A. Yehoshua - The Extra

The father is pale and silent, and though he slowly turns the pages of a newspaper, it would seem that death discourages reading. Nevertheless, he doesn’t look pained or depressed, as if death had been a difficult but successful surgery, and is relieved because further death will not be necessary. Would it be right, wonders the dreamer, to exploit the gift of his resurrection to bid farewell to him too before her trip? She heads into the kitchen to ask her mother whether saying goodbye to a living-dead person would add to his pain, except the kitchen has relocated to some unknown corner of the apartment, and in its place is a small, dark bathroom, its window bolted shut. A pale woman, immersed in reddish foam, lies in the bathtub, her eyes closed, not her mother but a total stranger. The eyes of the woman open wide. She is young, though apparently the owner of the apartment.

In the morning her mother phones, apologizing for calling so early.

“You were looking for me last night, so I’m calling before you vanish in the distance.”

“You did well. It’s time for me to get up. But what’s going on? Only a few days in Jerusalem and you’re back in Tel Aviv. Do you actually regret not sticking with the assisted living?”

“Regrets are also part of life,” says the mother evasively. “But not to worry, my daughter, we won’t draft you again for any experiment.”

Noga provides her mother with details of the orchestra’s trip to Japan. She spells out the names of the cities letter by letter and, for emergencies only, tells her how to get through to her cell phone with an entry code, and of course reminds her of the high cost and the time difference. But she doesn’t mention the second harpist who dropped out at the last minute and the possibility that the whole trip might be in vain.

“Good,” says the mother, “this way I’ll be able to keep track of you at all times.”

Now the daughter wants to know how old she was when they moved from the apartment where she was born to the one where she grew up.

“How old?” her mother asks. “Why?”

“No reason.”

“You know me, no reason is not a reason.”

“Let’s say because of a dream.”

“You have time to dream before a trip like this?”

“It was a dream that didn’t ask permission.”

“How can I give you an exact answer if I’m not sure how old you are now?”

“You’re not sure? Ima!”

“Yes, it is odd, but I just want to confirm you’re forty-three.”

“Why three? Where’d you get three? Not even two, and that’s two months away.”

“Not even two? So why do you think of yourself as a hopeless woman?”

“Hopeless? In what sense hopeless?”

“I apologize. In no sense. I already told you that the Uriah story is eating me up inside. But I’m not saying anything. Okay, forty-two. So if we do the simple math, when we moved from Ovadiah Street in Kerem Avraham to Rashi Street in Mekor Baruch — in other words, from the apartment where you were born to the one you grew up in — you were all of five, five and a half. When we moved I was already pregnant with Honi, who was born in the new apartment, which by the way was never new and never will be. But why are you digging into the past? What happened in the dream?”

“You and Abba always refused to show me the apartment where I was born, even though you described it as beautiful and special, with a view.”

“Yes, a wide-open view, from more than one window. But I’m sure that with so many births and so much new construction in the area, nobody has a view anymore. Yes, it was a very nice apartment, in a neighborhood that changed since then, became blacker than black, the usual story.”

“If it was such a nice apartment, why did you move?”

“Why, why, all these whys because of a dream?”

“Why not?”

“All right — we moved because your father insisted.”

“Why?”

“Again why? What was in that dream that upset you so much?”

“Abba was in it, for the first time since he died.”

“Ah… Abba… It’s about time. In my dreams, this week alone he appeared three times.”

“And said something?”

“No. He can only speak if we give him something to say. So far in the dreams he’s only an extra, standing up.”

“An extra in a dream? Good one.”

“You see? Sometimes I also have great ideas.”

“Absolutely. Sometimes too many. But still, why did you leave the lovely apartment?”

“You really insist on knowing.”

“Because you’re avoiding the answer.”

“All right. The young landlady, who lived on the same floor, died suddenly, and the husband quickly remarried, so the new wife could take care of the baby.”

“There was a baby?”

“I just said, she died in childbirth.”

“You didn’t say that.”

“Sorry.”

“But what did Abba care if the landlord found a wife to take care of the child?”

“Ask him when he comes to visit you again in a dream.”

“Now you’re hiding something.”

“Because it was a long time ago, and complicated, and if I go into detail you might miss your flight.”

“Don’t worry about my flight. It suddenly occurs to me that I also saw this young woman in my dream, the dead one.”

“You didn’t see anything. You were five years old then, or five and a half.”

“So that was how Abba started having those strange delusions!”

“Could be. You knew him. The humor, cracking jokes, his little comedy routines, it all came so naturally to him, unless of course something bad happened. Then he would get scared and imagine the worst. And since I was also pregnant when the landlady died, he insisted that we leave the apartment and move someplace else.”

THE CHARTERED JAPANESE AIRCRAFT looked old, but the cabin was spotless. Most of the instruments were stowed in the belly of the plane along with the musicians’ luggage, except for the flutes, clarinets and oboes, which would easily fit in the overhead compartments. A few violinists who deemed their instruments priceless received special permission to keep them in sight during the flight. There were only twelve seats in business class, which were reserved for the conductor and his wife, as well as Herman Kroon, the deputy mayor of Arnhem and his wife, the Japanese cultural attaché who initiated the trip and the young composer Van den Broek. The remainder were allotted to senior musicians, most of them not young. Noga was seated, of course, in tourist class, beside a contrabass player, Pirke Wisser, a plump, middle-aged Dutch woman who, it turned out, was a grandmother.

Just after takeoff, at three in the afternoon, one of the pilots came out of the cockpit and with the help of a digital display briefed the passengers about the flight, which would first head north, not east, since the polar route was shortest. Thus now, at summer’s end, the sun would shine during most of the flight, and only an hour or two before landing in Japan would they encounter the starry night sky.

Winging over the North Pole struck some of the musicians as a bold, even presumptuous undertaking for an older airplane, and there was macabre joking that the orchestra’s crash into a giant iceberg would be a boon for Arnhem, not merely relieving the municipality of a budgetary burden, but obviating any costly search for bodies and instruments. For some musicians, fear of flying is intensified by such black humor, and there are calls for self-control and silence. All are exhausted following the festive farewell concert, and since the sun will stand still in the heavens, it’s best to lower the shades.

Crammed in her seat beside a round window, the Israeli harpist floats above white lakes of ice, pondering her interrupted dream. Will her imagination manage next time to chat with her silent father, the extra? Now that the dream has been interpreted, will she be able to dream it again? She smiles sadly at the grandmother beside her, a tall, stout player in whose hands the contrabass seems like a violin that grew up and stood on its feet. The Dutch woman smiles in return, and is well aware of her neighbor’s concern. Yes, based on many years of experience with the orchestra, she believes that someone will be found in Japan to play second harp. “Everyone in the orchestra,” she says, “especially after such demanding rehearsals, is determined not to forgo the Debussy.”