“Pardon me?”
“Skip it, Mr. Stoller, I’m tired. You’ll get your answer from my mother personally. By then I’ll be with my harp, rehearsing the Berlioz Fantastique.”
“Ah, Hec-tor Ber-lioz…” He draws out the name, as if remembering a childhood friend. “Yes, a wild genius and ladies’ man, but what’s your hurry? The harp in Symphonie Fantastique enters only in the second movement.”
“What,” she gasps, “you know his music?”
“His and others’ too,” he replies with a triumphant smile. “You think just because I’m an old lawyer who helps clear out old apartments in haredi neighborhoods that I lack culture? Look around here, so benighted and poor. What’s the matter, you don’t want your mother to live and die near your brother?”
“I want that very much.”
“So work on it, convince her.”
He tips his hat and goes on his way.
She is shocked by the cocky sophistication of an elderly and tattered lawyer who knows his Berlioz, and watches him fade into the darkness. She pushes open the little gate, and with the nagging fear that Uriah has her parents’ key, she climbs the stairs cautiously, heavily, as if reprising her imaginary disability of the previous day.
The apartment is dark, but she is in no hurry to turn on lights, for fear that in one of the rooms, in one of the beds, lies her former husband.
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.
Thirty-Six
NO ONE WAS LURKING in the dark apartment, yet her restored calm was marred by mild disappointment. Did her panicky response in that little hospital room turn him off for good? Is the “ancient bleeding love” merely a presumptuous projection of her mind on his? And if Uriah persists, how will he know his time is limited and in a few days she’ll be beyond his reach? Suddenly angry, she wants to phone her brother, but realizes he’ll probably make her even dizzier. Thus the best path to relaxation is to make dinner and watch a good film on television.
But her sleep is restless, as in the first days after her arrival, and she divides it among the three beds. In the morning she calls her mother and brightly announces, “I’ve changed my mind, Ima. I’m not putting any more pressure on you, and even if you decide to return to Jerusalem, don’t cut the time short on my account. No reason you should pass up even one good meal you’ve already paid for, or one hour of deep sleep Tel Aviv provides you. I take it all back, Ima. Let’s the three of us honor the experiment till the end. In any event, rehearsals of the Berlioz will start only the day after I get back.”
“And Uriah?” the mother remembers. “You’re no longer afraid of him?”
“Apparently he’s given up. And even if he comes, what could he want? Just to mourn the past.”
She no longer bothers with the bolt, and sometimes, when she goes out, she just closes the apartment door without locking it, and evenings she stays home, on the assumption that a man clinging to an old love would prefer to arrive in the dark. So it goes, day after day, as she counts them off before her departure from the city of her birth, dry days with cool nights. From time to time she walks around in the shuk, of which she’s grown fond on this visit — maybe in hopes of running into Elazar, who three days after his disappearance had stuck a note on her apartment door.
When she saw the sheet of paper from afar, she laughed. Was the bleeding love making do with a piece of paper? But as she held the page, the handwriting was unfamiliar.
Dear Extra,
I haven’t risen from the dead, because I wasn’t there. The people at the entrance didn’t know how to get rid of the eternal extra, so they sent me to a morgue that didn’t exist.
Even after I realized that they had tricked us into separating, I didn’t give up on you, until I saw you rolling around in a nightgown in a wheelchair, and I thought, Why get in the way of my extra enjoying herself? and I started following you from afar. But then I got an urgent call from a real hospital in Jerusalem: the sick grandson I told you about had been hospitalized and wanted his grandfather. So I rushed over there without saying goodbye, and I’ve been at his bedside for two days, and when he says, Saba, you mustn’t move, his command carries more weight than a police superintendent’s. And I’m pleased to say that there are encouraging signs, but for the duration, I’m at his side.