She had always loved this little police station, which still bears the marks of the British Mandate in the form of two stone lions that guard the front door. The years have erased the ferocity in their eyes, which seem now merely to be winking, yet they’re a sweet childhood memory. Little Honi was afraid of them, and she would get him to pet their heads and stick his tiny fingers in their jaws to pacify them.
The two bored policewomen inside have never heard of a retired officer by the name of Elazar, nor did Noga’s mimicking his stutter awaken their memory. If he’s a movie extra, they say, she should watch more Israeli movies and catch him there.
Instead of going straight home, she takes a roundabout route through the most radically ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods—Mea Shearim, Geulah, Kerem Avraham—where she wanders the streets, stopping to read death notices on the walls alongside posters of dire warning and denunciation. When she gets back to Mekor Baruch and Rashi Street, she is shaken. Can it be the “new extra,” waiting in reality by her building? But once again it’s the old lawyer representing the heirs of the apartment’s owner.
“So, Noga,” he greets her with fatherly warmth, “by my reckoning, your mother’s trial period is over, and we need to know if the right decision has been taken.”
“If it has, Mr. Stoller, it’s not good for you.”
“How could it not be good for me?” The old man winks. “What’s good for me is good for her.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, listen to reason and get out of a neighborhood that’s getting more and more haredi.”
“My mother, sir, is not afraid. She believes, in fact, that the haredim enhance her secularity.”
“That’s because she only talks to her neighbors the Pomerantzes, a sweet and moderate family. But the Pomerantzes are a dwindling breed, and the extremists are taking their place, people not merely bound by the strictest commandments but who also believe in devils and angels. I’ve got just such a crazy family interested in your apartment, prepared to pay an excellent price, which will enable us to increase the key money to be refunded to your mother. Therefore you, a rational European musician, must help your brother uproot the delusions about Jerusalem from your mother’s mind.”
“I can’t uproot anything from her mind. She herself will decide what to uproot and what to plant. Where are the owners of the apartment living now?”
“In Mexico, and they need money.”
“So they uprooted not only Jerusalem from their minds, but all of Israel.”
“My dear lady, with all due respect, who are you to criticize?”
“But I will come back here, sir. Ultimately there’ll be an orchestra in Israel that will need me.”
“Yes, yes, I’ve heard that before. Everyone promises to return, but in the end they fly back in a coffin.”
“I’ll come back alive,” she shouts, “you’ll see, if you live that long.”
“Pardon me?”
“Skip it, Mr. Stoller, I’m tired. You’ll get your answer from my mother personally. By then I’ll be with my harp, rehearsing the Berlioz Fantastique.”
“Ah, Hec-tor Ber-lioz . . .” He draws out the name, as if remembering a childhood friend. “Yes, a wild genius and ladies’ man, but what’s your hurry? The harp in Symphonie Fantastique enters only in the second movement.”
“What,” she gasps, “you know his music?”
“His and others’ too,” he replies with a triumphant smile. “You think just because I’m an old lawyer who helps clear out old apartments in haredi neighborhoods that I lack culture? Look around here, so benighted and poor. What’s the matter, you don’t want your mother to live and die near your brother?”
“I want that very much.”
“So work on it, convince her.”
He tips his hat and goes on his way.
She is shocked by the cocky sophistication of an elderly and tattered lawyer who knows his Berlioz, and watches him fade into the darkness. She pushes open the little gate, and with the nagging fear that Uriah has her parents’ key, she climbs the stairs cautiously, heavily, as if reprising her imaginary disability of the previous day.
The apartment is dark, but she is in no hurry to turn on lights, for fear that in one of the rooms, in one of the beds, lies her former husband.
Thirty-Five
THOUGH IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE for Uriah to pick out an old key tossed in a drawer, it would never have occurred to him to unlock this apartment, or come near it. When he ran into his former brother-in-law at the opera, he didn’t expect, after a long silence, anything more than a brief exchange of empty pleasantries. But after Honi, with the intimacy of a long-lost relative, briefed him about the old folks’ home and piqued his curiosity about his former wife’s appearance on the stage, Uriah had felt that the chance encounter was significant for him but irrelevant to his present wife, so when she approached, he hurried to end the conversation.
Something had been burned into his mind, something his former brother-in-law apparently intended. And so, after failing to locate on the stage the wife he never got over, he decided to go back to the opera the next night as an infiltrator with binoculars.
And that night, after midnight, when he returned to Ma’aleh Adumim, unsettled by the extra in her embroidered costume leading dark-skinned children at the foot of Masada in a little wagon harnessed to a decorated donkey, he felt that her brother, deliberately or not, had involved him in a pointless but necessary experiment, obligating him to one more move. And since he recognized that if he were to request a simple face-to-face meeting, nothing could be said that hadn’t been said many times over, he preferred that the encounter be not real but imaginary. If his former wife had chosen to show up in Israel as an extra in the stories and imaginations of others, why should he not join her as a partner?
It had not required many inquiries with agencies that booked extras. At the first agency he phoned, in Jerusalem, he happened upon a former secretary of his, who was pleased to find him Noga’s name among the extras listed for a television series about a hospital.
At the Ashdod port he was not permitted entry to the film location, because his name did not appear on the list of extras. In the belief that he’d find another way in, he wandered around the port, drank beer with longshoremen at a small cafeteria, and they showed him the entrance at the far end of the warehouse. When night fell and the man standing guard left his post, he sneaked inside and began to wander the corridors, recognizing Noga as a disabled woman in a nightgown, transported in a wheelchair. But he was careful not to reveal himself before assuming the role of a new character. After asking directions he arrived at the wardrobe room, where he pretended to be an extra and the staff helped him realize his vision—the torn, filthy uniform of a soldier, which he put on over his own clothes, and for greater effect, a red-stained army bandage wrapped around his forehead. This lost soul went off in search of Noga, and found her in the dining room, but after the meal, as she looked for a bed for the night, he didn't hurry after her, and when she entered a little room and closed its makeshift door, he didn’t dare follow her, but stationed himself outside like a watchman, lest some stranger enter before he did. Only after the tumult died down did he allow himself, as a wounded soldier from the battlefield and not as a former husband, to slip into the bed next to hers and again watch over her sleep as he had when they were married. And indeed on that night she had difficulty sleeping. From time to time she sighed and wrestled with the blanket and pillow until she subdued them. And if a pale ivory foot or delicate arm, familiar objects of desire, remained exposed after the struggle, he had to cover them up carefully before giving way to merciful sleep.
But in the dim first light of day, as he first noticed her eyeing him reproachfully, he realized that the character of a wounded soldier did not draw her close; it repelled her. The logical conclusion was that if he wanted to make the most of the experiment her brother had scripted for him, he could do so only by means of his real self.
NO ONE WAS LURKING in the dark apartment, yet her restored calm was marred by mild disappointment. Did her panicky response in that little hospital room turn him off for good? Is the “ancient bleeding love” merely a presumptuous projection of her mind on his? And if Uriah persists, how will he know his time is limited and in a few days she’ll be beyond his reach? Suddenly angry, she wants to phone her brother, but realizes he’ll probably make her even dizzier. Thus the best path to relaxation is to make dinner and watch a good film on television.
But her sleep is restless, as in the first days after her arrival, and she divides it among the three beds. In the morning she calls her mother and brightly announces, “I’ve changed my mind, Ima. I’m not putting any more pressure on you, and even if you decide to return to Jerusalem, don’t cut the time short on my account. No reason you should pass up even one good meal you’ve already paid for, or one hour of deep sleep Tel Aviv provides you. I take it all back, Ima. Let’s the three of us honor the experiment till the end. In any event, rehearsals of the Berlioz will start only the day after I get back.”
“And Uriah?” the mother remembers. “You’re no longer afraid of him?”
“Apparently he’s given up. And even if he comes, what could he want? Just to mourn the past.”
She no longer bothers with the bolt, and sometimes, when she goes out, she just closes the apartment door without locking it, and evenings she stays home, on the assumption that a man clinging to an old love would prefer to arrive in the dark. So it goes, day after day, as she counts them off before her departure from the city of her birth, dry days with cool nights. From time to time she walks around in the shuk, of which she’s grown fond on this visit—maybe in hopes of running into Elazar, who three days after his disappearance had stuck a note on her apartment door.
When she saw the sheet of paper from afar, she laughed. Was the bleeding love making do with a piece of paper? But as she held the page, the handwriting was unfamiliar.
Dear Extra,
I haven’t risen from the dead, because I wasn’t there. The people at the entrance didn’t know how to get rid of the eternal extra, so they sent me to a morgue that didn’t exist.
Even after I realized that they had tricked us into separating, I didn’t give up on you, until I saw you rolling around in a nightgown in a wheelchair, and I thought, Why get in the way of my extra enjoying herself? and I started following you from afar. But then I got an urgent call from a real hospital in Jerusalem: the sick grandson I told you about had been hospitalized and wanted his grandfather. So I rushed over there without saying goodbye, and I’ve been at his bedside for two days, and when he says, Saba, you mustn’t move, his command carries more weight than a police superintendent’s. And I’m pleased to say that there are encouraging signs, but for the duration, I’m at his side.
Nevertheless I grabbed a minute and hopped over to say goodbye, because I remembered that in the coming days you’ll be flying away. And so, dear Noga, I’m done forever with being an extra. The fictions we enjoyed together were my swan song. And even if they build a morgue at the port, I’ll not be there. So when you go back to playing your harp in Europe, think well of the eternal extra of the past, who sometimes got stuck when he spoke, but his thoughts were clear and pure. All I wanted from you was friendship, and am grateful that I received it.
She is pleasantly surprised by the candid and fluent text, free of hesitations or erasures. And yet she wonders, clenching her fists: How will I slake the old desire that arose in Jerusalem? Is there really nothing left for me but to wait for the flutist who betrayed my concerto?
And at night, in her disappointment, she again wanders from bed to bed until, as in her high school years, she satisfies her desire in the bed of her youth.
Morning light bathes the big kitchen of her parents’ apartment, where, still drowsy, she sits in a nightgown, slowly eating a soft-boiled egg, half listening to a concert on the classical station of Israel Radio, when Uriah arrives, shaved and combed, in jacket and tie. “I was on my way to work,” he explains with disarming nonchalance, “and I thought, why not say hello to her before she vanishes again.”
And as if he had never pretended to be an extra in a torn army uniform, his head in a bloody bandage, or hadn’t silently crept into the adjacent bed at midnight, he now stands smiling and serene, no embarrassment or apology, surveying the apartment he knows well from the years of his marriage, struck by how shrunken it seems.
“Not shrunken,” she replies, calm. “Honi threw out some old pieces of furniture, so Ima wouldn’t long for them in Tel Aviv at th-the—”
“The old folks’ home,” he says, rescuing his ex-wife from the stammer that suddenly seizes her. Not looking at her directly, and careful not to touch a thing, he is mesmerized by the apartment, drawn into the living room and bedrooms as if he were a buyer or broker and not a man come to mourn his humiliation. But Noga knows well that despite the confident façade, the jacket and tie, the briefcase that hasn’t budged from his hand, despite “on my way to work,” he is agitated by the uncontrollable adventure he has just plunged into.
“Yes, the old folks’ home,” he says, almost defiantly, as if it were the source of evil. “And for the life of me, Noga”—he is still careful not to focus his gaze—“I can’t understand why your brother, in such a quick, random encounter next to the toilets, after years of absolutely no contact, had to involve me in your mother’s old folks’ home and the question of yes or no. Obviously, it’s no.”
“Meaning?”
“That she won’t leave Jerusalem.”
At last he looks straight at her, and a beloved face sets her heart pounding.
“And maybe she’ll want to surprise you too?” She smiles.
“Me? What have I got to do with this?”
“Well, you’re here.”
“And all his small talk about the old folks’ home was just a pretext, so he could tell me you were here in Israel.”
“Why a pretext?” she says, defending her brother. “No pretext, just a simple explanation so you’d understand why your ex-wife appeared as an extra on the opera stage, and not be shocked when you saw her there.”
Uriah considers this.
“But why did he need to call attention to your performance?”
“He didn’t need to, no,” she confirms. “It was a big pointless mistake. Honi shouldn’t have mentioned my existence. Better he should have talked about the music, asked you whether or not you enjoyed act one.”
He senses the irony that has evolved over many years of separation, and concedes:
“I saw no trace of you in act two.”
“But I was there!” She raises her voice. “At first I was a smuggler and even carried a sack, and ended up with the chorus at the bullfight.”
“And I wasn’t sure if Honi was just pulling my leg.”
“No, Uriah,” she says, still defending her brother, “Honi wouldn’t pull your leg. Not a chance. He loves you. You know how he mourned over you and got angry with me when you were compelled to leave me.”
“Yes, I assumed he was serious, and so the next night I came back, because I still wanted to see you on the stage.”
“What? You came back to the opera at Masada?”
“But not in the audience. I sneaked onto the stage.”
“The stage? No way. Sneaked in from which side?”
“From the north, Noga, the north. I circled around the orchestra and got close to your little hill and followed one of your Bedouin kids with binoculars . . .”
“Mine?” She laughs. “How so?”
“In the cart pulled by your donkey.”
“Again mine.”
“Lucky kids. And what kind of extra were you, anyway? A Gypsy woman?”
“Gypsy woman smuggler in act two, but with the children and donkey I was just a simple country girl.”
“And you really did look young, younger than I remembered you.”
/> “Too bad you didn’t come out on the stage. They would’ve found a part for you too.”
He stares at her coldly.
“The conductor spotted me and got security men to remove me.”
“And then?”
“I went home.”
“But why? If you came without your wife, you could have waited for me and said hello.”
“Why? I had more than enough of you in my life, so why look for you at intermission? I also told myself that maybe a story that wasn’t ours but someone else’s was my chance to understand what was still blocked. In fact, when I saw them wheeling you around in your nightgown with an IV dangling over your head, I felt what I didn’t dare to feel all those years I was with you—that you, Noga, are essentially a crippled person. You have a defect, and so there’s no point blaming you or being angry with you. Even when you’re playing music and apparently acting normal, the sickness is nesting deep inside you. And so the question remains: why, after my decision to let go of you forever, do I come back to you again, in your childhood apartment?”
“I don’t get it either. But if you can let go of your briefcase for a second and dare to sit down, together we might discover something new.”
Thirty-Seven
GLUM, SERIOUS URIAH SITS down in the kitchen, placing his briefcase on the table amid plates and cutlery, perhaps preparing for a quick getaway.
“If you take the briefcase off the table,” says his former wife, “I’ll make sure it doesn’t run away.”
“I keep it in full view not to forget that a whole world awaits me out there, and to remember not to be swept away by you.”
“Nevertheless, it’s not nice of your black briefcase to scare my soft-boiled egg.”
“Soft-boiled egg? I don’t remember your liking your eggs soft.”
“Oh, how good that someone in the world remembers things about me that I’ve forgotten. Yes, I hated soft-boiled eggs. Ima didn’t have the patience to keep boiling them, and the liquid yolk was like saliva. But now, on my own, I make up for her sins, and when I time it right, the egg tastes wonderful, and when the spoon taps the shell, even the chicken that laid it is happy.”
The Extra Page 15