My Nine Lives. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

card games and didn’t contradict when she told me that he could have made a living as a card sharper. “Better than the piano,” he said cheerfully. Without his glasses, he looked almost gentle, probably because he was so nearsighted; and it was always a surprise to see that his eyes were not dark but light grey.

      Then there were the times when he was a guest at one of my parents’ dinner parties. On those evenings Leonora sparkled in a low-cut evening gown and the sapphire and ruby necklace she had inherited from her mother-in-law. Her successful dinners were her personal triumph, so that she was entitled to the little glow that made two red patches of excitement appear on her cheeks. But at that time, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, I was embarrassed by what I thought of as her smug materialism. It seemed to me that she cared only for appearances, for her silver, her crystal and china, and for nice behavior (she even tried to make me curtsey when I greeted her guests). She was in her middle thirties, in wonderful shape, radiant with health and the exercise and massage she regularly took: but I thought of her as sunk in hopeless middle age with no ideals left, if ever she had any, which I doubted.

      Except for me, everyone appreciated her dinner parties, including Yakuv whenever he was invited. In his crumpled, rumpled evening suit, he ate and drank like a person who is really hungry: which he probably was, and certainly Leonora’s exquisite dishes must have been a wonderful change from his stale coffee and doughnuts. After dinner he was persuaded to sit down at the piano, and this my parents made out to be a special favor to them, though before he left Rudy’s check had been tactfully slipped into his pocket. He played the way he ate—voraciously, flinging himself all over the keys, swaying, even singing under his breath and sometimes cursing in Polish. All this made him perspire profusely, so that afterward he could hardly respond to the applause because he was so busy wiping his face and the back of his neck. The enthusiasm was genuine—even unmusical people realized that they were in the presence of a true artist; and I could well imagine how Kitty had been so carried away the first time she heard him that she knelt at his feet.

      Kitty resented the fact that Yakuv performed for my parents’ guests, that he had to do so in order to earn money; and also that he himself didn’t resent it enough. He never complained, as she did constantly, about his lack of reputation and success. He probably didn’t think it worth complaining about. A bitter sardonic person by nature, he expected nothing better from fate, which he accepted as being terrible for everyone. When Kitty tried to make him say that he only went to Leonora’s parties because of Rudy’s check, he said, “Oh no, I go for the food—where else would I get veal in a cream sauce like Leonora’s?” And never losing an opportunity to provoke her, he added, “If only you learned to cook—just a few little dishes, one isn’t even expecting miracles—”

      “Oh yes, now you want me to be your cook-housekeeper! How you would hate it, hate it!”

      He laughed and said that on the contrary, a cook-housekeeper was just what he needed; but we both knew that he didn’t mean it because the three of us were on the same side—what I thought of as the artistic, the anti-bourgeois side.

      This was the way things stood with us when I went away to college and then, two years later, on my own quest—which I won’t go into now except to say that I may have been influenced by Yakuv’s view of life. I mean by his pessimism, his assumption that no hopes were ever fulfilled in this life; and while he left it at that, it may have been the reason why I, and others like myself, Jewish and secular, turned to Buddhism. For a while I wanted to be a Buddhist nun—it seemed a practical way out of the impasse of human life. But then I dropped the idea and got married instead.

      With all this happening, I became detached from my family in New York. I skimmed through their letters only to satisfy myself that everything was as it always had been with them. It was difficult to tell my parents’ letters apart: they had the same handwriting with traces of the spiky Germanic script in which they had first learned to write. The facts they presented were also the same—the concerts and plays they had liked or disliked, an additional maid to help Lina who had got old and suffered with her knees. Kitty in her scrawl did not report facts: only excitement at a painting or a flowering tree, anguished longing for a child, Yakuv’s impossible behavior. He of course did not write to me. I don’t suppose he wrote any letters; to whom would he write? Apart from our family, he seemed to have no personal connection with anyone.

      The only change they reported was that the brownstone in which Kitty and Yakuv had been renting was torn down. That whole midtown area was being built up with apartment blocks where only people with substantial incomes could afford to live. Kitty gave me a new address, downtown and in a part of the city that had once been commercial but had been moribund for years. When I went to see her on my return to New York, I found the warehouses and workshops still boarded up; the streets were deserted except for a few bundled-up figures hurrying along close to the walls. This made them look like conspirators, though they may only have been sheltering against the wind, which was blowing shreds of paper and other rubbish out of neglected trash cans. But some of the disused warehouses were in process of being revived, one floor at a time. In Kitty’s building there were two such conversions, and to get to hers I had to operate the pulleys of an elevator designed for crates and other large objects. Kitty’s loft, as she called it, seemed too large for domestic living though it had a makeshift kitchen with a sink and an old gas stove. Kitty’s own few pieces of furniture looked forlorn in all this space; even Yakuv’s piano—for his furniture too had come adrift here—seemed to be bobbing around as on an empty sea. He himself wasn’t there; he was on tour, things were better for him now and he was getting engagements around the country. And Kitty’s career also seemed to have taken off: she had rigged up a dark room in one corner of her space, and in the middle of the floor was a platform with two tree-stumps on it, surrounded by arc-lights and a camera on a tripod.

      Instead of going to my parents, I had come straight to her from the airport. I felt it would be easier to tell her about what I saw as the dead end of my youthful life—I had abandoned both my Buddhist studies and my marriage—and it was a relief to unburden myself to her. She listened to me in silence, which was really quite uncharacteristic of her. There were other changes: the floor had been swept, there were no dishes in the sink. After I had finished telling her whatever I had to tell, she murmured to me and stroked my hair. How right I had been to come to her first, I felt; I knew I could not expect the same understanding from my parents, whose lives had been so calm, stable, and fulfilled.

      My parents’ building and all its neighbors stood the way they had through all the past decades, as stately as the mansions that they had themselves displaced. The doormen were the same I had known throughout my childhood; so was the elevator man who took me up to where Leonora was waiting for me in the doorway. She held me to her bosom where I remembered to avoid the sharp edges of her diamond brooch. “But now it’s my turn!” Rudy clamored, caring nothing about having his good suit crumpled as I pressed myself against him, inhaling his after-shave and breath-freshener.

      But “No not here, darling,” Leonora said when I started to go into my room. My father cleared his throat—always a sign of embarrassment with him. But Leonora exuded a triumphant confidence: “Because of the piano,” she said, ushering me into the guest bedroom, which was considerably smaller than mine. I didn’t understand her: the piano had always been in the drawing room and was still there. “The other piano,” she said. “His.” She spoke as if we had already had a long conversation on the subject. But we had not, and it took me some time to realize that this other piano was Yakuv’s new one that Rudy had bought for him.

      Again skipping intermediate explanations—“It’s so noisy at Kitty’s,” Leonora said. “Could someone tell me why she has to live in a warehouse? He needs peace and quiet; naturally—an artist.”

      So there had been changes, and principally, I noticed, in Leonora. Her coiled hair was newly touched with blonde; her cheeks had those two spots of excitement I knew from her dinner parties. She kept taking deep breaths as if to contain some elation inside her.

      Rudy took me for a walk in Central Park. As usual on his walks, my father wore a three-piece herringbone suit, a Homburg hat, and carried a rolled umbrella like an Englishman. From time to time he pointed this umbrella in the direction of a tree, an ornamental