The Extra

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “But there is no such child, and there won’t be one. You understand. You know.”

  “I know and understand.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “I know that too. Actually I feel it.”

  “If you know everything, why did you come?”

  “To return the key to your mother and keep my promise to tell you that the time had come and I didn’t hide anything from my wife.”

  “And you still didn’t think to look at my childhood harp, which you ran away from this morning, and which Honi will throw away tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Wrong again. I took off the cover and looked at it, to try and understand its power.”

  “And did you?”

  “I saw a unique and unusual instrument, a primitive shaatnez, a hybrid of harp, guitar, banjo and more. I can see why your father, who knew nothing about music, wanted to get it for you, not in a music store but an antiques shop. It can’t make music now, many strings are missing, and those that are left are loose and bent, so how could I understand why it enslaved you?”

  “You can’t. And neither you nor I can resurrect the dead, so go back to your wife and don’t torment her anymore with the illusion that you can turn back the clock.”

  Forty-Four

  SINCE THE RESIDENTS of the old folks’ home in Tel Aviv include some very old ones, soon to depart this world, the management tried to provide the healthy and charming lady from Jerusalem with a pleasant and comfortable stay, so that she might cast her fate with the residence and enhance its image. But as it became clear that the little perks and luxuries, the lectures and the concerts, had not produced a decision in favor of Tel Aviv, and that the popular lady would soon be leaving, everyone was sad, and Honi, feeling guilty for his mother’s decision, at the last moment spread idle promises of a repeat experiment. Thus their arrival in Jerusalem was delayed, and the savory lunch prepared for them by the daughter was turned into a half-eaten dinner.

  Honi wears a look of dejection. “Don’t worry,” says his mother, “you won’t have to rush here for every little inconvenience. I’m surrounded by plenty of poor Orthodox people who’ll be happy to take care of me for a few pennies.”

  “And for the same nickel they’ll bring you back to religion.”

  “Not me. Abba and I managed to hold our own, and God made us stronger in the process.”

  As her three heavy suitcases are hauled to the apartment one by one, she makes a tour of the three big rooms and marvels: “What’s this, Noga? Was I really such a good mother that you spruced up the apartment for me?” “Yes, you were great,” says Noga, “because you always made me feel free.” Tears gleam in the eyes of the old woman, whose emotions are usually blocked by irony. As Noga smiles at her mother’s tears, her brother storms through the resurrected apartment, grousing about the weak lighting and checking out Abadi’s bolt. “This is not a bolt,” he sneers. “It’s a parody of a bolt. If you had a dog here, that would stop the bastards.”

  “Au contraire,” the mother says, laughing, “a dog will appeal to them a lot more than Israeli television.”

  “No need to worry,” says his sister. “No more kids. Shaya personally brought his son to apologize.”

  But Honi stands firm. “It all depends on Ima not tempting them again.”

  “I am not responsible for the temptation. It was your father. He hoped that the television would make them secular.”

  “A futile hope.”

  “Of course, but when I saw how they wore themselves out running up and down the stairs out of sheer boredom, I began to feel sorry for them.”

  “Beware of pity,” pronounces Honi, fixated again on the lights. “We have to change all the bulbs,” he says, poised to take his sister’s two suitcases down to his car.

  “Wait a minute,” scolds his mother, “relax, what’s your hurry? This is the last night, this is goodbye. If you need to get back to your wife and children, have a safe drive home, and we’ll call a taxi to take Noga to the airport.”

  Honi objects. He is the one who waited at the airport three months ago and will be the one to take her back there and be responsible for her until the last minute. The flight is at five in the morning, and Noga should get there around three—so no taxi, just him. That’s what he promised himself.

  “If that’s what you promised,” says his mother, “you can relax. Instead of taking Noga now to your place in Tel Aviv and going back to the airport in the middle of the night, act logically and get a little sleep here. Even if I turned down protected living in Tel Aviv, I still need, at least on the first night, a protected home in Jerusalem.”

  “Protected from what?” Honi asks.

  “From loneliness and sadness.”

  A pleasant calm settles on the old apartment, and Noga takes the fruit bowl from the refrigerator, sets out three plates and small knives and says, “Here, children, let’s polish off the Land of Canaan, but without the blessing.” And they peel and eat the remaining fruit, duly impressed by the beautiful, delicate glass bowl, especially the gold decoration at the rim. Honi says the bowl is fragile, should be handled carefully, and he gets up to wash it in the sink, where it falls and shatters and his fingers drip with blood.

  “Was the bowl included with the Pomerantzes’ fruit?” he asks his mother, licking his wounded fingers, “or do we have to return it?”

  “Let’s consider it included, since you broke it, on purpose.”

  “Not really on purpose, but I also didn’t want Pomerantz to be too happy you’re coming back.”

  “Don’t be a child,” Noga says. “Stop sucking your fingers. You can’t recycle the blood. Run cold water on them until we find a bandage.”

  But the mother has forgotten what’s in the apartment and what isn’t, and they have to dig through drawer after drawer to find some ancient Band-Aids.

  The bleeding is finally under control, but the shirt and pants are stained, requiring immediate attention, and Honi stands in his underwear before his mother and sister, who dismiss his embarrassment: “We’ve seen you naked before, no problem.”

  Be that as it may, he’s cold in the Jerusalem evening, and his sister lends him a big shirt, his mother contributes an old bathrobe, and he sits comfortably, a man dressed as a woman, reminiscing about himself as a child, and instead of complaining again about his mother’s failed residence in Tel Aviv, he envisions the fast train of the future that will zip between the two cities in twenty minutes flat.

  “Then you can come here every time I sneeze,” his mother teases.

  And so the evening goes. They are still in the kitchen, and after they’ve carefully picked the shards of the bowl from the sink and eaten a bit more of the meal Noga prepared, the talk turns to the past and concentrates on the virtues and flaws of the father who died nine months before, and Noga recalls the rainy night she saw her father shuffling from room to room like a humble Chinese man.

  “Yes,” the mother confirms, “in recent years when he would get up at night to use the bathroom, he would turn into a different character on his way back to bed—Chinese or Indian or Eskimo, or somebody disabled or paralyzed. We once saw a wonderful short film called Aisha, about a woman of ninety-six, all bent over, who would lean on a pail as she walked, and he was so impressed that he tried imitating her in the dark.”

  “But why?” Honi is shocked, hearing for the first time about his late father’s nocturnal habits.

  “To amuse himself and me.”

  “And you were actually amused?”

  “At first, out of surprise, then I reprimanded him.”

  “Hardly reprimanded,” Noga recalls. “‘That’s not Chinese, it’s Japanese,’ she would tell him, as if Ima really knows how the Japanese walk. Then he’d look bewildered and take even smaller steps.”

  And she jumps up and charmingly mimics her father’s steps.

  The chatter flows freely and merrily as the night slowly embraces their camaraderie. They drift on to relatives and abs
ent friends, and even Uriah’s name comes up, but the two women are careful not to let slip one word about his performances and visits, and it would appear that Honi has not only accepted his failure to move his mother near him, but that the failure has lifted his spirits. He walks from room to room in his mother’s robe, planning how to renovate the apartment, to put money into it now that they’ve been spared the expense of the old folks’ home. And as he puts together a list of what to replace and what to fix, and especially how to improve the lighting, he arrives at the emptied clothes closet and rocks his father’s new black suit back and forth on its hanger.

  “Take it,” urges his sister, “don’t be stubborn. Take it before Ima throws it out. You might need it someday.”

  “That day will never come. Who wears suits like this anymore? Abba only had it made so he wouldn’t be conspicuous in the neighborhood.”

  “Maybe in the future you’ll also need to not be conspicuous here.”

  “Me?” he shouts. “Why?”

  “So they won’t throw stones at you.”

  He pauses, unsure if she is joking. Then, in a snap decision, he frees the suit from its hanger, folds it into a small bundle and declares that he will personally donate it to charity.

  The family is getting tired, and as the mother is still confused in her apartment and has not begun to unpack, the temporary tenant who is leaving Israel indefinitely has to act the efficient housewife. She changes sheets, spreads out blankets, arranges towels, but her brother’s wet, bloodstained clothes she cleans with only partial success before tossing them in the dryer, which rattles the dimly lit Jerusalem flat with a vaguely menacing roar.

  “Yes, we must get some sleep,” says the mother after her daughter has finally finished packing her bags. She urges her two children to turn out their lights, but because it’s hard to part from the daughter, whom she’d hardly seen during the three experimental months, she subverts the sleep agenda and has Noga join her for a midnight cup of tea. “Come, you’ll sleep on the plane,” she says to her daughter, “and I won’t wake up till the afternoon. Honi must go to bed. In two hours he has to drive you to the airport.” But Honi is lured by the spontaneous tea party. “No worries,” he scoffs, “from Jerusalem to the airport at two in the morning takes half an hour, tops,” and wrapped in the old robe, he joins his mother and sister, but instead of tea he makes himself a strong Turkish coffee.

  Now, as Noga studies her brother’s weary face, her heart melts and her anger fades. Nonetheless, she is careful not to mention Uriah’s bizarre appearances, lest her brother think he made it all happen. So they sit, warm and drowsy, refusing to let sleep come between them. “Children,” the mother suddenly declares, “please don’t be upset that I failed the test. On the contrary, be happy about the failure. Now, with no insane maintenance payments in Tel Aviv, here in Jerusalem I feel like a wealthy woman. And as a wealthy woman, even old Stoller will have to respect me and make do with the piddling monthly rent until my dying day, which will be many years from now—being rich, I will have a greater will to live. And as a rich woman,” she goes on, “I will not only phone you, Noga, every day, but I may even come to visit you in Europe, to listen to your harp. What do you say?”

  “Shh . . . she’s asleep,” says Honi.

  Indeed, the harpist hasn’t held out, and as she sits at the table her eyes are closed, her breathing is heavy, and her head droops and nods. Her brother and mother stand her up gently and lead her to her bed, lay her down and cover her. “Even one hour of sleep will help,” declares Honi, “so she won’t be confused and get on the wrong plane.”

  Now, in the quiet of night, the mother is very much tempted to tell her son the Uriah story, but loyal to the promise she made to her daughter, she restrains herself and goes to take the pants and shirt from the dryer, their bloodstains warm but undiminished. The time passes quickly, and at two in the morning, it’s difficult to wake the sleeper, and lest she stumble on the way to the car, her brother and mother help her down the stairs, put her in the front seat and fasten her seatbelt. Only then, in the chill of the coming dawn, does she open her beautiful eyes and kiss her mother and whisper, “Now that you’re rich, you can have free protected housing in Europe with me.”

  The car sails away with the windows open, so the summer night breeze will rouse the sleepy woman. In the airport, despite the bloodstains on his clothes, Honi insists on steering his sister through the check-in process, including the baggage inspection. And because it’s hard to say goodbye, he holds Noga’s boarding pass in his hand, so he can accompany her to the place where he will be told: Stop.

  It’s hard for her too. She knows she is returning to a foreign orchestra, free of any obligation other than her music, while her brother remains in a country that never ceases to be a threat to itself, saddled with a demanding family and a lonely mother who insists on growing old in an old apartment. When Noga takes the boarding pass from him, she wonders: Why not give him some hope that she, for one, is not so lonely. After all, she was not only an extra here, but also a woman who was wanted and loved. Standing by the doorway of the security area, she gives her brother a quick rundown of what happened since the intermission at Carmen in the desert, the story of the former husband who invaded the opera stage and then turned himself into a wounded extra, before daring to appear as himself in their childhood apartment to demand the child who wasn’t born.

  Honi doesn’t seem surprised, as though it was he who thought up the convoluted story she is confiding to him, and as she keeps talking, he is careful not to stop her, just to take her arm gently and move her from place to place, so she will not block the flow of passengers to the metal detectors, or notice the tears that fog his eyes.

  Forty-Five

  AFTER NIGHTS OF WANDERING among beds, the sleep she’d hoped for on the flight to Amsterdam was unsettled and spotty, and in the morning, on the bus from the airport, her eyes were fixed on the great green fields and the plentiful water, as if she were visiting the Netherlands for the first time.

  Three months ago, the landlord’s son helped her carry the two suitcases down the narrow, winding stairs, but today she does without his help, to avoid a long conversation with the landlady, who will be curious to know the outcome of her mother’s experiment with assisted living.

  Her attic apartment consists of two rooms, small but comfortable. And since she has lived there for quite a while, it’s easy to spot any changes that took place in her absence. The three houseplants stand in place and have been tended properly, and the kitchenette is sparkling clean. But there’s a whiff of suspicion that the landlord’s son, or possibly her friend the first flutist, took advantage of her absence and came to sleep, alone or otherwise, in her bed.

  So she rips off the sheets, shoves them in the washing machine and, before putting on new ones, lies down on the bare mattress and tries, eyes closed, to make orderly sense of her memory of Israel. But the passion for her instrument propels her instead to the musicians’ café by the concert hall, where after a couple of double espressos her mind is fixed on the waltz in the second movement of Berlioz’s Fantastique.

  As it turns out, it is not this piece that awaits her, but another one, richer and more complex. This is the news about to be delivered by Herman Kroon, the orchestra’s general manager, who is happy that “our Venus” has returned, and clenches between his teeth, unlighted, the pipe Noga bought for him in the Old City, trying to get a taste of the Holy Land. Before telling the musician about the program change, he is curious to know what the elderly mother has decided, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Where is it better to live out her old age?

  “Jerusalem,” the harpist says quietly. “My mother returned to her old apartment, and I knew that would happen.”

  The man’s face brightens. He is a Flemish bachelor of seventy-five, tall and nattily dressed, who after his retirement from the cultural affairs department of the city of Antwerp was chosen as administrative director of the Arnhem orchestra. When his tenu
re in Holland is over, he too will likely return to his old apartment in the gray Belgian port, and is thus encouraged by the decision of a distant, unfamiliar widow of similar age.

  Noga asks about the response to the Mozart double concerto that was stolen from her.

  “People still love Mozart,” says Herman with an evasive smile. “Mozart is easy for them.”

  “I wasn’t asking about Mozart,” she says sharply, “but about reactions to the performance.”

  Herman remains evasive. “Your loyal friend Manfred is a virtuoso, and so Christine, whom I brought in from Antwerp, did the best she could not to get in his way. Don’t be angry with her. She is surely not to blame.”

  “Not her,” whispers Noga, deciding to leave it at that.

  Only now is she struck by the silence around her.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “The orchestra is playing tonight in Hamburg. They’ll be back tomorrow, and rehearsals begin in three days’ time.”

  “And we’ll start with the Berlioz?”

  “No, Noga, here’s good news for you. The Fantastique has been canceled.”

  “Canceled?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s what you call good news for me, Herman? Why was it canceled?”

  “Because we’ve played it so many times. Also, we don’t have the budget to double the timpani again and add three more contrabasses and bring all the noisy toys the Frenchman required to describe the torments of his love.”

  “And what’s instead?”

  “Instead of Berlioz we chose another French piece, something mature and subtle, and this is the news that will please you personally. Instead of the little waltz for harp in the second movement of the Fantastique, you and Christine will have the full dialogue between the wind and waves in Debussy’s La Mer.

  “La Mer!” she rejoices. “Oh, Herman, you’re so right, this is wonderful news, consolation for the three months I didn’t play with you. The harp is almost the main player.”