Читать книгу The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History - Michael Blumenthal - Страница 11

THREE BEDS

The boy, hardly nineteen, was the son of a famous Israeli sculptor David Yogev and his beautiful, much younger, wife Sarah. He was a beautiful young man as well, and, what’s more, intelligent and athletic in the bargain, possessed of the kind of calm and reticence even very few adult men could pride themselves on. So it was no wonder that older women—particularly those afflicted with unhappy marriages or sexually disinterested husbands—took an interest in him.

It was no wonder, also, that Daphna Feuerstein, who had seduced his far shyer and less attractive older brother, Etan, several months earlier, would begin to show an interest in him as well. The two boys’ bedrooms in their parents’ Tel Aviv apartment on En Harod Street were only inches apart and the temptation for an attractive woman of thirty-five to parade around in various states of undress in front of two hardly post-adolescent young men was simply too great to resist.

He had had girlfriends before—too many for a boy his age, some family friends insisted—but his father had been a young man of notoriously varied romantic experience, so it was no surprise that the branch hadn’t fallen far from the tree. His older brother, Etan, had also inherited a great deal from his father. But in his case it was the sensitive and artistic (and, insofar as the details of the quotidian life were concerned, mostly dysfunctional) side. Already a published poet and accomplished watercolor painter by his twentieth birthday, the young man was possessed of a radically otherworldly air, complete with a state of physical dishevelment and untidiness that made him far less attractive to women than his popular and exceedingly well-adjusted brother—skier and windsurfer par excellence, star student, budding veterinarian, and already what the American rock and roll legend Elvis Presley might have called a hunk a hunk of burning love.

Daphna Feuerstein had been Etan’s first lover, and it rendered matters no less untidy within the Yogev family that, in addition to being the mother of three young children, she was also David Yogev’s best friend’s daughter. She was also nearly fifteen years older than the young virgin she had so eagerly taken to bed, and nearly seventeen years older than his younger brother, to whom, she liked to think, she would have far less to teach.

Whatever it was she had, or didn’t have, to teach young Simon Yogev, she figured, she would have plenty of time to find out. She planned on this being a long relationship—far longer, at least, than the one with his brother Etan had been. As she saw it, it had more potential. She loved the scent of Simon’s body, the taste of his semen, she loved the soft furry hair on his legs and his lithe, muscular chest, and, perhaps above all, she loved the tight black curls on his head, loved running her fingers through them when they made love, and loved, even, the silence with which he responded to her forceful vocal demonstrations of ecstasy and pleasure.

Her estranged husband, Hanan, was an artistic and attractive man too—and had gradually become rich in the bargain. When they first met at a Tel Aviv nightclub, he had been a struggling jazz musician, a man who had an easy way with women and a difficult time paying the bills. Then, once their first son was born, he had decided that the combined life of a struggling artist and a family man wasn’t for him, and, spotting a void in Tel Aviv’s booming economy, had opened a bicycling messenger service catering to the new boom in internet and high-tech companies. Soon there was plenty of money to go with the music.

Their other two children, a boy and a girl named Rami and Timla, had been born in rapid succession, and soon thereupon there followed a large house in Tel Aviv’s airy and affluent Jaffa district. They seemed to have it all: looks, money, three beautiful children. The kind of couple others—Simon and Etan’s mother among them—pointed to with a combination of adulation and envy.

But, as was almost always the case, cracks and crevices were forming just beneath the smooth veneer of the enviable. Though hardly inexperienced during her adolescent years in Tel Aviv, Oslo and Budapest (her father was an Israeli-born Hungarian, her mother a Norwegian), Daphna Flinker had married young—at hardly twenty—and had her first child just before her twenty-second birthday. Two children and ten years later, with her husband spending more and more of his time and energy emptying bills from the pockets of bicycle messengers and less and less on her, she had begun to feel she was missing something—sex above all—and she knew that, just below the portrait of the loving, beautiful, and happily married young mother she presented to the world, another canvas was beginning to take shape: that of a embittered young woman filled with unrequited hungers and unanswered cravings.

She was also a painter, and not without a modicum of talent, so that her small initial intimacies with Etan Yogev often focused on their shared artistic passion, as well as her comfortable, almost familial, friendship with his parents. She saw him as a young Chagall, herself as Frieda Kahlo (she even looked, a bit, the part—a kind of Latino sabra); she perceived him as a wild mop of hair that needed taming and felt herself a temptress eager and willing to domesticate it.

Etan Yogev had had no experience in bed—and hardly any outside of it—and it was not without a strong feeling of awkwardness and insecurity that he had first allowed Daphna Flinker to guide his somewhat ambivalent member into her own body, and his lips against her lips. She enjoyed it—this teacherly role—it had been a very long time since she had been able to practice the art of sexual instruction, and there was something exciting and alluring about this—all that innocence in a single place! Yes, he was unkempt, disorderly, possessed of an air of distraction, but nonetheless—nonetheless!—there was something—how else could she put it?—something adorable about him. She imagined that he closely resembled his father as a young man . . . and just look what had become of him!

As for young Etan, he had found it confusing at first—so much closeness to an actual human being! He had been reading about such pleasures for so long—so many Madame Bovarys and Anna Kareninas, so many lustful and tragic romantic heroines (even, from America, the occasional Edna Pontellier, parrots urging her on from their cages)—that the actual experiencing of one hardly seemed as novel, or exciting, as one might have imagined for a young boy losing his innocence to an older, more experienced, woman. What’s more, his younger brother had always been the one the girls were interested in, allowing his own romantic life to remain abstract and imaginary. And that was just the way he might—had he reflected upon such matters at all—have preferred it.

The day he had kissed Daphna for the first time they had ridden their bikes to the Sea of Galilee for a swim. It was late August—just at the height of Israeli summer before the High Holy Days—and the air was crisp and clear, the water revivifying, even shockingly, cold. Even he couldn’t help notice how lovely she was—even lovelier in a bathing suit where one could see, or imagine, all of her. She was small and dark, with fiery, passionate eyes and a little-girl-like laugh that suggested someone far younger than her years. And then there was her skin—dark, well-oiled, beckoning. It seemed to him like the skin of the heroines of the great romantic novels. It made him timid, but it also made something just below his waist begin to tingle.

When they lay together on the grassy shore of Galilee after emerging from the water, she placed a hand on his leg, stroking the thin hairs. Then she began kissing his neck, caressing his feet with her own. It felt good—no, it felt very good. And—awkwardly, timidly, ineptly at first—he responded, with her more than willing to show the way.

David and Sarah Yogev, like many members of the Israeli artistic and intellectual elite, were libertines insofar as their children’s sexual experience was concerned. So it was not so much disturbing that their almost twenty-one-year-old son was sleeping with their best friend’s married daughter in their house as it was bizarre—particularly for Sarah Yogev—to be suddenly awoken to the pleasure-induced moans of a woman whose three young children and their father she had fed at her table just weeks before. She wasn’t sure what she felt—Was it betrayal? Jealousy? Merely confusion? But one thing she knew for certain: She didn’t like it. Why couldn’t her older son, like his younger brother before him, simply choose an appropriate young virgin with whom to first experience the pleasures of the flesh?

But, then, she reasoned, nothing else about her elder son had ever been appropriate—why should this be? She too had had her share of wild times, after all. As a twenty-five-year-old girl, she had gone to Paris for the express purpose of seducing the twenty-five year-older famous sculptor who was to become the boys’ father. And there had been plenty of amorous adventures prior to that as well. So why deny her young sons theirs? And, after several months, urged on by the obvious bemusement and vicarious pleasure her husband felt at this turn of events, she had even begun to get used to the idea.

“Elle a quand même un beau cul,” David Yogev would remark in French, suggesting that certain of the more admirable portions of Daphna’s anatomy had not entirely escaped his attention. “Non, pas du tout,” his wife was forced to admit. Her husband, she recalled, had always been particularly fond of nice asses. Before gravity had begun to exact its inevitable toll, she had even been possessed of one of her own.

As a young couple in Paris—or, rather, as a young woman and a significantly older man—she and David often sat in cafés and played what they affectionately called “the three-bed game.” Each one would name an artist or intellectual in Tel Aviv whom they knew (a man for him, a woman for her) and then—by going through a list of the lovers they each knew their selection to have had—they could usually determine that the two people they had chosen were never more than three beds apart! So incestuous was the world of the Israeli intelligentsia! So one had to admit that the story of Daphna Flinker and Etan Yogev seemed to fit right in.

The real trouble, however, only began when Daphna’s attentions and ministrations began to shift from Etan to his younger brother. It had begun rather subtly—with her often sitting beside Simon, rather than Etan, at the dinner table, followed by what seemed longer and longer periods, during her visits with the children to the Yogev’s Galilee week-end home; that the two of them were absent from the house altogether. Then there were the glances, the seemingly accidental touches, all the signs Sarah Yogev could so well recognize from her own younger years.

Daphna and Simon, of course, had done their best to make it seem as if there had been a full stop, followed by a long ellipse rather than a mere segue, that separated her relationships with the two brothers. The facts, however, belied such an explanation. Simon Yogev well remembered the first night Daphna Flinker had come to his bed in his parents’ Tel Aviv apartment. There had been a quiet dinner downstairs—his mother’s famous Hungarian goulash followed by her equally famous cheese-and-apricot strudel—during which he couldn’t help notice that Daphna’s gaze, rather than being directed at his older brother, was perpetually fixed on him, and that, from across the table, her feet brushed against his more frequently than mere chance might have allowed.

That night, sleeping rather fitfully, he woke to the rustling of his own sheets and the warm, not unfamiliar, feeling of a woman’s flesh beside him, and then of equally warm lips descending his chest toward his still-sleeping member, accompanied by a feminine voice whispering sweetly in Hebrew, Ahuvi Simon… ahuvi, ahuvi, ahuvi. What had followed from that was the inevitable—a night filled with such fantastically lubricated lust and tenderness that not even a glimmer of fraternal loyalty could interfere with its pleasures. In the morning he would have to, as some writer his father liked—perhaps it was the Frenchman Zola?—had written, “swallow his large toad of nausea and regret,” in any event. There was now little question as to what Daphna Flinker’s real desires had been: Simon’s brother had merely been a way station en route to her actual goal, and now she had attained it. But, even before this, a certain unspoken tension between the brothers had long been in the air—how could it not have been? It would be devastating to his older brother, Simon thought guiltily (he was well acquainted with the story of Cain and Abel), from whom he had already stolen most of the future family glory, to have his first lover taken from him by his brother as well?

She would simply break up with Etan, she promised him, she would tell him what perhaps had become obvious to him already—that, painting or no painting, they really didn’t have very much in common, that she didn’t really feel the relationship was good for either of them in the long run, and so on and so forth. (How then, Simon wondered, would she explain why the relationship was good for the two of them?)

But beneath Simon Yogev’s veneer of otherworldliness there lay rather acute powers of intuition and observation. He had sensed Daphna’s impending flight from his sheets in favor of his brothers’ even before it had actually taken place. He may have looked like Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, but he was possessed of his father’s foresight and intuition. And he could feel, nightly, the sense of Daphna’s flesh, as well as her attentions, unwinding from his own.

Living in two almost entirely separate worlds—Etan in the world of intellect and art, Simon in that of sports and women—whatever rivalry might ever have existed between the brothers previously had been contained mostly below the surface. At times, Etan had even ventured a foray into his younger brother’s territory—as, for example, several years earlier, when he had taken up swimming and bicycling with a vengeance, managing to join the annual summer swim all the way across the Galilee. In the process, he had also developed a body far more muscular and sculpted physique than his disheveled, unkempt coiffure and otherworldly gaze might have suggested.

But each seemed dominant within his own sphere, into which the other dared not tread, and Simon Yogev had always taken it for granted than his older brother—if he could somehow survive the daily tasks of paying the bills and doing his laundry—was heir apparent to their father’s artistic gifts, even if not to his capacities with women and soccer balls.

So that Etan Yogev’s little romance with Daphna Flinker, in addition to providing his mother with a few sleepless nights, had provided a not entirely unwelcome realignment of the status quo, and that, if nothing else, had provided Sarah Yogev with a certain welcome relief: Perhaps her older son, after all, was not doomed to a life of being cared for by his mother, or by some doughty, desperate young woman sufficiently enamored of his artistic gifts to overlook the absence of most others. Perhaps he would still grow up to be “normal,” whatever that meant.

So, when the transition from the older brother’s bed to the younger’s openly took place, the fault lines between fantasy and reality suddenly split open as well, and, with them, the relative peace and contentment that had, for some months, characterized the Yogev family’s winter and early spring came to an end. Now it was not only Simon’s potentially wrecked future (Daphna Flinker, Sarah Yogev feared, was ripe for motherhood yet once again), but his older brother’s apparently fractured ego that needed tending to, not to mention the Cold War-like mini-détente that now erected a kind of psychological Berlin Wall between the two brothers’ sleeping quarters as well as in their day-to-day relations.

Etan, to put it simply, was heartbroken, his brother guilt-ridden, their briefly shared concubine triumphantly radiant.

Like someone moving backwards through the seven stages of grief, Sarah Yogev slowly moved from her initial state of shock and disbelief, followed reluctantly by acceptance and hope, to profound depression, followed by unmitigated anger at her younger son and his much older girlfriend, and then by a profound sense of guilt toward her fragile and hyper-sensitive older son for having allowed the liaison with a so much older—and still married!—woman to go on to begin with. Now the bargaining stage was about to begin, but it was not yet clear to her where on the table her chips lay, or whether, perhaps, simple denial might be the wiser course.

One thing she decidedly didn’t want, she kept reminding herself as she was once again confronted—at an even higher volume—with Daphna Flinker nightly (and occasionally mid-afternoon) orgasmic elocutions from upstairs, was a grandchild at this point in her life, much less three step-grandchildren to go with it. So she rather unsubtly placed a package of condoms right beside Simon’s bed and another in the bathroom cabinet where he kept his shaving things. There were no lengths, she reminded herself, a desperate woman wouldn’t go to in order to hold onto a man she loved . . . particularly if that man happened to be only a boy.

As for David Yogev, his sincere concern over his older son’s fragile and wounded ego was somewhat mitigated by the bemusement—and, indeed, admiration—with which he observed his friend’s daughter navigate, and escape seemingly unscathed from, the various romantic minefields that lay in her path. He had always been intrigued by rebels and anti-moralists—Raskolnikov had always been his favorite literary character, along with Julien Sorel—having long been one himself. This girl was not merely, he thought (a small but undeniable glimmer of paternal envy running through him) a marvelous conquest . . . she had hutzpah to boot. She knew what she wanted, or at least desired, and was determined to get it. How convincingly could a man like himself argue with that?

Clearly, his younger son, guilt and all, was hardly unhappy with these new amorous developments either. Hardly were his university classes over for the summer, but that he and Daphna set off for two weeks in Rome, the kind of “in your face” romantic interlude Sarah Yogev attempted to mitigate the effects of upon her jilted and fragile older son by taking him, along with her husband and their younger daughter, on a two-week vacation to Provence. A friend of theirs, an Israeli politician of some note, had recently purchased a marvelous mansion there, on a cliff directly overlooking the Mediterranean. At the very least, Sarah thought, she could offer her sensitive older son something “poetic” to offset the more fleshly pleasures his younger brother was so obliviously occupied with in Rome.

As for Daphna Flinker, the weeks in Rome with her young lover—and without the burden of her three children, whom she had left with their grieving father—were a welcome reprieve from the life she had, it seemed, so eagerly abandoned. They, of course, visited the Coliseum and the Pantheon; kissed in front of the Trevi Fountain; strolled among the labyrinthine alleys of Trastevere, and amused themselves at the rows upon rows of washing strung out from the apartments in Mama-Leone tradition. They picnicked in the Roman Forum, and, after making a compulsory donation to the monks who guarded it, discretely made love in the Capuchin cemetery. It hardly bothered them when their landlady, a former Benedictine nun who, they detected from the outset, looked disapprovingly upon what she accurately perceived as their difference in age, finally threw them out, finding the late-night sounds of their lovemaking a bit too much for her and her ailing husband to take.

Luckily for the young couple, there was a vacant—and, given their limited budget, inexpensively priced—room available at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, in the very precious Palazzo Falconieri at via Giulia 1, where a friend of Peter Vajda’s, a Hungarian-Israeli painter by the name of Sinai Sulzberger, had recently become Director. This allowed the young lovers to roam the very same corridors where such eminent Hungarians as the expert of Greek mythology, Károly Kerényi, the philosopher György Lukacs, the writer Antal Szerb, the poet Sándor Weöres, and the composer Zoltán Kodály—some of them even Jews!—had once walked. So that their second week—with those around them seeming to revel in, rather than being disconcerted by, the late-night arias of Daphna Flinker—passed even more happily than had the first.

Simon’s older brother, meanwhile, was enjoying the French coast and its many visual and culinary pleasures, and—surrounded by friends and family—his thoughts returned only infrequently to his former girlfriend. There were, after all, poems to be written, paintings to be made. The pleasures of the flesh had been intense, but brief. Nonetheless, a wound had opened within him—perhaps more a wound of repudiation than of loss, more one of wounded pride than of lost pleasure. For once, he had briefly triumphed over his younger brother—and, what’s more, on the amorous battlefield where his brother had reigned so supreme! But now, that, too, was lost, and he was forced to reassume his previous persona as the bedazzled genius who cared little for earthly pleasures.

The family returned from their Provençal journey, and the young lovers from their romantic two weeks in Rome, at virtually the same time, so that the Yogevs and what had by now become their “extended” family—including not only Daphna, but her three children, somewhat reluctantly repossessed from their increasingly depressed father—once again reconvened at Galilee for what had now unofficially become the “anniversary” of Daphna Flinker’s quasi-conjugal entry into the family circle—or, it might be more accurately stated, the family’s entry into hers.

Unlike the previous year, it had been a torridly hot summer, even for the Middle East, the Galilee being no exception, and some of the obvious tension that had by now more or less solidified between the two brothers was slightly dissipated by periodic sojourns to the lake for refreshment—mostly in groups of two or three, with the two young lovers, of course, usually choosing to bicycle on their own, leaving the children in the care of Sarah Yogev or her young daughter Katya, who, at the age of twelve, had already developed something of a maternal instinct. Few, if any, words were exchanged between the brothers, while their mother did her utmost to constantly extol the enormous pleasures of their trip to France, thereby hoping to assure that the ever-turning wheels of jealousy and envy would be lubricated in the other direction as well.

On the eve of the holiday itself, ever hopeful of some reconciliation between the brothers and of reestablishing an atmosphere of family harmony, Sarah Yogev proposed that they all go to nearby Tiberias for a staged Hebrew-language performance of The Tragedy of Man, the dramatic poem by the famed nineteenth-century Hungarian Imre Madach that had often evoked comparison’s to Milton’s Paradise Lost. With the exception of David Yogev, who opted to stay home and work on his newly commissioned bust of Yitzhak Rabin, and Daphna, who felt uncomfortable about leaving the children in the care of someone who entered all too easily into a state of artistic trance, the others reluctantly agreed. Neither of the boys wanted to further disappoint their mother, who had seemed more than a bit edgy and depressed of late.

Not that the Madach play—Etan, himself hardly in an elevated mood, thought to himself—was a particularly uplifting choice of entertainment. Taking place after Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden, in it Adam dreams the course of modern history, which only serves to fill him with despair. He, Eve, and Lucifer then take on different historical roles as they pass through ancient Rome, the Crusades, Kepler’s Prague, revolutionary Paris, and finally, a post-historical time when ecological disaster has nearly destroyed the world.

Once he has learned of the degradation that awaits humanity, Adam considers suicide, but when he discovers Eve is pregnant, places his faith in God and the future. In all the play’s scenes and anticipatory dreams, Adam, Eve, and the archfiend Lucifer are the chief and constantly recurring personae dramatis. As the play nears its end, Adam, despairing of his race, tries to commit suicide. But, at the critical moment Eve informs him that she is about to be a mother, and the play ends with Adam lying prostrate before God, who encourages him to hope and trust.

Etan had read the play several times—Simon, in fact, had read it as well, (albeit reluctantly; it had been assigned in his Central European Literature class) and looked upon the evening ahead with a dour countenance and a sagging spirit. But, he thought to himself, after all the obvious pain he had caused his mother and brother, going along was the very least he could do. What, after all, was a mere wasted evening in the greater scheme of things?

It was in this manner that Daphna Flinker and David Yogev, after Daphna had put the children to bed, found themselves alone in the Yogev’s large kitchen later that evening, enjoying a quiet supper of Norwegian salmon, potato kugel, and green beans, expertly prepared in advance by Sarah, and a fine bottle of Gewurztraminer from the nearby Golan Heights Winery, owned by a friend of David’s who had made his fortune in South African diamonds.

Daphna had always found David Yogev, even at seventy-two, an intriguing man. There was something terribly dignified about him, so cavalier, so—how else could she put it?—Old Worldly. He seemed to her like an aging Don Juan, a slightly pot-bellied Casanova, of times past. Lord Byron, had he lived to an old age, might well have come to resemble him. “L’chaim,” the older man toasted, clicking his glass against hers.

“L’chaim,” she replied, smiling. He was certainly still an attractive man—the kind of man who, no matter how advanced his age, still adored women—but now, against the candlelight alone with his older son’s paintings everywhere around them—he seemed even more attractive, even more diabolically cunning and wise.

There was much a woman could learn from older men, she had always been told, and he, no doubt, had already taught his share of younger women a great deal. Suddenly, she could feel her feet moving against his beneath the table. She could feel the pillows moving beneath her head once more. He was gazing, paternally yet seductively, into her eyes from across the table. Slowly but surely, he could feel her body, almost of its own accord, begin to rise, slowly heading toward yet another bed.