The Extra

Twelve

IN THE MORNING Noga phones Manfred in Arnhem and asks him to nail down the promise given her regarding the Mozart concerto. “Not to worry,” he assures her, “the Concerto for Flute and Harp is meant for the two of us, and I will not play it with any other harpist.” Meanwhile, as the keeper of the key to her little flat in Arnhem, he casually mentions a faucet left running in her bathroom, a result no doubt of her hasty departure, but promises all will be dry by the time she returns.

She wonders if he is only looking after the apartment or also using it, but the distance between the Middle East and Europe dims her concern, and when Honi calls about tomorrow’s work as an extra, she makes jokes as she jots down the details in her father’s old notebook, where he would faithfully record every errand assigned him by his wife or children.

At lunchtime she cooks herself a real meal, then enters her parents’ darkened bedroom, takes off her clothes and adjusts the electric bed, but her sleep is soon punctured by footsteps scurrying up and down the stairs and an occasional wild, piercing scream, as if a small predatory animal were fighting for its life.

Silence finally returns, a breeze compels the dozing woman to rearrange her blanket, and as sleep takes its time to settle in, there are two soft taps on the apartment door.

Noga smiles. These must be my mother’s TV children, she thinks, doing her best to ignore them. But the tapping, soft and rhythmic, goes on. To hell with them, she says to herself, and waits, and it stops, permission now granted for blessed sleep, for Noga to burrow into the pillow and be carried to a place she’s never been, a crowded city street in a ghetto, where someone is giving a speech in a faint but familiar voice full of eloquent indignation. Can she have traveled so far in her dream only to hear that voice again? She flings off her blanket, wraps herself in a bathrobe and silently opens the living room door.

The TV is on at low volume. Sitting cozily in the two faded armchairs that survived her mother and brother’s purge are two boys with sidelocks, clad in black, hats perched on their laps, the tzitzit fringes of their ritual undershirts dangling on their thighs. The older boy senses her presence and looks up at her seriously, brazenly, with a tinge of supplication. In the other armchair nestles a beautiful, golden child, twisting his right sidelock into a curl as his light blue eyes stare at the speaking prime minister.

“Who are you? How did you get in?”

“Your mother said,” the older one answers, “if she’s not home, I’m allowed to calm him down with the television.”

He points to the little boy.

“She couldn’t possibly have said something like that.”

“I swear it. You weren’t in Israel, that’s why you don’t know.”

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Yudel… Yehuda… Yuda-Zvi.”

“You be careful, Yuda-Zvi, I know all about you two. You’re Shaya’s kids.”

“Just me. This is Shraga, he’s a cousin, the youngest son of my mother’s sister. But you got to know only my father, not my mother.”

“Right,” she answers. “I never met your mother and I don’t want to meet her. Now turn off the television. Where’s the remote?”

“I don’t have it. He has it. He picks out for himself what and who calms him down.”

“Like the prime minister, you mean,” she says with a smile.

“Yes, he can relax him, depending on what he says. And this one, if he doesn’t get a little TV every day, he runs up and down your stairs and everyone goes crazy, including your mother.”

Noga bends over the little boy, who has still not looked at her, and searches for the remote under the hat on his lap. Then she removes him from his seat and rummages in the depths of the armchair. But the child doesn’t mind; his eyes are glued to the screen, and the remote is hidden the devil knows where. She gives up on him and unplugs the TV, and the child attacks her with a wild scream, tries to bite the hand that silenced his prime minister, and when she shakes him off, he curls up on the floor and bitterly weeps.

“You can’t take him away from the TV like that,” Yuda-Zvi explains, sitting peacefully in his armchair.

“Like what?”

“All of a sudden.”

“Enough is enough,” she says. “What’s with this kid? What’s wrong with him? Where’s his mother? Where’s his father?”

“His father is always sick, and my aunt has no more strength for him, so my mother asks me to take care of him. Because he — you may not know this — he is not an ordinary boy but an important boy.”

“Important?”

“He’s the great-grandson of the Rebbe, the Tzaddik, the righteous one. And if other children in that family die, he might someday have to be the Tzaddik, when he’s a hundred and twenty.”

But she is unimpressed by the tzaddik wailing on the floor.

“Does your grandmother upstairs know you’re breaking into an apartment that isn’t yours?”

“Grandma doesn’t know much of anything anymore,” the boy answers truthfully. “But even if she did know, she wouldn’t care, because she understands that only television can help his pain. And I promise you, Noga”—he speaks her name matter-of-factly—“your mother also doesn’t care if I calm him down with her television. She even gave me a key.”

“A key!”

“Yes. Because she knows that if I take him in through the bathroom window, he could possibly, God forbid, fall and be crushed.”

“And where is the key now?”

“Why?”

“Where’s the key?”

“It’s here… I have it.”

“Give it to me.”

“Why? You don’t have a key to the apartment?”

“Give it to me right now, or else…”

As the little tzaddik looks up at her, his eyes gleaming with tears, the older boy unbuttons his shirt collar and hands her a string with the key that her father had put on a red ring, to tell it apart from his many other keys.

She opens the front door and quietly says:

“That’s it, boy. That’s it, Mister Yuda-Zvi. This is the last time… and I will speak to your grandmother and your grandfather.”

“Just not Grandpa,” says the terrified boy. “Please, not Grandpa,” he begs, before she slams the door on them both.