A. Yehoshua - The Extra

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 absent 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?”