Friendly Fire (15 page)

Ya'ari heeds his daughter's warning to curb his usual curiosity regarding her friends' education and training, and does not pry into the visitor's activities to get an inkling of his purpose in life. To avoid an interrogation that will anger Nofar, he talks about the weather, applauds the rain and deplores the strong winds, which sometimes sneak into apartment towers. He adds a gripe about the holiday, which in the past amounted to jelly doughnuts and spinning dreidels and has now been upgraded into a holy respite from work. For example, all the engineers in his firm left at noon for a children's play at the Hall of Culture and never returned.

The friend drifts around the room, his expression pained and suspicious, voicing neither sympathy nor agreement with Ya'ari's remarks. His small deep-set eyes keep reverting to the family photos that Daniela has planted everywhere, on walls and bookshelves. Not like a passing acquaintance, here today and gone tomorrow, but like someone with a stake in the matter, he studies each picture carefully, as if trying to decipher the structure of the family. And when he gets to the photograph, framed in black, of Eyal, he asks in a fevered whisper, "This is the cousin Nofar never stops talking about?" Fear makes the host's heart beat faster. "I wonder how old he would be if he were alive."

"About your age, thirty-two. He was only three years older than Nofar's brother."

But the curious friend doesn't let up. Perhaps he agreed to attend a candle-lighting in a strange home only so that he could learn more details about the soldier who was killed by his comrades' fire.

"Nofar told me that you had to break the news to his parents."

"To his father. I wasn't alone; an officer and a doctor were with me."

"And he really was killed accidentally, by our own forces?"

"Yes, by friendly fire, something like that...," Ya'ari whispers.

"And they had to tell that to the family?"

Ya'ari's face darkens at the stranger who has the nerve to burrow into his intimate life, but for his daughter's sake he controls himself.

"Of course. The media in any case would have made the truth public. But they call it 'our own forces,' and I put it slightly differently, to soften it."

"And did it really soften it?"

Ya'ari does not answer, because at that very moment Nofar enters the living room with her hair wet from the shower. She is wearing black, and her almond eyes, her mother's eyes, shoot him an arrow of warning.

"So, at last we get to see you," he kisses and hugs her tight.

"So come on, Abba, let's light the candles, because we're going to a party. But remember what I asked, only the basic blessings."

He nods and goes to the big silver menorah, already prepared with its four candles, removes the shammash and lights it with a match. Printed on the blue package of candles are the two blessings, which he reads while applying the flame to the first candle. Then he hands the burning shammash to the friend, who uses it to light the second candle, then passes it to the young woman. Nofar heats the tip of the third candle to expose its wick, and when the bluish flame intensifies to yellow-red, she returns the shammash still lit to her father, who restores it to its place.

A
ND IN
E
AST
Africa, on the top floor of the farmhouse, Daniela turns over on her bed in the dark and has a hard time finding the point of fatigue from which she can confidently slip into sleep. It is almost midnight, and even if in her homeland it's an hour earlier, the candles have surely gone out long ago at her house, and her son and daughter-in-law's too. As for Nofar, she is probably boycotting all lights of happiness till she exhausts the grief in her heart.

Yirmiyahu's detachment could become contagious; she had better be careful. He seems content with his primitive surroundings, and the memory of his wife is growing dimmer. If Daniela can't find a way of arousing memories in him of Shuli, and of her too, he won't do it for her.

She gets up from the bed and opens the shutters wide and looks out on an expanse with no artificial light. Right now she very much needs the touch of her husband's hand. His attentive eye. How easily she could have made him come along.

She turns on a light and examines the skull of the young monkey that sits on the desk. A relative who went extinct a few million years ago and has returned as a replica. She pries his mouth open with her fingers to study his jaws. There's only one real tooth here—which one she can't tell. No, she strokes the smooth skull, you were not an eating machine.

Sleep continues to elude her. If Yirmiyahu hadn't been so quick to burn the Israeli papers instead of just handing them back, she could have lulled herself with old news from home. But there is not a letter of Hebrew in sight, apart from the novel. Last night she read two more pages, and they bored her.

Given no choice, she opens the book where she left off yesterday and moves the lamp closer. The heroine has found herself a new love, or a boyfriend, or merely a friend. Someone involved in shady business. To the author's credit, it may be said that she does not raise false expectations in the alert reader. It's obvious that the relationship will not last till the end of the novel, but attraction and lust will do for now.

Okay, the reader squints, let's see how and why they get sick of each other. On
[>]
the heroine travels with her friend to Europe. They arrive at a hotel in a capital city, and the author begins without much ado an elaborate depiction of their lovemaking. Daniela is quite tolerant of sexual descriptions in novels; they seldom last for more than two or three paragraphs—a page at most. But this author has decided to go into detail and continue the episode until the end of the chapter: eight full pages dense with foreplay and intercourse. Is the passion that erupts between these characters realistic, that is, equal to the capacities of the heroine as portrayed up to now, or has the author decided to inflame her artificially to satisfy her readers' expectations? The descriptions are very physical, and, as usual with such episodes, repetitive. The language is precise and for that very reason also revolting. This author is shameless; no word is off-limits to her. Daniela feels cheated. Previously the characters, in spite of their weaknesses, have manifested a certain spiritual longing; now all of a sudden, this crude naturalism. She examines the back cover to see if the editor's summary contains any hint to prepare the reader for this vulgarity. But it would appear that although the editor could have attracted more customers, he preferred to keep quiet and protect his reputation for fine literary taste.

Should she skip over this chapter and go to the next? The reader considers this as her breathing grows heavier. But since she is not in the habit of skimming, she soldiers on, page after page, till the light goes out in the room of the lovers, who have reached supreme satisfaction.

And the furious reader drops the novel to the floor, turns off the light, and waits patiently for merciful slumber.

T
HE CLOUDS THAT
descended before dawn on the coastal plain have spread thickly over Tel Aviv, and at six
A.M.,
when Ya'ari opens his bedroom blinds, he is surprised to discover that not only has his neighbor's house been engulfed by the milky mist but also the tree that was planted in the yard a decade ago to hide the homes from one another. He shakes dead damp leaves from the newspaper flung on his doorstep and tries to detect a breath of wind in the fog, or any trace of movement in the hidden world.

The world is bundled in silence, at ease with its air of mystery. As Amotz drinks his morning coffee, checking
Ha'aretz
for yesterday's rainfall, patiently waiting for the sun to free his neighbor's house from its shroud of haze, he remembers the idea floated by Gottlieb, who appeared to him in last night's dream pushing the stroller of an alert baby girl clad in a technician's jump suit and with a screwdriver dangling from her neck, who gazed at the dreamer with starry eyes. Here, this is my expert, Gottlieb grumbled, and you would send her all alone, unsupervised, into the shaft? But Ya'ari awoke before he could answer the elevator manufacturer.

The young tree in the garden emerges from the thinning fog, and beyond its branches appears the house next door, with its lights on and the owner, a famous gynecologist, marching along with
religious devotion on his treadmill. The phone rings, and Ya'ari scoops it up with the certainty that at this hour it can only be Moran. But to his disappointment it's his father, who should just be getting up and being washed, which requires time and concentration. Something wrong, Abba? No, says the old man, I'm the same as always. But I wanted to ask, before you firm up your schedule for the day, that you come here earlier—in the morning, not the evening. The candles I'll light with Hilario, but you, if you can, come to me this morning. It's something urgent—no, not medically, just humanly.

"Let me guess. That woman in Jerusalem finally got hold of you."

"Not hard to guess."

"But tell me, Abba, honestly—it's not ridiculous for me, or someone else in the office, to try to repair a private elevator from fifty years ago? By the way, did you tell her you're in a wheelchair?"

"No, no, Amotz, we won't talk like this on the phone about Devorah Bennett. You try and get here soon, before work, and we'll sit and discuss quietly how we can help her. Give your father half an hour. No more."

"It's not a question of half an hour. You know how Francisco doesn't like it when I interrupt the morning routine."

"Francisco will forgive us this time. I already talked to him."

T
HE ANTICIPATION
of hearing her husband's voice through the phone in Dar es Salaam reporting on the welfare of her loved ones rouses Daniela from bed, and she is up and about before sunrise. She opens the shutters and leans out to refresh her spirit in the dark chilly air. Then she turns to pick up the novel from the floor and leafs through it to find the place where she stopped the night before. Since her sister's death, she finds herself rereading pages, but by the time she notices, it's too late to skip ahead. Only rarely does a
second reading reveal hidden aspects of the characters and events. In fact, sometimes it makes the writing seem even shallower.

She skims the final page of the chapter she finished last night. The sexual descriptions now seem to her less degrading. Is it daybreak that tempers the vulgarity of the nighttime reading, or have her fragmented dreams reconciled her to it? Either way, she has no intention of rereading that chapter, and anyway, it would be better to save the rest of the novel for the trip home, to take advantage of every free minute here for seeing nature and conversing with Yirmiyahu and the locals. So she removes from her passport the stub of her used boarding pass and marks the page.

Despite the open window, it feels stuffy in the smallish room, and after brief hesitation she puts on her African dress and wraps herself in her sister's windbreaker and walks down three flights, noting three or four doorways per floor. She needs to clarify which is Yirmiyahu's temporary bedroom. Although she feels well, and well rested, it's still a good idea for a woman whose blood pressure has gone up to know on which door she can knock at night if something weighs heavily on her heart.

She wouldn't dare to explore outside, even around the main building of the farm, until the sun climbed higher and human voices were audible in the vicinity. But she will try to fix herself a cup of coffee. The huge kitchen is silent, and because she can't find the light switch, she makes do with the glow of dawn in the windows, rummaging among the utensils hanging on the walls until she finds a little pot that resembles a Middle Eastern
finjan.
She fills it with water, certain that she will also find some coffee, maybe even sugar and milk.

On the day of the terrible news, in her sister's home in Jerusalem, feeling miserable about being late and annoyed that it was she who was assigned to the kitchen, she dropped a big jar of coffee, scattering shards of glass and black grounds all over the floor. The lateness hadn't even been her fault. Moran hadn't set foot in his old school building, not even to share the news of his cousin's death with the principal or the secretary. Instead, with shaking knees he had paced the empty schoolyard for more than three-quarters of an hour waiting for the bell, and only when it rang had he rushed to the teachers' lounge to stop his mother at the doorway, and without saying a word hug her tight and lead her to the exit.

By the time she reached Jerusalem, she had been preceded not only by Amotz but by relatives and friends who had already been informed, so that when she first saw her sister she found her already surrounded by the kindness of others, depriving her of the personal time and space to wrap her arms around the bereaved mother and absorb some small measure of the grief roiling inside her. In those first moments in the crowded living room, she had felt helpless in the presence of women who did not hurry to yield her the place she deserved; it even seemed that they blamed her for being late, and it was therefore she who was sent to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee that might keep her sister from fainting.

Now, in this kitchen that takes up the entire ground floor of a farmhouse, she opens cupboard after cupboard in search of coffee and sugar. But the shelves are bare of food, holding only baking pans filled with fossils. Perhaps these are remnants of extinct animals, but judging by the clutter they seem not to be rare or valuable, like those she was shown last night at the scientists' dining table, and, since they are not destined to cast new light on the origins of man, may merit one more quick look before being thrown in the trash.

An elderly African enters the kitchen soundlessly, walking with a slight limp. He nods lugubriously upon hearing the white woman's request for coffee and sugar, and opens one of the great refrigerator doors, taking out black coffee, brown sugar, and some grayish milk—but whose? From what animal? She questions the old man, who knows some English. And he pronounces the name of some beast utterly unfamiliar to her, though it might be familiar if pronounced
otherwise, and she decides she can do without milk until someone more authoritative and precise can clarify its provenance.