The Extra (26 page)

Noga exits the basement and walks out to the street as night slowly falls in the Netherlands. A fine European rain sweetens the air. She goes back to the musicians' café, where the owners greet her fondly. Her sojourn in Israel to assist an elderly mother has raised her stock in the eyes of the Dutch; they all have parents or relatives whose dilemmas of old age will involve them, or already do.

“She returned to her old apartment in Jerusalem,” Noga announces triumphantly.

Only natural, declare the restaurant owners, and a longtime waiter offers his approval: “Hard to give up Jerusalem.”

Noga corrects him: “It's easy to give up Jerusalem, but Tel Aviv is too expensive.”

While she enjoys some of her favorite foods, she entertains the woman proprietor, who has sat down beside her, with tales of her adventures as an extra.

“And you didn't play for three months?”

“Only once, for just a few minutes—in the desert, by a historic mountain covered with ruins.”

That night she phones Jerusalem, but there is no answer. She calls Honi to ask about their mother. He knows nothing, hasn't called her since they parted the night before. “If she insists on Jerusalem, she should enjoy it however she likes,” he snaps. “You and I have done our part.”

The next day she works for hours at the music library, organizing all the parts in the piece. She makes sure no instrument is left out, carefully marks the cues and phrases for each one. At twilight she returns to the orchestra's office, carrying in her arms a sizable bundle of scores, and sees the weary musicians get off the bus that has brought them home from Germany and help each other unload instruments from the truck that followed. She watches from afar as her harp is slowly wheeled to the storeroom, but does not yet approach it. Everyone is glad she is back. The aged flutist overflows with affection and calls over a tall, pale woman with hard eyes and a bitter smile. This is Christine, her understudy. Belgian, from Antwerp, French by tongue and temperament, awkward in English and Dutch.

“Your harp, it has a strong sound,” she informs the Israeli. “I tried to play it gently.”

“Thank you,” says Noga, extending her hand to the woman, whose belly, under a light pastel sweater, signals early pregnancy.

“And what is happening with your mother?” asks the harpist who took her place in the Mozart.

“Yes, what did she decide?” chimes Manfred.

Other musicians, despite their fatigue and eagerness to get home, want to know what an old mother in faraway Jerusalem has decided.

These Dutch people have no other worries, Noga thinks, chuckling to herself. Their wars ended seventy years ago, and they glow with self-satisfaction. They knew when to give up their colonies in Southeast Asia and have been spared the new wave of terrorism. The euro is stable, their economy is strong, and unemployment is low—so all they have left to worry about is my mother.

“She decided to stay in Jerusalem,” she tells the musicians gathered around her, “which I expected all along.”

In the evening there is still no answer in Jerusalem, and the daughter leaves a voicemail message: “Where's the new heiress?” She immediately phones her brother, who spoke with the mother in the afternoon, and reports that now she's complaining that because of the experiment they imposed on her, she barely saw her daughter in those three months. From now on, will she have to meet her only in films?

Her mother calls that night. Yes, she's been spending time in town, with friends in cafés, going to movies, but the Uriah story has stayed with her. “Your visit, Nogaleh, still hovers over me like a dream. You were in Israel for three months and I barely saw you. I did learn from you to wander at night from bed to bed, but my sleep is hardly sound.

Noga tells her about the change in repertoire, the trip to Japan and about
The Sea
of Debussy, which in French sounds identical to
la mère
, the mother. “So in Japan,” she consoles her mother, “I'll be playing you on my harp.”

“At least that,” sighs the mother, ending the conversation.

I
N THE MORNING SHE GOES
to the music library, where she finds a score of Debussy's
Sacred and Profane Dances
. She makes a photocopy and gives it to Herman, who says not a word and places it in a drawer. In the evening, the orchestra members gather at the concert hall for a briefing about the trip to Kyoto. In fluent English, the cultural attaché of the Japanese embassy in The Hague provides information about their lodging near Doshisha University in Kyoto, and shows impressive slides of the auditorium and the temples of the holy city and environs. Four concerts are scheduled for orchestra subscribers, and three more are planned in two southern cities—Kumamoto and Hiroshima. Finally, since the musical director has not yet arrived, the administrative director of the Arnhem orchestra goes over the specifics of the repertoire, which will include Beethoven's
Emperor
Concerto; a rotation of Haydn symphonies 26, 92 and 94; the
Melancholy Arabesques
by Van den Broek, for it is important to include a contemporary Dutch composition; and, of course, as requested by the Japanese, the orchestra will perform
La Mer
. The Japanese pianist who broke her arm playing tennis in Berlin has recovered, and will make her own way to Japan, where there will be two rehearsals of the
Emperor
, a piece both she and the orchestra know well. The orchestra has also played the Haydn works in recent years, so four rehearsals in the coming week should suffice. The focus will be on Debussy and the
Arabesques
, which is a complex and difficult piece, but is fortunately only eight minutes long.

The principal conductor and musical director, Dennis van Zwol, strides into the room, straight from the airport, and is greeted with polite applause. He is a bald, chubby man of about sixty, with blue, froglike eyes, a strict and erudite musician whose ample sense of humor softens his pedantic demeanor. He ascends the stage in jeans and a red sweater and sits down beside Herman, surveying his musicians with amusement. When he spots the harpist, he waves to her warmly. So, she whispers to herself, why not, he's friendly, likes a good joke, and they say he also loves receiving gifts.

The next morning the rehearsals begin. There are no parts for the harp in the Haydn symphonies, so she sits in the hall and watches. After a short break, some of the strings leave the stage, and their places are taken by percussionists, including a few playing strange instruments. The conductor calls for a young composer, a man of around thirty with a ponytail, to take his place on the podium, to lead the first encounter with his provocative cacophony.

Van Zwol chooses to sit next to Noga in the auditorium and inquires about her vacation.

Blushing, she insists on repeating what she said to Herman: “It was not exactly a vacation.”

“Then what was it?”

“Something complicated and surprising. I myself still don't understand what it was.”

“And your mother?”

“She decided to stay in Jerusalem.”

“And you are satisfied with her choice?”

The question reflects an unexpected sensitivity, and she tries to offer an appropriate response.

“From this distance, what good would my worrying do her?”

The conductor nods sympathetically, and she elaborates.

“My father died nine months ago. He and my mother were inseparable, dependent on one another, and who knows if they enjoyed that or whether their devotion had become oppressive. I think the sudden freedom my father granted my mother is exciting for her, and she may be afraid to curtail that freedom with the rules and activities of a retirement home.”

Van Zwol nods gravely even as he winces at the wild sounds emanating from the stage, which are interrupted by the tapping of the baton as the young composer attempts to explain to the players ideas that gave birth to his music. Although it is Van Zwol who will conduct this piece in concert, he does not intervene, in order to give the musicians the chance to experience the new composition through the passion of the composer himself.

He meanwhile drums with his fingers on his knee a different, hidden melody that enters his mind. And she again says to herself, Really, why not?

She turns to him, blood rushing to her face. “Maestro, I brought you an unusual gift from Jerusalem, something you might find useful.”

“A gift?” He is surprised. “Oh, my dear Venus, I do have a weakness for gifts, but on condition they are inexpensive and small and just symbolic, because that way I am not obligated to give gifts in return.”

A quake of anxiety seizes her as she leans over and produces the whip from her bag, wrapped in a shawl of her mother's and tied with string.

He recoils. “What is this?” he asks. “It doesn't look like a small gift.” But his lust for gifts overcomes his resistance, and he carefully undoes the string and shawl, releasing the strong scent of leather that has whipped the bodies of many beasts.

“What is this?” The conductor is shocked.

“It's a whip I bought from a Bedouin in the Old City, a whip that tamed and drove camels in the desert, and I thought, Maestro, that it might also be good for taming and driving us musicians.”

The froggy blue eyes of the Dutchman light up with great amusement, and he raises the whip to his nostrils.

“I don't believe it . . . You thought about me all the way in Israel.”

“Why not? I'm a musician in your orchestra.”

“True. And you thought I need to strengthen my conducting not only with a baton but a whip?”

“In a symbolic way, Maestro. Only symbolic. It's a symbolic gift, the kind you like.”

“Marvelous,” he murmurs, and extends the whip along the empty seats to measure its length, apparently tempted to whip something or somebody.

“But why symbolic?” he asks, studying the pretty harpist warily. “Why only symbolic? Why not whip someone who ruins the tempo or misses notes or comes in at the wrong place?”

She is alarmed.

“No, no, Maestro, it's a symbolic whip, only symbolic, otherwise the musicians will blame me.”

But the maestro continues to marvel.

“Where did you get the idea to bring me a whip?”

“As it happened, I bought it for myself, to protect myself from the neighborhood children who were breaking into my mother's apartment to watch television, which was forbidden in their homes.”

“Television is forbidden? Why?”

“Because according to our religious people, it corrupts values and draws the children away from Torah studies.”

“Yes,” rhapsodizes the Dutchman, “your religious people have it exactly right. Television is evil and corruptive, and you did well to whip their children.”

He clasps the Bedouin whip to his breast like a beloved infant.

“Symbolic . . . symbolic,” he mutters, “and I have the urge to whip this young man on the podium who is driving our orchestra crazy with his music.”

She laughs. “No, no.”

With great feeling he takes her hand and lifts it to his lips, gathers up the whip, takes it with him to the podium and embraces the young composer, who has just concluded his
Melancholy Arabesques
with a blast.

“Bravo,” he says, “but it still needs polishing.”

The percussion players vacate the front of the stage for the string players arriving from the wings. The two harpists take their positions behind the harps, the timpanists tune their drumheads, the other percussionists strategically arrange their instruments, the French horn players remove their slides and shake out the spit, the oboists and bassoonists choose the right reeds and adjust them. Gradually they all finish leafing through the scores, and quiet descends on the stage.

The conductor taps the music stand with his baton and begins the little lecture he likes to deliver when starting a new piece.

“At the end of the nineteenth century, France lost a war to Germany but won the culture war. Paris became the capital of the European artistic avant-garde, the city where the painters Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas created Impressionism, while French poetry thrived in the Symbolist vein.

“Claude Debussy, born in the year 1862, was revolutionary in his style and became the greatest painter of music and a leader in the Impressionism of sound, though he complained that ‘imbeciles,' as he called them, categorized his music as Impressionist, confusing painting and music. Debussy established a new concept of tonality in European music. With his fertile imagination he rebelled against the strong German influence in classical music and turned to exotic areas of influence, taking non-European scales and musical colors from the Far East, also borrowing from Spanish dance, and experimented boldly with instruments that seldom had central roles in classical music, writing, for example, complex parts for the harp.”

Van Zwol points his baton at the two harpists and smiles broadly.

“Symbolism in literature also influenced Debussy,” continues the conductor, “and he wrote program music, giving symbolic and literary titles to his compositions, and strove with elegance and sensitivity to evoke the complexity of nature and humans, first and foremost to fathom the soul of woman.”

“We would like to have more specific details,” says Ingrid, a beautiful French horn player. “Also personal ones if possible.”

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.”