A. Yehoshua - The Extra

“But they’ll s-s-see my face as that of a dead man!”

“And when they see you’re finally dead, it’ll be a relief.”

Elazar sighs. “If that’s your decision.”

“But you won’t be bored. There’ll be a story line in the morgue, a medical debate about your death, possibly ending in an autopsy.”

“Most entertaining.”

Now they ask his companion what she would like to be: a patient or the relative of one? If a patient, chronic or recovering?

Elazar jumps in: “Patient, but not critical, just ill.”

But the casting people are not about to hide such a pretty face between blankets and pillows, and so that the camera can caress her femininity, a compromise is suggested: a patient in a wheelchair, hooked up to a colorful intravenous bag.

Elazar is taken to the morgue, and Noga is led through a maze of thin white plywood partitions to an unidentified woman who asks her to change into a floral nightgown. Then she is seated in a wheelchair and taught how to operate it. Her clothes are placed in a plastic bag and hung on the chair, and an IV pole is added on, with a bag filled with blood-red fluid, its tube attached securely to her arm. From here on, she is told, she is free to go about as she wishes. They will find her when she is needed.

The night is not far off, and through the few windows, installed in the warehouse for the film production, the setting sun pours the remains of its day, a potion of copper and gold. Noga wheels herself amid medical equipment, beds and gurneys, occasionally encountering mobile cameras and fuzzy microphones. Despite its transient, improvisational quality, she finds the set to be believable and well suited to its purpose. From time to time she rolls into one of the rooms, where patients bedecked with medical devices greet the guest with friendly waves and invite her to take an interest in their imaginary ailments.

But she mainly sticks to the corridor, to check if there is a back exit from imagination into reality, and perhaps along the way to peek into the morgue and check up on the smiling policeman, missing his protective presence.

The corridor gets darker, seemingly narrower, due perhaps to some mysterious intent of its planners or merely to the evening that envelops the world. This entire huge and forbidding warehouse — it occurs to her suddenly — is a metaphor for humanity, and we are all extras in its story, not knowing if a credible and satisfying resolution awaits us at the end. If only, she sighs, it were set to the right music.

People have to press themselves against the walls to make way for her wheelchair, some of them patients, some relatives, others extras or actors, medical staff and production staff — who can tell the difference between the real and the fictitious? There are those who smile sympathetically and inquire about her disability, and others who pass by in silent sadness. But she keeps rolling along, determined to find that back exit, which suddenly dazzles her with a glimpse of the gray-blue Mediterranean.

The door leads to a small platform of facilities for workers at the port, with two sheds, one for storage and the other for changing clothes, as well as a small cafeteria, and the doorway is blocked by a large man — the retired judge, a familiar and amiable extra whose uniform, baseball cap and pistol establish him as the hospital security guard.

“What can you do?” he says merrily to the wheeling harpist in her brightly colored nightgown. “They haven’t given up on me, asked me to be the guard at the hospital door, so my character will be a regular fixture in the series, a way to fatten my pension.”

“No need to apologize,” Noga assures him. “You’re an Israeli Hitchcock. The audience can’t relax till they spot his cameo. Meanwhile, our friend Elazar has been taken to the gallows. He won’t be able to show his smiling face anymore.”

The judge laughs. “Don’t worry, the stuttering policeman will rise like a daisy from the dead and fill important roles. And you, dear Noga, have you concluded your experiment?”

“Mine? You mean my mother’s.”

“Yours too, because you’re part of it.”

“True.”

“What’s the verdict?”

“Mother is still up in the air, but my sense is she won’t abandon Jerusalem.”

“Bravo! That’s how a brave secular woman should act. And you, dear?”

“In ten days’ time I report for duty in Europe beside my harp, to begin rehearsals of Berlioz’s Fantastique .”

“That way, you’ll be leaving Israel without appearing as an extra in a TV commercial and not just in a fictional story.”

“What’s the difference?”

But as the judge-cum-security-guard tries to explain the essential difference, her attention strays to the cafeteria and its customers. These are mainly men, no longer young, presumably dock workers and customs clerks, gray-haired and bald, but she imagines them as seagoing folk at a Mediterranean port, and is seized by a fierce nostalgia, as if they retained something precious that she had lost, some feeling that has no substitute.

“You’re not listening.”

“You’re right, because I’m burned out, with no one around to explain to me how the devil I got talked into this. And you, my honored friend, where do you find the strength to hop from story to story? Your family doesn’t miss you?”

“On the contrary, it’s good that I’m not at home. Ever since I retired they’ve complained that I never stop judging them.”

And as the blood of the vanished sun is soaked into the clouds, the cafeteria’s lights go out to hasten the exit of the customers, a weaker light is turned on, a tall Sudanese appears and proceeds to set the chairs upside down on the tables, and in the fading twilight there emerge from the cafeteria not humans but silhouettes, headed for a rear gate of creaky revolving bars that ejects them from the port one by one. One figure remains standing on the platform as if lost in thought. Instead of exiting the revolving gate with the others, the figure turns around and heads toward the sea, past huge containers and enormous cranes, walking slowly, dreamily, alongside a gigantic, dark ship, as if hoping to draw strength from it, or inspiration. The unhurried, hesitant steps, halting from time to time, unsettle the woman watching, as if she has seen it before. Her gaze persists until the figure is swallowed in the darkness, and at the edge of the breakwater the lighthouse begins flashing its beam, three short blinks and a pause.

“What are you staring at, young lady?”

“How did the twilight in Israel become so short?”

“Become? When?” The judge laughs. “You’ve been in Europe too long and you forget how fast darkness falls in your homeland.”

“Apparently.”

“So what do you say?”

“About what?”

“About the possibility that before leaving you participate as an extra in an interesting commercial, which I’ve already signed up for.”

“No,” she protests, “I’m done being an extra. I won’t be in any more made-up stories, not in commercials and not in reality, and so I am saying goodbye forever to you too, mighty watchman. You must be strict. No one must be allowed to enter and no one to escape. And now I am going to resign and give up my chair.”

She mischievously pulls down the brim of the judge’s cap until it covers his eyes, and spins her wheelchair around and back into the corridor, which is not as dark now, for at the far end two spotlights have been turned on to shoot a scene that calls for her participation.

Even as she rises from her wheelchair to announce her departure and request that she be liberated from the intravenous tube stuck to her arm, a young man wearing an ID tag gently seizes her arm and seats her back in the chair.