The Extra

Thirty-Nine

“YOUR CHILDHOOD LOVE was unwilling to shake your hand.”

“Because I was wearing a nightgown.”

“Even if you were wearing a fur coat there would have been no handshake from him.”

“What does he matter? You’re still here.”

“You just announced I’m on my way to work.”

“No, today the work will be done here. We’ll seat your love, that stubborn entity, between us, and together we’ll set you free.”

She goes into her room, puts on one of her mother’s bathrobes over her nightgown, and on her way back to the kitchen she picks up the glass bowl, rimmed with a gold decoration, apparently part of a set. The fruit is unblemished and ripe — plums and apples, grapes and cherries, pears and peaches. She places the bowl between her and her former husband, and the indignity resurfaces.

“It’s pretty annoying and insulting that a neighbor, a haredi yet, is the first to know about my mother’s decision to come back to Jerusalem, and also suspicious that this man is so quick to send her a bowl of fruit.”

“Maybe it’s his wife.”

“No, it’s him, because his wife — I learned this from the grandson — is so ill she doesn’t know who she is. It’s him. But why? Why does he care whether Ima comes back here or not?”

“Why shouldn’t he care?” says Uriah. “When I was surprised that your parents had stayed in the neighborhood, you used to claim, perhaps half seriously, that there are religious people who enhance and sweeten their neighbors’ secular way of life. Maybe also the opposite is true — your mother’s secular life sweetens his religiosity. When you played your harp on Shabbat, he would get all excited and prophesy that you would play in the Holy Temple.”

“Fine, there’s something to that. Now there’s an old lawyer lurking in the neighborhood just waiting to sell the apartment to an extremist haredi family, and those people are specialists in making life miserable for the Orthodox who are less ultra than they are.”

She sets down two small plates and on each puts cherries and grapes, a pear and a peach, along with two small knives, and says, “This, Uriah, is so we’ll have the strength to work.”

He looks around with mild disbelief, takes a knife and peels the pear, hesitates a moment, then reaches over without asking permission and peels her pear as well, but when he tries to peel the peach, the juice sprays all over.

“Careful, you’ll stain your nice jacket. Take it off, and your tie too. You were always good at staining yourself. Anyway, what’s with the tie?”

He finds this amusing, as if his ex-wife were an actress playing the wife he once had. And like a soldier who has been given a sensible order, he takes off his jacket and tie, undoes the top button of his shirt, sits down and goes back to peeling the peach.

“Strange,” he says, “how the ultra-Orthodox from poor neighborhoods in Jerusalem end up in the Galilee.”

“Why not? After the government built them yeshivas all over the country, they turned themselves into teachers and were in great demand.”

He nods his agreement with the woman who has long since left her homeland, then eats a few grapes and a few cherries, not putting the pits on the plate but getting up and tossing them in the trash under the sink, then rinsing his hands.

“Strange”—he has grown attached to the word—“how nothing here has changed. Even the same trash can from when we were married.”

“Exactly the same. But if you hadn’t left me, you’d have managed to persuade my parents to buy a different trash can, one more in line with your ideology.”

“No doubt. I had a very good relationship with them both.”

“More than good. They really loved you. Honi especially.”

“And I loved this old apartment, not just because it was your childhood home, but for itself. This is where we slept together the first time.”

“And do you remember what you said afterward?”

“What?”

“‘I hope we won’t have a baby from this.’”

“That’s what I said?”

“Yes, and that makes sense. We were so young, why be parents so soon?”

“True.”

“You don’t remember how I responded?”

“How did you respond?”

“‘Don’t worry, Uriah, we won’t have a child just like that.’”

“Even then?”

“Even then I could feel the controlling nature of your love. Only you didn’t want to hear the warning, and your love wasted time on me, which is why your kids are now in elementary school and not high school.”

“I don’t remember what you said.”

“Maybe you thought it was just talk. But I don’t just talk.”

“Not you.”

“And if you’re hoping that our work today also includes making love, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“Why?”

“Because I won’t let you or me hurt your wife, even though I don’t know her and you insist she doesn’t resemble me in any way.”

“In any way.”

“But she is important to me, because I made a sacrifice for her. After you forced yourself to leave me, I knew that the heart that was still bound to me would not be able to connect with another woman. And so, although I could have waited and hoped for a position as a harpist in some Israeli orchestra, I hurried to accept the Dutch offer and disappear from your horizon, so you’d be free to heal with a new relationship. So don’t think that we can repeat the past, even if I have the urge and capacity to do so.”

He gets up sullenly, walks into the living room, picks up the whip from the sofa, holds it close to his face, smells it, then winds it up and places it on the television. He goes into the bedroom to look at the double bed, and is startled to discover the elevated hospital bed, plugged into the wall socket.

“What’s this? Where’d it come from?”

“After my father died, my mother wanted to replace their worn-out double bed with a new single bed, but a young engineer, who took over for my father at the municipality, offered her an old hospital bed that he upgraded himself with a clever electrical system. If you want, you can try it.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Why not? Back then you insisted we sleep together in my parents’ double bed, not in mine.”

“Because your bed was narrow, the bed of a teenager, and it was important to both of us to have a space that would calm our fear and confusion. So we made love in your parents’ bed. They were abroad at the time, as I recall.”

“In Greece.”

“Far enough so they wouldn’t surprise us.”

“I wasn’t afraid of being surprised, but of violating my parents’ intimacy. I washed and ironed the sheets, but two spots of my blood managed to stain the mattress, and I couldn’t get rid of them, so I had to flip the mattress over.”

“And let’s assume that your parents, without knowing it, had sex on the proof of their daughter’s virginity — maybe that was nice for them, unconsciously I mean.”

“So now you’re getting into my parents’ unconscious.”

“By logical deduction. I, for example, wouldn’t care if I slept on a mattress where, unbeknownst to me, were buried signs of my daughter’s virginity.”

“How old is she now?”

“Six.”

“Then you have time.”

“I hope. Anyway, if even in the beginning you had your doubts about having children, I, as a young man, swept away by love, might have interpreted your hesitation as a teenager’s fleeting radical protest against the state or against the world.”

“The state?”

“In the hackneyed sense that if Israel was going downhill, better not to have children here.”

“I never said that and never thought that. And even if I was sometimes too radical for your taste, I could have given birth to radical children who would aid and abet my radicalism.”

“In other words, the future here is not secure, is full of danger.”

“No.” She raises her voice. “Who am I to presume to know what will be here in the future? Who am I to decide if the danger is real or exists only in newspaper articles? My parents conceived me during a terrible, shocking war, and still the two of them didn’t presume to know. Oy, Uriah, you won’t get free of a disobedient love if you keep rehashing old stuff.”

He smiles, and she knows, as in times gone by, that tough talk on her part doesn’t deter him; it makes him want her more. He cautiously leans over the bed and tugs one of its levers, listens to the buzzing motor, watches the pillows rise. Then he turns to her and gently says:

“Then there’s no point in discussing your music.”

“Of course not.”

“Still… it’s very important to you.”

“In the right proportion. But there’s nothing about music that precludes having children.”

“So I shouldn’t even try to complain again about your harp.”

“No. It makes me angry.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s no truth to it. We talked about the harp so many times, one could write a book about it. I never saw myself as a tormented artist whose life is enslaved to her art. Bach had twenty children, and that didn’t prevent him from writing a new cantata every day. In my case all the more so, because I don’t write music but just perform it.”

“Bach didn’t give birth to them or nurse them or take care of them. His wife did that.”

“You’re being clever to escape.”

“From what?”

“From the slavery your love wanted to impose on me.”

“On you or on me?”

“No difference. To enslave me, you wanted to be enslaved to me.”

“But you could always have gotten free.”

“Only so long as we didn’t have children.”

“Why? If you wanted, children or no children, you could have gotten free of me.”

“No. Because in your anger and humiliation the children would have become hostages, and you would have harmed them.”

“Harmed them? But they’re my kids too.”

“As revenge because I abandoned you… I took pity on them by not giving birth to them.”

“But what could I have done to them?”

“Medea slew her children as revenge on the husband who abandoned her.”

“That’s mythology. What could I have done?”

“Maybe thrown one of them from the roof, and yourself too.”

“I can’t believe that such a thought ever occurred to you.”

“From the moment you began to call me Venus and not Noga, even as a joke, I understood what a dangerous place your love had reached.”

“Didn’t you tell me that your father always told you to look in the sky for the planet that belonged to you?”

“But who asked you to follow in his footsteps? No, I didn’t want to be Venus, not for you or for anyone. I was born in this apartment with neighbors around me for whom the only myth is simple, old-time religion. I wasn’t named Noga after a planet in the sky, but for a grandmother who died a long time ago. And I chose the harp not because I wanted to play in the Temple, but because not many people play it, so I knew I wouldn’t have much competition. But a young woman from a modest home and neighborhood, a pretty woman but certainly not beautiful, a reasonable and rational woman but not unusually talented, turned for you into a figure of adoration, a religion.”

“Religion?”

“Your own private one.”

“And in this religion there is no room for children?”

“They are in danger.”

He gives up, shaken and perhaps gratified by the blow she landed on him. He points to the electric bed, its sheets tangled, and asks almost in a whisper whether in the months she has lived here by herself this has been her bed.

“Not the only one. At night I wander from bed to bed.”

“And last night?”

“Last night I slept in this one too.”

“Will it bother you if I lie in it a bit?”

“But a minute ago, when I suggested you try it, you asked if I was crazy.”

“I was wrong, Noga, I was wrong.”

And he takes off his shoes and lies on the bed on his back, fiddling with the levers until he finds a comfortable position, tucks his fists under his graying head and closes his eyes, his arms like a pair of wings spread on either side.