Friendly Fire (12 page)

And so, desiring only to dream, he threads his car through crowded streets, marveling at the sight of the many ultra-Orthodox children who have been excused from Torah study and, lacking a show of their own to attend, are filling the playgrounds along the banks of the Yarkon River, sliding and swinging, despite the cold weather, the fringes of their ritual undershirts flapping in the breeze.

Before entering his building he clears the leaves the wind had amassed at the front door. The near perfect neatness of the apartment underscores the absence of his habitually messy wife. He restores to its place a red candle that has fallen from the menorah set up for the evening's lighting, heats his lunch, and eats it rapidly. Then he goes into his bedroom and gets undressed. Is dozing off alone, without making love, a good enough reason to disconnect from the world?

Without hesitation he unplugs the phone. Tomorrow afternoon Yirmiyahu will take Daniela to Dar es Salaam, as agreed, and place a call to Israel. So for now he can let things go. The Filipinos are looking after his father; the army has taken Moran, whose mother-in-law is supposed to deal with the children; and Efrat's good looks will excuse her failings. Nofar in any case is out of his control, even if she does show up this evening. He draws down the blinds, turns on the heater, gets into bed, and pulls the blanket over him. It's nice, this unaccustomed silence, undisturbed even by the rustling of newspapers by his side. Yes, out of love he should have offered to go with her, but the wiser love was not to insist on it. And he did make sure to warn Yirmiyahu to be extra vigilant in the face
of her absent-mindedness and dreamy confusion, which have lately grown worse.

He knows that his brother-in-law would have preferred him to accompany her. But had he made the trip, he would have weighed down the visit with his polite silence, which would have been interpreted as ironic. Nor was another visit to Tanzania worth the expense and aggravation of travel. It was only three years ago that they were there. He remembers exploring a huge crater with Shuli and Yirmi, an enclosed nature preserve filled with predatory animals and rare plant life. Yes, sometimes he has pangs of longing for the soothing expanse of the savanna or the swirling colors of the sunsets, but just to indulge in nostalgia, would it have been worth neglecting his business for a whole week and instead sit mutely between his wife and brother-in-law? After Yirmi jumped on that "friendly fire," which he haplessly uttered at a terrible moment, and began to cling to it so absurdly, Ya'ari realized he should be wary of spontaneous conversation with him. Gottlieb is right. Bereaved fathers have a different agenda in their heads.

He gets up to draw the curtain and darken the room, and notices that his cell phone is on the bureau, live and breathing. Should he turn it off completely, or set it on silent vibration? He finally decides on vibration but also stuffs it under his pillow.

S
OON, ON THE
African farm, it will be three
P.M.
From outside the locked door of his bedroom, Yirmiyahu calls to the sleeping woman: We're leaving! Why did you think I didn't need to wake you?

Daniela apologizes, even though she does not feel she is to blame. On trips abroad she always keeps her watch set on Israeli time, to stay in sync with her children and grandchildren. Amotz takes care of local time.

"But Amotz isn't here," her brother-in-law points out with mild annoyance and tells her to hurry up; otherwise he'll leave her here to finish her novel.

Though this is a woman who adheres to "her own pace," the threat of being left alone at the farm with an elderly African watchman gets her moving faster. Besides, there's no fussing over what to wear. Deftly she slips back into her African dress, not only because of its comfortable fabric but also out of the knowledge that only here, in Africa, can she get away with wearing anything so colorful.

In front of the farmhouse the vehicles stand ready for the journey. The food coolers are stacked one upon the other, and next to them are jugs of milk and water and small bags of flour and potatoes and white beans for individual cooking, a few big kettles of soup, and the freshly washed cooking pots and dinnerware. The goat, its slaughter apparently postponed, surveys the scene with interest. The cooks, who have removed their white uniforms and put on short gray sheepskins, finish the last bits of preparation for the trip, oiling the hunting rifles and poking around under the hoods of the old pickup trucks.

There is no one in the kitchen, except for Sijjin Kuang, wearing a greenish smock. She places a plate and cup for the visitor on one of the long tables.

"We'll heat up something for you," Yirmi tells Daniela, "but only on condition that you eat fast."

But the hungry guest will not degrade herself and eat alone before the eyes of strangers, and certainly not at a pace to which she is unaccustomed. No, she says, she'll hold out until it's time to have dinner with the diggers. That way their journey can begin right away. But the Sudanese nurse is not pleased by the guest's forgoing of food and expertly fixes her two sandwiches for the road. Nor does she stop at that; even as the pickups' engines sputter into activity, she vanishes into the building and returns with a windbreaker. Your dress is pretty, but at night you'll need something more against the cold, she tells Daniela, before taking her place behind the wheel of the Land Rover.

Yirmi has long legs, and therefore, apologizes to his sister-in-law, who has been relegated to the backseat, amid the luxury items designated for the researchers—bottles of whisky and cognac, packets of cigarettes and chocolate—and medical supplies for everyone. She places Sijjin Kuang's windbreaker on her lap and looks around her and nibbles at a sandwich. The Land Rover travels between the two pickup trucks, and in the lead truck ride the Africans with their hunting rifles.

"Why rifles?" wonders the visitor, and they tell her that sometimes animals and birds of prey are attracted by the traveling feast and need to be chased away.

The convoy first heads toward the small village they visited in the morning, where children are still congregating by the shed housing the elephant with the cyclops eye. From there, the road slopes gently down to the vast, silent savanna, where the air and the dry grass, patchy and scorched, shine golden in the western sun. The vehicles drive slowly, keeping their distance from one another to avoid the clouds of dust kicked up by the tires. Now and again they are stopped by a herd of plodding gnus or unhurried zebus, who take their time before deigning to move on and clear the road.

The great expanse before them stirs a feeling of respect in the visitor. Yirmiyahu directs her attention to a giant baobab with a trunk wider than his room at the farm and branches that look like thick roots shooting skyward, as if the tree were growing upside down. On one branch crouches a golden beast of prey.

On this plain, the dead, animal and human, are not buried, says the Sudanese nurse, but rather left exposed in the wild, to be eaten by animals and birds, reabsorbed into the natural world that gave them life. Their bodies will not be resurrected, but a good soul may hope to find a strong wind that will agree to carry it.

Two hills stand out on the horizon: this might be their destination. For as soon as the hills appear, the convoy shifts its formation from single file to side by side with the brotherly freedom—or rivalry—of those whose goal is clear to them and who have no need for a defined pathway or any rules of the road. They advance under the sheltering sky, whose palette of colors deepens toward evening, and a dizzying swirl of ravening birds swoops toward the traveling food stores, undeterred by occasional gunfire. The Africans gaily wave from the pickup trucks at the Land Rover, especially at the Israeli visitor, who only yesterday morning took off from her homeland and whose country and husband and children and grandchildren already appear strangely distant to her. Yes, she muses, maybe it would have been a bit much to light Hanukkah candles in a place where one is seeking the primal ape who never anticipated that Jews, too, would spring from his loins.

The Sudanese and her brother-in-law exchange now and then a few words, muffled by the engine noise. She pulls the windbreaker lent her by Sijjin Kuang tightly across her lap and rubs it with her fingers, then lifts it to her face and inhales its smell. She gasps. As the Africans fire with cries of joy at a stubborn hawk and bring it down, she quietly taps Yirmi's broad back and holds up the wind-breaker. Before she can ask, he answers:

"Of course. It was Shuli's. Didn't I tell you that I'd have a warm coat for you here?"

I
N ISRAEL, IT'S
still three o'clock. The pillow beneath the husband's head has stifled not one vibration but five, thanks either to the quality of the feathers or the soundness of his sleep. But each vibration has left in its wake a message, and now Ya'ari is on his feet, listening to all of them.

The first, to his surprise, is from Nofar. Okay, Abba, if Imma
isn't there, I'll come around seven. A friend whom you don't know will come with me and also won't stay long. So okay, we'll light candles. But that's it. Please don't sit this friend down for an interrogation and don't ask him what his parents do. He's just a friend. Here today, gone tomorrow. As for the candles, my condition is no 'Maoz tsur' or any of the other songs I loath. Do a short blessing, if you must, and that's it. And if you're dying to sing, sing to yourself after we go. Not a tragedy. Because if you want your daughter's love, obey her. Sorry.

The second message is in a feeble voice. This is Doctor Devorah Bennett speaking from Jerusalem. If this is in fact your number, Amotz Ya'ari, then please don't hang up on me now in the middle, and call back at zero two six seven five four double zero and six at the end. I repeat: zero two is Jerusalem, and then six seven five four double zero and at the end again six. I urgently need your father. If you tell him my name, Devorah Bennett, he will certainly remember me. Because we were great friends. I know he has been ill, but at my apartment there is a private elevator that your father built many years ago, and he gave it, gave me, a lifetime guarantee, the lifetime of the elevator I mean, or more correctly my lifetime. I know that your firm doesn't do repairs but only design, but mine is a special case. All I ask of you is your father's telephone number. That is all I ask. Please, Ya'ari, if you would be so kind...

The third message is from Efrat. Well, that's that. Moran for starters has been sentenced to a week's confinement to his base, and they also took away his cell phone battery. He said that he would try to reach you tomorrow morning to explain what exactly happened. He is still awaiting a trial for his previous absences. In the meantime I've arranged with my mother for her to take the kids from preschool and day care—Hanukkah vacation for them starts tomorrow—but if you could help her out at least in the beginning, that would be great. I'm still up north and won't be back till late...

The fourth message is from the tenant in the Pinsker Tower. I've been waiting in vain for an answer. Therefore we have no alternative but to be more explicit with you. We consulted with people from the construction company, and they claim that those who designed and manufactured the elevators are responsible for the winds. Therefore you and the manufacturer are obligated to at least determine the source of the problem prior to a meeting at which we will all figure out how to deal with it. If you continue to ignore us, we will be forced to take legal action. We know that such a lawsuit could drag on for years, but as you know, the court would compensate us for damages incurred in the meantime.

The fifth message is from Yael, Efrat's mother, a high-strung and good-hearted divorcee, whose wry locutions Ya'ari always finds entertaining. You have doubtless already heard from Efrat that your son was socked with a week's confinement to base for his arrogant flippancy. But also Efrat for her part insists on staying today at her terribly important training course. With two problematic parents such as these there is no choice for grandpa and grandma from both sides but to join hands so that the grandchildren will not be abandoned. So please, Amotz, get back to me immediately; I am, as we speak, in the dentist's chair as he plots to extract one of my teeth, but my cell phone is always close to my heart, ever-ready to inform you of your role in the current mess."

Without delay he calls his son's mother-in-law, who asks him through semi-anesthetized lips and a mouth full of cotton rolls to fetch the children from preschool at four and wait for her at the Roladin Café across from her house.

"A café?"

"Why not? They know the children there. Order each of them a scoop of vanilla, and remind the waiter not to put chocolate sprinkles on Nadi's, because he thinks they're flies. It's a nice place, and as soon as my tooth is pulled I'll dash over and relieve you. Sorry, but what can I do? Today in any case is Daniela's turn, but
she told me that she's going all the way to Africa to console her brother-in-law who's stuck out there, and who could begrudge her such a noble gesture?"

T
HE EVER SHIFTING
African sky now promises an imminent sunset, and the purple hills on the horizon assume the shape of an prehistoric snail. The ground beneath the tires is cruder and bumpier now, rife with stubborn scrub and hidden potholes. The drivers no longer have the freedom to choose their own path, and they resume their small caravan formation, feeling out the best way to go. In the distance, bands of zebras flicker at times into view, disappear, then return. Foxes or hyenas peek out amid the scattered trees, having smelled the soup from afar, and try to join the crawling food convoy. One of the Africans, who has donned his chef's hat in honor of the approaching meal, gets on top of his truck's tarpaulin and opens fire over the heads of the wild animals—not to do harm, just to warn them off.

Since dusk falls rapidly in the region, it is already dark when the caravan arrives at the large encampment of the excavators, pitched on the slope of a bare volcanic canyon. In the depths of the canyon, one can just glimpse a bluish sparkle of water. Closer by, the
UNESCO
flag flaps on a tall pole, and small flags in a variety of colors are planted all around it to mark the locations of fossils. A crowd of diggers, men and women, are already unloading the contents of the vehicles, including the live goat, with cries of joy. Sijjin Kuang rushes with a medical kit to one of the big tents, while the white administrator stays with the liquor bottles, the cigarettes, and the chocolate, awaiting the arrival of the scientists.