"No prayer book or chapters," she answers impatiently, because she realizes that she will not easily get rid of the young man whose thin, soulful face is adorned with the first signs of blond beard, and who intends ardently to pursue the religious obligation he has happened to incur in an airport on an African afternoon.
"Okay," he says, after considering a moment. "Wait for me a minute and I'll find you a complete Bible. There's time before the flight to Tel Aviv."
He quickly disappears into the big crowd, perhaps to seek the help of his friend, and about ten minutes later returns and presents her with a big new Bible, apparently purchased just for her—a dual-language Bible, Hebrew and English.
The English version is not the King James, but the Hebrew is the same antique Hebrew she has been looking for. She remembered it as Jeremiah Chapter 42, but she finds what she wanted in Chapter 44. And she reads it silently, her insides ringing, as the American yeshiva boy, his face translucent with piety, stands beside her, fascinated and nervous.
Therefore thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will set My face against you for evil, even to cut off all of Judah. And I will take the remnant of Judah, that have turned their faces to go into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, and they shall all be consumed, in the land of Egypt shall they fall. They shall fall by the sword, and shall be consumed by famine, they shall die, from the smallest even unto the greatest, by the sword and by famine, and they shall be an execration, and a desolation, and a curse, and a mockery. For I will punish them that dwell in the land of Egypt, as I have punished Jerusalem: by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. And of the remnant of Judah that have come into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, none shall escape or remain to return to the land of Judah, to which they have a desire to return, and dwell there. For none shall return, except a few survivors.
Then all the men who knew that their wives made offerings unto other gods, and all the women who were present, a great assembly, and all the people who dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying: As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not listen to thee. But we will certainly perform every word that is gone forth out of our mouth, to make offerings unto the Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings unto her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our officials, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then had we plenty of bread, and were well, and suffered no misfortune. But ever since we stopped making offerings unto the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink-offerings unto her, we have lacked all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by famine.
9.
AMOTZ ALREADY SEES his wife from afar, but Daniela can't yet spot him among the crush of welcomers. Out of habit she heads toward the right-hand exit at that slow, even pace he likes, pulling her little wheeled suitcase behind her. He backs away and circumnavigates the crowd, and for some reason there is a new heaviness in his step. So rare is it for her to be the one away and he the one left behind, that he has an urge to delay their reunion, perhaps so she'll sense that he's not always on call when she wants him.
Surprisingly, she, too, does not stop to wait for him, but keeps walking, apparently absentmindedly, and when he intercepts her from behind, as Moran did to him at the army base, his experienced hands, gripping her hips, can sense the sadness and exhaustion of both her body and her mind. And so, as he brings her head close to him, his lips brush not her mouth but her forehead, just the way she kissed him at the moment of parting, seven days ago.
"Done?" he half asks, half declares.
"Done," she confirms, and her eyes, which gleam at the sight of him, are already surprised. "What's this? In my honor you didn't shave today?"
"Not in your honor, I just didn't have time. At night we dealt with the winds in the tower, and in the morning Francisco needed me because my father ran a high fever, and while waiting for Doctor Zaslanski I fell asleep in Hilario's room, and then I had to rush to the airport."
"And you didn't shower?"
"I can't shower there, with all of Abba's stuff in the tub."
"You can only sleep there."
"Sleep and dream."
"And what about your father?"
"His fever went down."
"And you didn't go to the office today?"
"They let Moran out of his confinement this morning, and I sent him to the office to replace me."
"So, in short," she says, gently touching his stubble, "you had a wild time."
"If that's what you call a wild time."
"You know, in work clothes and unshaven you actually look young and cute."
"So I'll stay like this."
"And the winds?"
"Just as I thought, the fault is in the shaft. There were lips and holes in the wall, left there by accident or maybe on purpose, that have the effect of a church organ."
"A church?" she says, laughing, "so what will the tenants do? Cross themselves and pray?"
"The construction company should pray for mercy from the insurance company. Gottlieb and I are off the hook. But wait a second, Daniela, we have to call Moran and tell him you landed. This time, maybe since he was sitting in the army camp with nothing to do, he worried about you even more than I did."
"More than you?" she says, slightly stung.
"After hearing your voice and Yirmi's from Dar es Salaam, I calmed down completely."
"And did you miss me?"
"I didn't have time to miss you." He smiles, knowing this hurts her, attempting to prick this thin crust of estrangement that he did not anticipate. He unlocks the car with the remote control, and instead of putting the suitcase in the trunk, he seats it like a passenger in the back.
"As it happens I did have time to miss you," she says seriously as she buckles her seat belt, "and also to be angry."
"Angry? About what?"
"That you didn't come with me."
He is surprised and not surprised.
"And I thought that's what you really wanted. Quiet time for yourself. To revive childhood memories, undisturbed by someone who doesn't belong."
"After thirty-seven years of marriage," she bursts out, "it's high time you understood that my sister is not only mine but yours, and Yirmi, who is stuck out there, is your affair too. You should have insisted, not let me go alone."
"But how?" he says dumbfounded, "it was you ... you..."
"You ... you..." she mimics him, "yes, but I'm also allowed to be wrong sometimes, and you could have understood and prevented the mistake."
He grins at this. "How could I understand that you were mistaken, if for thirty-seven years you've made sure to convince me that you always know what's right and what's not when it comes to the family?"
She falls silent, only looking at him with a pained expression.
"But what happened there? Why was it a mistake to go there alone?"
"Later."
"At least give me a hint."
"Soon. First you. Tell me about the children, and what happened with Moran and the army."
"He blew off his reserve duty again, but this time they caught him. It was the adjutant of the battalion, an old friend of his from officers' training, who made sure he was confined, and they're going to put him on trial for his previous absences. In the end they'll probably strip him of his rank. That's it, Daniela, no more officers in the family."
"And in your opinion this is a tragedy?"
"Not a tragedy, just a small painful disgrace."
"Not in my opinion. I don't need any more military glory. You should know that Yirmi out there is not just grieving for Shuli, and she wasn't the one we talked about most of the time. He's bogged down in pain and rage over the Eyal story, with ramifications and private investigations we didn't know anything about. The 'friendly fire' you planted in his brain won't let him go."
"I planted in his brain? Me? What is this, you came home ready for combat? Excuse me, I didn't plant any fire, nor could
I. He planted it himself. I just tried to soften 'shot by his own forces' with something that's maybe also slightly ironic..."
"Okay, don't get upset, maybe I was wrong."
"Your mistakes are coming at me so fast, I'm not used to it. What's going on?"
"Enough, let it go, I didn't mean to cast blame, just to express regret that you didn't come with me and help me deal with a difficult and miserable man. But not now. I'll try to explain later. Meanwhile, say a word about the grandchildren."
"Sweet."
"And Nofar?"
"Friendly for a change."
"You kept in touch?"
"Kept in touch?" he says, taking offense. "I personally took care of every family member. First Efrati, I made it possible for her to go to a party on Friday, and all night I babysat the kids who screamed and cried. And on Saturday I drove her and the children to Moran's base, and wandered around in the pouring rain with the kids to give her and Moran—I will elaborate later on—quality time. As for Nofar, I was with her in Jerusalem not once but twice. And on top of all this I had my father, who after you left turned into a lion in love and lassoed me into taking care of a private elevator belonging to an old flame of his, an amazing old lady in Jerusalem. You should have seen the way my father schlepped me back and forth. I was not just a devoted father and grandfather to them all but a good son too."
"So you really did have a wild time," she says with a smile.
"Too wild. Life overwhelmed me from every direction. But what's going on there, in Africa? When does Yirmi intend to come back?"
"He's not coming back. He doesn't even think about returning. Africa, he says, enables him to disengage from everything."
"What's that mean, disengage, and what's everything?" Ya'ari says dismissively. "Is there such a thing as everything? And even if there were, how is it possible to disengage from it? Forget it; Daniela, I know Yirmi no less well than you do. He has no choice, he'll come back in the end."
10.
WHY DOES SHE suddenly find so oppressive the glaring urban milieu that surrounds her? The elephantine towers scattered about the Tel Aviv megalopolis, the giant advertisements morphing one into the next, the aggressive drivers to the right and left, entering and exiting the highways? Even the luxurious front seat in the big car flusters her, as if she still yearned for the backseat of a sputtering Land Rover driven by a sad woman from Sudan.
Her husband talks and she listens, but her attention wavers. Because he is used to her fascination with little details, he tries to convey moods and tones of voice, and weather and colors and smells, happy to recount his activities to her to prove his effectiveness and skill. So he loads his wife with every minutia, not even sparing her his discovery of an erotic video between Baby Mozart and Baby Bach.
"So what'd you do with it?"
"I put it back where it was. What am I going to do with a tape like that?"
"Nonetheless, you watched it."
"Only the beginning."
"And what was in the beginning?"
"What else? Some young woman, a little scared."
"So you really did live a wild life when I wasn't here," she says, sticking to her theme.
"And what about you?" he says in jest. "A wild death?"
"I fought against death," she says, seriously.
"What do you mean by that?"
"First finish your story."
"I've already covered the main points. But first let's get organized."
Their house is dark and cold, and she asks him to turn on the heat. Exhausted and sad, she doesn't linger in the kitchen with him but goes straight up to the bedroom, takes off her shoes, and plops down fully dressed on the unmade double bed that her husband abandoned in the middle of the night. The blanket brushes the floor, and his pajamas are in a heap near the pillow. But instead of feeling at home in the most familiar place in the world, she is unsettled by the many possessions around her. After her spartan lodgings in Africa, her bedroom seems stuffed with extraneous objects. Unnecessary closets and shelves, baskets filled with empty perfume bottles and dried-out compacts. Even the family photos on the walls—she and her husband, children and grandchildren, and the last picture of her nephew—seem excessive in number.
Amotz carries up the suitcase and sets it in a corner, sits down by her feet, and strokes and massages them.
Her eyes close.
"You're not hungry?"
"No. Is the water hot yet?"
"Almost. I turned on the electric boiler, in case the solar heater isn't enough."
"You wash up, too, please."
"Why?" he says disingenuously, "you told me that like this, dirty and in work clothes, I'm younger and cuter."
"Young and cute, but wash up anyway."
He leans over her and kisses her face and neck, stepping up the tempo of his caresses. She is soft, passive, but when he reaches to unbutton her blouse, hoping to bury his face between her breasts, she grabs the masculine hand and stops it short.
"And what happened to that real desire?"
"It exists, it'll come."
"Why not now? What's wrong with now?"
"Now I'm not all here yet. Wait for me."
Disappointed, he continues to kiss her face, her neck, his stubble scratching the bare smoothness of her skin. She closes her eyes in pain and pushes him away.
"Either shave now, or forget the kisses till tomorrow."
"For just kisses it's not worth shaving," he says sullenly, gets up and paces the room restlessly.
"Tell me, what's this excavation team about? What are they digging for?"
She tells him about the team and its scientists, about the evening visit to the dig, about the eating machine that didn't fit into the evolutionary process, and also about Dr. Roberto Kukiriza, who asked her to smuggle prehistoric bones for inspection at Abu Kabir.
"In violation of the law?"
"What could happen?"
"Where are they?"
"In my toiletry bag. But there's nothing to see. Just three dry bones of an extremely early monkey."
But he insists, and quickly finds the bag in her suitcase, extracts the three bones, feels and smells them, holds them close to his eyes.
"That's all?"
"That's all."
"And if they had caught you and arrested you? Prisons in primitive dictatorships are worse than cemeteries."
"You would have found yourself a new wife, a better one," she says, smiling, aching with remorse.
"There is such a person?"
"Of course. There's always someone better."
He now notices the dual-language Bible in her open suitcase.
"What's this? You took a Bible with you on the trip?"
She tells him about the American yeshiva boy, and why she asked for a Hebrew Bible at the airport. He listens with amazement.
"The Book of Jeremiah? I don't understand. What does Yirmi want with that? Is he for him or against him?"
"Against him, totally against him."
"That is to say, against himself a little too."
She wants to drop the subject. The water is hot, she says, go take a shower downstairs, and I'll bathe here. But dim the lights a bit.
And only when she hears the water flowing on the first floor does she enter her shower to check the bite on her shoulder. The teeth marks have already grown indistinct, and all that remains is a reddish crescent, explainable in any number of ways. Nevertheless, she does not want her husband, who knows every inch of her body, to examine it. And she soaps up for a long time, till her flesh grows red.
She puts on a nightgown and gets into bed. Picks up a copy of Ha'aretz and recalls the burning of the newspapers and lets the paper drop.
Her husband ascends to the bedroom, wearing not pajamas but running shorts. His face is still unshaven.
When she wakes up at midnight, she does not find her husband beside her in bed. She goes down to the living room and sees him sitting in total darkness watching a movie on televisio
n.
"What, you're not sleeping?"
"No, I slept all day, and now I'm awake as the devil."
He is a devil, she thinks, and in the darkness the shining screen lends his face a mysterious aura. The devil can still discover, she thinks with dismay and goes to the dining table, where the Hanukkah menorah sits alone, bereft of candles. "What's this? The holiday is over?"
"Not over," he says, "tonight is the last candle. But you fell asleep so quickly."
"So how many candles do we light?"
"Eight. Eight."
"Let's light them, then. I didn't light a single one in Africa."
"In the end he really did burn all the candles you brought?"
"Not in the end, at the beginning." And she takes the box and wonders, "how is it there are so many candles left? Didn't you light any at home? After all, you like playing with fire."
"I lit them here only once—the third candle, with Nofar. The rest burned in other homes. At my father's, and with Efrati and the kids, and at the army dining hall when I visited Moran, and even at Gottlieb's factory. I didn't need to go home and light them by myself."
"So come now." She brightens suddenly. "It's not too late." And she sticks eight candles of various colors into the menorah, adding a red shammash.
"You do it," he says, not budging from his chair. "Because you didn't light a single candle, I'm letting you light all eight."
"All right, but turn down the TV, we can't make the blessing like this."
"You want us also to do the blessings?"
"Why not? As always."
"Then you do them. We live in feminist times, you're not exempt. There are women rabbis out there who go around in prayer shawls and phylacteries."
"But where are the blessings?"
"They're printed on the box."
"So simple and handy."
He lowers the sound on the television, but he leaves the picture on. She lights the shammash with a match, shares its flame with all the other candles, and reads the blessings by their light. Come, she orders him, now we'll sing. He rises reluctantly from the armchair. But please, he insists, just not "Maoz Tsur." It's a song Nofar also hates.
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