The Extra

Thirty-Five

THOUGH IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE for Uriah to pick out an old key tossed in a drawer, it would never have occurred to him to unlock this apartment, or come near it. When he ran into his former brother-in-law at the opera, he didn’t expect, after a long silence, anything more than a brief exchange of empty pleasantries. But after Honi, with the intimacy of a long-lost relative, briefed him about the old folks’ home and piqued his curiosity about his former wife’s appearance on the stage, Uriah had felt that the chance encounter was significant for him but irrelevant to his present wife, so when she approached, he hurried to end the conversation.

Something had been burned into his mind, something his former brother-in-law apparently intended. And so, after failing to locate on the stage the wife he never got over, he decided to go back to the opera the next night as an infiltrator with binoculars.

And that night, after midnight, when he returned to Ma’aleh Adumim, unsettled by the extra in her embroidered costume leading dark-skinned children at the foot of Masada in a little wagon harnessed to a decorated donkey, he felt that her brother, deliberately or not, had involved him in a pointless but necessary experiment, obligating him to one more move. And since he recognized that if he were to request a simple face-to-face meeting, nothing could be said that hadn’t been said many times over, he preferred that the encounter be not real but imaginary. If his former wife had chosen to show up in Israel as an extra in the stories and imaginations of others, why should he not join her as a partner?

It had not required many inquiries with agencies that booked extras. At the first agency he phoned, in Jerusalem, he happened upon a former secretary of his, who was pleased to find him Noga’s name among the extras listed for a television series about a hospital.

At the Ashdod port he was not permitted entry to the film location, because his name did not appear on the list of extras. In the belief that he’d find another way in, he wandered around the port, drank beer with longshoremen at a small cafeteria, and they showed him the entrance at the far end of the warehouse. When night fell and the man standing guard left his post, he sneaked inside and began to wander the corridors, recognizing Noga as a disabled woman in a nightgown, transported in a wheelchair. But he was careful not to reveal himself before assuming the role of a new character. After asking directions he arrived at the wardrobe room, where he pretended to be an extra and the staff helped him realize his vision — the torn, filthy uniform of a soldier, which he put on over his own clothes, and for greater effect, a red-stained army bandage wrapped around his forehead. This lost soul went off in search of Noga, and found her in the dining room, but after the meal, as she looked for a bed for the night, he didn't hurry after her, and when she entered a little room and closed its makeshift door, he didn’t dare follow her, but stationed himself outside like a watchman, lest some stranger enter before he did. Only after the tumult died down did he allow himself, as a wounded soldier from the battlefield and not as a former husband, to slip into the bed next to hers and again watch over her sleep as he had when they were married. And indeed on that night she had difficulty sleeping. From time to time she sighed and wrestled with the blanket and pillow until she subdued them. And if a pale ivory foot or delicate arm, familiar objects of desire, remained exposed after the struggle, he had to cover them up carefully before giving way to merciful sleep.

But in the dim first light of day, as he first noticed her eyeing him reproachfully, he realized that the character of a wounded soldier did not draw her close; it repelled her. The logical conclusion was that if he wanted to make the most of the experiment her brother had scripted for him, he could do so only by means of his real self.