The Extra

Twenty-Nine

THE NEWS THAT HIS FORMER WIFE will soon appear on the stage has greatly unsettled Uriah, but he is careful not to betray any hint of the news to his spouse. Although their seats are in the middle section, close to the stage, he looks around for binoculars. “Why binoculars?” asks his wife. “We’re not far away.” “Be that as it may,” he replies, “it was sometimes hard for me in the first act to tell who Carmen was, so at least I’ll know in the second act who her replacement is.” He asks the man sitting in front of him if he can borrow his binoculars for a moment, and as the first notes are sounded he lifts them to his eyes and doesn’t put them down until the man asks for them.

He’s not sure if he has managed to pick out Noga. He thought he spotted her among the smugglers who moved between the hills, dressed for the road carrying a sack of stolen goods on her back. After the binoculars were taken from him, he began to peer at a different woman. His wife was getting angry: “What’s the problem? What are you looking for?”

“I want to see the understudy clearly.”

“What do you care? By the way, what did her brother tell you?”

“Nothing. Their mother is moving to assisted living, that’s all.”

The singing of the chorus does not drown out their whispers, and they are venomously silenced from all sides.

Since they live in Ma’aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem, and their children are at a neighbor’s, they leave at midnight for home, an hour’s drive. His wife, noticing his gloomy mood, tried again to find out what he was told during intermission, but Uriah denied he was told anything at all.

In the morning, after just a few hours of sleep, he drove his children to school, and from there continued to his job at the Ministry of Environmental Protection in Jerusalem, where he told his two secretaries about the opera in the desert, including the grains of sand that sabotaged the voice of the famous star who needed to be replaced with a local Carmen. At noon he went to the compliance department to find out if anyone was dealing with the trash that was building up at the foot of Masada. That night’s performance would be the third and last, and before the opera’s producers took off for Tel Aviv, profits in hand, it was worth making sure Masada didn’t turn into a garbage dump. Nor could he stop thinking that his former wife would again be an extra on the stage, and he goes to the equipment storage room of the department and signs out a pair of field binoculars. Do I have the strength for this? he asks himself, cutting his workday short, getting home before the children do, taking off his clothes and trying to catch a bit of sleep.

He wakes up at four p.m. to find a bustling household and his wife walking around red-eyed and yawning. He immediately takes charge, and after dinner he steers her to bed to make up for her lost sleep, and promises that for next year’s opera at Masada they will stay overnight at a hotel. “No,” declares his wife, “the next opera, if we go, will be in a hall and not under the sky.”

Uriah has mustered his nerve and decides to go to the desert. He says he has an evening meeting of senior staff with the minister of environmental protection. He will set his cell phone on vibrate and keep it in his shirt pocket, by his heart, so he can feel every jitter.

As darkness falls, Uriah heads east, gliding toward Jericho and a half-moon flanked by a trio of twinkling stars. At the Beit HaArava junction he turns south, and in less than an hour he can see the beam of light sweeping across the mountain of the ancient suicides. He has no admission ticket, and no intention of spending more money on this opera, so before reaching the main parking lot he swerves onto a dirt road and bounces along, circling the opera venue until he is blocked by large rocks. He switches off the headlights and engine and walks past the stage, planning to hide behind one of its adjacent little hills, natural or artificial, he can’t quite tell. From there, he will train his binoculars on the woman who refused, despite her love for him, to give birth to a child.

As a former combat officer in the Israeli army, he strides with confidence, and the tragic mountain of Masada helps him navigate accurately. He can hear the musicians tuning their instruments. But will the security guards, if there are any, know that this man with a bit of gray in his hair isn’t trying to sneak into an opera he saw last night and whose tunes he can hum, but just wants to look at one extra, with whom he has an unsettled score?

Silently he approaches the northern hill and the sound of laughing women. Now a hush, and then the audience of thousands explodes in applause for the conductor. Within a few seconds, ethereal music drifts in his direction. He inches closer, chooses an observation point and kneels down, and through the binoculars of the Ministry of Environmental Protection he observes the country girls of Seville, one of whom stands by a donkey hitched to a cart containing two little children, who wave to the crowd they are supposed to be unaware of. His heart pounds as he recognizes his former wife gripping the halter, out of context in peasant costume but still the same woman who could not be persuaded to have children with him, despite his undying love for her.

The music pulls her and the cart across the stage toward the opposite hill, and so as not to lose her, he advances slightly, careful not to enter the field of vision of thousands of eyes focusing on the stage, and thinks he has succeeded.

But from the commanding heights of the podium, the tall conductor is stupefied to spot a gray-haired man not connected with the plot, and as he dictates the tempo with crisp, stormy movements, and crouches and leaps to bring Bizet’s music to life, he also threatens the foreign invader with his baton, tries to shoo him away. But Uriah does not budge. Rock solid at the edge of the stage, he tracks the country girl who crosses paths with another cart and vanishes behind the second hill. And as he is considering whether to follow her, he is seized by two young security guards and removed from the area.

“Please, sir,” says one of the guards, not unkindly, “if you have no money for a ticket, then listen to Carmen at home. Don’t spoil the magic for others.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

For a moment the guards conspire to confiscate the fine-looking binoculars, but after the man introduces himself as a supervisor of environmental protection who has come to make sure Masada doesn’t turn into a garbage dump, they drop the idea.

Before the end of act one he heads back toward Ma’aleh Adumim. On the uphill road from Jericho the cell phone vibrates close to his heart, and he says gently to his wife, “Go back to sleep. I’m almost home.”