Textile Page 15

  One sentence had stayed with her from the book which had helped her to prepare for her matriculation exam in Jewish history: “Ze’ev Tiomkin’s plans burst like a bubble of suds.” She refused to let her plans burst like a bubble of suds.

  “You mustn’t break,” she murmured. “You have to go on. Wake up, Dr. Gruber, wake up.” She shook him, slapped him, poured water on him, and cried, “Please, Dr. Gruber, don’t despair. We can’t let them break us. Please.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “Did I faint?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Bahat went on dripping water onto his face and spreading it over his forehead and cheeks.

  “Breathe slowly, everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Did you call an ambulance?” he asked.

  “No, no, there’s no need to call an ambulance for everything. Look, you’re awake. You’re alive. Be grateful. Sometimes you can pull through on your own, without drama! This isn’t a play. We’re only human . . .”

  Gruber didn’t listen to her. He was in shock.

  “I have to go back!” he said.

  “Of course you do, there’s no question about it. But in the meantime, before you go back, I’ll bring you another glass of water.”

  She hurried to bring him cold water. He drank.

  “Look,” she said to him, “in any case she donated her body to science, so there’s no need for you to hurry back, you can complete your mission.”

  “What an idiot . . .” mumbled Gruber.

  “Who?” asked Bahat apprehensively.

  “My wife. An idiot plain and simple. All those plastic surgeries, it all came back to her like a boomerang. It’s hard to believe that I’m a widower. The title doesn’t suit me at all. I’m the most vital man in the world.”

  9

  LIRIT LIT A CIGARETTE. AT LAST SHE HAD HANDED OVER the management of the crisis to her father. She sat on the sofa and waited for a lightening of the load, but to her surprise she failed to feel it. She regretted not having taken that American woman’s phone number from her father. She reached out for the Haaretz newspaper and put it on her lap with the intention of leafing through it, but her eyes were full of tears. For the first time since her mother’s death, she wept. She put the paper down and shook her head from side to side as if to say she didn’t believe it, she refused to accept it.

  The Grubers subscribed to Haaretz, L’Isha, French Vogue, Marie Claire in English, and the American Cosmopolitan. In addition their mailbox was always full of scientific journals in various fields for her father, and professional journals in the textile field for her mother.

  Lirit saw that she was out of cigarettes, and she took Mandy’s handbag and set out for the shopping center to replenish her supply. As she crossed the road on her way to Mikado, she was assailed by the smell of sewage. She looked around her and she couldn’t understand where it was coming from. After all, the neighborhood was a new one and you weren’t supposed to smell the drains.

  Now she noticed the foreign workers busy at the manholes, shouting instructions to each other in perfect Hebrew. She understood that they were foreign only when she heard the Israeli driver of the sewage truck talking to them.

  Lirit spoke to the owner of the snack shop about the smell.

  “It’s a horrible smell, I know,” he said. “It puts my customers off. Takes away their appetite for cracking sunflower seeds. But the ones who suffer most are the clothing stores. Nobody wants to choose clothes under the pressure of a stinky smell.”

  “What happened?” asked Lirit as he counted her change.

  “There’s some foul up in the main pipelines of the neighborhood. I don’t know if you’ve had a whiff of what’s going on in the underground parking garage.”

  “No,” said Lirit. “I live opposite.”

  The man from the snack shop said: “I’m telling you, I only park my car outside, because on minus two, and sometimes even on minus one, you can die from the smell. My boss told me to say that it’s temporary, so that’s what I’m telling you: it’s temporary. They’re taking care of it.”

  Lirit pulled a smiling face, which she had learned and copied from her mother, and turned round to go home. Many things caught her eye, there was no doubt that her point of view had changed completely and she was now like a butterfly in a field of spring flowers. If her prehistoric Shlomi was right and it was impossible to swim in the same river twice, and the main thing in life was change itself—Shlomi said that change contained a lot of fire energy—then why shouldn’t she embark on a shopping expedition now in this Mikado, with her mother’s credit card, as long as it hadn’t been cancelled? What was stopping her? Who would stop her?

  She scolded herself that it wasn’t nice, but nevertheless, in spite of the smell, she went into the opticians and tried on a pair of sunglasses for two hundred dollars that looked great on her, and paid with her mother’s credit card, but on the slip she signed Gruber without forging her mother’s signature. There were limits.

  Afterward she went on looking the place over. She went into Nine One One and bought three tight-fitting tops, which in the past, with Shlomi, she wouldn’t have dared to wear because of their price.

  She went home to rest, and made up her mind that after taking a little nap, because she was feeling giddy from the terrible smell, she would call a taxi (why waste time looking for parking in Tel Aviv?) and go to Dizengoff Center to continue what she had only just begun. If her father called her on her cell phone, first, she didn’t have to answer, and second, she didn’t owe him an account of her whereabouts, in a fitting room for example.

  She would get the details of his return flight, and tell him that she would come and pick him up at the airport. He was her father, after all.

  SHE STAYED IN THE CENTER for about five hours. She progressed at her leisure, going from shop to shop. At last she could buy clothes she hadn’t even dared to want to buy when she was attached to Shlomi and under her mother’s moral supervision. She remembered how at the beginning of their relationship he already had the nerve to insist that she get rid of her previous wardrobe, which included things worth thousands of dollars, like original designer outfits from Paris, Rome, and London. Because of these outfits her mother hadn’t spoken to her for three days from the minute the credit card charge showed up, but in the end she was forced to admit that Lirit looked fantastic in them. All her clothes, including the stunning shoes she had bought in Manhattan when she traveled to that island after the army, everything, in his presence she had thrown into the collection bin for the poverty stricken of the settler town of Netivot. Shlomi photographed the event, symbolic to him and meaningful to her, with his Minolta camera. They were very much in love, and Lirit was smiling in the photographs.

  Now she wanted to renew herself and forget the past. She was obviously suffering mental distress. Not being a particularly sociable person, she didn’t have a girlfriend she could talk to. In her cell phone she had the number of her therapist, whom she hadn’t been to see for many months. Lirit thought that she didn’t want to open up the subject of her mother’s death with herself, or with anyone else either, including her therapist.

  Mandy had found the therapist for her in Smuts Avenue in Tel Aviv, and she had gone to her about ten times over the period of a year. She and her mother never referred to the therapist by her name, but would say, “the therapist from Smuts Avenue.”

  There was no doubt that Lirit herself felt that she had undergone a significant amputation, but she didn’t confront reality head on. She said to herself that she would wait for her father and face it then, because in the circumstances, when even Dael had disappeared from the picture, she was afraid of falling apart. If Lirit had had a support in her short life, it was her mother.

  In Dizengoff Center they had installed spiral escalators, of the kind her father had invented, and Lirit felt she had entitlement to wander round the place, go up and down the escalators and in and out of the shops, to her heart’s content.

/>   On the way home with all her shopping bags, the taxi driver charged extra for the weight. Lirit felt ridiculous when he stopped outside the entrance and helped her to empty the taxi of all the shopping bags bearing the names of top designers. It took her fifteen minutes to get it all inside, in several rounds.

  Inside the house the shopping bags took up a large area of the living room. Suddenly she felt nauseous, as she always did after she had done something superfluous, or not particularly necessary.

  It was a Thursday, and she only had until tomorrow to find storage solutions for all her new clothes. When Dael came home for the weekend, she wanted all the goodies to be organized in the closets, as if they had always been there.

  She cut the labels off the garments and threw them into the blue recycling bin in their garbage room, together with the paper bags. At the same time she collected all her shanti clothes from the Shlomi era, all kinds of salwars, sandals made from recycled leather, and secondhand clothes from India and Thailand, and packed them into eight big plastic bags, black and opaque.

  Feeling guilty and upset she got into the Jacuzzi, and dripped in neroli oil, which had a label on it with writing in an unfamiliar hand, “For severe depression and healing wounds.” The thirty-six shopping bags had really cost a lot of money, she said to herself, conscience stricken. But never mind, it was because of the grief.

  AFTER THE JACUZZI, Lirit moved the black bags onto the porch of the triplex, in case her father suddenly showed up and asked what they were. She wouldn’t have the courage to tell him the truth, and if he thought that she had started to get rid of her mother’s clothes, he might be angry.

  In any case he wasn’t in such great shape at the moment; there was no point in getting into an argument with him now.

  A few hours after the darkness deepened, and under its cover, she stood and threw the bags full of her old clothes off the porch, and they landed on the evergreen vegetation of the place. Afterward she went downstairs, picked them up one by one, and loaded them into the car.

  Lirit didn’t have far to drive before she found, in a neighborhood next to Telba-North, a collection bin for the needy, as noted on the side in letters clearly visible during the day, but invisible in the dark. For a long time she stood there and hoisted the big bags into the bin, until it was full to overflowing and she had to cram them in by force. She left the last bag by the side of the bin, and drove away.

  She called Inquiries for the number of the electronic answering service of arrivals and departures at Ben-Gurion Airport, and wrote down all the arrival times of the big airlines that seemed reasonable to her.

  PART III

  1

  GRUBER’S FLIGHT TO NEW YORK (JFK), AND FROM THERE TO Israel by El Al, was supposed to depart from Ithaca at six in the morning. At four forty-five Bahat woke him up, full of a joy the likes of which she had not known for a long time. A new era was opening. She was smartly dressed and made up, as if she was going out on a date, not driving to the quaint Ithaca airport.

  So intense was her desire for Gruber to be gone that if she could have she would have flown him as far as Cyprus herself. Anything further than that she considered too dangerous.

  She went up to the guest room where the guest was sleeping. The door was slightly ajar. She went in and called his name three or four times. When he didn’t answer she came closer to the bed and even shook him, until he opened red eyes and said,

  “Leave me alone, Bahat. Let me sleep.”

  “But your plane leaves at six. You have to go to the airport now. Come on, your suitcase is already in the trunk, I packed it myself. You fell asleep with your clothes on, so just get up and freshen yourself up and let’s go. I found you a new toothbrush because I already packed yours.”

  “Five more minutes,” said Gruber and went back to sleep.

  Five minutes passed, and the story repeated itself until in the end Gruber sat up in bed with his eyes closed and sighed bitterly. Bahat thought he was groaning in pain and her heart went out to him.

  “My dear,” she said gently, “we undergo hard things in our lives. But we have to carry on. You must get up,” she bent over him. “You have responsibilities.”

  “Yes, but there’s no funeral, right? So I’ll leave on the next flight. It isn’t a tragedy. You know why?” He stood up, his eyes still closed, and his clothes smelling of alcohol, sweat, and other smells banned by international conventions. “Because the tragedy has already happened. The tragedy is behind us.”

  “You have a responsibility to your children to be united with them in your grief. To seclude yourselves.”

  “What business is it of yours in the first place?” asked Gruber in a kind of illumination and he opened his eyes for a minute. “Where do you get off telling me to seclude myself. Why should anybody in the world tell me how to behave in a time of trouble? What’s important is where I can go on sleeping now. All the bedclothes are stinking. I need fresh clothes. I sweated like a pig last night.”

  “If you like I’ll change your bedclothes right now,” said Bahat on her way out of the room.

  “Why change the bedclothes!” Gruber called after her. “Just bring me some dry tracksuit. And hurry up, I don’t want to wake up, or I won’t be able to get back to sleep.” He sat down and closed his eyes again.

  “Okay,” said Bahat and hurried to the walk-in closet. She still didn’t get where the Israeli was going with this, or maybe he was simply broken up and he wasn’t going anywhere. She came back with an Adidas tracksuit. Gruber was already waiting for her half naked, having thrown his dirty shirt onto the floor like a boy.

  “Give it to me,” he said. He put on the tracksuit, and went back to sleep.

  Bahat thought it was a question of aftereffect and delayed reaction. At the most, he would miss this flight and leave tomorrow. The airport was open tomorrow too. It wasn’t the end of the world. Nevertheless, she wasn’t cut out for decadent enigmas, but for charging ahead.

  She sat down in the living room and waited. There was nothing more for her to do. There was no longer any need or point to escaping into the spider research. She went to her Jewish bookshelf and took down a volume of the Talmud and tried to read it, but she had zero focus.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, Irad came downstairs and apologized profusely. He said that he was simply no longer capable of distinguishing between what was important and what wasn’t important. Bahat said that it was only human to behave strangely in situations of distress, and that it was impossible to expect everyone to be at their best every day, what he had done yesterday was enough, he was definitely head and shoulders above the average person.

  She put his coffee down in front of him.

  “How about a snack? Something sweet?” she asked.

  “No thank you,” he replied, and after a minute he said:

  “I’ve come to a conclusion.”

  “Yes?” asked Bahat curiously.

  “I’m not going back to Israel. At least not soon. I need more time before I go back there. I’m staying here in the meantime, if you don’t mind. I really like your bedroom and the direction of the view; it faces east, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s change, just for a few days. You get the morning sun. I don’t want to get rickets. My room doesn’t have a serious window.”

  Bahat wanted to react to the criticism and tell him that she didn’t see any need for enlarging the window in the guest room since she hardly had any guests, and certainly not for long enough to make them worry about the shortcomings of the room.

  “I’d like to stay in your room for a few days,” said Gruber, “and for you to sleep in the room you gave me. Just for a few days . . .”

  “But your children, and the terror suit project—what do you call it—the TESU.”

  “My children,” he said and wrung his hands. “They have already received the blow. And now they’re ready to absorb the next one. I won’t let them know. They’ll understand for themselves.
This way they’ll get it into their heads gradually. Not in a boom. I won’t answer the phone, and you’ll say that I’ve gone and you don’t know where. No,” he paused, “that’s too dramatic, I will speak to them. If they ring, I’ll talk to them.”

  “And the project?”

  “Last night I sent the defense minister an email. That there’s news, there’s a breakthrough, and the critics and slanderers can shut their mouths. I didn’t go into detail, so he wouldn’t take the credit at my expense. I said I was on my way. That doesn’t mean I have to be there to kowtow to him in two days’ time. Let him crawl a bit himself. There’s no question about it, Bahat, it’s a great achievement.”

  For the first time she noticed that for a while now he had been calling her by her first name, and it pleased her because he pronounced the h so beautifully, with a lot of aspiration, and didn’t turn her into Bay-hat like the Americans did.

  He went on:

  “All you have to do, Bahat, is to understand that this is the reaction of a very sensitive man, whose ship of life has reached the gulf of oblivion. I myself haven’t yet taken in this duality, that on the one hand you’ve given me the data, and on the other hand my wife is dead and I’m a widower, can you believe it? Me? A widower? I feel as if the laws of physics have changed.”

  He rested his brow on his hand, and what could Bahat say?

  After a silence he added:

  “I think that five hundred dollars a week, including food and laundry, would be very reasonable. Can you wheel my suitcase back in from the car?”

  Bahat froze in her place, still confused.

  “Irad Gruber, you are a very unusual person,” she said in the end, taut as a spring. Her nervous system reacted before she did. “Who else is like you? And who do you really care about?”

  “Obviously I care about my children and my work. And my poor wife. And myself of course. But I can’t move until I restart, do you understand?”