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?"
14.
THE 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.
Now they draw near, climbing up from the canyon, young and dusty and most of them naked to the waist, Africans differing one from the next in appearance and hue but all of them astonished to find a middle-aged white woman clad in a colorful African dress and an old windbreaker. "Who is this?" they inquire in English, in a variety of accents.
And Yirmiyahu presents the sister of his late wife, who has left her husband and family and country and come for only a few days to try to connect with the spirit of her beloved Shuli.
The black researchers greet her heartily, impressed by the boldness of this older woman who has come all the way to their excavations of the origins of the prehistoric man who split off from the chimpanzee millions of years ago, in order to grieve for her sister. Daniela is beside herself with excitement, and with the natural assertiveness of a longtime teacher wants to know the names of the half-naked people standing before her, their countries of origin, and the professional expertise of each and every one. Yirmiyahu did not exaggerate in describing the multinational nature of this group that has gathered from all over the continent. Here is an archaeologist from Uganda, and with him a botanist from Chad, and two tall South African geologists, and a Tanzanian anthropologist as black as coal who is the leader of the mission. Behind them stand a physicist from Ghana and an American zoologist from Kansas City who has not forgotten his ancestors and has come from the New World to help verify that humanity began right here.
And as they introduce themselves with their musical-sounding names and their professional titles and energetically shake the hand of the older woman whose English is so fine and precise, she wonders with slight concern if her daughter-in-law has remembered that today she won't be able to pick up the grandchildren from nursery school and day care, even though it's her turn to do so.
15.
THE MILD CONCERN of the woman in East Africa coincides with panic in Tel Aviv, as Amotz arrives to pick up his grandson from day care and discovers to his amazement that this is not one small nursery but an entire network of them sharing a single schoolyard; in the bustling crowd of toddlers in motion, he has a hard time picking out his own.
From the moment he agreed to collect the grandchildren, he has been under pressure. First he tried to move the safety seats from his wife's smaller car to his own, but after getting tangled up with straps and buckles and losing valuable time, he gave up on his car and took hers—which, besides being slower, was almost out of gas. On the few occasions he accompanied his wife to this narrow, crowded Tel Aviv street, he would wait for her double-parked or
in a handicapped-parking spot till she returned with the precious cargo. Sometimes he would wonder how it was possible that from the gate of a yard that looked so small emerged so many little children. Only today, entering the yard himself, does he realize how expansive it is. His inability to locate his grandson's group fills him with alarm, especially when he discovers that because he is a bit late, or perhaps because of Hanukkah, some of the rooms are already empty. And because he is not known here as a grandparent, he cannot simply loiter in the yard and wait, but must dash around till he finds the right child, dressed and buttoned up properly, clutching a little backpack, wearing on his head a paper crown with a Hanukkah candle, staring distantly at the grandfather who joyously falls to his knees before him.
"What happened to your wife today?" the young nursery-school teachers wonder.
For a moment Ya'ari considers whether this is the right moment to list the reasons for her absence, but in the end he gives them an abridged version.
"All the way to Africa?" they marvel, and urge him to warn Nadav's parents that during the holiday jelly-doughnut free-for-all, their son managed to sneak off and join some other kids in an afternoon nap. On normal days they never forget to prevent him from doing so, and make sure they tire him out in the playground, so he won't wear down his parents till midnight.
Ya'ari nods his head and grins. It won't be a problem for his parents, but for his other grandma; he'll be sleeping at her house tonight along with his sister. Right, Nadi?
But the child is listening in suspicious, unfriendly silence, and there's no knowing what he has in store for anyone.
Then the two of them go to pick up Nadi's sister, Neta, a sweet and friendly child, who rushes toward them with a small clay menorah. She instructs her grandfather how to buckle her brother into his car seat.
In the little café across from his son's mother-in-law's house, they know the children well. There's no need for long explanations to get scoops of vanilla ice cream in colorful bowls, one scoop with chocolate sprinkles and the other plain.
"Grandma always takes off Nadi's coat, because he gets it dirty," Neta remarks to Ya'ari.
Ya'ari complies with his granddaughter's instructions and removes the Italian coat from its gloomy owner. Unlike his spouse, he is incapable of recalling in which European city the children's clothes were purchased on various visits, but this particular store in Rome he remembers well because of the coat's ridiculous price.
He tries to help his grandson work at his ice cream, but Nadi doesn't need any assistance. With his little spoon he digs and burrows intently into the depths of the white ball, till the spoon taps the bottom of the dish.
"Another scoop," he firmly demands, but Ya'ari refuses. "In the summertime you can eat two scoops of ice cream, but in the winter one is enough. When I was your age," he tells his grandchildren, "my father would never think of giving me ice cream in the wintertime."
"Is your father still alive?" Neta asks.
"Of course. You don't remember you visited him on Rosh Hashanah?"
Neta remembers her great-grandfather's shaking, which made her scared, but what impressed Nadi was his wheelchair.
Outside, a drumbeat of rain begins. Whether because of the weather or because of Hanukkah, so many people are packed into the café that Ya'ari feels mild pressure to give up the table. But where to go? Daniela knows how to chat with the grandchildren, because she knows the names of their teachers and also their friends. But Ya'ari knows no names, and his attempts to draw the kids out with general questions about the world elicit a neutral yes or no from the girl, while the tough little toddler doesn't even turn his head. Fewer than forty-eight hours have passed since his wife left, and already he longs for her to be seated by his side and in her wisdom to help him engage his grandchildren. He offers to order them jelly doughnuts and hot chocolate, but they're sick of jelly doughnuts, and he has no choice but to violate what he just decreed and order them another ice cream.
Ya'ari is fascinated by the little boy as he expertly sculpts away layer after layer. He has always reminded his grandfather of someone—but who could it be? This question lacks a clear answer. Day by day Neta grows to resemble her mother, but the genetic inspiration for her little brother's features, the color of his eyes, is less easy to divine. Moran sometimes jokes that thanks to all of Efrat's screaming in the delivery room they didn't notice that their darling newborn had been switched with a bad baby.
Daniela always objects strenuously to that: Bad? How dare you? He's just an active child, full of imagination and turmoil, which is why he is afraid to fall asleep by himself. But he is also a thinker, and in the preschool there are children who admire him.
Only after the thinker's spoon has rapped the empty dish over and over does Grandma Yael merrily arrive, wrapped in a fox stole, or possibly wolf, her cheeks red from the cold, a lollypop in either hand. The two kids cling to her with great affection and an obvious sense of relief: she has rescued them from the supervision of a grandfather who asks stupid questions. "Where's the tooth?" Nadi demands.
It seems that Grandma Yael told her grandchildren about the aching tooth and promised to show it to them after it had entered the wider world.
"This kid is fantastic," she says, giving the boy a mighty kiss, "he remembers everything," and she quickly removes from her purse a handkerchief in which a large wisdom tooth, with its little root, has been respectfully wrapped.
Neta recoils. "Yuck," she says. But the little one does not fear his grandma's tooth and even strokes it gently with his finger.
"Does it still hurt if I touch it?"
This is a straightforward woman, without any so-called repression mechanism. So concluded Daniela when she and Ya'ari first got to know their in-law. Yael's lack of inhibitions made it easy for Daniela to weave a warm telephone relationship with the other grandma, but Ya'ari is wary of her. At the last minute, without asking beforehand, she invited to Efrat and Moran's wedding, which the Ya'aris financed, fifty more guests than the number allotted her, and only the caterer's ingenuity prevented anyone from going home hungry. She is an emotional and unpredictable woman, yet all in all a happy one. Even her ex-husband, a bitter, cynical playboy, danced with her at the wedding till after midnight, breaking the heart of his young date.
Ya'ari gets up and puts on his jacket.
"That's it, Grandpa's going," he announces, then suddenly remembers that the teacher asked him to report that Nadi again succeeded in stealing an illicit nap.
"Oy," sighs the grandmother, clasping her hands with dismay, "what's going to happen, sweetie? Another white night for Grandma without sleep?"
"Black," the child corrects her. "Abba says, Nadi made me a black night."
l6.
A BLACK, VELVET night softly blankets the other grandmother at the edge of the basalt canyon. Above her, unfamiliar African stars spin the Milky Way of her childhood into a torrential river of light bursting into the depths of the universe. Somewhere down the slope an unseen generator putters, shattering the stillness, powering the strings of grimy electric bulbs that line the paths between the tents. Closer by, flames dance bashfully under big pots propped on stones and filled with good food.
The Tanzanian team leader, Saloha Abu, invites the guest to the researchers' table, where the cooks are already dishing out generous portions.
"Ask them about their excavations," Yirmi whispers. "Take an interest in their work, they need attention and appreciation."
Daniela nods.
"With your fluent English you'll be able to communicate with them and understand their anthropological explanations, which I can't make head or tail of. Maybe also because my hearing is bad."
"Hearing or concentration?"
"Maybe also concentration ... like any other solitary person."
"Don't worry, I'll show great interest," says the guest, her eyes sparkling as they near the fire, "and not merely out of politeness but also habit. A teacher knows how to engage young people."
The Tanzanian team leader chooses Dr. Roberto Saboleda Kukiriza, an archaeologist from Uganda, to explain the essence to the white woman.
Dr. Kukiriza is a handsome man of about thirty-five. His studies in London polished the English he learned as a child, and he is eager to explain and demonstrate their work. He immediately abandons his plateful of delicacies and hurries to fetch a folding wooden board that has glued to it a colorful map of Africa, indicating anthropological sites both established and potential.
He sets up the map for the guest, adjusting its position to catch the firelight, then turns to this woman who is at least twenty years his senior and says, "I will explain it to you, Madam, but only on the condition that you eat."
The scientific lecture has a political prologue: Dr. Kukiriza begins by deploring the violated honor of Africa and the developed world's loss of faith in its future. Famine, disease, and especially vicious conflicts and wars, have sown this despair. Indeed, one cannot bend the bitter truth that under colonial rule the extent of famine and disease and killing on the continent was less than after independence. Worst of all, the disdainful attitude of the first world, the second, and even the third—which calls Africa the last world—is being absorbed more and more deeply into the African soul itself: depression threatens to dry up the wellsprings of the people's joy. That is why this group of scientists has decided to transcend tribal and national rivalries and try to raise Africa's stature through original and independent research. Without state-of-the-art laboratories and sophisticated equipment, but only simple and inexpensive tools, they are digging and probing the earth to find the source of all of humanity, the evolutionary link between the chimpanzee and Homo sapiens, in order to put Africa back on the map of the world as the cradle of civilization.
Friendly Fire Page 10
