"Grandpa put me in a tank," the boy announces proudly.
"Well done, Nadi," his father gushes, "see what a great grandpa I gave birth to?"
The two children laugh.
"Not true, you didn't give birth to Grandpa, he wasn't in your belly," Neta declares.
"Grandma Daniela gave birth to Grandpa," Nadi says, chortling.
Moran hugs them and kisses their heads. And Efrat's eyes, their sandy blue color deepened by the rain clouds above, melt for her children, and she extends a caressing hand.
They've made up, Ya'ari concludes in a flash, judging by the confined soldier's effusiveness. And really, why sit in some unfamiliar café and waste the limited time together with gripes and recriminations, when you can go out into nature, and in the cold and rain of winter salve your wounded relationship with a quick coupling? There will come a time to remember well this Hanukkah holiday, the car's owner smiles inside, as he warms himself in the back, cramped between the children's safety seats; maybe a third grandchild will be born of it. Yes, a bright bloom is returning to Efrat's face, and her calm look, lingering on her husband, is not merely free of disdain but even appreciative of a man who knows how to make the most of a short interlude, and how to recognize, under his wife's rain-drenched battledress, the yearning of her flesh.
And really, why not? Disaster, as we have seen, sometimes lies in wait only a footstep away, so why bicker with your beloved, when you could take pleasure in him? In two days Daniela will return from Africa, and he knows she will want, as always, on her first night home, to know what happened to her husband day by day and hour by hour while she was away. And although she does not like him to speculate about their children's sex lives, this time he will insist on telling her how he stood with the grandchildren at the gate of the camp, exposed to thunder and lightning, while her son and daughter-in-law were out making love in the fields. Yes, he will withhold nothing from her. And therefore, on second thought, he will not spare her the blue video hidden between Baby Mozart and Baby Bach, lest she stumble upon it as he did. But really, why shouldn't she know? In three years she will be sixty, and she is mature enough to understand that there is wilder libido in the world than she has previously imagined. After all, she herself, before she disappeared through the departure gate at the airport, was the one who spoke the words real desire.
10.
DIDN'T FORGET HER? Daniela laughs, astonished, and removes her feet from the opposite armchair, a movement that tilts her a bit backward. But how so? We exchanged at most a few words at the end of the flight.
"True," says the elderly Englishman as he elegantly gathers the skirts of his white bathrobe and sits down carefully in the vacant chair. They exchanged only a few words, but he remembers every one of them and regrets that he had not begun to converse with her at the start of the flight, to hear more about the late sister and the soldier killed by his comrades' friendly fire, and especially about herself, who she is and what she was smiling about the whole time with such tranquillity. But since during most of the flight she preferred to look out the window, as if deliberately avoiding him, it would not have been polite to interrupt her. Was the view really so fascinating, or did she think him not sober enough for conversation?
"Both."
But does the lady really believe that such a veteran drinker as he could become intoxicated during a flight of less than one hour? How many drinks did the stewardess bring him? Two? Three?
"At least five," she says, and smiles at the purplish, white-haired Briton, who sits before her naked under his bathrobe, gazing at her with admiration.
Five? Really? She counted them? Nevertheless, he did not depart the aircraft drunk.
"There was no way of knowing, since two stewards came quickly and took you in a wheelchair. Now I gather they were from this farm of yours. But what matters is that now you are completely sober, and you can apologize to me..."
To apologize to a pretty woman is a singular pleasure ... but, all the same, for what?
"For giving me a calling card from this farm and telling me it was yours, although you are just a patient here."
Correct, says the Englishman, laughing heartily, he is just a patient, but a senior patient, a perennial patient, who returns here every year of his own free will for treatment, and he may thus be considered a bit of a shareholder too. But if she demands an apology, he will readily supply one. Yes, he is sorry that he misled her. He is sorry. There is nothing easier for an Englishman than to utter those words. From the moment he saw her maintain her aristocratic composure when she was detained at the departure gate, he found her attractive, and even more so during their short conversation at the end of the flight. And so, although he knew that the chances they would meet again were exceedingly slim, as she had told him that her visit to her brother-in-law would be brief, he had the notion of planting a little lure, like a hunter seeking to trap a rare animal. And in the end it succeeded, for here she is.
Daniela blushes, but smiles forgivingly.
"You are mistaken. I did not know that you were here. I did not notice that this place is the farm on the calling card you gave me. I simply came along with my brother-in-law, who was bringing a malaria patient, a young woman from the excavation team. But it is true that I did not forget you. I have been a teacher for many years, and I have trained myself to remember my students, and therefore people I meet by chance I remember as well. And when my husband isn't with me and does not demand all my attention, a unique person like you may be engraved in my memory."
To be engraved in the memory of such a lady is a great honor.
"If you want you may call it an honor..." Daniela tries to dampen the slightly sweaty excitement of the bathrobed Englishman, who is beginning to resemble a dirty old man. "But anyway, what are you doing here? You don't seem particularly ill."
That is correct, he is not actually ill, but he will be one day, and he plans to end his life with dignity. As a bachelor without children, living on a modest government pension, in England he has no chance to receive honorable care. In the municipal old-age homes, the old Englishwomen pester the elderly bachelors like him.
"What kind of work did you do?"
In more recent years he worked for British Rail, but his true career was with His Majesty's armed forces. He was too young for the world war, but when he joined up just afterward he asked to be sent to places where there was some hope of active duty, to colonies in Asia and Africa. But after India and Palestine were lost, the other colonies began to demand independence, and by the time he reached the rank of major, not a colony remained where the British Empire might rule honorably and justly without encountering much terrorism. Thus at the age of fifty, if she can imagine it, he became a train engineer for British Rail, and fifteen years ago, when he retired, he decided to return to East Africa not as a colonialist but as a patient.
"And you chose Africa over all the other places you served?"
Yes, of all the peoples of the former Empire he prefers Africans as caregivers. They are more genuine and honest than the Pakistanis or Burmese, and when they care for one's body, they do not try, as do the Indians, to steal your soul. They are modest and not suspicious, like the Arabs, or afraid that perhaps they will be afflicted by European diseases. They are introverted people, and they care for you without too much talking, like veterinarians caring for pets. It is true that the scenery here is less impressive than elsewhere on the continent, but he feels that a monotonous semiarid expanse enables one to depart from life with less anguish and more hope.
"Hope for what?"
Hope that one is not really losing anything by dying. This hope enables one to be indifferent to death, like an animal.
He speaks intimately, but with fluency, as if acting on stage. She finds it odd to be speaking so openly with a stranger, a man old enough to be her father who is nevertheless sitting in front of her wearing only a bathrobe.
"This is your standard of comparison? Animals?"
"Do
n't underestimate them."
"Of course not. Three years ago, when my sister was still alive, and my brother-in-law was an official chargé d'affaires, we came, my husband and I, for a visit of a few days, and the four of us went out to a nature preserve, and it was fascinating to see how they conduct themselves."
Those preserves are filled with tourists, and the animals there have begun to adapt their behavior for our gaze. But here it's a different story. Here they're in the heart of authentic nature, a place where once there was a great salt lake, and if you were to stay overnight, you would see an extraordinary spectacle. Around midnight, animals of all kinds gather here, dozens of animals large and small, who come from the far reaches of the wild to lick the salt from the dried lake bed. And they do so in silence and solidarity, neither bothering nor intimidating one another, each one licking its required dose of salt and going on its way. For this reason alone, it is worth staying here.
She shrugs. Here in Africa she is at her brother-in-law's disposal, and he determines her daily schedule. But if sugar were embedded in the basin of this lake, she too would go down for a taste; and she wouldn't wait till nightfall, but do it now, in the middle of the yellow afternoon.
"Would you?" The old Briton is astounded by such a passion for sweets in a woman who seems so levelheaded. Alas, he has no sweets to offer her. It is forbidden for the patients to keep food in their rooms. But perhaps the bottle of local liqueur stashed in his room might be considered a sweet.
Daniela is ready and eager to taste this liqueur and at the same time to have a peek at his room, since the small lobby, where she has been sitting for more than an hour, has told her nothing about what the rest of this place is like and what exactly goes on here.
But to her great surprise, the man recoils from the idea of letting her go up to his room. No, his room is no sight for a stranger's eyes, and it is also strictly forbidden to invite to one's room guests who are not mentally prepared for the visit. If she would kindly wait, he will bring the liqueur here.
Once again she is alone. In another forty-eight hours she will be in the air, and Africa will fade into memory. In Israel it is Shabbat, and if Moran is still in confinement, she hopes that Amotz is making things easier for Efrat by taking Neta and Nadi to the playground. Her mind springs into alertness and the feel of the worn-out black leather chair suddenly repels her. She puts on her shoes and goes to look out of the window. She can indeed make out a gleaming white area that might be the lake bed. Obviously it would be an incredible spectacle, seeing the animals gathered by moonlight to lick the salt they need to stay alive. But for her the spectacle is over. She'll never come back to Africa, not even if Amotz wants them to go. There are other places in the world. And if Yirmiyahu insists on ending his days here, he can arrange the shipment of the urn of his ashes to Israel himself. That is, if he even wants to be buried beside her sister.
The elevator begins to move. It halts, then moves again—whether up or down is not clear. Finally it arrives, bearing the desk clerk, who has not found her anything sweet, doubtless because he didn't try, but has brought her, as she asked, a book in English: The Holy Bible, the Old and New Testaments in one volume.
So many years have passed since she last opened a Bible. At school ceremonies selected passages from the Prophets are invariably read aloud with great feeling, mainly by girls for some reason, but she can't even remember on which shelf her Bible rests at home. Now here in this desolate plain in Tanzania, of all places, she takes the book she has known since childhood, in this edition joined altogether naturally to the Gospels and Epistles, which she has never read.
Before the desk clerk sits down to resume his archival assignment, she asks him what is taking her brother-in-law and the nurse so long. The rebellious malaria patient is still doggedly refusing to remain, he says. Maybe I should go up to convince her, Daniela suggests helpfully and turns toward the elevator. But the desk clerk springs up in a panic and blocks her path. Visitors who are not prepared may not go upstairs.
If so, perhaps there really is something here that they are afraid to expose, she thinks. She drags a chair over to the window. She has never before read the Bible in a foreign language. No translator or date are listed in the book, but from the lofty English phrases she gathers that this old-fashioned translation is the King James Version. As she starts turning its pages she immediately comes up against words like aloes and myrrh, of whose Hebrew meanings she has not a clue.
She randomly opens to 2 Samuel and reads about Amnon the malingerer, who invited Tamar to his chamber so that she might prepare two ugot—"a couple of cakes," by this translation—and she finds the prose clear and engaging. The English meter of Jeremiah's poetry seems to her stately and beautiful, and she is very pleased by the little English vocabulary test she gives herself. Now she'll try her skill with the speeches made by the friends of Job, the man who cursed the day he was born, and see if they explain the failings of the world better in English than in the difficult Hebrew she recalls from her youth.
The British patient lightly taps her on the shoulder. Now dressed in a shirt and suit, he flashes her a criminal wink and triumphantly waves a bottle containing a golden liquid. What have you found here? he asks his new friend, and she shows him the book and asks boldly which he likes better, the Old Testament or the New. He is taken aback. In two months he will be eighty, and no one has ever asked him to prefer one text over the other. Not even his priest. Christianity has taught us that the Bible is one organic whole, whose elements complement each other and flow from one to another—as in Shakespeare's plays, where King Lear fleshes out and amplifies the madness of Hamlet, and the great love of Juliet for Romeo is transmuted into the devotion of Lady Macbeth to her murderer husband.
His answer surprises her, like an extraordinary answer from a mediocre student of whom she expected little. And the colonial officer, pleased by the effect of his words, hands her a glass and carefully doles out a few experimental drops, and as these are drops, she can only lick them, and their taste is strange and definitely unfamiliar to her, but clearly sweet. She hands him back the glass and says, Let us drink, sir, I am ready.
And very slowly she drains two glasses, and after hesitating requests a third, but the Englishman, who was not prepared for such enthusiasm, which might well empty his bottle, suggests deferring the third glass; the lethal influence of the local alcohol becomes apparent only gradually, he warns her, and it's best to take a break. Meanwhile he gently takes the book from her, as if to renew his old acquaintance with it.
At this moment, Yirmiyahu appears, without Sijjin Kuang, and he is amazed to see that even in such a remote and isolated place his sister-in-law has succeeded in landing an elderly British admirer, who now introduces himself and offers a friendly drink.
But Yirmiyahu, who looks worried, declines the drink. They must take to the road. Sijjin Kuang will stay the night to help the sick woman adjust to the place, and he will now be driving. Although the distance is not great, he had best remain sharp.
"I don't understand," Daniela confronts her brother-in-law in English. "What has one to get used to here? Are there painful sights that require mental preparation? Is it because of the caregivers, or the patients? They even prevent me, a mature woman, from going upstairs, as if I were a schoolgirl."
The Englishman smiles and places a friendly hand on her shoulder. Calm down, Daniela, my dear, he says, with the familiarity of a close friend. There are too many young people here, boys and girls, and it would be imprudent and unfair to expose them.
Yirmiyahu says nothing, and when he sees that his sister-i n-law, still waiting for a clear answer, remains seated in her chair, he grabs her hand, just as if she were her sister, and pulls her to her feet. But Daniela hangs back. She takes the Bible from the Englishman and presses it to her chest.
"What book is this?"
"I asked the desk clerk for something to read, and he found me, you'll never guess, a Bible, in English, with the New Testa
ment too."
"So what? You can leave it on the table."
"No, I want to read it a bit in the remaining days. You see things in the English that you can't in Hebrew. In the meantime nobody here will miss it, and you can return it when you come to pick up your patient. On the condition that you not burn it."
Yirmi's eyes sparkle.
"Why not burn it? Why should the source of all troubles be more immune than the newspapers? This book is where all the confusion and curses begin. This especially must be destroyed."
Daniela regards him quizzically, but still warmly.
"Here it's in English, not Hebrew."
Yirmiyahu looks affectionately at his sister-in-law.
"If it's in English, we'll give it a pardon."
11.
"THIS IS ISRAEL," declares Moran, handing his father the keys. "Thunder and lightning and commotion, then out jumps the sun to calm everyone down. Too bad that nature isn't more cruel in this country, to force the people to fight against it instead of one another. This is winter?" He continues to embellish his observation, perhaps in order to distract them all from the fact that he arrived late and exposed his father and children to the raging thunderstorm. "In global terms, this is just a pleasant autumn."
He and Efrat are standing beside the car, and as Moran leans into the back to buckle his children into their car seats, the redheaded adjutant pops out of nowhere looking for his confined soldier and is surprised by the beauty of his wife. That's it, I have to confiscate your husband, says the adjutant to the woman studying him with mild contempt. Believe me, I could have sent him to the West Bank, to stand at roadblocks and chase wanted men, but I felt sorry for him and preferred to adjust his attitude here. What can I do, I'm a man who doesn't give up even on lost causes. And he suggests to Ya'ari to change his route and take the trans-Israel highway back to Tel Aviv. You won't be sorry; you can now get onto it near here, and even though it's a longer way around, and he had also objected to its construction because of the damage to the landscape, it really is quick and not crowded, and it's silly to keep boycotting it.
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