Friendly Fire (13 page)

Now they draw near, climbing up from the canyon, young and dusty and most of them naked to the waist, Africans differing one from the next in appearance and hue but all of them astonished to
find a middle-aged white woman clad in a colorful African dress and an old windbreaker. "Who is this?" they inquire in English, in a variety of accents.

And Yirmiyahu presents the sister of his late wife, who has left her husband and family and country and come for only a few days to try to connect with the spirit of her beloved Shuli.

The black researchers greet her heartily, impressed by the boldness of this older woman who has come all the way to their excavations of the origins of the prehistoric man who split off from the chimpanzee millions of years ago, in order to grieve for her sister. Daniela is beside herself with excitement, and with the natural assertiveness of a longtime teacher wants to know the names of the half-naked people standing before her, their countries of origin, and the professional expertise of each and every one. Yirmiyahu did not exaggerate in describing the multinational nature of this group that has gathered from all over the continent. Here is an archaeologist from Uganda, and with him a botanist from Chad, and two tall South African geologists, and a Tanzanian anthropologist as black as coal who is the leader of the mission. Behind them stand a physicist from Ghana and an American zoologist from Kansas City who has not forgotten his ancestors and has come from the New World to help verify that humanity began right here.

And as they introduce themselves with their musical-sounding names and their professional titles and energetically shake the hand of the older woman whose English is so fine and precise, she wonders with slight concern if her daughter-in-law has remembered that today she won't be able to pick up the grandchildren from nursery school and day care, even though it's her turn to do so.

T
HE MILD CONCERN
of the woman in East Africa coincides with panic in Tel Aviv, as Amotz arrives to pick up his grandson from day care and discovers to his amazement that this is not one small nursery but an entire network of them sharing a single schoolyard; in the bustling crowd of toddlers in motion, he has a hard time picking out his own.

From the moment he agreed to collect the grandchildren, he has been under pressure. First he tried to move the safety seats from his wife's smaller car to his own, but after getting tangled up with straps and buckles and losing valuable time, he gave up on his car and took hers—which, besides being slower, was almost out of gas. On the few occasions he accompanied his wife to this narrow, crowded Tel Aviv street, he would wait for her double-parked or in a handicapped-parking spot till she returned with the precious cargo. Sometimes he would wonder how it was possible that from the gate of a yard that looked so small emerged so many little children. Only today, entering the yard himself, does he realize how expansive it is. His inability to locate his grandson's group fills him with alarm, especially when he discovers that because he is a bit late, or perhaps because of Hanukkah, some of the rooms are already empty. And because he is not known here as a grandparent, he cannot simply loiter in the yard and wait, but must dash around till he finds the right child, dressed and buttoned up properly, clutching a little backpack, wearing on his head a paper crown with a Hanukkah candle, staring distantly at the grandfather who joyously falls to his knees before him.

"What happened to your wife today?" the young nursery-school teachers wonder.

For a moment Ya'ari considers whether this is the right moment to list the reasons for her absence, but in the end he gives them an abridged version.

"All the way to Africa?" they marvel, and urge him to warn Nadav's parents that during the holiday jelly-doughnut free-for-all, their son managed to sneak off and join some other kids in an afternoon nap. On normal days they never forget to prevent him
from doing so, and make sure they tire him out in the playground, so he won't wear down his parents till midnight.

Ya'ari nods his head and grins. It won't be a problem for his parents, but for his other grandma; he'll be sleeping at her house tonight along with his sister. Right, Nadi?

But the child is listening in suspicious, unfriendly silence, and there's no knowing what he has in store for anyone.

Then the two of them go to pick up Nadi's sister, Neta, a sweet and friendly child, who rushes toward them with a small clay menorah. She instructs her grandfather how to buckle her brother into his car seat.

In the little café across from his son's mother-in-law's house, they know the children well. There's no need for long explanations to get scoops of vanilla ice cream in colorful bowls, one scoop with chocolate sprinkles and the other plain.

"Grandma always takes off Nadi's coat, because he gets it dirty," Neta remarks to Ya'ari.

Ya'ari complies with his granddaughter's instructions and removes the Italian coat from its gloomy owner. Unlike his spouse, he is incapable of recalling in which European city the children's clothes were purchased on various visits, but this particular store in Rome he remembers well because of the coat's ridiculous price.

He tries to help his grandson work at his ice cream, but Nadi doesn't need any assistance. With his little spoon he digs and burrows intently into the depths of the white ball, till the spoon taps the bottom of the dish.

"Another scoop," he firmly demands, but Ya'ari refuses. "In the summertime you can eat two scoops of ice cream, but in the winter one is enough. When I was your age," he tells his grandchildren, "my father would never think of giving me ice cream in the wintertime."

"Is your father still alive?" Neta asks.

"Of course. You don't remember you visited him on Rosh Hashanah?"

Neta remembers her great-grandfather's shaking, which made her scared, but what impressed Nadi was his wheelchair.

Outside, a drumbeat of rain begins. Whether because of the weather or because of Hanukkah, so many people are packed into the café that Ya'ari feels mild pressure to give up the table. But where to go? Daniela knows how to chat with the grandchildren, because she knows the names of their teachers and also their friends. But Ya'ari knows no names, and his attempts to draw the kids out with general questions about the world elicit a neutral yes or no from the girl, while the tough little toddler doesn't even turn his head. Fewer than forty-eight hours have passed since his wife left, and already he longs for her to be seated by his side and in her wisdom to help him engage his grandchildren. He offers to order them jelly doughnuts and hot chocolate, but they're sick of jelly doughnuts, and he has no choice but to violate what he just decreed and order them another ice cream.

Ya'ari is fascinated by the little boy as he expertly sculpts away layer after layer. He has always reminded his grandfather of someone—but who could it be? This question lacks a clear answer. Day by day Neta grows to resemble her mother, but the genetic inspiration for her little brother's features, the color of his eyes, is less easy to divine. Moran sometimes jokes that thanks to all of Efrat's screaming in the delivery room they didn't notice that their darling newborn had been switched with a bad baby.

Daniela always objects strenuously to that: Bad? How dare you? He's just an active child, full of imagination and turmoil, which is why he is afraid to fall asleep by himself. But he is also a thinker, and in the preschool there are children who admire him.

Only after the thinker's spoon has rapped the empty dish over and over does Grandma Yael merrily arrive, wrapped in a fox stole, or possibly wolf, her cheeks red from the cold, a lollypop in either
hand. The two kids cling to her with great affection and an obvious sense of relief: she has rescued them from the supervision of a grandfather who asks stupid questions. "Where's the tooth?" Nadi demands.

It seems that Grandma Yael told her grandchildren about the aching tooth and promised to show it to them after it had entered the wider world.

"This kid is fantastic," she says, giving the boy a mighty kiss, "he remembers everything," and she quickly removes from her purse a handkerchief in which a large wisdom tooth, with its little root, has been respectfully wrapped.

Neta recoils. "Yuck," she says. But the little one does not fear his grandma's tooth and even strokes it gently with his finger.

"Does it still hurt if I touch it?"

This is a straightforward woman, without any so-called repression mechanism. So concluded Daniela when she and Ya'ari first got to know their in-law. Yael's lack of inhibitions made it easy for Daniela to weave a warm telephone relationship with the other grandma, but Ya'ari is wary of her. At the last minute, without asking beforehand, she invited to Efrat and Moran's wedding, which the Ya'aris financed, fifty more guests than the number allotted her, and only the caterer's ingenuity prevented anyone from going home hungry. She is an emotional and unpredictable woman, yet all in all a happy one. Even her ex-husband, a bitter, cynical playboy, danced with her at the wedding till after midnight, breaking the heart of his young date.

Ya'ari gets up and puts on his jacket.

"That's it, Grandpa's going," he announces, then suddenly remembers that the teacher asked him to report that Nadi again succeeded in stealing an illicit nap.

"Oy," sighs the grandmother, clasping her hands with dismay, "what's going to happen, sweetie? Another white night for Grandma without sleep?"

"Black," the child corrects her. "Abba says, Nadi made me a black night."

A
BLACK, VELVET
night softly blankets the other grandmother at the edge of the basalt canyon. Above her, unfamiliar African stars spin the Milky Way of her childhood into a torrential river of light bursting into the depths of the universe. Somewhere down the slope an unseen generator putters, shattering the stillness, powering the strings of grimy electric bulbs that line the paths between the tents. Closer by, flames dance bashfully under big pots propped on stones and filled with good food.

The Tanzanian team leader, Saloha Abu, invites the guest to the researchers' table, where the cooks are already dishing out generous portions.

"Ask them about their excavations," Yirmi whispers. "Take an interest in their work, they need attention and appreciation."

Daniela nods.

"With your fluent English you'll be able to communicate with them and understand their anthropological explanations, which I can't make head or tail of. Maybe also because my hearing is bad."

"Hearing or concentration?"

"Maybe also concentration ... like any other solitary person."

"Don't worry, I'll show great interest," says the guest, her eyes sparkling as they near the fire, "and not merely out of politeness but also habit. A teacher knows how to engage young people."

They sit down with the researchers in a square of collapsible tables, at whose center, ringed by stones, a bluish fire hovers on its coals like a hen on a nest full of eggs. The aroma of the hot food on Daniela's plate is giving her a huge appetite. She has eaten nothing since Sijjin Kuang's sandwiches. Even so, she doesn't dig in before asking the scientists to explain to her the nature of their project.

The Tanzanian team leader chooses Dr. Roberto Saboleda Kukiriza, an archaeologist from Uganda, to explain the essence to the white woman.

Dr. Kukiriza is a handsome man of about thirty-five. His studies in London polished the English he learned as a child, and he is eager to explain and demonstrate their work. He immediately abandons his plateful of delicacies and hurries to fetch a folding wooden board that has glued to it a colorful map of Africa, indicating anthropological sites both established and potential.

He sets up the map for the guest, adjusting its position to catch the firelight, then turns to this woman who is at least twenty years his senior and says, "I will explain it to you, Madam, but only on the condition that you eat."

The scientific lecture has a political prologue: Dr. Kukiriza begins by deploring the violated honor of Africa and the developed world's loss of faith in its future. Famine, disease, and especially vicious conflicts and wars, have sown this despair. Indeed, one cannot bend the bitter truth that under colonial rule the extent of famine and disease and killing on the continent was less than after independence. Worst of all, the disdainful attitude of the first world, the second, and even the third—which calls Africa the last world—is being absorbed more and more deeply into the African soul itself: depression threatens to dry up the wellsprings of the people's joy. That is why this group of scientists has decided to transcend tribal and national rivalries and try to raise Africa's stature through original and independent research. Without state-of-the-art laboratories and sophisticated equipment, but only simple and inexpensive tools, they are digging and probing the earth to find the source of all of humanity, the evolutionary link between the chimpanzee and
Homo sapiens,
in order to put Africa back on the map of the world as the cradle of civilization.

Yes, although fossils of a human nature, prehistoric hominids, have been discovered in various places around the world, there is consensus in the scientific community that the original human, per
se, came from the great apes of Africa. It is only when the chimpanzee branches into
Australopithecus afarensis
that the evolution that leads us to ourselves begins in earnest. In these times, when the developed world is giving up on this continent and may yet abandon it, it is perhaps proper for Africa to remind humankind, if not of where it is headed, then at least of where it has come from.

This, of course, is an ideological goal and not a scientific one, admits the eloquent speaker to the white visitor, yet in the end a modest goal, not a revolution, for in any case we remain obligated to evolutionary science, and ideology is merely a frosting that can be scraped off. Indeed, evolution itself is not a revolution but rather a process of transmission, like a relay race. Chimpanzees are still running around the world with no intention of turning into humans, but five to seven million years ago one chimp was born who handed down something new to its descendants. And one of those descendants passed this same something, with a minor addition, to its own offspring. And what is this "something"? One may call it a new trait, physical or mental.
Trait
of course is an imprecise literary word, but there is none better to explain the whole matter. Because what it describes might be an extra wisdom tooth, or a twisted one, or a more rounded design of the hip joint, or a keener, subtler sense of smell that increases the animal's curiosity about its environment.