The Extra

Twenty-Four

THE NEXT DAY and the day after, the children did not sneak in. Are they sick of television, or did they find a more kosher TV? Perhaps Shaya’s son devised a different way to soothe the stormy spirit of the little tzaddik. Either way, the threat of the whip had not been in vain, and the whip itself will eventually be put to use.

Yet she continues to hope that the children will again try to break into the apartment. In the entire building, perhaps the entire street, this is the sole remaining bastion of secularism. And even if a few scattered families secretly own the scandalous appliance, none would dare admit it.

She hopes to prove to herself that the whip is not a myth but a reality, and so refrains from locking the front door with Abadi’s bolt and leaves open the window in the bathroom. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” her father would declare when she was little. He would even undo his belt to frighten Honi when she would catch him rummaging through her schoolbag or chest of drawers, and demand that her parents protect her from him. But her father would drop the belt without ever waving it as a threat, because the boy would defuse the anger with sweetness and smooth talk, and beg forgiveness in an amusing performance of bowing and kneeling before his sister.

She was, in their home, an object of awe and reverence. When she was a girl it was taken for granted that no one could make her do anything against her will. This wasn’t, however, out of stubbornness for its own sake, but because her boundaries were always fixed and stable, if not always explicable, even to herself. Only her younger brother, who tagged along behind her in childhood and perhaps loved her the most, would try to shift the border and come closer.

When she and Uriah became romantically involved, Honi was thrilled, not only because he admired the future husband, but because he thought that through him he could deepen the connection with his sister. Uriah too was fond of his future brother-in-law, and when he was still an officer in a combat unit, he would come to the building in a command car and take the excited youngster on rides around Jerusalem, allowing the boy to touch the trigger of his army rifle.

But Honi’s hope to be an uncle to his sister’s baby was not fulfilled. After several years of marriage, her firm refusal to bear children became clear, and it was the brother, not the parents, who protested and fought in various ways for the unborn child, inevitably provoking anger. Only when Uriah demanded he stop pestering his sister did he refrain, and not long thereafter he too married, and was quick, perhaps defiantly so, to give his parents the grandchild they yearned for.

The circumcision took place in this very apartment, which to everyone’s surprise had room for a multitude of relatives close and distant, of friends and acquaintances. This was after Noga’s divorce, but Uriah came to the celebration and stared coldly at the newborn, who slept serenely on the knees of its grandfather, the honored sandak, as the mohel recommended and supervised by Mr. Pomerantz carefully performed the cut, his long beard brushing the tiny penis. Noga kept her distance from them, but beamed with joy at her happy brother, not least in the hope that he would now leave her be, and also because she had just been accepted as a harpist by the Dutch orchestra.

Now the apartment is empty and she is in charge. And since many possessions and pieces of furniture are gone, the space has expanded and could accommodate even more guests at a new celebration — were there any reason for one. But with her in control, and in the rising heat of summer, the lone tenant can strip off her clothes and walk naked between the rooms before dipping her body into the blue foam.

The waters of Jerusalem feel sweet, since she believes they derive in part from ancient cisterns of rainwater, as her father had taught her. So she lingers in the bathtub that stands on iron feet shaped like the talons of a bird of prey, and every few minutes she sinks beneath the foam, to the sounds of old Hebrew songs on a tiny transistor radio, mixed with an unfamiliar wailing, caused perhaps by weak batteries.

It takes a while for her to realize that the wailing does not originate from the batteries or a remix of the old songs, but rather from actual wailing through the open window, where two little feet in white socks and worn-out sandals are scrambling for a foothold.

“He’s going to fall!” she screams and, naked and dripping with foam, leaps to the window and grabs the two flailing feet. Feeling more secure, the child loosens his desperate hold on the drainpipe and lets himself slide to the floor between the wet arms and breasts of the woman. Quickly she returns to the window, expecting to find his guardian behind him. But there’s no one on the pipe. It twists its rusty way upward, above it only a patch of sky.

“And this time you came by yourself.”

She leans over the tzaddik, who huddles at her feet, his sweat sour, his little hands black from the pipe. She picks him up joyfully, deftly peeling off his gray jacket and white shirt, its filthy collar embroidered with a mysterious pattern. As he struggles, she strips off his worn trousers, hand-me-downs from one generation to the next, and under them discovers a soiled diaper, which she throws in the trash, and pulls the tzitzit undergarment, its fringes stuck together, over his head. Naked as a newborn, the boy is propelled through the air, landing in the bathwater, and in her eyes he is no longer a boy but a beautiful little girl, whose two wet sidelocks gather into a golden mane.

Dousing him with fresh water, she diligently purifies his body, no organ escaping the hand of the confident musician, and while doing so she recalls the advice her father gave her mother, to handle the tzaddik with care, for he might become the leader of a stubborn religious camp that could topple a government. Sure, why not, let him topple a government, but at least he won’t pollute it.

And despite her awareness of her own nakedness, she is in no hurry to cover it up. Boy or girl, she says to herself, why should I not be engraved in the child’s memory? And she wraps the clean body in a big towel and carries him, light as a feather, into the living room and seats him in her father’s armchair, and he still looks to her like a girl, in whose blue eyes sparkle diamonds of tears but whose little arm is outstretched pleadingly at the black screen.

Television, again? But why not? She switches on the set, hoping the symphony orchestra on the Mezzo Channel will captivate the little viewer with its rich sound. But the tzaddik demands the remote control, expertly changing channels, coming to a halt at the Jungle Channel and a troop of monkeys.

In which case, he’s not so damaged after all.

Suddenly a frantic pummeling rattles the front door. She wraps herself in a bathrobe, firmly fastens its belt, shakes out her hair and combs it with her fingers, and only then opens the door for the pale and terrified chaperone. She escorts him to his protégé, who sits in the armchair wrapped in a big towel, transfixed by monkeys delousing one another with care.

“He’s going to fall and crash if you keep this up,” she scolds, not unkindly.

Yuda-Zvi says nothing. His face is red, he bites his lip, and then, in a heartbreaking gesture, he kneels before the little boy, who is not looking at him, and feels and smells the damp towel. “What is this?” he asks. “You washed him?”

“Of course.”

“Why? What did he do to you?”

“He slid down the drainpipe and came in here filthy and stinking.”

“So what?”

“What do you mean, so what? He had to be washed.”

“How?”

“How? With soap and water. You’ve heard of water? You know what soap is?”

Shaya’s son studies her with undisguised anger.

“And the clothes? His tzitzit and the shirt with the special embroidery?”

“Don’t worry, it’s all safe, except for an old diaper. But make sure, Yuda-Zvi, not to dress him now in those dirty clothes. Take him up to Grandma and change him.”

“He has no other clothes here.”

“Just take him from here as he is, wrapped in this towel, which is a gift to you. But first swear to me on your father’s life, the life of Shaya Pomerantz, that never, but never, will you sneak in here again, not through the door or through the window, because if this tzaddik were to fall and get hurt, what would all his Hasidim do?”

“They’ll find another tzaddik,” he mumbles darkly, and measures her with a blazing look that assesses her nakedness under the robe. He’s not a child anymore but a furious adolescent, who rips the remote control from the little one’s hand and shuts off the TV, strips the towel from the boy and flings it with disgust on the floor, then pulls the screaming, naked child to the still-open door and, without a parting word, takes him up to the grandma who no longer knows she is a grandma.