A. Yehoshua - Friendly Fire - A Duet

From the look she casts his way, it's clear she is waiting for a rave review for her performance, but Ya'ari prefers to keep quiet. Daniela has already warned him against giving his daughter-in-law the sort of compliments that a man gives a woman. You do not look at your daughter-in-law through the eyes of a man. Even what was permitted to her father is forbidden to you. Indeed she was right. For as she bends over her sleeping son, lying beside him on the sofa, to determine whether she ought to move him to his bed, the perfumed breasts that nearly brush his face, and in particular the tiny tattoo engraved above one of them, ignite a strange desire that for a brief moment takes his breath away.

"Don't move him. Let him stay here with me. Even if he wakes up, I'll manage with him."

"The main thing," she says, astonishing him, "is not to show signs of fear or weakness, because then he gets crazier."

"Gets crazier? You're not exaggerating?"

To be on the safe side, in case of an emergency, she puts Baby Mozart into the VCR. From Neta's infancy Ya'ari remembers fondly the little railway cars carrying adorable animals and the dancing of these animals, and the car that vanishes and then reappears and reconnects and disappears again, and the sea lions sliding and climbing and sliding and climbing, all of this to the masterful music of Mozart, which according to researchers calms the souls of toddlers and at the same time sharpens and broadens their minds. If such a video had been available in my day, Ya'ari likes to complain, I wouldn't be a mere engineer today, but rather a major scientist.

Overriding his objections, the gorgeous mother insists on tiptoeing in her high heels into the children's bedroom to say good bye to her drowsy girl, and to allay any potential separation anxiety by telling her that her grandpa, strong and alert, will protect her from evil spirits and bad dreams. Half-asleep, the girl mews a little protest. For the life of me, Ya'ari protests, I don't see the point of all this frankness. But Efrat's beauty apparently obliges her to report her every movement, so that her husband's imagination will not torment him. Now she wraps herself in a thin blue shawl that matches the color of her eyes.

"You won't be cold?"

"It's fine, I'll be driven door to door."

And before leaving, glowing with happiness and gratitude, she wants to kiss and hug tightly the available old babysitter, but he pulls away, lightly touching her hair, so that her flesh will not get too close to his.

"Go… go… you're wasting time."

The moment the door closes a heartrending cry bursts from the bedroom: Imma, Imma'leh, where are you? And when he hurries in and turns on the light, he finds his granddaughter, a darling duplicate of the vanished mother, standing in her bed and stubbornly wailing a lament: Imma, Imma, Imma'leh, where are you? Why did you go?

Neta is considered a well-behaved and rational child, and compared with her wild brother is sometimes defined as an angel come down from heaven. Ya'ari is therefore certain he will easily be able to calm the crying that has left her anguished and shaking. But when he tries to take her in his arms, she only increases her shrieking, propping her head with her little hand as if it were about to fall off.

He shuts the door to the children's room so that her cries will not wake her brother, but it's too late. The toddler is pounding on the closed door now with his little fist, and when he enters — barefoot, agitated, red-eyed — he climbs at once onto his bed and sits in a weird cross-legged position, coolly studying his blubbering sister, waving his little foot like a pendulum.

"But I'm here, I'm with you, I'm taking care of you," Ya'ari tries to convince his granddaughter that she has not been abandoned, but her weeping has its own momentum now and nothing will stop it. She is still holding her head in her hand, as if she felt a stroke coming on, and out of that vertigo of lamentation, throttled now and then by deep internal sobbing, throbs the relentless dirge: Imma, Imma, Imma'leh, where are you? Where did you go?

Ya'ari is desperate. He anticipated a battle with Nadi, but not with Neta, who is always willing to cooperate. And so, after unsuccessfully trying to calm her with promises, he decides on a new tactic.

"But how can this be, Neta, my darling, a big girl like you, look how your little brother is sitting quietly."

He instantly regrets his words, as a squawk of deep humiliation cuts into the weeping.

So they sit, the three of them, trapped in a loop of lamentation and monotonous wailing whose immediate cause is by now forgotten, as if performing a ritual of ancient, prehistoric loss. And her brother sits on his bed, still waving his foot. He is only two years and a few months old, but his broad, strong face testifies that he is bound to grow into an aggressive man, if not a violent one. He reminds me of somebody. But who? It is a question Ya'ari has asked himself countless times. He smiles softly at his grandson and asks for advice: So what now, Nadi, how do we calm your sister down?

"Nana wants her Imma," the toddler sums up the situation for his grandpa.

"I WANTED THE feel of that roof at night, but the military would only approve a visit in the daytime. Finally we compromised on late afternoon, which extended a bit into darkness. The company commander was friendly and tried very hard to satisfy my curiosity and to help me understand. And because he was an experienced and serious officer who knew the local residents well and wasn't afraid of his shadow, he gave himself the authority to deviate slightly from the instructions of his superiors and allowed me to remain standing on the roof, on the spot where Eyali stood, until after sundown, when lights began to go on in the houses."

At the African farm, evening is also not far off. Yirmi sits with his back to the open window, facing his bed, where his sister-in-law now lies with the novel she read slowly through the afternoon spread open at her side.

Yirmi has obviously slept soundly, without interruption. His eyes are wide open, his face is free of anger, and he exudes a pleasant, freshly washed smell. He has exchanged the sweaty clothes of his nighttime trip for clean and ironed ones; he knocked delicately on the door to his room, and only after verifying that Daniela was not asleep and was quite willing for him to enter did he do so, and turned his desk chair toward the bed and sat down with the luminous African plain stretching behind him.

"And of course it never occurred to Shuli that you were going there."

"Of course not. You think I would scare her, let her worry that she might lose me too in the same place? Even after I went there I told her nothing, because I knew she would be sure, and rightly so, that I would want to go back."

"And you did want to go back…"

"I didn't only want to, I did. But alone, without any Israeli beside me."

"And you didn't tell Amotz either."

"That's right. Because I knew that there were no secrets between you two, and the minute you knew — you, who can't keep a shred of a secret — it would get to your sister at the speed of sound."

Daniela tries to object, but she knows he is right: it is hard for her to keep a secret from her loved ones. She pulls at the blanket to cover her bare feet and suddenly longs for her mother, who died two years after Nofar was born.

"But how could you get permission to go on that roof?" she asks testily.

"It wasn't hard at all, amazingly enough. In the bereavement department of the Defense Ministry, there's this little office set up especially to deal with odd requests from parents, or children, or siblings who have lost a loved one. A middle-aged official sits there, who is himself a longtime bereaved father. He works as a volunteer alongside a woman officer who is very skilled and efficient. She makes the connections with army powers that be. A visit by parents to the place where their child fell is not unusual, provided that the area is no longer a war zone, such as Sinai or the Golan Heights or even the Lebanese border. But in the occupied territories, it's a complicated affair because there's no battlefield and yet the whole thing is a battlefield. But they still have enough flexibility to accommodate a parent, or even a brother or sister, who wants to experience the feel of the place where their loved one was killed, and perhaps also to understand why, for what. You get what I'm saying?"