A. Yehoshua - Friendly Fire - A Duet

Should she skip over this chapter and go to the next? The reader considers this as her breathing grows heavier. But since she is not in the habit of skimming, she soldiers on, page after page, till the light goes out in the room of the lovers, who have reached supreme satisfaction.

And the furious reader drops the novel to the floor, turns off the light, and waits patiently for merciful slumber.

THE CLOUDS THAT descended before dawn on the coastal plain have spread thickly over Tel Aviv, and at six A.M., when Ya'ari opens his bedroom blinds, he is surprised to discover that not only has his neighbor's house been engulfed by the milky mist but also the tree that was planted in the yard a decade ago to hide the homes from one another. He shakes dead damp leaves from the newspaper flung on his doorstep and tries to detect a breath of wind in the fog, or any trace of movement in the hidden world.

The world is bundled in silence, at ease with its air of mystery. As Amotz drinks his morning coffee, checking Ha'aretz for yesterday's rainfall, patiently waiting for the sun to free his neighbor's house from its shroud of haze, he remembers the idea floated by Gottlieb, who appeared to him in last night's dream pushing the stroller of an alert baby girl clad in a technician's jump suit and with a screwdriver dangling from her neck, who gazed at the dreamer with starry eyes. Here, this is my expert, Gottlieb grumbled, and you would send her all alone, unsupervised, into the shaft? But Ya'ari awoke before he could answer the elevator manufacturer.

The young tree in the garden emerges from the thinning fog, and beyond its branches appears the house next door, with its lights on and the owner, a famous gynecologist, marching along with religious devotion on his treadmill. The phone rings, and Ya'ari scoops it up with the certainty that at this hour it can only be Moran. But to his disappointment it's his father, who should just be getting up and being washed, which requires time and concentration. Something wrong, Abba? No, says the old man, I'm the same as always. But I wanted to ask, before you firm up your schedule for the day, that you come here earlier — in the morning, not the evening. The candles I'll light with Hilario, but you, if you can, come to me this morning. It's something urgent — no, not medically, just humanly.

"Let me guess. That woman in Jerusalem finally got hold of you."

"Not hard to guess."

"But tell me, Abba, honestly — it's not ridiculous for me, or someone else in the office, to try to repair a private elevator from fifty years ago? By the way, did you tell her you're in a wheelchair?"

"No, no, Amotz, we won't talk like this on the phone about Devorah Bennett. You try and get here soon, before work, and we'll sit and discuss quietly how we can help her. Give your father half an hour. No more."

"It's not a question of half an hour. You know how Francisco doesn't like it when I interrupt the morning routine."

"Francisco will forgive us this time. I already talked to him."

THE ANTICIPATION of hearing her husband's voice through the phone in Dar es Salaam reporting on the welfare of her loved ones rouses Daniela from bed, and she is up and about before sunrise. She opens the shutters and leans out to refresh her spirit in the dark chilly air. Then she turns to pick up the novel from the floor and leafs through it to find the place where she stopped the night before. Since her sister's death, she finds herself rereading pages, but by the time she notices, it's too late to skip ahead. Only rarely does a second reading reveal hidden aspects of the characters and events. In fact, sometimes it makes the writing seem even shallower.

She skims the final page of the chapter she finished last night. The sexual descriptions now seem to her less degrading. Is it daybreak that tempers the vulgarity of the nighttime reading, or have her fragmented dreams reconciled her to it? Either way, she has no intention of rereading that chapter, and anyway, it would be better to save the rest of the novel for the trip home, to take advantage of every free minute here for seeing nature and conversing with Yirmiyahu and the locals. So she removes from her passport the stub of her used boarding pass and marks the page.

Despite the open window, it feels stuffy in the smallish room, and after brief hesitation she puts on her African dress and wraps herself in her sister's windbreaker and walks down three flights, noting three or four doorways per floor. She needs to clarify which is Yirmiyahu's temporary bedroom. Although she feels well, and well rested, it's still a good idea for a woman whose blood pressure has gone up to know on which door she can knock at night if something weighs heavily on her heart.

She wouldn't dare to explore outside, even around the main building of the farm, until the sun climbed higher and human voices were audible in the vicinity. But she will try to fix herself a cup of coffee. The huge kitchen is silent, and because she can't find the light switch, she makes do with the glow of dawn in the windows, rummaging among the utensils hanging on the walls until she finds a little pot that resembles a Middle Eastern finjan. She fills it with water, certain that she will also find some coffee, maybe even sugar and milk.

On the day of the terrible news, in her sister's home in Jerusalem, feeling miserable about being late and annoyed that it was she who was assigned to the kitchen, she dropped a big jar of coffee, scattering shards of glass and black grounds all over the floor. The lateness hadn't even been her fault. Moran hadn't set foot in his old school building, not even to share the news of his cousin's death with the principal or the secretary. Instead, with shaking knees he had paced the empty schoolyard for more than three-quarters of an hour waiting for the bell, and only when it rang had he rushed to the teachers' lounge to stop his mother at the doorway, and without saying a word hug her tight and lead her to the exit.

By the time she reached Jerusalem, she had been preceded not only by Amotz but by relatives and friends who had already been informed, so that when she first saw her sister she found her already surrounded by the kindness of others, depriving her of the personal time and space to wrap her arms around the bereaved mother and absorb some small measure of the grief roiling inside her. In those first moments in the crowded living room, she had felt helpless in the presence of women who did not hurry to yield her the place she deserved; it even seemed that they blamed her for being late, and it was therefore she who was sent to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee that might keep her sister from fainting.

Now, in this kitchen that takes up the entire ground floor of a farmhouse, she opens cupboard after cupboard in search of coffee and sugar. But the shelves are bare of food, holding only baking pans filled with fossils. Perhaps these are remnants of extinct animals, but judging by the clutter they seem not to be rare or valuable, like those she was shown last night at the scientists' dining table, and, since they are not destined to cast new light on the origins of man, may merit one more quick look before being thrown in the trash.

An elderly African enters the kitchen soundlessly, walking with a slight limp. He nods lugubriously upon hearing the white woman's request for coffee and sugar, and opens one of the great refrigerator doors, taking out black coffee, brown sugar, and some grayish milk — but whose? From what animal? She questions the old man, who knows some English. And he pronounces the name of some beast utterly unfamiliar to her, though it might be familiar if pronounced otherwise, and she decides she can do without milk until someone more authoritative and precise can clarify its provenance.