the cities we were in—they were all the same, with the same sort of museums built in the early 1900s by local millionaires to house their art collections. At night I attended his performances in a concert hall donated by a later set of millionaires; I was very proud of him, his playing and the effect it had on his audience. He was not only a superb pianist, he looked the part too as he lunged up and down the keyboard, his coat-tails hanging over the piano stool, a wild-haired artist, profoundly foreign, an East European import from an earlier era. Afterward there was always a reception and dinner for him; surrounded by rich and wrinkled women, his eyes would rove around the room, and when he found me, he shrugged and grimaced from behind their jeweled backs.

      Leonora had given me careful instructions about his routine, what to do with his clothes, when he would need the first cup of black coffee that he drank throughout the day. Of course, like everyone else, I got things wrong and he flew into a rage but always one that was tempered to me—that is, to the child I was for him. And with me he got over it more quickly than with the others, and also pitched in to help, so that somehow we muddled through together. Whenever there were a couple of hours to spare in the afternoons, we would go to a local cinema; he liked only gangster or cowboy movies, and since the same program was always playing in the different cities we visited, we saw each one several times. At night I sat up with him in his suite, waiting for the pills without which he couldn’t sleep to take effect. He read aloud to me—Pushkin in Russian, Miłosz in Polish; I didn’t understand but liked to listen to him in these languages that seemed more natural to him than the English he spoke in his sharp Slavic accent. During the time I spent alone in the hotel, I continued with my own writing; it was the first time that I attempted poetry, maybe because he liked it better than prose. He encouraged me to read it to him, listening carefully, asking questions, sometimes making a suggestion that often turned out to be right.

      He asked about the years I had spent on my own travels. He was particularly interested in my Buddhist period. He himself was of course a complete agnostic, that was the way he had grown up among those whose mission it had been to overthrow everything. I said that had been my mission too, to overthrow the nihilism they had left us with. “But a nun,” he said, smiling. Although I had long ago given up that ambition, I defended myself. I said that having started on a path, I wanted to follow it as far as it would take me—I had more to say but stopped when I saw the way he was looking at me. His lips were twitching. I didn’t really expect him to take me seriously; it wasn’t only that I was so many years younger than he, I suspected that he took none of us seriously. He even seemed to have the right to be amused by us, as though he were a much wiser person. I don’t know whether this impression derived from the fact that he was a great artist, or from the mixture of the Talmud and Marxist idealism that I thought of as his background.

      Since it seemed to take longer and longer for his sleeping pills to have effect, our conversations became more protracted. He wanted to know about my marriage, a subject that I disliked talking about except to say that it had been a mistake. He drew me out about the nineteen-year-old boy who had been the mistake. I admitted that what had attracted me to him was his frailty, which I had interpreted as vulnerability (later he turned out to be hard as nails). It had started when we had bathed together in the Ganges and I saw his frail shoulder blades—it was the first time I had seen him without his robe. “His robe?” Yakuv asked; so then I had to admit that he too had been in the religious life and had been planning to become a monk. I glanced at Yakuv, and yes, his lips were now twitching so much that he could not prevent himself from laughing out loud. I laughed too, maybe ruefully, and he pinched my cheek in his usual way. Only it wasn’t as usual, and that was the first time I stayed with him all night. Although for the rest of the tour we still took separate rooms, we usually stayed in his, except when he was very tired after a concert and then he said I had better sleep in my own little nun’s bed. But mostly he wasn’t tired at all but with plenty of energy left in his short and muscular body. His chest and back and shoulders were covered in grey fur; only his pubic hair had remained pitch black.

      He gave me no indication of what to tell or not to tell at home, but it turned out to be easier than expected. Leonora and Kitty were astonished at the way I had stuck it out with him. All their questions were to do with the practical side of my duties—how I had managed to make him catch planes on time and tidy him up for his performances. I gladly supplied them with answers, adding an amusing anecdote or two which made them clap their hands in joyful recognition. They had been there before