The Extra (15 page)

The two Arab children in the cart wave to the delighted audience, of whom they were supposed to act unaware. The three on foot hum to themselves. They cross the stage from north to south, intersecting the path of the empty cart rolling from south to north. While the tobacco workers jostle each other with female abandon, the walking donkey defecates on the stage. Outstanding, Noga says to herself as the fresh aroma strikes her nostrils. Every moment here is a gift. She will entertain her friends in the Arnhem orchestra with stories of her wonderful turn as an extra. Meanwhile, she prods the donkey to pull the cart with the children to the far side of the hill, where, amid the tempest of music and banging of drums, she detects the modest part of the harp.

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.”

T
HE 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?”

T
HE 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.

In the morning, after just a few hours of sleep, he drove his children to school, and from there continued to his job at the Ministry of Environmental Protection in Jerusalem, where he told his two secretaries about the opera in the desert, including the grains of sand that sabotaged the voice of the famous star who needed to be replaced with a local Carmen. At noon he went to the compliance department to find out if anyone was dealing with the trash that was building up at the foot of Masada. That night's performance would be the third and last, and before the opera's producers took off for Tel Aviv, profits in hand, it was worth making sure Masada didn't turn into a garbage dump. Nor could he stop thinking that his former wife would again be an extra on the stage, and he goes to the equipment storage room of the department and signs out a pair of field binoculars. Do I have the strength for this? he asks himself, cutting his workday short, getting home before the children do, taking off his clothes and trying to catch a bit of sleep.

He wakes up at four p.m. to find a bustling household and his wife walking around red-eyed and yawning. He immediately takes charge, and after dinner he steers her to bed to make up for her lost sleep, and promises that for next year's opera at Masada they will stay overnight at a hotel. “No,” declares his wife, “the next opera, if we go, will be in a hall and not under the sky.”

Uriah has mustered his nerve and decides to go to the desert. He says he has an evening meeting of senior staff with the minister of environmental protection. He will set his cell phone on vibrate and keep it in his shirt pocket, by his heart, so he can feel every jitter.

As darkness falls, Uriah heads east, gliding toward Jericho and a half-moon flanked by a trio of twinkling stars. At the Beit HaArava junction he turns south, and in less than an hour he can see the beam of light sweeping across the mountain of the ancient suicides. He has no admission ticket, and no intention of spending more money on this opera, so before reaching the main parking lot he swerves onto a dirt road and bounces along, circling the opera venue until he is blocked by large rocks. He switches off the headlights and engine and walks past the stage, planning to hide behind one of its adjacent little hills, natural or artificial, he can't quite tell. From there, he will train his binoculars on the woman who refused, despite her love for him, to give birth to a child.

As a former combat officer in the Israeli army, he strides with confidence, and the tragic mountain of Masada helps him navigate accurately. He can hear the musicians tuning their instruments. But will the security guards, if there are any, know that this man with a bit of gray in his hair isn't trying to sneak into an opera he saw last night and whose tunes he can hum, but just wants to look at one extra, with whom he has an unsettled score?

Silently he approaches the northern hill and the sound of laughing women. Now a hush, and then the audience of thousands explodes in applause for the conductor. Within a few seconds, ethereal music drifts in his direction. He inches closer, chooses an observation point and kneels down, and through the binoculars of the Ministry of Environmental Protection he observes the country girls of Seville, one of whom stands by a donkey hitched to a cart containing two little children, who wave to the crowd they are supposed to be unaware of. His heart pounds as he recognizes his former wife gripping the halter, out of context in peasant costume but still the same woman who could not be persuaded to have children with him, despite his undying love for her.

The music pulls her and the cart across the stage toward the opposite hill, and so as not to lose her, he advances slightly, careful not to enter the field of vision of thousands of eyes focusing on the stage, and thinks he has succeeded.

But from the commanding heights of the podium, the tall conductor is stupefied to spot a gray-haired man not connected with the plot, and as he dictates the tempo with crisp, stormy movements, and crouches and leaps to bring Bizet's music to life, he also threatens the foreign invader with his baton, tries to shoo him away. But Uriah does not budge. Rock solid at the edge of the stage, he tracks the country girl who crosses paths with another cart and vanishes behind the second hill. And as he is considering whether to follow her, he is seized by two young security guards and removed from the area.

“Please, sir,” says one of the guards, not unkindly, “if you have no money for a ticket, then listen to
Carmen
at home. Don't spoil the magic for others.”

“You're absolutely right.”

For a moment the guards conspire to confiscate the fine-looking binoculars, but after the man introduces himself as a supervisor of environmental protection who has come to make sure Masada doesn't turn into a garbage dump, they drop the idea.

Before the end of act one he heads back toward Ma'aleh Adumim. On the uphill road from Jericho the cell phone vibrates close to his heart, and he says gently to his wife, “Go back to sleep. I'm almost home.”

T
HE PREVIOUS MORNING
, before the mother and son drove back to Tel Aviv, the three sat together on the hotel terrace, watching people float in the salty waters of the Dead Sea. They spoke about the grains of sand that had prevented the prima donna from playing Carmen after act one, and how those same grains of sand had only improved the singing of the Israeli understudy, who was showered with bravas and became a star overnight. Noga yawned and said, “Grains of sand appeared to me once in a dream. I don't remember why.” Her brother and mother looked at her affectionately. She'll have to take a nap in the afternoon, or she won't have the strength to pull the donkey, who sometimes stops and will not move.