The Extra

Fifty-Three

THE SNORING THAT THE CONTRABASSIST had warned of in advance indeed disrupted Noga’s sleep. At first she tried to muffle her ears with a pillow, but it was no match for the snores. With no alternative, she left the room in hopes that the snoring might wake the snorer. The guesthouse was dark and silent, with a dim light in the stairway. She went down to the dining room but found it locked, and the front door was locked as well, but a rear door turned out to be open, with trees whispering in the park beyond.

The night is pleasingly cool, and she is drawn into a thicket of trees whose overcrowded roots have emerged from underground to twist around the trunks. Along the paths are bushes decorated with tiny light bulbs, apparently left over from some celebration, that calm her nerves with their childish innocence. She steps on, bathed in the sweet, familiar fragrance of fresh-mown grass. From the middle of the garden comes a murmur of human voices, borne on a bluish cloud of harsh tobacco smoke, recalling the cheap cigarettes Uriah was addicted to in his army days. She follows the smell and the voices, arriving at a handsome wooden gazebo, in front of which are gathered a dozen or so young men and women, most likely students from the university, smoking and talking, and planted among them, to her astonishment, is the little old man who came from afar to be her partner. He sits on a bench, barefoot, his legs folded under him. He wears the same gray robe, with the same pack tied to his back. But his white braid is unraveled for the night, and the mane of hair framing his face gives him the look of a sweet old Japanese woman from an American movie about World War II.

He is half asleep, half listening to the youngsters, with a small pipe stuck in his mouth. The young people, noticing the foreign woman heading their way, fall silent. But she is no stranger to the old man, and to demonstrate this she stands before him and bows deeply, in the spirit of their meeting a few hours earlier at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. But the old man merely nods his head, apparently failing to recognize her as his partner. Is he a blind musician, improvising the part of second harp? She feels a sudden pang of anxiety, but doesn’t press the issue. Touching two fingers to her lips, she offers an excuse for her presence: the craving for a cigarette. The young people oblige her, and rather than say thank you, she delights in local custom and bows to the whole group, cigarette in mouth, as if she were a soloist onstage before a cheering audience. She then walks back to the guesthouse, filled with the scent of simple tobacco that reminds her of Uriah.

The room is still, but the snoring grandma has woken up and turned on her small bedside light, waiting to apologize to the neighbor. To be honest, she hadn’t imagined that her snoring would startle and drive away the Israeli, who has evidently long grown accustomed to sleeping alone. Now she will not fall back to sleep until Noga has soundly done so. As reinforcement she offers Noga a dependable sleeping pill, whose effect is impervious even to cannon fire. “A whole or just a half?” “Whole,” says the harpist. “Half the night is gone, and tomorrow’s a big day.”

The little pill is indeed a mighty potion, and the sleep is so deep that her dreams lie dormant. And when she opens her eyes she finds herself alone in the room, her neighbor’s bed meticulously made, and morning fiercely shining through the folds of the window curtain. It is nine o’clock. Eight hours of pure sleep, which instead of alertness have produced a thick blur. Noga smiles, thinking, This sweet grandma could have killed me so she could snore to her heart’s content. She rises sluggishly, washes slowly, her head spinning, limbs heavy, and before making her bed she rushes just in time to what’s left of the breakfast buffet. The many hours of sleep did her no good, and the visit to the park seems like an illusion; she’s not even sure if the cigarette was lit or not. Since the rehearsal at the concert hall is called for one p.m., most of the musicians, encouraged by eager guides, are making a quick tour of two more temples. But the Israeli does not seek further holiness — she has more than enough in her homeland. She returns to her room, where instead of making her unruly bed she slips back into her nightgown and huddles like a fetus, no longer from fatigue but from feelings of illness and pain.

At noon Manfred arrives to wake her. What’s going on? carps the flutist. They will only be in this jewel box of a city for four days, so what’s the point of sleeping? She looks at him sadly and doesn’t reply. Her roommate is astounded: there’s no way a little innocent sleeping pill could depress somebody quite so much.

“Little but not innocent,” Noga mumbles feebly in English. “But it’s not depression, it’s memory.” Without adding a word, she banishes Manfred and goes to the bathroom, and is terrified to find two blood spots on her nightgown. Could her period conceivably be coming back, or is this a symptom of something more serious? She washes out the nightgown, rubbing the blood spots with a bar of soap, struck by a sensation of death.

The Kyoto Concert Hall is splendidly modern, resembling a giant shoe. The heel is a round structure containing the main hall and its rectangular lobby. At the back of the stage rise the lofty pipes of the organ, silvered and gilded, in the manner of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Most of the instruments have been brought onstage, and her harp has been joined by a black one the likes of which she has seen only in old photographs. “Is this the house harp?” she asks the Japanese cultural attaché, who explains that this is the private harp of the elderly Ichiro Matsudaira, which he brings with him to every performance. The rehearsal begins with Symphony No. 26 in D Minor by Haydn, a dramatic, tempestuous symphony, which an ensemble of the best players performs with vigorous precision. As they play, Herman Kroon and a woman violist, who Dennis believes has a uniquely sensitive ear, prowl about the hall to verify how its acoustics respond to a foreign orchestra. It turns out that what sounds right and good in Europe also sounds right and good in the Far East.

Next in turn, after the Haydn symphony, is Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and most of the musicians who had not been part of the previous ensemble come to the stage. Only Noga and a few percussionists stay seated in the hall. She has installed herself in the first row to get a better look at the Japanese soloist, on account of whose arm, broken in a tennis game in Berlin, Noga had been robbed of the Mozart concerto. This is a short, dark young woman in jeans and a lightweight blouse, her hands quick and dexterous, and it would seem that her self-confidence flourishes here in her homeland, for she asks, even in rehearsal, that the house be completely dark, to compel the few listeners to concentrate on her alone.

Her playing is powerful, fast, virtuosic, but uninspired. From time to time the conductor halts her racing tempo, trying to reach a compromise, not always with success. “She’s a well-known kamikaze,” Herman whispers to Noga, “who turns music into a suicide mission. But don’t worry about her, tonight they’ll love her, because she was born in a small town not far from here to a poor family, and when she studied music she supported herself as a waitress and babysitter, and soared to the top on her talent alone. Many people here still remember her from the beginning of her career, and whoever doesn’t can read about it in the program. The Japanese, unlike us, don’t just flip through the program, they read it from cover to cover. And besides,” Herman goes on, “let us not forget that this is the Emperor, and for the Japanese that’s not Napoleon but their emperor — beloved, mysterious, revered, the bedrock of their identity.”

Little noises in the darkness. Noga turns around and sees the elderly harpist feeling his way inside, a small stick in his hand. She wants to exchange a hello with him, but fears he will again find it hard to recognize her. No matter, she thinks, soon we’ll sit shoulder to shoulder and he won’t be able to deny me.

The glorious metallic tones of the piano are suddenly accompanied by the acute contraction of her lower belly, like a knife blade turning in her gut, and though she tries to distract herself from the pain, it won’t let up. The young Japanese woman is galloping like a wild horse that has thrown its rider, and the conductor is trying to slow her down with the help of the wind instruments. Noga has seen her share of young and brilliant soloists who after a few years sink into anonymity. Soloists of age sixty or seventy are less abundant than these youngsters. Personal life experience, the broader and deeper the better, is the key to fresh interpretation of the tired, crowd-pleasing classics.

The pain increases, her muscles strain. “Excuse me,” she whispers to Herman, and goes out of the hall in search of the ladies’ room, which is tucked someplace far away, and she only finds a large door with the stenciled image of a person in a wheelchair, crowned by one word in Japanese. Does this suggest anyone, male and female? If she had access to the chair she occupied as a disabled extra, she’d roll right in, not as a man or woman, but just a human. In the absence of such a chair, does her distress confer permission? There is no one in the corridor to tell her what is and isn’t proper, so she cautiously opens the door and enters.

She finds a big, wide stall, immaculate as a doctor’s office. At one side is a diaper-changing table big enough for twins or even triplets. She unzips her pants and discovers that the same bloodstains that she removed from the nightgown have reappeared on her panties, larger and redder than before. Something is wrong with her body. Her periods are long gone. What are the odds of a return visit?

A loudspeaker tucked in the ceiling plays the music from the hall, and while she is convulsing miserably in a public washroom, the notes of the Emperor’s finale cascade from a piano above her head. In a few minutes the conductor will exchange a few more words with the soloist before moving on to the second part of the rehearsal. But Noga doesn’t budge. She waits for the pain to subside, or at least to make its intentions clear. Very slowly she tries to regulate her breathing. The new blood spots cannot be removed right now, and will alas accompany her to the stage, but with all her might she will strive to control the pain, hoping it will actually intensify her performance.

The Emperor is finished. According to the program, the time has come for the Melancholy Arabesques of Van den Broek. In which case, she has eight whole minutes to recover and calm down. Lucky for her that in the end they didn’t cut anything from the already short piece. She waits for the opening shriek of the piccolo, and now, here goes, the third time she’s heard these insane arabesques, this one through a little speaker in the ceiling, and quite miraculously, what had earlier sounded chaotic and gratuitously provocative seems cloaked in a kind of decadent beauty. Yes, despite his disdainful objections to this work, the maestro has succeeded, perhaps under the influence of his wife, in shaping it to shock listeners without repelling them.

Her eyes are glued to the clock, and at the fifth minute she gets up, straightens her clothes and quickly applies makeup before the mirror to conceal her pallor, and as the Dutchman’s demanding arabesques flow to a finish, she feels a vague flowing within herself. Could this be a vestige of the old abortion? It’s crazy just to raise the possibility.

She returns to the hall precisely as the young composer rushes with excitement to embrace the conductor, whose interpretation, in the end, was an improvement. Her new partner is already sitting on the stage, tuning his harp. She walks over slowly and bows slightly to him, and now he does recognize her, but instead of returning the bow he surprises her by extending his hand.

Sitting close to his black harp, she can examine it thoroughly. It looks large and unwieldy, owing perhaps to its extreme age, or in contrast to its tiny player. At the top of the harp there is no portrait of an angel or embossment of a gold crown, but the face of a black bird. The Japanese has his score open, and from the folds of his robe he produces thin gold-rimmed glasses and places them on his nose. At least he won’t be playing from memory, Noga consoles herself as she begins to tune her strings. The harpist, her very old new partner, listens with concern as she works, without a word or suggestion — just his tiny hand trembling at every twitch of a string, then relaxing when it reaches its proper pitch.

The musicians who have played three pieces in a row and gone out for a break now return to the stage. Ingrid, the French horn player, walks past Noga and senses her distress. “Is anything wrong?” she asks, placing a soft hand on the Israeli’s shoulder. “Yes,” Noga decides to admit. “If you have a little time after the rehearsal, I will need your help.” “Of course I’ll have time,” promises the musician, “as much as you want.”

The words are spoken sincerely. Ingrid de Monk is a beautiful young woman who protects herself through generosity of spirit. Well aware of the attraction, envy and confusion that her beauty can arouse, she tries to dull her glamour by means of simple, rumpled clothes, and also tries to be as helpful as possible to anyone who needs help. From her husband, older by a number of years, a family doctor at a rural clinic, she has acquired useful snippets of medical knowledge, plus a little toolbox containing pills and ointments, bandages and tape, a thermometer and blood-pressure gauge, pins and needles and buttons, and even a makeup kit. She carries this box, dubbed the “Wonder Horn” by her fellow musicians, not only when traveling, but sometimes to long rehearsals, possibly as a sort of penance for the gift of beauty bestowed on her.

Dennis van Zwol takes the podium and waits for the absolute silence that enables the sounding of the first note. To Noga’s astonishment, the Japanese harpist has removed his wooden clogs and is poised to press the pedals with his tiny, wrinkled bare feet. The conductor turns to the two harpists, readies their entrance with a finger of his left hand and then, with the baton in his right hand, gives a clear sign for the timpani to stroke the opening beats, and the old man plucks the first note with a stunning power that Christine could never accomplish, and Noga joins him an eighth note later, plucking rapidly and without accents. Side by side, in partnership and dialogue, with four swift hands and quick, precise pressure on the pedals, the two summon the wail of the wind and the sparkle of the waves from the music of Debussy, convincing the strings and woodwinds, and the percussion in their wake, that they are in fact sailing together on the wide-open seas.

And with love and devotion to her instrument Noga is able to conquer her pain. Inspired by the fierce virtuosity flourishing in the fingers of the old man, whose black harp seems entwined with his body, she discovers that her own instrument has a tone and resonance she had not known or imagined, and these tempt her to pluck its strings with all her might, nearly to uproot them.

The maestro settles down, and instead of waving his arms and jumping, he closes his eyes, and with soft, nonchalant hand motions he lets the orchestra guide its conductor, who sails alone in a simple sailboat, trusting the music not to drown him or betray him, but land him safely on the shore of his desires.

When the last note disappears and silence conquers the hall, the administrative director cannot contain himself and leaps from his seat with the cry of “Bravo! Bravo!” while Dennis’s wife rushes from her seat to the stage and bows emotionally to the entire orchestra.

And the conductor sighs and says, “What a pity this is just a rehearsal.”