A. Yehoshua - The Extra

“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.

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 tenure 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.”

“The two harps.”

“Of course. Both of them.”

He admires the pretty musician’s dimpled cheeks as she glows with happiness. Taking a wad of tobacco from a box on his desk, he tamps it into the twisting pipe from Jerusalem, but has difficulty lighting it.

“This is a young and modest pipe,” he pronounces, taking up his old pipe, which readily responds. “But I won’t give up on it.”

“Where did you get the idea to replace the Berlioz with Debussy?”

“You won’t believe it — from very far away, the management of the Kyoto orchestra. While you were in Israel we got an unexpected offer from our embassy in Japan for an exchange of orchestras with Kyoto, and when we mentioned Berlioz, we sensed a polite hesitation, because the Fantastique had been in their repertoire the previous year, so they came up with an original notion, expressed in an inspired fashion. Here, listen to what they wrote us: ‘You, the Dutch, have wrestled with the sea and succeeded in taming it and even conquering it to some extent, whereas for us Japanese the sea brings destruction and death. Therefore kindly perform Debussy’s La Mer for us not only as musicians but as experienced conquerors of the sea, and maybe through your performance we too can learn how to contend with the sea that surrounds us.’ Strange, no?”