The performance ended at midnight, but the participants did not arrive at the hotel until two in the morning. In the lobby, a message from her brother awaited her.
“Noga dear: Yoni is sick, and Sarai won’t want to leave him alone or with Ima. I tried to sell the tickets, but sworn enemies of opera swarm all around me. So Ima and I will come tonight to see Carmen and the extra standing by her side, to cheer you both on and shower you with praise.”
Twenty-Eight
THE NEXT DAY THE DESERT wind grew stronger, and on the opera’s second evening grains of sand fluttered from the little hills onto the stage. During the first act, Carmen felt the sand scratching her throat and damaging the quality of her singing, and so during intermission, despite attempts by the production crew to lubricate her voice with remedial concoctions, and despite assurances that the evil wind would die down, she refused to continue performing her role in the second act, for fear that her professional reputation would be tarnished. In art, she decreed, there are no excuses or allowances, and she demanded to be driven back to the hotel. It would now take time to bring in the understudy and prepare the audience, not only for a change of voice, but for a different version of the opera’s title character.
Honi and his mother arrived at the Dead Sea in late afternoon, and since their hotel was far from Noga’s, they did not manage to see her before the performance, but the three agreed to meet for lunch the next day, before their drive home. “I do realize,” Noga told them on the phone, “that you came to this opera for a donkey dragging two little kids in a cart, but try to enjoy the music too.”
They did. Honi forgot to bring his binoculars, but borrowed opera glasses from the woman sitting next to him, and through smudged lenses he searched for the family extra. Once he located her, he handed the glasses to his mother, but at that very moment the donkey blocked her daughter’s face and all she could see was the cart with two children.
At the intermission they decided to stay in their seats, but when the announcement came that the interval would be prolonged because of the change of cast, they joined the mass migration to the snack bar area and restrooms.
The restrooms are the portable kind — narrow but efficient booths side by side, not designated by gender, so the traffic moves relatively fast. Even so, when Honi and his mother arrived, there was a long line, and Honi brought a chair for his mother from the snack area to sit on while waiting.
The private time with his mother in the desert afforded Honi the opportunity to apply final pressure in favor of assisted living near him. Noga is scheduled to return to Europe in three weeks, so the decision must be made. But the mother, who had guessed his intentions, made up her mind not to be pressured on this outing, and not to respond to Honi’s hints that the choice of Tel Aviv was a fait accompli.
As he approaches his mother to indicate that she is next in line, she points to a woman of about forty, waiting in a different line, and says, “Take a good look. Doesn’t she remind you a lot of our Noga?” “How so?” he says. “The shape of her head,” says the mother, “and the way she’s putting her hair in a bun. Also the way she stands.”
Before he can respond, a toilet stall becomes vacant and the woman disappears within, and as the line gets shorter, a well-built man, his hair flecked with gray, exits a stall, and Honi, his heart pounding, recognizes his sister’s former husband.
“Uriah!” he calls out, as if afraid the man will avoid him. “Uriah!” he calls again, almost pleading.
The mother is taken aback. Just a moment ago she spotted a woman who looked like her daughter, and suddenly the ex-husband appears in the flesh. But her turn has come, and she heads for the toilet.
Honi tightly embraces his lost brother-in-law, and without asking how he is doing, quickly describes the current experiment in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“Where’s Noga? Is she here too?”
Honi laughs. “Here, but not with us. Onstage.”
“In the orchestra?” Uriah’s face lights up. “She has a job in Israel?”
“No, not yet,” says Honi, and with a cryptic, slightly sheepish smile he tells the story of the extra.
Meanwhile, toilet doors open and close, and the woman who reminded the mother of her daughter exits a stall and touches Uriah with a smile, and Uriah, with odd hesitation, introduces his wife as if she were a stranger. The loudspeaker announces the start of the second act, and the former husband abruptly ends the encounter before Honi can introduce himself to the second wife and shake her hand.
The audience, weary from the long wait, hurries back to its seats, but the mother is delayed, and Honi is afraid she may be having trouble unlocking her stall, though he’s not sure which one it is. The loudspeaker issues the final call, and the unabating wind carries the sounds of instruments being tuned, as Honi rushes back and forth by the toilets calling quietly, like a little boy, “Ima, Ima, what’s going on?” and tapping on doors, trying to guess where she is hidden. At last she emerges, her face washed and powdered, her hair newly combed. Her stall had a mirror that inspired her to freshen up and look pretty in honor of the new Carmen.
On the way to their seats Honi tells her about Uriah’s wife and marvels at his mother’s perceptiveness, but she remains blasé: “It’s only natural that Uriah would find a woman who looked like the lover he left. But what did you talk about? What did you tell him?”
“Nothing, it was very quick, just a few words about our experiment — I mean yours.”
“Why did you have to tell him? It’s none of his business.”
“No reason.”
“There’s never no reason.”
“Yes there is. No reason.”
“I just hope you didn’t tell him Noga is on the stage.”
“I did or I didn’t,” he says angrily. “I can’t remember my every word. I told you, it was a brief conversation, and Uriah was the one who cut it off. Anyhow, good God, they separated nine years ago, so who cares anymore?”
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.