A. Yehoshua - The Extra

He is half asleep, half listening to the youngsters, with a small pipe stuck in his mouth. The young people, noticing the foreign woman heading their way, fall silent. But she is no stranger to the old man, and to demonstrate this she stands before him and bows deeply, in the spirit of their meeting a few hours earlier at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. But the old man merely nods his head, apparently failing to recognize her as his partner. Is he a blind musician, improvising the part of second harp? She feels a sudden pang of anxiety, but doesn’t press the issue. Touching two fingers to her lips, she offers an excuse for her presence: the craving for a cigarette. The young people oblige her, and rather than say thank you, she delights in local custom and bows to the whole group, cigarette in mouth, as if she were a soloist onstage before a cheering audience. She then walks back to the guesthouse, filled with the scent of simple tobacco that reminds her of Uriah.

The room is still, but the snoring grandma has woken up and turned on her small bedside light, waiting to apologize to the neighbor. To be honest, she hadn’t imagined that her snoring would startle and drive away the Israeli, who has evidently long grown accustomed to sleeping alone. Now she will not fall back to sleep until Noga has soundly done so. As reinforcement she offers Noga a dependable sleeping pill, whose effect is impervious even to cannon fire. “A whole or just a half?” “Whole,” says the harpist. “Half the night is gone, and tomorrow’s a big day.”

The little pill is indeed a mighty potion, and the sleep is so deep that her dreams lie dormant. And when she opens her eyes she finds herself alone in the room, her neighbor’s bed meticulously made, and morning fiercely shining through the folds of the window curtain. It is nine o’clock. Eight hours of pure sleep, which instead of alertness have produced a thick blur. Noga smiles, thinking, This sweet grandma could have killed me so she could snore to her heart’s content. She rises sluggishly, washes slowly, her head spinning, limbs heavy, and before making her bed she rushes just in time to what’s left of the breakfast buffet. The many hours of sleep did her no good, and the visit to the park seems like an illusion; she’s not even sure if the cigarette was lit or not. Since the rehearsal at the concert hall is called for one p.m., most of the musicians, encouraged by eager guides, are making a quick tour of two more temples. But the Israeli does not seek further holiness — she has more than enough in her homeland. She returns to her room, where instead of making her unruly bed she slips back into her nightgown and huddles like a fetus, no longer from fatigue but from feelings of illness and pain.

At noon Manfred arrives to wake her. What’s going on? carps the flutist. They will only be in this jewel box of a city for four days, so what’s the point of sleeping? She looks at him sadly and doesn’t reply. Her roommate is astounded: there’s no way a little innocent sleeping pill could depress somebody quite so much.

“Little but not innocent,” Noga mumbles feebly in English. “But it’s not depression, it’s memory.” Without adding a word, she banishes Manfred and goes to the bathroom, and is terrified to find two blood spots on her nightgown. Could her period conceivably be coming back, or is this a symptom of something more serious? She washes out the nightgown, rubbing the blood spots with a bar of soap, struck by a sensation of death.

The Kyoto Concert Hall is splendidly modern, resembling a giant shoe. The heel is a round structure containing the main hall and its rectangular lobby. At the back of the stage rise the lofty pipes of the organ, silvered and gilded, in the manner of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Most of the instruments have been brought onstage, and her harp has been joined by a black one the likes of which she has seen only in old photographs. “Is this the house harp?” she asks the Japanese cultural attaché, who explains that this is the private harp of the elderly Ichiro Matsudaira, which he brings with him to every performance. The rehearsal begins with Symphony No. 26 in D Minor by Haydn, a dramatic, tempestuous symphony, which an ensemble of the best players performs with vigorous precision. As they play, Herman Kroon and a woman violist, who Dennis believes has a uniquely sensitive ear, prowl about the hall to verify how its acoustics respond to a foreign orchestra. It turns out that what sounds right and good in Europe also sounds right and good in the Far East.

Next in turn, after the Haydn symphony, is Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and most of the musicians who had not been part of the previous ensemble come to the stage. Only Noga and a few percussionists stay seated in the hall. She has installed herself in the first row to get a better look at the Japanese soloist, on account of whose arm, broken in a tennis game in Berlin, Noga had been robbed of the Mozart concerto. This is a short, dark young woman in jeans and a lightweight blouse, her hands quick and dexterous, and it would seem that her self-confidence flourishes here in her homeland, for she asks, even in rehearsal, that the house be completely dark, to compel the few listeners to concentrate on her alone.

Her playing is powerful, fast, virtuosic, but uninspired. From time to time the conductor halts her racing tempo, trying to reach a compromise, not always with success. “She’s a well-known kamikaze,” Herman whispers to Noga, “who turns music into a suicide mission. But don’t worry about her, tonight they’ll love her, because she was born in a small town not far from here to a poor family, and when she studied music she supported herself as a waitress and babysitter, and soared to the top on her talent alone. Many people here still remember her from the beginning of her career, and whoever doesn’t can read about it in the program. The Japanese, unlike us, don’t just flip through the program, they read it from cover to cover. And besides,” Herman goes on, “let us not forget that this is the Emperor , and for the Japanese that’s not Napoleon but their emperor — beloved, mysterious, revered, the bedrock of their identity.”

Little noises in the darkness. Noga turns around and sees the elderly harpist feeling his way inside, a small stick in his hand. She wants to exchange a hello with him, but fears he will again find it hard to recognize her. No matter, she thinks, soon we’ll sit shoulder to shoulder and he won’t be able to deny me.

The glorious metallic tones of the piano are suddenly accompanied by the acute contraction of her lower belly, like a knife blade turning in her gut, and though she tries to distract herself from the pain, it won’t let up. The young Japanese woman is galloping like a wild horse that has thrown its rider, and the conductor is trying to slow her down with the help of the wind instruments. Noga has seen her share of young and brilliant soloists who after a few years sink into anonymity. Soloists of age sixty or seventy are less abundant than these youngsters. Personal life experience, the broader and deeper the better, is the key to fresh interpretation of the tired, crowd-pleasing classics.

The pain increases, her muscles strain. “Excuse me,” she whispers to Herman, and goes out of the hall in search of the ladies’ room, which is tucked someplace far away, and she only finds a large door with the stenciled image of a person in a wheelchair, crowned by one word in Japanese. Does this suggest anyone, male and female? If she had access to the chair she occupied as a disabled extra, she’d roll right in, not as a man or woman, but just a human. In the absence of such a chair, does her distress confer permission? There is no one in the corridor to tell her what is and isn’t proper, so she cautiously opens the door and enters.