Textile

1

A TAXI STOOD ON THE CORNER OF YOCHEVED BAT-MIRIAM and Alexander Penn Street with its lights on and its engine off. On the back window was a message in big, white handwritten letters which said: I DRIVE ON GAS, NOT GASOLINE. AND YOU?

The light from the decorative street lamps joined the soft beams shining from amid the vegetation of the flourishing front gardens, which were all the same: three lemon cypresses, another three or five Thai ficuses, and one strange and unfamiliar tree that had shed its leaves and whose trunk was covered by thick, short thorny growths with hard, menacing points.

Taller and more prominent than these plants was a kind of slender palm whose large, feathery fronds looked as if they were bursting from a fountain with a low-pressure jet. This palm — which had been imported at the end of the nineties, was called a coconut palm (Syagrus romanzoffiania) even though it bore no relation to the edible coconut fruit — required very little water, while its rapid and imperious growth produced results of a cunning and historically helpful nature: it gave rise to the impression that the suburb of Tel Baruch North had not been established yesterday or the day before, but had been there for years. As the tall, flourishing coconut palms proved.

The suburb of Tel Baruch North was special, very different from the undistinguished sister suburbs surrounding it, and although it had been set up in the blink of an eye and was completely new — it proclaimed seniority and permanence, even if life itself was fleeting. An impressive achievement that explained the high price of the apartments.

GEOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Tel Baruch North is situated to the north of the old Tel Baruch, but also to the south of the old established Kiryat Shaul, famous for its two vast cemeteries: one for the fallen in the wars of Israel, and the other for the ordinary dead, who are hardly ever buried there at public expense anymore, since it is over capacity and plots are hard to come by and cost a fortune.

Despite its proximity to Kiryat Shaul, it never occurred to any of the planners of the suburb, which arose as if overnight, to call the new suburb Kiryat Shaul South. And rightly so. The word “south” gives rise to horror among the many denizens, or would-be denizens, of the affluent “north,” and to call a North Tel Aviv suburb Kiryat Shaul South would mean financial suicide as well as being socially insensitive. But the founders of Tel Baruch North (Telba-N.) were no fools. They drilled to the depths of human thought and took into account both the differences between North and South, and the difference between tel, a hill or permanent natural phenomenon, and kirya, a man-made township, here today and gone tomorrow. In this successful concept they cunningly encompassed death, deterioration, and extinction — in other words the absence of the above. They wanted and got a superior location that proclaimed: I’m here to stay, and soon a generation will arise that will have no idea that once I never existed.

BUT ALL THE MOCKERY in the world vis-à-vis this expensive piece of real estate fades and dies in the twilight hour, when a natural pink lights up the neighborhood and all the artificial forms of lighting that illuminate the houses are refracted by the pale, shiny marble surfaces. Then a kind of halo is created around some of the buildings. A halo that even lends a spiritual significance to these stepped buildings containing apartments with alternating porches, which provide privacy and a certain kind of beauty, duplexes, triplexes, penthouses, and also ordinary four-roomed apartments, which no doubt lack for nothing either.

In those days in Israel it was no simple matter to work up enthusiasm about anything, but the place left a powerful impression, and gave rise, even in the driest and most arid hearts, to eager aspirations that had seemed lost to them. Fearful souls too, and those whose brains had been riddled by time until they were almost hollow, could not help but be captivated by the cute electric blinds, the graceful porches bounded by balustrades of transparent, tempered glass. And all these wretched, ravaged souls could not help but connect all this beauty and luxury to some kind of posterity beyond their grasp.

And if the blinds and the lighting and the porches themselves failed to impress, the job was done by the hanging gardens that embellished the porches and, with unparalleled aesthetic integrity, maintained stylistic uniformity with the vegetation in the front gardens.

TO BE FAIR, we should point out that together with profound admiration and appreciation, it sometimes happened that envy raised its head and overcame even those who regarded themselves as cool customers, capable of exerting absolute control over the most extreme situations. This envy was fierce and devastating, and it wreaked havoc even among all kinds of social democrats, who would, on principle, never live in a place where money was so important. Like autumn leaves, the mask of hypocrisy fell from the faces of the envy stricken, their jaws dropped, and they were overcome by bitterness at the fact that they had no part in this real-estate marvel.

THE DRIVER OF THE TAXI that drove only on gas was a young man of thirty-five who had a beard and wore a black skullcap. In the past he had been a star footballer, playing center forward for Maccabi Tel Aviv, but he had become religious and retired from the game. He was waiting next to his car for a fare who had asked for a taxi that drove on natural gas, and he was wondering whether to call the fare on the phone or to wait a few minutes longer. He was the one who had arrived early after all.

The ex-football player looked around at more of the fine buildings in this new suburb that had grown up south of Kiryat Shaul, in order to take in the place that the top 10 percent had recently built for itself, in spite of the recession.

He thought that the people who lived here lived exactly like he himself would live if only he had persevered in his brilliant football career. He too felt that he was being invaded by envy, but since he was a man inspired by the wisdom of thousands of years, he succeeded in restraining his covetousness in a second.

He simply raised his eyes to heaven, just as the rabbi had told him to do at least once a day in order to understand the place of the individual as opposed to the rest of the world, took a couple of deep breaths, and erected a barrier between himself and the eternal bliss, imaginary or not, radiated by the suburb of Tel Baruch North.

IRAD GRUBER, who was only fifty, but who in the past month had been so depressed that he looked like sixty-five, walked down the path between the seasonal flower beds and looked round irritably for the taxi that was supposed to take him to the airport. With one hand he dragged a medium-sized suitcase on wheels, and in the other he held a heavy briefcase containing important documents and a laptop computer.

The driver, who Gruber immediately recognized as the famous ex-football player, opened the trunk, and only when he, the fare, came right up to him, deigned to relieve him of his suitcase and heavy briefcase.

Khhhh. . Irad Gruber snorted in contempt, for in the many countries he had visited porters and drivers came running to take his luggage, including those who did not know who he was.

If Irad Gruber had been in a mood suited to his character, there is no doubt that he would have given the insolent driver a piece of his mind. However in recent times, as a result of other troubles, the gifted scientist had been suffering from dejection and gloom, and he therefore let the matter of the driver’s insolence drop and resumed his contemplation of the world with the glum expression, full of sorrow and anguish, of someone who had recently suffered a shock.

He sat down on the backseat, his long woolen coat folded on his knees, and set out on his ten-day trip to the most powerful country in the world. He cast a glance, empty of content, in the direction of Mikado, the commercial center of the neighborhood, and quickly averted his eyes from the white florescent light that jarred his pupils.

All that remained for him was to hope that the decision makers in the Defense Ministry and the Weapons and Infrastructure Development Administration (WIDA) had not decided to save money at the expense of his comfort, but had taken the trouble to buy him a business-class ticket, as a person of his stature deserved.

In less than a minute the ex-football star and the gifted inventor and recipient of the Israel Prize were on the Ayalon Highway, and the car that did not pollute the planet joined the traffic on the road leading to Ben-Gurion Airport.

A FEW HOURS AFTER his departure, Amanda Gruber, the wife of Irad Gruber, left the triplex on the corner of Yocheved Bat-Miriam and Alexander Penn Street, Tel Baruch North, and drove in her maroon Buick to the Medical Frontline offices in the new branch of Sea and Sun, in order to undergo a far-from-simple surgical procedure at the hands of the number two surgeon in the world in the field of intrusive cosmetic corrections, an ex-Israeli by the name of Carmi Yagoda.

From Dresden, Germany, Dr. Yagoda had been urgently summoned to perform shoulder blade implants, an operation which had become very popular with women of means in whom the years had eroded the projection of the shoulder blades, making their backs flat and boring, both in motion and at rest.

Carmi Yagoda was famous worldwide due to his success in operating on the faces of children in the third world who had been born deformed, and his home in Dresden displayed impressive before-and-after photographs. In recent years he had tired of improving deformed faces, which could never be brought to perfection, and he had gone in for major plastic surgeries such as the present case. He had been particularly successful in liposuction of the waist, and in shoulder blade implants.

Yagoda was known for his precise and rapid attachment of prosthetic shoulder blades to the collarbone and the tendons and muscles that moved the shoulder blades (scapula), such as the trapezius muscle, and the muscles straightening the back and bringing the shoulder blades closer.

The ex-Israeli doctor’s fine-motor skills also saved his patients from postoperative limitations on their movement. He promised Mandy that she would be able to resume swimming within a month.

MANDY’S HUSBAND knew nothing about his wife’s planned hospitalization in Medical Frontline, and she saw no point in telling him, since he was absorbed in himself and his own affairs, and recently, because of problems and hitches in his present project, he couldn’t see an inch in front of himself. In fact, his wife had counted on her husband’s problems at work to get him out of the way. With tense apprehension she followed the news about the threatened general strike, hoping that it would break out after he left the country, and spread to El Al and the airport workers, so that he would be stuck in America for at least two or three weeks, and by the time he returned she would be completely recovered and perhaps she wouldn’t even have to tell him about the operation.

A YEAR HAD PASSED since the Grubers’ son Dael had joined the army and become a sniper in the Givati Brigade. It was Aya Ben-Yaish, Dael’s girlfriend, who had informed Mandy where her son was serving. Ever since then Mandy had preferred to be unconscious, or semiconscious, in order not to know what was happening and not to worry uselessly about her combat soldier son.

Since she was a healthy woman, she went in and out of cosmetic surgeries. She had already undergone seven such operations, most of them on her face. Excluding the nose job she had had as a girl. To her satisfaction, her face grew to resemble that of a horse less and less from operation to operation.

The operation for which Dr. Yagoda had been flown to Israel was her eighth.

OF ALL THE WORKERS at the family pajama factory Nighty-Night, which sold most of its stock to the ultra-Orthodox population and was situated in the industrial zone in East Netanya, only Carmela Levy, Mandy’s secretary and the forewoman of the sewing shop, knew the other, deeper reason for the wave of operations undergone by the boss. Only poor Carmela, whose son Yehuda Levy had been killed in Lebanon, knew that it was all for the sake of the general anesthetic during the surgery and the distracting recovery in its wake.

During the last inventory two months earlier, Mandy had told her explicitly, “If they put my son on the front lines as a sniper without asking my opinion, then I can’t take the suspense. I want to sleep and sleep and wake up younger and younger the day after he gets out of the army. At his welcome home party I’ll look like a woman of thirty-five,” joked Amanda, who was already breast lifted, stomach flattened, cellulite emptied in the thighs, eyebrow raised, cheekbone implanted, and raised to half-mast in the face and neck. Only her long hair remained white. Beautiful, abundant, wavy, and white, since she was allergic to every kind of hair dye. The combination of her made-over face, with the cute little nose that dated from the Passover vacation when she was seventeen, and her wavy white hair turned the woman into a walking work of art. All the more so since she took care to dress in ensembles, which Carmela considered the height of good taste, consisting of the colors white, cream, black, and greenish gray.

Carmela loved Mandy with all her heart and soul, and Mandy too did not keep her at a distance but made her into her confidante in everything concerning the pajama factory. Carmela would never forget Mandy’s solicitude during the mourning period for her late Yehuda, coming every day for the shivah, crying with her, and making several large purchases at the supermarket for the many condolence callers, at her own expense. Carmela would always remember how she rose to the occasion during those terrible days.

Dael was only a child then, but Mandy had already begun to plan how she herself would endure the difficult days ahead.

Because of Carmela’s loyalty, and also because of her profound knowledge of the mysteries of textiles, so necessary for a pajama factory, Mandy had said to her on a number of occasions, “You’re the flower of Nighty-Night. You’re my only worker with a twinkle in her eye.”

Carmela’s association with Nighty-Night dated from the days when Amanda’s mother, Audrey Greenholtz, managed the factory. At first she would come to the plant once every few weeks, on behalf of Singer sewing machines, to oil the machines and clean them with special cloths.

After Audrey’s death, Mandy promoted her. She sent her to a Labor Ministry sewing course, went on paying her salary for all three months of the course, and gave her a profession. Carmela was sure that but for Mandy, she would have come to a very bad end, as a body cast up by the sea onto the Netanya beach.

After the boy’s shivah, Carmela lost the will to live. Mandy couldn’t stand to see it happening, and she sent her to a great psychiatrist who in two months got her out of bed and put her on her feet. In spite of all the differences, there was a rare, strong friendship between Mandy and Carmela, a kind of secret pact, and in Nighty-Night they said that Carmela Levy received a salary of over six thousand five hundred net, and that she got more coupons on holidays, and more rest and recreation days than anyone else.

2

TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE LATEST OPERATION, AMANDA called her grown-up daughter Lirit, and confided in her. Lirit lived on a small-holders cooperative called Brosh next to Te’ashur in the northern Negev, with her boyfriend Shlomi. The Grubers, busy with their own affairs, were relieved that their twenty-two-year-old daughter had found herself a forty-two-year-old boyfriend (although Mandy thought he was closer to fifty) and had gone to live with him in an organic paradise in the Negev, far from their eyes. Every month they would throw a few thousand into her bank account for her to do with as she pleased.

As far as Mandy was concerned, Lirit’s future was too uncertain and her choice of partners too haphazard, lacking in planning and content. At the end of her NCO-Casualties course she had fallen in love with a Jamaican Rastaman called Lucas, whom she met at a Reggae club in town.

For almost two years, during her entire army service, Lirit went about with this Lucas, until three months before her discharge from the IDF Mandy invited him for a heart-to-heart in a park on King George Street. She offered him twenty thousand dollars cash to break off relations with her daughter and leave the country never to return. He agreed, and one week later he vanished, leaving a letter, or more precisely a note, in which he wrote in Hebrew with Latin letters: It’s better this way. Sorry.

Lirit’s heart was broken by Lucas’s abandonment, and she either cried all day or didn’t speak. Because of the nature of her work in the army, the psychiatrist gave her a month of excused duty days, to recover her balance.

Even after she got over her depression and returned to her terrible task as an NCO-Casualties, this confused young soul agonized over the question: Why so suddenly? How come she hadn’t noticed any warning signs of the fading of the Jamaican’s love? Why did he disappear from one day to the next?

Something in her ability to comprehend her fellow man was fundamentally flawed, she concluded.

And from then on Lirit got it into her head that anyone who attached himself to her was doing so out of pity or karmic repair, with no hint on the horizon of how she would disabuse herself of this mistaken idea.

After the army Lirit went to the kibbutz seminar to learn how to be a nursery school teacher, because the company of innocent little children who didn’t yet know what was waiting for them, made her feel good. She made them laugh and fascinated them by making all kinds of faces and noises, and her teachers told her that she had what it takes.

SHLOMI WAS FAR LESS PROBLEMATIC than Lucas, even though this esoteric departure from the norm was also a far cry from what Amanda had in mind. She couldn’t understand why her daughter couldn’t find someone cute (and there were plenty of cute guys around today), of her own age and religion, preferably from Israel, preferably in Israel, preferably from the center of the country and from a satisfactory family — and she wished Lirit would study something (even if it was only teaching nursery school) and marry him. Mandy thought that if Lirit got married she wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore. She thought of someone along the lines of a promising student of business administration, or even a young math teacher who wasn’t a pedophile.

She was afraid that her daughter would repeat the mistake that she herself had made when she married Irad Gruber. Although it was true that in his youth he had been great looking, a real charmer with a full head of hair, not like today with his receding hairline, but as a kibbutz leaver he suffered from a lack of earning ability. She had spent a fortune on financing his doctorates and living expenses for the duration. In the course of the years he had progressed and traveled the world, while she stayed stuck with the 100 percent cotton pajamas with no fear of religiously prohibited impurities.

And even after he had completed all his degrees in biology, technology, and engineering, as well as postgraduate courses in personnel management and administration, Irad Gruber remained a financial burden on his wife. Without funding from any outside agency he applied himself to all kinds of inventions in every possible field, conveying to all and sundry the sense that he was about to make an important breakthrough.

“It’s hard to support a genius,” she would joke, without raising a laugh from anyone, including herself.

AND INDEED, after a not insignificant number of years the spiral escalators invented and designed by Irad Gruber gained worldwide recognition and distribution, and the Ministry of Culture, Science, and Sport (CSAS) intervened and provided funding, and Gruber gave Israel’s reputation a boost at a terrible time, when most of the world disapproved of its policies. Many air-raid shelters throughout the world acquired the spiral escalators, as did airports and shopping malls. Much space was saved by this Israeli with his brilliant invention, which in certain places prevented the chopping down of forests or other environmental destruction.

He made many millions for the state, and a few for himself. Mandy fell on the money and invested it in profitable ventures. Gruber was disdainful and didn’t object. Money wasn’t his field, he liked to say.

On the fifty-fourth anniversary of the establishment of the state, he was awarded the Israel Prize for bringing credit to the country in difficult days and injecting important foreign capital into its resources. On the fifty-fifth anniversary of the state he was granted the honor of lighting a torch at the official Independence Day celebration on Mount Herzl.

A WEEK AFTER the attack on the Twin Towers, Gruber was approached by the Weapons and Infrastructure Development Administration (WIDA) at the Defense Ministry and invited to a meeting with important people from the highest echelons. It upset them to see a local, homegrown talent wasted for the benefit of random crowds, coming and going in international airports and shopping centers, while what people desperately needed now was simply to stay alive.

He had a series of meetings at the Defense Ministry with various VIPs, and in a brief and to-the-point conversation in a cafe in the London Ministore, between the deputy defense minister and Irad Gruber, the ministry hired the services of the gifted man to design and produce special, lightweight protective suits that would not limit the movements of the people wearing them, unlike the armor worn by medieval knights, or the heavy flak jackets of our own day issued only to those on the front line.

These important suits were known by the code name “TESU,” or T-suits (in other words, terror suits). The plan was to issue them to all the troops on active service and also to the reserves, and later on to supply them to the entire civilian population, in the event of a terrorist attack.

This was a formula that suited the needs of Irad Gruber down to the ground. The escalators had brought him money, a local prize, international fame and respect, and the new suits would bring him the Nobel Prize. The government provided him with all the conditions for the manufacture of the T-suits. Mandy thought that she would have to attach a catheter to her husband’s head to drain off all the piss that had gone to it since he had received the Israel Prize. Otherwise it was liable to burst with self-satisfaction.

There were about sixty patents registered in Gruber’s name, and he had started work on some of them before being approached by the Defense Ministry. Mandy feared the success of more grandiose projects. What he had already achieved was enough for her. But from Irad’s point of view this was an opportunity to prove that he wasn’t just a mercenary publicity hound, as a certain newspaper had claimed, but also a great humanist. He set all his other ideas aside, and for three years he had devoted himself exclusively to the ultimate rescue suit — the TESU.

AMANDA HAD ALWAYS raised the children alone, without any help from Irad. As soon as she recovered from the shoulder blade surgery, she planned to drop in to the Steimatzky branch in Neve Avivim and pick up a few books to prepare her spaced-out daughter for the psychometric tests. And as a girl who had grown up on lowbrow juvenile literature, she would get her a few magazines too, to look at when she was resting from her studies.

Mandy liked going to the shopping center in Neve Avivim, because she had done her shopping there for twenty years when she was living in a penthouse at 44 Tagore Street.

She usually bought the classics Dael asked her to get for him there too, although she sometimes ordered them for him on the Internet. She had heard, from Aya Ben-Yaish again, that immediately after a targeted assassination her Dael was left with the smell of gunpowder on his hands, never mind how often he washed them and what soap he used, and only immersion in very high literature distracted him from the smell.

The child therefore took advantage of the long lulls between ambushes and liquidations in order to read the classic of world literature: Stendhal, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote, Thomas Mann, Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Crime and Punishment, Kafka, and so on. He didn’t ignore the classics of Hebrew literature either, and was particularly fond of Mendele Mocher Seforim and all kinds of old books with titles that began with the words “The Collected Works of. .” He also had a notebook that was very precious to him, in which he wrote down Hebrew words that were unfamiliar to him because they were no longer in use, and on weekends, after surfing his favorite porno sites, he would translate them into contemporary Hebrew and enter the site of the Language Academy to offer his suggestions.

He had developed a method of reading in breadth, in other words he would read a number of books at once. Breadth reading demanded a special effort and distracted him from current affairs. He would also test himself to see that he wasn’t getting mixed up between the plots of the novels and putting a character from one book into another book by mistake. These tests were also excellent etudes for the mind, enabling him to maintain thinking in breadth as opposed to his linear thinking as a sniper, and he thought that in this way he saved himself, because when all was said and done Dael was a very sensitive boy.

Mandy didn’t know that her son read several books at once, sometimes as many as five, and nevertheless she correctly interpreted his intensive reading as an act of balance. After shooting someone, he felt the need to connect with something uplifting, and she was very willing to respond to this noble need.

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE the important conversation, two weeks before the surgery, Mandy sat in her car in the car wash and prepared herself. Soap from thin boring pipes sprayed the car, and giant brushes emerged from hiding and scrubbed energetically, until the dark red car was completely covered with a thick layer of white foam.

Inside the foam, from which she was protected by the car, Mandy wondered what would be the most effective way of appealing to her daughter to make her agree to leave Shlomi in the Negev, and their natural farm based on a number of “ideals” she couldn’t remember at the moment, and take on the burden of being Mandy Gruber for ten, maximum twelve, days.

The mother aimed herself at a balance between forcefulness and tenderness, and got ready for the very possible contingency in which Lirit would begin to yell and go berserk. In this case, she would cut off the conversation and call again later. That was the advantage of these cell phones, which sometimes disconnected.

On the other end of the line, long rings repeated themselves without a human or nonhuman response. They must be digging up the beets, thought Mandy.

The car had emerged from the tunnel shining and beautiful since she had had it waxed. She waited at the stop sign before the right turn, without noticing that the road was empty and she could go. She was busy listening to the long dial tones somewhere in the Negev.

Finally Lirit answered.

“What did I take you away from?”

“Shlomi wanted me to come and see something.”

“What?” She turned right as if there was a traffic light there and it had just changed to green.

“What?” Lirit was surprised at the interest.

“Yes, what?”

“That tree bark prevents weeds from growing, and there’s no need to spray anything. We’re going to collect tree bark in a minute.”

“I understand, enjoy yourselves,” said Mandy, and added, “Darling.”

Lirit was sure that her mother was encouraging her in her way of life, and she was surprised and happy, but a second later she realized that it was only the preamble to a serious request.

Mandy told Lirit that this time too she would have to come up north during her hospitalization in order to stand in for her. In other words, as she was well aware, this wasn’t the first time that she had had to stand in for her. Both in her previous home and in this one Mandy had called on her. It couldn’t be helped. It was an emergency. She should see it as a war. She would have to sleep in the luxurious triplex in Tel Baruch North, and not in the ruin where she was living now. To disconnect and activate the alarm system, to keep an eye on the Columbian so she wouldn’t steal her cosmetics, like the one before her and the Filipina before that, who had made long distance calls to all her friends in Manila. To arrange for the Columbian to get the key and return it. And above all: to take herself every day to the family pajama factory in Netanya and manage it to the extent that Lirit was capable of managing anything.

She asked her first-born to make an effort on her behalf, because this time she really needed this operation. Carmela would help Lirit with whatever she required. “It’s all arranged, my sweet. He’ll manage without you for a few days. Sometimes it’s healthy to take a break,” she hurried to soften the impression.

“I can’t believe that you’re actually going through with this insane operation,” said Lirit.

“What’s insane about it?” asked Mandy and passed the turnoff to Tel Baruch North by mistake. “My shoulder blades have become eroded, and I’m having replacements implanted. They’ve already done three thousand of them to date. I’m not prepared to look at my back and see sunken skin where my exquisite shoulder blades once were.”

At this moment Shlomi came in and lay down on the sofa without doing anything. Lirit’s mother went on talking to her, she said that she had only left her a few little tasks that she could take care of easily, but Lirit’s attention had already been distracted. Negative vibrations were reaching her from the tired man with the slow movements who was lying on the sofa. Altogether, he had been giving off a lot of negative energy recently, and sometimes it seemed to her that he was aiming it straight at her, because she had forgotten to water their organic vegetable garden a few times and things had died. In addition to which, the carrots had failed, the cucumbers had holes in them, and the pumpkin had rotted.

Lately he hardly spoke to her, as opposed to periods when he even talked too much. And she, who suffered from severe attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), was unable to listen to such long speeches of at least an hour against globalization and destruction and the exploitation of Africa and the children in Southeast Asia. The communication between these two suffered from severe limitations, since in addition to Lirit’s ADHD, Shlomi’s verbal skills were poor. He would sometimes begin sentences with the word “what,” and the words that followed were not always in the right order, and he added unnecessary similes, and repeated them several times, and all this verbal inflorescence was supposed to be connected to the initial “what.”

Lirit said “Good,” and “No problem” to her mother, in order to get the conversation over. And even before she had succeeded in taking in the gist of her mother’s words, before she had started to examine in theory the possible effects of leaving the farm or her relations with Shlomi, the latter rose from the sofa, took a few steps, walked past her, went outside, and called her to come and see something, this time at the bottom of the garden. The red worms had multiplied and fattened in the compost heap. She hurried over and expressed exaggerated admiration for the compost and the size of the worms, whatever it took to stop him sulking and to moderate this negativity of his.

AFTER SHE HAD EXPRESSED such enthusiasm for the work of the worms, Shlomi smiled his good smile at her and she breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t sulking and he wasn’t cross with her, he was simply absorbed in himself, as people sometimes were absorbed in themselves, he explained to her on his own initiative without her asking. She sat down on the old sofa and Shlomi went to fetch his latest photographs. One of his photographs had once been published in The Voice of the South for twenty-seven dollars.

Shlomi was not only an idealistic organic farmer, but also a gifted photographer, and he was trying to get into the journalism market in the south of the country. This time he dwelled only on his latest photographs, especially of the floods in the Negev, and Lirit sat on his lap and said:

“How lovely,” and “That’s amazing,” and “This one is to die for.”

“Tell me,” Shlomi asked his girlfriend, and shook her off him because her embrace was a little suffocating and he felt hot, “do you think I could offer these pictures to the Gates of the Negev local council as a calendar? That means hundreds of dollars. What I’ve got here isn’t only the floods, in other words ruin and destruction. Take a look at this one. .” He showed her a close up of flowers. “And this one. . and this one. . I think we’re going to have a fantastic spring this year, by the way.”

“If not Gates of the Negev, then some other local council,” said Lirit. “A person would have to be an idiot not to take them.” She stood up, changed into her smoking clothes, and went outside, accompanying the entire process with facial grimaces that related to her conversation with her mother shortly before.

She knew that her mother wanted her, when the day came, to inherit the factory and continue the tradition, and she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to, but in the meantime no need had arisen for her to express any wish in the matter. Her mother was a strong, healthy woman. It only annoyed her that Dael showed no interest in the pajama factory, and that it was so clear to their mother that she was the one who would take command of the family concern while Dael was expected to charge ahead. The guy had already acquired a profession in the army, not like her, who in her army service had only learned how to grab hold of collapsing people a minute before their bodies hit the floor or some piece of furniture.

And indeed, Dael had organized a future for himself after the army. The day after his discharge he was going to fly straight to Hollywood and become a paparazzi to the stars. Judging by his success as a sharp shooter, the Hollywood stars were in for a big surprise. Dael thought that after he made his first fortune from his photos he would open a school right there in Los Angeles for paparazzi photographers, who would have to pass strict tests in order to be accepted, and whose year-long studies would cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

THE NIGHTY-NIGHT pajama factory had been founded by Audrey Greenholtz, Mandy’s mother, in the middle of the sixties, soon after the two of them arrived in Israel from the former Rhodesia, when the child was eight.

For years Audrey held to the opinion that the factory should serve only the ultra-Orthodox population, since the ultra-Orthodox population was the most stable thing in Israel. Any deviation from this target population would spell the end of the factory, in the opinion of its founder.

Difficult life circumstances had made Audrey Greenholtz into a fighter as well as a schemer. She thought it was a mistake for mothers to be soft on their daughters, and she raised her daughter to be tough, drilling it into her that giving in wasn’t an option, no matter what.

When the Rhodesian police came to the Greenholtz family home and informed the mother that the body of her husband, Aaron Greenholtz, had been found headless on the roadside, she did not collapse or start screaming, but carried on resourcefully. This resourcefulness she tried to pass on to her daughter Mandy, who tried to pass it on to her daughter Lirit, with diminishing success from generation to generation.

When Audrey died in 1989, and Mandy took charge, she put up a dummy tombstone to her father, Aaron Greenholtz, in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery, according to whose inscription his memory would never fade. But the truth was that his memory didn’t exist. Mandy had forgotten him completely.

In the middle of the nineties, Mandy thought of adding another line to her father’s tombstone, something along the lines of “Murdered in race riots in Rhodesia, 19—” but she didn’t do it.

AUDREY COULDN’T STAND Israel and she never stopped telling her daughter and the few friends she had here that it was only Aaron’s death that had forced her to come to the Levant, and that nothing but terrible distress would have brought her to a place of no distinction, full of men with weak characters. She was enraged against Israeli men, who gave her the cold shoulder because she already had a daughter from a marriage that had ended in death, and who regarded her as irrelevant.

During her first days in Israel, Audrey acted out of character — and collapsed. She barely brought herself to acquire a three-roomed apartment in Arlozorov Street in Tel Aviv. She was told that this was classic North Tel Aviv, and that it would always remain classic.

But six months after arriving in Israel, Audrey got out of bed and she never fell again. She called in renovators, who turned right into left and ceiling into floor. During the period of the renovations the two of them stayed in the old Sheraton Hotel, which no longer exists and today there is a big hole where it used to be. Every morning she set out from the hotel to take three or four buses to Netanya, to the factory she set up there in the industrial zone.

Audrey herself invented the name Nighty-Night. Her knowledge of the Hebrew language was nothing to write home about, and she thought the name was clear enough for people in the Levant. She acquired a few classic Singer sewing machines, and insisted on handwork even when technology made faster and more efficient machines available.

Only in this way can the connection of the material with the thread be felt, while the movement of the foot accelerates the blood circulation and improves the concentration of the workers, Audrey explained her conservatism.

There was also the factory outlet that was opened before the holidays, and then — what a flood! Religious women bought pajamas in bulk and paid in cash, and the child Mandy got a kick out of being in charge of the cash register of the outlet, which also, of course, sold second-class goods for those who could not afford to buy first-class pajamas.

The adolescent Mandy was very happy when the government changed the currency and varied her life behind the cash register. She liked counting the change out loud, sometimes also in Yiddish, for the women in the wigs, and seeing the notes piling up in the compartments of the cash register made her feel really good, because she saw how happy it made her mother.

“Come and see,” she called her, and her mother would call back from the distance: “Nice work!”

IN THE BEGINNING there were about a dozen seamstresses working in the factory, but today, still on Singer machines but new electric ones, there are sixty, most of them ultra-Orthodox, and others from different sectors of religious and secular Judaism. After the death of her mother, Mandy didn’t change a thing in the factory, partly because she was afraid it would bring bad luck, but mainly because it was her mother’s will, and she complied as usual.

Thus it happened that at the dawn of the third millennium there was a factory in Israel where people worked almost like once upon a time. From Audrey’s deathbed, Mandy was delivered another fatal blow. Instead of occupying herself with her death and parting from this world, the dying woman issued instructions as if tomorrow morning she would be opening another twenty branches of Nighty-Night. First of all, she ordered Mandy not to be tempted to change the machines. And she also forbade her to change the system of locking up the factory: eight heavy locks on the gate without any remote control. In addition she commanded her daughter not to remain alone in the event that “he,” God forbid, should die before his time (she always called Irad “he,” never mind how many prizes he got or how many inventions were registered in his name with the patents registrar as intellectual property). And if she ever got it into her head to divorce him, Audrey warned her, it would mean three generations of lonely women in the family, since her mother too had raised her alone, because her own father died young from typhus or malaria.

“You hear? We don’t get divorced!”

Mandy almost fainted at the sound of this sudden announcement. She knew that her mother was opposed to divorce, but not for a moment could she have guessed that on her very deathbed she would slam her with an ace like this. She had planned to run to the rabbinate and open divorce proceedings as soon as the seven days of mourning were over and now after the dying woman’s veto the only place she could divorce Irad was in her imagination, which she didn’t have.

She sank into melancholy, and everyone around her, even Carmela, attributed her sadness to her parting from her mother.

LIFE WITH THE GENIUS Gruber became more and more difficult as the years went by, and the task of putting up with the man fell mainly on Mandy. He never listened to anyone and talked without stopping while at the same time apologizing for being a nuisance and saying that he knew he was a nuisance but he couldn’t help it. It didn’t depend on him. His genius mind was unable to stop inventing unique inventions that nobody had ever thought of.

Over the course of the years he stopped needing any kind of intimacy, and Mandy couldn’t see an end to all this ego trip. The children had become immune in their childhood to his long speeches, which could go on for hours because he liked to think out loud, and accordingly only Mandy was left to supply him with an audience. Again and again she was forced to listen to simulations of presentations he planned to present to capitalists so they would invest in this or that invention produced by his brilliant mind, and she had to make comments even if she didn’t have any and even if she sometimes stopped paying attention.

NOT LONG AFTER Dael’s bar mitzvah, which was held in the Neve-Kodesh Synagogue in Neve Avivim and considered a highly successful affair, came Gruber’s success with the spiral escalator, and she enjoyed a little respite from the headaches he gave her.

But the comeback arrived in the interval between the spiral escalators and the special protective suits. During this period Gruber experienced emptiness and boredom, and all that remained to entertain him was to hone in on Mandy again. Accordingly Mandy found herself spending unnecessary overtime in the factory. But then he would drive her up the wall worse than ever over the weekends, following her all over the house and telling her about his thoughts and ideas. Sometimes she would shut herself in the lavatory, but he would stand behind the door and go on talking.

His genius bordered on mysticism. In order to give expression to his many talents all he needed was a pencil and a piece of paper. “The genius with the pencil” he was called in many places, including at the Ministry of Defense. At home they had a large collection of pencils with erasers and without, for in the course of the years Gruber had developed a fear that an idea would come to him and he wouldn’t have a pencil to write it down and it would escape his memory.

AFTER DAEL WAS DRAFTED into the army, Mandy began the business with the plastic surgery, and most of the time her face was bandaged. Gruber told her that she looked like the heroine in Georges Franju’s movie, Eyes Without a Face. The father of the heroine was a sadistic surgeon who performed experiments on his daughter and ruined her face.

Obviously she couldn’t show herself at the factory like this, and once more Carmela came into the picture. Every night Mandy would sneak into their garage in Tel Baruch North, start the car, and drive to Netanya, to the pajama factory. There was something inhuman about the woman with the bandaged face racing alone in the American car on Highway 4. Once the police stopped her for speeding, and the policemen were very embarrassed. Mandy told them that her face had been burned when she was making chips for the children, and the explanation satisfied them and they even let her off and only told her to be careful not to exceed the speed limit in future.

In the factory Carmela would be waiting for her with all the paperwork, and they would go over all the events of the day together. The official version given to the workers was that due to intolerable tension stemming from some mental crisis or other, the boss had developed a skin disease, which was definitely not terminal, but until further notice prohibited her from exposing herself to the sun.

How would Mandy have survived the endless operations without the boundless loyalty of Carmela, who was so kind hearted that she even released Mandy from the burden of gratitude? Day after day she simply repeated the words, “Now it’s my turn. You helped me, now I’m helping you.”

And every time Mandy would throw her eyes up to heaven and say:

“There’s no comparison. .”

ONCE SHE DARED to arrive at the factory with her face bandaged not at night, but at dawn. She had to approve fabrics she had ordered, with new colors and patterns, and she needed daylight in order to see the main shade of the fabric properly and to feel it. Feeling the fabric by daylight was an essential stage in its acquisition and Mandy, like her mother, was able to tell the quality of the knitting, of the warp and woof of the material, in the blink of an eye, and how it would withstand frequent laundering.

After she had approved the fabrics, she turned toward the parking lot, but before she could get there and drive rapidly away, five seamstresses arrived early for work. They didn’t know whether to pretend not to see her, or to go up and ask her how she was. They didn’t know what the right thing to do was in a case like this. Suddenly one of them burst out laughing, and tried in vain to stifle her laughter, because the last thing Mandy was capable of arousing in her present plight was fear. The others sniggered too. And when they disappeared from sight she heard all five of them laughing.

Two hours later, after returning to the triplex on the corner of Yocheved Bat-Miriam and Alexander Penn Streets, she sent all five notices of dismissal by SMS, and they complained about it to the labor tribunal. The case is still under review, but a photograph of the five women has already appeared in the press under the heading: “Dismissed by SMS.”

Mandy wasn’t bothered by the bad press. In any case, most of her customers only read the ultra-Orthodox newspaper.

3

LIRIT PREFERRED THE TRIPLEX IN TEL BARUCH NORTH TO the penthouse in Neve Avivim. Although she never said anything out loud, because she had hardly ever had the opportunity to stay in Telba-N., it was evident that she was glad to move there after life close to the earth and close to Shlomi. Indirectly, therefore, her mother’s plastic surgeries did her a favor. And since this time, as it sometimes happened, Gruber was abroad, Lirit took over her parents’ handsome suite and settled down to reflections of a futuristic nature, about how her own apartment would look when the day came. In these plans for her future, neither Shlomi, nor his enlarged nature photographs decorating the walls, appeared in her mind’s eye. She lay in bed like a princess and watched her favorite channel on the huge television facing her, the E! Channel, reporting on the difficulties in the lives of Hollywood stars in the past and present. She was in no hurry to get to the factory in the mornings, she knew that Carmela was on the job, and only when it was nearly lunch time she dropped in to Nighty-Night to see that everything was under control. In the meantime she saw a repeat showing of a program about Winona Ryder, and allowed herself to drift off into different thoughts. For example where should she have her children, in a Jacuzzi or in a dolphin pool? It was clear to her that she would go for one of these options, after hearing a videotape of some actress, not Ryder, who gave birth to her first son in a Jacuzzi, and then her first daughter in a dolphin reef.

On no account did she wish to repeat her mother’s mistakes, giving birth to her and to Dael in a hospital and relying on a local anesthetic. Lirit didn’t want any anesthetics, local or general. She knew that the secret of her strength was to be the antithesis of her mother.

On the other hand, the design of the new house was definitely something she could adopt. For weeks Mandy had searched for an architect to plan the interior before the contractor went for the standard. She drove to see the houses in Arsuf at the suggestion of recommended architects. She saw five possibilities in Arsuf, and three in communities where well-known people had built themselves homes. She didn’t like any of them. Luckily she heard about a certain Oz Bonfil, a gifted Israeli designer who had gone to live in Tuscany and changed his name to Pasquale Bonfil. The person in question came to Israel twice a year, on Passover and Rosh Hashanah, to visit his sister. Mandy flew him over and put him up in the Dan Panorama at the end of winter, beginning of spring, and he stayed in the hotel for two months, for at a certain stage he saw fit to supervise the progress of the work himself.

Before Bonfil began work, Amanda presented him with two no-nos. One, that there be nothing in the apartment reminiscent of the Levant, nothing exotic, oriental, or Indian. And two, he was on no account to exceed the generous budget she had allowed him, because although from a socioeconomic point of view they belonged to the top 10 percent, they didn’t belong to the top 1 percent and not to the top one-thousandth either. There was a difference that wasn’t a nuance between the top 10 percent and the top 1 percent.

“In the top 1 percent, the sky’s the limit,” said Mandy, “but with us the limit is lower,” and she told him the sum she had in mind.

At first Bonfil grumbled about the second veto and argued that he only worked with people for whom the sky was the limit, but afterward he agreed and said that if he had to stay within the framework she had given him, they could forget about the possibility of uniting the first and second levels in one big space, and crowning it with a ceiling that had become available from a cathedral in Bologna.

Mandy took a week to think about the possibility of bringing the ceiling from the Bolognan cathedral for the unification between the first and second levels recommended by Bonfil. Sometimes the idea seemed fine to her and sometimes it seemed silly. She took into account the cost of bringing an entire ceiling from Bologna, with the insurance and the headaches, asked herself why she should do away with a level and turn a triplex into a duplex, she could have bought a duplex to begin with, so what if the ceiling would be high and ecclesiastical? And after she had considered every aspect, and calculated the cost, she decided: No!

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. Gruber 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.

But he knew that if after he met her and it all turned out to be wishful thinking, he would die in America of a stroke or cardiac arrest. He was already suffering from health problems as a result of the hell of the previous week. An irregular heart beat, an antsy feeling at the tips of his fingers, and shame, great shame. He couldn’t look his biophysicists in the eye. They had spent months prying into the spinning glands of the right spiders, but apparently that wasn’t enough.

Success in the mass production of spider webs was a one-way ticket to eternity, and Gruber longed to leave his mark on eternity, like Copernicus, Galileo, the inventor of the pendulum clock whose name he had forgotten, and the same with the steam engine and the small pox vaccination, Darwin, Michelangelo, and Nobel himself, who invented dynamite.

Gruber knew very well that a Nobel Prize for the invention of the ultimate protective suit was already waiting in Stockholm for the person who came to pluck it. In his mind’s eye he could already see the trivia question: What is the name of the man who removed the sting from war and international terror by inventing the protective suit against deadly weapons?

But at this point reality suddenly intruded again, and the up-to-date facts overcame his being like a natural disaster, and at precisely ten thousand miles above the Atlantic, at a temperature of minus fifty degrees Celsius outside, Gruber fell into a deep depression. He tried to go to sleep but failed. Destructive thoughts ravaged and riddled his brain. His head became hollow.

If he returned from his trip to the United States empty handed. . It would be Titanic three — if Titanic one was the disaster of the Titanic itself, and Titanic two was the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

In his mind’s eye he saw himself coming back with nothing. And the force of the blow made him lose consciousness. The flight attendants and the passengers all thought that the person leaning back with his mouth open was sound asleep, and left him alone until an hour before landing. Only then did they grasp his situation and they shook him until he woke up and found himself looking at a doctor who was asking him if he suffered from epilepsy. Gruber replied in the negative, and the flight attendants pampered him in the hour left before landing.

And during that hour Gruber also pieced together the visions he had seen while his mind was wandering.

He had spent the time in question at a cocktail party with representatives of enlightened countries. They were angry with him and told him that the success of the protective suits, and their distribution worldwide, were paradoxically harmful to the welfare of mankind. The covering of humanity in the work of his hands would damage one of the pillars of war: the dead.

One of the guests volunteered to explain to him that the industry of mourning and bereavement employed many people in the global village, and also that there were countries in the world which were so multicultural, that grief and bereavement were the only things that kept the peace there and prevented civil war from breaking out.

“It’s impossible to establish a new state every two streets and a square,” said the man. And the prophet Isaiah too suddenly appeared to him toward the end of the flight, not in the shape of flesh and blood, but as an inner command, since Gruber knew that in the book of Isaiah, chapter 59, verse 6, it said, “Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works.”

The plane landed. Gruber was as wet as after aerobic activity. He stood up to take the heavy bag containing his laptop computer down from the luggage compartment.

4

THE ANESTHETIST GAVE MANDY AN ADDITIONAL SHOT IN the vein. Her upper back had already been opened up: two nice, neat cuts to the right and the left, parallel to the spinal cord.

“Unbelievable the things people do today,” said the OR nurse, “a friend of a friend of mine in Ohio had a collarbone implant on both sides to improve her decolletage, and that’s even before what she did to her breasts. It’s insane what people do to themselves. I even heard about someone who had the backs of her hands lifted. The only operation I’d be prepared to have would be a look implant, but nobody’s invented one yet. If they had — I’d like to have it.” And after a second she added longingly, “Aaah, if only there was such thing, a look implant!”

“A look implant?” said Yagoda and a flash of mockery appeared in his sad eyes peeping over the green mask, “What for? To see a better world?”

“No, Professor. So that the look won’t expose the age. All the plastic surgery on the face, and in my opinion on the body too, are useless as long as nobody’s invented a look implant. The look betrays the age. People don’t realize this. You can see everything in a person’s look.”

“Interesting, interesting,” Yagoda tried to make nice, “and will it be possible to choose a different look for every day?”

“For every hour,” giggled the nurse.

“That will come too, wait and see,” he said, just to put an end to the conversation.

Yagoda was a Harvard graduate, and among other things he had learned there how to maintain pleasant relations with the operating team, and how to hum the consonant M in order to give rise to the illusion of interest and attention. On the other hand, he had also learned how to defend himself from total immersion in idle chatter, which was liable to distract him from the ongoing operation. From time to time he had to throw out an indisputable statement of fact, after which there was nothing to say. This defined him as the boss of the given operation, and set him above the rest of those present.

This time he said: “The average person is capable of saying two hundred words a minute, and the average person is capable of listening to one hundred and sixty words a minute. Which means that there will always be those who talk to the air, owing to the limitations of the average person’s ability to listen. There will always be words that are wasted on thin air.”

Silence fell. He didn’t want to seem superior, even though if he hadn’t been superior to a lot of people, he would not have become a plastic surgeon with an international reputation, as well as the assistant director of the plastic surgery department of the biggest hospital in Dresden.

WHEN HE WAS STARTING out over there, and curious and nosy people asked him what had brought him to Germany, he had replied: “Love.” And this reply shut them up. There never was and never would be a more crushing reply, Yagoda knew, when addressing the question of his emigration to Germany.

Monica, whom he had met in Harvard, loved him, and for as long as the love lasted the couple had lived in the city of Hamburg, which he actually detested. He persuaded Monica to move to Cologne, and she agreed, also in the name of love. The young Yagoda felt that he had the moral right to ask her to move from town to town in that country, after he himself had completely given up on Israel, for her sake.

Today Yagoda thought that moving to Cologne had been a mistake. They should have moved to Munich. Cologne had shortened the life of their love, owing to circumstances and coincidences that would never have happened if they had stayed in Hamburg, or moved to Munich.

When the love between him and Monica was over, other loves came, all in this complicated country, loves which also produced children. Yagoda had four children, dispersed in different cities in Germany, corresponding to his loves.

He arrived in Dresden divorced for the third time, shortly after the fall of the wall. They offered him a job in a local hospital, and he made very good progress, even though he had no love there. In fact he was already worn out by relationships and the efforts demanded of him in order to go forward and not get bored in the relationship. He put his heart and soul into fresh approaches and holidays, but there was always friction.

Yagoda preferred Dresden to all the other cities in Germany.

In the Second World War the allied forces had bombed this city very thoroughly, and most of it was new, in relation to other big cities.

The absence of history was convenient for him.

And nevertheless he reminded himself from time to time that he was a Jew, and repeated to himself that if he had been alive then, he would have stopped being alive a long time ago.

Since coming to the city of Dresden, the doctor flourished and even if he had no love there, he didn’t see it as a tragedy. Here and there he had a fling with a married nurse, and he was satisfied with this.

HE FINISHED MAKING ROOM for the new shoulder blades. According to the concept of the state-of-the-art operation, there was no need to remove the old shoulder blades, since they were so worn out anyway, and they could even serve as a bed for the new ones.

The new ones would hide the old ones as long as she lived.

The two prosthetic shoulder blades were brought on a tray, boiling with sterilization. They were made of tough plastic material, in a shade of very pale light green. Their size and sharpness had been decided by Mandy weeks before the operation, according to examples he had sent her on the Internet.

Dr. Yagoda was about to put them in place, join them to the muscles, and the muscles to the bones and tendons, as required — and then to close up Mrs. Gruber, one of many who could not, on any account, face the effects of the passing of time.

IT WAS NOT LONG since Mandy had buried her mother Audrey, who was eighty-two when she died. With her own eyes she had observed the process of her decline, and if she so wished, she could also have documented it in a special notebook. She had noticed how Audrey grew shorter and shorter, and how the little hump on her back made it increasingly bent, although it never reached the terrible angle of ninety degrees. She saw the hair on her head dwindling to a tuft that no hairdresser in the world could set into a hairdo that lasted more than ten minutes.

Even though she saw her mother almost every day, and everybody knows that if you see someone so frequently, you don’t notice changes, Mandy noted to herself that her mother’s face was shrinking further and further toward some unknown point. Her neck too, once the most magnificent neck in Rhodesia, and then in the Levant, was shrinking fast, while at the same time the handsome contours of the south of her face melted into the skin of a wobbly double chin.

All this was accompanied by the retreat of the mind of a woman who until the age of sixty-something could multiply seven hundred and forty-eight by nine-point-nine in a matter of seconds in her head. She herself reported on a fog that was gradually covering her lucidity, and said that she had to rely on “ever-diminishing areas” in order to communicate her thoughts.

In the last two years of her life, Audrey Greenholtz agreed to leave the apartment at 18 Arlozorov Street and move into a renovated old-age home on Einstein Street. But once she was there she never stopped complaining about how miserable she was, and how she suffered from the mere presence of the other old people, who made her feel depressed and hopeless. She claimed that their appearance alone was enough to age her and even to kill her, and rebuked her daughter for removing her from her home.

Mandy reminded her that she had offered to get her “someone” to help her day and night, and that she was the one who refused and preferred the retirement home. But Audrey ignored her.

“There are some people who, even when they grow old, nobody throws them out of their homes,” she said to her daughter and made her feel guilty. And she also said that she had wandered the world enough, and the proof of how far she had traveled was that she came from a country that only existed on old maps.

After a short time, as if to close ranks with the other Einstein residents, she deteriorated greatly, until in the last year of her life it happened — not often, but it happened — that she forgot the nature of her relationship to her daughter. Were they sisters? Was she her neighbor from 18 Arlozorov, who had come to visit her yesterday, the one whose husband was a compulsive key-holder collector?

Audrey’s imagination housed marginal characters from the past, who were suddenly illuminated from a new angle, such as, for example, the Singer technician with whom she had been in love at the end of the seventies, something which so far as Mandy knew had never actually happened. Sometimes she would ask Mandy when she had returned from Detroit, because a textile conference had once taken place there years ago and Mandy had attended it on behalf of the factory to pick up ideas for fabrics which they would then commission from the textile factory they worked with without fear of impurities or fear of anything else.

When Mandy was supposed to fly home, a big strike broke out and her return was delayed, and Audrey was very worried about her. Lirit was then twelve years old, Gruber was wrapped up in himself, and the grandmother was afraid that Mandy would never return and the burden of caring for the two children would fall to her.

This wasn’t completely irrational, because for a few days there was no telephone connection with Mandy, and it was only with the help of the Israeli consulate in Detroit that they succeeded in locating her.

It was a very big strike, although there have been bigger ones since. In any case, when it came to an end, the economy was no longer the same as it was before.

ON THE LAST NIGHT of her life, after she had sentenced Mandy to not being the third generation of female loneliness, and even threatened her that she would haunt her from heaven if she introduced radical changes in Nighty-Night, she murmured the names of outstanding members of the ultra-Orthodox clientele of the pajama factory in the sixties and seventies.

After she died, Mandy sank into a permanent state of depression. It seemed that she did everything with an apathetic shrug of her shoulders, without a real smile. Suddenly she understood that nature was cruel and it didn’t give anybody a discount, not even her. To her increasing annoyance and resentment she discovered that the contours of the bottom of her face, too, were disappearing into a new chin, which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, with no justification, after all her efforts not to put on weight. And she also discovered that a layer of fat of more than a centimeter thick had grown on her back, making her beautiful spine hollow and disappointing. Her vision too was deteriorating. When she looked at the notices she had published in the papers announcing her mother’s death, the small letters and even some of the big ones were blurred.

At the optician’s office next to her house, they told her that she was plus two in her right eye and plus one and three-quarters in her left eye, and she needed bifocals for driving and reading.

In order to compensate herself, Mandy bought gorgeous glasses for $675.

ABOUT A YEAR after her mother’s death Mandy went back to cherishing the vain hope that while the march toward extinction was self-evident, and it was clear that she would grow old and die like everybody else, perhaps she would be given special consideration “over there,” wherever that might be, and the process would be softened in her case. “Over there” they must know how important external appearances, aesthetics, were to her, and therefore they would meet her halfway. Perhaps because of her CV: after all, she had been second to the queen of the class in primary school, and quite popular in high school too.

At the same time she began to change her diet to a strict regime: no milk, meat, fish, eggs, bread, or coffee — only fruit, vegetables, and some seaweed or other. In the morning she drank wheat grass that she pulverized and made into juice herself, and during the day she made sure to swallow all the most up-to-date vitamins and omegas on the market.

Before she embarked on the series of plastic surgeries, she gave the cosmetics companies a chance, and spent a fortune on their promising products, especially one which was made of caviar (Creme Caviar), which she ordered on the Internet from a store in Los Angeles and paid $1,570 for.

In those days the home page on her computer, at home and at work, was the website of a famous and innovative cosmetics company, and she even downloaded screen savers from their site with all kinds of variations on the company’s logo.

Dael’s conscription sent her back to her ordinary news site home page and to a simple Nivea face cream, having put the rest in the hands of her chosen plastic surgeons. She chose them with great care after investigation, and she also made inquiries as to anesthetics, but since she was unable to get her hands on any, she made do with various tranquilizers, which she took care to vary after a few months because she thought that this way she would save herself from getting addicted.

To date Mandy had spent $68,000 on plastic surgery, and it was clear to her that as long as Dael was in the army and he still had time to be served — this was what her life would look like. About her death, she refrained from thinking.

IN THE MEDICAL FRONTLINE OR there was unexpected stress. The saturation level of the oxygen in Mandy’s blood began to drop. Seventy-five. There were a few minutes of very professional and controlled alarm, and in the end the operating team succeeded in stabilizing the patient and the operation continued.

But so far as Dr. Yagoda was concerned, those stressful moments during the course of the surgery on Mrs. Amanda Gruber concluded a chapter in his life. He would no longer perform plastic surgeries in Israel. He would no longer come to Israel at all, not even for the Passover Seder or Rosh Hashanah with his sister in Nahariya. His connection with the State of Israel was at an end.

Yagoda was so alarmed because for the first time since he had been living on his own without any love, he had nearly lost a patient on the operating table. He connected the drama in the OR to the country in which it had taken place, and to the grievous cardiac condition of its inhabitants, and decided to return to Germany the next morning. He considered giving up surgery altogether, and restricting himself to pre-operative consultations in a private clinic.

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.

The two girls had been on their way to New York, to spend their last week there. Hagit just wanted to pass through Ithaca, because she was a bookworm addicted to useless knowledge. She had read in the thick guide book that they had bought at the beginning of their trip, which was already tattered with use, that little Ithaca was full of secondhand bookshops, and she wanted to pick up a few classics. Her English was excellent, much better than Bahat’s, even though she had never lived in an English speaking country.

For some reason Hagit was interested in the history of the United States, and at this point in the conversation she explained to Madeleine that in the past Ithaca had been called the city of sin, and even Sodom, because in its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, all kinds of lowlifes had lived there. Only after the Civil War between the North and South did the licentious town become a place of refinement, education, and beauty, with a highly developed community life, churches, and a great awareness of the importance of education in the life of the individual and the town. Ithaca’s educational institutions, especially Cornell University, were well-known today all over the world.

As far as Hagit knew, Bahat’s lover, Randall McPhee, a good-looking guy with long, curly hair, was going to study at Cornell University, science or Italian, after graduating from college with distinction.

“What does the place look like?” asked Madeleine.

“It’s a beautiful place. Lots of atmosphere. There’s a big lake with a stormy river running out of it. Huge waterfalls. Lots of green. It’s very cold in winter. Randall promised your daughter she wouldn’t be cold. But there’s something strange about the place. It’s hard to explain. Have you ever heard of Rod Serling?”

“No.”

“Do you watch The Twilight Zone on television?”

“Sure,” said Madeleine, who saw everything there was to see on television.

“It’s he who wrote the script for the series, and he based it on the atmosphere there.”

“What do you say!”

“Do you know Nabokov?”

“The writer?”

“He taught at Cornell.”

“And what did you say was Bahat’s boyfriend’s name?”

“Randall. It’s a Southern name. The family is originally from Texas. You don’t know how hard I tried to persuade her to come back to Israel and not to stay in that place, and with a Texan too. Look, Mrs. Segal, your daughter slept with a lot of men in America, and when she met Randall I thought it was just another fling. I didn’t know it was eternal love.”

“Eternal love?” asked Madeleine.

“That’s what your daughter said.”

“Do you think they’ll get married?”

“I’m sure they will,” said Hagit.

“Do you think I should go there and try to persuade her to come home?”

“I can’t really see the point, Mrs. Segal. I tried everything. Your daughter’s head over heels in love with him. And you know her. There’s nothing anyone can do. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and come home, and maybe not. But I promise you that I’ll come and visit you sometimes,” she said when she spotted a tear in Madeleine’s right eye.

“I haven’t even got the money for a plane ticket. And I don’t want to go there and impose myself on them. Reudor took everything, everything.” Now the tears were streaming down her face.

Hagit stayed in the little apartment on Shimoni Street for another half-hour and ate dried fruits past their sell-by date. She didn’t have anything encouraging to say to Madeleine, and so she promised her again that she would come and visit her once a month. This promise brought no consolation, especially since her daughter’s traveling companion forgot about her promise and failed to keep her word.

MADELEINE SANK into profound melancholy with fits of apathy, and spent the rest of her life watching television, which improved a lot over the years. The number of channels rose from one to two, and then to many, and together with this expansion the interchannel competition increased as well. Madeleine put on a lot of weight, and needless to say, she no longer did any twists or stretches, and standing on her head was obviously out of the question, even against a wall. Her head could no longer bear the weight. Things worked out well for Shoham in Eilat, she completed a course in deep-sea diving, talked all the time about corals and coral reefs, and said that when she had a daughter she would call her Coral. On the rare occasions when she came to visit her mother, she noticed that the thin, supple woman had turned into an overweight couch potato. She tried to talk her into moving to Eilat to be close to her, but she knew there was no chance. She would not move from that couch until her dying day.

6

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTIES, STANLEY AND SAMANTHA McPhee, Randall’s parents, came to Ithaca from a little town in Texas, because they wanted to give their children a good, Northern, enlightened education, without the oppressive complexes of the history of the South. They didn’t want their children to grow up with inferiority complexes, and to have to change their southern accent whenever they met anyone from the North and encounter forgiving, patronizing looks.

After years of practice in the prestigious town, Stanley and Samantha succeeded in almost completely effacing their accent, and planned that the next generation, headed by Randall, would bury it forever.

Stanley and Samantha wanted to invest in the northern branch of the McPhee family, and so they wanted five children, including Randall. But the only child born to them was Randall, because six or seven times Samantha miscarried in the third month of her pregnancy.

The doctors in the Woman’s Health Center in Ithaca could not explain why such a healthy woman was unable to bring her pregnancies to term. And the doctors in New York they consulted for a second opinion couldn’t explain it either.

THE FAMILIES OF BOTH Stanley and Samantha McPhee (née Griffith) were members of AHS (American Hibiscus Society), and in Texas where they lived, the members of these families were considered fanatics on the subject. After their day jobs they devoted themselves to breeding improved new strains of the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, and to inventing other exotic strains, in shades of near-black or pure white, with hearts that changed color three times over the summer.

Stanley and Samantha had met at a big exhibition of new hibiscus strains, and fallen in love.

When they moved to Ithaca, they took with them a few fine rare strains for their large garden, but most of them died in the first frost of November.

Samantha was furious with her new husband for not thinking about it in advance and not setting up a hibiscus hothouse equipped with the heaters and humidifiers required for a tropical plant originating in Hawaii.

In spite of her pregnant state, she carried the big pots containing the surviving bushes into the house, and instructed her husband to set up the above-mentioned hothouse in the big backyard and equip it with everything required.

Setting up the hothouse and operating it cost the couple a fortune, and in order to pay for it and also to earn a living, they opened a florist shop in downtown Ithaca, and next to it a secondhand bookstore. They called the florist shop Some Flowers and the bookstore Book Report. The income from the two stores minus the high costs of the hothouse provided the couple and their son Randall with a good living, but they still felt an inexplicable emptiness.

Accordingly they threw themselves heart and soul into a purpose — Samantha into Randall, and Stanley into the search for a hibiscus unlike anything ever seen before: as blue or black as possible, with a psychedelic heart.

RANDALL MCPHEE KISSED Bahat Segal for the first time among the strange blooms produced by his father Stanley. Two days later Bahat drove her friend Hagit to the Syracuse airport to fly to New York City and from there to Israel. They didn’t speak the whole way.

Randall’s parents weren’t crazy about their only son’s choice and stayed aloof. Bahat wasn’t bothered. After her alternative childhood in Shimoni street in the green suburb of Ramat Aviv, and in San Francisco, she was a girl full of self-confidence and she knew very well how to get along on her own, and she even took a historical masochistic pleasure in the stupid condescension of her Presbyterian mother-in-law.

Her father-in-law, Stanley McPhee, admired Richard Nixon with all his heart and soul, and a portrait of Nixon went on hanging in their home even after the Watergate scandal broke out. Bahat saw that her in-laws were hardcore Republicans, and nevertheless she went to study botany at Cornell University because she thought, who knows, perhaps one day she would succeed in creating new strains of hibiscus, to the delight of Stanley and Samantha, leading to the fall of the interracial barrier that Bahat actually did her best to encourage: she saw it fitting to begin many critical remarks about their thinking and way of life with the words, “We Jews. .”

Bahat did well in her studies, and got into the subject of the hibiscus as if there weren’t any other flowers in the world. Even though she found botany rather boring, she completed her first degree in two years. At the same time exactly, Randall completed his BA in Latin and Italian, and planned to get out of the hibiscus business to set up as a translator of these languages into English.

At the end of these two years, during which she had also worked in the family stores, Bahat switched to zoology, where she found herself far more than in botany because everything was more dynamic and dramatic.

Her master’s she did on arthropods, and her doctorate on the Nephila, weavers of the strongest webs in the world. Her sister Shoham had recovered from her arachnophobia by the time she completed her army service and the two of them corresponded, thus Bahat learned about Shoham’s success as a midwife on the coral reef in Eilat, where she had even developed a new technique.

Two daughters were born to the mixed-race couple Randall and Bahat: the first was called Sara, and the second Ruth — two names which did not clash with either religion or descent, so that the girls wouldn’t have identity problems either in the United States, North or South, or in Israel, if and when they ever decided to go back, even if only on a trip to discover their roots.

Obviously the girls received the best education in the world, thanks to the excellent educational system in the town which their grandparents migrated to for precisely this reason. They were both very spoiled, too much so in Bahat’s opinion, but she didn’t really have a say in the matter because Samantha took over Sara and Ruth as if they were her own daughters, and Bahat knew that even if she wanted to go back to Israel with the girls, they wouldn’t cooperate with her because of their grandmother.

AFTER TEN YEARS of marriage, on her thirty-first birthday, Bahat caught Randall on a table in the family hothouse next to one of big heaters, screwing Emily Boston, his first love from the age of fourteen. The two of them had not anticipated her arrival, since Pa had gone to rest and Bahat was supposed to be in the store helping Ma, or at most, sitting at home and reading an academic article about capillary physiology.

Later, Bahat discovered that Randall had returned to the bosom of Emily Boston soon after Ruth was born, in other words the affair had been going on for nearly seven years.

Randall promised Bahat that he would stop seeing Emily, but he was wasting his breath, because Bahat wanted a divorce, and Randal married Emily Boston.

After the divorce, Randall and Emily Boston moved to Boston, to a two-hundred-year-old house overlooking the river, where the plumbing kept breaking down and the repairs cost a fortune.

Randall’s parents stayed in Ithaca until the day they died, which was not long ago, one after the other, and they saw it fit to leave their house to their granddaughters, but until the girls reached the age of twenty-one, their mother could do whatever she liked with it.

Ostensibly Bahat could have gone back to Israel with her daughters, who had since understood that she was their real mother and they had better listen to her, but Bahat was deep into her research on the Nephila, funded by the Ithaca Municipality, Cornell University, the Pentagon, and the French Ministry of Health. This being the case, the girls went to college, one to study mathematics and the other fractal geometry, and they lived in a rented apartment, while downtown Bahat became acquainted with her loneliness. She operated the stores from a distance, by means of hired workers, and to tell the truth she didn’t really care about the business anymore, as long as they brought in what was expected of them every month.

In those sad days a Reform synagogue called Tikkun v’Or was opened in Ithaca, and Bahat found some consolation in it, especially in the Kabbalat Shabbat at the beginning of the Sabbath and the Havdalah at the end, even though the latter was sometimes held before the Sabbath was actually over. She liked singing the prayers without an American accent and in a loud voice, so that all the Reform Jews would hear and learn.

MCPHEE’S MAIN ACHIEVEMENT with the golden orb weavers to date was the doubling and tripling of the number of spinning glands on the abdomen on the female spinner, and she had even interfered with the control mechanism of the gene, forcing the female Nephila spiders to spin more and more, faster and faster.

She worked day and night to increase the spinning rate, but she devoted her weekends to attending services at Tikkun v’Or, and recently she had even spoken to one of the regular worshippers, an architect by profession who had taken part in designing the synagogue, about saying a prayer to the Divine Presence for the wellbeing of her daughters and the success of a very important experiment, without going into detail about it due to the highly confidential classification of the project.

Now the arachnologist McPhee stood in the arrivals hall of the Syracuse Airport, holding a yellow cardboard sign on which was written with a black marker in Hebrew “Irad Gruber,” with a drawing of a spider underneath it, spinning its web from the last r in “Gruber.”

She was wearing her best clothes and her hair had been dyed to the roots, because she wanted their meeting to be something big.

She was worried about the identification. Not that she was afraid of espionage or some kind of swindle, she just wanted to identify the Israeli as quickly as possible and drive him home with her so he could rest, the guy must be asleep on his feet.

He had sent her his photograph by email, but photographs can be misleading.

7

BUT WHEN THE TIME CAME, BAHAT HAD NO DOUBT AT ALL. She would have recognized him even if he had arrived on a Jumbo Jet instead of the little blue American Airlines plane. He advanced toward her, full of aches and pains, barely able to carry himself and his briefcase, dragging the medium-sized wheeled suitcase behind him. Bahat threw the placard with his name on it into the litter bin, walked straight up to him, and said in Hebrew:

“Shalom, shalom, welcome. Give me your case, you look exhausted. Soon everything will be all right, don’t worry.”

Gruber looked at her with an astonishment that embarrassed her. What had he expected? she asked herself.

They shook hands and felt a mutual aversion, stemming from the fact that they were strangers after all, but then, as if in response to a signal agreed upon in advance, they both began behaving according to accepted norms of a business meeting. Communication which was ostensibly personal, but on the most general and boring level.

“Boy, am I exhausted,” replied Gruber, and noticed that she had dyed her hair, even her scalp was brown, “I feel as if I’m on my last legs.”

“Everything will be all right,” said Bahat, and took over the job of dragging the wheeled suitcase, too. She tried to match her pace to his, which was slower than hers. “You have nothing to worry about. You can relax after all the tension of the journey.”

“My problem is my back,” Gruber informed her, “I think that my entire spine is dislocated.”

“We’ll see what we can do about it,” said Bahat and smiled at him.

Naturally they got a bit lost, because even though Bahat had written down exactly where she had parked her car, and also the color of the row where it was parked, she had lost the note with all these important details on it. And so the inevitable moments followed, during which she stood still and felt the familiar foolish feeling while she searched miserably for the lost note, even the color of which she had suddenly forgotten. While not yet not admitting to herself that she was becoming sclerotic even before reaching the age of fifty, she let out an impatient breath and shook her head in a gesture of annoyance with herself because on no account did she want to expose her sclerosis to the visiting scientist. Luckily, in the end she found the note, in the back pocket of her jeans, the pocket in which she had kept important things as a child and as a girl in the army. She thanked some historical self and changed her mood completely, from nervous embarrassment to something new and challenging, and by the time they reached her beautiful car she was in high spirits and filled him in on the doubts she was having at that very moment: whether to take him home first and then to the masseur, or first to the masseur and then home. In the end she decided on her own initiative, since at that moment in time Gruber was simply passive. He wasn’t interested, he wasn’t listening to her, and she decided that while he was getting a massage, she would take the briefcase and the suitcase home. It wasn’t far, it was all downtown.

IN THE CLEAN and freshened up car (for she had washed it that same day and thrown out all the rubbish that had accumulated on the back seat), she told him that lately she had been forgetting things and that she was worried.

Her Hebrew sounded strange to him. Something about the accent seemed wrong. Her r was a little too pronounced, perhaps to hide the American r she had picked up. Her voice jarred on him too. He didn’t listen to what she was saying, and instructed himself to remain passive and hope for the best. This was the category of mental activity demanded of him. And the decision enabled him to sink into himself.

Bahat paid at the exit from the parking lot and joined the traffic without any problems. Now she fell silent. She wasn’t stupid either. Not only was she a genius from the intellectual point of view, she also possessed enough natural sensitivity to appraise the limits of the personality of the person next to her, and she sensed that somebody here demanded the maximum and maybe more, whether it existed or not.

She grasped that in his essence he prevented her own being from expanding to the dimensions she was used to: her maximum.

She expelled her breath in disappointed resignation to the situation, which in any case was irreversible. The guy had come all the way from Israel, and now he was here and she had to take care of him and finish what she had started, in the spirit of the saying “Anyone embarking on a mitzvah is commanded to complete it.”

Sometimes Jewish expressions popped into Bahat’s mind, and lately, since she had been studying to become a Reform rabbi at the Hebrew Union College, she had even felt haunted by these quotations, such as: “Who is a hero,” “A word is enough for the wise,” “Think before you act.” And in the end, after saying to herself “Let not him that girds on his armor boast himself as he that puts it off,” she turned to the man sitting next to her and asked:

“How was the flight from New York?”

“Ghastly by any reckoning. Bumpy all the way, like being on the cable railway to the top of Masada.”

“And was the flight from Israel ghastly too?”

“That was a nightmare of a different kind. Ugly flight attendants, disgusting food with your neighbor’s face stuck in your tray, and toilets that haven’t been cleaned since the invention of the airplane.”

“I understand,” said Bahat and looked glum as a sign of sympathy. “But all that’s over and done with now, right?” She made an effort to smile at him, but she was sad. He too twisted his face into a half smile, and thought, let her go and pull the wool over somebody else’s eyes. That Israeli accent is only a disguise. She’s one hundred percent American already. You can tell by that forced smile, those translated expressions, and the automatic way she tries to make conversation. Look how nice she was to that Asiatic parking lot attendant, what was he, Japanese, Chinese, maybe Vietnamese? She told him to have a nice day, with that pseudo-familiarity that is incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t an American, and he called her Ma’am.

Bahat calmed down and began to feel satisfied on the whole. Things were coming along. She had found him at the airport, and he was now in her hands. Despite the beauty of the place, it wasn’t every day that a scientist of such standing came to visit her in Ithaca, an Israeli what’s more, and Bahat McPhee was ready to do a lot for him. For one thing, he had won the Israel Prize — which she would never win.

While studying to become a Reform rabbi, McPhee learned to hide her eccentricities, which had become very pronounced since her enforced loneliness. Over the years, ever since the exposure of the Emily Boston affair, her face had taken on an exaggeratedly severe expression, and she had become fanatical about noise. Even the singing of the birds at dawn disturbed her greatly.

Now she fell enthusiastically on the important guest and told him about her advanced studies in Judaism, but he wasn’t interested. He nodded politely, but looked around at the sturdy maple trees. He immediately compared them to the coconut palm that had taken over the place where he lived. He wanted to tell McPhee about the palms of Tel Baruch North, but was unable to interrupt the torrent of her words, that were coming down on him now like an avalanche.

“He’s really something, this masseur,” she said suddenly, “By the way, he is also the president’s masseur.”

“Which president?”

“The President of the United States of America. By the way, the president is a graduate of our Cornell University, and not of Yale like everybody thinks. I’m taking you to him.”

“To the president?” asked Gruber with some surprise.

“No,” chuckled Bahat, “to his masseur from his student days, who has continued to remain close to him. He’s first-rate. He’ll put you on your feet in a minute.”

For a while they drove in silence until her cell phone began to signal a text message.

“Must be one of my daughters,” she said. “They really love me. This way we keep in touch all day long, even when they’re in college. I’m very attached to them.”

“I’m sure,” mumbled Gruber.

She switched on the light in the car and tried to focus her eyes on the letters while driving.

“Read me what’s written there,” she asked in the end and handed him her cell phone.

“‘Mother, I love you,’” he said. “But in English.”

“Ah,” sighed Bahat. “Don’t tell me, it’s the eldest. A treasure. But she wants to apply to Columbia University. I don’t understand it. Why run to New York when you’ve got the best university in the world right next door?”

“It’s a matter of adolescence,” said Gruber, under duress, “my eldest is living in the Negev with some idiot, her boyfriend.”

“Is that so?” Bahat was pleased. In Israel too children put a distance between themselves and their parents, you couldn’t do anything about it, it was a law of nature.

8

FORTY MINUTES AFTER LANDING IN ITHACA, A PLACE IN which he had never set foot before, Gruber was lying in his underpants on the bed in the aromatic treatment room of the masseur of the incumbent President of the United States of America. Before burying his face in the pillow with a round hole that made it possible to breathe without effort, he managed to read the sign in English in a color that was a little too Indian for his taste. Something in the style of Lirit’s clothes since she began going round with that creature. He read, “Leave the world, forget everything, let yourself rest,” and thought that he had better do as it said.

“How do you want it?” asked the professional. “Strong Swedish?”

“Strong, yes, yes,” said the Israeli. And he joked to himself: Ha ha ha. “Swedish. .” he muttered aloud, and remembered that he was abroad and said, “Well done” in English.

In his own country Irad never let a week pass without retaining the services of one of the better masseurs in the Tel Aviv area, with a preference for Oren Berger, who was also the Israeli triathlon champion. A few of the residents of Bat Miriam Street had seen him on television. The guy would drive up on his Harley Davidson from his inferior neighborhood, making a terrible racket as if he didn’t give a damn for Tel Baruch North, as if the whole thing meant nothing to him, as if he would never in his life live in one of the apartments there.

No more than twenty-five years old, he was already the Israeli triathlon champion and had been for three years in succession. With his youth and his motorbike that his parents had bought him after winning the title one autumn day that may have been dreary for many others, but was not for him — he felt like a king. A masseur who looked like a wrestler. Making house calls equipped with a special mattress and ethereal oils, he would spend the whole day in Tel Baruch North.

Gruber thought that the masseur he knew at home contained a contradiction: on the one hand, the Harley Davidson, an Israeli triathlon champion, the rough appearance with the tattoos and piercings, and on the other hand, a masseur with the most gentle touch in the Levant. All in one person: Oren Berger.

Mandy preferred hot stones on her once-beautiful back. It was not some proven scientific preference. Simply, she was so ashamed of herself for being sexually attracted to the Israeli triathlon champion. She calculated that he was six years older than her son, and this closeness in age embarrassed her greatly.

She really loved winners. Ever since she was twelve years old and her mother threw a bat mitzvah party for her in a hall in Dizengoff Street, close to where they lived on Arlozorov Street.

But Mandy had eyes in her head. She had received a very conservative education, and it was in her bones. As a woman pushing fifty, she knew that instead of letting Berger feel her body she should keep a safe distance from him, full of hot stones. Gruber talked a lot about the contradiction in the personality of the masseur, the Israeli triathlon champion, and it made her blood boil, but she didn’t say anything, and only asked herself how many more times she would have to hear about the marvelous duality in this interesting person’s personality.

Oren Berger, the dualist, wasn’t crazy about the new neighborhood that had gone up almost overnight, but he had big ambitions to be both an internist and an acupuncturist and a doctor of Chinese medicine, and he needed a lot of patience. He had patience and motivation.

He would begin his rounds in Telba-N. on the corner of Yocheved Bat Miriam and Alexander Penn Street, and go on from there, to all the new streets which were almost all named after poets and writers of Hebrew and Jewish literature. According to what he had found out, they were all big guns in poetry and literature and they were all dead. In the street named after Stefan Zweig, which he found on Google, he had two clients in almost every building, and it was a relatively long street.

On Fridays he would do his weekly round there, and then, at about five, he would go home and shower. On Saturday he would go out with his girlfriend to conquer the Judean Desert on his motorcycle. He never went over sixty miles per hour, even though he could. He could do up to two hundred and twenty, but he didn’t like the resistance from the air.

Gruber thought a lot about Oren Berger, he actually forced himself to study this Baroque character. Sometimes, when Berger was giving him a massage and loosening the knots in his muscles, Gruber thought how lucky he was to have won the Israel Prize, and that he didn’t have to run and swim and cycle for kilometers to do so (Gruber didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, and at the age of fifty it was a little late to learn, never mind all that bullshit about how it’s never too late). At the same time, he envied the young man for his amazing body.

He compared their two statuses and thought that they were more or less on a par, except that people would never call Gruber the past winner of the Israel prize, which gave him an advantage. He would never lose the title or the prize. In this sense he felt like the Frank Sinatra of Israeli science.

Oren Berger was never bored with Gruber. He felt close to Gruber, admired his quick thinking, and thought that to him Gruber could really talk, perhaps because they had both done something for the State of Israel. Therefore he felt it was legitimate to talk to the scientist about whatever was on his mind, and sometimes he would embark on long monologues about his exploits with his biker friends in the desert. Berger and his friends met every Saturday and rode to all the craters they felt like, as if Israel was full of craters.

Once Gruber had even asked him to stop bragging about his amazing life as a twenty-five year old.

A guy who on the previous Saturday had been to the ruins of a Nabatean city, and who had been there the Saturday before that too — how great was that?

By the way, the idea of implanting artificial shoulder blades came to Amanda Gruber from Oren Berger, who in the course of the two massages he had given her before she changed to the hot stones, told her about three of his clients, two white-collar and one from King George Street in Tel Aviv, women whose posture had been transformed by the operation. The one from King George Street walked round the city center with a bare back, proud of the carved peaks of her shoulder blades. It was actually through this woman that Mandy had reached Dr. Carmi Yagoda.

THE CURRENT MASSEUR made mincemeat of Oren Berger. With all due respect, Oren Berger might be a triathlon champion, but this guy was the champ of champs. The Yankee, who looked to be about Gruber’s age, was so outstanding that the scientist soon stopped feeling the wound gaping in his heart ever since the collapse of his T-suit experiment. At last he let go of his personal Titanic and saw things in a general, cosmic, calming light.

“Lavender or sage?” asked the masseur.

“Excuse me?”

“Aroma in the room. Lavender or sage?”

“Sage,” said Gruber to the annoyance of the masseur, who hoped he would go for lavender. Obediently he lit candles and dripped sage oil on the burner.

The American masseur, whose nickname was Hamlet, had majored in comparative literature at Cornell and graduated with honors. His diploma hung on the wall within sight of the treatment bed.

On the opposite wall the visitor from Tel Baruch North made out certificates for the completion of courses in massage and further studies in the field. Three of the diplomas were in Chinese or Japanese.

A third wall was full of hand-shaped hamsa amulets. Gruber estimated their number at about fifty, and he asked Hamlet if he believed in the Evil Eye. Hamlet replied that things often happened in his life which could be attributed to the Evil Eye that someone had given him. Gruber wanted to know if there was a connection between the number of amulets and the amount of bad energy sent him by envious people, and Hamlet said yes, but that was not the reason he kept dozens of amulets on the wall. He was simply keeping them for a very high up person.

“Who?” asked Gruber, and Hamlet ignored the impertinent prying and replied: “The president.”

“The incumbent?” asked Gruber.

“Yes,” said Hamlet without hesitation. “Every time he gets a hamsa from someone in your part of the world, he entrusts it to me. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll have to leave the White House and return to Texas, and then he can take these amulets as a souvenir, and what’s the harm if they incidentally also ward off evil eyes?”

They both fell silent. Hamlet kneaded Gruber’s upper back and said: “Jesus, this isn’t a back, it’s concrete. Don’t you have masseurs in the Middle East?” he asked, completely serious.

“Of course we do,” said Irad Gruber in an insulted tone, “I simply had crazy flights that destroyed my back, and I’m under stress. The stress is killing me,” he added, even though he was beginning to relax.

“Okay,” said Hamlet and poured almond oil into his palms. “You’ll walk out of here soft as a ripe tomato. Do you like tomatoes?”

“Very much,” said Gruber.

“Which kind do you like better? The big ones or the small ones? Do you have the small ones?”

“Yes.”

“Small round ones or small long ones?”

“Both kinds, I guess,” he didn’t like talking in English, and fell silent, apart from grunts of pleasurable and important pain.

And then came the really painful moment. Suddenly, something in his back! He screamed uninhibitedly. Hamlet recoiled.

“GOOD,” said Hamlet regretfully. “They say that over here the taste is less natural, but I don’t know the natural taste, so what do I care.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Gruber, his whole back still hurting.

“The small round tomatoes.”

Gruber couldn’t stand the peace of mind that masseurs tried to convey. It annoyed him to be spoken to as if he was in a monastery.

“One of the times the president was here he brought me a divine basket of fruit.”

He went back to work, concentrating on another area of the back, massaging and oiling, massaging and oiling, he too grunting.

“The president’s got a lot on his mind now and I respect him. He has the elections to worry about. Otherwise he would get to Cornell more often. He really likes visiting his friends. A great guy. He’ll win the elections.

“And now relax as if you’re in a crater on Venus,” he said slowly, in a low voice.

“What?”

“I took a little survey among my clients. What most relaxes them is a crater on Venus, or some other deserted planet, where the force of gravity is greater than on Earth. And to imagine that nobody can see them. In this way they’re forced to blot me out too, and causality, and judgmental attitudes, and I can tell you it relaxes most of them. Even though I’m married to a wonderful woman, before I go to sleep even I imagine that I’m alone on a deserted planet, and that I have no history. History is a load. A burden. Comparative literature is a burden too. A lot of things to remember. And so I decided to devote my life to my peace of mind.”

“Ah, ah,” Gruber groaned enjoyably as the latter smeared more oil on his back.

The masseur smiled to himself, sweating and satisfied, and said, “In half an hour tell me if you’re ready to sign the wall behind you, which you can’t see,” and he turned his head to indicate it. “A wall of important, satisfied clients. Abba Eban signed it too. I liked the late Abba Eban a lot.”

“If Abba Eban signed, I’ll sign too,” said Gruber without betraying his surprise. Even though he hadn’t yet decided who it would flatter more, him or the former foreign minister.

“The former president of France, Georges Pompidou, signed too. Remember him?”

“How old are you?” Gruber suddenly asked. He himself hardly remembered the late Pompidou, and when he tried to imagine his face he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t confusing him with some other European leader. An Englishman maybe, or the secretary general of the United Nations.

“Fifty-nine,” said the masseur.

“You should come and give massages in Israel,” said Gruber.

For ten seconds, the masseur dragged out his chuckle at Gruber’s joke — leave Ithaca to go and massage Israelis’ backs!

“That’s how it is with you people in the Middle East,” he spoke again, after an interval, while massaging Gruber’s scalp. “You kill them, they kill you. You have no choice, you have to kill one another,” and he permitted himself to press down lightly on a few meridians.

“That’s all,” he said in his gentle voice, and went to the end of the room to wash his hands in the sink. Gruber noticed that he exaggerated his ablutions. While soaping and scrubbing his arms up to the elbows, Hamlet called out to him, “Get up very slowly without straining your neck. You have a problem with the first vertebra, which holds up the head. When you get back home, go and have an x-ray. I didn’t work on it much, only around it, on the muscles.”

He dried his arms on a towel that matched the other colors in the room: pale peach and magnolia.

“Get dressed behind the screen, you’ll have time to think about signing the wall while you do it.”

Irad got up slowly. The pain in his back was gone.

From behind the screen he heard Hamlet say, “The effect of the massage lasts for a few hours. You may feel tired.”

“I’m tired anyway,” said Gruber.

When he looked at the signature wall, he saw that they were all in Latin letters, except for Abba Eban’s, who had signed in Hebrew. A. Eban. He signed in Hebrew next to him: I. Gruber.

IN THE BRIGHTLY LIT reception room, lacking any aroma of medicinal herbs, the Israeli scientist was about to pay for the enjoyable massage himself, but he was informed that Bahat had paid in advance.

Hamlet emerged from the treatment room with a pair of tongs holding a hot towel, which he wrapped round Gruber’s neck, and said, “Run to Mrs. McPhee’s car, the cold is bad for you. I’ve already called her.”

The woman who was going to get his TESU project off the ground, and bestow eternal significance on his signature emblazoned next to that of Abba Eban, stepped out of her warm car with the engine still running to meet him, and quickly opened the door of the passenger seat. She smiled at him. Her teeth were as white as a toothpaste commercial.

“Thank you very much,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” she replied, and they drove off.