Textile Page 16

  “And you think,” she said and began pacing round the room, “that you have some special right to an absolutely deluxe restart, while others can restart in the heart of their distress?”

  “I don’t think I have the right. I simply know that there’s no other way for me to get over my wife’s death except by staying a few more days in the diaspora and not jumping right back into the fray in Israel. In the past months I’ve been working so hard, and the pressure I’m under could give me a stroke on the spot, and then what? Who would take care of everybody? I’ll restart, and then I’ll check all the errors and fix them one by one, on a linear model. And you can simply relate to me as if I’m the pilot who fell into your house, and you’re the little princess who stays with him during the difficult moments until he fixes the plane.”

  Bahat blushed. He’d read Saint-Exupéry?

  He asked for a towel and went into the bathroom. Bahat quickly called Professor Propheta in Berkeley, and caught him on his cell phone. She apologized for turning him out, and told him about what was going on in her house. Now she understood that it was a critical mistake. She should have let him stay, and he would have helped her. They would have been two against one, now she was absolutely alone facing—

  “The enemy,” said Propheta and sniggered. “I’m telling you, every Israeli is an occupier. That’s what they do. And now, seriously, listen Bahat, he’s lost it temporarily, two or three days and then he’ll leave. His wife died. He can’t afford to go on acting like a freaked-out kid stuck in India forever.”

  He advised her not to do anything radical for the time being, like bringing in the police, or calling someone in the consulate in New York. The whole thing seemed to him like an aberration caused by grief.

  “It’s a pity we can’t put him to sleep and lock him in a suitcase,” said Bahat.

  “Yes,” said Propheta and chuckled. “Interesting how stupidity and genius can exist side by side in the same person.”

  “Tell that to your students,” said Bahat and put the phone down. Afterward, worried, she went out to her car and wheeled the suitcase back in.

  EVERY HALF HOUR or so she went to check if the temporary consent signed by Rabbi Shlesinger was still in the drawer, and that the barrier separating her from society had indeed fallen. At the official ordination, which would take place in New York on the twentieth of the following month, she would have to make a speech. And she would make it. She planned to talk about the first woman rabbi in history, Deborah the wife of Lapidoth, and to say that she was following in her footsteps and nothing more. She felt like being modest because she wanted those responsible to know that not only had she done something for the State of Israel that the time had not yet come to reveal, the importance of which was beyond doubt, but that she was also someone who knew how to move aside when necessary. Moving aside when necessary was in Bahat’s eyes a noble virtue, and when she imagined herself moving aside, for example for the sake of her daughters, she always thought of the great sage Rashi’s mother and how she moved aside and was saved from the pogrom by the opening up of the magic wall of Worms.

  IN THE DISTANT Telba-North, Lirit was already beginning to wonder why there was no word yet from her father, and she even had a touching telephone conversation on the subject with Dael. Dael too didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t tell his sister he suspected their father of going AWOL. He expressed the hope that nothing had happened to him. Lirit told him she had checked with the Defense Ministry, and they told her there that he had contacted them by email and said that he was late because he was sitting shivah for his wife in Ithaca.

  “Sitting shivah?”

  “That’s what they said he said.”

  But about an hour after the conversation with her brother, Lirit received a call from America. It was their father, and this time he gave her a phone number, he was very warm, he even called her “my love,” and she immediately melted because he had never called her that before.

  Lirit asked him if everything was all right, and he said that obviously nothing was all right, and Lirit was surprised, she never knew that her father was so attached to her mother, and even if he was, it was a strange way to treat her death.

  And then she did something that her mother would have done if she had been alive, or if she had been in her place. Lirit asked to speak to Bahat.

  IRAD REACHED OUT and handed the phone wordlessly to his hostess.

  “What?” asked Bahat.

  “My daughter wants to talk to you.”

  She took the receiver and said,

  “Hello?”

  Lirit introduced herself—very politely, clearly a well brought-up girl, the mother had done a good job. Lirit brought Bahat up to date briefly on what Lirit already knew that Bahat knew, and asked her opinion on what was happening.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bahat.

  “How is he acting?”

  “Listen—”

  “Is it difficult for you to talk? Can he hear?”

  “Every word,” said Bahat.

  “Can’t you distance yourself from him a bit? Our cordless phones work over a distance of several hundred feet. How about yours?”

  Bahat went down to the ground floor and said:

  “I really don’t know. I don’t think that your father can take a long journey. That’s clear. I’ll have to look after him for a while.”

  “Is he eating?” asked Lirit.

  “Very little. Yesterday he ate soup, and with that he did me a favor. He left half of it. And today a tuna sandwich in the morning, and then he told me he threw it up.”

  “Is he drinking?”

  “Coffee nonstop.”

  “No, I’m asking about alcohol.”

  “I don’t keep alcohol in the house, ever since my girls were living here.”

  “I understand,” said Lirit. “Okay, look,” she said, “he gave me a phone number, and I’d like to verify it.”

  The number Lirit read out to her bore no resemblance to her telephone number.

  “The question is whether he’s aware,” said Lirit, and there was a note of profound concern in her voice.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” said Bahat, “the situation is confusing me too and disrupting my life. Does he have a boss you can talk to? People that can shake him out of it? Friends? A brother? Someone.”

  “Of course he has. He’s a person with a lot of friends. But let’s wait, because I don’t want to get him into trouble, if it’s a crisis that will blow over soon then the whole world doesn’t have to—”

  “I very much hope so,” said Bahat.

  2

  “IF THERE’S SUCH A THING AS REINCARNATION,” SAID DAEL to his sister over the phone, “then in my next incarnation I want to be a tree. But not a cypress. Nothing so exposed. Or you know what, I’d prefer something inanimate. Like a piece of pipe. Something completely useless. And that way I’ll know,” the soldier sniggered, “that anyone who’s my friend is a real friend, because I’m just a pipe rusting in the desert . . .” he laughed. “You don’t know what a night I had, Lirit, the world’s worst—”

  But Dael was wasting airtime on his sister because she too was very upset. In her last phone conversation with their father, at midnight on the US East Coast, he had dropped a bomb. He told her that he had fallen in love with Bahat, deeply, desperately. It was stronger than he was, it had shaken him to the foundations, and he didn’t know what to do.

  Lirit asked her father if Bahat was in love with him as well, and he said sadly that he was the last thing in the world that interested Bahat. Lirit wondered if she should have a frank talk with Bahat, but she thought that it would be a betrayal of her father, and she decided against it. The father said to his daughter that Bahat was now in a place from which “she was looking outward,” to what was beyond loneliness, to people, action, movement, helping others. That she was about to become a Reform rabbi and she couldn’t wait to get started.

  Gruber suffered from a
disorder of excessive talkativeness, and now, on the phone with Dael, there was no stopping his daughter either. She grabbed the floor from her brother, in the middle of the dialogue of the deaf, and explained to him that as she understood it Bahat was sick of staying at home, and all she wanted was to get out, out of Ithaca to New York, to Mississippi, to Utah, to roam the length and breadth of the USA, to meet people, convert here, marry a Jewish couple there, see the world, live on a very busy schedule, with no time for anything between one thing and the next but getting to that next thing. Just imagine, she’s going to be a rabbi! Our father has fallen in love with a rabbi, and claims he’s never felt like this about a woman before and he has to make the most of his new situation! Such happiness!

  THE NEW INFORMATION did not succeed in really penetrating Dael’s mind. He was preoccupied with the event of late last night. If only his mother had been alive, and he could have told her what had happened, she would have been properly astonished.

  Now all that was left him was to imagine himself telling her, and her murmuring intently: That’s terrible! That’s shocking, Dael! That’s incredible, Dael! Mainly she would have repeated his name again and again, Dael, Dael. She was the one who had chosen this name. Gruber had chosen Lirit’s name, and she had insisted on Dael’s.

  They had an assassination. Everything proceeded according to plan until the moment when Dael shot at the center of the mass, saw the guy taking the bullet and not falling, shot again, and saw him taking the bullet and not falling, until in the end he fell. In the meantime they were being shot at, and he and his friends ran under fire to confirm the kill, and saw that the target was padded round the chest with a belt of Yellow Pages from every area of the country.

  Dael had almost been killed by the shots fired at them. Do you understand? To die right after you, mother?

  This was why he preferred to be a useless piece of pipe, etc.

  At the end of this imaginary conversation he called Aya Ben-Yaish, in the hope that she would listen to him, and say something, maybe that it was a miracle he was alive, because it really was a miracle. Aya Ben-Yaish was not available, and Dael went to continue his breadth reading of Scott Fitzgerald, Homer, a biography of Moshe Dayan, and Primo Levi.

  AT THE END of her morning conversation with her brother, Lirit felt a great emptiness. She didn’t have Mandy’s talent for throwing the right slogans into the air and bringing the man home in the space of a few hours.

  Later on she raced north on the coastal road. The traffic was less heavy now than at eight, and she, unlike her mother, had no intention of getting up at the crack of dawn and arriving at the factory at half past six, seven. Those days were over. On the radio too they said that the northbound traffic was proceeding unimpeded, but that at some junction, not connected to her, oil had been spilled on the road.

  Why had he fallen in love all of a sudden? What was really going on there? In the end, contrary to her previous decision, she called Bahat, even though over there it was maybe five in the morning. And the latter answered immediately, and listened to the young Israeli, who was trying to preach to her from a distance, and then Bahat said, “Honey, your father and I have only spent two nights together. I wanted to cheer him up, and I’m a woman too. Believe me, we both needed it. Your mother hasn’t had sex with him for years. He told me. Did you know? Did she have a lover?”

  “Can I talk to him?” asked Lirit, who simply couldn’t believe her ears.

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “When he wakes up, tell him to call the factory urgently, or me on my cell phone!” she said, and only when she arrived at Nighty-Night, she noticed that the left-hand outside mirror had been ripped off the car.

  SHE PARKED the big Buick next to the Singer technician’s Fiesta. What could you do? Class divisions were class divisions. The commotion at the entrance to the factory signaled anarchy. After she entered the air-conditioned interior, and the beads of sweat on her forehead stopped forming pools, she saw Carmela Levy trying to get the panic-stricken seamstresses to calm down. Only the Singer technician was nowhere to be seen, and she concluded that he was busy oiling the machines. She would introduce advanced technology, for God’s sake! Far more efficient sewing machines had already been invented; she had leafed through the textile journal Mandy subscribed to and seen sophisticated models there. She wondered how much they cost.

  Carmela hushed the girls, and Lirit realized that Carmela had organized them under her wing, and she was sheltering them.

  Although this wasn’t the first time she had visited the factory after the death of the boss, the girls’ faces looked distraught due to the uncertainty, and rightly so. It seemed that in spite of the facade that everything was under control (by intuition or from television, she knew that she had to show authority), it was clear to the workers that she too didn’t know what she wanted.

  “Assembly in the canteen in half an hour,” she said and went up to Mandy’s office. Carmela asked if she wanted her to come upstairs to the offices with her, and Lirit understood that the first thing she had to do was to fire this woman, and she said to her, “No need.”

  No hand but Mandy’s, or somebody authorized by her, touched the office and the special things she kept there in glass-fronted cabinets, such as the collection of dolls from all over the world. Carmela was the only person she permitted to dust her delicate collections, for some of the knick-knacks were breakable, or broken and put together again. The collection of dolls from all over the world Mandy had inherited from her mother Audrey Greenholtz, the founder of the factory.

  When Lirit was little, her mother had strictly forbidden her to touch these dolls, as if they were cursed or something. Afterward there was a period when the curse was lifted, and Mandy let her, but two years later when she was at about the age of fifteen, madam had decided that Lirit’s hands had become clumsy due to the surge of hormonal energy, and she was relegated to her previous status with regard to the collections.

  But now she was dead, and Lirit sat on her executive chair and adjusted it to suit her. The air-conditioner was set at freezing, the way Mandy liked it, the computer was dark, and when Lirit pressed enter, to see what was on the screen, she was surprised to see a picture of herself and her brother as children, sitting and eating popsicles on the beach. It was very moving, but Lirit had no time for such luxuries, and she took a pen and paper and started to write down notes for her speech.

  She didn’t want to lie, and so she noted to herself to say that she didn’t want to lie or mislead any of the loyal workers, but there was no doubt that they were in a period of uncertainty and it was impossible to know what was going to happen. Only six days had passed since Mandy had passed away. She crossed out Mandy and wrote Amanda. And she continued that she herself had not yet started to digest what had happened and why, and she had no, she repeated, she had no detailed plans with regard to the factory and the future of its workers.

  This, in fact, was the gist of what she had to say. And when she said it in the canteen, some of the girls burst into tears and others talked about compensation. She repeated that the situation was not clear, and that they all had to understand that she had received a harsh blow, and she did not yet have the strength either to carry on from where her mother left off, or to set out on a new path.

  Somebody pointed out that this wasn’t what she had said a few days ago on the phone. They reminded her that she said they had to continue on Mandy’s path, and Lirit admitted that she had said so because that was what people always said, but they didn’t mean it literally. It was impossible to swim in the same river twice, she said, and stressed again that she didn’t know what was going to happen. They had to understand that there wasn’t only a crisis in the textile industry, there was also a crisis in Nighty-Night, and it was impossible to jump straight into a resolution of the crisis before the crisis had spoken its last word.

  The women had no idea what she was talking about. They were resentful. They had unemployed husbands and famili
es to feed. They couldn’t live like this. But she raised the banner of uncertainty again and the need for everyone, including herself, to go with the flow of this uncertainty for the time being.

  ON THE WAY BACK from Netanya she wondered what she was really going to do with the pajama factory. What changes should she introduce? Should she renovate, or continue the tradition? Was it tradition or stagnation? And what about what she had once thought could be a big hit today: pajamas for babies and toddlers made from organic cotton?

  Clearly people in the top 10 percent would buy them for the use of their offspring, and maybe the 30 or 40 percents below that too. People would buy them as gifts for baby showers too, if the babies were dear to them.

  Yes, why not? Lirit mused, and nearly missed the turnoff, but managed to change course in time, though fortunately for her there were no traffic cops or cameras in the vicinity. Pajamas from organic cotton! She began racking her brains for slogans for a future advertising campaign. And perhaps not only for infants? She expanded her plans. For all ages! Yes. Why discriminate against the parents? Lirit let her thoughts range far and wide: first she would put out a line of pajamas for infants from organically grown cotton, and later on the same thing for all ages, under the slogan, “Why shortchange the parents?” She already had a vision of what an advertising campaign for both items at once would look like: Give them to your children and also to Mom and Dad and Granny and Grandpa, who gave their all to their children . . .

  Today, said Lirit to herself, people take great care of their bodies and their health because of the security situation in the world, not only in Israel. The more the security situation deteriorates, the more people will invest in sporting appliances, vitamins, nutritional supplements, organic vegetables, and organic cotton.

  She remembered that a year ago she had been on a shopping expedition with Mandy at the up-market Ramat Aviv mall. They both tried on bras, and nothing felt comfortable. Mandy said that all the bra manufacturers should be forced to use organic cotton in their products so that they wouldn’t scratch people.