Friendly Fire

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Perhaps Amotz could have dealt with Yirmiyahu. Not for himself, but for Shuli, and also for Elinor and Yoav, so that they might return to Israel after their studies. Only Amotz, with his straightforward intelligence, could have wrested a commitment from Yirmiyahu to keep in touch with the family, at least till his black mood died down.

  But Amotz, she thinks to herself with mild disdain, is obviously taking advantage of her absence to go to bed even earlier. She can see him in her mind's eye in his red flannel pajamas, climbing into their big bed at this very hour, surrounded by the photos of the children and grandchildren on the walls as he gathers the financial pages of the newspapers from the floor and gets under the big quilt, without feeling that he ought to be not in Tel Aviv but here, on a remote African farm, awake and ready to do battle with a man bent on destruction.

  True, nihilism can be a mask for terrible personal trauma. But she knows that self-hatred cannot lead to rehabilitation. Yet she herself is helpless in confronting Yirmi and refuting him with serious arguments. She is a teacher of English: she deals with the meaning of words, with grammar, and sometimes with the analysis of characters in short stories and plays. But Amotz's head is filled with facts and figures, and he can remember the number of dead and wounded on both sides not only in Israel's wars but also in the wars of other, far away nations. When he reads at all, he reads biographies and nonfiction, which is why he can come up with examples from times and places she didn't know existed, why he is able to compare Israelis with other peoples and distinguish real blame from imaginary blame. He should have been here by her side to rein in his brother-in-law, not merely for the sake of truth, but also so there would be hope for their children and his, so that Elinor and Yoav could come back to Israel, with or without their doctorates, and produce at least one grandchild to restore meaning to his life and wipe away the strange sweetness he found in the Hebrew of a young Palestinian woman filled with hatred and scorn.

  In this fierce need for her husband, mixed with resentment, she fails to notice a gentle knocking on her door, until the door moves slightly and is cautiously opened. Through it, to her delight, walks in Dr. Roberto Kukiriza, with the bones of the prehistoric ape, the one who did not manage to fit into the evolutionary chain.

  She blushes and says to him, "I thought you had given up on me, or that you had forgotten your bones."

  "We have not given up on you," he answers in a friendly tone, "and how could we forget our discoveries? But a few colleagues were worried that we might be unfairly involving you in a strange and uncomfortable mission. The fact that you concealed it from Jeremy also caused us some concern."

  "No problem there," she promises quickly. "I am willing to tell him."

  "Very good. This will pacify the doubters. For we wish to be sure that Jeremy is also at peace with what we are imposing upon you. Over at Abu Kabir they are already waiting for you."

  She eagerly extends her hand, and he takes from his pocket a small cloth bag, opens it, and shows her three bones, each different from the others in size and color and shape, and suggests that she pack them in her suitcase.

  "Certainly."

  But he is still reluctant to hand them over and inspects the suitcase lying open on the table to find the right spot.

  "Perhaps we should put them in an unlikely place," he suggests. "Perhaps in your toiletry bag. A clearly female zone they will not search."

  "That's a good idea," she says, and pulls the bag from his hand.

  3.

  AND SO IT has come to pass, muses Ya'ari with pride, all because of my quiet authority. Between two and three in the morning the team of six "wind people" have assembled in the brightly lit lobby of the tower, and beside them, beaming, stands a seventh: Mr. Kidron, chief of the apartment owners' association, holding two emergency flashlights powered by large batteries and silently giving thanks to the winds for not betraying him by dying at the moment of truth. The heavyset night watchman has been dispatched to the gate of the car park to ensure that no resident will show up at the last minute and get trapped between floors.

  The four elevators have been stopped on different floors and must be brought together and then shut down individually. Only then will it be possible to ride on the roof of one of them, traveling slowly the full height of the shaft, casting a light on its walls. Although he carries both a master key and a triangle key in his pocket, Ya'ari prefers not to use them in the presence of the manufacturer, to avoid giving the impression that maintenance is his domain. The technician brought by Gottlieb summons each elevator in turn, shuts down the group control, and then detaches, with the triangle key, the electrical connection between the shaft door and the door of the cab, and in the end all four elevators stand before them open-mouthed, awaiting their inspection of the winds.

  The cell phone of the tenants' leader rings. The guard wants to know what to do about a man and a woman who have arrived at the parking garage with five heavy suitcases. They landed at the airport just an hour ago and knew nothing about any inoperative elevators. What floor do they live on? Ya'ari asks, and when he hears it is merely the eighth, he sternly rules that they should leave the bags in the lobby till morning and go up on foot. But no, the woman is pregnant, and so Ya'ari decides to go fetch them himself in the big central elevator, and orders the technician to get one of the side elevators ready to move.

  "Right or left?"

  Ya'ari and Gottlieb look at the expert, who turns her face upward, listening attentively.

  "Left," she declares. "The defects are on the left side."

  This time Ya'ari takes out his keys, despite the presence of the manufacturer, and reactivates the big elevator and goes down to collect the couple who have returned to their native land. And indeed he finds a pregnant woman and heavy luggage. So, he teases them, you came back to the suffering homeland? But he has only half hit the mark. The couple live and work in America and have even become citizens, but they want their child to be born in Israel, in the apartment they bought as a vacation home, so they can get help in the first few months from the parents on both sides. Practical Zionism, Ya'ari says, chuckling, and helps them slide the heavy bags out of the elevator.

  When he gets back to the lobby, he sees that the preliminary work on the left-hand elevator is proceeding apace. Gottlieb is a professional par excellence and knows every bolt of the elevators Ya'ari designed for him. He stands alongside a dexterous and disciplined technician and instructs him what to unscrew in a shiny, apparently seamless elevator, and the car swiftly bares its hidden electromechanical apparatus before the astonished eyes of the construction company representatives.

  The technician enters the elevator and lowers it a bit without closing the door of the cab, and a few seconds later the group sees him riding on its roof. He operates it using the three-button service controls—two pressed for each direction, up or down. And now, with the elevator suspended between the lobby and the car park, even the lawyer can get a sense of the dark shaft rising upward, divided by the three sets of iron bars that stabilize the movement of the elevators and the counterweights along the guide rails.

  The roof of the car that has been opened up is small, unlike the roof of the big central elevator, and Ya'ari deliberates whether to send only the technician and the expert for an introductory tour of the exposed shaft or to join them. He finally decides to go along. He takes the two emergency flashlights from Mr. Kidron and says, okay, I'm going to cast a light on the ill winds. He hands one to the expert, who is already in position, keeps the other for himself, and says to the technician, Let's go, habibi, we're taking off.

  The elevator floats upward. The technician carefully controls the service buttons so that the car's movement is slow, almost imperceptible. The listener from Kfar Blum is sure that the winds are breaking in at the fourteenth floor, but Ya'ari insists on checking every floor thoroughly. Strong beams from the two flashlights scour the walls of the shaft, revealed in their nakedness as pocked and wrinkled. Here and there spri
gs of iron wire sprout from the concrete—once even an old scrap of newspaper. Now and then what looks like a human face or animal form drawn on the wall, and sometimes a sentence carved in an unknown language. This is no simple job, Ya'ari says to the technician, who looks tensely up into the dark expanse of the shaft as though fearful of colliding with an unexpected object. Floor by floor they glide past iron elevator doors numbered in sloppy and varied handwriting. By the beams of light they scan the walls meticulously, and Ya'ari never asks the technician to halt the gradual climb. But when they reach the thirteenth floor, Rachel says: This is it, Nimer, stop here.

  And indeed, as soon as the elevator falls silent there is no doubt that here is the entry point of the menacing, aggressively groaning wind, as the tiny woman, her flashlight beam licking the wall methodically, points out to Ya'ari something in the shaft resembling open lips or perhaps nostrils, the consequence of faulty casting, or even malice. Like the pipes of a giant church organ, these nostrils produce a surprising variety of resonant—or dissonant—sounds.

  "This is the spot you were thinking of?" Ya'ari asks the expert, who is standing up now, smiling sadly.

  "This is the place. When I came a few days ago to listen to the winds with your Moran, I thought the problem was at the fourteenth floor, so I was only slightly off."

  "Believe me," Ya'ari says, patting her fondly, "God makes bigger mistakes. If your Gottlieb and I were to spend a whole night riding up and down the shaft, we would never come upon this pipe organ. So let's bring the engineer up here and even his lawyer, so they'll see where the wailing comes from and then go back down with the blame and responsibility, and let the rest of us sleep at night."

  He instructs the technician to take the elevator back to the lobby. And when he gets down from its roof, he first of all praises the manufacturer, who has been dozing in the cozy armchair next to the night watchman's table. "A good thing you didn't leave your perfect pitch in Upper Galilee, otherwise you and I would be traveling up and down in that shaft forever." And to the engineer he says, "Why waste words, you won't believe it till you see for yourself. So come on, don't be scared, take a flashlight and sit on the roof of the elevator. The young lady will bring you safe and sound straight to the failures of your construction company."

  The engineer hesitates for a moment, then takes the flashlight from Ya'ari and climbs onto the elevator, and is lifted off into the dark shaft with the little woman and the technician, beaming light in hand.

  Ya'ari sits down in the watchman's chair and interrogates Gottlieb about the technician he brought along with him. Who is he really? Rafi? Nimer? A Jew? An Arab? A hybrid, a mixture, mumbles Gottlieb, half asleep. In what sense? Ya'ari asks. A mixture of all the good things still left in this country, Gottlieb mutters, and closes his eyes.

  The lawyer paces restlessly. From time to time he goes to the elevator shaft and peers upward, as if wondering whether his engineer has been swallowed by the void.

  "Careful," Ya'ari says. "Even falling only two floors down to the parking lot is a bad idea. But if you'd like us to take you up to the defect as well, so you can see why you'll be totally unable to defend it—no problem."

  The lawyer is lost in thought. The head of the residents' association stands to the side, pleased at getting the inspection he had hoped for, but wary of its results. He would have preferred the discovery of a technical flaw in the elevators. A flaw in construction will require repairs that will interfere with normal life in the tower.

  "Maybe you, too, would like to go up and see how the winds make their music?"

  "No," Kidron says nervously. "It's enough to hear it, I don't need to see it."

  The elevator returns to the lobby. The expression on the engineer's face as he gets down from its roof is that of a man who has seen an apparition. He whispers with the attorney, who gathers that he can't justify his fee if he doesn't see the defect with his own eyes. It might be possible to cleverly shift the damages to the insurance company. The hybrid technician sits somberly on the roof, bent over the control box, but the expert's big eyes shine as she invites Ya'ari to rejoin her and take another ride up to see the wondrous natural organ.

  Why not? And this time he won't stop at the thirteenth floor but will soar all the way to the thirtieth. Maybe there he will discover new acoustics.

  "You come, too, and see the organ," Ya'ari says, prodding the lawyer. "I'll take you there myself."

  And the lawyer, a handsome young man, accepts Ya'ari's challenge and prepares to climb up as the latter tells the technician to make way. I also know how to press three buttons, he jokes, and very carefully he heads on high with the lawyer and the expert.

  First he ascends to the top of the shaft, the thirtieth floor, to hear from there the full lung power of the abyss. Far below them they can still see the glowing white light of the lobby. Then he cautiously takes them down to the thirteenth floor, and the expert casts her beam on the lips, or nostrils, of the pipe organ—the handiwork of Romanian laborers, or Thai, or local Arabs, and perhaps intended to lend a spice of life to the innards of the building. But the anxiety of the attorney, who has never before ridden bareback on the roof of an elevator through a dark shaft, has apparently compromised his powers of understanding. Where? Where? he keeps asking insistently. I don't see a thing. Faced with such lawyerly obtuseness, the expert, still flashing the beam of light, stretches her body out to the side of the shaft, to point with her hand at the strange flaws bathed in water stains or mold—and the end of the red scarf wound about her neck catches in the iron track of the counterweight, she stumbles, and the flashlight falls from her hand, plunging like a meteor into the pit below, as she grabs the iron bars that separate the elevators, letting out a yelp of pain that staggers Ya'ari.

  4.

  A FEW MINUTES after the departure of the handsome archaeologist, the visitor hears the engine of the vehicle that waited for him and hurries to her window, just in time to see how the beams of its headlights, piercing the fine rain, stripe the dirt road like a golden whip.

  The bones sit among her toiletries, wrapped in their cloth bag, and for a moment she considers wrapping them in something more to insulate them from the odors of makeup and perfume, but he decides not to. If everything that has clung to these bones deep in the ground for millions of years hasn't impaired their identity, they won't be compromised by the scent of her toiletries.

  In spite of her promise to inform her brother-in-law about her little mission, she would be in no hurry to see him, if she didn't also feel compelled to tell him a few pointed things that might get lost in the swirl of her departure in the morning. She puts on her gym shoes and—although the night is warm—her sister's old windbreaker, and goes down to his temporary quarters. But the door that opens at her touch reveals an empty room and bare bed. Disappointed, she continues on to the dining room. The high table is still on its lofty perch by the west window, and to her amazement it is still covered with the remains of the festive dinner, as are the other tables, and the sinks are filled with unwashed pots and pans. Yet despite the disorder and grime, she feels at home in this place and is not afraid to be alone in the cluttered darkness. And because she thinks Yirmiyahu will pass by en route to his room, she finds a seat by one of the tables and waits for him.

  The silence is absolute. She thinks about the prehistoric bones that have settled in with her makeup and again feels bad about her loyal housekeeper, who will not be getting the lipstick she requested. Should she add pain to disappointment and tell her why and where this special and expensive lipstick was thrown away?

  She brushes the crumbs off a section of the table and lays her head down and closes her eyes. She'll wait for him a little longer, but if he takes his headache as license to closet himself in the infirmary—perhaps with the added confidence that she wouldn't dare go there in the dark—she'll have to give up tonight and postpone her planned speech till the hour of parting.

  As she rests her head on the big table, eyes closed,
sleep flutters over her like a little bird, and for a few minutes she drifts off. And when she lifts her head heavily and opens her eyes in the dark, for a moment she doesn't know where she is, and in the faint light of the windowpane she sees the silhouette of a little elephant, its trunk lifted silently skyward and its wondrous eye floating alongside—an independent creature, flickering in all its blueness.

  But the mirage quickly fades and again becomes the silhouette of the high table, the blackened skeleton of the giant branch that burned during the festive speech, left leaning there, and the glowing embers in the belly of the stove, whose door was left ajar.

  Now, at last, her whole being is broken open by the pain of longing that she came to find in Africa; the loss of her sister finally batters her, here in the big kitchen, with a force she has never yet experienced. She gets up and lightly kicks shut the door of the stove to hide the dying fire, and lets her tears find release in a long, lingering sob that convulses her entire body.

  Yes, perhaps her excessive devotion to her two grandchildren in the past year was also intended to muffle that longing, which is why she had to come alone to Africa to join in her brother-in-law's grief. But Yirmi, shackled by his attempt to find meaning in the fire that killed his son instead launched friendly fire at his wife and her family. Oh, Amotz, maybe your intentions were good, but you could not imagine the falsehood bound up in the phrase you blurted out when you brought the terrible news.

  Tonight, following the monologue about separation and disengagement that Yirmiyahu subjected her to, it's natural and understandable that he would try to avoid her. He knows her well, and knows she can respond harshly and judgmentally even when she seems to be a cheerful and receptive listener. Therefore tomorrow morning he will be quick to send her on her way. You have to rush, he'll say, the rain overnight mucked up the dirt roads; Sijjin Kuang is a stickler for timetables and hates to be late.