The Extra (19 page)

“Your rapping never made an impression on him. I know that Uriah won't leave me alone.”

“What can he want from you now?”

“The children I didn't give him.”

“So stop being an extra, enough with other people's stories, and he will not find a way to get to you. From now on, stand up for yourself, in reality, with the whip in your hand.”

“But I'm talking about reality, Ima. That's what I'm afraid of.”

“Then I'll ask Honi to warn him to leave you alone.”

“No, no. No way. Not one word to Honi.”

“Why?”

“Because Honi will make things worse. Now that it's more or less clear to him that you won't move here to live near him, he'll look for a way, with Uriah's help, to tie me down to Jerusalem so I can help him take care of you.”

“When did this become clear to him?”

“At the opera at Masada, when you stayed together in the hotel. It takes a while for his crafty mind to get over its illusions, but in the end he understood what I understood from the beginning.”

“You two know what's in my mind even before I do?”

“It happens sometimes.”

“And if I surprise you?”

“You won't.”

“Tell me, my daughter, how do you manage to play such a delicate and romantic instrument even though you talk so rudely?”

“When I play I don't talk. When I play I'm not furious.”

“Why are you furious?”

“About the brother you gave me.”

“But your brother loves you. You know how attached he is to you. Even when he was a baby in his carriage, he would scream and nobody could calm him down. Only when you bent over him would he stop crying and start smiling.”

“Except Honi isn't in the carriage anymore, and now the tears are mine.”

O
VERCOME WITH EMOTION
, she hugs and kisses her mother. “Go ahead, surprise us,” she says, and hurries from Tel Aviv to the apartment in Jerusalem, bolts the front door, and though she's certain that even a former husband bleeding with love for his first wife will not dare to wriggle down a drainpipe or gutter, she checks the feeble hook on the bathroom window, unplugs the phone and takes a long shower to shed the remains of imaginary reality before huddling in her childhood bed.

She wakes relaxed. The possibility that Uriah may try to come here need not frighten her so long as she maintains the integrity of her boundaries. Even if he still has a key to her parents' apartment, now there is also the bolt, which will compel him to ask permission. What troubles her is Elazar's silence. It was he who enticed her to take part in the hospital series, and even if he didn't get the role of the dead man, he should have at least said goodbye before vanishing. True, she has been stringing him along, but really, a man his age, with a grandson, and an experienced police investigator, ought to know that patience is mandatory, even in the case of a lonely woman who will soon fly away.

How to find a man she knows only by his first name, whom she's met as an extra, in jobs that he or her brother had set up for her? Undaunted, as evening falls she strolls through the Mahane Yehuda market, stops at his favorite restaurant and describes him in detail to the waiters, imitating his stutter a bit, and they recognize the character but don't know his family name or address, only that Elazar was a former police commander, so she should inquire at the police station by the market entrance.

She had always loved this little police station, which still bears the marks of the British Mandate in the form of two stone lions that guard the front door. The years have erased the ferocity in their eyes, which seem now merely to be winking, yet they're a sweet childhood memory. Little Honi was afraid of them, and she would get him to pet their heads and stick his tiny fingers in their jaws to pacify them.

The two bored policewomen inside have never heard of a retired officer by the name of Elazar, nor did Noga's mimicking his stutter awaken their memory. If he's a movie extra, they say, she should watch more Israeli movies and catch him there.

Instead of going straight home, she takes a roundabout route through the most radically ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods—Mea Shearim, Geulah, Kerem Avraham—where she wanders the streets, stopping to read death notices on the walls alongside posters of dire warning and denunciation. When she gets back to Mekor Baruch and Rashi Street, she is shaken. Can it be the “new extra,” waiting in reality by her building? But once again it's the old lawyer representing the heirs of the apartment's owner.

“So, Noga,” he greets her with fatherly warmth, “by my reckoning, your mother's trial period is over, and we need to know if the right decision has been taken.”

“If it has, Mr. Stoller, it's not good for you.”

“How could it not be good for me?” The old man winks. “What's good for me is good for her.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, listen to reason and get out of a neighborhood that's getting more and more
haredi
.”

“My mother, sir, is not afraid. She believes, in fact, that the
haredim
enhance her secularity.”

“That's because she only talks to her neighbors the Pomerantzes, a sweet and moderate family. But the Pomerantzes are a dwindling breed, and the extremists are taking their place, people not merely bound by the strictest commandments but who also believe in devils and angels. I've got just such a crazy family interested in your apartment, prepared to pay an excellent price, which will enable us to increase the key money to be refunded to your mother. Therefore you, a rational European musician, must help your brother uproot the delusions about Jerusalem from your mother's mind.”

“I can't uproot anything from her mind. She herself will decide what to uproot and what to plant. Where are the owners of the apartment living now?”

“In Mexico, and they need money.”

“So they uprooted not only Jerusalem from their minds, but all of Israel.”

“My dear lady, with all due respect, who are you to criticize?”

“But I will come back here, sir. Ultimately there'll be an orchestra in Israel that will need me.”

“Yes, yes, I've heard that before. Everyone promises to return, but in the end they fly back in a coffin.”

“I'll come back alive,” she shouts, “you'll see, if you live that long.”

“Pardon me?”

“Skip it, Mr. Stoller, I'm tired. You'll get your answer from my mother personally. By then I'll be with my harp, rehearsing the Berlioz
Fantastique
.”

“Ah, Hec-tor Ber-lioz . . .” He draws out the name, as if remembering a childhood friend. “Yes, a wild genius and ladies' man, but what's your hurry? The harp in
Symphonie Fantastique
enters only in the second movement.”

“What,” she gasps, “you know his music?”

“His and others' too,” he replies with a triumphant smile. “You think just because I'm an old lawyer who helps clear out old apartments in
haredi
neighborhoods that I lack culture? Look around here, so benighted and poor. What's the matter, you don't want your mother to live and die near your brother?”

“I want that very much.”

“So work on it, convince her.”

He tips his hat and goes on his way.

She is shocked by the cocky sophistication of an elderly and tattered lawyer who knows his Berlioz, and watches him fade into the darkness. She pushes open the little gate, and with the nagging fear that Uriah has her parents' key, she climbs the stairs cautiously, heavily, as if reprising her imaginary disability of the previous day.

The apartment is dark, but she is in no hurry to turn on lights, for fear that in one of the rooms, in one of the beds, lies her former husband.

T
HOUGH IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE
for Uriah to pick out an old key tossed in a drawer, it would never have occurred to him to unlock this apartment, or come near it. When he ran into his former brother-in-law at the opera, he didn't expect, after a long silence, anything more than a brief exchange of empty pleasantries. But after Honi, with the intimacy of a long-lost relative, briefed him about the old folks' home and piqued his curiosity about his former wife's appearance on the stage, Uriah had felt that the chance encounter was significant for him but irrelevant to his present wife, so when she approached, he hurried to end the conversation.

Something had been burned into his mind, something his former brother-in-law apparently intended. And so, after failing to locate on the stage the wife he never got over, he decided to go back to the opera the next night as an infiltrator with binoculars.

And that night, after midnight, when he returned to Ma'aleh Adumim, unsettled by the extra in her embroidered costume leading dark-skinned children at the foot of Masada in a little wagon harnessed to a decorated donkey, he felt that her brother, deliberately or not, had involved him in a pointless but necessary experiment, obligating him to one more move. And since he recognized that if he were to request a simple face-to-face meeting, nothing could be said that hadn't been said many times over, he preferred that the encounter be not real but imaginary. If his former wife had chosen to show up in Israel as an extra in the stories and imaginations of others, why should he not join her as a partner?

It had not required many inquiries with agencies that booked extras. At the first agency he phoned, in Jerusalem, he happened upon a former secretary of his, who was pleased to find him Noga's name among the extras listed for a television series about a hospital.

At the Ashdod port he was not permitted entry to the film location, because his name did not appear on the list of extras. In the belief that he'd find another way in, he wandered around the port, drank beer with longshoremen at a small cafeteria, and they showed him the entrance at the far end of the warehouse. When night fell and the man standing guard left his post, he sneaked inside and began to wander the corridors, recognizing Noga as a disabled woman in a nightgown, transported in a wheelchair. But he was careful not to reveal himself before assuming the role of a new character. After asking directions he arrived at the wardrobe room, where he pretended to be an extra and the staff helped him realize his vision—the torn, filthy uniform of a soldier, which he put on over his own clothes, and for greater effect, a red-stained army bandage wrapped around his forehead. This lost soul went off in search of Noga, and found her in the dining room, but after the meal, as she looked for a bed for the night, he didn't hurry after her, and when she entered a little room and closed its makeshift door, he didn't dare follow her, but stationed himself outside like a watchman, lest some stranger enter before he did. Only after the tumult died down did he allow himself, as a wounded soldier from the battlefield and not as a former husband, to slip into the bed next to hers and again watch over her sleep as he had when they were married. And indeed on that night she had difficulty sleeping. From time to time she sighed and wrestled with the blanket and pillow until she subdued them. And if a pale ivory foot or delicate arm, familiar objects of desire, remained exposed after the struggle, he had to cover them up carefully before giving way to merciful sleep.

But in the dim first light of day, as he first noticed her eyeing him reproachfully, he realized that the character of a wounded soldier did not draw her close; it repelled her. The logical conclusion was that if he wanted to make the most of the experiment her brother had scripted for him, he could do so only by means of his real self.

N
O ONE WAS LURKING
in the dark apartment, yet her restored calm was marred by mild disappointment. Did her panicky response in that little hospital room turn him off for good? Is the “ancient bleeding love” merely a presumptuous projection of her mind on his? And if Uriah persists, how will he know his time is limited and in a few days she'll be beyond his reach? Suddenly angry, she wants to phone her brother, but realizes he'll probably make her even dizzier. Thus the best path to relaxation is to make dinner and watch a good film on television.

But her sleep is restless, as in the first days after her arrival, and she divides it among the three beds. In the morning she calls her mother and brightly announces, “I've changed my mind, Ima. I'm not putting any more pressure on you, and even if you decide to return to Jerusalem, don't cut the time short on my account. No reason you should pass up even one good meal you've already paid for, or one hour of deep sleep Tel Aviv provides you. I take it all back, Ima. Let's the three of us honor the experiment till the end. In any event, rehearsals of the Berlioz will start only the day after I get back.”

“And Uriah?” the mother remembers. “You're no longer afraid of him?”

“Apparently he's given up. And even if he comes, what could he want? Just to mourn the past.”

She no longer bothers with the bolt, and sometimes, when she goes out, she just closes the apartment door without locking it, and evenings she stays home, on the assumption that a man clinging to an old love would prefer to arrive in the dark. So it goes, day after day, as she counts them off before her departure from the city of her birth, dry days with cool nights. From time to time she walks around in the
shuk
, of which she's grown fond on this visit—maybe in hopes of running into Elazar, who three days after his disappearance had stuck a note on her apartment door.

When she saw the sheet of paper from afar, she laughed. Was the bleeding love making do with a piece of paper? But as she held the page, the handwriting was unfamiliar.

Dear Extra,

I haven't risen from the dead, because I wasn't there. The people at the entrance didn't know how to get rid of the eternal extra, so they sent me to a morgue that didn't exist.