Friendly Fire (26 page)

"This is breakfast or lunch?"

"Both. After you've contributed a hundred dollars in honor of the tears of a wandering elephant, you deserve a full meal. And don't be put off by the distinctive taste of the meat; it was cooked on a hot fire. And let's not ruin the meal with talk that I know will only upset you."

"Keep talking, I hate eating in silence. I'm listening. I never thought that identifying the soldier who accidentally shot Eyali was of any concern to you. After all, they said he was not to blame."

"Of course he wasn't. The fault was entirely Eyal's. But still I wanted a connection with the one who killed him."

"What kind of connection?"

"A connection."

"And in the end you identified the young man?"

"No, in the end I gave up and stopped trying."

WITH A TREMBLING
hand the elderly Ya'ari tries to sketch for his son the inner structure of the hydraulic oil piston that raises and lowers the little elevator, and Hilario runs back and forth between rooms, fetching pages torn from his arithmetic notebook for further attempts. As the father recollects it, the two parts of the piston are screwed together internally, not joined by an exterior flange, whose bolts would rust over the years. That was how he guaranteed sturdiness and reliability for the long term, and ensured that the hydraulic oil would not leak out of unforeseen openings. But not even high-grade steel, the kind produced in Czechoslovakia before World War II, can resist forever the wear and tear of time. Therefore, it will be necessary to locate the joint, separate the two parts, remove the defective bearings and replace them with new ones.

"The sketch isn't worth the effort, Abba," his son says, "I'm sure the inside threads have melted together by now and we won't be able to take the thing apart. The only way is to take the whole mechanism out of the wall and try to install something else that'll work on the same principle."

"But there's no chance we can get ready-made parts that'll be right for my little elevator. We'll have to make a new piston from scratch, just like the old one."

"Turning a new one is a different story. I have no idea who can do it, not to mention the cost."

"Why? I'll ask Gottlieb to make it in his factory. He owes me a lot, and he'll do it for me."

"Don't kid yourself that he'll work for you. And I'm not at all sure that he's capable of turning you a new piston. Everything in his factory is automatic and programmed, and the lathes work according to standard models. Gone are the days of workshops that do custom-made private elevators on the whim of single women."

"He'll make it for me," says the father, ignoring his son's cynical remark. "I know he can do it."

Hilario stands at the ready beside the wheelchair, poised to run into his room and tear out another page for the old man. Francisco sits nearby, listening intently. In the kitchen, amid the steamy aromas of lunch, Kinzie trills a song.

"And we haven't yet discussed the wailing electrical system," Ya'ari continues in a quarrelsome tone, "which is a separate story. I'll be damned if I can figure out where you hid it, Abba, and where it gets its current."

The old man smiles. Why be damned? Where it's hidden he doesn't remember, but because this is not spirit but matter, in the end it will be found. And the elevator gets its power directly from the electric company.

"The electric company?"

Of course. Devorah Bennett's apartment, like the other old apartments in the building, never had three-phase power, and his father was wary of overloading the system, so he found a way to circumvent the apartment's wiring and supply the elevator directly from the electric company. Meaning that all these years the little girl has had a free ride, as if she were a veteran member of the company's workers' committee.

"I see this woman aroused criminal urges in you," Ya'ari jokes. "But if that's the situation, you can forget about me. I'm not going near any wailing and shaking electrical system connected to some unidentified illegitimate source."

"Don't exaggerate ... you told me that Gottlieb has some woman around his plant who's an expert on technical noises, so we'll take her to Jerusalem and together we'll locate the cat and silence it."

"What's this 'we'll take' and 'we'll locate'?"

"I'll go up to Jerusalem, too. Before I die I want to see, one more time, the elevator that goes straight from her bedroom. Did you tell her I'm now in a wheelchair?"

"I gave her a hint."

"Why?"

"So she wouldn't bother you too much. But don't tell me this is a secret you're ashamed of."

"Not any more. But to tell the truth, when I first got sick I was very embarrassed, and because of that I broke off contact. Because you should know that after Mother died, I tried to give myself more freedom, to bring more substance to what I already felt about her. Amotz, to tell you the truth, when I built her the elevator in her bedroom, I really fell in love with that woman. Not one phase but all three. I almost couldn't breathe when I was near her. Afterward I tried to cool this love down. But when Mother died and I was alone, we had a lovely affair, not too intense, age-appropriate. And had it not been for all the psychiatric patients in and out of there all day, I would even have gone to live with her. But then the tremors got worse and also moved to my knees..."

Ya'ari face burns red as he hears his father's confession of love.

The Filipino woman comes out of the kitchen, small and flushed. A pixie in colorful silks, asking the boss in English if he's ready to eat.

"Maybe in a little while," he answers in his own creaky English. "But the chicken schnitzel is right from the pan, just as you like it."

"Eat, Abba. I'm not running away; I'll sit with you."

"But it's unpleasant for you to watch them feeding me."

"Not so bad. It's fine. I'll even join you."

Francisco takes a large napkin and covers the father's chest. He brings a plate with schnitzel and snap peas, cuts the chicken into little pieces, places a fork into the father's trembling hand, and in his own hand holds another fork, with which he feeds the old man.

"You also want schnitzel like Abba?" the Filipino asks Amotz.

"Schnitzel I can get anywhere. I would rather try a dish that your wife makes for you."

The Filipino woman is pleased by the compliment, and in a yellow plastic bowl, the same bowl from which Amotz as a child ate his oatmeal, serves him hot soup, rich with seafood.

"You eat shellfish?" The father is surprised.

"What can you do? From childhood you taught me to eat everything that's put in front of me."

Francisco feeds the trembling old man, wiping his lips, now and then collecting from the napkin peas that fell from his mouth and returning them to their destination. Amotz does not shrink from the painful sight, but feels his heart go out to his father as he struggles to maintain his dignity. Therefore, when the old man begins to ask gingerly about the owner of the elevator and wants a detailed description of the lady and her room, he suggests that his father invite the little girl for a visit and promises that he himself will drive her down and back.

But the old man does not want Devorah Bennett to visit him at home and see him in his miserable wheelchair. Surely not before he has proven his ability to stand behind the lifetime guarantee that he gave her.

"Let's talk to Gottlieb," he urges his son.

"Gottlieb won't do any good here. Gottlieb has already lost his love for the profession and thinks only about money."

"Very good." The old man perks up. "If he thinks only about money, then threaten that you won't order the new Defense Ministry elevators from him. I'm sure he'll hurry to make you anything you ask."

"Threaten him?" Ya'ari is taken aback. "Go that far?"

"Yes, Amotz. If you promise a woman something for a lifetime, you have to keep the promise."

"
BELIEVE ME
," Y
IRMIYAHU
continues, "it wasn't easy to give up trying to identify the soldier who fired the fatal bullet. It was very important for me to meet him face to face. At first I tried to clarify it in a direct and open fashion, and found myself up against a stone wall among the members of the unit. Then I tried roundabout methods. But even though I was very clever and went so far as to visit the site and calculate possible lines of fire, I was left without a positive identification."

"Why?"

"Why? Because they were all terrified and did everything in their power to prevent it. They were afraid I was planning some sort of reprimand, an accusation, or a lawsuit. Or even that I would go outside the law, stalk the killer in some sick way. That happens sometimes, and it might have happened with me too. There was no way I could persuade them that I was actually acting out of concern for the shooter, who, although it was indisputably Eyali's own fault, might carry around a psychic wound that would infect his entire life. I wanted to be capable of calming the boy, telling him, habibi, I am the father, and I confirm your innocence. You are exonerated not only by your commanding officers but also by the parents of the boy you accidentally killed. For your good, we will keep in touch. If, in the course of your life, anxiety or guilt rise inside you over the friendly fire you aimed at a comrade who miscalculated the time of day, you can always come visit me, and I will help you ease the guilt and lighten the anxiety."

"Strange..."

"It is strange, but it's also the truth. I became obsessed with wanting to hold the finger that squeezed the trigger, as if it were the last finger that touched Eyali's soul. Yes, Daniela, in those first months I thought in terms of spirit and soul, until I abandoned all that foolishness."

On her plate remain pieces of the meat, of which she is suspicious. One of the cooks hums a cheerful African song to himself, accentuating its tempo by drumming briskly on a pot, now and then stealing a glance at the two white people. Both of them are tired, she for no apparent reason, maybe because she's so far from her husband, but Yirmiyahu definitely deserves a rest—a few hours after their return from Dar es Salaam, something justified an urgent
nighttime ride out to the dig. But the rapt attention of his empathetic sister-in-law fuels his fevered confession.

"Theoretically, identifying the shooter should not have been difficult. Because this wasn't anonymous fire, coming from artillery or a helicopter, where all the sophisticated hardware can show for certain are the intended targets, not the actual hits. No, this is a simple story, almost a fable, of gunfire among friends, a small group of elite soldiers, eight all told, including the commander of the ambush: a likable officer named Micha, who because of what happened became almost like a member of our family. He also had been at university, a law graduate, and he sent Eyal to the rooftop of a local family as a lookout, in case the 'wanted man' eluded the trap they had set for him. And it wasn't one ambush, but two, north and south, each fifty or sixty meters away from the building. So it was all clear and simple. Do you remember any of what was said at the time?"

"I think so."

"If so, you'll recall that I didn't give the family many details. Shuli cut herself off entirely from the story even at the early stages, and rightly so. Whereas I kept chasing after more, digging here and digging there, with a recklessness that maybe fits a certain type of male bereavement. For example, the desire I had, later on, to find out who was the 'wanted man' on that wretched night, what made him so great that they honored him by bringing eight soldiers at night to Tulkarm."

"Why was that important to you?"

"That's exactly the question the officer from the General Security Service asked me. What's the point of telling you his name? Wanted men come and go, and the list endures forever. Soon the whole Palestinian people will be wanted by us. 'Even so,' I insisted, 'wanted for what? Wanted why?' 'Wanted for the heavenly tribunal,' the officer joked, and didn't reveal a single detail. And rightly so. Because one detail leads to another, and such information has no practical significance if the death has already occurred. But I was still in shock and I felt compelled to exhume the entire reality of that night. I asked the TV news for the tape of their coverage of the military funeral. It was a very short report, not even a minute long, and at night, when Shuli was sleeping, I played it over and over on the VCR, not to watch our own suffering, including the drama of Nofar, who seemed about to throw herself in the grave after him, but to study carefully the faces of the honor guard, who fired the three shots to which a soldier is entitled even if he caused his own death by mistake. Again and again I watched those soldiers, all of whose names and histories I knew, because I thought that maybe through facial expressions when they pulled the trigger I would discover the man behind the friendly fire."

"Absurd..."

"That's right, absurd. But that's how it was, then. What can I say? It's also normal and natural. The first months of mourning are a whirlwind of absurdity. On the outside you keep your cool, and inside you lurch from fantasy to madness, and until I came to a final, philosophical flash of recognition, at night on the rooftop of that house in Tulkarm, I was unable to get free of all that absurdity and begin the process of forgetting.

"For you have to understand. His friends didn't abandon us. We aren't the Americans or Japanese, who send telegrams of condolence to parents in distant cities and say, Bye-bye and we won't be seeing you. With us there are established customs of bereavement, rules by which you don't abandon the soldier's family but instead maintain a connection. An institutional connection and a personal one. The soldiers from his company come to visit now and then and become a bit like relatives, inviting you to their family functions, talking about themselves, sharing their experiences. At first they come as a whole group, awkward strapping boys who barely fit into the living room and keep an eye on one another lest a careless word slip out. But after they have studied the nature of the
bereaved parents and confirmed that these remain civilized people and that death has not eradicated the essence of their humanity, they let themselves come for more intimate visits—in threes, in pairs, even alone, and in this way they pass your suspicions from one to the next, back and forth, like a volleyball, and some of them are discharged and continue to visit you as civilians, and your presumptuous, pathetic, and pointless attempt to identify the shooter becomes harder and more complicated every day. The individual friendly fire is absorbed into the 'fire of our own forces,' a collective fire, and then slowly, slowly is transformed from army fire to civilian fire, and civilian fire to undefined fire, until the shooter himself is no longer sure whether one night he got up and shot his friend by mistake. And then I said to myself, if so, I need to shift direction, and instead of chasing after shadows to offer forgiveness to someone who doesn't need it or ask for it, let's demand that the army show me the place; let me go to the roof of this house in Tulkarm to understand what misled my son. But this is a story for another time. Now I want to sleep. What did you want to say?"