Textile Page 4

  They decided to leave the ceilings as they were and dwell mainly on the division of the space and its design. And in the end what came out was such a charming little palace that Mandy didn’t feel right hanging the old pictures from the previous house on its walls. She went around a few galleries and bought a few interesting originals. Bonfil agreed to pop over from Tuscany for a couple of days and help her find the right place for each painting, and he didn’t ask a fee for his advice, and even said that it was fun.

  LIRIT THOUGHT THAT what was so great about the house was that it was both as amazingly comfortable and as gorgeous as an adorable hotel in a European capital, without the artificial manners of the reception clerks.

  The film about Winona Ryder came to an end and Lirit got into the Jacuzzi feeling that she had come to a certain conclusion, both as a result of her private thoughts and as a result of the film about the difficulties in the life of the Hollywood star, but in fact she hadn’t come to any conclusion at all, since she hadn’t actually defined her doubts to herself yet.

  The Jacuzzi had not been used for quite a time and it took a while for the water to come out of the nine jets, but after a few minutes she abandoned herself to the currents massaging her muscles, and she thought, how can this compare to the miserly trickle coming out of the rusty shower in her and Shlomi’s house. She was sure that if she could only succeed in getting him into the Jacuzzi—perhaps if she got in with him, after all it was a Jacuzzi for two—he wouldn’t be able to deny his body this pleasure.

  But she knew that after Shlomi had been shocked by their leather living room, and asked if Mandy had a fur coat, and she said she didn’t know—there was no chance he would come to her parents’ home any time soon, let alone take a dip in their Jacuzzi. She switched on the radio next to the foaming tub, and read the label still stuck to its side that informed her that the Jacuzzi possessed 1.2 horsepower, nine jets, a special regulator governing the strength of the massage, and underwater lighting. She looked for the regulator, and tried out all kinds of combinations, until she found the one she liked best. Strong on the upper back and shoulders.

  Suddenly something bothered her. She felt guilty for being in the Jacuzzi and not at least at work, or perhaps even more worthy: by the side of her mother who was undergoing her surgery today. She was sorry she didn’t have a telephone with her in the Jacuzzi, because she didn’t feel like getting up, and also because she didn’t know what to say if her mother asked her why she wasn’t at the factory.

  Still, she had gone to Medical Frontline with her yesterday. She was there all day, and it drove both of them crazy. They argued nonstop. Lirit took a lot of crap from her until she finally lost her temper and said that her stomach hurt and she was going home. And Mandy had explicitly asked her to go to the factory today, but she, Lirit, didn’t have it in her system to be with her mother on the day of the operation, or at least in the factory from 8:00 a.m. People are sometimes mean and I can be mean sometimes too, she thought to herself and sighed. It wasn’t clear yet, maybe she would still go, maybe she would still make it, although how much could a person be expected to take?

  Her heart contracted, and she got out of the Jacuzzi steeped in guilt.

  While she was drying her hair she remembered that yesterday, when they gave her mother an EKG, they told her she had the heart of a thirty-year-old, and how happy it made her. The cardiologist said that it wasn’t a compliment but a fact. All day Mandy basked in this fact, because she always felt bad about not taking part in serious sports with an emphasis on heart-lung endurance.

  “You see?” she said to Lirit, “And you nag me for not going to a gym.”

  “I never nagged you, I just said that physical activity would do you good. It can also dispel anxiety. Endorphins.”

  “Okay okay okay,” Mandy dismissed her, “you know everything. About endorphins too.”

  Mandy had a lot of anger against Lirit in her heart, at this moment and in general. She was not satisfied with the rate of her daughter’s progress in life, even though she had never asked herself: Progress to where? And to what? Except perhaps once or twice when the girl was a teenager.

  After they made up, Mandy urged her daughter to go to the factory, “So things won’t descend into anarchy there like in the Palestinian Authority.”

  “In any case I have to go in for a tête-à-tête with Dr. Carmi Yagoda,” she reinforced her words.

  “Can’t I come with you?”

  “No,” commanded Mandy and went into the room, leaving Lirit to drive to the family factory.

  YAGODA EXPLAINED EVERYTHING again to Mrs. Amanda Gruber from beginning to end, all the stages of the operation. Afterward he asked her to remove her blouse and bra, and to lie on her stomach and not to move. He concentrated and marked the place with Indian ink where the new shoulder blades she had chosen would be installed. And then he let her sit up and showed her, with the help of two mirrors, the sketch he had drawn. Mandy nodded her head to signify her approval, and while she was getting dressed Yagoda told her that up to recently shoulder blade surgery had been a much more complicated business, since the surgeon had to find the two original shoulder blades which had been absorbed by the back, and to return them to their rightful place, more or less symmetrically, and to sharpen the point of the shoulder blade which had been blunted by time. Many women were shocked after the operation. The new operation had been preceded by a courageous conception of surrender to the ravages of time: what was gone was gone, never to return, and therefore it was necessary to take out the used shoulder blades and replace them with new ones. The points of the shoulder blades, points, evident when the hands were moved, the patient could choose according to her taste, before the surgery was performed. Mandy had already chosen.

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE OPERATION, when the nurse came to give Mandy a shot, she also asked her if she would have any objections to being photographed to advertise Medical Frontline. She was the fiftieth woman in Israel to have the operation. But Mandy refused point blank. All her life she had run away from publicity, and not because she couldn’t rub shoulders with the highest in the land, if she wanted to.

  She simply didn’t like going anywhere with her husband, and avoided being seen with him in public. Sometimes, when both of them had to leave the house, he in the Buick and she in a taxi, she would linger over her makeup, or her eyeliner, just so they wouldn’t leave the house together.

  Only on rare occasions did the Grubers go as a couple to a cocktail party hosted by a colleague in the scientific field, or by some big bug in the secret service, the Mossad, or the aircraft industry. In all the years of their marriage, they went out to a restaurant together twice. Mandy detested all that “Pleased to meet you,” “How well you look,” “So glad you could come . . .”

  It was time for the general anesthetic she was waiting for. She lay in surrender on the operating table, under the bright lights.

  Everyone was dressed in green with masks on their faces, and they treated her like a child. They called her sweetheart and meideleh, and said nu, nu, nu, too, as if she was a naughty little girl. She liked this strange pampering. The operating-room nurse asked her to turn over and lie on her stomach if she didn’t want her shoulder blades in front. The anesthetist said, “No no. First I put her under and then we turn her over.”

  “As you wish,” said Dr. Carmi Yagoda and moved aside, and the anesthetist jabbed her. Mandy managed to turn over by herself, and then she was obliterated. The nurse put a green sheet on her back and folded it. Only the area of Mandy’s upper back was left exposed, and on it the outlines of the operation that Dr. Yagoda had sketched the day before.

  FLYING COACH CLASS to New York did not suit a man of Irad Gruber’s position. People squeezed into their seats like chickens in a coop. Nobody had told him that there would be a two-hour layover in Paris. And all around him was a group of hyperactive fifteen-year-old boys, the sons of ex-Israelis living in Chicago, whose two counselors were unable to control them. Gru
ber thought it was the worst flight of his life.

  Earlier, on the ground, he had tried to upgrade his ticket. He was used to flying business class and there was no reason on earth why he should accept a drop in his standard of living now. But the ground attendant at boarding told him that business class was full, that all the seats next to the emergency exits were taken, and there were no window seats left.

  Gruber felt as if he was trapped in a flying cage. Rubbing shoulders with the loudmouthed masses of the people of Israel made him ill. Now he had no doubt that his status in the eyes of the Defense Minister had taken a dive, the only question was when the dive would be arrested and his body would hit the ground and they would bury him together with the whole TESU project.

  The TV screen on the back of the seat in front of him showed the temperature outside and the distance from the unexpected destination city: Paris. He switched channels. Actors too young for him to know their names appeared, making the movie of no interest to him. He looked for quiet music on the audio channels, found the oldies channel, and listened to Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye singing “You are everything and everything is you.”

  At Charles de Gaulle Airport he got off and waited, according to instructions, in an isolated hall with cold croissants on plastic plates and a hot water urn that refused to come to a boil.

  When the call to return to the plane came over the loudspeaker, he grumbled out loud, making some critical remark, but the other passengers, who heard him, failed to react. Despite the fact that he himself was an inventor and discoverer, he was not in the least impressed by the invention of the airplane. He had irritable bowels, and he swallowed a pill.

  In the heights over the Atlantic there was a storm, and the captain said, “This is your captain. Passengers are requested to fasten their seatbelts and remain in their places.” As soon as the storm calmed down, the food arrived. Gruber lifted the aluminum lid from his meal and saw what it was he was supposed to eat. He was surrounded on all sides.

  He hardly ate a thing, and signaled for his tray to be removed. The flight attendant who arrived was very ugly and she looked sadly at his tray and at him, as if she herself had prepared the meal. She and her colleagues had done their best to improve the conditions of the flight for the grumpy passenger in 48H, they had helped the two Americans to control the youths from Chicago, gone back and forth to bring Gruber another blanket that didn’t scratch, an extra pillow, more water, more coffee.

  Around him, sleep had fallen on everyone. He was amused by the fact that the flight attendant took an interest in his future wishes too: “Would you prefer beer or water to drink?” He could hardly pour the beer, because the storm wasn’t really over, and there was no room for him to raise his elbows either. The beer made his stomach feel even worse, and he really needed to go to the toilet.

  He tried to stand up, packed in between two sleeping sons of ex-Israelis from Chicago, and in the end he was obliged to climb over one of them, and then to take five or six steps to the tail of the plane and join the line. Although he took care to count the people in front of him, he wasn’t sure that he had kept his place. As soon as he entered the little cubicle and shut himself in, the plane shook and the light instructing passengers to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts went on again. There was an extension of the fasten seatbelt light in the toilets. Gruber actually felt rather relieved at not having to fasten any seatbelt, and he reassured himself by imagining that he wasn’t in a plane in the sky but in a train in Israel traveling to Beersheba, which explained the swaying left and right.

  Now he looked around at the most popular place on the flight. Everything was wet from the urinating of his all predecessors, down to the first generation. He vomited his modest meal, flushed the toilet (which made a noise, as the warning notice in Hebrew and English warned), washed his face, and again felt the stab in his irritable bowels, which symbolized anxiety with regard to the future, and outrage at what had already happened and could not be changed.

  The source of the genius’s agony was the sudden, simultaneous death of four thousand golden orb weavers (Nephila maculata), known for their strong, flexible golden webs, from which he had hoped to produce the T-suits and turn Israel into a Security Textile Power.

  In the tropical regions where Nephila maculata originates, the inhabitants succeeded in exploiting their strong webs to make fishing nets and lines, and in South America there were attempts to use the webs of this talented spider in the manufacture of safety nets for circus acrobats.

  Gruber went further.

  He emerged from the toilet pale and swaying. His exhaustion was evident to all, and he himself felt that he could no longer stand being himself. A genius, sensitive, vulnerable, the joke of the week, a complete floor rag. The two Chicago youths did not wake up in the course of his efforts to return to his seat, and he collapsed into it with a sigh.

  All the hopes of the Israeli scientist were pinned on an American colleague by the name of Bahat McPhee, an ex-Israeli he had met on the Internet, in the international forum of arthropod lovers. The relationship between Irad Gruber and Bahat McPhee was one of the strangest and most complicated ever formed between an Israeli living in Israel and an American-Israeli colleague.

  In the beginning they asked each other ordinary questions, such as, when and where were you born, why did you leave Israel, what’s new in Israel and in America, what school did you go to, what did you do in the army, how did you come to dedicate yourself to the study of the arthropods, etc.

  In one of their conversations, Irad let slip to Bahat, without paying attention and without thinking, his birth date: the twenty-fifth of December. From that moment on Bahat changed her attitude toward him and became full of reverence and respect, exceeding anything he could remember even in the days when he was awarded the Israel Prize.

  The meaning of the glory with which she showered him after discovering his birth date, he learned directly from her. She worshipped Rod Serling, she wanted to set up an Internet site in his memory, at the moment she didn’t have the time, but soon she intended to go into low gear and do it.

  “Who’s Rod Serling?” asked Gruber hesitantly.

  “The genius who wrote The Twilight Zone. You remember the series? Didn’t you watch television when we were children?”

  “Aah, I saw it,” he said.

  “You and he were born on the same day, albeit not the same year. He died in seventy something, and you’re still alive.”

  “I’m still alive,” Gruber confirmed.

  After Bahat McPhee discovered that Irad Gruber and Rod Serling were born on the same day (you can never know what biographical detail will connect a man to his fellow), she not only treated him with great affection, she went much further and disclosed secrets to him. She too was working on increasing the productivity of the spinning glands of the golden orb weavers, and her goal was his goal: to manufacture a lightweight protective suit, flexible and effective, in an era of uncertain personal security.

  The prestigious Cornell University, situated in the town of Ithaca, together with the municipality of that same town, in conjunction with other bodies she preferred not to talk about on the Internet, were funding her research. She asked who was funding his research, and he didn’t mind telling her.

  DURING THE PAST terrible week when all his spiders died at once while he was investigating the genome of their silk proteins, he had not spoken to her, because he was afraid she would make fun of him. Everyone knew that the spider was not a social animal, and collecting four thousand of them in a single space, however big, was asking for trouble. He knew this, but for some reason he hoped it would work out, that the spiders would not let him, Dr. Irad Gruber, down. After their death he also asked that the possibility of the spiders having been deliberately gassed be investigated, but he didn’t know if anyone had bothered to check it out.

  In the nights following the death of the four thousand Nephila he suffered from insomnia (exactly like Rod Serling), and on
the third night he called her up on the ordinary telephone and told her about the catastrophe. To his astonishment she did not laugh or mock, but listened with empathy, and when he concluded his confession, she went so far as to volunteer to help him and fill him in on all her research findings to date. “You are not alone,” she said to him, and his heart filled with hope. She added, “Get on a plane and come here. You won’t be sorry. It’s a beautiful place too.”

  Gruber didn’t think twice. He would have traveled to any godforsaken hole in the world to save his project from capsizing. He applied to the defense minister to approve a trip to New York State, in order to meet an ex-Israeli American who for mysterious reasons was willing to donate her research findings on the golden orb weaver free, gratis, and for nothing. The defense minister was a forgiving man and he approved the trip, which seemed to him an act of despair and an escape from reality.

  Gruber knew that the ministry had already approached his rivals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who were working with biophysicists from Munich on producing extremely strong spider webs without spiders. From an article published in Current Biology he learned that the Jerusalemites had succeeded in transferring the web-producing genes, albeit not in commercial amounts, to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The flies had begun to produce spider webs from their saliva glands, which are equipped with giant chromosomes.

  Clearly, therefore, the Jerusalemites too were intent on the mass production of spider webs, and in light of the new circumstances, they were likely to get there before him.

  McPhee claimed to have made far more significant progress, but she was not willing to go into detail on the Internet or on the phone, but only face to face. He hoped all this wasn’t some day-dream, even though he was afraid she might be somewhat eccentric, because of her attitude toward Rod Serling, and especially because she was so proud of the fact that for a number of years he had taught communications at one of the excellent colleges in her town, Ithaca. There was something boastful too in her claim that everyone knew that Ithaca provided the best educational services in the world, about which she bragged as if she was one of the founding fathers.