A. Yehoshua: Friendly Fire: A Duet

Amotz carries up the suitcase and sets it in a corner, sits down by her feet, and strokes and massages them.

Her eyes close.

"You're not hungry?"

"No. Is the water hot yet?"

"Almost. I turned on the electric boiler, in case the solar heater isn't enough."

"You wash up, too, please."

"Why?" he says disingenuously, "you told me that like this, dirty and in work clothes, I'm younger and cuter."

"Young and cute, but wash up anyway."

He leans over her and kisses her face and neck, stepping up the tempo of his caresses. She is soft, passive, but when he reaches to unbutton her blouse, hoping to bury his face between her breasts, she grabs the masculine hand and stops it short.

"And what happened to that real desire?"

"It exists, it'll come."

"Why not now? What's wrong with now?"

"Now I'm not all here yet. Wait for me."

Disappointed, he continues to kiss her face, her neck, his stubble scratching the bare smoothness of her skin. She closes her eyes in pain and pushes him away.

"Either shave now, or forget the kisses till tomorrow."

"For just kisses it's not worth shaving," he says sullenly, gets up and paces the room restlessly.

"Tell me, what's this excavation team about? What are they digging for?"

She tells him about the team and its scientists, about the evening visit to the dig, about the eating machine that didn't fit into the evolutionary process, and also about Dr. Roberto Kukiriza, who asked her to smuggle prehistoric bones for inspection at Abu Kabir.

"In violation of the law?"

"What could happen?"

"Where are they?"

"In my toiletry bag. But there's nothing to see. Just three dry bones of an extremely early monkey."

But he insists, and quickly finds the bag in her suitcase, extracts the three bones, feels and smells them, holds them close to his eyes.

"That's all?"

"That's all."

"And if they had caught you and arrested you? Prisons in primitive dictatorships are worse than cemeteries."

"You would have found yourself a new wife, a better one," she says, smiling, aching with remorse.

"There is such a person?"

"Of course. There's always someone better."

He now notices the dual-language Bible in her open suitcase.

"What's this? You took a Bible with you on the trip?"

She tells him about the American yeshiva boy, and why she asked for a Hebrew Bible at the airport. He listens with amazement.

"The Book of Jeremiah? I don't understand. What does Yirmi want with that? Is he for him or against him?"

"Against him, totally against him."

"That is to say, against himself a little too."

She wants to drop the subject. The water is hot, she says, go take a shower downstairs, and I'll bathe here. But dim the lights a bit.

And only when she hears the water flowing on the first floor does she enter her shower to check the bite on her shoulder. The teeth marks have already grown indistinct, and all that remains is a reddish crescent, explainable in any number of ways. Nevertheless, she does not want her husband, who knows every inch of her body, to examine it. And she soaps up for a long time, till her flesh grows red.

She puts on a nightgown and gets into bed. Picks up a copy of Ha'aretz and recalls the burning of the newspapers and lets the paper drop.

Her husband ascends to the bedroom, wearing not pajamas but running shorts. His face is still unshaven.

When she wakes up at midnight, she does not find her husband beside her in bed. She goes down to the living room and sees him sitting in total darkness watching a movie on television.

"What, you're not sleeping?"

"No, I slept all day, and now I'm awake as the devil."

He is a devil, she thinks, and in the darkness the shining screen lends his face a mysterious aura. The devil can still discover, she thinks with dismay and goes to the dining table, where the Hanukkah menorah sits alone, bereft of candles. "What's this? The holiday is over?"

"Not over," he says, "tonight is the last candle. But you fell asleep so quickly."

"So how many candles do we light?"

"Eight. Eight."

"Let's light them, then. I didn't light a single one in Africa."

"In the end he really did burn all the candles you brought?"

"Not in the end, at the beginning." And she takes the box and wonders, "how is it there are so many candles left? Didn't you light any at home? After all, you like playing with fire."

"I lit them here only once — the third candle, with Nofar. The rest burned in other homes. At my father's, and with Efrati and the kids, and at the army dining hall when I visited Moran, and even at Gottlieb's factory. I didn't need to go home and light them by myself."

"So come now." She brightens suddenly. "It's not too late." And she sticks eight candles of various colors into the menorah, adding a red shammash.

"You do it," he says, not budging from his chair. "Because you didn't light a single candle, I'm letting you light all eight."

"All right, but turn down the TV, we can't make the blessing like this."

"You want us also to do the blessings?"

"Why not? As always."

"Then you do them. We live in feminist times, you're not exempt. There are women rabbis out there who go around in prayer shawls and phylacteries."

"But where are the blessings?"

"They're printed on the box."

"So simple and handy."

He lowers the sound on the television, but he leaves the picture on. She lights the shammash with a match, shares its flame with all the other candles, and reads the blessings by their light. Come, she orders him, now we'll sing. He rises reluctantly from the armchair. But please, he insists, just not "Maoz Tsur." It's a song Nofar also hates.

"What's to hate in a song like that?" she protests. "You sound like Yirmi."

"Like Yirmi or not like Yirmi, I don't like that song."

"But it won't do you any harm to sing it along with me, a duet."

— Haifa, 2004–2007