Friendly Fire (43 page)

The Filipinos seem to enjoy the unusual task they have happened into. Instead of washing and feeding paralyzed old men, or taking walks with grouchy old ladies, they are dismantling a unique invention and carrying an elderly elevator on their shoulders. The hostess sighs with relief, relaxes, and falls asleep in her chair. Ya'ari's eyelids also droop, and his vision grows blurry. He listens to the quiet voices, rests his hand on the bed and imagines his father lying upon it years ago, among the pillows. He recollects the pleasured panic of the young woman in the tape tucked between Baby Mozart and Baby Bach in Moran's apartment.

Should he tell Daniela, or spare her the distress?

He opens his eyes and realizes he must have dozed off for a few minutes, for the elevator has vanished behind the doors of the clothes closet, and on the floor by the bed rests an ancient creature, with one forked leg like the devil Ashmedai, a greenish cylindrical piston like a the long tail of a lizard, and a control mechanism that resembles the head of a small cat, sprouting severed nerve endings in a rainbow of colors.

The lady of the house is still deep in dreamland, and his father, looking with affectionate pride upon the original machinery that stayed intact for so many years, smiles at Ya'ari and says to him, See what happens in old age? At the height of emotion you run out of stamina and fall asleep, and wake up when it's over and feel guilt and regret. And he directs Francisco, who has been washing his hands in the bathroom, to help his colleagues take the dismantled apparatus down to the ambulance that waits on the street with Maurice, and to bring up the wheelchair.

"My dear," he says, waking his lady friend, "we took apart the machinery for you. There will be no more humming and wailing. But whether it will also be possible to resurrect the elevator, so you can go strolling on the roof—this depends now not only on me but also on an old friend, who is in love only with money."

The psychologist opens her eyes and smiles a knowing smile. "And I thought you would stay for lunch."

"Lunch?" old Ya'ari says with surprise. "Why? So you can tie a bib on me and feed me with a spoon? When love crosses into degradation, I retreat."

T
HE PATIENCE OF
the African women has paid off. Sijjin Kuang opens the medicine cabinet and distributes pills, and also gives two aspirins to the white man. "Please, give me some, too," Daniela says.

"I'm going to bed after a sleepless night," Sijjin Kuang announces, "and you should also," she adds firmly, standing tall over the Israeli visitor. "Early tomorrow morning I will bring you to Morogoro. The plane is small, and you must get there early so they don't give your seat away."

"That can happen here?" The visitor is alarmed.

"Yes, here too," her brother-in-law says.

"And you won't come with me to the airport?" she asks, turning to her brother-in-law in Hebrew.

"What do you need me for? You've already heard more than I wanted to tell you, and even more than I thought I knew. So much that you won't remember what to tell Amotz."

"You're so sure I tell him everything?"

"Has anything changed?"

She studies him sourly and does not answer. Yirmiyahu turns to Sijjin Kuang and surprisingly, in his limited English, summarizes the last few sentences spoken in Hebrew. The Sudanese woman regards the two of them with puzzlement, and before locking the medicine cabinet asks if anything else is needed of her. A sleeping pill, requests Daniela, you've got me worried about getting up early and I'm afraid I won't be able to fall asleep. But sleeping pills are not popular among Africans and are not to be found in the medicine
cabinet. Like a magician the Sudanese produces another white aspirin between her long black fingers and gives it to the woman who is fearful for her sleep.

"Maybe you should really go now and get some rest instead of hanging around here," says Yirmi to his sister-in-law, in the patronizing tone of an older brother. "On Sunday nights, before returning to the dig, the team has a custom of holding a fancy dinner in the style of a 'high table,' and they'll surely insist that you be there."

"High table?" She laughs. "What is this? Oxford and Cambridge?"

"If they feel like honoring themselves in such a fashion, what's wrong with that? So go on, take a nap, so later you won't yawn in their faces."

Again she senses his clear desire to keep his distance from her, maybe because he feels he has already got carried away and doesn't want to be dragged any farther. But she says to herself that if she gives up and doesn't hear the end of the story, she'll be guilty of disloyalty to her sister, who was kept in the dark about her husband's desperate adventure. So she takes off her shoes and plants herself on the bed and directs a penetrating gaze at her brother-in-law, who stands at the threshold of the inner room, half in the light and half in darkness. "Yirmi, what do you mean, a lesson in Judaism?"

"In Jews."

"And who, may I ask, was the teacher—the Palestinian landlord, or your pharmacist?"

"Neither one. The pharmacist was afraid to come to the meeting that he himself had arranged. Someone warned him at the last minute that despite his blue Israeli ID card, he might be prevented from getting back into Jerusalem from the West Bank if he was caught. His absence worried me at first and even frightened me, because I had put my security in his hands. Although he was a Christian and not a Muslim, he was held in respect as a medical man. But I realized he would not be coming only when I was already sitting
on the rooftop waiting for him, and by then there was no retreat. It was a winter night, very cold but dry, and this time there was no laundry flapping on the clothesline, just a few old armchairs, and the middleman, an Israeli Arab with two wives, one in Israel and the other in the territories, sat me down and said, Coffee will arrive right away, sir, and in the meantime enjoy the air, which is cleaner here than where you live, and disappeared. I sat and listened to the sounds of the city, which were different from the sounds of an Israeli city, and I tried to absorb what Eyali heard in his last hours. I sat alone and waited, and no one came up, and then I knew that if they were to kill me now, or kidnap me, I absolutely deserved it, because I was tempting fate and provoking a humiliated enemy."

"At least you were aware of this."

"Apparently I was slightly infected by their suicidal impulses."

"And how did it end?"

He has finally understood that his sister-in-law, like a hunting dog, will not let him go, and he brings a chair from the other room and places it beside her bed.

"All right. So when the landlord saw that the pharmacist wasn't coming, he didn't know what to do with me and sent me his daughter—the young and pregnant one I met when I came with the army officer."

"The student of history with the mellifluous Hebrew."

"You don't forget a single word."

"A single word of yours. So don't worry about Amotz, he'll hear it all from me."

Her brother-in-law falls silent, as if upset that his words will not remain between the two of them in Africa but will be reported in Israel. But he recovers quickly and continues.

"So this young woman, the student, arrives on the roof, followed by her mother, fat and jolly as ever, presumably there to protect her. The student is now huge, almost ready to give birth, but her face is fresh from all the rest she gets under curfew and closure,
glowing with imminent motherhood, and her black hair spread on her shoulders. And the mother brings coffee on a tray."

"So they won't be tempted to kill you if you fall asleep," she jokes.

"An unarmed old man like me they could slaughter even if I am awake; even a woman could do it. No, they brought me the sweet coffee so I could sit and explain with a clear head what I really wanted from them. Why I kept coming back there. And when I saw that pregnant student—whose studies at the Ruppin college had been interrupted by the intifada and would not likely be resumed, and whose husband, so I gathered from her, had run off to one of the Gulf states to look for work and would not soon return—who knows, maybe he was the wanted man they were staking out—when I saw her coming to sit down quietly beside me, I had this revelation, that it was in fact she who had drawn me to risk my life and return back here. Yes, it was her sympathy I was looking for. I wanted to hear from a well-educated young woman, in her gentle Hebrew, that even if, like the others, she saw us as enemies, she was still capable of sympathy for a naïve and stupid soldier, who risked his life so as not to leave filth for his enemies."

"She knew what had happened?"

"Of course."

"And you got from her the sympathy you wanted?"

"No. On the contrary. It was the student who was the toughest of them all. She began with a rebuke based on the history she had learned at an Israeli college. Why is it you Jews can penetrate all sorts of foreign places and settle into other people's souls? Why is it so easy for you to wander from place to place without forming bonds of friendship with any other people, even if you live among them for a thousand years? Because you have a special god who is yours alone, and even when you don't believe in him, you are certain that because of him you have the right to be everywhere. In that case, who will love you? Who will want you? How will you survive?"

"This is all familiar stuff."

"Yes, but there on the roof in Tulkarm, through the bottomless bitterness of this pregnant young woman, it took on a new coloration. Maybe because she was soon to give birth, maybe because her husband wouldn't be there at the delivery, maybe because of her studies that had been cut short, she felt she had nothing to lose with me, that I was laid bare before her, a stubborn old Jew. What are you doing here again, she asked, what can a man be looking for at night among his enemies? Why are you bothering and frightening my father? What do you want from me? That I'll offer you compassion for your soldier? Why should I feel sorry for a soldier who invades a space that does not belong to him and doesn't care about us, who we are and what we are? Who takes over a family's roof in order to kill one of us, and thinks that if he does us a favor and leaves us a clean bucket, washing away the evidence of his fear, we'll forgive him for the insult and humiliation? But how can we forgive? Can we be bought with a clean bucket?"

"That's how she explained it to you? As an added insult? That's crazy."

"No, Daniela, don't make life easy for yourself. She's not crazy. She's strange, but not crazy. Idiosyncratic, but not crazy. She spoke with clarity and logic. We are sick and tired of you, she said. You took land, you took water, and you control our every move, so at least give us a chance to join you. Otherwise we'll all commit suicide together. But you, for all of your ability to bore your way into other people, you are closed up within yourselves, not blending in or letting others blend with you. So what's left for us? Only to hate you and pray for the moment that you will move away from here, because this will never be a homeland for you if you don't know how to blend into everything that's in it. So go on, she says, pick up your walking stick again and get out of here. Even the baby in my belly is waiting for it."

"What was her name?"

"She wouldn't tell me."

"You quote her as if she actually convinced you."

"She didn't convince me, but she impressed me. With her female confidence. And the pregnancy saddened me greatly. Because if Eyali were alive, I could have a daughter-in-law like that, who would give birth to a child who speaks sweet Hebrew."

"Again with the sweet lovely Hebrew? In what way sweet?"

"When Arabs speak proper Hebrew, without mistakes, even more flowery than normal, there's often a sweetness to it. The accent becomes softer, and because they are self-conscious about pronouncing
p,
afraid it'll come out as
b,
they stress it more, with a sort of anxious musicality. The verb in their sentences comes at the beginning, and the shift in word order creates a dramatic difference. And there's also a singsong phrasing that turns a statement into a question, so that instead of saying, It hurts me, she'll say, And how can I not be hurt? And instead of saying, I hate you, she says, How can people not hate you? Something like that."

"And this is sweetness?"

"To me it is."

A
T MIDDAY IN
an ambulance descending from the mountains to the coastal plain sits the elevator apparatus in its entirety, one of a kind, in back with the four Filipinos, who keep their distance from it. Old Ya'ari is there, too, sitting in the wheelchair, feeling satisfied that the disassembly was achieved without mishap, thinking over the next step: how to convince Gottlieb to make a new piston that will fit the fork lift.

He is still ashamed of his tearful outburst on his friend's doorstep, but he is also grateful to her for wisely recasting his weakness as a strength. In any event, it was good that he resisted her offer of lunch. Who knows, he might have cried again over the cake.

Ya'ari and the expert are crowded up front with Maurice, listening to the ambulance driver reminisce about his last trips with
Ya'ari's mother. When I see your father alive and kicking in his wheelchair, I miss her. She was a real lady, and when she died she was your age, Amotz, but had no complaints or bitterness.

Ya'ari confirms that diagnosis and distills the purpose of life into one short sentence: Do everything possible to leave this world without complaints or bitterness. But his own final test has not yet arrived, and for now he has nothing to do but wonder why it's already afternoon and no one has called from his office asking a question, requesting advice, or reporting a complaint—as if his business can actually go on without him. Maybe there's another children's play today? he wonders and phones his secretary, who assures him that all his employees have come in, despite it being the tail end of the holiday, and are working diligently, and that no problem has arisen among them requiring the boss's wisdom and experience. However, there is a stranger who has been sitting in his office for several hours and insists on waiting for him.