The Extra

First U.S. edition

Copyright © 2014 by Abraham B. Yehoshua

English translation copyright © 2016 by Stuart Schoffman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected]
or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yehoshua, Abraham B.

Title: The extra / A. B. Yehoshua ; translated by Stuart Schoffman.

Other titles: Nitzevet. English

Description:
1
st U.S. edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. | Originally published as: Nitzevet.

Identifiers:
LCCN
2015043035 (print) |
LCCN
2015048954 (ebook) |
ISBN
9780544609709 (hardback) |
ISBN
9780544715936 (ebook)

Subjects:
LCSH
: Musicians—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | Jewish fiction. |
BISAC: FICTION
/ Literary. |
FICTION
/ Jewish.

Classification:
LCC PJ5054.Y42 N5813 2016
(print) |
LCC PJ5054.Y42
(ebook) |
DDC 892.4/36—DC23

LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043035

First published as
Nitzevet
by Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2014

Cover photograph © Vladimir Nykl / Eyeem / Getty Images

Cover design by Archie Ferguson

Author photograph © Leonardo Céndamo

v1.0516

 

For Ika, my beloved, my partner

A
T FOUR IN THE MORNING
the cell phone rings, its alarm forgotten from the day before, yet she doesn't turn off the wistful melody planted in the gadget by an elderly flutist who wanted to be remembered during her long visit to Israel. Nor, when quiet is restored, does she curl up under her parents' warm quilt to resume her interrupted sleep. Instead she tugs lightly on the levers of the electric bed and elevates its head, so that while still lying down she can scan the dawning Jerusalem sky, in search of the planet for which she was named.

When she was a child, her father told her to look for that planet before sunrise or just after sunset. “Even if you don't find yourself in the sky,” he said, “it's important to look up now and then, at least at the moon, which is smaller than your planet, just as your brother is smaller than you, but seems bigger to us because it's closer.”

And so, on this visit to Israel—perhaps because of her forced unemployment, or else her temporary job as a movie extra, which sometimes requires working at night—she often lifts her eyes to the Israeli skies, less hazy than those over Europe.

On her brief visits to Israel in the years before her father's death, she would stay with old friends from the Academy of Music rather than at her parents' home. Contrary to what her brother, Honi, thought, this was not out of distaste for the new Orthodox neighbors who were turning the neighborhood “black.” Actually she, who in recent years had kept her distance from Jerusalem and enjoyed the secure and liberal milieu of Europe, found it easy to believe in respectful, tolerant coexistence with a minority, even as it showed signs of becoming a majority. After all, in her youth, when she practiced her music on Shabbat, the neighbors did not protest.

“In the ancient Temple they would play the harp on religious holidays,” Mr. Pomerantz, the handsome Hasid who lived one floor above, once told her. “So it's nice for God-fearing people to know that you're now practicing for the coming of the Messiah.”

“But will they also let girls like me play music in the new Temple?” demanded the young musician, red-faced.

“Also girls like you,” affirmed the man, gazing at her, “and if, when the Messiah comes, the priests won't let you because you're a girl, we'll turn you into a handsome lad.”

Even this minor memory strengthens her belief in a local climate of tolerance, and unlike her brother, who fears his mother's besiegement by the ultra-Orthodox, Noga watches their bustling lives with no grudge or complaint, merely with the amused eye of a tourist or folklorist who welcomes all the songs of the world to sing out in full color.

After her marriage, she had lived in Jerusalem for a few years with her husband, Uriah, but after leaving Jerusalem, and subsequently her husband, she preferred, on her occasional Friday night visits, to return after Shabbat dinner to Tel Aviv. Her parents' intimacy, which only deepened in old age, made things harder for her, not easier. They'd said nothing about her refusal to have children, had even made their peace with it, and still she sensed that it was a relief for them that she not spend the night in their space. That way she would not intrude on a couple fiercely faithful to their ancient, narrow wooden bed, where they would snuggle together in serene harmony. If one of them was alarmed by a strange dream, or woke up over some fresh worry, the other would immediately wake up too and continue a conversation that apparently took place while they were sleeping.

Once, on a stormy Friday, lacking transportation back to Tel Aviv, Noga stayed over and slept in her childhood room, and during the night, between whistling winds and flashes of lightning, she saw her father walking with tiny steps from room to room, his head bent submissively and hands pressed to his chest, Buddhist fashion.

From the double bed, a voice of gentle exasperation: “And what's the matter now?”

“The lightning and thunder turned me all of a sudden from a Jew into a Chinaman,” the father explained in a whisper, nodding his head graciously at the masses of Chinese who had come to wish him well.

“But the Chinese don't walk like that.”

“What?”

“They don't walk that way, the Chinese.”

“So who does walk like that?”

“Japanese, only Japanese.”

“Then I'm Japanese,” her father conceded, shortening his steps and circling the narrow double bed, bowing to the bride of his youth who lay before him. “What can I do, my love? The storm blew me from China to Japan and turned me into a Japanese.”

T
HE SINO-JAPANESE MAN
was seventy-five when he died, amiable and funny to his last breath. One night his wife woke up to complete a thought she'd had before falling asleep, but was met with silence. At first she interpreted the silence as agreement, until she grew suspicious, tried shaking her husband and, while shaking him, realized that her lifelong companion had left the world with no pain and no complaint.

During the mourning period, as she grieved with relatives and friends, she spoke with amazement but also resentment about his silent and rude exit. Since her husband had been an engineer, the supervisor of the water department of the city of Jerusalem, she joked that he had secretly engineered his own death, blocking the flow of blood to his brain the way he had sometimes blocked the water supply of ultra-Orthodox Jews who refused to pay their water bills to the Zionist municipality. “Had he revealed to me the secret of an easy death,” she complained to her son and daughter, “I would spare you the ordeal of mine, which I know will take longer and be harder for all of us.”

“We'll manage the ordeal,” her son solemnly promised, “on condition that you finally leave Jerusalem. Sell the apartment—its value goes down by the day, thanks to the Orthodox—and move to a retirement home in Tel Aviv, near my house, near your grandchildren, who are afraid to visit Jerusalem on Shabbat.”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“That some religious fanatic will throw stones at the car.”

“So park outside the neighborhood and walk with the children, it'll be good exercise for all of you. Fear of the Orthodox is unbecoming, in my opinion.”

“It's not exactly fear . . . more like disgust.”

“Disgust? Why disgust? They're simple people, and like anyplace else, there are good ones and bad ones.”

“Of course, but you can't tell them apart. They all look alike, and even if they're all angels, they're not going to look after you. So they should stay where they are, and you, now that you're alone, should come and live near us.”

His sister kept quiet, not because what he was saying wasn't logical, but because she didn't believe that their mother would consent to leave Jerusalem—that she'd agree to give up an apartment, old but comfortable and large, where she had spent most of her life, to imprison herself in a tiny flat in an old folks' home, in a city she considered inferior.

But Honi pressured his sister too. Now, after their father's death, it would be hard for him to look after his mother. “If you've left the country to escape responsibility for our parents,” he accused his silent sibling, “at least help the one who stays on duty.”

Now she took offense. She had not left Israel to escape responsibility but because she had not found a position with any of the local orchestras.

“You would have been accepted by many Israeli orchestras if you hadn't insisted on playing an aristocratic instrument instead of a democratic one.”

“Democratic?” She laughed. “What's a democratic instrument?”

“Flute, violin, even trumpet.”

“Trumpet? You'll regret it.”

“I regret it already, but before you leave the country again, help me convince Ima to leave Jerusalem. That way, you can stay in Europe with your mind at ease till the end of your days.”

Despite their gripes and acrimony, mutual trust and affection prevail, and when he teases her, she retaliates with embarrassing episodes from his childhood—telling everyone how she'd be summoned from her class in grade school to her brother's kindergarten, where he played pranks on his friends and had to be confined to the bathroom until his sister arrived to walk him home as he bawled the whole way from the Street of the Prophets to their apartment on Rashi, while she tried to calm his stormy soul.

Now Honi is thirty-six, with his own media company, producing documentaries and commercials, a man struggling and mostly succeeding to sustain himself and his staff with new ideas. But his life is not easy. His wife, whom he adores, is an artist who enjoys a modest reputation among cognoscenti, but her works are too intellectual and complex, and buyers hard to find. This may be why she raises their three children with a certain bitterness, which has led to attention deficit in the older boy and chronic crying in the younger girl. And so, when Honi again urges his mother to leave Jerusalem and move to assisted living near his home in Tel Aviv, it's not for economic reasons, but because he demands of himself, especially after his father's death, that he be a devoted and helpful son, without making his already hard life harder.

S
HE TILTS THE BED
downward with a soft electric buzz, hops nimbly to her feet and, with small steps reminiscent of her father's on that stormy night, heads for the big living room window to watch for the golden planet through its iron bars. An erudite friend, a violinist in the Arnhem orchestra, on learning the origin of her Hebrew name, Noga, explained to her that in mythology, Venus is not only female but satanic, but could provide no additional information. In the quiet deserted street, a young woman in an impressive blond wig leads a sleepy schoolboy by the hand, his pale sidelocks dangling from his little black hat. She watches the two intently until they round a corner, then goes into the old “children's room,” where her two suitcases lie wide open, as if yearning to return to Europe. In the corner, wrapped in oilcloth, rests a musical instrument that Honi had taken down from storage so she could decide what to do with it. When she graduated from elementary school her father had surprised her with this instrument, something between a harp and an Oriental oud, which he found in an antique shop in East Jerusalem. It had twenty-seven strings, some broken now or missing, and those that remain wobble at the slightest touch. On one of her previous visits to Israel, she considered taking it to Arnhem and finding a young European musician eager to tackle the historic instrument, but she knew that even in such a cultured Dutch city as hers, situated not far from the German border, she was unlikely to find someone so inclined.