The Extra

Thirty-Eight

“YES, THERE’S KNOCKING at the door. You expecting someone?”

“No. I wasn’t expecting you either. Maybe it’s your wife, coming to show me the kids.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“But my father—”

“Your father had the right,” he interrupts angrily. “You don’t.”

Standing at the doorway is a Hasid, dressed in black with a broad-brimmed hat, his beard and sidelocks soft and flaxen, beautiful emerald eyes shining through the thicket of hair. With a gentle smile he proffers a glass bowl piled with fruit and says, “A little something from my mother and father to your mother. They should all live and be well.”

Behind him hides a child, he too wearing black and a hat, a schoolbag on his back, his head bowed but his eyes alert.

“Yuda-Zvi!” she happily exclaims. “Here you are again.”

And now she recognizes Shaya, the handsome son of the Pomerantz family, who in their youth would sometimes chat with her on the stairs with no barrier between them, in complete freedom, before he was dispatched to a distant yeshiva.

“And you too, Shaya,” she adds excitedly, her face burning. “I’ve been living here for three months, and I even had a strange sort of romance with your clever son. But you, where are you these days?”

“I’m not far from here,” he explains graciously, “on Ovadiah Street in Kerem Avraham, but during the week I teach up north near Safed, which is why we haven’t run into each other.”

“A shame, because your Yuda-Zvi would drop in here freely via the gutters and down the drainpipe, and bring along a mixed-up little tzaddik. By the way, where is he?”

Shaya smiles. “The tzaddik, as you call him, Shraga, he should live and be well, was sent away to Safed, to a family with the patience and heart for children like him. But here is Yuda-Zvi, coming to you to ask forgiveness, because we know what he has done. Right, Yuda-Zvi?”

“Right,” the boy confesses in a whisper.

“And the fruit is for your mother, lovely fruit from the Galilee, the vineyards and orchards of Mount Canaan. Your mother phoned my father yesterday to tell him she was returning to the neighborhood, and we wished to congratulate her on her decision and give her our blessing.”

“Of all of us, it was your father she told first,” she murmurs, astonished.

“Maybe it was easier for her that way.”

Insulted, she does not take the fruit from him, motioning for his son to come to her. The boy hesitates, looks pleadingly at his father, who nudges him forward. She clasps the child to her bosom, stares him in the eye and says, “Now do you understand that because of stupid television, you and your little tzaddik could have crashed to the ground?” Yuda-Zvi nods, and she strokes his sidelocks, straightens his hat, lightly kisses his forehead and eyes and returns him to his father, who watches with a smile and sways back and forth with immense devotion.

Only then does she take the fruit bowl from Shaya, placing it on top of the TV and indicating Uriah, who still stands with briefcase in hand. “Maybe you recognize him,” she says. “This is Uriah, my former husband, who is on his way to work.” Uriah, red with embarrassment, extends his hand, but when she extends hers too, Shaya quickly drops his hand and moves it to the doorframe, covering the mezuzah as if to keep it warm, until he and the boy depart.