A. Yehoshua - The Extra

Laughter and applause.

The conductor raps his baton.

“If we start recounting Debussy’s romantic adventures, we won’t get to the first notes of the piece today, nor do I wish to be responsible for corrupting decent Dutch men and women with racy French anecdotes. That’s what the Internet is for, answerable to no one. So suffice it to say that he was quite the adventurer, and that his tonal instability may have derived from romantic instability. He switched women easily, cheated on them unconscionably, and one of his wives shot herself in despair in the Place de la Concorde and survived only by a miracle. But all this proves that for him, woman was the ultimate creation, an eternal grail of love and desire, even when no longer young and pretty. She is the purpose of art.”

The musicians, women and men, nod in agreement.

“Debussy died at the age of only fifty-five, at the end of the First World War, as German cannons battered Paris with their last remaining shells. And so his funeral procession took place in empty streets, although he was, in my view and that of many others, the most important French composer of the twentieth century, whose influence continues to be felt to this day.”

“How, exactly?” demands a white-haired cellist.

The maestro laughs. “I see you don’t want to play today, just talk.”

“We want to have a better understanding of what we’re playing,” several voices chime in.

“Fine, fine, you’re right, because in recent years this orchestra has not played Debussy, and this is music that requires particular precision. It’s not easy or simple. A complex and dreamlike harmonic world, scales of whole tones, atonal passages, glittering transitions. His repetitiveness is unsettling. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we are not lounging in a beach chair and looking at the sea, but entering the depths, and the Japanese want an answer from us — what to do in the next tsunami.”

“Just so it doesn’t swallow us too,” interjects a veteran oboist, and everyone laughs.

“No,” the humorless first violinist assures her, “we shall not perform on the east coast of Japan but on the west coast, the one not exposed to the Pacific Ocean that still yearns for the moon that was born from it.”

The conductor silences them with a tap of his baton.

“Now let’s get to work. And since this is a serious and difficult piece, I will be more of a taskmaster and less of a comedian, nor will I limit myself to mere criticism. Rather, I’ll do some whipping, since I just got a whip as a gift.”

He picks up the Bedouin whip, extends it and waves it cautiously above his head.

Pandemonium. The orchestra goes wild. Shouts from every corner. “Not fair!” howl the string players. “Your whip only reaches us and not the winds and percussion!”

“Why won’t it reach them?” asks the conductor. “It will. I’ll step down from the podium and whip any faraway offenders.”

A bold cellist asks, “Where did you get the whip?” She rises from her chair and comes over to inspect it.

I hope he doesn’t give me away, Noga thinks, cringing. Damn, what a mistake I made.

But Dennis van Zwol, the incorrigible joker, cannot conceal the provenance of the gift. “Beware, friends,” he declares, “the whip arrived from the Holy Land. Our Venus gave it to me as a gift, to strengthen my standing with you. You know the Israelis, don’t you? They are new Jews, swift and strong, who don’t hang up the whip as a wall decoration, like us cowardly Europeans, but use it to straighten out anyone who angers them. So beware — from now on, I too am a new tough Jew.”

The Bedouin whip merits an enthusiastic reception, as bows, trumpets and woodwinds are waved at the harpist, who reddens with emotion. Finally the musicians calm down, and deep silence engulfs the hall.

Van Zwol closes his eyes, presses his palms together. After prolonged introspection he lifts the baton delicately, as if all musical wisdom were hidden within it, bids the timpani to beat the first sounds, then signals the two harpists, their hands poised on the strings. Christine is to strike the first note with the left hand, and immediately thereafter, Noga, the first harpist, is to enter with her left hand, and though both are playing the same melody, they are to remain an eighth note apart, in strict time. But the conductor quickly stops them, for it turns out that Christine is unaware that her harp, not the other, is supposed to stress every note in the opening bars.

“Pay attention,” he warns her in French. “Sharpen your accents.”

He gives a sign to start over, then again stops. He feels the accents are not emphatic enough.

Noga studies Christine’s face as she groans under the weight of the conductor’s reprimands. Her face is pale and severe; luminous golden hair streams to her shoulders. From time to time she veils her face with her hand, as if banishing a painful thought. She has come to the rehearsal in a long, baggy dress that covers her long body, and the little bulge, which at their first meeting seemed to Noga to hint at pregnancy, has vanished. Over and over Christine stresses the accents requested by the conductor, but she cannot seem to satisfy him. Noga hides her head behind her harp, fearing that the conductor will move her from first harp to second, to achieve the sound he insists upon. Finally he resigns himself and motions to the orchestra to play a few more bars, then harangues the clarinets and bassoons to produce exactly the soft sound his inner ear is seeking.

“How can you not feel,” he says, by way of explaining his mood, “that here the composer has planted the melody of a mysterious sea nymph, the song of a melancholy mermaid, which from now on will evolve as a motif in the depths of the music.” It is clear to the orchestra that they are in for a rough patch, and although the piece is not long, merely twenty-eight minutes, they will spend many hours rehearsing picky nuances, to realize the vision of a conductor who has decided to turn The Sea into his new flagship.

When the rehearsal is over, Manfred is quick to complain to Noga: “That whip you gave him drove him out of his mind.”

She grins. “It’s okay. He’s still got enough mind left over.”

Manfred invites her to dinner, and she declines. She’s still recovering from the sojourn in her homeland, but not to worry, they’ll have ample opportunity in Japan.

“We’ll have to wait till Japan?”

“Why not?” she says, and asks about Christine — who she is, how well she played the Mozart, why she looks tormented.

The flutist doesn’t know much. In the Mozart double concerto she played with precision, but the notes lacked luster and emotion. He hasn’t noticed her distress, just her reticence, maybe because her French is hostile to Flemish and English, and her accent is funny. He hasn’t really delved into her story. He’s not interested in silent married women, only in unattached and talkative ones, like the one who stands before him.

“Christine is married?”

“It’s hard to say. More or less. In any case there is a man in her life. He was at all the concerts, sat in the front row, apparently not out of love for music but out of concern for her. He would arrive from Antwerp, sometimes in his work clothes — a dockworker, or immigrant, or refugee seeking asylum.”

“Where’s he from?”

“I didn’t ask — it’s none of my business. The world today is intermingled. We even have an exotic woman from the Middle East, where people still ride innocent camels and prod them with whips, who became the first harpist of a civilized orchestra.”

He puts his hand on her shoulder and says, “By the way, you got prettier in Israel. You have color. What do you people eat there?”