Friendly Fire (19 page)

The first thing he does is lower the volume on the TV. Then he raises the blinds and restores the daylight, and only afterward begins his interrogation of the babysitter, as if she were to blame simply for being there.

"Has their mother called?"

"No."

"And their grandma?"

"No."

"So who has called?"

"Just you."

But Nadi jumps up and says, "Not right, also Abba talked to us."

"Abba called?"

"Yes." The babysitter remembers now. "After you called."

"And what did he say?"

"He was looking for Imma," Neta says helpfully. "He said that the army is still keeping him, and Imma should send him warm clothes."

"Underpants," Nadi adds, "Abba needs underpants. And also undershirts."

"And that's it?"

"That's it," says Neta.

"No," her little brother corrects her, "he also kissed his telephone."

Now Ya'ari's anger has cooled, and he allows the babysitter to turn up the roar of some forest animals who at the moment are dancing merrily with the program's host. Then he goes to the fridge to see what's in it before asking whether anyone is hungry. They are all hungry, especially the chubby babysitter. He eagerly volunteers to remedy this, and, swiftly prepares little sandwiches, garnishing them, as he has learned from his wife, with graceful curls of cucumber, and serves them to the entranced children on the floor. Then he makes a bigger sandwich for himself and strolls with it around the apartment.

Because he sees Moran every day at the office and Daniela prefers to look after the grandchildren in her own home, he does not often visit the home of his son and daughter-in-law. Now, in their absence, he takes the opportunity to get to know it better. First he explores the living room, checking out the CDs and videos, then moves to the children's room, to have a look at their drawings and games, and from there he heads into the bedroom and finds the double bed very messy, looking as if on the previous night two people slept there, not one. He examines his son's clothing and
finds that unlike the conjugal bed, the clothes in the closet have merited orderly arrangement. Trousers and shirts are hung up, sweaters are neatly folded and stacked on the shelves, and in the underwear drawers nestle carefully sorted briefs and undershirts.

What happened with the army this time? Why have they suddenly become so heavy-handed? Next to the bed a PDA is blinking. He easily locates the number of his son's army unit, and after a second's hesitation, he calls it. The young female soldier who answers knows of Lieutenant Ya'ari and even has an idea of where he may be confined. For although the soldiers have already been sent to man checkpoints in Samaria, the adjutant officers of the reserve battalion remain inside the 1967 border at the training camp near Karkur.

"Karkur?" Ya'ari closes his eyes a moment and conjures a map of Israel. "Karkur? That's not so far away."

"What can you do?" grumbles the clerk. "Everything is close by in this country."

Ya'ari returns to the living room and finds that the babysitter has again shut out the daylight, the better to bond with the TV. The jungle animals have completed their dance, and now a sharp-tongued human is conducting a heart-to-heart conversation with a group of boys and girls on the subject of proper parenting. His granddaughter, Neta, still a bit young to pass judgment on her parents, has repaired to her room to begin a drawing. Nadi, meanwhile, is sleeping soundly on the floor, and the young babysitter is not strong enough to lift him onto the sofa. Ya'ari hurries to gather the slumbering toddler in his arms, marveling at how heavy the boy is, as if something extra were hidden inside him. Wanting him to sleep soundly, he passes by the children's room and Neta's artistic activity and carries him to his parents' unmade bed. With loving compassion he removes the child's shoes and covers him with their blanket. Then, observing the high forehead and strong, almost cruel line of the child's jaw, he asks himself: This boy, who does he remind me of?

"How much do you get an hour?" he asks the young babysitter, whose eyes are still fixed on the screen, when he goes back into the living room.

He then learns that she is not the original babysitter: that's her older sister, who collects the salary and pays her a portion as subcontractor.

"Subcontractor?" says Ya'ari, laughing.

"That's what she says I am."

"What's your sister's name?"

"Yuval."

"You should know that Yuval is exploiting you."

The babysitter is stunned; glittering tears appear in her calflike eyes.

"I was only joking..." the grandfather says. "It's certainly not your fault." He feels the need to console the chubby girl but is careful not to stroke her. Enough, it's time for him to get out of here. But the menorah displayed on top of the television bothers him. It is blotched with drops of wax, and the stumps of two of last night's candles are still stuck in it, as if a natural or man-made wind had prevented their peaceable extinction. He extracts the bits of candle, takes the menorah to the sink, puts it under hot water from the tap, and then scrapes off the wax drippings with a knife. Before returning the menorah to the television he sticks in four white candles plus a blue shammash for the evening's lighting.

If Nadi were awake, it would be possible, although it's still daytime, to light candles with his grandchildren and even sing a brief song with them. He smiles at the babysitter, but the girl has not forgiven him for insulting her big sister. So what is he doing here, damn it? He takes hold of himself, and an urge to exert control snaps him into quick action. In the kitchen he finds a large clean garbage bag and tiptoes with it into the bedroom. Nadi is still sleeping soundly. He carefully opens the closet and stuffs two pairs of pants into the bag, along with a heavy sweater and a light one, adding handfuls of underpants and undershirts, as if this were not
a confined soldier but a long-term prisoner. Afterward he writes on a slip of paper his cell phone number and that of Grandma Yael and gives them to the girl.

She looks at the phone numbers.

"Yael is your wife?"

"No, Yael is the other grandma. My wife is in Africa."

And when he goes to say goodbye to his granddaughter, she clings to him, why are you going? Stay, Grandpa, but he kisses her with finality. I have to bring Abba warm clothes so he won't be cold, but Imma will be back soon.

He slings the trash bag over his shoulder and leaves the apartment and doesn't ring for the elevator but rather stamps quickly down the stairs out into a twilight world and a gorgeous winter sky, blue and orange and white.

U
NWILLINGLY, DRIVEN BY
his sister-in-law's firm demand, Yirmi signals for the two porters to follow him, and under a colorless sky, into a cold wind and a light rain that prickles their faces marches their small and singular procession, led by a white man, old and bald though tall and fit, clutching the arm of a middle-aged white woman shielding herself with an umbrella, and a short distance behind tread two barefoot porters with baskets on their backs; as the four pass the building of the former Israeli diplomatic mission, now occupied by a Chinese tobacco company, they are suddenly joined, as out of thin air, by the stately nurse Sijjin Kuang, also attended by a barefoot porter with a straw basket affixed to his shoulders. Now all six walk together along a street of whitewashed houses and up to the door of the clinic. The entrance is clogged with patients and their companions, but Yirmiyahu, in the strength of his whiteness, leads the procession past them into the building, where without asking either doctor or nurse he confidently navigates his way to a sickroom with
five beds, and points to a bed by the window: the last stop on Shuli's rapid departure from this world.

And now in her sister's bed there lies a young man, a Tanzanian who looks with alarm at the white man and woman who stand before him staring, and at the Sudanese woman who towers behind them, and Daniela, unable to contain the emotions that emerge as powerfully and gloriously as she had hoped, approaches the bed and takes the hand of the young patient and squeezes it in friendship, adding a few words of encouragement in English. And the African, although he may not comprehend their meaning, understands their kind and consoling tone, for he takes the liberty, this young man, of stroking that friendly white hand. And the caress of the delicate black fingers of a sick young man, beside the window through which her sister's soul left this world, justifies absolutely the long journey she has made from Israel to this place.

Now the three porters, who with their baskets still on their backs also followed the imperious white man into the room, make way for the doctor and nurse, arrived in haste to demand the reason for this unprecedented invasion. Yirmiyahu introduces himself, and his sister-in-law and explains. They nod with understanding and sympathy, and because they are new to the infirmary, they call for a veteran doctor, who remembers well the white woman who died here the year before. And although he has nothing to say about the treatment they never had a chance to begin or the respirator that was late to arrive, he can at least testify that she passed away quickly and without undue suffering, lying in the bed by the window.

W
ITHOUT CHECKING THE
map for the Karkur exit, Ya'ari heads north on the coastal highway, working his way into a three-lane crawl of thick end-of-day traffic. The air has grown milder, and Ya'ari does not hesitate to roll down the passenger window, hoping to inhale the aroma of well-watered fields and maybe a hint of distant orchards. At this hour the light is at its best, and in the Israeli sky, so boring and monotonous most days of the year, a small drama is unfolding. The setting sun, blazing itself a westward path through the crest of puffy clouds moving in from the sea, sculpts snowy peaks and antediluvian beasts, and ignites the fiery beard of a hoary giant.

In a hundred hours, more or less, he will pick up his wife at the airport. Some of these hours will melt away while he sleeps or works, but at times he will be gripped by longing, mainly for her attentive ear. If his love could take control of time, she would return home sooner. At this moment, however, her absence is an advantage. Ya'ari has no doubt that his wife would have sternly forbidden this sort of expedition. Moran is nearly thirty years old, and his father does not need to show up in his quarters to humiliate him with a bundle of undershirts and jockey shorts. His wife, that Efrat, should be attending to his underwear, instead of her endless training courses.

Moran, however, is not only his son but also an employee of his firm—thus will Ya'ari justify himself at times, half seriously—and as an employer, it is his right and his duty to attend to his personal business. Daniela, of course, rejects this disingenuous double dipping, which gives him, but not her, additional rights in the son they share, and if she were here now she would say, that's nonsense, for you he's only a son, and besides, how can you be so sure that you'll find him or that they'll let you see him? This trip is useless, and afterward don't complain that you're pressed for time. Thus, with her wily wisdom, would she have prevented this trip.

But at the moment her wiles and wisdom are detained in Africa, and he is master of his fate, betting that his ingenuity will save the journey from being pointless. And if he doesn't find Moran, that's not so terrible. Karkur is not far away, the snail-paced traffic allows him to admire the beauty in the winter light and the
movements of the clouds, and Hanukkah lends a festiveness to the overflowing parking lots at the shopping malls of the kibbutzim near Tel Aviv: Ga'ash, Shefayim, and Yakum. The old fields, now pricey real estate, are dominated by an old-fashioned water tower crowned by a big rotating menorah, already releasing light from all nine candlesticks, though the holiday is only half over.

Ya'ari, too, feels released—a pleasant feeling. Only rarely has he the patience to drive confined to the middle lane, with no chance of passing or maneuvering. And since in the lanes to his right and left he has been escorted for the past kilometer by women whose upper bodies and profiles he finds attractive, now he lowers the window on the driver's side so that the two open windows, right and left, create a living, though silent, communion between the two of them, and to his great surprise they indeed notice each other and try to signal right past him.

Now he spots the magnet that has drawn this heavy traffic: an Ikea outlet. Once he passes the commercial strip south of Netanya, the flow of cars speeds up, creating a strong wind that forces him to raise the windows again and turn down the heater. After a bit of hesitation, he phones Nofar and gets her voicemail. Happy to be saved from a frosty, anxiety-provoking conversation, he leaves a warm but carefully worded message. Next he calls the apartment he has just left to see if the woman of the house has returned, but a new voice answers: the babysitter's older sister, come to replace her subcontractor.

"Don't worry, Grandpa," she addresses him officiously, "your grandchildren are already fast asleep. Neta also nodded off in the middle of her drawing. Everything is just fine. If anything pops up, I'll call. I've got your number right here."

Again his thoughts return to the phone conversation with his wife. Now it seems to him there was a mild tension in her voice, as if she were uncertain that her visit was really welcome. And it's true that in the course of his long friendship with his brother-in-law, he
has sometimes been aware of various oddities in his behavior. If since his wife's death he has chosen to stay in a wild and remote place not just as a means of fattening his retirement funds but also as a way of detaching himself from the family, maybe he is not pleased with the sisterly visit she has imposed on him.

North of Netanya the charms of freedom wear off. The three lanes shrink to two; the traffic slows to a crawl again and sometimes stops altogether. The car in the lane to his right, sealed and dark, with tinted windows, keeps trying to cut him off. If he were to start a political party, he would run on a one-line platform: Widen the highway between Netanya and Hadera. Surely that would win a few seats in the Knesset, though it would never occur to him to run for office. Sometimes he too yearns to burn all the Israeli newspapers in a big furnace. But his wife reads them avidly. She who would teach high school must understand reality in order to explain it to her students.