Textile Page 13

AND HE HAD SOMETHING to be enraged about! As an aperitif, Propheta was angry about having to leave his post at the University of Montpelier in the south of France and move to the USA, and to the ends of the earth what’s more, to Berkeley.

  The USA and France seemed to Propheta like two different planets, and he was unable to make the transition smoothly, so that part of him always remained in Israel, another part in Montpelier, and now he had to manage with what was left.

  For three years now he had been outside Western Europe, and he yearned to go back there, but he didn’t have a hope. All the senior positions in Western Europe were taken, and he refused to go to Eastern Europe or to Scandinavia, even though he had offers. In Europe it was easier to forget the pains of life, he thought. In Europe you weren’t alone. There were other people, and you could talk to them. They answered you. In the USA people were always asking you how you were, and if you answered them seriously, you found yourself talking to thin air, as had happened to him more than once. The question “How are you?” wasn’t a question at all, it was just a greeting.

  Every day outside of Europe was a waste of time, especially in view of the fact that Hebrew studies in Berkeley were at an all-time low since the outbreak of the second Intifada, and he, like other Hebrew professors in the USA, had to be grateful that their departments hadn’t been shut down due to a lack of interest, as had already happened in a few places, like Yale, for example.

  It may well be that it was this lack of interest on the part of the Americans in Hebrew culture that had prompted Propheta himself to stop taking an interest in Hebrew literature. Although he went on teaching as usual, sometimes even he felt like walking out of his own classes.

  And this being the case, a great void opened up in Propheta’s life. And he filled this void with geopolitics, a field in which he began to be very interested, and also, in his opinion, to master.

  He was of the opinion that the period of the beginning of the third millennium, in other words right now, was of unparalleled importance, and that the future of humanity would be determined by the people who set the tone. Propheta wanted to set the tone, but first he set out to master the contents. And in the meantime, so as not to cut himself off from the revolution, in a special notebook he wrote down all the great events all over the world, including in Chechnya, and also in all kinds of African states that didn’t even have a functioning state. He wrote down everything in a clear hand in a special notebook, in case there wouldn’t be any computers after the world was destroyed.

  Recently Propheta had published a book of his own on the subject of contemporary politics, intended to sell for eleven dollars to students of international relations so that if they didn’t have a clue about what was happening, his words would reverberate inside them. To the students of Hebrew at Berkeley, fifteen in all, he distributed the book for free.

  The First Autoimmune Period—this was the title of his book, and its thesis was that the new terror should be fought in the same way as autoimmune diseases. “What is happening here?” he asked in his book. “The world should be seen as a human body that fails to perceive something as friendly, and attacks it. Wake up sick world! Build alternatives!” he cried, without going into details.

  His book was relatively thin, one hundred and forty pages in all, and it ended with a call to action. Professor Propheta called on psychologists and depth psychologists to found a new psychology that would explain what was happening and what had happened in the soul of the contemporary terrorist to make him want to carry out a large scale, disturbing act of destruction.

  The confused citizens of the world had the right to receive a more serious explanation than “these people are insane.” The terrorists who emerged from the refugee camps or from the heart of one or another European capital were not crazy people. Their acts had a rational explanation, and it had to be discovered. Reading between the lines it was evident that he was unimpressed by chaos theory, and that he scorned those who relied on it to provide a so-called explanation, while in fact they were throwing sand in the eyes of the confused citizens seeking peace and justice.

  Psychologists were falling down on the job, they had to set everything else aside and concentrate on the question of how to identify potential terrorists in childhood, and to prevent them, through educational means, from reaching such extremes. He did not rule out the possibility that early signs of the potential for destruction might even be identified in future terrorists while still in the mother’s womb.

  Until white smoke rises! he demanded. They had to work on it until the personality structure of the suicide bomber was exposed! For example, to understand why he didn’t put an end to his life on his own, alone in his room, or in a solitary spot in the bosom of nature, why he insisted on taking other people with him. And the brilliant minds should also identify the personality structures of those who sent the suicide bombers. What kind of psychological projection led a man to send someone else to commit suicide, instead of committing suicide himself? And this information should be made available to everybody. He demanded transparency!

  His book was full of exclamation marks, which made his readers feel uneasy.

  He was interviewed in the local Berkeley paper, and he explained his positions in detail, but the interview only received one short, thin column, accompanying a terrible passport photo (the one from his green card), and it read that a new book had been published by an ex-Israeli who argued that many Israelis, in contrast to himself, had lost their minds because of the occupation, and that he, whose mind was clear and lucid, wanted to warn people that the world was about to be destroyed, with Israel at the top of the list.

  Propheta was insulted at having been mentioned in the context of the occupation when he had sought to write an abstract book, and tried to make sure that the word “occupation” didn’t appear in it even once.

  In the last chapter of the book he asserted unequivocally that the human race had embarked on its suicidal autoimmune journey with two important historical events: the rise of Khomeinism, and the fall of the walls between East and West, which had completely confused the world. He hinted that the fall of the walls had been a calamity for mankind.

  But he also had a consoling, optimistic message. In the end, humanity would be saved thanks to the Chinese. The Chinese, who constituted a very serious slice of the global population, would realize that there was no other nation capable of overcoming the dangerous autoimmunism that had invaded the human race. And then, with Confucian discipline and an emphasis on bureaucracy and minute detail, the Chinese would take over the world, which by then would be almost completely virtual, and set it to order, in their Chinese way.

  ALL THIS, more or less, Propheta told Gruber while standing up and sipping his chai, with the smell of the ginger spreading through Bahat’s living room. In the end it didn’t make a big impression on Gruber, in spite of the dramatic silence with which Propheta concluded his words. The parrot too, which had flown off his shoulder and was standing on the table, seemed indifferent.

  “Where did you meet Bahat McPhee?” asked Gruber.

  “The first time was on the forum on Rod Serling, if you’re familiar with the name. But the second time I met her was at the JCC, the Jewish Community Center in Berkeley, on the ninth anniversary of Rabin’s assassination. There was some Israeli klutz there who talked about economics and corporations, as if it had anything to do with Rabin’s murder, and I shouted ‘Murderer, murderer!’ from the audience, and she tried to calm me down, but I was already in a trance. ‘You killed fifteen Arab kids then, you’re criminals, but that’s a different matter.’”

  “But why blame the lecturer for corporations?”

  “He’s morally responsible. Anyone who doesn’t leave Israel, like I did by the way, bears moral responsibility. After a few years of seeing the damage done to the Israelis by the occupation, I picked up my heels and made for France. It was only there that I began to live. And when I say ‘live’, I don’t mean ‘survive.’”


  “Obviously,” said Gruber.

  “They removed me from the hall and Bahat came with me, even though she doesn’t hold my opinions. From then we’ve been friends, in spite of the ideological chasm. She says that the law of sympathy according to Gershom Scholem operates between us.”

  “I never read him,” said Gruber.

  “Neither did I. But it’s something in the kabbalah. About souls knowing each other from previous incarnations, and the law of sympathy operates between them. She says that kind of sympathy exists between us, mystical.”

  “You know what?” said Gruber, “I will have chai.”

  “Really?” Propheta said, pleased. “I’m the chai champion of Berkeley.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  7

  “WHERE IS SHE?” ASKED PROPHETA, STEPPING CAREFULLY with two fresh cups of chai toward Gruber, who was sitting in front of the television and watching the end of All the President’s Men. Again the smell of the ginger pervaded the living room. Propheta took a coaster from a little stack of rubber coasters standing on the table, and Gruber followed his movements with interest. He couldn’t remember if they had this same custom at home, or if Mandy served tea and coffee in cups with saucers, making coasters unnecessary.

  The arguments between Mandy and Lirit on this subject had been completely wiped out of his memory. Lirit would drink hot drinks from a mug without using a coaster. If there was one thing Mandy couldn’t stand, it was rings on tables. In other people’s houses too, she would wonder how they could leave rings on tables that had cost thousands of dollars. It seemed crude and Israeli to her.

  “Where is she?” Propheta asked again after blowing on his cup.

  “Sleeping,” said Gruber.

  “You don’t know how happy I am now,” Propheta said suddenly, as if this time there was something special in the chai, “You know, just talking Hebrew. Not that I have a problem with English. I speak English like an American, I pick up languages quickly. It goes without saying that if I taught Hebrew in Montpellier, French isn’t a problem for me either, but when I speak Hebrew,” his eyes shot sparks of happiness, “I can give my facial muscles a rest. And relaxing the facial muscles relaxes areas in my brain. And I won’t say it isn’t a pleasure. And this is after living outside Israel for years.”

  He sat down on the sofa next to Gruber, not in order to watch the end of the movie, but in order to speak Hebrew.

  Gruber pretended to be radically interested in the movie. He narrowed his eyes in order to catch every word, even though it wasn’t up to the eyes to hear, and Propheta understood his body language and kept quiet.

  “What do you think of her house?” he asked after a while.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” said Gruber, who, because he was so surprised by the question, answered it honestly, “On the one hand it’s young girl’s apartment, and on the other hand an old woman’s, with all this pseudo-antique kitsch. There’s no direction. Did you see the photograph of Richard Nixon? What’s the nature of her relationship with the Hispanic bio-technologist?”

  “I think pure sex, and that it’s over. Ever since the business of Reform Judaism came into the picture, she put a stop to it, because he’s uncircumcised.”

  Gruber paid no attention to his words and continued:

  “My wife wouldn’t have looked at this place even if it was on the seashore. My wife really likes living next to the sea. When she was a child she lived in Tel Aviv not far from the sea, and ever since then the sea is an essential view-supplement for her.”

  “Do you live next to the sea?” asked Propheta, listening with half an ear.

  “No. We live in Tel Baruch North. Do you know it?”

  “I’m from Motza, next to Jerusalem.”

  “Tell me, do you think I don’t know that Motza is next to Jerusalem?”

  “Until the age of fifteen,” added Propheta. “After that we moved to Beit Zayit. My parents are still there. In a retirement village, but every day at five in the morning they go to the pool.”

  Gruber didn’t ask him if he missed the views of the Jerusalem hills because he wasn’t interested, and in any case, Bahat McPhee was coming down the stairs in neurotic overload. She needed her pills. By the way she walked Propheta could tell that she was suffering from some chemical deprivation or other and that there was no point in talking to her until the chemistry kicked in.

  Gruber, ignorant of the problem, stood up.

  “Hi, good morning to you.”

  She didn’t answer. She walked past them on her way to the kitchen, returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola she had taken out of the fridge, and swallowed the pills clenched in her fist with the help of a sip straight from the bottle.

  Gruber said, “In our family everyone has his own drink. My wife introduced this rule so that no one would drink from anyone else’s bottle, on grounds of hygiene.”

  “Do you want to drink cola from a bottle?” asked Bahat quietly. “I have a stock of bottles. But not cold.”

  “I never drink straight from the bottle,” said Gruber, untruthfully.

  Propheta felt a little pang of jealousy, but which he knew was not legitimate. Although he realized that Bahat was not yet focused, he was insulted by the fact that she had not responded to his presence. He hadn’t expected her to fall into his arms, but nor had he expected her to ignore him.

  McPhee wondered if she had given him some kind of hint to come. And even if she had, it was a mistake, and she wanted to get rid of him.

  But Propheta was determined to protect Bahat McPhee and had no intention of leaving her alone with any devious Israelis. If she didn’t realize that she was being exploited, then thank God he was here. The woman was about to give away to Israel information she had worked on for years, often at the expense of her social life. He thought that if she was really going to give them the right answers, then she had to demand money in return. And there was no reason for her to tell the rabbi from Albany about it. Not everyone had to know everything about everybody.

  But he knew that McPhee was set on feeling noble, and that if she took even a single dollar from the Israeli she would feel as if she had betrayed herself.

  Bahat, in the end, was a very lonely woman. People who used to be her friends and who used to call her occasionally had deserted her out of consideration because they had persuaded themselves that they didn’t want to disturb the genius at her research. Because of everything she had gone through in her life, and because of her years of loneliness, she tended to lose her sense of proportion and she needed someone to supervise her judgment. Which is where he, Propheta, came into the picture.

  He held the opinion that she had been through enough, by which he meant the affair with Emily Boston, and the whole mess that came after it when Randall left her his parents to take care of until the day they died.

  He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt this woman, whom he regarded as an angel in human form.

  The truth was that Propheta was in love with her, but he knew that she couldn’t stand him physically. To him Bahat was a breath of fresh air in his world, and her social isolation touched his heart. She was mistaken in thinking that when she was a Reform rabbi she would meet people in the framework of her routine, and that they would have to be nice to her, that she would make friends with some of them, and then perhaps she would also find some lover she could stand physically and in whom she would find all the qualities her heart desired, at least for a few years because she was already sick to death of being with spiders all day long.

  Propheta was also suspicious of the rabbi from Albany, but he had no way of approaching her. What kind of a person was she? How could the rabbi allow this woman—who anyone could see had been disappointed by the world and who was acting out of utter despair—to pour years of her hard work into the hands of the Israelis? If he understood correctly, she was actually giving up her chance for a Nobel here, and perhaps even risking her liberty. Harming the security of the United States was the la
st thing she needed.

  On the other hand, the danger to relations between the USA and the State of Israel didn’t interest him so much as a hair of his mustache, which had once been ginger and was now a yellowish gray. On this point Propheta thought that as a logistics officer in the reserves he was no mean strategist because he was perhaps the only one here who thought things through to the end.

  BAHAT SAW THE TRANSMISSION of information to Gruber as an excellent way out of the condition of being buried alive that she had organized for herself over the past few years. When she set the two things opposite each other—the modification of the gene responsible for the activity of the spinning glands in the spiders, opposite the title of Reform rabbi, which meant a lively social life, and what’s more, one without feeling that she was imposing herself on people because she would be serving them by the very fact of her presence—it was very clear to her which of the two she preferred.

  The sign that she was doing the right thing she found in the terrible headaches which assailed her before she had decided between the two. As long as they continued, alternating between the left side of her head and then the right, she felt torn between her loyalty to the United States and her loyalty to herself. But the moment she made up her mind, they vanished into thin air.

  “I don’t feel like coffee,” she suddenly said sadly, and it seemed that only then she noticed the presence of the parrot that was now perched on the windowsill. But she ignored it.

  “Do you want me to make you chai?” asked Propheta happily.

  “Yes, but I haven’t got any cardamom.”

  “I know you haven’t. I took note of it,” he smiled at her and she smiled back at him, a perfunctory smile, not from the heart but out of embarrassment.

  McPhee approached the sofa where Gruber was sitting.

  “After the chai we’ll go to visit my spider farm,” she said. “And in the meantime the pills will take effect.”

  “What pills do you take?” asked Gruber with affected empathy.