A. Yehoshua - The Extra

“But I’m talking about reality, Ima. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Then I’ll ask Honi to warn him to leave you alone.”

“No, no. No way. Not one word to Honi.”

“Why?”

“Because Honi will make things worse. Now that it’s more or less clear to him that you won’t move here to live near him, he’ll look for a way, with Uriah’s help, to tie me down to Jerusalem so I can help him take care of you.”

“When did this become clear to him?”

“At the opera at Masada, when you stayed together in the hotel. It takes a while for his crafty mind to get over its illusions, but in the end he understood what I understood from the beginning.”

“You two know what’s in my mind even before I do?”

“It happens sometimes.”

“And if I surprise you?”

“You won’t.”

“Tell me, my daughter, how do you manage to play such a delicate and romantic instrument even though you talk so rudely?”

“When I play I don’t talk. When I play I’m not furious.”

“Why are you furious?”

“About the brother you gave me.”

“But your brother loves you. You know how attached he is to you. Even when he was a baby in his carriage, he would scream and nobody could calm him down. Only when you bent over him would he stop crying and start smiling.”

“Except Honi isn’t in the carriage anymore, and now the tears are mine.”

OVERCOME WITH EMOTION, she hugs and kisses her mother. “Go ahead, surprise us,” she says, and hurries from Tel Aviv to the apartment in Jerusalem, bolts the front door, and though she’s certain that even a former husband bleeding with love for his first wife will not dare to wriggle down a drainpipe or gutter, she checks the feeble hook on the bathroom window, unplugs the phone and takes a long shower to shed the remains of imaginary reality before huddling in her childhood bed.

She wakes relaxed. The possibility that Uriah may try to come here need not frighten her so long as she maintains the integrity of her boundaries. Even if he still has a key to her parents’ apartment, now there is also the bolt, which will compel him to ask permission. What troubles her is Elazar’s silence. It was he who enticed her to take part in the hospital series, and even if he didn’t get the role of the dead man, he should have at least said goodbye before vanishing. True, she has been stringing him along, but really, a man his age, with a grandson, and an experienced police investigator, ought to know that patience is mandatory, even in the case of a lonely woman who will soon fly away.

How to find a man she knows only by his first name, whom she’s met as an extra, in jobs that he or her brother had set up for her? Undaunted, as evening falls she strolls through the Mahane Yehuda market, stops at his favorite restaurant and describes him in detail to the waiters, imitating his stutter a bit, and they recognize the character but don’t know his family name or address, only that Elazar was a former police commander, so she should inquire at the police station by the market entrance.

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.

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.