Friendly Fire (9 page)

She sat on his bed and listened, careful not to appear tired so as not to offend him, but he gathered himself and before leaving her to her fatigue, he showed her how to work the faucets in the shower, and with an ironic smile promised plenty of piping hot water, since the boiler on the bottom floor was still consuming the Israeli newspapers and lighting the Hanukkah candles.

After washing herself long and thoroughly, she got into bed, and to wind down from the trip and drift off without a husband by her side, she read a page from the mediocre novel. Then she turned out the light, and with her rare talent for transmuting worries and fears into memories and dreams, she put her palm to her mouth like an infant at the breast and fell asleep.

At dawn, when her brother-i n-law entered on tiptoe to close the shutters and protect her from the blazing sunrise, she simply smiled her thanks, and since she could rely on him to send, in her name, an electronic sign of life to her husband, she allowed herself many more hours of untroubled slumber.

I
N THE MORNING
Ya'ari is pleased to find, in his e-mail at the office, the long-expected message. Now, with his wife under his brother-i n-law's supervision, he may let go of his anxiety until her return trip begins five days hence. With his mind unencumbered, he tries to perfect on the computer his nocturnal vision of a narrow corner elevator, independently controlled, that would rob hardly any space from the four others. But he is still reluctant to enlist any of his employees, lest one of them glibly dismiss the idea out of hand. First he had better ask Moran, since his criticism, however harsh and negative, will remain between father and son.

But Moran is late. Has Nadi again deprived his parents of sleep, and, as usual, was it his father who got up to calm him, not his mother? This grandson, two years old, for all his sweetness is a stormy little scamp, and the grandfather and grandmother concur in blaming their daughter-in-law, who while assiduously trying to find herself has apparently neglected her child. But the two continually caution each other not to say a word of criticism to her or Moran. When they first met her, seven years back, she was a shy, pale girl; no one could have foreseen the beauty that would later bloom. Now, after bearing two children, her body has filled out, and her skin has a new luster. She goes about in heels that increase her height and show off her attractive legs, and her face, sculpted by cosmetic art, has been drawing attention. Yet the beauty only recently revealed, to her as well as to others, confuses her somewhat. It has helped her find jobs but also undermined her determination to stick to them. Out of cocky confidence that the world will always pay homage to her good looks, she tends to make light of her obligations, quits a situation without thinking it through, and switches jobs arbitrarily, out of caprice.

Outside it is gray and quiet. Rain and wind have stopped, yet this wintry calm does not prevent that stubborn, depressive head of the Pinsker Tower tenants' council from calling Ya'ari's cell phone once more to demand that he do something to stop the whistling noise in the elevators. Unwilling to debate the limits of his responsibility with a private individual, Ya'ari merely inquires politely whether the winds are still raging in the tower even as on the big tree outside his office window not a leaf is stirring.

"Not one leaf?" the tenant says, snickering. "Maybe for you, Mr. Ya'ari, but these elevators of yours don't need any winds from the outside, they create their own."

Ya'ari laughs, hanging up with a vague promise.

It's now nearly nine o'clock and Moran is still not in. Ya'ari calls his cell phone, but gets only the voice mail. And though he knows that his daughter-in-law is doubtless still asleep, he also calls their home phone, but that, too, goes unanswered. Given no choice, he
calls his daughter-in-law's cell, and as usual a lovely disembodied voice invites him to leave a message. A few minutes later, she gets back to him, sounding confused.

"Right, I forgot. I forgot to let you know that Moran left this morning for reserve duty."

"Reserve duty? After all that? What changed?"

"I mean, he didn't exactly leave by himself, they took him."

"Who?"

"A military policeman."

"Military policeman? They still exist?"

"Apparently so."

"Damn it, I warned him. But he thought they'd forget about him."

"They didn't forget."

"You, too, Efrati, forgive me, are not totally blameless on this. You should have pressured him not to provoke them."

"Great, Amotz, now I'm to blame," she retorts, as if her beauty were a permanent guarantee of her integrity. "Why me? Why are you so sure that he involves me in his little pranks?"

"Okay, sorry. So what happens now? I need him urgently in the office."

"If you need him, you'll find a way to get to him."

"And the children, Efrati?" he says, softening, "and the children? You don't need help with them?"

"Of course I need help. I have a training class up north till late tonight. My mother promised that they could sleep at her place, but if Nadi falls asleep again at his preschool, she won't be able to cope with him at night."

"And I had planned to light candles with you this evening."

"Very good ... so you two go to my mother, light candles with her, and help her out a bit. The kids will be happy, too ... and if my mother's already worn out, maybe you and Daniela could take them home to sleep at your place."

"No, wait, listen, Efrati, it's just me. You forgot that Daniela flew yesterday to Africa."

"Oh, right. I'm not used to thinking about the two of you apart; I forgot all about it."

T
HE SHUTTERS, CLOSED
at dawn, have indeed enabled the visitor to sleep till late morning, and as she becomes aware of the hour, she realizes how worn out she must have been from the emotion and anxiety of the day gone by. Yirmi has apparently not deemed a few days' visit sufficient reason for clearing a shelf in his small armoire, so her little suitcase will have to serve as a clothes closet. Only her African-patterned dress, which Amotz encouraged her to buy three years ago in the market in Dar es Salaam and which she never dared wear in Israel, she hangs at full length alongside her brother-i n-law's khaki clothing, to rid it of wrinkles before trying it on at last, here on the continent of its origin.

The old shutters open with an agreeable creak, revealing a landscape of low-lying reddish hills covered with stumpy but abundant vegetation. The thick wayside foliage that had accompanied her nocturnal trip around Mount Morogoro is gone, and the vista now before her, for all its greenness, has a flavor of the neighboring desert. Near the entrance to the farm, she recognizes the Land Rover that brought her, parked between two pickup trucks.

She descends unhurriedly to the ground floor, where she is surrounded by a whirlwind of human activity accompanied by the singing of women, the rush of flowing water, the clatter of dishes, and the cackle of chickens. Into the oversize sunny kitchen comes cookware and tableware, sticky and coated with dust, sent back overnight from the site of the dig—plastic containers, plates and cups, mounds of spoons, forks, and knives—all of it taken to the sink at once, for soaking and scrubbing. A cornucopia of supplies is
arranged on the dining tables: fresh vegetables, brown eggs, corn bread, slabs of bloody meat, and fish still quivering. On one of the tables stands a cage full of squawking chickens, and tied to the entry door is a black goat nursing her kid, which is also destined for slaughter.

The stoves are ablaze, covered with enormous pots, kettles, and skillets; beside them, black men and women in white toques and headscarves chop the heads and tails from fish, hack up cuts of meat, boil, stir, and roast. Yirmi takes full and active part, too—not in cooking, but in commerce. Wearing a colonial pith helmet, he sits at a table with old-fashioned scales, banknotes, and coins arrayed before him and lists the details of all supplies entering the kitchen, scrutinizing each bill before paying it. His very being projects the authority of a white man, bald and old, against the abundant vitality of Africa.

"Well, you slept soundly," he says, in a tone of mild rebuke toward his sister-in-law, who has come to mourn a dead sibling but behaves as if she were on vacation. And he calls Sijjin Kuang, the nurse, who is making the rounds of the stoves, supervising the cooks—perhaps watching over their culinary hygiene—and requests that she bring the guest a selection of the day's dishes, for a combined breakfast and lunch.

Food is prepared at base camp, then packed in plastic containers and sent in insulated coolers to the dig. The scientific team there is not big: ten people, all Africans, most of them born in the region, who acquired professional experience working with European teams in Kenya and Ethiopia and South Africa and are now conducting their own excavation. The workers assisting them at the dig come from local tribes; the idea is that the ethnic and linguistic ties between the scientists and their laborers will facilitate the discovery of the fossils they seek.

Daniela is ravenous, but unaccustomed to dining alone. She invites the Sudanese nurse to keep her company, and Yirmiyahu
covers up the banknotes and coins with his helmet and joins her too. When the head chef comes to clear the dishes at the end of the meal, she praises his cooking and offers to help wash up. The black man, amazed by the older white woman's friendliness, bares his teeth as if about to swallow her whole.

Yirmi bursts into laughter. "Wash the dishes? You? Here?"

"Why not?"

"Why not? Back in your parents' house, on Saturdays after lunch, you resorted to all kinds of tricks to avoid the one chore they imposed on you, till finally Shuli would get fed up and go wash them herself."

"Instead of me?" Daniela's face turns red. "That's not true ... maybe she would sometimes come help me dry them."

"No, no." He insists, for some reason, on this childhood memory now more than forty years old. "You were quite the artist at shirking."

"I didn't shirk anything, I just wanted to do it at my own pace."

"At my own pace," he says, chuckling, as if speaking of something that happened yesterday, "but in the end there was no pace at all."

Daniela smiles. Yes, "at my own pace" had indeed been her avoidance tactic. She always hoped that someone whose patience had run out would do it in her place, or at least help her. Although washing the Shabbat lunch dishes had in fact been her sole housekeeping responsibility, she'd sit gloomily through the meal, and because in general she was a cheerful child, the other family members easily diagnosed her "dishwashing depression" and joked about it, yet they refused, for educational reasons, to coddle her. What's so hard about washing dishes? her mother would sympathetically ask her adorable daughter. And Daniela would struggle to describe the humiliation of being stuck in the small dreary kitchen—which actually repelled her mother as well—while everyone else was indulging in Sabbath-afternoon naps.

"At her own pace," when they were all curled up in their beds, she would enter with mild disgust that sunless room in their workers'
apartment and stand beside the scratched-up, graying sink, crammed with dishes each more revolting than the next, douse the lot of them with copious quantities of soap, and then go off to leaf through the newspaper or chat awhile on the phone, hoping the soap would do the job on its own. And when the parents awoke from their nap to find a sink still full of filthy dishes and she heard the redemptive sound of a running kitchen faucet, she would hurry in, perky and smiling, and say, hey, what's the rush? Didn't I promise I'd wash them myself? How come you never have enough patience to let me do it at my own pace?

Now, as she watches the joyful collective labor in the giant kitchen, it occurs to her that it wasn't the scrubbing itself that made her suffer, but the loneliness. After all, she had always happily helped her father tend their little garden or paint a porch railing, but her spirit had rebelled against being left alone to face the grimy leftovers of her sleeping family, much as she loved them all.

And if it sometimes happened that because of "my own pace" there remained by evening not one clean glass, plate or spoon, and the household swelled with righteous anger at this immobile "pace," her sister would rise to her rescue and without complaint would placate everyone by entering the kitchen as her full partner.

"She really was never mad at me?" Daniela asks now, with wonder. "It would have been so natural for her to be angry, too..."

"Angry? No, I don't remember..."

The little sister, who in a few years will be sixty, lifts her eyes with relief and thanks and stifled tears to the blue skies and red and green hills of the African savanna.

I
N
T
EL
A
VIV
the winds have risen, and with them a stormy phone conversation between Gottlieb and Ya'ari.

"All the same, Ya'ari, explain to me again, this time logically, please, what exactly is driving you right now? Why do you keep
obsessing over these noises when you know as well as I do that they are not the fault of your design, and certainly not of my manufacturing. You want to waste a day's work, shut down the elevators, dismantle the doors, run up expenses, and all you'll discover is what is obvious to everyone, that the construction company skimped on iron and screwed up the casting, and that they're the only ones who should be butting heads with the tenants."

"You might turn out to be right in the end, but in any case Moran met with your expert, the woman technician..."

"Rolaleh."

"And in her opinion the defects in the shaft are old and apparently existed before we installed the elevators, so that even if we are not formally responsible for them, morally..."

"
Morally?
" The manufacturer is taken aback. "That's a new one. Where'd that come from?"

"Listen, and don't get angry. Your technicians had a moral responsibility, and so, I admit, did our engineer who supervised the job, to make note of any defects and alert the construction company before installation."