The Extra (6 page)

“If you say so. You undoubtedly know.”

And he tips his hat and bids her farewell.

The apartment's bathroom light was left on by mistake, though the window is closed.

She undresses, but before deciding in which bed to start the night, she sits in front of the TV, watching a concert with the orchestra on a stage in the middle of a forest, and a crowd of twenty thousand enthusiastic Germans sitting on the grassy ground, listening to popular classics. The camera lovingly caresses the bare shoulders of the women musicians. Until two years ago, she too performed with her shoulders bare, but they grew thicker, and compared with the magnificent shoulders of other female players, they suddenly seemed to her ungainly. So she decided to cover them, though Manfred, the first flutist, found no fault with them and kissed them with passion and joy.

I
N THE MORNING
Noga phones Manfred in Arnhem and asks him to nail down the promise given her regarding the Mozart concerto. “Not to worry,” he assures her, “the Concerto for Flute and Harp is meant for the two of us, and I will not play it with any other harpist.” Meanwhile, as the keeper of the key to her little flat in Arnhem, he casually mentions a faucet left running in her bathroom, a result no doubt of her hasty departure, but promises all will be dry by the time she returns.

She wonders if he is only looking after the apartment or also using it, but the distance between the Middle East and Europe dims her concern, and when Honi calls about tomorrow's work as an extra, she makes jokes as she jots down the details in her father's old notebook, where he would faithfully record every errand assigned him by his wife or children.

At lunchtime she cooks herself a real meal, then enters her parents' darkened bedroom, takes off her clothes and adjusts the electric bed, but her sleep is soon punctured by footsteps scurrying up and down the stairs and an occasional wild, piercing scream, as if a small predatory animal were fighting for its life.

Silence finally returns, a breeze compels the dozing woman to rearrange her blanket, and as sleep takes its time to settle in, there are two soft taps on the apartment door.

Noga smiles. These must be my mother's TV children, she thinks, doing her best to ignore them. But the tapping, soft and rhythmic, goes on. To hell with them, she says to herself, and waits, and it stops, permission now granted for blessed sleep, for Noga to burrow into the pillow and be carried to a place she's never been, a crowded city street in a ghetto, where someone is giving a speech in a faint but familiar voice full of eloquent indignation. Can she have traveled so far in her dream only to hear that voice again? She flings off her blanket, wraps herself in a bathrobe and silently opens the living room door.

The TV is on at low volume. Sitting cozily in the two faded armchairs that survived her mother and brother's purge are two boys with sidelocks, clad in black, hats perched on their laps, the
tzitzit
fringes of their ritual undershirts dangling on their thighs. The older boy senses her presence and looks up at her seriously, brazenly, with a tinge of supplication. In the other armchair nestles a beautiful, golden child, twisting his right sidelock into a curl as his light blue eyes stare at the speaking prime minister.

“Who are you? How did you get in?”

“Your mother said,” the older one answers, “if she's not home, I'm allowed to calm him down with the television.”

He points to the little boy.

“She couldn't possibly have said something like that.”

“I swear it. You weren't in Israel, that's why you don't know.”

“What's your name, boy?”

“Yudel . . . Yehuda . . . Yuda-Zvi.”

“You be careful, Yuda-Zvi, I know all about you two. You're Shaya's kids.”

“Just me. This is Shraga, he's a cousin, the youngest son of my mother's sister. But you got to know only my father, not my mother.”

“Right,” she answers. “I never met your mother and I don't want to meet her. Now turn off the television. Where's the remote?”

“I don't have it. He has it. He picks out for himself what and who calms him down.”

“Like the prime minister, you mean,” she says with a smile.

“Yes, he can relax him, depending on what he says. And this one, if he doesn't get a little TV every day, he runs up and down your stairs and everyone goes crazy, including your mother.”

Noga bends over the little boy, who has still not looked at her, and searches for the remote under the hat on his lap. Then she removes him from his seat and rummages in the depths of the armchair. But the child doesn't mind; his eyes are glued to the screen, and the remote is hidden the devil knows where. She gives up on him and unplugs the TV, and the child attacks her with a wild scream, tries to bite the hand that silenced his prime minister, and when she shakes him off, he curls up on the floor and bitterly weeps.

“You can't take him away from the TV like that,” Yuda-Zvi explains, sitting peacefully in his armchair.

“Like what?”

“All of a sudden.”

“Enough is enough,” she says. “What's with this kid? What's wrong with him? Where's his mother? Where's his father?”

“His father is always sick, and my aunt has no more strength for him, so my mother asks me to take care of him. Because he—you may not know this—he is not an ordinary boy but an important boy.”

“Important?”

“He's the great-grandson of the Rebbe, the
Tzaddik
, the righteous one. And if other children in that family die, he might someday have to be the
Tzaddik
, when he's a hundred and twenty.”

But she is unimpressed by the
tzaddik
wailing on the floor.

“Does your grandmother upstairs know you're breaking into an apartment that isn't yours?”

“Grandma doesn't know much of anything anymore,” the boy answers truthfully. “But even if she did know, she wouldn't care, because she understands that only television can help his pain. And I promise you, Noga”—he speaks her name matter-of-factly—“your mother also doesn't care if I calm him down with her television. She even gave me a key.”

“A key!”

“Yes. Because she knows that if I take him in through the bathroom window, he could possibly, God forbid, fall and be crushed.”

“And where is the key now?”

“Why?”

“Where's the key?”

“It's here . . . I have it.”

“Give it to me.”

“Why? You don't have a key to the apartment?”

“Give it to me right now, or else . . .”

As the little
tzaddik
looks up at her, his eyes gleaming with tears, the older boy unbuttons his shirt collar and hands her a string with the key that her father had put on a red ring, to tell it apart from his many other keys.

She opens the front door and quietly says:

“That's it, boy. That's it, Mister Yuda-Zvi. This is the last time . . . and I will speak to your grandmother and your grandfather.”

“Just not Grandpa,” says the terrified boy. “Please, not Grandpa,” he begs, before she slams the door on them both.

A
FEW NIGHTS LATER
, on the ride back to Jerusalem after the jury shoot, with the actress's red scarf still wrapped around her neck, Noga casually tells Elazar about the two boys.

“Even if you took away their key, don't be so sure they won't come back,” he says. “The little b-b-bastard probably made a copy, so don't be surprised to find them again in front of your TV.”

“So what am I to do?”

“The n-n-next time, don't kick them out and don't argue. Act friendly, get in touch with me, and I'll put on my old police uniform and make sure that the little
tz-tzaddiks
won't b-b-bother you again, forever.”

“Forever?” She laughs. “I'm only staying in Israel for another couple of months.”

“So wh-what? You're still entitled to p-p-peace and quiet.”

The stutter is annoying, but also charming in its way, with an element of surprise. Entire sentences flow smoothly, and just as she has forgotten that he stutters, an ordinary word or a modest preposition, which might carry some hidden implication, becomes a psychological impediment, and then, instead of simply repeating a word or syllable, he gets stuck on a certain sound and prolongs it. In the dark minibus making its way to Jerusalem, she senses his attempt to draw closer to her, not only because he likes her, but because she is free and unattached, without a husband and children, with no desire to have children, and also because her time in Israel is limited and there's no risk of getting emotionally involved, which could hurt him or someone in his family.

And since he knows about future projects of the agency that hires the extras, he tries to win her over during the drive by urging her to take part in them as well.

“I don't need that much money,” she says.

“It's not just m-m-money,” he protests, “but to be a participant without any effort or ob-obligation in the stories of all kinds of characters, and perhaps also be engraved in the m-m-memory of the audience. Tonight, for example, you announced the verdict very well. When this movie is completed, if it ever is, there will doubtless be viewers who will remember how softly but c-c-confidently you pronounced
gu-il-ty
, as if you were not talking about the killer, but about y-y-yourself.”

The retired judge, sitting silently across the aisle, apparently dozing, turns his head. “Yes, madam, Elazar is right. These days a court is expected to announce a grim verdict in a personal tone of voice, even with mild hesitation. I am still used to declaring a verdict with dramatic force, which is why they passed me up.”

At the bus stop near the former Edison movie theater Noga and the judge get out, and Elazar suddenly decides to join them. “I'll see you home so I know where to come q-q-quickly if you want to chase away the boys.” But Noga points to her building from afar, lest he attempt to escort her upstairs.

E
LAZAR WAS UNDETERRED
. The next day he phoned and asked her to join him in the late evening at a bar, where a scene was to be shot for an Israeli film requiring several middle-aged extras to supplement the regular younger crowd. This was no more than a pleasant evening on the town, he added. The scene would be simple, not long, and would be shot without fancy direction or cinematic effects, the extras would blend in anonymously, the camera would be hidden. The extras would be asked to act naturally like the rest of the crowd, drink, listen to the music and chatter away to their heart's content. They would not be paid. The production would cover the cost of drinks; the night on the town constituted the pay.

They made plans to meet on the street, near her building, but he arrived early and came up to the apartment on the pretext of checking out the bathroom window and testing the strength of the drainpipe that the boys had used to enter the flat. Then he checked the front door and offered to come back and install an interior bolt, and also to put a new lock on the bathroom window, but Noga was reluctant to make improvements in the Jerusalem apartment before the resolution of the Tel Aviv experiment. She put on simple high-heeled shoes, donned the red scarf—her new favorite—and hurried him out the door.

To her surprise, he said that the bar was just around the corner and suggested they walk over. “You don't mean,” she said, “there's such a place in my
haredi
neighborhood.” A mysterious smile crossed his lips. He said, “You'd be amazed what one can discover not far from home.” He led her into the nearby
shuk
, the Mahane Yehuda market, its alleys and passageways washed clean, the shops and vegetable stalls silent and shuttered. The smells of smoked fish, spices and cheese lingered in the night air along the route to a structure flanked by two torches of friendly fire, with a nighttime crowd gathering inside, and no telling who was a regular patron and who a mere extra.

“You ever go to the
shuk
at night?”

“Not by day or by night. My brother set up an open account at the grocery near the apartment so I wouldn't have to elbow through the
shuk
to find cheap tomatoes.”

“Cheap tomatoes?” he said, feigning umbrage. “Kindly do not condescend to the
shuk
. It's much more than cheap tomatoes. This bar, for one, is a wonderful restaurant during the day.”

They went down some stairs as music rose from underground, a former storage cellar tastefully made over with small tables and banquettes, and in a rear alcove, an accordionist belting out old favorites.

Now, as they sit close together, partly in the role of extras and partly as themselves, she is aware of the man's desire to succeed where previous men have failed. And though this stammering policeman has a wife and grown children, even a small grandson, and has no need for another child, he will not give up on the pretty, dimpled harpist, and tells her about upcoming jobs, such as a television series set in a hospital, complete with doctors, nurses, administrative staff, labs and of course patients, requiring many extras to supplement the professional actors, who suffer and agonize, die or get well, depending on the plot.

The accordion lets fly a Gypsy tune. Even if most of the assembled are strangers to one another, a breeze of intimacy blows among them.

“Can you tell, based on your experience, who here is an extra, who a customer, and who an actor?”

“No,” he admits. “Even with my experience, it's hard, because I don't know where the camera is, so I can't tell who's aware of it and who's not.”

She smiles, understands, slowly sips her beer and says softly:

“I must say, you're really something.”

“So what do you say about the hospital show?” he asks, encouraged. “It's a long series, so they'll need some chronic extras. I'm already signed up, and if you extend your stay in Israel, you could make a fair bit of money.”