Textile Page 6

  Before leaving he glanced at Mandy’s chart. There was nothing in it about sensitivity to any anesthetic whatsoever. He left the OR, ripped off his mask and gloves, threw them all into the nearest bin, stopped at the first telephone he came across, dialed information, and asked for the number of Lufthansa in Israel. At Lufthansa they answered in German, told him that a flight for Frankfurt was departing in five hours’ time, and promised him that he would make it. There were two places left in business class.

  Dr. Yagoda felt that he was advancing with resolute steps toward a turning point in his life. From Frankfurt he would take a train home, announce that he was taking a month’s leave, and disappear for two months at least. Who knows, perhaps in those two months he would find a new love, which would shoot jets of hope into his empty soul, and he would be filled with new strength. The German doctor had learned to exploit his love affairs to store up energy for times when the daily grind turns you into a carob pod that’s been lying in the desert for a year.

  EIGHT HOURS AFTER the complicated operation, which had succeeded in the end, but had cost the surgeon his peace of mind, Mandy lay on her stomach in the nice room they had given her, bandaged and immobilized in a number of places, but open eyed and completely au fait.

  They had promised her five stars, and she had nothing to complain about because all she could see of the five stars was a bit of white carpet, but she couldn’t tell if it was wall-to-wall, because she couldn’t see the end. If she had turned her head to the right, the patient would have been able to see more of the carpet and part of a cupboard. But turning her head involved excruciating pain, and she had to call the nurse to hold her hand when she turned it.

  Since eating in her position was impossible, she received nourishment and liquids and all kind of medications through a variety of tubes. In intimate matters they tried to make things as easy as possible for her. But there were limitations and grave embarrassments. Mandy thought that this time she had gone too far.

  LIRIT CAME TO VISIT her, after going home to change her clothes. In the end she had paid a flying visit to the factory after the Jacuzzi. She and her mother had agreed that she would come every day to report on what had happened in the factory. She arrived at the hospital dressed atrociously, as usual. Her daughter was revealed to Mandy’s eyes in flat yellow shoes, flimsy as ballet shoes, a short billowing white skirt, and a very tightly fitting rayon tank top, pale yellow with white flowers, with straps that tied behind the neck and an extra piece of material in the area of the stomach that was also supposed to billow in the breeze.

  Her shoulder blades were exquisite, as usual. But what suddenly infuriated Amanda, after she asked her to bend down so that she could see all of her, were the two braids which were thrown back, but one of them kept falling forward and Lirit would flip it back again. The two braids were thick, long, and brown, like Pocahontas.

  “Are you doing this to me on purpose? Braids?” hissed Mandy from the depths of her strange position.

  “Mother, stop it. You’re lying there like this, and that’s what you have to say to me? I already prepared an answer in case you had something to say about my shoulder blades. When will you realize that I’m twenty-two years old, and that I have the right to wear braids?”

  “You look like a whore from the Little House on the Prairie. And it annoys me that precisely when I’m lying in the hospital dying of pain, you turn up like this to tease me. It shows a lack of consideration.”

  “Ex-cuse me,” said Lirit and she undid her braids.

  “Are you trying to tell me that you went to work like that? We work with a religious clientele!”

  “Mother, anyone would think that you hadn’t just had surgery. Usually you’re much quieter after surgery, and it’s fun to come and visit you. Maybe it’s the only quality time we have together. Do you want to ruin this too?”

  Mandy was silent for a moment, and it seemed she had calmed down.

  “A short page is what suits you best, like I used to have your hair cut when you were a little girl. You have an amazing neck and a perfect collarbone—a short page is what would show them off best. Take advantage of what you have as long as you have it.”

  “I don’t want a page,” said Lirit for the umpteenth time since the age of five.

  “So don’t have one. At least we’ve agreed on the braids.”

  LIRIT WENT ON unbraiding her hair, and suddenly she became worried because Shlomi hadn’t called her all day. How come? Her mother’s having such complicated surgery—never mind that she wasn’t there either—and he doesn’t call to ask how she is. What is this? It’s the behavior of a psychopath, that’s what! Is Shlomi a psychopath? she asked herself and she didn’t know the answer.

  Mandy saw her daughter sending a text message on her cell phone.

  “Just a minute,” said Lirit as she wrote. “I’m just sending this and then I’ll finish undoing the braids.”

  She sent the message and finished undoing her braids.

  “Okay now?” she asked a moment later, and bent down so Mandy could see.

  “Yes.”

  Lirit asked her mother if she was in pain now. Amanda said that she was in pain all the time, it was just a question of how much. Lirit said it was logical for her to be in pain, after all she had undergone surgery today, and she looked at the dripping infusion. The sight had a slightly hypnotic effect on her, and she sank into herself.

  “They’re giving me antibiotics,” said Mandy. “I had a fever an hour ago. You know that the doctor has already gone back to Germany? I don’t know why he’s in such a hurry.”

  “Another operation, what do you think,” said Lirit. “The only thing that interests them is money. You’re acting not quite normally.”

  “Yes, I feel a little strange too. Vo-mi-ting dish!” yelled Mandy.

  “Mommy!” cried Lirit and she leaped for the kidney-shaped green dish.

  “Here, here it is . . .” Lirit brought the dish to Mandy’s mouth.

  Mandy succeeded in raising herself a little while mumbling in ex-Rhodesian English, and vomited all the liquids. Then she closed her eyes.

  “They gave me too much anesthetic. Disgusting.”

  The patient fell back onto her stomach with the help of her daughter, moaning all the time:

  “Ai, ai, ai . . .”

  Without opening her eyes and with great difficulty she said to herself:

  “I want to wear bare-backed dresses again . . . but it hurts so much. Never mind . . . it will pass . . . it’s not a disease, it’s only plastic surgery.”

  And to Lirit she said, “You understand, darling Lirit, I couldn’t bear having my shoulder blades rubbed out and a back as flat as a plate with a canal for a spine. I said to myself, forget the spine, but the shoulder blades! I couldn’t take it. And now look what a position I’m stuck in . . .”

  Tears poured from her eyes and were absorbed straight into the white sheet, on which was written in decorative Hebrew letters: Medical Frontline.

  “In two days’ time I’ll be allowed to get up, to lie on my back. Everything will be all right,” she consoled herself. “Come here a minute, Liritkeleh, help me, dear. I want to turn my head to the other side. It’s hard, it hurts, but I’m sick of having it on the same side all the time. All I need are bedsores on my face!”

  As gently as she could, but with a little sting of malice, her daughter said:

  “Mother, you have to flow with time. To accept the change.”

  “When you grow up, you accept the change,” muttered Mandy.

  “But you have to. It’s stupid to fight the wheels of time . . .”

  “How’s Dael?” cried Mandy suddenly and stretched a tiny bit, because of the pain. It was only now that she remembered this worry. “Was there any exchange of fire mentioned on the news? Did they say an Israeli was killed in the shooting, his family not yet notified?”

  “Everything’s fine, I spoke to him fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Thank God,”
said Mandy. “That’s what I feared the most. I’m under the anesthetic, and something happens to him.”

  Lirit thought: What difference does it make if she’s anesthetized when something happens to him? What’s she missing that’s so urgent for her to know?

  “What about your father?” Mandy sighed again.

  “He’s probably still up in the sky,” said Lirit and looked at her mother lying on her stomach as helpless as an overturned tortoise. There was a lot of compassion in the daughter’s look. And on the other hand, to be on the safe side, she thanked God that she was still young with her whole life before her, and not like her mother who was buried in a pajama factory. She, whatever her situation in life might be, still had a lot of opportunities!

  5

  BAHAT MCPHEE WAS AN ABSENTMINDED WOMAN, WHICH led to deficiencies in her orientation in space. In her late forties the condition worsened, to such an extent that she would lose her car even when she parked it outside the underground parking lots she hated. Not long ago she had lost it when she parked (by mistake) two streets away from her home, since the parking space reserved for her was occupied, and it never occurred to her to appeal to the authorities.

  One day, in the middle of searching for her car in minus four of the underground parking lot, McPhee had a revelation. She understood that people’s terror of death was a post-traumatic phenomenon. Death was so terrible that their minds consented to remembering only the fear they experienced when it happened, and not the event itself.

  McPhee knew that difficult and central events in a person’s life were erased from the center of the memory and stationed like soldiers on the periphery, in the margins of the margins, to keep them from returning and upsetting people again. She too had black holes in her memory, and perhaps they were responsible for the damage to her orientation in space.

  During the same revelation on minus four, row seventeen, the professor of zoology also understood that we were not given souls in order to wax lyrical on the fear of their extinction and the difficulties of life. She knew nature, this wasn’t how it behaved. In nature nothing got lost. Including the soul. She noticed that while she found it difficult to believe in the existence of God, she could really connect to the Divine Presence.

  Armed with these insights Bahat McPhee began to study at Hebrew Union College, at first on the Internet, and later also on short trips to New York.

  She was a very lonely, bitter woman, and it was to be expected that the Divine Presence would send her revelations from time to time. Most of the hours of the day she spent in her lab, riveted to the golden silk webs and their manufacturers, the Nephila maculata.

  Recently, with the lack of significant progress in her research, the prestigious Cornell University had brought in a Hispanic bio-physicist residing in Ithaca, fifteen years younger than she was, named Mario Salazar. During the first two weeks a passionate love affair broke out between the two, but it quickly petered out. To the credit of the participants in the lightning romance, let it be said that they did not suffer from mutual rejection after the storm subsided, but became practical, concentrated, brisk, and the research which had previously faltered suddenly charged full steam ahead, with results she was happy to pass on to the Israeli inventor.

  MCPHEE WAS BORN in Israel, in the green suburb of Ramat Aviv, in the small Shimoni Street, leading off the big Reading Street. She lived in with her parents, Reudor and Madeleine Segal, and her arachnophobic sister, Shoham, in a two-and-a-half-roomed ground-floor apartment.

  At the end of the sixties, when she was twelve, the family went to San Francisco as emissaries on behalf of the state. Reudor Segal was a senior civil servant.

  In San Francisco the Segals settled down for two years in a lovely apartment on a hill, not far from Chinatown. From the windows the two sisters, sweet Bahat and Shoham, looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge and tried to guess the meaning of the elusive landscape on the other side of the river.

  During this period their parents were caught up in the beatnik revolution, and in the framework of their search for the right way of life, they became acquainted with Shivananda Yoga, after which they were never the same.

  At the end of his mission the state fired Reudor, due to budget cuts, and he sank into unemployment and depression. He even started to talk about divorce. Madeleine, who was at her wit’s end in trying to prevent the melancholy Reudor from leaving her with two children and a bit of lawn adjoining the front porch, suggested that okay, he could start proceedings that would end in divorce, but in the meantime they should practice yoga on the aforementioned strip of lawn. The yoga brought them together, and they improved from day to day. After a few months they even started to give lessons privately, on the lawn and inside the house, and afterward they got permission to work in the Shimoni Street air-raid shelter, because luckily for them there wasn’t a war at the time. They taught five days a week and stopped talking about getting divorced. About a year after Reudor lost his job, their financial situation stabilized and they opened the first yoga school of its kind, which they called Splendor on the Lawn. The school had dozens of students. Some of them preferred her, and others preferred him, but there was no jealousy between them, only harmony, and it seemed that they had reached safe harbors, at least for the time being.

  Every day at dawn they did an hour of yoga on the lawn. Lightly and flexibly, they executed all kinds of positions (asanas) which released energetic blocks, including head stands without a wall. For a long time the two of them were capable of remaining upside down between heaven and earth, thereby enabling the blood to reach every capillary in their brains, steeping themselves in a pleasant relaxation. In the morning hours they would cook vegetarian food for the children who attended the Alliance Israelite school, and around noon they would go to open the doors of Splendor on the Lawn.

  Their daughters Bahat and Shoham were obliged to become parasites insofar as they always went to visit their friends, but never invited their friends home because they were afraid that their mother or their father would suddenly stand on their heads, and they would become pariahs.

  The yoga kept the family together, but isolated the two girls.

  Financial security made it possible for the parents to develop the art of conversation between themselves, and to pass on to their students what they discovered or invented. And indeed they invented various expressions to convey to their students what they should do and feel.

  For example, the Segals were the first in the country to say, “I’m speaking from a place of . . .” They were the ones who invented the culture of “place” in the Hebrew language, and it was from there that they spoke to their students during the lesson and after it. All kinds of abstractions turned into places. There was a place of pain, a place of loneliness and frustration, a place of wanting to help, a place of compassion, and so on. They were the first to recognize that someone speaking from a place of anger was unable to talk to someone speaking from a place of acceptance. The widespread use of this term indirectly helped hundreds of psychologists throughout the country to communicate with their clients, and vice versa. Neither the state nor the Language Academy saw fit to reward the Segals for their efforts, but they were serene and it didn’t bother them.

  Their dream, which came from a place of daydreams, was of course to go to India for as many years as possible, and there to learn how to live to the ripe old age of ninety-something.

  ON THE DAY that Shoham received an exemption from guard and kitchen duty due to her terror of spiders—arachnophobia—Madeleine and Reudor set out for Mysore in India to learn and internalize another brand of yoga (Ashtanga).

  Bahat was already planning her post-army trip.

  At first things in India were almost perfect, but after a few weeks the Segals met a local yogi called Helen. Three months after they landed in India, Reudor ran away to Rishikesh with his new love Helen, who was also a guru.

  Helen was more supple than Madeleine and more advanced than her in yoga, even though
she was eight years older than Madeleine. She had been born in India, and had practiced from the age of three. Her parents had arrived there as colonialists in the framework of the expansion of the British Empire, and they had all returned to England in the framework of its contraction, after India received its independence. Helen had returned with them, but after a decade she wearied of the West and went back to India for good.

  Her loneliness, her wisdom, her smile, and her agility captivated Reudor, who in any case was beginning to be bored to death with his wife.

  After the separation from Reudor, Madeleine suffered a terrible crisis, which she overcame under the devoted care of nuns in Mysore. When she recovered her prana, she returned to Israel and to her daughters with the intention of cherishing them and remedying the injustices of the past. But Bahat had already set out on her coast-to-coast trip to America with her high school friend, Hagit, and Shoham had studied to be a midwife, and gone to work in the Yoseftal Hospital in Eilat.

  This being the case, Madeleine Segal took up residence on her own in the ground floor apartment in green Ramat Aviv, and she made no attempt to renew the glory days of the yoga school, with the result that she soon fell into severe economic distress—something she had never experienced before.

  And then the third blow fell. Bahat, who had set out for no more than a three month coast-to-coast trip, did not return to Israel, having fallen in love with a local boy from some university town in the far north of New York State. One daughter in Eilat, one daughter in northern New York, a husband in India—thus Madeleine summed up her achievements in life.

  She spent hours on the phone to Bahat, imploring her to leave her local lover and return to her motherland and her mother, to what was left of her mother, she really needed her, and what did she have to do in upstate New York anyway. But Bahat was determined to be independent and even more original than her parents.

  When Bahat’s traveling companion Hagit returned to Israel, she went to visit Madeleine and told her how Bahat’s desertion had come about. Madeleine recognized pure evil in her, but she sat quietly and listened to the wicked girl.