"And the children, Efrati?" he says, softening, "and the children? You don't need help with them?"
"Of course I need help. I have a training class up north till late tonight. My mother promised that they could sleep at her place, but if Nadi falls asleep again at his preschool, she won't be able to cope with him at night."
"And I had planned to light candles with you this evening."
"Very good… so you two go to my mother, light candles with her, and help her out a bit. The kids will be happy, too… and if my mother's already worn out, maybe you and Daniela could take them home to sleep at your place."
"No, wait, listen, Efrati, it's just me. You forgot that Daniela flew yesterday to Africa."
"Oh, right. I'm not used to thinking about the two of you apart; I forgot all about it."
THE SHUTTERS, CLOSED at dawn, have indeed enabled the visitor to sleep till late morning, and as she becomes aware of the hour, she realizes how worn out she must have been from the emotion and anxiety of the day gone by. Yirmi has apparently not deemed a few days' visit sufficient reason for clearing a shelf in his small armoire, so her little suitcase will have to serve as a clothes closet. Only her African-patterned dress, which Amotz encouraged her to buy three years ago in the market in Dar es Salaam and which she never dared wear in Israel, she hangs at full length alongside her brother-i n-law's khaki clothing, to rid it of wrinkles before trying it on at last, here on the continent of its origin.
The old shutters open with an agreeable creak, revealing a landscape of low-lying reddish hills covered with stumpy but abundant vegetation. The thick wayside foliage that had accompanied her nocturnal trip around Mount Morogoro is gone, and the vista now before her, for all its greenness, has a flavor of the neighboring desert. Near the entrance to the farm, she recognizes the Land Rover that brought her, parked between two pickup trucks.
She descends unhurriedly to the ground floor, where she is surrounded by a whirlwind of human activity accompanied by the singing of women, the rush of flowing water, the clatter of dishes, and the cackle of chickens. Into the oversize sunny kitchen comes cookware and tableware, sticky and coated with dust, sent back overnight from the site of the dig — plastic containers, plates and cups, mounds of spoons, forks, and knives — all of it taken to the sink at once, for soaking and scrubbing. A cornucopia of supplies is arranged on the dining tables: fresh vegetables, brown eggs, corn bread, slabs of bloody meat, and fish still quivering. On one of the tables stands a cage full of squawking chickens, and tied to the entry door is a black goat nursing her kid, which is also destined for slaughter.
The stoves are ablaze, covered with enormous pots, kettles, and skillets; beside them, black men and women in white toques and headscarves chop the heads and tails from fish, hack up cuts of meat, boil, stir, and roast. Yirmi takes full and active part, too — not in cooking, but in commerce. Wearing a colonial pith helmet, he sits at a table with old-fashioned scales, banknotes, and coins arrayed before him and lists the details of all supplies entering the kitchen, scrutinizing each bill before paying it. His very being projects the authority of a white man, bald and old, against the abundant vitality of Africa.
"Well, you slept soundly," he says, in a tone of mild rebuke toward his sister-in-law, who has come to mourn a dead sibling but behaves as if she were on vacation. And he calls Sijjin Kuang, the nurse, who is making the rounds of the stoves, supervising the cooks — perhaps watching over their culinary hygiene — and requests that she bring the guest a selection of the day's dishes, for a combined breakfast and lunch.
Food is prepared at base camp, then packed in plastic containers and sent in insulated coolers to the dig. The scientific team there is not big: ten people, all Africans, most of them born in the region, who acquired professional experience working with European teams in Kenya and Ethiopia and South Africa and are now conducting their own excavation. The workers assisting them at the dig come from local tribes; the idea is that the ethnic and linguistic ties between the scientists and their laborers will facilitate the discovery of the fossils they seek.
Daniela is ravenous, but unaccustomed to dining alone. She invites the Sudanese nurse to keep her company, and Yirmiyahu covers up the banknotes and coins with his helmet and joins her too. When the head chef comes to clear the dishes at the end of the meal, she praises his cooking and offers to help wash up. The black man, amazed by the older white woman's friendliness, bares his teeth as if about to swallow her whole.
Yirmi bursts into laughter. "Wash the dishes? You? Here?"
"Why not?"
"Why not? Back in your parents' house, on Saturdays after lunch, you resorted to all kinds of tricks to avoid the one chore they imposed on you, till finally Shuli would get fed up and go wash them herself."
"Instead of me?" Daniela's face turns red. "That's not true… maybe she would sometimes come help me dry them."
"No, no." He insists, for some reason, on this childhood memory now more than forty years old. "You were quite the artist at shirking."
"I didn't shirk anything, I just wanted to do it at my own pace."
"At my own pace," he says, chuckling, as if speaking of something that happened yesterday, "but in the end there was no pace at all."
Daniela smiles. Yes, "at my own pace" had indeed been her avoidance tactic. She always hoped that someone whose patience had run out would do it in her place, or at least help her. Although washing the Shabbat lunch dishes had in fact been her sole housekeeping responsibility, she'd sit gloomily through the meal, and because in general she was a cheerful child, the other family members easily diagnosed her "dishwashing depression" and joked about it, yet they refused, for educational reasons, to coddle her. What's so hard about washing dishes? her mother would sympathetically ask her adorable daughter. And Daniela would struggle to describe the humiliation of being stuck in the small dreary kitchen — which actually repelled her mother as well — while everyone else was indulging in Sabbath-afternoon naps.
"At her own pace," when they were all curled up in their beds, she would enter with mild disgust that sunless room in their workers' apartment and stand beside the scratched-up, graying sink, crammed with dishes each more revolting than the next, douse the lot of them with copious quantities of soap, and then go off to leaf through the newspaper or chat awhile on the phone, hoping the soap would do the job on its own. And when the parents awoke from their nap to find a sink still full of filthy dishes and she heard the redemptive sound of a running kitchen faucet, she would hurry in, perky and smiling, and say, hey, what's the rush? Didn't I promise I'd wash them myself? How come you never have enough patience to let me do it at my own pace?
Now, as she watches the joyful collective labor in the giant kitchen, it occurs to her that it wasn't the scrubbing itself that made her suffer, but the loneliness. After all, she had always happily helped her father tend their little garden or paint a porch railing, but her spirit had rebelled against being left alone to face the grimy leftovers of her sleeping family, much as she loved them all.
And if it sometimes happened that because of "my own pace" there remained by evening not one clean glass, plate or spoon, and the household swelled with righteous anger at this immobile "pace," her sister would rise to her rescue and without complaint would placate everyone by entering the kitchen as her full partner.
"She really was never mad at me?" Daniela asks now, with wonder. "It would have been so natural for her to be angry, too…"
"Angry? No, I don't remember…"
The little sister, who in a few years will be sixty, lifts her eyes with relief and thanks and stifled tears to the blue skies and red and green hills of the African savanna.