Friendly Fire (51 page)

"What, you're not sleeping?"

"No, I slept all day, and now I'm awake as the devil."

He is a devil, she thinks, and in the darkness the shining screen lends his face a mysterious aura. The devil can still discover, she thinks with dismay and goes to the dining table, where the Hanukkah menorah sits alone, bereft of candles. "What's this? The holiday is over?"

"Not over," he says, "tonight is the last candle. But you fell asleep so quickly."

"So how many candles do we light?"

"Eight. Eight."

"Let's light them, then. I didn't light a single one in Africa."

"In the end he really did burn all the candles you brought?"

"Not in the end, at the beginning." And she takes the box and wonders, "how is it there are so many candles left? Didn't you light any at home? After all, you like playing with fire."

"I lit them here only once—the third candle, with Nofar. The rest burned in other homes. At my father's, and with Efrati and the kids, and at the army dining hall when I visited Moran, and even at Gottlieb's factory. I didn't need to go home and light them by myself."

"So come now." She brightens suddenly. "It's not too late." And she sticks eight candles of various colors into the menorah, adding a red shammash.

"You do it," he says, not budging from his chair. "Because you didn't light a single candle, I'm letting you light all eight."

"All right, but turn down the TV, we can't make the blessing like this."

"You want us also to do the blessings?"

"Why not? As always."

"Then you do them. We live in feminist times, you're not exempt. There are women rabbis out there who go around in prayer shawls and phylacteries."

"But where are the blessings?"

"They're printed on the box."

"So simple and handy."

He lowers the sound on the television, but he leaves the picture on. She lights the shammash with a match, shares its flame with all the other candles, and reads the blessings by their light. Come, she orders him, now we'll sing. He rises reluctantly from the armchair. But please, he insists, just not "Maoz Tsur." It's a song Nofar also hates.

"What's to hate in a song like that?" she protests. "You sound like Yirmi."

"Like Yirmi or not like Yirmi, I don't like that song."

"But it won't do you any harm to sing it along with me, a duet."

—Haifa, 2004–2007