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  “Yes you have,” said Gruber without remembering if she had or not.

  They went on driving through a forest of tall thin trees. The darkness was absolute. Gruber couldn’t understand how she allowed herself to drive at a speed of ninety miles per hour.

  “A friend of mine from Berkeley taped these prologues for me.”

  “Very nice.”

  “It really was very nice of him. I told him so too. And it was from him that I heard about the Serling commemoration fund. He drew my attention to the fact that for only seventeen dollars you can get a really neat email address. Your name and then @rodserling.com. He himself has an address like that. But I think it’s going a bit too far.”

  “So do I,” said Gruber.

  “But Raffi Propheta doesn’t think so. His admiration of Serling knows no bounds.”

  “Who’s Raffi Propheta?” asked Gruber, and for a moment he was afraid he had missed something important.

  “My friend. From Berkeley University. He made this tape for me. He teaches Hebrew at Berkeley, and he’s active in the Serling commemoration fund. He’s a very special person. From the moment I heard that he too was a Serling fan he shot up in my estimation. He lives in Berkeley. I never visit him. Not because I’ve got anything against Berkeley, but because I simply can’t leave the spiders for long. It’s enough that I go to the Hebrew Union College in New York. It really makes me nervous to leave the spiders, even though since they stuck me with the Hispanic I’m less nervous about leaving the research without supervision.”

  “Clearly.”

  “My relations with Raffi Propheta are platonic, there’s nothing between us except for conversations in Hebrew. He’s the only person I know here who I can speak Hebrew to the way I’m speaking to you. Naturally I can find Israeli students in Ithaca, the place is full of them, by the way, but talking to students isn’t much fun. Apart from which, he’s up to date on all the changes in Hebrew slang, and he has a student who’s doing a doctorate in the subject under his supervision. They’ve got a lot of respect for him in Berkeley. You’ve never heard of him in Israel? Raffi Propheta?”

  “It’s not my field.”

  “Right,” she giggled. Gruber noticed that she was familiar with all the turns in the winding road and took them automatically.

  “I had a serious moral problem with him, but I overcame it. All in all I learned a lot about Rod Serling from him. For example, that he comes from a Jewish Reform family, and that he became a member of the Unitarian church, and also that he was a boxer. Did you know that?”

  “No,” admitted Gruber.

  “Serling made a movie called Heavyweight Requiem. He was a Renaissance man. He was a paratrooper too. He served in the US army and fought like a hero.”

  “Good.”

  “And he was only five foot three.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “He died in seventy-five. But before that he collected six Emmy awards,” she added proudly.

  Gruber’s mental condition was desperate. He was convinced that he was being driven by a woman who was not right in her head. But at the same time he knew that this did not contradict the fact that she had the ability to help him in his limping research.

  “He’s pro-Arab and anti-Israel big time,” she said as if revealing a great secret.

  “Who?”

  “Propheta. Whenever the IDF kill someone he calls and barks at me as if I’m the virtuoso mind behind the army’s activities in the territories.”

  “Obviously not,” said Gruber.

  “But I need him,” she said in the tone of an intimate confession. “I need to speak Hebrew on the phone or face to face. I’m not sexually attracted to him, you mustn’t think . . . the fact that he hates Israel makes it impossible for me to see him in that light. I like him, but not that much. Listen to this, in my opinion this is one of the best introductions—”

  Again Serling’s voice filled the interior of the car:

  There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, yes,” Gruber made haste to reply.

  It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.

  “If there’s a word you don’t understand tell me.”

  “I understand.”

  It is the middle ground . . .

  “The halfway point,” shouted McPhee.

  . . . between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is . . .

  Gruber noticed that she was moving her lips together with the tape, and he felt a great sense of detachment.

  . . . the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.

  “My pro-Arab friend from Berkeley has all the episodes that come after these introductions on DVD. Would you like me to get them for you?”

  “No, no. We have the same thing in Tel Aviv too.”

  “Okay,” she said in disappointment. “I only wanted to help. You know that I only want to help,” she said and gave him a meaningful look, that lasted too long for someone who should have been keeping her eyes on the road. And then she returned her eyes to the road and they drove for a while in silence until she stopped the car, put on the hand brakes, and said in a childish voice, “Here we are.”

  Gruber saw a depressing three-storied building. In darkness.

  His sense of strangeness instantly deepened and he felt dizzy too, as if his whole body was suddenly operating according to different laws of physics, those of a kind of Twilight Zone. This Israeli woman from the arthropod forum was bringing him to an abandoned building, that she claimed was a fancy French restaurant. With all due respect, he was not yet ready to explore another dimension.

  “Come along,” said Bahat, and they both got out of the car, which she locked with a screech of the alarm.

  “The entrance is round the other side. Careful how you go. The stones are slippery here from the deluge that came down before you landed. Did you feel it on the plane?”

  He didn’t answer, only walked behind her in the dark. They entered the building. Bahat said, “It was once a geriatric hospital.”

  They walked down a long corridor, on the right and left were peeling green doors with numbers on them, 212, 213 . . .

  “A French restaurant in a hospital?”

  “The hospital isn’t operating, the restaurant is,” said Bahat and opened a brown door, revealing a dimly lit French restaurant full of diners.

  “Name please?” a hostess pounced on them.

  “McPhee,” said McPhee, and took off her coat, helped Gruber off with his, and handed them both to the hostess.

  McPhee smiled at Gruber, and he thought the smile was false and that her teeth were as white as those of a lot of Americans. But he also thought that when he got back to Israel he would have his own teeth whitened, he was a public personality, winner of the Israel Prize, he couldn’t afford to go round with plaque and yellow teeth.

  The hostess led them to a table that did not meet with McPhee’s approval, and she requested another table. There was no other table available, and she asked for Rene to be called. Rene arrived during the middle of a lovers’ quarrel at one of the tables, and as a result a table to McPhee’s taste becoming available. As soon as they sat down she said something she had planned to say before, but hadn’t managed to:

  “It’s hard to know if there are more pro-Arabs than Arabs at Berkeley. In my opinion there are. But perhaps now it’s balanced out a bit. After all, the pro-Arabs need Arabs next to them so that they can show them that they’re on their side.”

  “Presumably,” said Gruber and he looked at the menus and didn’t understand a thing.

  “I’ll explain,” said McPhee and she explained all the dishes to him.

  Gruber looked at her and realized that never in all his life had he felt so alienated anywhere.

  But perhaps it was only the tiredness, he tried to encou
rage himself, and decided to stop asking himself questions and to start taking an interest in the menu. Suddenly he felt hungry too, and he even said so to Bahat.

  “I told you so, the appetite comes with the food.”

  Gruber didn’t like having this kind of saying repeated to him. He worked out what time it was in Israel, and he felt like calling someone there now, never mind who, and suddenly he realized that he had forgotten his cell phone in Tel Baruch North, on the bedside table, for some reason on Mandy’s side.

  “Oy,” he said sadly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot my cell phone at home,” he said.

  “Do you want mine? You want to make a call? What time is it over there?”

  “What time is it over here?” He smiled. “No, never mind.” It seemed to him that he wouldn’t be able to produce a single sentence in Hebrew now that would sound authentic. He was probably beginning to take on an American tinge himself, and whoever answered the phone in Israel would notice it at once, and conclude that Irad Gruber wasn’t solid enough and that he changed in accordance with whatever country he happened to be in.

  During the course of the meal, which lasted for exactly two hours, McPhee talked without stopping, only pausing when her mouth was full. Gruber ate and nodded, sometimes smiling and sometimes looking serious; there were even moments when he tried to engrave what he was eating on his memory, but his thoughts wandered. All his numbers were in his cell phone memory. If anything here was as it should be, and this woman had important and useful information, he would have to let the Defense Minister and the head of WIDA know immediately. How was he going to do that without the numbers on his cell phone? He was too tired to find a solution, and he ordered crème brûlée and decaffeinated espresso.

  Bahat was drunk and asked him to drive back. All the way on the winding road between the forest of tall thin trees he thought about Rod Serling who had written about the beyond and the fifth dimension and the imagination, collected six Emmy awards, and died young.

  3

  IN ISRAEL THE DAY WAS COMING TO THE END OF THE TWILIGHT hour, and all its beauty was going to be over in a matter of seconds. Lirit came home after an exhausting working day at Nighty-Night, tanned as if she had spent two weeks in Eilat. In fact, she had gone straight from the pajama factory to the health club at Mikado, where she had obtained a spray-on tan, and now she was suffering from a guilty conscience for not going to see her mother all day. She imagined that she wasn’t doing too badly, and comforted herself with the thought that tomorrow she would go before work.

  The tan looked terrific, authentic and even, Lirit said to herself as she examined her naked body in the mirror. Shlomi was right not to like nudity with color differences left by swimsuits. A swimsuit seemed to him an artificial additive. Lirit thought that she would return to their home in Brosh on the border of Te’ashur in two, maximum three days, and at the health club they told her that the tan would last up to a week.

  Because of his views she made up her mind not to tell him how she had acquired the tan, but to say that she had sunbathed in the nude on the roof of the pajama factory.

  She called Medical Frontline and someone who didn’t actually have a clue told her that her mother was sleeping after receiving strong painkillers.

  Now Lirit looked like a typical Telba-North girl of her age: blonde streaks—which someone like that would have done herself for a few dollars or at the Mikado hairdressing salon when she had the time—thin but not emaciated, quite tall, and most importantly self-confident beyond what you would expect for someone of her age, as if the majority of her achievements were already behind her, and all she had to do now was go from strength to strength. Most of the inhabitants of Tel Baruch North, even if they weren’t twenty-two-year-old girls with blonde streaks, were self-confident to a fault. It may well be that the evergreen vegetation, together with the slightly exaggerated resemblance of the houses, whether multistoried or not, had in the end done the job, whether the planners had planned it or not: they had implanted in the inhabitants what was so sorely missing in other suburbs of Tel Aviv, the conviction that the place would survive a war.

  She didn’t know if she was allowed to take a shower, and she called them to ask. They said yes she was, no problem. In the shower she felt flooded by pity for her mother, who had been buried for years in a place where there were only female workers, most of them ugly, and the only man who sometimes came there was the Singer technician, maybe the same one who had come onto her grandmother, and maybe also to the next generation.

  Lirit dried herself quickly and took a big white T-shirt belonging to her father from the walk-in closet, put it on, lay down on her parents’ comfortable bed, switched on the remote of the plasma screen television, which was a little too big for the size of the room, and gave her the feeling that she was sitting in the front row of a movie theater.

  She switched from the BBC World News to the Good Life Channel, but they were only showing cooking programs there, and Lirit wasn’t really keen on the subject, especially since she was under no obligation to get to grips with it as yet. She switched to the E! Channel, to see the homes of celebrities residing in Hollywood.

  All the homes of the celebrities were standing firmly on their foundations, and the celebrities were very happy with their homes and their careers, even though they had known ups and downs. They showed a singer who had gotten into trouble, and was now in danger of losing everything, including his personal freedom.

  Lirit opened the drawer of her mother’s bedside table and took out a bottle of Yves Saint Laurent pink nail polish, opened it, sniffed the smell she loved, and started to paint her toenails.

  Her mother’s business pink didn’t really go with the rather savage orange-brown of her skin, but she couldn’t find the remover. She waited for the nail polish to dry, and after that she didn’t have any plans. Shlomi hadn’t called or sent a text message, and she was very tense, to the extent of a pounding in her heart every two minutes. Beads of sweat stemming from the fear of abandonment, mixed with the fear of life without him, collected on her forehead. Lirit didn’t admit to herself that she found Shlomi somewhat boring, and that therefore the fact that he hadn’t called was enough to make him fascinating in the extreme.

  On the movie channel The Postman Always Rings Twice was starting, with her mother’s favorite actress, Jessica Lange, and Lirit thought it was the right thing for today to watch a movie starring her mother’s favorite actress.

  All through the movie she was preoccupied by Shlomi’s failure to call. If she had been alert to her feelings and in touch with them in real time, she would have demanded a clarification from Shlomi weeks ago, when the crack began. On the other had, it was clear what he would say. He would say again that you couldn’t swim in the same river twice.

  Shlomi got on Lirit’s nerves with this proverb, and Lirit didn’t know anymore if she loved him, really him, or if she was just obsessive about him and a junkie for his approval.

  She examined her cell phone again. Perhaps in the meantime he had sent a text message, or a heart, or a smiley, but the cunning little screen was empty, and it only showed the time and the state of the reception and the battery, and it was all so empty! No picture of an envelope and no sign of a call that hadn’t been answered, for example, when she was in the shower. She hardly had any incoming calls. Ever since she had gone down south, she had cut off all contact with her girlfriends.

  She turned her eyes back to the plasma screen. She tried to remember the name of the male lead playing opposite Lange, but she couldn’t, because she had never heard of him anyway.

  She made up her mind to wait for the credits at the end of the movie and learn this missing detail.

  Suddenly she noticed that she felt good. Comfortable. Secure. And that the only thought disturbing her peace of mind was that Shlomi hadn’t called. If she dismissed this thought from the course of her life, at least for a while, everything would be all right.

>   There was no doubt that escaping from the natural and organic life with Shlomi to the artificial life supported by every possible gadget had done her good. All in all she had really missed civilization and especially globalization, and wanted to buy some Diesel clothes, and a few other brands that enriched the rich and impoverished the poor. She planned on a big shopping spree before going back south, and wondered if she should take her new acquisitions with her to Brosh on the border of Te’ashur, or leave them in Telba-North.

  Fifteen minutes after the sensational sex on the kitchen table in The Postman Always Rings Twice her cell phone rang, and Lirit recognized Shomi’s cell number on the screen, which meant that Shlomi was using it now in spite of his repudiation of all its upgraded features because a call from cell to cell cost less. Lirit let it go on ringing for her own enjoyment and she thought, there you are, as soon as you let go, he called.

  She wanted to sound busy with something entirely different, like a person with a world and life of her own, of which Shlomi constituted only a small derivative even though she respected this derivative. At the same time she wanted to give her hello a happy note, because they were in a relationship after all, and why hide happiness if it existed. But already by the sound of Shlomi’s hello she understood that they were in for a serious discussion of essential issues. She really didn’t feel like starting this kind of discussion now, in the middle of the movie, and so she immediately adopted a despondent tone:

  “My mother’s not doing too well.”

  And thus she succeeded in forcing Shlomi to take an interest in the health of her mother, who he couldn’t stand anyway. Only after he had complied with the demands of common humanity, he turned to the personal: quite simply, he wanted to split up with Lirit. It was quite simple, he said again. He needed to live by himself for a while, it wasn’t an absolute separation, but it was definitely a separation. Quiet detachment.