When We Danced on Water: A Novel

By Evan Fallenberg

A conversation between a Tel Aviv waitress and her elderly customer sparks a journey of healing in this compelling novel by the author of Light Fell.

At eighty-four, Teo, one of the world’s most influential choreographers, is ready to withdraw from the bombast and romance surrounding his long and illustrious career. But then he meets Vivi, a waitress at a Tel Aviv café, and the slumbering passions of his youth are rouses once more. Suddenly and unexpectedly, his desire for a woman’s touch, his anguished memories of World War II, and his complex, soulful engagement with dance all come rushing back. Vivi’s life will change, too, as Teo’s affection forces her to confront her guilt over an illicit relationship during her days as a soldier. Soon their interactions with art, their very investment in living, will reawaken ghosts of their painful, suppressed pasts—from Warsaw to Copenhagen, from Berlin to Tel Aviv—that cry out for forgiveness and peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062033437

Book preview

Chapter 1

He said, Where’s Rona.

She said, Who’s Rona.

These were, in fact, their first words, though neither would have remembered them even a week later, had anyone asked. And the issue of Rona was never solved, since there had never been a Rona. Maybe she was Nora, or Nola, or Ola, or Ora; he was always getting it wrong. But she had brought his coffee the way he liked it—strong, one sugar, hot foamed milk on the side, along with a glass of water with ice and a slice of lemon—and so that morning when she had appeared at his table, this new she, he was already missing someone he had never really cared for beyond his cup of coffee.

Their encounter took place in a Tel Aviv coffee bar so small that it cannot be called a restaurant and barely even a café. When disassembled at the end of the day, chairs piled on tables and stools upturned on the bar, it squeezes into an area no bigger than a closet. But this coffee bar is in an old shopping arcade, once newfangled and popular, that stands near Ibn Gabirol and King Saul streets, occupying a niche, an alcove, that most people run past to get to the medical center at the back, the cosmetician, the sex shop, or the ballet studio in the basement. Regulars come here to swap complaints with Yossi, the proprietor, while enjoying the brew from his excellent Italian coffee machine, but others notice nothing more than the fake tulips budding from tiny vases on each table as they whip by.

Where’s Rona? he asked, tilting his head back and fixing a watery gaze on her disheveled face.

Who’s Rona? she asked, startled not by the question but by his eyes, one blue, the other green. They made her feel that the floor was gently tilting.

Never mind, he said, and he gave her instructions on how to prepare his order.

Teo stops for coffee late in the morning on the days he now comes to supervise, advise, or merely watch the dancers of the Tel Aviv Ballet; he no longer teaches. After he has unlocked the studio doors, turned on the lights, aired the place (there is always a below-ground mustiness one gets used to in minutes), he checks his desk for mail or messages left for him by the ballet company administrator, then heads upstairs for coffee with a pile of paperwork and dance magazines in hand. Within just a few days Vivi knows to have Yossi start preparing the coffee the minute she sees Teo pass by on his way downstairs, so that his order will be ready by the time he reemerges.

Chapter 2

When Vivi leaves the coffee bar she never takes the short, direct route home. First, in nearly any weather, she steps outside the shopping arcade, parks herself on the nearest bench—a slatted wooden affair that the Tel Aviv municipality occasionally paints green—and smokes one of the three daily cigarettes she allows herself. She stretches her legs out as far as they will go, wriggles her toes, watches passersby and birds, and enjoys each deep inhalation of her Winstons. When she has had her fill of smoking and looking, she rises slowly, as if with regret, and chooses a direction. Sometimes she will walk to the right because the woman who just walked by was wearing a beautiful pair of shoes, and sometimes she will walk to the left because there are a few clouds in that direction. There are days when she closes her eyes and spins around, then chooses left or right, and days when she stands waiting for a sign, any sign, and does not move until that sign appears. It always does, though once it took a full five minutes, during which a little boy stopped to ask if she were lost.

Then she begins her perambulations, wending her way from street to street in concentric, uneven circles. She walks eastward down Kaplan Street past the peaked-roof houses with flowerboxes built by the Templars, toward Azrieli Center, where she bends her head backward to stare at the edge of the triangular tower as it spikes the sky. She walks north to the open emptiness of Rabin Square. She walks west under ficus trees dangling vines like moss to the shade of the Royal Poincianas at Masaryk Square. And mostly she walks south, where Tel Aviv really happens.

She has what she calls her Theme Walks, still capricious but with a motif. So there is Scent Walk, where she picks up on the smells of coffee and steamed milk, falafel and shaved lamb’s meat, hyssop seasoning and roasting cashews and coriander and chicken on a spit and even certain people, leaning into their wakes as they pass; there is Foliage Walk, for noticing and naming the great many flowering plants she encounters; there are Jewish Walks, mostly at holiday times, when she counts Stars of David and synagogues and Orthodox passersby and Chabad emissaries and old men selling skullcaps on overturned orange crates. She has Graffiti Walks and Merchandise Walks and Architecture Walks and People Walks. Her most frequent are Baby Walks, featuring soft, cuddly babies of every color and size and women with bellies in various stages of pregnancy. On bad days she has Ugly Walks: dog shit on the sidewalk, people spitting, honking cars, the junkies and pimps near the old Central Bus Station. No matter what kind of walk she is having, though, she is aware of the stunning, relentless blue sky and green leaves nearly all year round. She wanders past old stores—Zion the Tailor, Madame Julie’s Institute of Beauty, a hardware store offering Hebrew labor—and shiny new places, their names written in English only. She cuts through parking lots and apartment buildings and hotels in order to reach backstreets, she emerges at the seashore and traverses beach after beach, each with its own crowd and style. There are people she waves at along her way—some whom she knows, some just because they seem pleasant—and at times she stops to exchange a word about the weather or the traffic or a cute baby or an elegant dress. She talks more to women than to men, since the men usually misinterpret her intentions, but children get more of her attention than anyone else. She walks like this for an hour, sometimes two, until finally she has had her fill of the city and can go in peace and silence to her apartment.

This ritual began years earlier, in a different country and climate, and continued quite naturally, almost compulsively, after her dramatic return to Israel. Mostly, in the twenty years that have passed since then, she has not missed a day, whether she has just finished work in a bicycle repair shop, a nursery school, a pastry shop, a library—after all her jobs, no matter whether she spends her days on her feet or at a desk, she walks, clears her mind and fills it up again, tries to observe but not to think or even feel. Her footsteps grow slower as she approaches home; she smiles less. There will be no messages on the answering machine save those from her worried mother, Leah; there will be breakfast dishes to wash and rumpled sheets either to stretch taut or nap on, there will be walls taunting her loneliness and framed photographs flaunting other people’s happiness and her own, long ago.

Maybe her flatmate, Pincho, will be home and awake, maybe not. She likes finding him there, a genial, patient presence, a good listener, someone who, like Vivi herself, has few plans outside work and welcomes time-consuming disruptions, always ready for a new project, an adventure. She loves, too, his perfect, effortless male beauty, the way every feature seems expertly crafted. After nearly two years sharing a flat, that beauty still catches her under the rib cage, tingles in her fingers and toes. She wipes her face of all interest or attentiveness but secretly she watches every movement and gesture: the way his pale gray eyes grow luminous with excitement; the way his smile spreads slowly, evenly, across his face until no corner of it remains untouched; the nervous thrum of his fingers when about to meet a member of his family; and the tightening of his countenance—eyes that narrow, lips that purse, all of this puzzling to Vivi—when he realizes that a man or a woman has taken notice of his looks and is wooing him.

She lets herself into the apartment and knows at once she is alone there. Pincho’s door is ajar, the flat is fresh with open windows and cross breezes. His favorite mug and another—one neither she nor he drinks from—stand drying on the countertop. She peers into the waste bin and sees tissues, the glint of a shiny packet farther down. She assumes it is a condom but she closes the lid before she can tell for sure. She glances about the kitchen, uncertain what to do now or for the next bundle of hours that stand before her like a dark thicket of pines.

Chapter 3

The spotlights are blue and gold, the air around him speckled with floating gems that sparkle and shimmer like bubbles in his wake. Dark figures—his fellow dancers—crowd the stage, but they are silent and still, and, like the enraptured audience, focused completely, solely, on him. Indeed, he feels himself to be the source of all the air and light and energy in the great theater, as if he had sucked it away from everyone and everything else, gathered it in from every corner of the cavernous hall. His feet effortlessly negotiate a complicated routine but his body simply twirls, spinning evenly under a powdery trail of stars. He neither tires nor dizzies. His arms levitate to shoulder height and bob there on waves of air.

A man in full dress uniform joins him onstage, barely visible at the edge of a gold spotlight. He continues to spin as the expressionless man sidles closer, stealing into the arc of his dance. The man presents him with a rose, whose scent reaches him and catches a ride on a twirl. He still watches the stars but is also, always, aware of the intruder just beyond his vision.

The uniformed man raises a gloved hand and the dancer halts, his back to the officer. The spotlights dim and the stars flicker and fade. He can feel the officer close behind, the man’s breath on his neck. Quite suddenly the officer rams the rose, now thick and hard, inside him from behind. It penetrates and pierces, and he feels the thorny, leafy flower climb higher and higher in his body, snaking past his heart and through his lungs until it rises through his throat and pries open his mouth, wider and wider, climbing all the while so that his head swings back on his hinged neck and the rose pushes upward past his gaping mouth, growing and smothering and growing and smothering until the tips of the petals tickle the ebony sky.

Teo awakens before dawn, more stiff and sore than usual. With difficulty he closes his mouth by cracking his jaw sideways. He catches a sidelong glimpse of Nelly in her nightdress standing at the edge of the bed as she gently lifts his head, with its thick and unruly mane of white hair, and slides under it the freshly plumped pillow. He stares up at the ceiling as he catches his breath and regains his bearings. After a minute he asks quietly, in Polish, Was I … moaning again?

Nelly, patient and stoic as an old dog, nods. She turns and walks silently from the room, but Teo can hear her morning sounds from the kitchen and knows she will return soon with a cup of steaming tea and a glazed-glass bowl of sugar cubes and two butter cookies on a china plate. It is too early for the tiny single rose in the porcelain bud vase or the linen napkin; those will arrive with breakfast, precisely at seven. He knows the night-darkened sky keeps Nelly from breaking routine, that as a creature of habit she will refuse to alter their schedule a whit until it has become perfectly clear that these early mornings of fear and pain have in fact become their routine; that each day, before morning’s official arrival, he will awaken parched and cheerless and contorted and that she, his faithful housekeeper for twenty-five years, will bring him tea and comfort on a tray.

He does not tell her of his nightly dream; their intimacy, though recently expanded due to his increasing frailty, has always been minimal. In fact, apart from discussing the weekly letters he receives from his sister, Margot, they talk little beyond the technicalities of their mutual existence: the daily menu, the weekly schedule, the rare visit. When he was younger, healthier, still choreographing, she kept the house silent and guest-free to enable his creativity, and managed the household with a bare minimum of questions in spite of her faltering, primitive Hebrew, a handicap with shopkeepers and handymen. Even now that he no longer creates and few people come to call, their cloistered existence renounces change, their quietude turns its back to noise and life.

A tall eucalyptus tree in the garden strums its soft, drooping leaves against the bedroom window. It is too early for the birds, those that did not travel south to the Nile Delta or the Red Sea; only an occasional car horn in the distance reminds him he is in the heart of Tel Aviv. As the sky lightens he can tell it will be cold, colder than yesterday, that they will probably skip their afternoon stroll today, too.

Nelly enters with his predawn repast, a small surprise: hot milk it is, with a touch of rum and sugar. She places the tray on his nightstand and helps slide him into a sitting position. The smell of camphor reaches his nose. Nelly, he asks, is your tooth hurting again? She lowers her eyes, embarrassed to be caught. Really, Nelly, this is absurd. You do not need to be with me every second of the day, I can manage by myself. If you put it off any longer you will find yourself terribly ill. She stands at his bedside as he lectures her between tiny sips of hot milk. Make an appointment for this afternoon. Promise me you will go today.

The camphor scent hovers above him even after Nelly has silently removed his tray to the kitchen.

Chapter 4

A little makeup, Teo says on a windy morning three weeks later as Vivi approaches his table, the table that is always his first choice: not too close to the bar and the noise from the coffee machine, not in the farthest row of tables jutting into the shopping arcade.

What? she says, startled. Until now barely a word has passed between them.

A little makeup wouldn’t kill you, he continues. A light foundation. A touch of rouge. You have fine features, but who can see them?

She finishes placing his order in front of him. The coffee cup clatters in its saucer.

Her chin rises slightly before she speaks, but her hand flutters nervously as she curls a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. Save it for your ballerinas, she says about to reel away from him.

Wait … ah, I’ve forgotten your name—

Vivi.

Vivi? Unusual. What is it short for?

With polite impatience she says, I started life as Varda. Awful name. I’ve been Vivi since I was a kid.

But Varda is Rose. And what could be lovelier than that? My mother was Rosa.

That’s nice, she says, stifling a frown, but I have to—

Your boss tells me you’re an artist, he says in a rush, as if his words were hands trying to encircle her.

She shifts her weight to one foot, no longer poised to run. I’m a waitress, she says flatly.

He ignores her response and her tone and asks cheerfully, What sort of art do you do?

What sort of … ? She sighs in exasperation, trapped. I paint. I embroider. I make collages, she says, bending back a finger as she lists each addition. I whittle, I sculpt. I photograph. I sketch, I bead, I weave. I do video art. And right now I’m learning glassblowing. That’s not the whole list, but you get the picture.

Well, he says, leaning back in his chair as if having been blasted backward, that’s … how shall I put it? Impressive.

She smiles for the first time, not sweetly. Then why don’t you seem impressed? she asks.

It’s just that … I have spent my entire life in one art form: dance. Oh, dance certainly incorporates a lot of other arts, but really, when you come down to it, I’ve taken a very narrow path while yours is … as broad as can be imagined. In fact, I cannot imagine it.

She glances around as if hoping to find customers needing her, but in fact, his is the only occupied table. She turns her full attention to their conversation. From your tone I’d say you’re not impressed, you’re actually quite critical.

He laughs like an old man, dry and doleful. Am I truly that transparent?

To me, yes, she says. I’m pretty good at reading people.

Add that to the list of your arts, he says.

Let me guess: you believe that a person can only be good at one art, the one he throws himself into wholly. Which makes someone like me—

A dabbler.

Not serious. Someone who wastes time and potential.

Vivi, he says as if affirming the fact of her name, I never would have said this, but since you seem to crave honesty then yes, with that kind of breadth you can never really be sublimely good at anything.

Sublimely good, she repeats. That’s beautiful. I wouldn’t actually mind being sublimely good if it weren’t for the downside. She places one hand on the tabletop and leans closer in to his face. With breadth you get variety. You get excitement. Fun. You never get bored.

He purses his lips and gestures to the chair across from him, inviting her to sit. She glances at Yossi, who is reading a newspaper behind the bar, then pulls out the chair and sits.

You know, he says, I studied with Balanchine in the early fifties, when he was just making his mark. Do you know who Balanchine was?

A great choreographer, she says.

The greatest. Beyond the dances, he created modern ballet itself. But he was not just looking to create the perfect dance or the perfect dancer, he was in search of no less than the truth. His quest seemed almost like a religion at times. Did you know that Mr. Balanchine frowned on his dancers marrying? He expected them to stay married to the ballet forever. I suppose that was a leftover from Imperial Russia, but still you would be surprised how many of his dancers did just that. He was profoundly disappointed when one of them let a romance get the best of her, and much worse when they got pregnant. Ballet is a way of life that leaves little room for anything else. But any art is like that, if you take it seriously enough.

She is shaping a response, but he is suddenly eager to share something and so she remains silent, attentive.

Those Russians! he says with a smile of disarming charm. They were peerless. I had an adagio class with Pierre Vladimiroff—he was a principal with Diaghilev and was the great Pavlova’s last partner—and Madame Danilova’s variations class, about dancing the classics. These were the classics, but she made them so fresh that everything seemed new. I had a class, too, with Mr. B. himself, a class in precision. We spent hours on the exact fifth position, on transition steps like the pas de bourrée. Those teachers demanded perfection, nothing less. It was glorious. But it was his choreography that defined his true greatness. He burned off all the lyric romanticism so that what remained was chunks of music and pure movement that he heaped one on top of the other. He used constantly changing rhythms, he pushed his dancers beyond the confines of the music. And this was all new, new, new! Can you imagine? He was changing the very way we look at the human body and how it moves! Do you see? These are not achievements that come from dabbling. Only from complete and utter devotion.

He is nearly out of breath, and flushed with excitement. His eyes are shining.

Although she is fully aware that she is being upbraided, it feels to Vivi like a privilege of sorts to hear these stories firsthand. Still, she cannot resist asking what she

Reviews for When We Danced on Water

[booksandblintzes · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Thank you to Goodreads, I received this book in an ARC giveaway :) I enjoyed the author's writing style and appreciated the uniqueness of his characters. The highlight of this book for me was his descriptions of the ballet, and the attitudes of his characters towards their art. I thought that some of the story-telling was choppy, and it undermined my sympathy for his character's experiences. I was surprised by the sparseness of his language in telling these stories compared with the lush detail in other parts of the book. (Although the writing style reminds me very much of other works by Israeli authors and Hebrew books I have read). It was a relative quick read, with some good characters and ideas about the world of art that will stay with me.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This slight novel is an intricate and revealing pas de deaux, a captivating performance. It is told in turns by Teo, an 85 year old former dancer and famous choreographer, and Vivi, a 42 year old artist/dabbler/waitress who is lost herself and yet inspires and ennervates Teo in ways he hasn't expected in years. As their relationship deepens, they tell not only of their presents and their differing philosophical stance on creation and art but also of their pasts and the terrible paralysing wounds they each suffered.Passion, obsession, and the art that can so easily inspire the one to cross the line and become the other weave throughout the narrative as the reader learns of Vivi's failed love affair with German Gentile Martin and of Teo's devastating debut dance in Berlin in 1939. Both the characters, the one who survived World War II and the one who was born long after it was over, are irretrievably damaged by Hitler and anti-Semitism, haunted by their former lives in Berlin. Vivi moved to a divided Berlin after her compulsory service for Israel so that she could follow boyfriend Martin, a man for whom she was prepared to sacrifice everything. But she is unable to reconcile the Martin who worked on a kibbutz in Israel with the Martin she joins in Germany, choosing to wander the city, drawn to the wall where she meets a dwarf who regales her with the terrible, hateful past of the city. So affected by the reality of this place so steeped in hatred and ghosts, she ultimately flees broken and devastated. Teo had also lived in Berlin, an unwilling prisoner trapped by the war and by desire. His is not the usual WWII tale of concentration camps and horrors too terrible to recount. His terrors were also damaging and life altering though. As a young boy he had gone from Poland to Denmark to dance, heading to Berlin on the eve of WWII against his family and friends' advice to dance his debut with the Royal Danish Ballet. After the performance, on the eve of Germany's invasion of his Polish homeland, detained because of his Polish nationality and in danger because of his Jewish heritage, he is rescued by a Nazi officer with an appreciation for art and dance. And so begins his acquaintance with obsession and possession.Teo and Vivi's stories intertwine seamlessly and their friendship with each other develops carefully as they debate and spark off of each other. Exquisite, lyrical, and intense, Fallenberg has captured the rhythms of dance in his language, the ability to inspire, to leap, and to inhabit the stars for brief flashes of time. His descriptions are visual and graceful. His musings on art and its creation through his characters' lives are fascinating as is the role of passion and singlemindedness. This is an impressive novel, tightly constructed and yet easily accessible. There are scenes of great horror but they are eased somewhat by the remove of the past and the healing of the present in the form of Teo and Vivi's growing relationship. An impressive accomplishment, the tale is riveting. The ending is a tad neatly coincidental but overall, this is a strong and gorgeous novel.