"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.