He knows that his brother-in-law would have preferred him to accompany her. But had he made the trip, he would have weighed down the visit with his polite silence, which would have been interpreted as ironic. Nor was another visit to Tanzania worth the expense and aggravation of travel. It was only three years ago that they were there. He remembers exploring a huge crater with Shuli and Yirmi, an enclosed nature preserve filled with predatory animals and rare plant life. Yes, sometimes he has pangs of longing for the soothing expanse of the savanna or the swirling colors of the sunsets, but just to indulge in nostalgia, would it have been worth neglecting his business for a whole week and instead sit mutely between his wife and brother-in-law? After Yirmi jumped on that "friendly fire," which he haplessly uttered at a terrible moment, and began to cling to it so absurdly, Ya'ari realized he should be wary of spontaneous conversation with him. Gottlieb is right. Bereaved fathers have a different agenda in their heads.
He gets up to draw the curtain and darken the room, and notices that his cell phone is on the bureau, live and breathing. Should he turn it off completely, or set it on silent vibration? He finally decides on vibration but also stuffs it under his pillow.
SOON, ON THE African farm, it will be three P.M. From outside the locked door of his bedroom, Yirmiyahu calls to the sleeping woman: We're leaving! Why did you think I didn't need to wake you?
Daniela apologizes, even though she does not feel she is to blame. On trips abroad she always keeps her watch set on Israeli time, to stay in sync with her children and grandchildren. Amotz takes care of local time.
"But Amotz isn't here," her brother-in-law points out with mild annoyance and tells her to hurry up; otherwise he'll leave her here to finish her novel.
Though this is a woman who adheres to "her own pace," the threat of being left alone at the farm with an elderly African watchman gets her moving faster. Besides, there's no fussing over what to wear. Deftly she slips back into her African dress, not only because of its comfortable fabric but also out of the knowledge that only here, in Africa, can she get away with wearing anything so colorful.
In front of the farmhouse the vehicles stand ready for the journey. The food coolers are stacked one upon the other, and next to them are jugs of milk and water and small bags of flour and potatoes and white beans for individual cooking, a few big kettles of soup, and the freshly washed cooking pots and dinnerware. The goat, its slaughter apparently postponed, surveys the scene with interest. The cooks, who have removed their white uniforms and put on short gray sheepskins, finish the last bits of preparation for the trip, oiling the hunting rifles and poking around under the hoods of the old pickup trucks.
There is no one in the kitchen, except for Sijjin Kuang, wearing a greenish smock. She places a plate and cup for the visitor on one of the long tables.
"We'll heat up something for you," Yirmi tells Daniela, "but only on condition that you eat fast."
But the hungry guest will not degrade herself and eat alone before the eyes of strangers, and certainly not at a pace to which she is unaccustomed. No, she says, she'll hold out until it's time to have dinner with the diggers. That way their journey can begin right away. But the Sudanese nurse is not pleased by the guest's forgoing of food and expertly fixes her two sandwiches for the road. Nor does she stop at that; even as the pickups' engines sputter into activity, she vanishes into the building and returns with a windbreaker. Your dress is pretty, but at night you'll need something more against the cold, she tells Daniela, before taking her place behind the wheel of the Land Rover.
Yirmi has long legs, and therefore, apologizes to his sister-in-law, who has been relegated to the backseat, amid the luxury items designated for the researchers — bottles of whisky and cognac, packets of cigarettes and chocolate — and medical supplies for everyone. She places Sijjin Kuang's windbreaker on her lap and looks around her and nibbles at a sandwich. The Land Rover travels between the two pickup trucks, and in the lead truck ride the Africans with their hunting rifles.
"Why rifles?" wonders the visitor, and they tell her that sometimes animals and birds of prey are attracted by the traveling feast and need to be chased away.
The convoy first heads toward the small village they visited in the morning, where children are still congregating by the shed housing the elephant with the cyclops eye. From there, the road slopes gently down to the vast, silent savanna, where the air and the dry grass, patchy and scorched, shine golden in the western sun. The vehicles drive slowly, keeping their distance from one another to avoid the clouds of dust kicked up by the tires. Now and again they are stopped by a herd of plodding gnus or unhurried zebus, who take their time before deigning to move on and clear the road.
The great expanse before them stirs a feeling of respect in the visitor. Yirmiyahu directs her attention to a giant baobab with a trunk wider than his room at the farm and branches that look like thick roots shooting skyward, as if the tree were growing upside down. On one branch crouches a golden beast of prey.
On this plain, the dead, animal and human, are not buried, says the Sudanese nurse, but rather left exposed in the wild, to be eaten by animals and birds, reabsorbed into the natural world that gave them life. Their bodies will not be resurrected, but a good soul may hope to find a strong wind that will agree to carry it.
Two hills stand out on the horizon: this might be their destination. For as soon as the hills appear, the convoy shifts its formation from single file to side by side with the brotherly freedom — or rivalry — of those whose goal is clear to them and who have no need for a defined pathway or any rules of the road. They advance under the sheltering sky, whose palette of colors deepens toward evening, and a dizzying swirl of ravening birds swoops toward the traveling food stores, undeterred by occasional gunfire. The Africans gaily wave from the pickup trucks at the Land Rover, especially at the Israeli visitor, who only yesterday morning took off from her homeland and whose country and husband and children and grandchildren already appear strangely distant to her. Yes, she muses, maybe it would have been a bit much to light Hanukkah candles in a place where one is seeking the primal ape who never anticipated that Jews, too, would spring from his loins.
The Sudanese and her brother-in-law exchange now and then a few words, muffled by the engine noise. She pulls the windbreaker lent her by Sijjin Kuang tightly across her lap and rubs it with her fingers, then lifts it to her face and inhales its smell. She gasps. As the Africans fire with cries of joy at a stubborn hawk and bring it down, she quietly taps Yirmi's broad back and holds up the wind-breaker. Before she can ask, he answers:
"Of course. It was Shuli's. Didn't I tell you that I'd have a warm coat for you here?"
IN ISRAEL, IT'S still three o'clock. The pillow beneath the husband's head has stifled not one vibration but five, thanks either to the quality of the feathers or the soundness of his sleep. But each vibration has left in its wake a message, and now Ya'ari is on his feet, listening to all of them.
The first, to his surprise, is from Nofar. Okay, Abba, if Imma isn't there, I'll come around seven. A friend whom you don't know will come with me and also won't stay long. So okay, we'll light candles. But that's it. Please don't sit this friend down for an interrogation and don't ask him what his parents do. He's just a friend. Here today, gone tomorrow. As for the candles, my condition is no 'Maoz tsur' or any of the other songs I loath. Do a short blessing, if you must, and that's it. And if you're dying to sing, sing to yourself after we go. Not a tragedy. Because if you want your daughter's love, obey her. Sorry.