"You don't trust your woman in Jerusalem to feed us?"
"Food there will surely be, but I know this lady very well. Given her regal manners my staff may be too intimidated to go to her table. We're taking care of them, so they won't be dependent on her refreshments."
"The staff, the staff," Ya'ari scoffs, "what staff?"
It turns out that a real delegation has been assembled, six escorts for one old man, not counting Ya'ari himself: a private ambulance driver; two Filipino friends recruited by Francisco; Hilario, in the role of interpreter; and one little surprise…
"What surprise?"
"A surprise," his father says, smiling. "When you see her, you'll understand right away that this is a surprise."
"But what sort of surprise?"
"A little patience, please. Have I ever disappointed you?"
Ya'ari looks fondly at his father, who is dressed festively for the occasion in a white shirt and black vest; a red tie lies folded in his lap. His shaking does not seem any better this morning.
"And your medicines?"
"I took a little more than the usual dose. And I have another dose in my pocket, in case the old girl tries to exceed the bounds of propriety."
"How many years since you've seen her?"
"Not since the beginning of the millennium. When my illness got worse, I understood that it would not be dignified for us elderly people to peddle illusions to ourselves."
"Illusions about what?"
The father removes his eyeglasses and brings his wristwatch close to his eyes to verify that the second hand is moving. Then he looks up at his son and grumbles, "Illusions… illusions… you know exactly what I mean, so don't pretend this morning to be somebody you're not."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning a square, naïve, limited, engineer."
The elder Ya'ari, who had no formal education, still teases his son sometimes about his degree in engineering. But the son doesn't drop the subject.
"Illusions that love can be a consolation for death?"
The father waves his hands irritably.
"If that explanation makes you feel better, then we'll agree on it. But do me a favor and save the philosophy for later, and instead tell me, should I put on the red tie, or is it too much?"
"If you don't also plan to put on makeup for the visit, then a red tie will brighten your pale face."
"But a festive necktie may give the wrong impression, that I'm coming as something more than a technician fulfilling a guarantee."
Ya'ari takes hold of his father's quivering hand.
"Lover-technician, nothing is more attractive than that."
There's a quiet knock at the door. Hilario, who is sitting by the table making sure that the baby won't spread her arms and legs and fly to the floor, runs to answer it. Two Filipino youths with sad adult faces enter awkwardly and are drawn immediately to their infant compatriot, who greets them with a friendly smile. Kinzie hurries in from the kitchen to introduce the newcomers, Marco and Pedro, good friends and fellow caregivers who got the morning off from their employers to help a friend carry his boss up four flights of stairs to his lover in Jerusalem.
EVEN AFTER FIVE nights here she still wakes up into pitch-darkness. This time she's roused by a sudden anxiety about Nofar, whose devotion to her service in the hospital could get her unwittingly infected by some rare disease. The day after tomorrow, immediately on returning to Israel, she will demand that Nofar spell out for her which injections are given to assistant nurses and explain the procedures for handling people afflicted with dubious illnesses. It has been several years since she and Amotz have grown wary of intervening in Nofar's private affairs, but illness is not a private affair.
She considers whether to turn on a light in the room or to try and cling to the tail end of the sleep that is slipping away from her. After fifteen minutes of lying still with her eyes closed, she concedes that this night's slumber has abandoned her for good, and she turns on the light, intending to replace her own worries with the material and moral losses of the heroine of the novel. But after two pages, the arbitrariness of the plot again stops her reading cold. Fictional troubles can't trump real concerns, and given no choice she lays aside the novel and picks up the King James Bible. At first she returns to the book of Jeremiah, calmly to assess the validity of the heated protest against the prophet by the man bearing his name. And indeed, the level of aggression directed by the biblical Jeremy against his countrymen, coupled with such ornate linguistic virtuosity, confirms her brother-in-law's accusation: these furious prophecies were delivered with pleasure and satisfaction rather than sorrow or pain.
She looks for the Book of Job. There, at least, she can find human suffering with a personal, not a national, dimension. She hopes, too, to find in it rare words to challenge her English.
In this version, for some reason the Book of Job is in a different place, hidden in a spot that considerably precedes Jeremiah. Once she locates it, though, she has no trouble at all collecting words indecipherable to her, such as:
froward
collops
assuaged
reins
gin
cockle
neesing
It is wondrous and pleasing to encounter in the Bible vocabulary she fails utterly to understand in a language that she loves and teaches, and she writes the words down on the last page of the novel. Perhaps she can use them to test the regional supervisor of English studies back home, an ironic bachelor from South Africa who likes her and cultivates her company. But would it be nice to embarrass a friend with a test he might well not pass?
Then she lets go of Job, which does seem to her a more estimable text, but stuffed with tedious repetitions. And in general — a lazy drowsiness flutters her eyes — one could compress the Bible a bit without losing anything significant. With the book in her hand she gets up to close the blinds against the imminent sunrise, but before laying it down and turning off the light, she decides to have a look at the Song of Songs.
Right from the sensual start—Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—the English flows melodically. Here there's not one cryptic word; each one seems right and trustworthy, with the spirit of the original Hebrew hovering over the lines. The old-fashioned English resonates with grace and grandeur, even a hint of humor. Here is love, open and generous, sometimes pleading for its life, sometimes daring and expansive, bronzed by the noon sun, or burning at night. Yes, now she understands why it was here that the bereaved father began to sob.
I am black, but comely,
O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kedar,
As the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me because I am black—
Because the sun hath looked upon me.
In the imagination of the white woman, on her bed at night in the Dark Continent, the Sudanese Sijjin Kuang arises now from the desert, black and comely, her stature like a palm tree, and goes about the city at night sick with love, wandering through streets and markets, searching for the one that her soul has loved, and she cannot find him, and the watchmen on the walls find her and beat and wound her, and tear away her scarf, and she is as a rose among the thorns…
And the Israeli visitor is drawn to her and runs after her, skimming through the eight chapters not in tears, but with a pounding heart.