The Extra

Twenty-Three

AT FIRST SHE DOUBTED she could fall asleep. Yes, the bed is wide, and the mattress hard enough, but the room lacks intimacy, like a hotel room, with a faint medicinal aroma. It’s pleasantly cool, but the rumbling of the air conditioner is an unwelcome interference. Through the wall, from the adjoining one-room apartment, she can hear coughing and sighing, and feels sorry for her mother. Honi wants so much to move her to this confined, unfamiliar place, which is clean and respectable but nevertheless a place not her own. In her Jerusalem apartment she subdues her insomnia by means of four different beds, but here — where can she go in her distress? To the big lawn in back? Had she herself waited for a harpist position to open up at the Jerusalem Symphony, and in the meantime been content with a teaching job at the conservatory or the music academy, and had she given her husband Uriah a child, he would not have left her and there would be no need for any dramatic changes. Uriah loved her parents, but now her mother is left truly alone in Jerusalem, and it’s not right to have Honi, the perennial worrier, rush back there every time there’s a problem.

Filtering in from outside are the roars of Tel Aviv buses and perhaps of airplanes landing, but these somehow enable rather than inhibit her sleep. Can it be, she asks herself, that the engines of vehicles in the coastal plain sound quieter because they are free of the ups and downs of the Judean Hills? Encouraged by this horizontal hypothesis, sleep slowly envelops her. The clock on the TV cable box indicates that an hour has gone by since she got into bed. But why should an hour suffice? She is sleeping here at her mother’s request, sleeping in pursuit of introspection, so she should try to extract at least one dream from the depths of her soul. Soon enough, sleep becomes her shelter. She pushes aside the pillows and buries her face in the sheet to smell a motherly scent, a smell of sweet and secure childhood, as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv blend into one.

And so two more hours fly by on the clock, as if the cable box were generating its own time. Were it not for the soft, stubborn sound of crying from the other side of the wall, the harpist might have gone on sleeping. Could it be that the previous tenant, who died here slowly, altered time before his death? And what’s going on out there in the world? Could her mother still be playing cards? Maybe she’s gambling away everything she owns? But Noga’s fatigue has not been slaked, it has become hungrier, and not until she notices between the window blinds that it’s grown darker outside does she force herself to get up. In a daze, she gets dressed, opens the door to the porch, crosses the garden of wilted flowers and heads for the lawn to take in the remnants of the sunset. On a pair of lounge chairs sit her mother and brother, with the grandchildren kicking a ball toward an invisible goal.

“Nougat woke up!” shout the kids, calling their aunt by the nickname inspired by candy she brings them from Europe.

“This can’t be Israeli fatigue,” says the brother. “In Israel you don’t do much of anything. This is fatigue you brought with you from your Europe.”

Noga doesn’t reply. She silently kisses the kids, then warmly hugs and kisses her brother and her mother, as if emerging not from sleep in a small room, but from a long and perilous journey.

Honi asks about the whip. “A real whip?” “Totally real,” she says, “nearly a meter long.” “It won’t help you,” he says dismissively. “Those haredi bastards are trained from childhood to confront the tear gas and water cannons of the police. Your whip will only tickle them. Too bad you didn’t buy a gun.”

“Enough, Honi, don’t get crazy,” chides his mother.

Still drowsy, Noga doesn’t respond and sinks into a chair her brother offers her. “Your bed mesmerized me, Ima,” she says. “No need here to wander from bed to bed to make it through the night — one is enough. The cosmos is calm in Tel Aviv. History and politics don’t leave it in ruins like Jerusalem. So if you want an answer regarding the experiment, I say yes, Ima, this is the place. Move here, absolutely, we’ll be relieved, and we’ll help you.”

Honi is surprised, excited, his eyes shining. He didn’t expect such a clear-cut declaration, and so soon. He secretly squeezes his sister’s hand with gratitude and turns to his mother:

“If, as you say, it’s Noga who knows your heart, more than Abba and certainly more than me, then listen to her.”

“Yeah,” the mother sighs, “I’m listening.”

“Then we can end the experiment,” says Noga, “and I can leave.”

“No, no, not yet,” the mother says, alarmed. “The experiment was for three months, and it’s barely been a month and a half. Please, children, no shortcuts. That’s not fair.”

Honi agrees. “We’ll live up to what we said we’d do, and besides, in another ten days Carmen will be waiting at Masada for Noga to help her.”

From his jacket pocket he pulls a few pages detailing the obligations and benefits of the extras in the opera to be performed in the desert. And he has tickets for himself and Sarai for the second evening, so the two of them can enjoy not only the music and the desert, but the sight of Noga as a country girl from Seville, strolling among the chorus in an embroidered dress.

“So that’s the role?”

“Here, take this and read it.”

“And you’ll come to laugh at me.”

“On the contrary, to be thrilled.”

Darkness gathers, the children have lessons to do and must be taken home. Noga hesitantly asks her mother if she can stay for dinner. “Let’s try,” says the mother. “Dinnertime is over, but we might find something in the kitchen for a rare guest.”

They manage to put together a fine meal in the dining hall from the evening’s leftovers. Noga is delighted: “Even the leftovers here are spectacular. So, Ima, despite your many virtues, truth be told, your cooking was fairly pathetic, borderline hazardous. So why not, in the years that remain, enjoy some good cooking? Not just the bed but also the food is in the plus column of this sheltered housing.”

“Maybe,” the mother confirms halfheartedly, the other half remaining unclear.

Noga did not return to Jerusalem until ten-thirty at night, and as she walked through the Mekor Baruch neighborhood, it looked to her just as it had in her childhood. The people are the same people, what they wear is what they wore, the shops are the same shops, the streetlights have the same weak bulbs. Yes, here and there homes have expanded, adding a story and a window, enclosing a porch, and municipal garbage bins sit alongside the houses — but the dead seem not dead, and the newborns seem as yet unborn.

In her heart she harbored a hope that she would find traces of the children in the apartment, and as soon as she entered, she went to feel if the TV was warm. It was not. She inspected the rooms, even checking whether the angle of the head of the electric bed had been changed, but no alien hand had touched the mechanism. She thought about the whip, and since for a moment she didn’t recall where she’d left it, she imagined that the little invaders had indeed been here and taken it. But then she remembered its hiding place and went to look for it in her parents’ empty clothes closet, left lying like a desert snake in its burnt reddish skin, its long tail resting on the picture of the king of Jordan in the newspaper spread beneath it.

Since she’d returned from Tel Aviv fully rested, she sat glued to the television, surfing from channel to channel, finally landing on Mezzo and going from a concert to a dance troupe to an opera, until at a very late hour her eyelids began to droop, and musical drowsiness segued into hallucination. But instead of seeking slumber in one of the beds, she felt underneath her father’s armchair for a lever that lowered the chair into a kind of bed. She doesn’t stay in this bed, but climbs in her dream onto the stage before her, where the orchestra is getting ready for the second act of a concert performance of an opera. The musicians are tuning their instruments, singers are gathering on the stage. The male singers are wearing black tie, and the women wear the costumes of the characters they portray. Although this is the second act, she doesn’t yet see her harp, which someone is to wheel onto the stage. Now it comes, the harp, large and majestic, but instead of being placed near a group of strings, it is moved to the brass section, next to the trumpets and trombones, not far from the drum that will drown out its sound. As she worries about the new location, a woman turns to her. “I am Carmen,” she says. “Can you sing the second act for me? A grain of sand got into my windpipe.”