Friendly Fire (37 page)

"And then I read a little of Joshua and mainly Judges. Those little wars are quite amusing, breaking out all the time in all sorts of places in the land of Israel, just like today; and accordingly in some remote town there will pop up a homegrown judge—Ehud, Gideon, Deborah, Jephthah, Samson—to do battle for a while and then disappear. True democratic rotation."

The car arrives at a new fork and stops. What's this? The driver interrupts the stream of his lecture. Where did this come from? And he shields his eyes with his hand and peers toward the horizon.

"You can't see a thing through this filthy windshield," Daniela says, and asks the driver for some water and a cloth. He removes a dirty rag from under his seat and hands her an army canteen, and she pours water on the windshield and starts scraping off the dead bugs. Yirmiyahu gets out and starts to walk down the road to the left, looking for tracks from the Land Rover from the morning, then does the same for the right fork.

"If we go the wrong way, remember this is where it started," he warns Daniela as he turns the car to the left, out of mere faith that this is the right direction. Sijjin Kuang was so involved in struggling to convince her Arab patient to stay at the sanatorium that she forgot to provide the Jews with detailed directions home.

"Nevertheless," Daniela says, smiling ironically, "it makes me happy to hear that you still think of yourself as a Jew."

"But I am peeling it off. Soon enough I will be a
muzungu
to the Jews."

She gives him one of her radiant looks, guaranteed to inspire trust. Over many years she has trained herself to listen calmly to the idiosyncratic opinions, some of them childish, of this man. But the ideas he has formulated in recent times have gone over the limit. Daniela is certain that if he were to find, even at his age, a new partner, her sister, too, would have been pleased.

"Yirmi, look closely, you sure you're on the right road?"

"Not certain, but I believe so. Despite those two huge trees tangled up in each other, which I don't remember from the morning."

"I actually think I do remember them."

"If so, Little Sister," he says, tapping on the wheel with self-satisfaction, "we're on the right track, and for the duration you have no choice but to listen to a synopsis of what I think of the prophets, and you'll see why supposedly awesome poetic passages make my blood boil. Because people like us, lazy secular people, who wave the flag of the ethical teachings of the prophets, don't actually read them. They remember one lovely verse, some lines that have been set to music, swords beaten into plowshares. They attack the Orthodox in the name of prophetic morality, they speak about universal justice, about courage and nonconformity—without examining too closely what this courage was for and where the nonconformity leads. Because if you look at them, you find that all of these teachings keep hammering the same nail. Who owns the justice? By what authority is it maintained? Is it universal justice, or only the justice of the God of Israel, in a package deal of loyalty? Yes, it turns out that this justice is tied to loyalty to God, and the rage is not about the welfare of widows and orphans but about unfaithfulness to God, who is basically a kind of crazed husband, jealous of his one and only wife whom he latched onto in the desert and has tormented ever since with his commandments. The great social drama is simple jealousy. And because the language is so majestic, and the rhetoric so hypnotic, we don't pay attention to what's said between the lines."

"And what is said between the lines?" Daniela takes off her shoes, pushes back the seat, and puts up her bare feet, which reach almost to the windshield.

"Between the lines and in the lines. Death, destruction, exile, punishment, more punishment, devastation, plague, and famine. Starving people eating their babies. It's true that sometimes, amid those horrible passages of rebuke phrased in such flowery language, an implausible snatch of consolation will creep in, something utopian and grandiose. Conditional consolation, annoying consolation, because it all comes down to the fire normally aimed at the people of Israel being redirected toward other nations. As if there can never be in this world a minute of genuine peace, and the axe always falls on someone.

"And this we have drunk in with our mother's milk, we've been fed it like baby food. So it's no wonder that we're all set for the next destruction that will come, yes, speedily in our own time, maybe even yearning for it, look, it's already right here, we've been hearing about it, we've read it word for word in wonderful language."

The dirt road is well packed. The Land Rover's tires ride as smoothly as if it were asphalt. The haze blurs the sunlight. The visitor takes off her sunglasses and studies the large man who so enjoys having an attentive audience for his fervid obsessions.

"You would also lecture my poor sister about all these theories?"

"Not much, because I didn't want to burden her with more gloom and doom. And soon enough reading the Bible began to nauseate me. But before I finally abandoned the book to gather dust on the shelf, I shared my thoughts with Rafaeli, the deputy director-general, and to his credit I must say he listened with great patience, like a therapist with his client, and didn't try to argue with
me, but merely recommended that I drop the prophets and move on to Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, and I said to myself, Fine, let's give the Bible one more chance. So I went to the Scrolls, and it was actually in the Song of Songs that Eyal's death suddenly overwhelmed me, and I read this poetry drowning in tears."

"Death in the Song of Songs?" his sister-in-law asks with a gasp.

"Because the beauty overwhelmed me. The love ... the wondrous eroticism, the descriptions of nature. And then it hit me hard what Eyal would never be able to enjoy."

"And you never returned to the Bible?"

"Never touched it again. I cut myself off from it along with all the other useless texts."

Instinctively she presses the book to her chest and looks up at a vulture perched on a treetop, spreading its broad wings.

"Did you also read Jeremiah?"

"Of course. After all, I am his namesake, tied to him from birth. And I quickly caught on that he was the sickest and most dangerous of all the prophets. An unstable man. Exasperating. Jumping from topic to topic. A professional grouch. A low-rent strategist. Don't be misled by the beautiful language, the pretty words, the metaphors and similes, the rhythm of the sentences. All these only interfere with hearing what actually lies behind them. Now, with the English translation in your hand, you can uncover all the violence and despair. And indeed if you translate it back into Hebrew, into real everyday language, the hatred and extremism will appear from behind the feathers of the peacock's tail. Try it ... why not? Here's an exercise for a teacher of English. You wanted to test your vocabulary? By all means, give yourself an exam."

How strange and special, thinks Daniela. Two grown people dealing with the Bible in the middle of the African plain. I came all the way from Israel to Tanzania to translate the Bible back into Hebrew.

She opens the book, finds Jeremiah, and says, maybe I'll read it first in English. No, he says, the English will get fancy and lure you
with linguistic decorations. Translate it spontaneously, a page at random, but into simple Hebrew, please, Hebrew that your children can understand.

She translates slowly, pressing her finger to the page, attempting to make herself heard over the wind that has started to howl.

 

"Therefore said God, the Lord of the regiments, Lord of Hosts ... God of Armies. Because you say this word, then see, I'm going to turn my words in your mouth into fire, and this people into wood, and it will gobble them up. You'll see, I'll bring a nation against you from far away, O House of Israel, says God, and it's a strong nation, an ancient nation, a nation whose language you do not know, and you won't understand what they say. Their quiver of arrows is like an open grave, they are all violent men. And they will eat up your harvest and your bread, and eat your sons and daughters, and eat your sheep and cattle, and eat up your grapes and fig trees, and with their sword they will ruin your fortified cities, which you depend on for safety. And yet, at this time, God says, I will not put an end to you. And if they ask, Why does our God do all these things to us? Then you tell them, just as you left me and served strange gods in your own land, so you will also serve foreigners in a land that is not yours."

 

"Oof, enough." She closes the book and puts it in the glove compartment. But Yirmiyahu is delighted by her translation.

"You see? Just a random passage, and the violence is immediately revealed. A prophecy of destruction, with relish. Disaster and death and cannibalism, and suddenly, this is typical, he panics at his own prophecy, and says, Wait, for all that, it won't be the end. But why shouldn't it be? If their sins are so great, why not finish them off once and for all? Very simple, because then there won't be anyone to prophesy to; he'll have no one to torture with his curses. He will be unemployed. And why is the foreign nation entitled to such a great victory? The simple answer: jealousy and control. Not
justice, only betrayal. You worshipped other gods, so you deserve that your sons and your daughters be eaten."

Daniela feels drained. The journey is not over, and Yirmi's driving has become slow and distracted. The haze in the air is turning into a yellow fog. The ancient prophet is wearing her out with his hatreds, and the philosophizing driver with his complaints.

"But there is one marvelous passage there," Yirmi goes on, riding the crest of his speech, "in chapter forty-something there's a section in the prophecies of Jeremiah that the editor needed a lot of courage to include. The exiles in Egypt rise in protest against the prophet, who has also ended up there, and they dare to tell him to his face: 'Enough, we've heard everything you said, and we have no intention of obeying you. It's good and pleasant for us to burn incense to the goddess—who is called by a unique name, the Queen of Heaven.' The men and husbands suddenly come to the defense of their wives who burn the incense, and say to the infuriating prophet plain and simple, 'Enough, that's it, we will keep doing the pagan ritual, because when we and our wives served this Queen in Jerusalem, we were happy, we had plenty of food.' The main thing—and this is the line I find so touching—they say to Jeremiah, listen to this: 'In Jerusalem, without all your admonitions, we were
good,
we felt we were
good,
but as soon as we started listening to you and stopped burning incense for the Queen of Heaven, we lost everything, and then came the sword and the famine.' Do you hear me? You hear?"

"Of course I do, you're yelling."

"I came upon that passage simply by chance—two or three months after we buried Eyal—and I was so moved I wanted to hug those exiles in Egypt from a distance of twenty-five hundred years. People who stood up bravely against the cursing crybaby, the professional killjoy, who also inflicted his name on me."

The road has become bumpy and is suddenly blocked. The driver goes out to inspect the wheels and finds them tangled in some thick vegetation with small purple flowers. Well, he says to his
sister-in-law, with all this talk about the Queen of Heaven I neglected the earth, and didn't notice that we should have arrived at the farm a while ago. But not to worry. Don't panic. We'll find the right road, we're not far away. There's a walkie-talkie in the car, and also an old pistol.

N
OFAR NOW HEARS
for the first time about the old man's girlfriend, and listens with great interest to her sister-in-law's description. Ya'ari is astounded how from a few random details that he dropped last night at dinner Efrat has been able to concoct a whole story of long-standing infidelity. Wonderful, says Nofar to her father. How encouraging to know that we have such a romantic and sophisticated grandfather, and really, why not go have a peek at her? Given her age, tomorrow may be too late, and we'll all be sorry for missing a good story.

"Even if we're dying to peek at her," Ya'ari says, surrendering to his daughter and daughter-in-law, "that still doesn't mean she can or wants to peek at us at this very moment."

"If she really loved Grandpa," Efrat declares confidently, "she'll also be interested in meeting his granddaughter and great-grandchildren and their mother. Tell her this is only a short visit. No more than fifteen minutes. Just to see Yoel's unique elevator. And she shouldn't put herself out."

Devorah Bennett is surprised to hear Ya'ari's voice on the phone, after all they had scheduled their meeting for tomorrow.

Then it is Ya'ari's turn to be surprised; secretly, without saying a word to him, his father promised to come to her in person, to feel the vibrations of the elevator with his very own body, and to listen to the cat.

"You didn't know about your father's visit tomorrow?" The old woman is astonished.

"Not even a hint."

"Because your father is probably afraid you won't let him make the trip. So listen to me, young man, and permit me to call you a young man even if you are a grandfather, I insist that you come along so he won't roll down my stairs."

"Don't worry, I won't leave him, not even for a minute."

And of course, it would give Devorah Bennett great pleasure to show them his father's elevator, and get a glimpse of his family.

Nofar runs to her department head for permission to be released a teeny bit early from her shift. When she returns without her nurse's gown, she looks thin and pale, but squeezes with youthful joy between the car seats of her niece and nephew. It's nearly four o'clock, and wintry Jerusalem, soon to be deprived of its Sabbath, seems to be blending religiosity and secularism into one gray experience. Ya'ari parks the car right in front of the Old Knesset, drawing on his own faith that an Orthodox mayor will not countenance violating the Sabbath by the writing of a parking ticket. Nofar and Efrat unfasten the drowsy children from their seats and zip up their coats. And Nofar, who is especially attached to her little nephew, smothers him with hugs and kisses before picking him up and carrying him across King George Street.