A. Yehoshua - The Extra

“He’ll hear it from me this evening, nor will he be surprised. The assisted living was an experiment, the three of us committed ourselves to three months, and we stood honorably by our commitment.”

“Given no choice.”

“You should eat the fruit so it won’t spoil.”

“We already ate some.”

“You’ve started referring to yourself in Jerusalem by the royal ‘we’?”

“Not quite. Uriah actually showed up, and I served him some of your fruit.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Believe it.”

“And this time he appeared as himself?”

“As himself.”

“So this time, at least, he didn’t want to scare you.”

“Not even as a wounded man did he want to scare me. He wanted sympathy.”

“And as himself?”

“As himself, after all these years, he still mourns for the child we didn’t have.”

“But he has children of his own. I saw them, hugged them.”

“Still, he won’t give up on the child I didn’t give him.”

“And on you?”

“Not anymore. It’s the child, not me.”

“So listen to me, Noga. Listen to what a wise woman has to say to a beloved daughter, hear me out and don’t interrupt. Give him that child, give it to him, and that way something real from you will stay in this world, not just musical notes that vanish into thin air. Make an effort, then go back to your music. Give birth to a child, and I will help him raise it.”

“He doesn’t need help. He’ll take the child home and raise it with his children.”

“And his wife?”

“I know him. He’ll persuade her, or force her.”

“If so — I’m out of breath — listen to me, I’m begging you. Don’t dismiss this out of hand. It’s a wonderful idea, it’s profound, and at the last minute it also turns our failed experiment into a surprising victory. Stay a little longer in Jerusalem, until it happens, and instead of outrageous payments to an old folks’ home, we’ll survive handsomely together in Jerusalem, owing nothing to anyone. Now that you are used to Jerusalem, and not afraid like your brother of the neighborhood Orthodoxy, stay with me a while longer. And Honi and I will participate with love and devotion in this experiment, which this time will be yours. You won’t have to work, not even as an extra, and if in the meantime some harpist retires, or gets sick or dies, you could—”

“Enough, Ima, enough delusions.”

“Why delusions? Today, with Abba no longer alive, these aren’t delusions. I swear to you on his soul that he was the one to blame, only he. With some weird confidence he succeeded in scaring me, and I bet you too, that you were likely to die in childbirth. I bought into it, but now that he’s gone, we have, you and I, the freedom and the ability to understand the reality by ourselves. And I’m telling you, you’re forty-two years old, and this is the last moment.”

“The moment has passed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have nothing in me to give life to a child, even if I were to succumb to Uriah.”

“In what sense? In what sense? Noga, my darling, in what sense?”

“In the simplest sense. My period, Ima. My periods stopped.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why would I?”

“So I wouldn’t keep torturing myself with false hopes.”

“I’m telling you now so you won’t torture yourself with false hopes.”

“But I will torture myself, because I know that even when it seems like the end, it isn’t the end.”

“Tell that to my body, Ima, not to me.”

“Then the time has come for me to speak directly to your body without your interference.”

“That would be wise and helpful, because the body, and not just the soul, sometimes needs a mother’s words. But hurry, because the day after tomorrow I have an early flight out of here.”

ONLY NOW, AFTER THE PHONE CALL with her mother, does it register that the encounter with her former husband rattled her so much that it’s hard for her to be alone in the apartment, and she hurries to the workers’ restaurant in the shuk and sits facing the entrance to see who comes in. But Elazar doesn’t appear, and the black camera on the ceiling is inert, the angle of its lens unchanged since her last visit. On her way back she buys some spices, to season the farewell meal she plans to cook the next day for her mother’s homecoming. But in the apartment, instead of napping on a blazing afternoon in one of the three beds that will soon no longer be hers, she changes from her sandals into sneakers, shaking out the sand from the Judean Desert, and makes a return visit to the little police station.

In the dimly lit station sit the same bored policewomen, and what was unknown in the past about the man who hurriedly broke contact remains unknown in the present. She gently pats the heads of the Mandatory lions, faithful to their post after so many years, and walks down Jaffa Road toward Zion Square, to see the building that, if memory serves, long ago housed the conservatory. But the original building, whose studios had been connected by an outdoor portico accessed by shiny stone steps, has vanished, and instead of asking passersby who won’t know the answer, she goes up Ben-Yehuda Street, the heart of the Jerusalem Triangle, to the street named for the British king whose son gave up the throne for the love of a divorcée, and walks past the circular synagogue en route to the Gymnasia, her high school. She sits down in front of a café and looks at the wide steps leading into the school, where sometimes the principal himself would stand to chide latecomers. It was here, as a freshman, that she became serious about classical music and learned to appreciate what she was playing, and after school hours, in a classroom with chairs inverted on tables, she learned to distinguish the unique sound of the harp amid the energetic fiddling of the other strings.

Her thoughts keep returning to Uriah, a married man and father of two, who mourns and yearns for the child not born to him. But what’s the value of such yearning if he lacks the patience and curiosity to look for just a moment at the childhood harp that, he insists, was the source of all his woe?

A week after she’d arrived in Jerusalem, she visited the Academy of Music, which in her day was in the process of moving from its home near the prime minister’s residence to the campus of the Hebrew University at Givat Ram. There she met two of her former teachers, who were happy to know that her love of music had not merely endured but flourished. First off, she wanted to know if there was a harp available for her to practice on from time to time. But her teachers didn’t think it dignified that she wait around between lessons so she could play a student harp. Take some sheet music and play in your imagination, they said, you’re enough of a professional to do that. Now, as she is about to leave Jerusalem, she is drawn back to the academy’s previous building, for another look at the spot where an enraptured young man waited for her, helmet in hand.

Since Lovers of Zion Street is not far from there, she continues on to the home of the parents of the youth who tried to poison his girlfriend so she would never leave him. Unlike that busy night of filming, the house is silent now. Only an old mother is visible through the kitchen window.

She walks downhill to the end of Lovers of Zion and over to the parallel street and stands before the gates of the former mental hospital, now a church, where the parents had installed their son to pacify his demons, thereby enabling his illustrious career overseas.

This journey on foot does not tire the harpist. On the contrary, it gives her pleasure. Her flexible sneakers add spring to her step, and the advent of the Jerusalem evening tempts her not to head home but to go on to Emek Refaim for a look at the first rented apartment she lived in after getting married. Was it really thirty-two steps that Uriah had to carry the heavy harp up and down for her? Old streets have been widened and familiar buildings renovated, so she cannot find the place at first, and when she does it looks different, but she’s sure the number of steps is the same. She can’t find the light switch on the stairway, so she climbs in darkness and counts. And yes, these are difficult stairs, steep and angular, unlike the friendly stairs in her parents’ building, where, when she’d get home from the Gymnasia, a gentle, handsome Orthodox boy would be waiting for a heart-to-heart talk.