A. Yehoshua - Friendly Fire - A Duet

"No," she hastens to respond, "not yet."

Once again, he and his car are swallowed up by the underground parking beneath the tower, but this time it's hard to find a spot. Can it be that even as the winds have grown worse, all the vacant apartments have found tenants? As he cruises the two floors of the garage, the gloomy voice of the tenants' spokesman blares from his car phone: Take my parking spot, Mr. Ya'ari. I left it open for you.

On the elevator landing of the lower floor the groans can be heard at full volume, and the expert's childlike face radiates satisfaction. They go up to the lobby level, where the night watchman directs them to Mr. Kidron's flat on the twenty-fourth floor. Signs lettered with an ink marker and bordered with thick black lines are posted on the walls of the lobby and the doors of the elevators. On first glance they resemble formal death notices, but a second look reveals they are merely warnings: Between two and four A.M. all the elevators will be shut down to enable the search for the winds.

The door marked kidron family is wide open, and all the lights are on inside. On the dining table, late-night snacks are laid out alongside carafes of black coffee. Gottlieb, who arrived earlier with a technician, is half-sprawled on a sofa, eating energetically while inquiring about the family connections of the lady of the house, a chubby, nervous woman clad in black and adorned with an engraved gold necklace. Her husband, too, is formally attired, in a dark suit and tie, as if dressed for battle with the representatives of the construction company, who are running late.

"Representatives?" Ya'ari says with surprise. "In the middle of the night they're sending us more than one person?"

Yes, both an engineer and a lawyer are on their way. These days no self-respecting company would come to such an investigation without an attorney, and since the country is flooded with lawyers the prices for nocturnal consultations have dropped precipitously.

Ya'ari introduces himself to Gottlieb's technician, a powerfully built man of about fifty, who sits communing with himself in a corner by the balcony, toolbox at his feet, coffee mug gripped tightly in both hands.

"Rafi." The man whispers his name with a downcast gaze.

No family warmth is evident between Gottlieb and the expert. The little woman avoids her stepfather, puts a cookie on a plate, and sits down near the technician. Tomorrow morning, Gottlieb informs Ya'ari, the work I am doing for your father will be done. But he will still need the mercy of heaven for his piston to function again in Jerusalem.

"Even if it doesn't work," Ya'ari responds coolly, "it's not the end of the world. Believe me, my father's tyranny has worn me out."

"Your father's tyranny? You're complaining? Hey, it's the same tyranny that woke me up tonight for this bit of theater."

"It's not worth it to you to get up in the middle of the night to clear yourself of blame and responsibility?"

"Not if I'm bringing two technicians getting paid at the nighttime rate."

"We're taking care of your young lady."

But the young lady, her star-bright eyes attentive to the discussion, says, leave him alone, Gottlieb, I don't need any payment. I'm happy enough just to listen for them, the father and son.

"Sure," Gottlieb waves her off sourly, "I know you both think I'm a miser, but you forget how much disability insurance I have to pay so we're covered if there's an accident. In my factory there are machines that can cut a man in half in two seconds, and then what? Who's going to pay for sewing him together? Me from my own pocket?"

"Gottlieb, my friend, there are no machines here."

"Yes, well, we're about to survey a dark shaft thirty stories high."

Ya'ari wearies of the pettiness and wants to break off the conversation, so while his host phones the tardy representatives of the construction company, he asks the wife's permission to go through their apartment to see if any drafts can be felt through its walls. Follow me, says the nervous woman, and leads him first into the couple's bedroom, the scrupulous neatness of which betrays that they have not been in bed this night. A small terrace off the room faces the southeast part of the city, and Ya'ari invites himself out for a look and again stands above the urban vista he surveyed six days before from the tiny balcony of the tower's machine room. On that long-ago morning the sky was overcast; now sharp points of light sparkle in the night. Amid the downtown skyscrapers, the looming colossi of the Azrieli project, and the proud tower at the Diamond Exchange, multicolored advertisements and the latest headlines alternate on huge digital screens; cropped-haired, leggy women touting dishwashers and clothes dryers segue into reports of the Iranian nuclear threat.

Plump, quiet Mrs. Kidron stands by his side, fondling her gold necklace and lifting her eyes toward a passenger plane that lowers its landing gear as it glides downward over the city. Ya'ari looks at his watch. Sixteen more hours until Daniela's arrival, provided that no wild beast has eaten her passport and ticket, and no arbitrary official has decided to change the flight schedule.

"Your son… the soldier," he mumbles, almost casually, his eyes still fixed on the plane, "did he get to know this new apartment?"

"No. He was killed two months before we moved here. We wanted to cancel the purchase, but it was too late."

"Why cancel it? Doesn't it make it a little easier, moving to a new place?"

"So we hoped, but in the autumn these winds started up, and they only made us more depressed."

"Depressed because of the winds? But it's purely a technical problem."

She regards him with a fearful expression.

"Is that what you believe?"

"I don't believe it; I'm certain of it."

Another passenger plane, a jumbo jet, zooms in from over the sea and prepares for landing. Ya'ari asks his hostess if he may have a look in the other rooms. She leads him through a small book-lined den into a children's room filled with toys, similar to the room Daniela set up at their house for the grandchildren. Ya'ari listens carefully. Yes, the groaning wind is only in the shaft and stairwell. The apartment itself is quiet. He feels a sudden need to see a photograph of her son, and he lightly touches the lady's hand and asks for one. But the mother refuses his request. All photos of their son are hidden deep in a closet, because the parents resolved to keep him with them not through photographs but through memory and, above all, imagination. Both of us, says the mother, agreed not to get stuck on an image fixed in time. We try to go back and connect through activity, take him to places he never saw and imagine how he would behave there. We want to keep him in perpetual motion, allow him to grow and even grow old, so he will not be forever frozen in pictures from childhood or the last photos from his military service.

Ya'ari's heart skips a beat, and he nods silently. Then he asks to be directed to the lavatory. He is quick to lock the door, and when it turns out that the switch is outside he does without light. He pulls down his pants and sits in darkness, tense, angry, perhaps in pain, lost in thought.

The wall behind him appears to be an exterior wall, and despite the late hour he can hear water flowing as well as the wailing wind. He feels a gathering sense of anxiety over Daniela's arrival. He is worried about malfunctions and delays on flights from Africa. But he still trusts the practical wisdom of his brother-in-law, who will know how to get his wife back to her homeland.

New voices are heard in the apartment, young and laughing. The representatives of the construction company have arrived to grapple with their guilt.

IN THE END they forgot to give me their bones, Daniela realizes, with disappointment, when she sees from her window that the two pickup trucks are ready to take to the road. But I won't run to remind them. Apparently it's not that important to them, or they don't trust me, or maybe this is another third world shortcoming, an inability to follow through. Yet not only was I not afraid to take the package with me, I was delighted to help them.