The Extra

by A. B. Yehoshua

“I poisoned it because I was never able to get a simple admission from you: ‘Yes, I am guilty.’ You, Noga, could be the foreman of any jury and cast blame on anybody else with complete confidence, but you always exonerate yourself.”

  “Jury?” she exclaims with amazement. “Wait, where’d you get that idea? Your deep attachment to me scares me sometimes. Listen, Uriah, if you don’t want to destroy your love, then go to work and take it with you, but don’t try to destroy me on its account.”

  Forty-One

  STARTLED BY THE LAST WORDS she blurted out, knowing from experience that he will be hurt and defensive, she looks with suddenly rediscovered compassion for a way to retract them. But Uriah turns abruptly away, quickly puts on his shoes and with a grim expression goes to get his jacket from the kitchen chair, shakes it out and puts it on, takes his necktie and goes to her old, familiar clothes closet and opens it, seeking a mirror.

  She follows him.

  “No,” she says gently, “you don’t need the tie.”

  He looks at her coldly.

  “Listen to me, it’s for your own good. Ties never looked right on you. They make you look uptight and bossy, especially now that your hair is turning gray.”

  “Tell me,” he says as he fumbles with the knot, “why is that any of your business?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Why not?” He imitates her mockingly. “Maybe why yes.”

  “It’s only natural.”

  “How I look? My look is no concern of yours. I don’t need your indulgence or anything else from you.”

  He yanks apart the tangled tie and starts over.

  “Listen to me. There’s a problem with that tie in particular. I saw it the minute you walked in. Not only does it not suit you in principle, but the color clashes with your shirt.”

  “The color is fine.”

  “Yes, but not for you, which is why I always had to help you. Can’t be that your wife didn’t also see this tie doesn’t match, unless she was busy with the kids.”

  His hands freeze. The tie dangles on his shirt.

  “Don’t talk about her, it drives me crazy.”

  “Don’t go crazy. You didn’t come here to go crazy, but maybe to reconcile. And I’ll help you reconcile and take my share of blame. But please, lose the tie.”

  Suddenly he surrenders, as she knew he would, pulls the tie from his neck and stuffs it in his pocket, but she pulls it out. “No,” she says, “let me fold it properly.”

  And she straightens and folds it, hands it back to him.

  He rejects her extended hand. “No, you keep it. So something tangible will remain and not just an imaginary book of poetry, and if somebody here turns into a handsome lad after all, why not have a tie handy?”

  A smile crosses her lips, and for the first time she has an urge to touch him. “Just a second, before you disappear,” she says, blocking his way to the door. “Since you brought up the story you’d patiently listened to countless times—now is your chance to take a look at the protagonist, the childhood harp that started my passion for playing.”

  “That harp? The little one? The old one?”

  “I thought my father got rid of it years ago, but it turned out he stashed it in storage, and Honi and Ima, who found it when they were clearing out the apartment, thought this poor old harp might be just the thing to comfort me while I was far away from my orchestra.”

  “And did it comfort you?”

  “How could it?”

  “Then why look at it?”

  “You don’t have to, but since you talked about it, and you’ve never seen it, here’s your chance.”

  “My chance?” He turns red with insult. “For this childhood harp I’ve made a fool of myself running after you? No, I’m here only to mourn my child that you aborted in secret.” He shoves her violently out of his way, opens the door and disappears down the stairs.

  Forty-Two

  NOW, WITH THE DOOR closed after him, pain and disappointment are all that remain. Noga hurriedly removes the old bathrobe and the nightgown and takes a long shower, then phones the assisted living facility with news of the fruit offering in honor of her mother’s return to Jerusalem.

  “Fruit?”

  “From Mount Canaan.”

  “Who brought it, Pomerantz himself or one of the grandchildren?”

  “Shaya, who refused to shake my hand.”

  “Why should he shake your hand? He was in love with you, but marrying him was the furthest thing from your mind.”

  “Still, I was insulted. We were good friends.”

  “Only on the stairs, so why be insulted?”

  “True, no point in being insulted by him, but I can be insulted by a mother who informs a stranger about a decision that her two children are eagerly awaiting.”

  “Honestly, Noga, were you really awaiting my decision after you claimed that you know better than I do what goes on in my mind?”

  “Nevertheless, there’s a family protocol that must be observed.”

  “You’re right. But since I couldn’t surprise you by the decision, I decided at least to surprise you with the way I announced it.”

  “And you succeeded. And Honi?”

  “He’ll hear it from me this evening, nor will he be surprised. The assisted living was an experiment, the three of us committed ourselves to three months, and we stood honorably by our commitment.”

  “Given no choice.”

  “You should eat the fruit so it won’t spoil.”

  “We already ate some.”

  “You’ve started referring to yourself in Jerusalem by the royal ‘we’?”

  “Not quite. Uriah actually showed up, and I served him some of your fruit.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Believe it.”

  “And this time he appeared as himself?”

  “As himself.”

  “So this time, at least, he didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Not even as a wounded man did he want to scare me. He wanted sympathy.”

  “And as himself?”

  “As himself, after all these years, he still mourns for the child we didn’t have.”

  “But he has children of his own. I saw them, hugged them.”

  “Still, he won’t give up on the child I didn’t give him.”

  “And on you?”

  “Not anymore. It’s the child, not me.”

  “So listen to me, Noga. Listen to what a wise woman has to say to a beloved daughter, hear me out and don’t interrupt. Give him that child, give it to him, and that way something real from you will stay in this world, not just musical notes that vanish into thin air. Make an effort, then go back to your music. Give birth to a child, and I will help him raise it.”

  “He doesn’t need help. He’ll take the child home and raise it with his children.”

  “And his wife?”

  “I know him. He’ll persuade her, or force her.”

  “If so—I’m out of breath—listen to me, I’m begging you. Don’t dismiss this out of hand. It’s a wonderful idea, it’s profound, and at the last minute it also turns our failed experiment into a surprising victory. Stay a little longer in Jerusalem, until it happens, and instead of outrageous payments to an old folks’ home, we’ll survive handsomely together in Jerusalem, owing nothing to anyone. Now that you are used to Jerusalem, and not afraid like your brother of the neighborhood Orthodoxy, stay with me a while longer. And Honi and I will participate with love and devotion in this experiment, which this time will be yours. You won’t have to work, not even as an extra, and if in the meantime some harpist retires, or gets sick or dies, you could—”

  “Enough, Ima, enough delusions.”

  “Why delusions? Today, with Abba no longer alive, these aren’t delusions. I swear to you on his soul that he was the one to blame, only he. With some weird confidence he succeeded in scaring me, and I bet you too, that you were likely to die in childbirth. I bought into it, but now that he’s gone, we h
ave, you and I, the freedom and the ability to understand the reality by ourselves. And I’m telling you, you’re forty-two years old, and this is the last moment.”

  “The moment has passed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have nothing in me to give life to a child, even if I were to succumb to Uriah.”

  “In what sense? In what sense? Noga, my darling, in what sense?”

  “In the simplest sense. My period, Ima. My periods stopped.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why would I?”

  “So I wouldn’t keep torturing myself with false hopes.”

  “I’m telling you now so you won’t torture yourself with false hopes.”

  “But I will torture myself, because I know that even when it seems like the end, it isn’t the end.”

  “Tell that to my body, Ima, not to me.”

  “Then the time has come for me to speak directly to your body without your interference.”

  “That would be wise and helpful, because the body, and not just the soul, sometimes needs a mother’s words. But hurry, because the day after tomorrow I have an early flight out of here.”

  Forty-Three

  ONLY NOW, AFTER THE PHONE CALL with her mother, does it register that the encounter with her former husband rattled her so much that it’s hard for her to be alone in the apartment, and she hurries to the workers’ restaurant in the shuk and sits facing the entrance to see who comes in. But Elazar doesn’t appear, and the black camera on the ceiling is inert, the angle of its lens unchanged since her last visit. On her way back she buys some spices, to season the farewell meal she plans to cook the next day for her mother’s homecoming. But in the apartment, instead of napping on a blazing afternoon in one of the three beds that will soon no longer be hers, she changes from her sandals into sneakers, shaking out the sand from the Judean Desert, and makes a return visit to the little police station.

  In the dimly lit station sit the same bored policewomen, and what was unknown in the past about the man who hurriedly broke contact remains unknown in the present. She gently pats the heads of the Mandatory lions, faithful to their post after so many years, and walks down Jaffa Road toward Zion Square, to see the building that, if memory serves, long ago housed the conservatory. But the original building, whose studios had been connected by an outdoor portico accessed by shiny stone steps, has vanished, and instead of asking passersby who won’t know the answer, she goes up Ben-Yehuda Street, the heart of the Jerusalem Triangle, to the street named for the British king whose son gave up the throne for the love of a divorcée, and walks past the circular synagogue en route to the Gymnasia, her high school. She sits down in front of a café and looks at the wide steps leading into the school, where sometimes the principal himself would stand to chide latecomers. It was here, as a freshman, that she became serious about classical music and learned to appreciate what she was playing, and after school hours, in a classroom with chairs inverted on tables, she learned to distinguish the unique sound of the harp amid the energetic fiddling of the other strings.

  Her thoughts keep returning to Uriah, a married man and father of two, who mourns and yearns for the child not born to him. But what’s the value of such yearning if he lacks the patience and curiosity to look for just a moment at the childhood harp that, he insists, was the source of all his woe?

  A week after she’d arrived in Jerusalem, she visited the Academy of Music, which in her day was in the process of moving from its home near the prime minister’s residence to the campus of the Hebrew University at Givat Ram. There she met two of her former teachers, who were happy to know that her love of music had not merely endured but flourished. First off, she wanted to know if there was a harp available for her to practice on from time to time. But her teachers didn’t think it dignified that she wait around between lessons so she could play a student harp. Take some sheet music and play in your imagination, they said, you’re enough of a professional to do that. Now, as she is about to leave Jerusalem, she is drawn back to the academy’s previous building, for another look at the spot where an enraptured young man waited for her, helmet in hand.

  Since Lovers of Zion Street is not far from there, she continues on to the home of the parents of the youth who tried to poison his girlfriend so she would never leave him. Unlike that busy night of filming, the house is silent now. Only an old mother is visible through the kitchen window.

  She walks downhill to the end of Lovers of Zion and over to the parallel street and stands before the gates of the former mental hospital, now a church, where the parents had installed their son to pacify his demons, thereby enabling his illustrious career overseas.

  This journey on foot does not tire the harpist. On the contrary, it gives her pleasure. Her flexible sneakers add spring to her step, and the advent of the Jerusalem evening tempts her not to head home but to go on to Emek Refaim for a look at the first rented apartment she lived in after getting married. Was it really thirty-two steps that Uriah had to carry the heavy harp up and down for her? Old streets have been widened and familiar buildings renovated, so she cannot find the place at first, and when she does it looks different, but she’s sure the number of steps is the same. She can’t find the light switch on the stairway, so she climbs in darkness and counts. And yes, these are difficult stairs, steep and angular, unlike the friendly stairs in her parents’ building, where, when she’d get home from the Gymnasia, a gentle, handsome Orthodox boy would be waiting for a heart-to-heart talk.

  Twenty-six steps and not thirty-two lead to the door of the old apartment. In which case, she thinks, scowling, why does a person who always prided himself on his precision need to add six stairs to embellish his suffering for the sake of her instrument? She heads back down, again counting the stairs, to double-check the number.

  The gathering dusk prompts the lighting of the street lamps, and the colors of fruits and vegetables glisten in the storefronts on Emek Refaim Street. Baby carriages cross the street in midblock and hold up traffic. Men look at her for long moments, and she imagines herself again as an extra, only this time without a camera or director or story—standing by herself and for herself. She would like to further explore this pleasant, secular neighborhood, but she needs to start packing her bags and prepare for her departure, and the light rail is far away, so she hails a taxi and asks the driver on the way home to stop for a moment in the Valley of the Cross. But the driver doesn’t know where he can stop in a valley paved long ago with fast roads, yet he does know where the monastery still stands, and how to approach it.

  “Exactly. Get as close as you can, stop for a bit, then continue.”

  And he does, and for a few minutes she and the cabbie look at the old, dark monastery, a little light burning in its tower.

  Did I forget to shut off a light? she asks herself as the taxi turns into her street and she spots a light in the apartment—or could it be the little tzaddik misses me?

  As she enters the kitchen, Uriah stands up. His face is tense and tormented, and the fluorescent light intensifies its pallor. The jacket he wore in the morning is gone, in its place a faded but familiar sweater.

  “Wait,” she says. “Before you apologize—”

  “Explain,” he corrects her.

  “You should know that I just got back from our rented apartment in the Greek Colony, and I counted the stairs twice that you complained about this morning, so you should know that it’s not thirty-two steps but twenty-six.”

  “You forgot to add,” he says calmly, “the stairs inside the apartment.”

  “Inside the apartment?”

  “Beyond the front door there were six more steps.”

  And in a flash the six interior steps come back to her, padded with old carpeting, and small pictures on the wall that she believed added a special charm and enhanced their marital intimacy.

  “Yes, you’re right. I forgot.”

  “Not by chance, not by chance,” he mutters. “But i
t’s unimportant, and I only wanted to explain—”

  “Don’t explain. I knew you’d hold on to the key my parents gave us, and had no doubt you’d be able to pick it out among all your other keys. Which is why I told my mother three days ago, ‘Uriah won’t need to ask permission to come in here.’”

  “But I wanted to ask permission, only you weren’t here. So I thought I’d simply leave the key.”

  “And stay around to protect it.”

  “Only because this morning I promised to let you know when the time had come.”

  “Which time?”

  “The time I would tell my wife everything I hid from her.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She cried. The anger and shock dissolved into a long cry.”

  “And you?”

  “I cried with her.”

  “You’re an honest man. You’re a faithful husband. It’s a shame I lost you so easily. But how did you explain to her the fever you’ve been running ever since Honi told you I was here?”

  “I said I’d given you up a long time ago, but was furious about my unborn child.”

  “Yours, or ours?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. Any child of yours, wherever he comes from—I’m taking him.”

  “But what would such a child give you, if you’re not a part of him? You already have your two children.”

  “He will give me what will be in him of you. It doesn’t matter what—a birthmark, a dimple, the shape of an ankle, maybe a smile, hair color. Little things, physical and mental, that you might not even be able to identify, but they are precious to me, which your music had stolen from me.”

  “The music?”

  “The playing.”

  “And what did your wife say about this child?”

  “She cried.”

  “And didn’t say anything?”

  “No. But I know that if she believes that this would quell my fever and restore my calm, she would be ready to adopt a child of yours to raise along with our kids.”

  “And that way she would merge herself with me.”

  “Perhaps.”