The Extra by A. B. Yehoshua Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œWho are you? How did you get in?”
    â€œYour 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.
    â€œShe couldn’t possibly have said something like that.”
    â€œI swear it. You weren’t in Israel, that’s why you don’t know.”
    â€œWhat’s your name, boy?”
    â€œYudel . . . Yehuda . . . Yuda-Zvi.”
    â€œYou be careful, Yuda-Zvi, I know all about you two. You’re Shaya’s kids.”
    â€œJust 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.”
    â€œRight,” she answers. “I never met your mother and I don’t want to meet her. Now turn off the television. Where’s the remote?”
    â€œI don’t have it. He has it. He picks out for himself what and who calms him down.”
    â€œLike the prime minister, you mean,” she says with a smile.
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œYou can’t take him away from the TV like that,” Yuda-Zvi explains, sitting peacefully in his armchair.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œAll of a sudden.”
    â€œEnough is enough,” she says. “What’s with this kid? What’s wrong with him? Where’s his mother? Where’s his father?”
    â€œHis 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.”
    â€œImportant?”
    â€œHe’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