Friendly Fire (42 page)

Ya'ari smiles and watches his father brace himself against the squat sturdy shoulders of Marco and Pedro and make his way into the elevator he had devised, where he presses against the wall to keep his balance and tells the Filipinos to let him stand alone. With a trembling hand he closes the grille. Behind the faded gold-colored lattice, with his bald head, gaunt face, and drooping shoulders, he resembles an old monkey in a cage. He pushes the up button, but his shaky finger lacks the strength to start the elevator, so he moves back slightly and presses the button again with the tip of his cane. The elevator shakes, moans, bumps from side to side, and begins to rise, and only when he is completely out of sight does the yowling in the shaft die down.

Francisco, Marco, and Pedro grin as if they'd seen a circus stunt, but little Hilario is worried. He approaches cautiously to peek inside the open closet and see where the elevator has disappeared to. Ya'ari does not hide his pleasure at his father's accomplishment and smiles broadly at the hostess, who has sunk helplessly into her armchair.

"Insane," she declares, coming to regret the forfeit of her peace and quiet for this tumult.

"Naughty boy," the expert agrees.

For a moment Ya'ari worries that his father will go out on the roof and be blown away by the wind. But after two minutes the wailing is heard again, and the elevator lands in all its musical richness.

Ya'ari hurries to extract his father, and since the old woman does not relinquish her chair, he seats him on her bed, props him all around with silk pillows, and waits for precise technical instructions as how to begin dismantling the piston without electrocuting himself.

Y
IRMIYAHU GOES INTO
the well-lighted room to refill his water glass. The African women, sitting now by the entryway, crowd at once into the clinic to demand the unlocking of the medicine cabinet. Slowly and with difficulty he utters a few words of refusal in their language, and they laugh and protest, till he loses patience and shouts at them angrily, and they scatter back outside. One of the young ones crumples to the floor and bursts into tears, and her friends lift her tenderly and lead her back to the dirt mound to await the return of the nurse.

Yirmiyahu leans over the sink and wets his face, then fills the glass and gulps the water, fills it again, and goes back into the inner room. He seems somehow surprised to see his sister-in-law still sitting there, poised on the second bed. For a moment he considers leaving the door open, then closes it.

A long silence.

"Don't tell me," she says suddenly, "that the malaria parasite can in fact pass from person to person, because if so, I'm next in line."

He glances at her.

"You're not in any line. This happens to me sometimes. My temperature goes up if I'm exhausted."

"Maybe it's a good defense against the prophets of Israel: you get sick before they can punish you. But you better watch out for them."

A sad smile lightens his face. "What can they do to me that they haven't done already?"

"Don't be so sure," she ventures. "I guarantee you that disasters await us that haven't yet been announced, not even in the English translation."

"Aha, I see you're beginning to get the principle. Prophecies of destruction, delivered with pleasure and lust."

"But in fact you prophesy the same way."

"I? Why me? I'm not a player or a partner. I freed myself of the leash of the forefathers. I look on from afar, indifferent and liberated, safe and sound in a place where there is not and never has been a shred of prophecy, or of fury, or of consolation. And here, even if they dig up the entire ground, they won't find a trace of a dry Jewish bone."

In two months he will be seventy, she thinks, but that doesn't stop him from reliving the rebellion of a high school student. Still, in the few hours remaining, he needs to be listened to. Because for all his bragging about detachment, it's not the arrogance of an ancient prophet that burns in his marrow, but the friendly fire. So she diverts the conversation back to its beginning. She is curious to know more details about the Jerusalem pharmacist, who at the height of the intifada managed to smuggle him safely back and forth at night.

Emile is a Christian Arab from East Jerusalem, about fifty years old, who through patient and industrious litigation won back the pharmacy that had belonged to his parents before the founding of the state. He is a flexible man, who speaks Hebrew well, and his pharmacy, in the German Colony, is clean and well-organized and open sometimes at night. Medicines that elsewhere are sold only by prescription he sells on the basis of trust alone. He is a knowledgeable
pharmacist, dispensing good advice about insomnia, weight loss, nausea, and heartburn. And when word spread in the neighborhood that Eyali fell not from enemy fire, he came to pay a condolence call at the home of Yirmi and Shuli, his longtime customers, and on his own initiative brought tranquilizers that he himself had concocted. From then on, every time they entered his shop, singly or together, he would attend to them promptly, with concern and devotion, inquiring about their physical condition and emotional state, serving them with compassion.

After the first, hurried visit to Tulkarm, when the Palestinian paterfamilias had evaded his meeting with Yirmi, Emile had keenly felt the frustration that had now been added to the agony, and with the help of relatives and friends managed to find the owner of the roof and persuade him to talk with Yirmi in exchange for a fee.

The story the Palestinian told did not anger Yirmi at first. Nor was he bothered by the absurdity of the incident. On the contrary, he found his son's gesture noble. But he was surprised by the utter lack of sympathy on the part of the Palestinian. Out of either anger or hatred, he never looked Yirmi straight in the eye, and without adding a word took the money and disappeared among the hothouse flowers.

And then Yirmi said to himself, This man is a day laborer, struggling to live under occupation; what can I expect of him, anyway? But the middleman, the educated Christian pharmacist, by all appearances a moderate fellow with an Israeli identity card, had shown no sympathy, had no kindly word for the innocence of the soldier.

And as he drove back to Jerusalem that day, a desire took root in him, actually not a desire but a necessity, a compulsion, to redeem Eyal's honor, to endorse an action that appeared stupid but also embodied the gallant spirit of a young man who surely knew he was risking his life in order to return a bucket rinsed clean to suicide bombers.

"Suicide bombers?" Daniela is astonished.

"Of course," Yirmi says. "If not today, then tomorrow. And at that moment I resolved to go back to Tulkarm and again go up on that roof, to prove to the Palestinian that we had not only given our son absurdly good heart and manners but courage too. So after a few days I went to Emile and told him that all his medicines would not help me calm down until I could go back to that roof to rescue my son's honor, and that such indifference over his simple human gesture was unacceptable to me. And if I had to bribe middlemen to sneak me in there, my wallet was open, on the condition that the middlemen wanted my money and not my blood. I told Shuli that I was being sent for one day to our embassy in Cyprus. On that night, she was actually staying with you in Tel Aviv, and I'm sure that she didn't suspect a thing. And although Tulkarm sits right on the border, getting there was not easy, believe me. On the way in, they didn't do much checking at the roadblocks, and because I rode in with some laborers and dressed accordingly, they couldn't tell me from the others. But on the return trip, they had to smuggle me into my own country on roundabout back roads, to protect me from enemy fire and friendly fire too."

"And all that was worth it?"

"Very much so. Because on the roof I received, in addition to a cup of strong coffee, a little lesson in Judaism."

"From whom?" she asks, laughing. "From the Palestinian or the pharmacist?"

A tap is heard on the door of the back room. Sijjin Kuang has returned.

O
NCE MORE THE
father tells his son: "Don't butt in. This time I'm in charge. It wasn't you who put together this elevator, and you won't take it apart."

"But on the condition you stay on the bed," the son answers. "You decided against the wheelchair, and I'm in no mood to see you fall down."

"Don't worry," his father says, "I'll give instructions by remote control. But you sit on the side and don't get involved. This elevator is guaranteed by me personally, not by the firm. Right, Mrs. Bennett?"

"A lifetime personal guarantee."

For some reason she still hasn't offered him the comfortable armchair she has claimed for herself—as if she likes seeing him propped up among the pillows on her big bed. She pulls the electric heater close, spreads a blanket on her lap, lights a cigarette, and seems ready for a long encampment. Suddenly a barrage of hail rattles the windows, and few white icy pebbles fly in through the shaft and roll on the floor, and darkness descends on Jerusalem.

Without explicit orders, the expert goes to the elevator and turns on the light. Then she takes the two reading lamps from either side of the bed, plugs them both into an extension cord, and directs their light toward the bottom of the elevator. New shadows begin to move on the walls. The old man beckons to Hilario, takes his hand and strokes his hair, and whispers at length in his ear what he should tell the Filipinos who are waiting for their orders. The lengthy Hebrew instructions are drastically condensed by the interpreter, and it now becomes clear that it was not merely so he could be spirited up the stairs that the old man mobilized Francisco's friends but also so they could hoist the little elevator by hand, making possible the detachment of the piston from the lift mechanism.

Now the expert wedges her childlike, sexually ambiguous body between the side of the elevator and the wall of the shaft where the piston is attached. Drawing on her experience in the regional auto shop of Upper Galilee, she locates the oil cap and unscrews it with a monkey wrench produced from her jumpsuit pocket. A trickle of viscous white liquid begins to flow out, instead of the completely blackened oil one would expect after so many years.

"What's that?" Amotz asks.

His father shrugs. He cannot identify the nature of this fluid, either. He found this pump in his native Czechoslovakia, in a warehouse of used elevator parts, and since he bought it for next to nothing, he didn't bother to examine its innards.

The white stuff continues to trickle. Even the expert, who now and then smells and tastes it, can't come to a conclusion regarding its nature or provenance. But she is collecting it, in a small jar brought beforehand from the kitchen, so perhaps they'll be able to identify it later on.

The lady of the house also wants to taste the liquid. She gives Hilario a small spoon, he brings her a sample, and she sticks the tip of her tongue into it. Could be machine oil, or maybe sesame, or truffle, or eucalyptus, or coconut, or kerosene or gasoline. Not bad, she says. Careful, my dear, jokes the old man, the guarantee I gave you does not include indigestion from elevator gravy. And they laugh, he on the bed, shaking on the silk pillows, and she in the armchair, the two of them relaxed and intrigued by the drama in this miniature theater, as Hilario explains to Marco and Pedro that they should prop the elevator a bit higher on their shoulders so Francisco can detach the forklift from the bottom of the cab and pull free the entire original and delicate unit.

"And the electric current?" Ya'ari suddenly wells with anger at his father. "Before Francisco starts to turn a single screw, we have to be sure he won't get electrocuted."

But the anger is unnecessary now. There is no current in any screw. The expert has already disconnected the power in secret and without permission, and is unharmed and happy.

Why does he have to worry so much over something that's not his responsibility? Why try to take control of a historic relic he is neither supposed nor obligated to know a thing about? If he joined the team in order to look after his father, he can see with his own eyes how good it is for the old man to lie on the big bed, in a warm and familiar room, beside a beloved friend, in the intimacy of a dark winter morning. And if so, why should a busy man like him, a bothersome worrier, not take advantage of this fortuitous moment of grace on the Hanukkah holiday and sit serenely in a corner? And if Daniela in Africa is bonding with her past but free of the present, he himself now has the chance to take time out from both. No secretary, draftsman, or engineer is ringing his cell phone for advice; in other words, the world is carrying on fine, even without him.

A smile of contentment lights up Ya'ari's face. Good, from this moment on, I am but a silent onlooker. He brings a wicker chair from the kitchen, stands it beside the big bed, sits down and crosses his legs and closes his eyes.

Francisco once told him and Daniela that the territory of the Philippines encompasses seven thousand islands, only about five hundred of them inhabited. In fact he and Kinzie come from two islands that are hundreds of kilometers apart. Thanks to the wide variety of dialects spoken across the whole archipelago, what unites their islands as a nation is the English language.

That lingua franca is proving effective in the bedroom of the psychoanalyst as well. Hilario, the clever first-grader, passes along in English the technical instructions he gets in Hebrew from the great-grandfather and explains to Marco and Pedro how to raise the lightweight elevator.

Although the cab is rather easily lifted upon the short men's shoulders, Francisco prefers not to rely solely on his two comrades and adds the support of a stepladder and a small bureau before crawling underneath to disconnect the lift arm.

The Filipinos speak softly among themselves, and old Ya'ari adopts their polite, respectful tone as he tells Francisco, via Hilario's translation, the correct procedure for undoing the screws. He must work slowly, with caution. The screws are rusted, and one must oil them and wait for them to yield gracefully, to exit undamaged from the place they have grown used to for so many years.