Daniela flashes a pleasant smile at the exuberant young man, whose English is almost a mother tongue. And before the huge omelet bubbling in the skillet finishes capturing and encasing the vegetables and meat, he hastens to set on the table, as an appetizer, a fragment of rock to illustrate his lecture.
Now, in the brightening light of day, she learns that the two young men are M.A. candidates from the University of Durban, Absalom Vilkazi and Sifu Sumana, and Daniela listens to their explanations appreciatively and patiently, with the mature serenity of a woman who in three years will be sixty but is unconcerned by her advancing age, trusting in the faithfulness of her husband.
EVEN ON THIS gray, wintry Saturday morning, the children get up early. He senses the feathery footsteps of his granddaughter, who approaches the sofa to check whether Grandpa has been replaced in the middle of the night by a subcontractor; and she doesn't settle for the familiar head resting on the pillow but pulls down the blanket a little to confirm that the body is his as well. She does this cautiously and with restraint, despite the laughter which seems about to erupt from inside her, and Ya'ari clamps his eyelids tight and keeps his face toward the wall, curious to see how his granddaughter will handle his slumber. First she tries to tug lightly at his hair, and when there is no response, she tickles the back of his neck; she seems caught between a desire to wake him and reluctance to make outright contact with an old man's strange body. Ya'ari remains frozen, still and unmoving. I know, Grandpa, that you're not asleep, a sweet whisper wafts by his ear, but he, face to the wall, stubbornly refuses to respond. She hesitates, then climbs onto the sofa, hops over his body in her bare feet, and installs herself between him and the wall. With a small but determined hand she now tries to pry open his eyelids. But I know you're not asleep, she says with self-justification.
Ya'ari pops open his eyes. See, she declares victoriously, I knew you weren't asleep. And then, without a word, he sweeps up the blanket and pulls it over his five-year-old granddaughter, carbon copy of her mother. He speaks straight into the blue eyes that dance with laughter, demanding an explanation:
"Why did you cry last night, after Imma left? You know that I know how to take care of you just like Grandma Daniela. So tell me, why did you keep crying like that? Just to make me crazy?"
The girl listens attentively, but she seems disinclined to answer. The laughter in her eyes subsides a bit, and still clutched in his embrace, she tries to evade the gaze that seeks to probe her hidden thoughts. Since she is his first grandchild, she has always received the royal treatment. From her earliest years she got used to climbing into their bed at their house, lying between him and Daniela and chatting about life. But now, instead of a forgiving and indulgent grandma, on her other side there is only a bare silent wall, and she seems to start feeling mildly anxious next to the grandfather who insists on an explanation for the crying marathon.
"Do you remember how you held your head, as if it were going to fall off?"
Her pupils contract with the effort of recollection, and she gives a little nod of confirmation.
"And do you remember," Ya'ari persists, "how you wailed away for half the night, Imma, where are you? Why did you go? You remember?"
The child nods slowly, shocked or scared by the grandpa who imitates her voice and her plaintive words.
"Why couldn't you calm down? What was upsetting you? Why wasn't I enough for you? Explain it to me, darling Neta, you know how much I love you."
She listens to him intensely, then sits upright, and with the quickness of a small animal throws off the blanket and jumps off the sofa bed.
But he seizes her little arm.
"If you love your mother so much, why are you waking me up this morning and not her?"
Her eyes open wide with astonished humiliation, and Ya'ari senses that his facetious rebuke went too far and the girl might begin a new round of weeping, and so, before she can bolt for her parents' closed bedroom door, he smiles at her forgivingly and points at her little brother, just now darting in from the children's room, his big head of hair disheveled and his eyes red, squinting balefully at the light as he climbs automatically into his high chair, which stands alongside the dining table.
"And here's your lovely little brother," he adds, trying to dampen her resentment, "who right after you stopped crying and went to sleep, began to cry and go wild. You remember, Nadi, how you went wild last night?"
The child nods.
"You remember how you kicked the door?"
The toddler glances at the door.
"What did the door do to you, that you kicked it like that?"
Nadi tries to think what the door did to him, but his sister spares him the trouble of answering.
"He always kicks the door after Imma leaves."
Ya'ari is relieved.
"Doesn't your foot hurt when you kick the door?"
Nadi soberly examines his bare foot.
"Yes," he whispers.
"So is kicking a good idea?"
The child has no answer, but the similarity to that other, faraway child still flickers in his face.
"So tell me now, kids," says Ya'ari, trying to get at the root of the mystery, "am I right that you cried and acted wild because you miss your Abba who is gone to the army?"
His suggestion seems reasonable enough to Neta, who despite everything wants to please her grandfather, but Nadi furrows his brow as if wondering whether this is the right answer, or if a deeper one lies behind it.
"So today, if you'll be good children, we'll take you to see your Abba in the army, and now let's eat some cornflakes."
And he pours the golden cereal into two colorful plastic bowls, adding milk according to each child's specific instructions.
DANIELA TAKES A knife and fork and begins to eat the omelet, which is rosy with meat and vegetables, while studying the black concave basalt stone that sits between her plate and coffee cup. This is a meaningful stone, laden with history, placed there to serve as a useful accessory in clarifying for the courteous listener not only how one can tell when Australopithecus boisei—that "eating machine" — branched off the path, clearly leading from chimpanzees to Homo sapiens, but also whether the conventional assessment, which holds that this ape ran into an evolutionary dead end, is in fact correct.
Because when we discover fossils from animals or creatures of a humanoid nature — a wisdom tooth, wrist bone, a solitary finger — embedded in ancient rock, the excavators must be religiously careful also to preserve the evidence of their surroundings. Especially the encasing rock, because that's where invaluable information is hidden that only a geologist can decipher, not merely regarding the date, which is determined by radioactive analysis, but also the question of whether this rock is a medium that just happened to capture a fragment of the prehistoric creature or whether it might also be a tool dropped from its hand. For if the ancient being knew how to use this stone to crack open his nuts, he should be upgraded a rung on the human ladder. Here is where the paleoanthropologists are dependent upon the professional eye of the geologist, and two heads are better than one. Only geologists are trained to determine whether a simple stone, like this one on the table, which is about one million six hundred thousand years old, is carrying a fetus inside.
"A fetus?"
"A metaphorical fetus," explains the second geologist, Sifu Sumana, who till now has been quietly focused on eating the last of the giant omelet straight from the pan.