A. Yehoshua - Friendly Fire - A Duet

"What?"

"We are muzungu, white people. Not actually white but peeled. Our black skin has been peeled from us."

"Peeled? This is the difference?"

"So I hear."

A bicycle rider who suddenly emerges from the darkness settles once and for all the quiet debate among the drivers, and the caravan makes a full U-turn and follows him until the moon bursts into view beyond the hills and illuminates the wilderness.

Yirmiyahu goes back to sleep. The air is cold, and Daniela zips up her sister's windbreaker. She hugs herself with both arms, and her thoughts wander to Tel Aviv. Did Amotz go tonight to light candles with the grandchildren again, or did he manage to cajole Nofar to come home? Now here again are the stream and the huts; the caravan picks up speed. The elephant shed is surrounded by torches and a sizeable crowd. Daniela has an urge to go back and look again, alone, at the miracle of the giant eye. She taps Sijjin Kuang on the shoulder and asks her to stop for a few minutes.

Unescorted and fearless she hurriedly makes her way through the African crowd. When she reaches the entrance to the shed, the elephant's owner has already recognized the white woman and sees the return visit as a sign of respect for the elephant and for himself. He therefore does not ask for an admission fee, but she takes a few dollars from her purse and sets them on his table.

And at this late evening hour, she sees the same sad wisdom revealed in that enormous eye. Daniela asks herself if this genetic defect will remain an oddity and eventually be lost, or if perhaps by some pathway not at all understood something of it will be transmitted into a new human evolution.

AS HE OPENS the door Ya'ari hears water running in the shower. If so, Nofar is already home, he thinks, and that pleases him, though he is nervous about meeting her new friend.

Yes, the friend is here. Not a lover or a boyfriend, just a friend, who nonetheless is not sitting and politely waiting but rather taking the liberty of sauntering around the living room as if he belonged there. This time, a new twist, it's not someone young like her, but rather older. His cheeks are unshaven and his temples are flecked with gray. A man who has met the request of a young friend to come with her, just as a friend, to light candles at the home of her father, who has been left alone on the Hanukkah holiday.

Ya'ari heeds his daughter's warning to curb his usual curiosity regarding her friends' education and training, and does not pry into the visitor's activities to get an inkling of his purpose in life. To avoid an interrogation that will anger Nofar, he talks about the weather, applauds the rain and deplores the strong winds, which sometimes sneak into apartment towers. He adds a gripe about the holiday, which in the past amounted to jelly doughnuts and spinning dreidels and has now been upgraded into a holy respite from work. For example, all the engineers in his firm left at noon for a children's play at the Hall of Culture and never returned.

The friend drifts around the room, his expression pained and suspicious, voicing neither sympathy nor agreement with Ya'ari's remarks. His small deep-set eyes keep reverting to the family photos that Daniela has planted everywhere, on walls and bookshelves. Not like a passing acquaintance, here today and gone tomorrow, but like someone with a stake in the matter, he studies each picture carefully, as if trying to decipher the structure of the family. And when he gets to the photograph, framed in black, of Eyal, he asks in a fevered whisper, "This is the cousin Nofar never stops talking about?" Fear makes the host's heart beat faster. "I wonder how old he would be if he were alive."

"About your age, thirty-two. He was only three years older than Nofar's brother."

But the curious friend doesn't let up. Perhaps he agreed to attend a candle-lighting in a strange home only so that he could learn more details about the soldier who was killed by his comrades' fire.

"Nofar told me that you had to break the news to his parents."

"To his father. I wasn't alone; an officer and a doctor were with me."

"And he really was killed accidentally, by our own forces?"

"Yes, by friendly fire, something like that…," Ya'ari whispers.

"And they had to tell that to the family?"

Ya'ari's face darkens at the stranger who has the nerve to burrow into his intimate life, but for his daughter's sake he controls himself.

"Of course. The media in any case would have made the truth public. But they call it 'our own forces,' and I put it slightly differently, to soften it."

"And did it really soften it?"

Ya'ari does not answer, because at that very moment Nofar enters the living room with her hair wet from the shower. She is wearing black, and her almond eyes, her mother's eyes, shoot him an arrow of warning.

"So, at last we get to see you," he kisses and hugs her tight.

"So come on, Abba, let's light the candles, because we're going to a party. But remember what I asked, only the basic blessings."

He nods and goes to the big silver menorah, already prepared with its four candles, removes the shammash and lights it with a match. Printed on the blue package of candles are the two blessings, which he reads while applying the flame to the first candle. Then he hands the burning shammash to the friend, who uses it to light the second candle, then passes it to the young woman. Nofar heats the tip of the third candle to expose its wick, and when the bluish flame intensifies to yellow-red, she returns the shammash still lit to her father, who restores it to its place.

AND IN EAST Africa, on the top floor of the farmhouse, Daniela turns over on her bed in the dark and has a hard time finding the point of fatigue from which she can confidently slip into sleep. It is almost midnight, and even if in her homeland it's an hour earlier, the candles have surely gone out long ago at her house, and her son and daughter-in-law's too. As for Nofar, she is probably boycotting all lights of happiness till she exhausts the grief in her heart.

Yirmiyahu's detachment could become contagious; she had better be careful. He seems content with his primitive surroundings, and the memory of his wife is growing dimmer. If Daniela can't find a way of arousing memories in him of Shuli, and of her too, he won't do it for her.

She gets up from the bed and opens the shutters wide and looks out on an expanse with no artificial light. Right now she very much needs the touch of her husband's hand. His attentive eye. How easily she could have made him come along.

She turns on a light and examines the skull of the young monkey that sits on the desk. A relative who went extinct a few million years ago and has returned as a replica. She pries his mouth open with her fingers to study his jaws. There's only one real tooth here — which one she can't tell. No, she strokes the smooth skull, you were not an eating machine.

Sleep continues to elude her. If Yirmiyahu hadn't been so quick to burn the Israeli papers instead of just handing them back, she could have lulled herself with old news from home. But there is not a letter of Hebrew in sight, apart from the novel. Last night she read two more pages, and they bored her.

Given no choice, she opens the book where she left off yesterday and moves the lamp closer. The heroine has found herself a new love, or a boyfriend, or merely a friend. Someone involved in shady business. To the author's credit, it may be said that she does not raise false expectations in the alert reader. It's obvious that the relationship will not last till the end of the novel, but attraction and lust will do for now.

Okay, the reader squints, let's see how and why they get sick of each other. On [>] the heroine travels with her friend to Europe. They arrive at a hotel in a capital city, and the author begins without much ado an elaborate depiction of their lovemaking. Daniela is quite tolerant of sexual descriptions in novels; they seldom last for more than two or three paragraphs — a page at most. But this author has decided to go into detail and continue the episode until the end of the chapter: eight full pages dense with foreplay and intercourse. Is the passion that erupts between these characters realistic, that is, equal to the capacities of the heroine as portrayed up to now, or has the author decided to inflame her artificially to satisfy her readers' expectations? The descriptions are very physical, and, as usual with such episodes, repetitive. The language is precise and for that very reason also revolting. This author is shameless; no word is off-limits to her. Daniela feels cheated. Previously the characters, in spite of their weaknesses, have manifested a certain spiritual longing; now all of a sudden, this crude naturalism. She examines the back cover to see if the editor's summary contains any hint to prepare the reader for this vulgarity. But it would appear that although the editor could have attracted more customers, he preferred to keep quiet and protect his reputation for fine literary taste.