A. Yehoshua - Friendly Fire - A Duet

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 sprigs 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.