the Art Deco commodes, and occasionally even walked atop the long dining tables when it was the most convenient way of getting from one place to another in a room crowded with furniture. The first time Yoav undressed me and bent me over I became stiff and awkward, not because of the position, which I liked perfectly well, but because I was leaning over a writing desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl. But no matter how careless they were, they seemed never to leave behind a mark or trace. At first I took this to be the grace of those brought up to consider such furniture their natural habitat, but once I knew Yoav and Leah better I began to think of their talent, if one can call it that, as something borrowed from ghosts.
THE HOUSE gave away its secrets more easily, and I got to know it well. It was four floors altogether. Leah lived at the top. She slept in the back room, in a canopy bed, and in the front one she kept an upright Steinway under a stained-glass skylight; at certain hours of the afternoon the ivory keys became streaked with color. Before I met Leah, I’d been intimidated by the idea of the place she held in Yoav’s life. He referred to her often in conversation, sometimes as my sister and sometimes just as she, and frequently he spoke of the two of them collectively. When her playing stopped, I was sure that she was watching from somewhere in the house, and the hair on my arms would rise. But when Leah finally appeared for the first time I was surprised at how slight and unassuming she was, as if all her being were reserved for the life inside. She seemed held together by some great pressure exerted from within. She kept a second piano, a baby grand, in a study on the ground floor. Sheet music was stacked everywhere. These pages migrated through the house, turning up in the kitchen and bathrooms. She spent a week or two memorizing a piece, breaking it down into smaller and smaller parts, playing these mechanically with an absent look on her face. She wore an old cotton kimono and rarely got dressed. A kind of grubbiness overtook her, the piano keys became smudged and even her fingernails collected dirt. Then the day would arrive when she’d swallowed the piece whole, consumed it and made it part of herself, and she would run around clearing everything up, wash her hair, and then sit down to play the piece from memory. She would play it a hundred different ways, very fast, or very slow, and with each note she would be one step closer to a kind of uncertain clarity. Everything about her was delicate and compact, full of grace, and yet when she laid her hands on the keys something enormous seethed in her. Years later, after I got Leah’s letter and went to Yoav in the house on Ha’Oren Street, in an enormous, vaulted room, hanging from the ceiling in place of a chandelier, I found her grand piano rigged up via ropes and pulleys. There was a terrible violence in it. It seemed to sway infinitesimally, though there was no breeze on that stifling day. Leah would have needed a ladder to play it. How she had hauled the piano up there was a mystery. Later, Yoav claimed he hadn’t helped her; one day he had gone out and when he came back it was there. When I asked why she would have done such a thing, he replied obscurely about the pureness of a note sounded in the air that rings, for a split second, without influence. But as far as I knew, Leah had stopped playing altogether after their father killed himself. Even when I was at the other end of the house I was aware of the piano hanging eerily, at times forlorn and others menacing, and I had the feeling that when it finally fell—it was just a matter of time until the ropes gave way—it would pull the whole house down with it.
Yoav’s bedroom in the Belsize Park house was directly below Leah’s. In general, what minimal furniture there was on both their floors was permanent, either because it was too much of an effort for things to be constantly carried up and down, or because it was a relief for them to dwell in some place that was, at least in this