“The master’s ballets deal with many things. With how right and proper it is that there should be a difference between rich and poor and with how wonderful it is to be out in the countryside. But above all they are about love, about love’s being all around us and being overwhelmingly beautiful or overwhelmingly sad but always something to do with over, with above, and never anything to do with below and most definitely never, ever anything below the waist.

  “These dances quite naturally lent a distinct character to our collective madness, and naturally we all went around, even on the way home from the theater, with our toes turned out and a swagger in our step and traces of greasepaint on our faces to show people that love clung to us, that in each of us there resided something of a prince, a princess, a peasant girl, or a devil—that in us, at any rate, the precious metals were to be found.

  “But with Andreas it was different; with him it was not powder and paint. He did not play a prince, he was a prince. Offstage, of course, I mainly saw him practicing, always with the wild intensity that stems from knowing one is doing the only right thing in this life, for the suspicion harbored by some of our number that the theater was actually a side track that ran off at a tangent, this never occurred to Andreas. He was convinced that every glissade brought him closer to the essence of life. But when he was not practicing I think that his life revolved around women; indeed I am certain that it revolved around women. Not around any one woman in particular, though—more like the opposite: it revolved around women as an ideal. I recall him as being chivalrous; when I call my image of him to mind I see him holding doors for the ballerinas and carrying their bags and helping them with technical problems, but above all I see him dancing with them, not as a dancer playing the part of a romantic hero but as the romantic hero himself, like some balletically brilliant and thoroughly compelling relic of the last century.

  “Who could ever understand it who has not seen it with their own eyes? Suffice to say that when he suffered agonies on stage his pain reached out into the house, so that people wept. And when he strode round a woodland lake of painted cardboard I would have sworn I heard nightingales sing. There were times when he would raise his dagger to commit an implausible histrionic suicide and a female member of the audience would rush onto the stage and stay his arm, and everyone in the theater believed—even I, who knew all about the cardboard knife and the other illusions, even I believed, some evenings, at any rate—they were about to see someone die. Let me put it this way: Andreas’s romanticism was such that it was perfect, apart from the fact that it was a hundred years out of date. At the time I thought: He’s never going to have any sort of ordinary life; there’ll never be a woman or a family or an old age for him; he is only capable of coming alive on the stage and so there he will have to live forever. In fact, it was not inconceivable that he, who broke the law of gravity every evening, might go on dancing forever. And if he cannot, I thought, then he will just have to die onstage, at the height of his career.

  “I got it all wrong, Rumi, which is just as it should be. When one sleeps and dreams that something here on Earth is going to last forever, I think one ought to be woken and set straight.

  “I was there when he laid eyes on the girl for the first time and so I know what took place, as far as one can understand something one witnesses but is not actually a part of.

  “There had been a gathering somewhere in Copenhagen, in an apartment high above the city, and now the party was over. I seem to remember there were people slumped in chairs and on sofas, sound asleep. Only two were awake, Andreas and I. I don’t know why he was still there—he was usually one of the first to leave—but that night, or it might have been early morning, he was still around. Perhaps he cherished some hope, perhaps he had been seized by a longing for something or other and now felt that, if only he waited, the world would draw him to its bosom and free him of some of the stucco inside him.

  “I am not one of those who think there’s much to be gained by waiting and hoping, so I woke the violinist. He was a small youth with a clubfoot and coarse hands, a country bumpkin who had played at dances in village halls until someone discovered that with his violin he drew the music through the air like a flawless silver thread. Andreas and I were very young but he must have been even younger, so in a way he, too, Rumi, was a talented child of great promise. But, still and all, a runty shepherd boy, a cowherd—that there was no denying—and yet we took him everywhere with us. When I walk, behind my own steps I can still hear the lopsided, lumbering thud of his shoe. We didn’t have much time for ugly people at the theater—the last thing we wanted to be reminded of was wretchedness. As far as we were concerned, cripples, and especially cripples from the provinces, were an affront to the grand and sacred delicacy of the theater. Nevertheless, we took the boy with us wherever we went and this we did because of his music. For, from the first time one heard him play, one knew that half of this boy’s soul had been left with the gods of music while the other half rested with the composers of today, from whence it whispered its burning inspiration to him. Added to which, he was happy. How do I know he was happy? I cannot say. I can’t recall ever speaking to him. I don’t even remember ever having seen him smile. And yet I know that he was happy. He—a cripple, a person who seemed to us born not even to tragedy but to the most abject misery—he glowed, when he played and when he dragged his foot after us, with an unnatural zest for life. And I have an idea that we took him around with us much as one walks around with an unanswered question that will not leave one alone.

  “So I woke him. We had given him wine, I remember; it was the first time he’d ever had anything to drink and the alcohol had had an extremely stimulating and, later, a brutally stupefying effect on him. But now he played anyway—a song, a disjointed, stuttering, gleeful, plaintive, and yet cool refrain. I heard it for the first time that night; I now know it by heart. It was written by a man named Stravinsky and then, as now, the music acted as a provocation. I have since learned that it tells of a young man who plays the violin and who sells his violin to the devil, but even then I had the feeling I was listening to something drawn from the abyss.

  “Then the girl danced. I don’t know where she appeared from, I hadn’t noticed her earlier, but suddenly there she was on the vast bare floor. She danced barefoot and she lifted the gimp and me out of our alcoholic haze and into a wild and quiet rapture. And she lifted Andreas into a mad infatuation.

  “Eventually she stopped, then disappeared, and after that I went home. When I left the room, Andreas was sitting stock-still in a chair, as if poleaxed, gazing at the spot where the soles of her feet had kissed the floor. I said not a word to him, partly because I was loath to spoil the moment and partly because, as I’m sure you will agree, one should never speak to anyone into whose brain the Lord has, as it were, injected an extra dose of oxygen.

  “Something like six months must have passed before we saw her again, and though we never spoke of her it was not because we had forgotten her but because we knew, of course, that somehow she was waiting just around the corner. And one morning there she was in class, standing at the barre working along with everyone else as if that were her rightful place. I have no idea how she got in, normally there would have been no question of the theater’s taking on an unknown nineteen-year-old, but even a mausoleum finds it hard to say no to a thing of wonder. And it may be that at first they rejected her—how should I know—but she was the type who, even if the door to a vault were being slammed in her face, would stop it with her foot and slip through the gap as if she had been begged to enter.

  “So now I had the chance to see her dance, to see not only her own indefinable movements but the eternal, meticulously fixed steps of classical ballet. I have been in the same room as her and on the same stage more times than I can count and I have never so much as come close to understanding how she could possibly have learned so fast and danced so beautifully. I tried guessing her past from her movements and the most I can say of what I observed then is that she had definitely, quite definitely spent a lot of time out playing with boys.

  “In fact, I was well aware that it was not so much her that I understood when I watched her dance as God. To be quite honest, I don’t know what to think about the existence of God—I make no bones about that, even to you, Rumi—but if he does exist and did create the earth, then, having seen that girl, I can see why he created the fish and the birds and the wild animals before he created man. Because, I said to myself, obviously he had to practice, obviously he had to train himself to the point where he was capable of combining the suppleness of the eel, the streamlined precision of the sparrow hawk, and the pantherlike spring of the cat in a human being such as this girl.

  “When she left her first morning class at the theater Andreas was holding the door for her; he had been standing there waiting for quite a while, wanting to be ready, and when she had gone he stayed, leaning against the door handle and staring at the empty space in the air that she had left in her wake and I was glad. It was good, I thought, to see a statue come down from its pedestal to stand swaying sheepishly in its adoration, particularly when the statue happened to be one’s friend.

  “Right from the outset I hoped that she would pick him up and dust him off, and when she had been at the theater for a year and danced with him for the first time I felt quite sure that she would. And in that expectation I was proved both right and wrong.

  “What I am now about to tell you I learned from Andreas. I saw what went on from a distance only, but what happened was that his chivalry was stretched to the limit. As a couple, onstage, they made everyone believe that love is undying and that it is possible to love the soul without lusting after the body. Offstage they were the best of friends, but no more than that. The one time I was bold enough to ask Andreas about their relationship, he smiled coyly and politely and told me how much he respected her and how women were superior beings. But I saw right through his smile and into the ice-cold loneliness out of which he knew only the girl could raise him.

  “Until one particular day Andreas bit back his feelings, then swallowed them, lest they attract the notice of, and intimidate, the superior being who lay in his arms every evening in the sight of two thousand people. But on that day he abandoned discretion and told her how things stood.

  “I’m almost thankful that I did not personally have to hear his explanation. Andreas was a dancer, words did not exactly trip off his tongue, and it is difficult to be in love in Denmark—things that ought to fall beautifully on the ear can so easily end up sounding as if they have been dredged up from a different age, as if they have been buried underground. Nevertheless, he managed it and he told me that it had come as a relief. At one point as he was talking and confessing everything, something had seemed to give way and he had dropped on one knee and kissed her hand and out of him there had poured a hodgepodge of stage directions from ballets in which he had danced, along with huge chunks of stucco and clichés he had picked up as a child, and something else, too—a stream of pure gold.

  “He told me that the girl heard him out without interrupting. Then, after a moment’s deliberation, she told him who she really was.

  “She began by saying that, since he felt as he did, she would have to tell him the truth. And this she did, matter-of-factly, almost as if she were reading a newspaper report, as if it were all something she stood outside of.

  “She was born in Germany not long before the war to a mother who for some reason was Danish, in a town whose name she did not care to recall but which had been engulfed by the front line. Her mother worked in one of the brothels in the town, establishments that were later appropriated by the state and handed over to the army. She was the only child living in the place and she had no idea how her mother contrived to hold onto her; she told Andreas that she had no explanations to give, nor did she seek any—all she knew was that ever since she had been old enough to remember what she saw, her mother had been a skinny, hardworking little whore feared by all, even her customers. She had entangled the long succession of men who passed through her door each day in long garlands of brazen behavior. The girl told Andreas that somewhere inside themselves men always hate a whore and that her mother was hated more than any other, and that she knew that all of the countless men who returned to her—until they were sent away and never returned to anyone ever again—came in the hope that the sperm they squirted into her would somehow make her shut up.

  “By now Andreas was already begging to be spared hearing more, but the girl stuck her foot in the gap and asked whether he hadn’t just asked for her trust, and then she continued.

  “From when the girl was very small her mother had had tuberculosis and the girl had always felt that this woman, her mainstay in life, ought actually to have been dead. ‘Children can sense these things,’ she told Andreas. ‘Children know when someone is living at odds with the natural order of things. I had this picture of death as a man with a scythe,’ she went on, ‘and I imagined that the reason he did not show up was that he was scared of what would come out when Mother saw him and opened her mouth.’

  “From the age of four, the girl had washed the soldiers’ penises over a tin basin bearing, beneath the imperial eagle, the legend ‘Pure in faith.’

  “Again here Andreas begged to be let off. ‘But that’s life,’ the girl said.

  “‘Then I don’t want to go on living,’ said Andreas.

  “‘That’s what they all say,’ said the girl. That’s what the soldiers had said, what her mother had said, what she herself had said. But just look at the soldiers whom she washed. They were shells. The insides of every one of them were drained of all humanity and filled with the same abysmal horror and misery, which never left them. Even when they took off all their clothes they held onto their rifles, placing them on the floor next to the bed, within arm’s reach; and even when they came, squinting, inside her mother, it was the rifle they were squinting at. Yet even such shells as these struggled to stay alive, though they said they couldn’t care less whether they died or not. Even they visited the girl’s mother to have the chance, for a moment, to despise a woman and to obtain a kind of picture, a postcard of sorts, of a tenderness that might have been, if not for the war.

  “The girl thought she must have been nine years old when her mother judged her old enough to sleep with a man. Nine was of course rather young, but she did not blame her mother. Her mother was dying, so for both of them it was a matter of life and death, and when it comes down to life and death there isn’t a great deal to be said, so there’s no point blaming one another. And it hadn’t hurt as much as one might have thought. She was not even angry at the men any longer, she said. Them she had forgiven.

  “‘When did it stop?’ Andreas asked, meaning, of course, when was she going to stop telling him all this and spare him this unwished-for encounter with reality, and heard himself ask in a hoarse, unrecognizable voice, the voice of a stranger, the stranger he had become in the short time it had taken her to tell her story.

  “Then one day her mother was dead, and shortly afterward, on what she thought must have been her fourteenth birthday, a man had tried to harm her. She had lain beneath him and felt her body being hurt and thought, No, I will live. And then she had clamped down on his penis so he could not pull out and had cut him loose with a razor blade, and it was at that moment that she ceased to hate men, at that moment she saw what the army chaplain had been getting at. She had laid her hand on this man’s head and sent him out into the desert to atone for what the others had done to her mother and herself.

  “What happened thereafter was not something she told Andreas about on that occasion. Instead she revealed it a little at a time, and it was a story of surviving on the street, of crossing borders to get back to her mother’s homeland, of finding foster parents, and at long last stepping into the sunlight.

  “What she told Andreas at the time was that he was not to look at her like that—she was happy now, she was strong and healthy, she never thought about those days now. She had told him about it only so that he would understand. Understand that never again could any man touch her in that way.

  “‘But I touch you, onstage,’ Andreas said.

  “‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘onstage, when the lights are lit and the theater is packed with people and we are dancing exactly as we know we are supposed to dance, I can rest assured that nothing unexpected is going to happen, so it’s perfectly all right for us to show love for each other up there. When the men wanted to turn off the lamp my mother kept next to her bed she would say no. I want it left on, she would say, because I’m a lamplight whore. And that’s just how it is with me, Andreas, I’m a lamplight whore—it is only possible when the stage is lit.’”

  Here Jakob took a momentary pause from his storytelling to sip from the kettle. Night had fallen. Somewhere in space, one could tell, the moon was waiting, but as yet the sky was overcast, as if the world (that is to say, Allah the learned, the wise, the merciful) would draw a veil over the two men and their tale.

  “I wonder, Rumi,” said Jakob, “what I can give you by telling you this story.”

  “A journey,” the Mohammedan solemnly replied. “Right now, I am with you on the stage of which you speak.”

  “But how can I be sure that it is the same stage?” asked Jakob.

  “Let us not expend our energies on questions to which there is no answer,” said the Mohammedan, “especially when we are in the middle of a story.”

  “You’re right,” said Jakob. “And that is what I told myself, wondering back then whether Andreas had actually grasped what she had told him. But as time went on, he proved to have a better, more profound grasp of it than anyone else could have had.

  “One of the best-loved ballets in Denmark is La Sylphide. It was also one of those pieces that Danish audiences flocked to see because it presented them with all four pillars of faith at once. It is a ballet about a man in love with a woman he cannot touch, because she is an angel of sorts who stands to lose both her life and her wings should any man attempt to make inroads upon her person.