The Extra

Ten

SHE HAD INTENDED TO VISIT her mother two days after arriving in Israel, but Honi tried to delay it. “You came for three months, not a week, so rest, get acclimated. In two days the retirement home has scheduled an excursion for the residents, and it would be good for Ima to join them. Wait another two, three days, let her get acclimated too, and I’ll try to pick you up from Jerusalem.”

She realized that the experiment on which he hung his hopes required his constant vigilance, not only regarding his mother, but her as well. But after four days in Jerusalem, she decided to elude his control and go down to Tel Aviv without his knowledge.

When she entered the gleaming lobby of the facility she was told her mother was at a concert. At first she stood by the closed door and listened to an amateur string trio, then grew impatient, silently opened the door and stood in the back of a small, dark hall, where perhaps twenty elderly residents were concentrating on their friends, a violinist, a violist and a cellist in a wheelchair, who played a trio by Schubert, missing more than a few notes as they fiddled vigorously together. The musicians noticed as she entered, and it seemed that her stately presence made them slightly anxious, but her mother, tranquilly enjoying the musical bonus of assisted living, did not yet see her.

Finally, she too noticed the extra woman standing in the back, and urgently wished to join her, but Noga signaled her to wait, and sat down so as not to offend the musicians.

At the end of the concert her mother introduced her to one of the old women.

“This is my daughter, a musician, but she lives in Holland…”

The visitor liked her mother’s experimental one-room apartment, which though located on the street level was attached to a private patch of ground, with flowers and bushes abutting a grassy lawn. The furniture was modest but new, and the bathroom was spanking clean.

“Would you believe, Noga,” said her mother, “that I as a tenant have to water the flowers?”

“And you don’t like that?”

“The watering I like, but not the obligation. In Mekor Baruch nobody has flowers anymore.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“And besides,” sighed her mother, “if Abba could have imagined that after he died I’d end up in Tel Aviv, he wouldn’t have left the world so peacefully.”

“But you’re not in Tel Aviv, you’re in assisted living.”

“Assisted in what?”

“In tolerating Tel Aviv.”

Her mother laughed. “In the six days I’ve been here, some nice old women have befriended me, one of them from Jerusalem, who remembers me from kindergarten and insists I haven’t changed a bit, not my looks or my mind.”

“So you already have a good friend.”

“Yes, it’s easy to make friends here, but to create a solid connection you have to provide stories of illness and other misfortunes. So many amazing stories here about exotic maladies, so vividly described you imagine catching them right then and there.”

“And you don’t have a disease you can spread in return?”

“None, my child. You know I’m healthy. Also, Abba’s death was so easy and simple, people are jealous.”

“Then talk about family problems.”

“We don’t have any. We were always a normal and stable family.”

“Normal?” Noga laughed. “What about me?”

“What about you?”

“A woman no longer young, whose husband left her because she refused to have children.”

“If you refused, what’s the problem? If you were unable, I could look for sympathy or pity. I’m not going to turn you into a problem to satisfy some old lady here.”

“Then at least provoke a little anger at me.”

“Why anger at you? If the experiment succeeds and I move here permanently, what will I gain from other people’s anger at you? Your father didn’t get angry, and he didn’t allow us to get angry either. ‘We have to honor Noga’s wishes,’ he said. ‘Childbirth can have complications, even cause death.’”

“Even death? That’s what he said?”

“He not only said it, he thought it.”

“Good Abba, he couldn’t think of another way to justify what I did.”

“That’s how he tried to explain it.”

“I didn’t connect my decision to any death.”

“Of course you didn’t. I don’t think you connected it to anything at all. You didn’t want to, and that was it. That’s also how I put it to Abba. But he stuck stubbornly to his explanation. So I said to myself, if Noga’s imaginary escape from death calms him down, who am I to deny it?”

The back door leading to the porch and garden was open, and Noga noticed that the room faced the western sky, bathed now in a reddish glow.

“It’s nice here, so pleasant. Honi found you a good place. By the way, I was amazed to see how many things you threw away. All of Abba’s clothes…”

“Not just Abba’s, mine too. Honi was impressed how easily I emptied out the closets. If the experiment here doesn’t succeed, I’ll at least return to an apartment that’s light and airy. If you had been with us, we would have convinced you to throw out things of yours that were still there.”

“Not much is still there.”

“True, not much, and you can throw the rest out yourself.”

“In any case, you left Abba’s black suit.”

“It was so beautiful and new, a shame to give it to charity.”

“Maybe you’re saving it for a new husband,” teased Noga, and her mother laughed.

“You know me, Nogaleh — do you see me with a new husband?”

“Or at least a lover,” the daughter insisted.

“A lover, fine, but he’d have to be Japanese or Chinese, as Abba used to joke with me at night, but they’re so small and thin the suit wouldn’t fit them. I thought of offering it to Abadi, but I worried he would be embarrassed to wear a dead man’s suit. So let’s keep thinking. If you want, we can give it to our neighbor Mr. Pomerantz. He’s still a handsome man and dresses well.”

“But without the shoes and socks, because that would be insulting.”

“Shoes and socks? What are you talking about?”

“The shoes and socks you left below the suit. It almost looked like you were waiting for Abba to come back.”

“That’s right, Noga, I am waiting for him to come back, but if the shoes and socks bother you, then you should throw them out right away.”

“We’ll see. It really is lovely here, and the residents seem quite cultured.”

“The ones you saw. There are others in frightful condition who barely get out of their rooms. But if the experiment succeeds, it will be a relief for Honi, who won’t need to travel to Jerusalem, which he hates more by the day. That’s why he’s so pleased I’m here.”

“He’s really attached to you.”

“Too much. Drops in several times a day to see how I am, even joined me twice for meals in the dining room. Yesterday he brought the children for me to look after. Good thing there’s grass here where they can run around, because my room’s too small for their energy. I thought they’d be picked up in two hours, but Sarai showed up after four hours. I said nothing, she’s an artist after all, and her sense of time is rather vague. If I can be useful once in a while, why not? Now it’s dinnertime, come join me.”

But Noga didn’t get up.

“Take it slowly, Ima. We’ll do it next time. Today I have no strength for interrogation by your old ladies.”

The mother went off to the dining hall, and Noga sank into the small armchair, fixated on the remains of sunlight. After a while she stood up and went out past the porch to the darkening lawn. How did this grow here? she wondered. This old folks’ home is a building among other buildings on an ordinary street, and suddenly it’s like Oxford or Cambridge, where you open a plain door to find an ancient cathedral with great expanses of grass.

She strolls across the lawn to figure out where it goes and how it ends, and in the violet twilight she can make out, beside a bench, a little old man in a wheelchair covered in a blanket, a thin scarf around his neck, dozing or perhaps unconscious, a shriveling intravenous bag connected to his arm.

A forgotten resident, not brought in for dinner? Or perhaps the IV is his meal?

She is careful not to wake him, and sits on the bench to ensure his safety in the gathering darkness. But soon, in the warm evening air, she is intoxicated by the serenity of her napping neighbor and closes her eyes — and suddenly an unknown hand clutches her neck.

For a moment she is terrified that the man with the IV has risen up to strangle her. But the old man is gone. Apparently someone has quietly wheeled him back inside. And behind her, the laughter of her brother.

“You better watch out,” she says. “At age forty-one my heart can’t handle your jokes.”

“Your heart is the same as ever,” Honi says, holding her wrist as if checking her pulse. “A young heart, a strong heart, a heart of stone, as Uriah used to say.”

“He complained about me to you too?”

“Yes, out of desperate love for you. And how’s the home I found for Ima? The lawn lets her look after the kids while sitting in an armchair.”

“And this will be her final apartment, if she wants?”

“This one, or maybe a better one, providing you don’t weaken her resolve.”

“I didn’t come to Israel to weaken any resolves, yours or hers.”

He nods in gratitude.

In the room, a fruit platter assembled by the new tenant awaits her two children, and the three of them now sit, six months after the father’s death, in the peaceful setting of a posh old-age home, light years away from the blackening neighborhood in Jerusalem, discussing the experiment just begun, and the arrangements for the Jerusalem flat under Noga’s care.

“Wait a minute,” Noga says. “Those children, Pomerantz’s grandchildren… what do I do if they come into the apartment again?”

“They won’t come in,” decrees her brother, “and if they try, don’t let them. Even if they beg, no mercy. Don’t repeat Ima’s mistake. And make sure the bathroom window stays locked. They managed in the past to climb down the drainpipe.”

“From the third floor down the drainpipe? How old are they?”

“The older one,” says the mother, “is eleven or twelve, the younger six or so. The older one is Shaya’s son. You remember him, Noga? Pomerantz’s middle son, the handsome boy you sometimes ran into on the stairs or in the street. After you got married and left, they arranged for him a bride among the most extreme ultra-Orthodox in Mea Shearim, and though he is more or less your age, he’s already fathered ten or maybe eleven children — I think even his mother gets confused how many. And that younger one is a cousin, and as it happens in these huge families, one of them always turns out retarded.”

“That’s not a nice word, Ima,” scolds Honi.

“If not retarded, then strange, a space cadet, but sweet, nice-looking. And because he is hyperactive, they send him with Shaya’s son to let off steam at grandma’s house. But how much can Mrs. Pomerantz keep him occupied? She’s not a well woman. They don’t have a television, of course, just a radio tuned to some religious station, so it’s no wonder the kids get bored and run around on the stairway, up and down, over and over, making noise and yelling. And this little one, the retar—‘challenged’ one, he sometimes makes these blood-curdling screams. So to keep them quiet, I invited them to watch a little television, children’s programs, because they don’t allow television.”

“And you got permission from the grandma?”

“I didn’t want to put her to the test, get her in trouble with Shaya, who has become a total fanatic, but I’m sure she knew, or at least guessed and looked the other way. It brought her peace and quiet. The Pomerantzes were always a respectable family, not extreme. When you played music on Shabbat, Nogaleh, they didn’t get angry.”

“Well, bottom line, what am I supposed to do now? Not only keep watch on the apartment, but also deal with crazy Orthodox children?”

“No, not at all. Don’t let them in, period,” says Honi. “Ima took pity on them, that was a mistake, but you don’t need to do that. Just take the key away from them.”

“Key? What key?”

“They apparently walked off with my spare key,” the mother says defensively.

“Then you should call the police.”

“Police?” The mother is taken aback. “How can you talk that way, Nogaleh? These are Pomerantz’s grandchildren, Shaya’s unfortunate kids. We should call the cops to lock them up? What’s wrong with you?”

“Not lock them up, just take away the key.”

“We’ll take the key, don’t you worry. Honi will phone Mrs. Pomerantz, she’ll take the key from them. Just lock the bathroom window at night, that’s all. It’s not so hard.”