Textile

1

MANDY’S SHOULDER BLADE TRANSPLANTS, WHICH DIDN’T look bad at all, stuck out of the Medical Frontline blanket. It was clear that the operation had succeeded in principle, but she was in excruciating pain such as she had never felt in her life before. Not even after the liposuction from her stomach, which was considered complicated from the point of view of rehabilitation.

In the day that had passed since the surgery, Mandy had been blasted sky-high with pain and painkillers, from Voltaren to Percocet. She felt as if a world war was being fought within her.

She couldn’t believe that this was happening to her, and she longed for the presence of one of her children to hold her hand and feed her water with a teaspoon, since she was lying on her stomach and couldn’t drink anything without spilling it.

But one of them was in the army and the other was keeping an eye on the factory, and her husband was in America with some woman.

It was clear that something mythological was happening. Mandy Gruber, born in Rhodesia, resident of Telba-N., was not made for such levels of suffering. And not only the pain. The humiliation too.

“Nurse, nurse,” she moaned.

Nobody answered.

She wanted morphine!

“Nurse! Nurse!” she tried again, in vain.

With a supreme effort, Amanda succeeded in reaching her cell phone (just how isn’t clear, since she wasn’t supple, her strong suit was aerobics — she had a class twice a week at the St. Tropez Institute in the Mikado complex) and dailed 144 to ask for the Medical Frontline number, in order to reach the ward in which she herself was hospitalized.

Someone said, “Inquiries 144, Hello. Adina speaking. .”

Mandy was relieved not to have to remember the number they gave her but only to punch the star. She did punch the number of the extension for the recovery unit, heavily, and listened to seven long rings, which she heard, without synchronization, from the phone and also from behind the wall.

Usually Mandy had a very authoritative voice. She used it when she was giving motivational talks to the girls at the pajama factory. Once every few months Mandy asked Carmela to assemble them all in the neglected yard, and when they were standing in a semicircle, she herself stood on a step (you had to have a bit of hierarchy) and shot words at them.

During these talks Mandy felt at her best, and after them she was exhausted, sometimes she even went straight home.

“Come here at once!” she ordered the nurse who answered at last, but instead of the familiar authoritative tones she heard her voice petering out from one syllable to the next.

“Morphine,” Mandy greeted the nurse who arrived all nice and friendly.

“You need the doctor’s authorization,” said the nurse.

“So ask for it,” whispered Mandy.

“I’ll ask, but I can tell you right now he won’t agree to give you morphine on any account.”

“That’s. . all. . I. . need,” Mandy tried not to scream, but in the end she let out a loud scream, and even the nurse looked sorry for her.

“Okay, okay, I’ll talk to him,” she said.

Tears fell from Mandy’s eyes. She bit her lip and waited for salvation to arrive.

Ten minutes later the nurse returned with the doctor on duty, a young man who had recently completed his residency and had an earring in his ear and a tag on his lapel that read “Dr. Bialystotski.”

The nurse switched on the reading lamp. Mandy explained that she couldn’t stand the pain. Dr. Bialystotski said, “That shouldn’t be happening, let’s examine you,” and closed the curtains round her bed even though it was a private room.

ON ONE SIDE of the bed stood the nurse, on the other the doctor, and both of them together lifted the blanket with the sheet beneath it, and exposed the bandaged back. Then together they removed the bandages, and the young doctor very carefully, but nevertheless painfully, removed the sterile strips supporting the implants, touched here and there, and accompanied the touches with questions:

“Does it hurt here? Does it hurt here? Does it hurt here? And here?”

Mandy answered yes to every touch.

He asked, “Mrs. Gruber, are you sensitive to antibiotics?”

“No,” she groaned.

“How much do you weigh?”

“Fifty-five kilo,” she replied weakly.

He spoke to the nurse in terms of drugs and ccs. And there was a note of urgency in his words.

“And what about the morphine?” asked Mandy.

“Give her morphine,” he instructed the nurse, with a severe expression on his face, “and first come with me to the office.”

But he didn’t wait until they reached the office. Mandy heard him raising his voice in the corridor.

“I don’t like it. We have to locate that butcher from Dresden, Yagoda, immediately, and bring him back urgently. This surgery is his responsibility.”

“But it’s night now in Dresden too,” said the nurse.

“I don’t give a damn,” he yelled, and sounded as if he had given himself a fright.

“Aah,” he cried suddenly, “she has to be given a pulse of steroids immediately, and make an appointment for a bone-marrow test on Medical On Line for today! And don’t forget Dr. Yagoda,” his voice receded, as if he was talking to her while walking backward, “Keep at it until he answers the phone. Night time in Germany. .” he snorted in contempt.

Mandy lay with her eyes closed, beside herself with suspense. The nurse came in and added something to the infusion.

“Is my condition grave?” asked Mandy.

“Grave? I wouldn’t say so. Your condition is worrying, and it’s being taken care of. Don’t worry, the painkiller will help you in a minute. Think positive thoughts and good things will happen.”

“Who can think at all?” asked Mandy, and the nurse didn’t answer her.

IT WAS NOT ONLY avoiding thoughts of home that helped the good sniper to carry out his mission as he lay on the roof of a building in Tulkarem. It was not only the disconnection from his mother, that not thinking about her constituted a kind of rest for him. Sniper number two, Hai-Ad Gonen, had given him a bit of cocaine earlier, and Dael could already feel its blessed effects.

Dael Gruber, who all the guys in the army and in civilian life called Gruber due to the difficulty in pronouncing the two vowels one after the other, was regarded by his friends as a sensitive sniper with a delicate soul. And indeed, he was an example to contradict what people generally say about snipers in armies, that they detach themselves from feelings and simply say to themselves, “Someone has to do the job,” and execute their task with cold-blooded composure. This was a sweeping generalization, and it didn’t apply to Dael.

Dael went for it in a big way, in other words he shot to kill, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked for him. It’s a question of psychological makeup. Sometimes it was a little hard for him to shoot at a concrete target, but then he concentrated and took targets from his life instead and set them up in his imagination in the place of the wanted man. In many cases he imagined the father of Moran Eliot, his girlfriend when he was at the end of the eleventh grade, when she was at the end of the twelfth grade.

Moran Eliot was his first love. It lasted for June — July — August and half of September. Moran was his first, but he wasn’t her first, and she said that after the first it didn’t matter anymore what number he was. It ended badly between them, and with hindsight he didn’t care. Her father was in his sights because he threw Dael out of the house in the most humiliating way, after Moran didn’t want to see him and called him a stalker.

With Aya Ben-Yaish things were steadier, if with less fire. She was a spoiled kid who had moved to Tel Baruch North with her parents when her father had been obliged to sell their villa after going bankrupt, and rent an apartment in Telba-N.

They met for the first time in Mikado. She went down there in very short white pants, as dictated by fashion, to buy Winston Lights for her father, and Dael went to buy Winston Lights for himself. He smoked, of course. No great love erupted between them, but there was definitely a certain love, more meaningful than a convenient arrangement. However, it was true that the distance between Stefan Zweig Street, where the Ben-Yaish family lived, and Yocheved Bat-Miriam Street, where the Gruber family lived, was conveniently short, and Aya herself was pleasant and compliant on the whole.

IT WAS A RESERVIST psychologist in civvies who taught the snipers imaging. He arrived in the framework of a training course organized by the army for elite soldiers, and tried, for example, to explain what happened in the brain of the sniper at the time of shooting. He also gave advice on what to do in all kinds of specific stress situations within a general situation of stress. He divided their time according to levels of stress: very, very stressed, very stressed, and so on, down to apathetic. Dael and three other guys were the only ones who wrote down what he said, and so he spoke only to them, but mainly to Dael.

Dael also asked good questions, and the reservist was happy to answer them, and before answering each question he said, “I’m happy to answer your question.”

He worked with them on controlling their emotions from the moment they left the base until they reached the site of the assignment. And then during the assignment until the minute they left the field. Dael wrote down all the tips, and looked at his bored companions and wondered what was going on in their heads. He imagined that what was going on it their heads was what would be going on in his head if he hadn’t been so stressed by nature and had not lived in a house where stress was what connected the inhabitants.

The reservist gave them exercises for the suppression of irrational thoughts, and flavored his words with amazing stories about his own past as a senior sniper, before he became a psychologist, and Dael thought he was definitely okay, this guy, like his mother said about the friends he brought home. On principle, he told them to aim in their imagination at people they didn’t feel anything in particular for, neither hate nor love. What he most recommended was a faint revulsion, and he confessed that he hit his own bulls eyes best when he imagined targets that aroused a faint revulsion in him, like teachers in high school, or even commanding officers in the army.

Dael thought that he could try, for example, the guests at his bar mitzvah. Not the ones that came to the synagogue, but the ones that turned up in droves after the service to lunch at the Stefan Baron restaurant.

But when none of the imaging exercises worked, and destructive thoughts swarmed into his mind like locusts, he thought about his father.

His hatred for his father was classic. His adoration of his mother was classic too. And his attitude toward his sister vacillated according to his mother’s attitude toward her. In the days of Lirit’s forbidden love for Lucas, sixteen-year-old Dael was the chief instigator of the family hostility toward the wayward girl, and on one particularly cold Saturday, when nobody wanted to leave their previous family home in Tagore Street, he wrote on the door of her room “Lirit the Parakeet,” a nickname that had the power to insult her when she was a child, and to which she was still, at the age of almost twenty, not immune.

None of the family tried to defend Lirit. Their father, as usual, was absorbed in himself, and Mandy said that she had a bad case of the flu.

“THEY WANT TO HIT at the heart of the civilian population, because they know that this is where it hurts the nation most,” the CO told them before the mission, but Dael thought that most of the nation didn’t feel a thing, except perhaps for a faint pang, and because of this he needed a bit of cocaine before they set out: in order to hide the lie from his thoughts.

In that early spring simultaneity became a weapon in the ongoing war. The terrorist organizations competed among themselves as to how many simultaneous attacks they could mount, and every organization had a virtuoso who orchestrated the simultaneity.

The semi-senior wanted man Dael’s force was assigned to liquidate was the virtuoso of the Fatah Eagles, a genius in his field, who according to the intelligence in the hands of the army, was busy planning five simultaneous attacks in different cities, including overseas targets. If the five bombs didn’t explode at exactly the same minute, the attack wouldn’t count as simultaneous. The number of casualties wasn’t important, but the simultaneity was. The competition was over the control of time.

Where the five bombs were supposed to go off the intelligence agencies had been unable to discover, but the CO said in the briefing that he himself wasn’t interested in knowing because in any case the planner would be eliminated today and he wouldn’t be able to execute his plan.

YOU NEVER KNEW exactly when the shot would be fired. That was how the M24 sniper rifle was designed — in order to prevent the body’s reflexes that could interfere with the execution of the execution. Dael compared the slow squeezing of the trigger to engaging the clutch on an uphill spurt, slowly, carefully, so the engine wouldn’t stall. He had passed the test on his first go and he was an excellent driver. His mother let him have her fragrant car with an almost easy heart.

The lookouts confirmed that the target had been eliminated, together with its intentions to develop itself into five simultaneous explosions, including targets overseas. As for the force, it was already close to base. Dael’s pulse was rapid, he was shaking and he wanted more cocaine. He sniffed his hands and cursed. Now his hands would stink for a week.

As usual afterward, he scrubbed himself for an hour in the shower and then lay down in bed and connected to the place where he had last stopped reading The Red and the Black by Stendhal. He allowed himself three pages before moving on to David Vogel. He had ten bookmarks, which Lirit had bought him for his nineteenth birthday, together with this book and another one by Jack Kerouac that was on sale. Was his simultaneous reading an obsession requiring treatment, or was it simply virtuosity, ostensibly superfluous? He remembered that his mother had told him a bookshop opened in Mikado and he wondered if they kept classics, or just the latest best sellers.

2

“WHAT?” ASKED GRUBER, WHO AFTER THE MASSAGE WAS ready both physically and mentally for a sleep of at least ten hours. “A French restaurant? Now?”

“Not just any French restaurant. Rene’s Restaurant,” said Bahat McPhee proudly.

Gruber yawned.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’ve already reserved a table. You have to make a booking there at least a week in advance, if we don’t go now we’ll never be able to go.”

He stared at her, red eyed. Bahat felt guilty.

“Don’t worry, it’s a fantastic place, once you’re there you won’t want to leave,” she said and drove too fast on the winding road.

“And we don’t have to spend half the night there either,” she said. “We won’t stay more than two hours, but Rene’s desserts are something special. You know he reopened the place just recently?”

“No,” said Gruber.

“He had a restaurant that was doing very well, but he shut it down and went to France for a few years. And now he came back and opened it again, but in a different place. You know what, I’ve got something to cheer you up,” she said and put on a tape.

Gruber couldn’t believe his ears. Introductions to episodes of The Twilight Zone.

“In my opinion some of them are brilliant.” She pressed stop, so she wouldn’t have to go back after her explanations. “You know that Serling himself is the narrator in the series?”

“No,” said Gruber in despair. In spite of the great massage, his neck could hardly hold itself up on his spine. If he had been condemned to death by the guillotine, his head would have come off even before the blade had finished its work.

“Listen,” said Bahat and increased the volume to a disturbing degree.

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

Gruber looked at her in horror. Did she really intend playing him the introductions to all the episodes? How far was Rene’s restaurant?

A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, The Twilight Zone!

She pressed stop and said: “Amazing, isn’t it? The man was a genius. I don’t think he’s been given the credit he deserves. There’s a whole society devoted to commemorating him. There was a time when I thought of joining, but it involved going to meetings with other people who admire him and his work. .” She fell silent. “I don’t like rubbing shoulders with people who only have one subject of conversation. It makes me nervous. . He was a great artist. Have I already told you that he was a lecturer in communications at Ithaca College, and that my daughters studied there too?”

“Yes you have,” said Gruber without remembering if she had or not.

They went on driving through a forest of tall thin trees. The darkness was absolute. Gruber couldn’t understand how she allowed herself to drive at a speed of ninety miles per hour.

“A friend of mine from Berkeley taped these prologues for me.”

“Very nice.”

“It really was very nice of him. I told him so too. And it was from him that I heard about the Serling commemoration fund. He drew my attention to the fact that for only seventeen dollars you can get a really neat email address. Your name and then @rodserling.com. He himself has an address like that. But I think it’s going a bit too far.”

“So do I,” said Gruber.

“But Raffi Propheta doesn’t think so. His admiration of Serling knows no bounds.”

“Who’s Raffi Propheta?” asked Gruber, and for a moment he was afraid he had missed something important.

“My friend. From Berkeley University. He made this tape for me. He teaches Hebrew at Berkeley, and he’s active in the Serling commemoration fund. He’s a very special person. From the moment I heard that he too was a Serling fan he shot up in my estimation. He lives in Berkeley. I never visit him. Not because I’ve got anything against Berkeley, but because I simply can’t leave the spiders for long. It’s enough that I go to the Hebrew Union College in New York. It really makes me nervous to leave the spiders, even though since they stuck me with the Hispanic I’m less nervous about leaving the research without supervision.”

“Clearly.”

“My relations with Raffi Propheta are platonic, there’s nothing between us except for conversations in Hebrew. He’s the only person I know here who I can speak Hebrew to the way I’m speaking to you. Naturally I can find Israeli students in Ithaca, the place is full of them, by the way, but talking to students isn’t much fun. Apart from which, he’s up to date on all the changes in Hebrew slang, and he has a student who’s doing a doctorate in the subject under his supervision. They’ve got a lot of respect for him in Berkeley. You’ve never heard of him in Israel? Raffi Propheta?”

“It’s not my field.”

“Right,” she giggled. Gruber noticed that she was familiar with all the turns in the winding road and took them automatically.

“I had a serious moral problem with him, but I overcame it. All in all I learned a lot about Rod Serling from him. For example, that he comes from a Jewish Reform family, and that he became a member of the Unitarian church, and also that he was a boxer. Did you know that?”

“No,” admitted Gruber.

“Serling made a movie called Heavyweight Requiem. He was a Renaissance man. He was a paratrooper too. He served in the US army and fought like a hero.”

“Good.”

“And he was only five foot three.”

“Is he dead?”

“He died in seventy-five. But before that he collected six Emmy awards,” she added proudly.

Gruber’s mental condition was desperate. He was convinced that he was being driven by a woman who was not right in her head. But at the same time he knew that this did not contradict the fact that she had the ability to help him in his limping research.

“He’s pro-Arab and anti-Israel big time,” she said as if revealing a great secret.

“Who?”

“Propheta. Whenever the IDF kill someone he calls and barks at me as if I’m the virtuoso mind behind the army’s activities in the territories.”

“Obviously not,” said Gruber.

“But I need him,” she said in the tone of an intimate confession. “I need to speak Hebrew on the phone or face to face. I’m not sexually attracted to him, you mustn’t think. . the fact that he hates Israel makes it impossible for me to see him in that light. I like him, but not that much. Listen to this, in my opinion this is one of the best introductions—”

Again Serling’s voice filled the interior of the car:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, yes,” Gruber made haste to reply.

It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.

“If there’s a word you don’t understand tell me.”

“I understand.”

It is the middle ground. .

“The halfway point,” shouted McPhee.

. . between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is. .

Gruber noticed that she was moving her lips together with the tape, and he felt a great sense of detachment.

. . the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone.

“My pro-Arab friend from Berkeley has all the episodes that come after these introductions on DVD. Would you like me to get them for you?”

“No, no. We have the same thing in Tel Aviv too.”

“Okay,” she said in disappointment. “I only wanted to help. You know that I only want to help,” she said and gave him a meaningful look, that lasted too long for someone who should have been keeping her eyes on the road. And then she returned her eyes to the road and they drove for a while in silence until she stopped the car, put on the hand brakes, and said in a childish voice, “Here we are.”

Gruber saw a depressing three-storied building. In darkness.

His sense of strangeness instantly deepened and he felt dizzy too, as if his whole body was suddenly operating according to different laws of physics, those of a kind of Twilight Zone. This Israeli woman from the arthropod forum was bringing him to an abandoned building, that she claimed was a fancy French restaurant. With all due respect, he was not yet ready to explore another dimension.

“Come along,” said Bahat, and they both got out of the car, which she locked with a screech of the alarm.

“The entrance is round the other side. Careful how you go. The stones are slippery here from the deluge that came down before you landed. Did you feel it on the plane?”

He didn’t answer, only walked behind her in the dark. They entered the building. Bahat said, “It was once a geriatric hospital.”

They walked down a long corridor, on the right and left were peeling green doors with numbers on them, 212, 213. .

“A French restaurant in a hospital?”

“The hospital isn’t operating, the restaurant is,” said Bahat and opened a brown door, revealing a dimly lit French restaurant full of diners.

“Name please?” a hostess pounced on them.

“McPhee,” said McPhee, and took off her coat, helped Gruber off with his, and handed them both to the hostess.

McPhee smiled at Gruber, and he thought the smile was false and that her teeth were as white as those of a lot of Americans. But he also thought that when he got back to Israel he would have his own teeth whitened, he was a public personality, winner of the Israel Prize, he couldn’t afford to go round with plaque and yellow teeth.

The hostess led them to a table that did not meet with McPhee’s approval, and she requested another table. There was no other table available, and she asked for Rene to be called. Rene arrived during the middle of a lovers’ quarrel at one of the tables, and as a result a table to McPhee’s taste becoming available. As soon as they sat down she said something she had planned to say before, but hadn’t managed to:

“It’s hard to know if there are more pro-Arabs than Arabs at Berkeley. In my opinion there are. But perhaps now it’s balanced out a bit. After all, the pro-Arabs need Arabs next to them so that they can show them that they’re on their side.”

“Presumably,” said Gruber and he looked at the menus and didn’t understand a thing.

“I’ll explain,” said McPhee and she explained all the dishes to him.

Gruber looked at her and realized that never in all his life had he felt so alienated anywhere.

But perhaps it was only the tiredness, he tried to encourage himself, and decided to stop asking himself questions and to start taking an interest in the menu. Suddenly he felt hungry too, and he even said so to Bahat.

“I told you so, the appetite comes with the food.”

Gruber didn’t like having this kind of saying repeated to him. He worked out what time it was in Israel, and he felt like calling someone there now, never mind who, and suddenly he realized that he had forgotten his cell phone in Tel Baruch North, on the bedside table, for some reason on Mandy’s side.

“Oy,” he said sadly.

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot my cell phone at home,” he said.

“Do you want mine? You want to make a call? What time is it over there?”

“What time is it over here?” He smiled. “No, never mind.” It seemed to him that he wouldn’t be able to produce a single sentence in Hebrew now that would sound authentic. He was probably beginning to take on an American tinge himself, and whoever answered the phone in Israel would notice it at once, and conclude that Irad Gruber wasn’t solid enough and that he changed in accordance with whatever country he happened to be in.

During the course of the meal, which lasted for exactly two hours, McPhee talked without stopping, only pausing when her mouth was full. Gruber ate and nodded, sometimes smiling and sometimes looking serious; there were even moments when he tried to engrave what he was eating on his memory, but his thoughts wandered. All his numbers were in his cell phone memory. If anything here was as it should be, and this woman had important and useful information, he would have to let the Defense Minister and the head of WIDA know immediately. How was he going to do that without the numbers on his cell phone? He was too tired to find a solution, and he ordered crème brûlée and decaffeinated espresso.

Bahat was drunk and asked him to drive back. All the way on the winding road between the forest of tall thin trees he thought about Rod Serling who had written about the beyond and the fifth dimension and the imagination, collected six Emmy awards, and died young.

3

IN ISRAEL THE DAY WAS COMING TO THE END OF THE TWILIGHT hour, and all its beauty was going to be over in a matter of seconds. Lirit came home after an exhausting working day at Nighty-Night, tanned as if she had spent two weeks in Eilat. In fact, she had gone straight from the pajama factory to the health club at Mikado, where she had obtained a spray-on tan, and now she was suffering from a guilty conscience for not going to see her mother all day. She imagined that she wasn’t doing too badly, and comforted herself with the thought that tomorrow she would go before work.

The tan looked terrific, authentic and even, Lirit said to herself as she examined her naked body in the mirror. Shlomi was right not to like nudity with color differences left by swimsuits. A swimsuit seemed to him an artificial additive. Lirit thought that she would return to their home in Brosh on the border of Te’ashur in two, maximum three days, and at the health club they told her that the tan would last up to a week.

Because of his views she made up her mind not to tell him how she had acquired the tan, but to say that she had sunbathed in the nude on the roof of the pajama factory.

She called Medical Frontline and someone who didn’t actually have a clue told her that her mother was sleeping after receiving strong painkillers.

Now Lirit looked like a typical Telba-North girl of her age: blonde streaks — which someone like that would have done herself for a few dollars or at the Mikado hairdressing salon when she had the time — thin but not emaciated, quite tall, and most importantly self-confident beyond what you would expect for someone of her age, as if the majority of her achievements were already behind her, and all she had to do now was go from strength to strength. Most of the inhabitants of Tel Baruch North, even if they weren’t twenty-two-year-old girls with blonde streaks, were self-confident to a fault. It may well be that the evergreen vegetation, together with the slightly exaggerated resemblance of the houses, whether multistoried or not, had in the end done the job, whether the planners had planned it or not: they had implanted in the inhabitants what was so sorely missing in other suburbs of Tel Aviv, the conviction that the place would survive a war.

She didn’t know if she was allowed to take a shower, and she called them to ask. They said yes she was, no problem. In the shower she felt flooded by pity for her mother, who had been buried for years in a place where there were only female workers, most of them ugly, and the only man who sometimes came there was the Singer technician, maybe the same one who had come onto her grandmother, and maybe also to the next generation.

Lirit dried herself quickly and took a big white T-shirt belonging to her father from the walk-in closet, put it on, lay down on her parents’ comfortable bed, switched on the remote of the plasma screen television, which was a little too big for the size of the room, and gave her the feeling that she was sitting in the front row of a movie theater.

She switched from the BBC World News to the Good Life Channel, but they were only showing cooking programs there, and Lirit wasn’t really keen on the subject, especially since she was under no obligation to get to grips with it as yet. She switched to the E! Channel, to see the homes of celebrities residing in Hollywood.

All the homes of the celebrities were standing firmly on their foundations, and the celebrities were very happy with their homes and their careers, even though they had known ups and downs. They showed a singer who had gotten into trouble, and was now in danger of losing everything, including his personal freedom.

Lirit opened the drawer of her mother’s bedside table and took out a bottle of Yves Saint Laurent pink nail polish, opened it, sniffed the smell she loved, and started to paint her toenails.

Her mother’s business pink didn’t really go with the rather savage orange-brown of her skin, but she couldn’t find the remover. She waited for the nail polish to dry, and after that she didn’t have any plans. Shlomi hadn’t called or sent a text message, and she was very tense, to the extent of a pounding in her heart every two minutes. Beads of sweat stemming from the fear of abandonment, mixed with the fear of life without him, collected on her forehead. Lirit didn’t admit to herself that she found Shlomi somewhat boring, and that therefore the fact that he hadn’t called was enough to make him fascinating in the extreme.

On the movie channel The Postman Always Rings Twice was starting, with her mother’s favorite actress, Jessica Lange, and Lirit thought it was the right thing for today to watch a movie starring her mother’s favorite actress.

All through the movie she was preoccupied by Shlomi’s failure to call. If she had been alert to her feelings and in touch with them in real time, she would have demanded a clarification from Shlomi weeks ago, when the crack began. On the other had, it was clear what he would say. He would say again that you couldn’t swim in the same river twice.

Shlomi got on Lirit’s nerves with this proverb, and Lirit didn’t know anymore if she loved him, really him, or if she was just obsessive about him and a junkie for his approval.

She examined her cell phone again. Perhaps in the meantime he had sent a text message, or a heart, or a smiley, but the cunning little screen was empty, and it only showed the time and the state of the reception and the battery, and it was all so empty! No picture of an envelope and no sign of a call that hadn’t been answered, for example, when she was in the shower. She hardly had any incoming calls. Ever since she had gone down south, she had cut off all contact with her girlfriends.

She turned her eyes back to the plasma screen. She tried to remember the name of the male lead playing opposite Lange, but she couldn’t, because she had never heard of him anyway.

She made up her mind to wait for the credits at the end of the movie and learn this missing detail.

Suddenly she noticed that she felt good. Comfortable. Secure. And that the only thought disturbing her peace of mind was that Shlomi hadn’t called. If she dismissed this thought from the course of her life, at least for a while, everything would be all right.

There was no doubt that escaping from the natural and organic life with Shlomi to the artificial life supported by every possible gadget had done her good. All in all she had really missed civilization and especially globalization, and wanted to buy some Diesel clothes, and a few other brands that enriched the rich and impoverished the poor. She planned on a big shopping spree before going back south, and wondered if she should take her new acquisitions with her to Brosh on the border of Te’ashur, or leave them in Telba-North.

Fifteen minutes after the sensational sex on the kitchen table in The Postman Always Rings Twice her cell phone rang, and Lirit recognized Shomi’s cell number on the screen, which meant that Shlomi was using it now in spite of his repudiation of all its upgraded features because a call from cell to cell cost less. Lirit let it go on ringing for her own enjoyment and she thought, there you are, as soon as you let go, he called.

She wanted to sound busy with something entirely different, like a person with a world and life of her own, of which Shlomi constituted only a small derivative even though she respected this derivative. At the same time she wanted to give her hello a happy note, because they were in a relationship after all, and why hide happiness if it existed. But already by the sound of Shlomi’s hello she understood that they were in for a serious discussion of essential issues. She really didn’t feel like starting this kind of discussion now, in the middle of the movie, and so she immediately adopted a despondent tone:

“My mother’s not doing too well.”

And thus she succeeded in forcing Shlomi to take an interest in the health of her mother, who he couldn’t stand anyway. Only after he had complied with the demands of common humanity, he turned to the personal: quite simply, he wanted to split up with Lirit. It was quite simple, he said again. He needed to live by himself for a while, it wasn’t an absolute separation, but it was definitely a separation. Quiet detachment.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m going through a very difficult period with myself,” she heard him say. “I’m over forty, and I haven’t achieved anything in my life. I haven’t even got a house of my own. Or a profession. The world’s getting harder and harder. I can’t adjust to it and I ask myself why.”

“And because the world’s getting harder and harder you want to separate from me?” asked Lirit.

“Yes, Lirit. It doesn’t suit me to be with you when I don’t value myself. You deserve better. Tell me, what am I to you? An aging loser who hates what he has become. I have to take it in spite of the wound to my ego, and to think about what to do next.”

“You’re not a loser,” said Lirit in a raised voice, but it didn’t help her to suppress the thought that he actually was. Shlomi was a loser according to plenty of criteria, except perhaps for those related to Buddhism or Zen-Buddhism.

“I thought that with you far away in the north, it was an excellent opportunity to tell you what I’m going through,” he said.

“Don’t you love me anymore?” Lirit asked him glumly, since neither Shlomi’s career nor his satisfaction with himself interested her, but only how he felt about her.

“I don’t know what love is. I only know that you can’t swim in the same river twice and that what’s past is past. If our relationship is to continue it has to be something new, and only after I know more about myself.”

“And isn’t it possible,” the girl from Telba-North made bold to ask, “for me to be at your side while you think? I’m quite quiet,” she said suddenly. “I won’t disturb you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“No-no-no,” pronounced Shlomi. “I’m not making it easy on myself. If I wanted to, I could go and stay with my mother in Sefad. I intend to stay here on my own and to break my head alone.”

“Hey, that’s a rhyme.”

“It came out by accident,” he said wearily.

There was an oppressive silence.

“Good,” said Shlomi.

“Good,” repeated Lirit.

“That’s it”’ said Shlomi.

“That’s it?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Okay.”

She hung up quickly because she didn’t want him to hear her cry. True enough, the guy was broken down and boring. But if she lost him — what would she do then?

Loss suddenly broke into Lirit’s life. Her mother had taught her that in situations that were impossible to bear, simply impossible, because the nightmare was larger than life, there was no alternative: you anesthetized yourself. At the moment it was clear to the former NCO-Casualties that she was stuck in a busy junction, without any traffic lights, not even blinking ones, and the situation was really scary. And so she detached herself from it.

She went to the medicine cabinet and found her mother’s kits arranged in little bags of cocktails: a bag with five Clonex zero-point-fives and two Vabens of ten milligrams and a Bondormin or two. Another bag contained one Clonex of two milligrams and six Bondormins, without Vaben, and so on, about twenty little bags with cocktails for anesthetizing sensation, consciousness, personality, and the body that contained all the above.

She chose a cocktail that was more or less pure Clonex, with just one Bondormin, and calculated that when she woke up, she would be able to cope with the sudden emptiness in her life where being part of a couple used to be, but in the meantime she went to the handsome kitchen, filled a disposable glass with too-cold water from the mineral water container, and swallowed the cocktail with its help.

Afterward she closed all the electric blinds in the house, not God forbid in anger, but with the decisiveness of a woman doing something that had to be done, and returned to her parents’ suite, which was as clean and tidy as a hotel suite because the Columbian cleaner had been there in the morning. First of all, she switched off her cell phone. Disconnected it completely, rather than putting it on mute, so that whoever called would get it in his face that the subscriber was not available and he should try again later. By this blunt treatment of the instrument she also denied herself the desire to look at the little screen and see how many calls — or, God forbid, what if none at all, which was also possible — had gone unanswered.

The young woman was well aware that the reality of her life was undergoing a process of change and that she had to get ready to deal with it differently. If Shlomi broke her heart — something she was no longer so sure would happen — she would cry only after she had taken care of her mother, and after her father had returned to Israel, and after Dael had survived the army, when life got more or less back on track, or found a different track.

She got into her parents’ beautiful comfortable bed, and the pills she had taken put her to sleep in five minutes.

4

RITA, THE INTENSIVE CARE NURSE IN ICHILOV HOSPITAL, tried every possible means of contacting the family of the patient Amanda Gruber, who had arrived straight from Medical Frontline in critical condition.

She got the phone numbers from Amanda herself, but there was no answer from the patient’s home, her daughter’s cell phone announced immediately that the subscriber was not available, and her son’s cell phone rang and rang to no effect.

Dael didn’t answer because he didn’t answer unidentified numbers on principle. His father, Irad Gruber, had instilled an aversion to unidentified numbers in him because all the numbers at WIDA were unidentified, apart from his own. Gruber preferred to remain identified, and thus to know if he was being screened.

While Rita was desperately calling him and his sister by turn, the outstanding sniper was busy on his base somewhere in the country, surfing the Internet by means of an upgraded cell phone belonging to a friend. He was searching for schools for paparazzi in the United States.

He found one in Santa Monica, one in Santa Barbara, one in Santa Fe, and one in Santa Cruz, and in another six places without Santas. He copied the addresses into a notebook where he wrote down sentences from important books. Only after repeated rings, when he could no longer overcome his curiosity to discover the identity of the insistent anonymous caller, he answered the phone.

And then—go wasn’t the word. He shot like a missile to his CO, who commanded him to make for his mother pronto, and volunteered to drive him to the station in time to get the last train to Tel Aviv. From the CO’s car he tried to get his sister at his parents’ home, but there was no answer, and her cell phone was silent too.

He couldn’t take the news that his mother was in critical condition single-handed, and he felt as if he was collapsing into himself.

While he was waiting for the train, he remembered his sister’s number at Shlomi’s, and when he called it, Shlomi answered, and Dael asked him if he had heard anything.

Shlomi had always been cool to him, because he thought that Dael had blood on his hands, that he was nothing short of a murderer, and that he should have refused to obey orders. This time Shlomi was really nasty, and only after Dael explained how grave the situation was, Shlomi volunteered the information that he had spoken to Lirit a few hours before, and added that since Dael was suddenly so worried about Lirit, he was beginning to feel worried too and asked Dael to keep him informed of further developments.

DAEL HAD NO INTENTION of keeping this schmuck informed about any developments. The loathing between them was mutual. It had come to a head one Friday night the previous winter when Shlomi had done them the favor of showing up at the apartment in Telba-North, after Lirit had pressured him into it. Mandy had prepared a relatively festive meal. Usually she bought takeout from selected delis, but this time she surpassed herself and made a quiche and salads — all organic, without pesticides, chemicals, and genetic modifications.

Around the table they talked about Dael’s ambition to study to become a paparazzo abroad, and to photograph celebrities on the local scene in poses that up to now had never graced a camera. Shlomi argued that this was an invasion of privacy and Dael insisted that the minute someone was a celeb — his life was no longer his own business.

Lirit tried to change the subject, and asked those present if they had seen that a Michal Negrin boutique had been opened in Mikado. Mandy couldn’t stand the jewelry they sold at those shops and shut her daughter up, without any sensitivity to the diversionary tactics her offspring was attempting to put into play, with the result that Shlomi launched into an inflammatory speech against Tel Baruch North and its inhabitants.

Dael remarked that with all due respect to the saying that fresh eyes see every flaw, Shlomi didn’t know enough to form an opinion about any neighborhood North of the Yarkon River. But Shlomi insisted that it was enough to check out a few streets here in order to know what you were up against, and Dael replied (apparently in order to impress Aya Ben-Yaish, who was also present at the table, but who kept quiet, except for occasionally giggling shyly, or spitefully, who knows) that for someone who couldn’t stand the place or the people who lived there, he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off one of them, meaning Lirit.

Lirit and Mandy exchanged shocked looks. Irad Gruber didn’t bat an eye, and only when Mandy whispered to him that his autism was off the charts, he intervened and said, “Okay-okay, enough-enough-enough, everybody shut up.”

Later that evening, when they were putting the dishes in the dishwasher, one rinsing in the sink and the other arranging, the mother and daughter decided to refrain in future from inviting Shlomi and Dael to sit at the same table because there was an ideological chasm yawning between them. That same week Dael was sent on a mission to eliminate someone heavy, and he imagined Shlomi and hit right in the center of the wanted man’s body mass.

ON THE TRAIN to Tel Aviv Dael tried his father’s cell phone a few times too, but in the end he understood that perhaps he hadn’t taken it with him to America at all.

The person sitting opposite him was sucking air through his teeth, as if an obstinate crumb was stuck there and he was trying to suck it out. The noise he was making with his teeth got on Dael’s nerves, and he asked himself how he could approach him without insulting him. Every formulation that occurred to him was disqualified as soon as he imagined what he himself would feel if someone had addressed him in such a way in the middle of the train. He had a talent for stepping momentarily into somebody else’s shoes, which ostensibly seemed completely in contradiction to the fact that he was also an outstanding shot. But he never stepped into the shoes of the people he shot.

He moved to another seat and rang home again and met again and again with the answering machine, which said in Mandy’s voice, “You have reached the Gruber family: Amanda Gruber,” (yes, she jumped to the head of the queue), “Irad Gruber, Lirit Gruber and Dael Gruber. You may leave a message for any of these.”

Dael thought about the word “these.” She could have said “them,” or simply said nothing after the word “message,” but Mandy, who had arrived in Israel at the age of eight, still had a complex about not being a sabra, and took every opportunity to display her mastery of the Hebrew language.

He couldn’t understand what was happening to his sister. “Troubles never come singly,” his mother liked to say, and added “God forbid.” The possibility of his sister being in trouble horrified him, and he tried to remember the name of their neighbors, something like Rotterdam, but not actually Rotterdam. . He recalled his mother saying that she had doubts about their Jewishness because of their Flemish appearance, and he remembered that their name was Amsterdam.

He called information and wrote down their number on the beautiful bookmark he took out of The Red and the Black. The doubtful neighbors were diligent but not at all efficient. They rang and rang, knocked and knocked, called, “Lirit, Lirit,” but got no reply. They told Dael that they could hear the phone ringing in the triplex. Mr. Amsterdam suggested calling someone to break in, but Dael thanked him politely.

He put his gun down on the seat on his right, passed the strap over his head to his left shoulder, and buried his head in his hands.

He had never felt so guilty. If he hadn’t been doing this job in the army, his mother wouldn’t have gone in for plastic surgery and Lirit wouldn’t have had to come up north in order to take charge of the factory.

He raised his head and looked at the approaching lights of Lydda and decided to prioritize. His mother was in certain danger, and he would therefore concentrate on her and set the mystery of Lirit aside for the time being.

AMANDA GRUBER PASSED AWAY at five fifty in the morning, Israel time. An hour before Dr. Yagoda left his home in Dresden in order to spend the following days and nights recuperating on the banks of some lake or other. In any case, there was nothing he could have done. A virulent germ had attacked the area of the operation. Usually this germ was friendly, but in rare cases it became virulent and consumed the bones rapidly.

Dr. Atzmon Lidani, the intensive care doctor, didn’t tell Dael and Lirit (who, after she woke up, was located safe and sound at home) in so many words that their mother was turning into a boneless mollusk. They understood for themselves. Dr. Lidani only told the horrified children that the bacteria had attacked their mother at five different points, and that the stronger it became from devouring the bones the faster it worked. Dr. Lidani did all he could. The minute he admitted the patient to intensive care, he had drawn up a protocol of liquids for her and given her pulses of steroids and huge quantities of antibiotics. In the meantime he had located an international expert on the bacteria in question on the Internet, in the state of Virginia. He had found him on vacation in Miami, and proceeded according to his instructions.

“He’s number one in the world, and I hold him in very high esteem,” said Dr. Lidani to Mandy’s children, “Let’s pray that something takes.”

“We’ll cross our fingers,” said Lirit.

Mandy was no stammerer, and even though she disliked the Hebrew language, she knew how to speak it fluently and very well. But now she had great difficulty in speaking since the bacteria had attacked the bones of her face and jaw.

“Nothing left,” she said. “Not worth it. The elbows. The head. It’s in the skull. Enough. No towels in the Sheraton. All finished.”

Lirit couldn’t bear to hear her mother talking like this, in sober despair and at the same time not to the point. The combination made her uncomfortable. She wanted to remember her at her best, and she told Dael that she was going to the vending machine to fetch hot chocolate for him and coffee for herself.

On her way back with the two brown plastic glasses, she heard her mother shouting, “Ohhhhhhh,” threw both glasses out of the window in a panic, and ran into the room.

Mandy had succeeded in raising herself on her stomach (the condition of her spine gave her an unnatural flexibility) and she was pleading with Dael to tell the nurse to turn her onto her back.

“Morphine. Lots. And head up.”

The nurses didn’t dare turn her over on their own initiative and went to look for the doctor. Dr. Lidani gave his permission, on the grounds of human dignity. He gave instructions for her to be given a heavy dose of an extreme painkiller, to wait for it to take maximum effect, and then to turn her over with her face to the ceiling.

Dael and two nurses turned her over and fixed the pillows, and Mandy whispered:

“To die on my back. Not my stomach. At least.”

It was apparent that she was gathering her strength. “Children. Body to science. The funeral later. For what’s left. No to organic cotton.” She looked at her horrified daughter. “No nonsense. My line to continue. Like my mother. From generation to generation.” After it seemed that she had fallen silent, she added with a unique effort, “I’ll haunt you from above.”

“Yes, yes, mother,” mumbled Lirit without believing her. She wondered if she would really haunt her, and remembered how her mother would say that death was the unraveling of a thread from the fabric of life, and from the point of view of the dead, death was a final exit. It seemed to Lirit that she had discovered a contradiction in her mother’s words, because if death was a final exit, the unraveling of a thread, how would she be able to haunt her from above?

“Only the ultra-Orthodox market. Only them. No tricks,” Mandy mumbled, and then she began to rattle, and the rest followed as usual, until death, the road to which was padded with generous amounts of morphine, because why let them suffer?

THE DOOR TO the Intensive Care Unit opened again to the brother and sister Gruber, this time on their way out.

“What time is it in the United States?” asked Lirit.

“Seven hours back.”

“Back? Not forward?”

“Back.”

“But there are a few time zones there. At least four.”

Dael didn’t answer because his world had collapsed. What did he care what time it was, even in Israel?

They walked silently down the vale of tears of the Ichilov corridors, until they reached the elevator.

The stock of the M24 got stuck between the two closing doors, and Dael groaned and pulled the gun toward him. He was still in uniform.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, “I don’t understand this situation.”

Lirit led her brother in the direction of their mother’s car, in which she had arrived. While she was racing into the Ichilov Hospital underground parking, she had muttered to herself, “What a terrible thing to happen. . what a terrible thing to happen.” And now, as she wandered round with her brother looking helplessly for the way out, she thought that it really was a catastrophe. She asked Dael:

“What’s going to happen now?”

Dael didn’t answer again, because his thoughts were a mess. When they arrived at the parking lot and it turned out that Lirit didn’t actually remember where she had parked, because of course she was very upset, he said, “Find the car already. I’m dying to get out of here. There isn’t enough oxygen here. They should hand out oxygen masks at the entrance to the parking garage, not a ticket. Did you pay?”

“No,” she said, and by chance they found a pay station.

“Do you remember the color? The section?”

“Orange I think. Green. I don’t know.”

“Brilliant,” he said.

They split up to look for the car in the oxygenless site. Dael continued in minus two, and Lirit went down to minus four. In minus four there was even less oxygen, and judging by the suffocating atmosphere Lirit guessed that the car was on this level. And indeed she found it, got in and switched on the ignition, and drove up to minus two, where her brother was sitting on some step, after giving up his search.

“Come on,” she called to him and opened the window of the seat to her right. “I found it.”

Dael got up, threw his gun and bag onto the back seat, and sat down next to her.

“Yallah, let’s get out of here,” he said.

5

IRAD GRUBER SWITCHED ON THE TELEVISION SET OPPOSITE his bed. He had no idea what time it was, neither here nor in Israel. On the screen two men maligned one another refereed by the host. Probably a repeat broadcast. A televised debate between two presidential candidates. The incumbent Republican, his face flushed and his expression resolute, and the Democrat, his skin gray, his face long, his look beaten. Gruber tried to take sides in order to give himself an interest in the debate that had nothing to do with him, just as he sometimes did when watching a football game on TV. But he lacked sufficient data on the American scene, and after a few minutes he was sick of their talk and began to flip channels.

Couldn’t be better! All in the Family—his favorite series of all time! And what’s more, an episode he couldn’t remember seeing when it first came out. Gruber smiled to himself when the familiar characters appeared on the screen, chuckled from time to time, and once even laughed out loud.

His laughter woke Bahat McPhee, who was sleeping in the next room. The laughter was uninhibited, carefree, not at all that of someone whose scientific world had come crashing down around him. She felt a little envious of the Israeli man who was capable of forgetting how grave his situation was.

She glanced at her watch. In another hour or two a pale light would dawn outside. Bahat detested the pale dawn light, a detestation dating from the period of her parents’ yoga studio in the green suburb of Ramat Aviv. She thought that normal people should be sleeping when the sun began to rise because it had nothing to do with them. Sunrise! Sunset, maybe. It expressed a lot of feeling. But all this excitement over a pale, boring sunrise got on her nerves, with all due respect.

In the end she gave up and switched on the TV in her room and listened with interest to the debate, with her eyes closed because she had missed the live broadcast. She was divided in her mind over the elections. One of the candidates was good for Israel and not so great for the Americans, and about the other they said that the USA was his top priority and that he thought America should look inwardly. Despite all the years that had passed since she last set foot on the land of Israel, Bahat was unable to choose sides in light of such divided data.

BAHAT HAD LEFT Israel at the end of the seventies, and since then she had only returned for the funerals of her mother and father respectively, and had not even stayed till the end of the week of mourning. She was one of those Israelis who are reluctant to stay in Israel because of fear, especially since the nineties, and it was just about then she also fell under the spell of Rod Serling, something that had a big influence on the bedrock of her reality.

From the beginning of the third millennium, Israel already seemed to her as frightening as Iraq. Afula and Falluja, Karkur and Kirkuk, what was the difference, she would sometimes sit and muse in the morning, with her sixth coffee and cigarette.

Since acquiring the title of Reform rabbi was conditional on spending at least one full year in Israel, she decided, on the advice of and with the consent of the most respected female rabbi in the congregation of Albany, that she, Bahat McPhee, would instead make a great, pure gesture, one that called for charity and sacrifice, toward the state of Israel, and the Albany rabbi would exempt her from the obligation of staying there for a year.

Sacrifice and charity for the sake of Israel would stand to her credit long after she became a Reform rabbi too, and Bahat liked the idea of having an advantage over all the others; it was pathological with her, the desire to open a gap, but she had been this way since she was a child.

Bahat McPhee gave a lot of thought to the move she would make. Carefully she calculated what she would lose and what she would gain. In the period of enthusiasm preceding Gruber’s arrival she became addicted to caffeine, and smoked like a Frenchwoman. And due to her smoking, her social problems grew more acute. Even before this nobody could have called her a popular personality in the Jewish community of Ithaca, or in the scientific community of Ithaca, or in the general population of Ithaca either. She had no status and/or charisma to attract people to her. She was regarded as a brilliant scientist who should be left alone in order to achieve the maximum.

Recently there were those in the congregation of Tikkun v’Or who suspected her of seeking a loophole to avoid spending a year in Israel. She had social problems even with the most open-minded people in Hebrew Union College, New York, New York, mainly because of her smoking, but perhaps also because of rumors and envy.

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to his liberal views, the candidate contending for the presidency seemed to McPhee a really gray character. His skin was gray and he radiated grayness. Perhaps in the end she would vote for the flushed incumbent, who people said was better for Israel.

A black-and-white series from the fifties with Lucille Ball began and Bahat changed channels, while Gruber, in his room, went on watching Archie Bunker. He didn’t understand everything; there were some words in English he couldn’t get into his head even after their meaning was explained to him a hundred times. “The English is my wife’s,” he would sometimes say at scientific conferences when beginning the lectures in embarrassing English, which did not embarrass him. The man was so on fire with his own brilliance that he wasn’t ashamed of his English.

Bahat wrapped herself in a robe and knocked on his door, she had had it up to here with the volume of these arrogant Israelis who couldn’t see anyone else even when they were right under their noses.

Gruber opened the door in his dark blue tracksuit. (When she was alive his wife had classed him as a disappointment, in spite of all his brilliance, and would say to herself, you’ll always walk alone, Mandy Greenholtz-Gruber, Mandy G-G, for short.)

“What the fuck are you doing to me!” Bahat upbraided him, “This isn’t the corner of Motzkin and Shenkin or whatever you call your streets there. I don’t like being woken up at this ungodly hour!”

“Sorry, “muttered the Israeli.” I have ya-efet.”

“You have what?”

“Jet lag,” he made haste to translate the latest innovation of the Hebrew Language Academy.

“Good, and now please keep quiet.”

“I’m very sorry,” said the guest, “I went too far, I’m very eccentric, my wife says I’m very eccentric too.”

“I’m not your wife, but I really need you to be quiet. We have a hard day ahead of us. I have to pass on a ton of secret information to you. I don’t feel comfortable about it, I’m afraid that the place is bugged, and that my Hispanic is an FBI plant. Once they even opened a file on Lucille Ball, can you believe it? I have to sleep well and not make any mistakes. I’m an American citizen.”

“So what are you saying?” asked Irad, horrified at the possibility that the important information for which he had come all this way would be denied him because of an attack of patriotism.

But she appeared to have returned to her original plans, for she said, “I’m saying that we have to walk a very fine line here and not make a false step in any direction. The key word is balance.”

“It’s a serious business, I agree,” said Irad.

“Then I’ll say goodnight,” said McPhee and turned to go back to her room. Gruber took a mental photograph of her receding back and the long, thick braid dangling down it. He asked himself if she worked out, and berated himself for not doing so personally.

He tried to go to sleep, but soon gave up and went quietly downstairs. There was a television set on the ground floor too, huge and flat as their own in Telba-North. He muted the sound and switched it on to All the President’s Men. Luckily he had already seen the movie more than once on cable.

He looked for the light switch in the kitchen and turned on all kinds of lights outside the house, at the bottom of the yard, in the garage, the garbage room, in the garden, apparently to call attention to its beauty, and quickly switched them off again. Judging by this McPhee’s sense of proportion, she was liable to accuse him of setting off a fireworks display.

He had never come across a woman with such a short fuse, a fact which he attributed to her genius. There was always a price to pay for genius. In his case, for example, the eccentricity, the egoism, the need for instant gratification. At the cocktail party on the terrace in Jaffa that Mandy had organized after he had received the Israel Prize, he had gotten into conversation with one of the guests, a neurologist if he wasn’t mistaken, about the price of genius. The guy, it transpired, had written an article on the subject years ago and had it published in the newspaper Davar, now defunct. According to him, the sensitivity of men of genius made it inevitable that their nervous systems would suffer harm. Gruber was embarrassed. Was the man trying to tell him that his nervous system was damaged? “That’s the package,” said his interlocutor with total confidence, and Gruber beat a hasty retreat before he could present him with the living proof of his thesis.

AT LAST HE FOUND the kitchen light switch and was immediately exposed to a long line of certificates of graduation and distinction hanging on the wall, in botany, zoology, Judaism. . okay, he had certificates at home too, albeit not hanging on the wall. He looked for her regular coffee and hoped she had regular milk as well, and not that half-and-half.

The coffee machine made a bit of noise and he prayed that Bahat was sound asleep again. In the fridge there was only half-and-half, and Gruber poured the stuff into his coffee, which it turned too white so that he contemplated the result with profound reservations.

He sat down on the sofa opposite the mute television and sipped his coffee. Suddenly he had a good feeling. Maybe because the coffee was good and stimulating. What did he lack? This fullness of being spread through him and he felt, as sometimes happened, that being should be appreciated as such, without all the bullshit of achieving. All in all, what did he have to complain about? He was healthy in body and mind, sitting in the exclusive north of the United States, in the home of an ex-Israeli, drinking coffee, feeling comfortable, even relaxed. Tomorrow, so she said, in other words today, she would pass on to him what she knew about the spider net, and in the meantime until that hour arrived, he would spend the time at his ease. Like now, watching a movie he had already seen and was therefore familiar to him. Those actors were already old. He had seen Dustin Hoffman in a recent movie. But what did Hoffman’s age have to do with him?

He stared at the bustling news room of the Washington Post, when suddenly on the wall to the right of the television set he noticed a framed official photograph of Richard Nixon himself.

Two puzzling questions occurred to him. Firstly, what did Professor Bahat McPhee have to do with Richard Nixon? And secondly, wasn’t it strange that he should discover this photograph just when they were showing All the President’s Men on television?

He rose to his feet and went over to the portrait. An old photograph. The president was smiling, so it had apparently been taken before the exposure of the Watergate bugging.

As for the first question he speculated that perhaps he was witness to a pure and simple love of Israel. It was Nixon’s airlift during the Yom Kippur War that had saved the state. Did McPhee gain inspiration from the disgraced president and say to herself, if he stood up for Israel why shouldn’t I bypass Cornell University, Ithaca City Hall, the Pentagon, and the French health authorities to give the Israelis a bit of a push?

Was she fully aware of the risk she was taking in handing over the vital information about the webs? For a moment he was afraid that the FBI was really watching her and that both of them were going to be thrown into prison for a long time, and made to feel guilty for the massive damage to the relations between Israel and the United States.

Who would be crazy enough to take the risk of damaging Israel’s relations with the USA, especially after Nixon’s airlift?

Gruber broke out in a sweat. Not only had he not thought his plans through to the end, he hadn’t thought at all when he applied for approval for his flight to the US after the occurrence of Titanic three.

He decided that if they were caught he would pin all the blame on her, he would say that the subterfuge was all on her initiative, while he himself believed that the financial backers and the Americans were in on the collaboration. He didn’t have the least idea that she was acting behind the back of the Pentagon, which in his opinion was unforgivable in such sensitive times.

He was deterred by the situation in which he found himself, and all he wanted was to be back in Israel with the information he needed and to forget everything that had gone before. Shimon Peres himself had told him personally, at some dinner, that spies took the risk of being forgotten in jail, and even worse, every novice spy knew that he had to be prepared for the total denial of the state in the event of his being caught. Peres had stressed that it was the most treacherous profession in the world. And indeed, what if the state were to deny out of hand that he had come to America at its behest and then accuse him of coming here on his own private business, for his personal profit? They might even say that he planned to convert his wife’s pajama factory, Nighty-Night, and manufacture T-suits for export to China!

A deep sense of uneasiness in the face of something a lot bigger than he was took hold of him. The coffee was tasteless, and in any case he had already finished it. His mood changed completely. He felt really uncomfortable. What if they put him in a cell with someone from al-Qaeda?

A taxi stopped outside McPhee’s house and let off a passenger. This was already too much for the Israeli scientist. He was convinced that an FBI agent had arrived, or an officer from some secret police force, which had been set up to deal with all kinds of eventualities after 9/11 and received an additional impetus after the bombings in Madrid and London. He reminded himself to deny everything out of hand. He would say that he had no idea McPhee was working behind the back of American interests, on the contrary! But at the thought of the diplomatic imbroglio, perhaps even the political earthquake to come, the scientist succumbed to an acute attack of vertigo.

Due to the vertigo, and also to the terror he felt both before and during the vertigo, in other words the terror of the vertigo itself, Gruber failed to notice that the man at the door had a large white parrot on his shoulder, something which immediately negated the possibility of his being an agent of the FBI. He also failed to notice the fact that the man had a distinctly Israeli appearance and a medium-sized suitcase on wheels.

The man rang the doorbell and Gruber went to open it. How great was his surprise when the man opened the door himself, with his own key.

Now the two of them stood facing each other, and Gruber didn’t know what language to speak.

The uninvited guest was not surprised to see Gruber, and said in Hebrew:

“Shalom, are you Dr. Gruber from Israel?”

Gruber nodded.

“I’m Professor Raffi Propheta, Berkeley University Hebrew studies, how do you do? Allow me to add that I am also a good friend and well-wisher of Bahat McPhee.”

6

THE TIME WAS 4:30 A.M. ACCORDING TO THE KITCHEN clock. No mentality, even the Levantine, approved of ringing somebody’s doorbell at this hour unless something had happened. Professor Propheta opened and shut kitchen cupboards as if the place belonged to him, all with the parrot on his shoulder. Gruber watched him.

“You want chai?” he asked Gruber.

“No, thank you,” he said, “I already had coffee.”

“You want another cup?”

“No, thank you.”

He looked like a bitter and perhaps aggressive man, but not dangerous. His bearing was stooped, almost feeble, and the contribution of his spine to his posture wasn’t clear.

“Don’t you drink chai over there in Israel?” he asked.

“My wife does,” said Gruber and began to smell the aroma of the ginger, familiar from home.

“Your wife is very wise,” said Propheta.

He didn’t like the look of this Propheta. He didn’t look good for his age, or not for his age either.

He was half bald, short, running to fat of the flabby kind. And on his bearded face, with the dusty looking mustache, was a sulky expression. He filled Gruber with a sense of defeat.

In order to recover, Gruber could have scolded him for his intrusion at this ungodly hour, and thus externalized his aversion to the man, but there was something pitiful about Propheta, and Gruber really did feel pity for him, especially when he saw that his hands trembled slightly — before, when he was peeling the ginger, and also now, as he poured the milk into the chai.

When he turned to face Gruber, with the hot drink in his hand and the parrot that didn’t budge from his shoulder, he complained that he couldn’t find the cardamom among Bahat’s spices, either she didn’t have any or she had run out, and Gruber noticed that the anger on his face was out of proportion to the offense, that the man presumably wore a permanent expression of anger and accusation. Although he had thought at first that the intruder was simply worn out after the journey from Berkeley to San Francisco, and from San Francisco to New York, and from New York to Ithaca, he now realized that the Hebrew teacher from Berkeley was a man full of rage.

AND HE HAD SOMETHING to be enraged about! As an aperitif, Propheta was angry about having to leave his post at the University of Montpelier in the south of France and move to the USA, and to the ends of the earth what’s more, to Berkeley.

The USA and France seemed to Propheta like two different planets, and he was unable to make the transition smoothly, so that part of him always remained in Israel, another part in Montpelier, and now he had to manage with what was left.

For three years now he had been outside Western Europe, and he yearned to go back there, but he didn’t have a hope. All the senior positions in Western Europe were taken, and he refused to go to Eastern Europe or to Scandinavia, even though he had offers. In Europe it was easier to forget the pains of life, he thought. In Europe you weren’t alone. There were other people, and you could talk to them. They answered you. In the USA people were always asking you how you were, and if you answered them seriously, you found yourself talking to thin air, as had happened to him more than once. The question “How are you?” wasn’t a question at all, it was just a greeting.

Every day outside of Europe was a waste of time, especially in view of the fact that Hebrew studies in Berkeley were at an all-time low since the outbreak of the second Intifada, and he, like other Hebrew professors in the USA, had to be grateful that their departments hadn’t been shut down due to a lack of interest, as had already happened in a few places, like Yale, for example.

It may well be that it was this lack of interest on the part of the Americans in Hebrew culture that had prompted Propheta himself to stop taking an interest in Hebrew literature. Although he went on teaching as usual, sometimes even he felt like walking out of his own classes.

And this being the case, a great void opened up in Propheta’s life. And he filled this void with geopolitics, a field in which he began to be very interested, and also, in his opinion, to master.

He was of the opinion that the period of the beginning of the third millennium, in other words right now, was of unparalleled importance, and that the future of humanity would be determined by the people who set the tone. Propheta wanted to set the tone, but first he set out to master the contents. And in the meantime, so as not to cut himself off from the revolution, in a special notebook he wrote down all the great events all over the world, including in Chechnya, and also in all kinds of African states that didn’t even have a functioning state. He wrote down everything in a clear hand in a special notebook, in case there wouldn’t be any computers after the world was destroyed.

Recently Propheta had published a book of his own on the subject of contemporary politics, intended to sell for eleven dollars to students of international relations so that if they didn’t have a clue about what was happening, his words would reverberate inside them. To the students of Hebrew at Berkeley, fifteen in all, he distributed the book for free.

The First Autoimmune Period—this was the title of his book, and its thesis was that the new terror should be fought in the same way as autoimmune diseases. “What is happening here?” he asked in his book. “The world should be seen as a human body that fails to perceive something as friendly, and attacks it. Wake up sick world! Build alternatives!” he cried, without going into details.

His book was relatively thin, one hundred and forty pages in all, and it ended with a call to action. Professor Propheta called on psychologists and depth psychologists to found a new psychology that would explain what was happening and what had happened in the soul of the contemporary terrorist to make him want to carry out a large scale, disturbing act of destruction.

The confused citizens of the world had the right to receive a more serious explanation than “these people are insane.” The terrorists who emerged from the refugee camps or from the heart of one or another European capital were not crazy people. Their acts had a rational explanation, and it had to be discovered. Reading between the lines it was evident that he was unimpressed by chaos theory, and that he scorned those who relied on it to provide a so-called explanation, while in fact they were throwing sand in the eyes of the confused citizens seeking peace and justice.

Psychologists were falling down on the job, they had to set everything else aside and concentrate on the question of how to identify potential terrorists in childhood, and to prevent them, through educational means, from reaching such extremes. He did not rule out the possibility that early signs of the potential for destruction might even be identified in future terrorists while still in the mother’s womb.

Until white smoke rises! he demanded. They had to work on it until the personality structure of the suicide bomber was exposed! For example, to understand why he didn’t put an end to his life on his own, alone in his room, or in a solitary spot in the bosom of nature, why he insisted on taking other people with him. And the brilliant minds should also identify the personality structures of those who sent the suicide bombers. What kind of psychological projection led a man to send someone else to commit suicide, instead of committing suicide himself? And this information should be made available to everybody. He demanded transparency!

His book was full of exclamation marks, which made his readers feel uneasy.

He was interviewed in the local Berkeley paper, and he explained his positions in detail, but the interview only received one short, thin column, accompanying a terrible passport photo (the one from his green card), and it read that a new book had been published by an ex-Israeli who argued that many Israelis, in contrast to himself, had lost their minds because of the occupation, and that he, whose mind was clear and lucid, wanted to warn people that the world was about to be destroyed, with Israel at the top of the list.

Propheta was insulted at having been mentioned in the context of the occupation when he had sought to write an abstract book, and tried to make sure that the word “occupation” didn’t appear in it even once.

In the last chapter of the book he asserted unequivocally that the human race had embarked on its suicidal autoimmune journey with two important historical events: the rise of Khomeinism, and the fall of the walls between East and West, which had completely confused the world. He hinted that the fall of the walls had been a calamity for mankind.

But he also had a consoling, optimistic message. In the end, humanity would be saved thanks to the Chinese. The Chinese, who constituted a very serious slice of the global population, would realize that there was no other nation capable of overcoming the dangerous autoimmunism that had invaded the human race. And then, with Confucian discipline and an emphasis on bureaucracy and minute detail, the Chinese would take over the world, which by then would be almost completely virtual, and set it to order, in their Chinese way.

ALL THIS, more or less, Propheta told Gruber while standing up and sipping his chai, with the smell of the ginger spreading through Bahat’s living room. In the end it didn’t make a big impression on Gruber, in spite of the dramatic silence with which Propheta concluded his words. The parrot too, which had flown off his shoulder and was standing on the table, seemed indifferent.

“Where did you meet Bahat McPhee?” asked Gruber.

“The first time was on the forum on Rod Serling, if you’re familiar with the name. But the second time I met her was at the JCC, the Jewish Community Center in Berkeley, on the ninth anniversary of Rabin’s assassination. There was some Israeli klutz there who talked about economics and corporations, as if it had anything to do with Rabin’s murder, and I shouted ‘Murderer, murderer!’ from the audience, and she tried to calm me down, but I was already in a trance. ‘You killed fifteen Arab kids then, you’re criminals, but that’s a different matter.’”

“But why blame the lecturer for corporations?”

“He’s morally responsible. Anyone who doesn’t leave Israel, like I did by the way, bears moral responsibility. After a few years of seeing the damage done to the Israelis by the occupation, I picked up my heels and made for France. It was only there that I began to live. And when I say ‘live’, I don’t mean ‘survive.’”

“Obviously,” said Gruber.

“They removed me from the hall and Bahat came with me, even though she doesn’t hold my opinions. From then we’ve been friends, in spite of the ideological chasm. She says that the law of sympathy according to Gershom Scholem operates between us.”

“I never read him,” said Gruber.

“Neither did I. But it’s something in the kabbalah. About souls knowing each other from previous incarnations, and the law of sympathy operates between them. She says that kind of sympathy exists between us, mystical.”

“You know what?” said Gruber, “I will have chai.”

“Really?” Propheta said, pleased. “I’m the chai champion of Berkeley.”

“I’m sure you are.”

7

“WHERE IS SHE?” ASKED PROPHETA, STEPPING CAREFULLY with two fresh cups of chai toward Gruber, who was sitting in front of the television and watching the end of All the President’s Men. Again the smell of the ginger pervaded the living room. Propheta took a coaster from a little stack of rubber coasters standing on the table, and Gruber followed his movements with interest. He couldn’t remember if they had this same custom at home, or if Mandy served tea and coffee in cups with saucers, making coasters unnecessary.

The arguments between Mandy and Lirit on this subject had been completely wiped out of his memory. Lirit would drink hot drinks from a mug without using a coaster. If there was one thing Mandy couldn’t stand, it was rings on tables. In other people’s houses too, she would wonder how they could leave rings on tables that had cost thousands of dollars. It seemed crude and Israeli to her.

“Where is she?” Propheta asked again after blowing on his cup.

“Sleeping,” said Gruber.

“You don’t know how happy I am now,” Propheta said suddenly, as if this time there was something special in the chai, “You know, just talking Hebrew. Not that I have a problem with English. I speak English like an American, I pick up languages quickly. It goes without saying that if I taught Hebrew in Montpellier, French isn’t a problem for me either, but when I speak Hebrew,” his eyes shot sparks of happiness, “I can give my facial muscles a rest. And relaxing the facial muscles relaxes areas in my brain. And I won’t say it isn’t a pleasure. And this is after living outside Israel for years.”

He sat down on the sofa next to Gruber, not in order to watch the end of the movie, but in order to speak Hebrew.

Gruber pretended to be radically interested in the movie. He narrowed his eyes in order to catch every word, even though it wasn’t up to the eyes to hear, and Propheta understood his body language and kept quiet.

“What do you think of her house?” he asked after a while.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Gruber, who, because he was so surprised by the question, answered it honestly, “On the one hand it’s young girl’s apartment, and on the other hand an old woman’s, with all this pseudo-antique kitsch. There’s no direction. Did you see the photograph of Richard Nixon? What’s the nature of her relationship with the Hispanic bio-technologist?”

“I think pure sex, and that it’s over. Ever since the business of Reform Judaism came into the picture, she put a stop to it, because he’s uncircumcised.”

Gruber paid no attention to his words and continued:

“My wife wouldn’t have looked at this place even if it was on the seashore. My wife really likes living next to the sea. When she was a child she lived in Tel Aviv not far from the sea, and ever since then the sea is an essential view-supplement for her.”

“Do you live next to the sea?” asked Propheta, listening with half an ear.

“No. We live in Tel Baruch North. Do you know it?”

“I’m from Motza, next to Jerusalem.”

“Tell me, do you think I don’t know that Motza is next to Jerusalem?”

“Until the age of fifteen,” added Propheta. “After that we moved to Beit Zayit. My parents are still there. In a retirement village, but every day at five in the morning they go to the pool.”

Gruber didn’t ask him if he missed the views of the Jerusalem hills because he wasn’t interested, and in any case, Bahat McPhee was coming down the stairs in neurotic overload. She needed her pills. By the way she walked Propheta could tell that she was suffering from some chemical deprivation or other and that there was no point in talking to her until the chemistry kicked in.

Gruber, ignorant of the problem, stood up.

“Hi, good morning to you.”

She didn’t answer. She walked past them on her way to the kitchen, returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola she had taken out of the fridge, and swallowed the pills clenched in her fist with the help of a sip straight from the bottle.

Gruber said, “In our family everyone has his own drink. My wife introduced this rule so that no one would drink from anyone else’s bottle, on grounds of hygiene.”

“Do you want to drink cola from a bottle?” asked Bahat quietly. “I have a stock of bottles. But not cold.”

“I never drink straight from the bottle,” said Gruber, untruthfully.

Propheta felt a little pang of jealousy, but which he knew was not legitimate. Although he realized that Bahat was not yet focused, he was insulted by the fact that she had not responded to his presence. He hadn’t expected her to fall into his arms, but nor had he expected her to ignore him.

McPhee wondered if she had given him some kind of hint to come. And even if she had, it was a mistake, and she wanted to get rid of him.

But Propheta was determined to protect Bahat McPhee and had no intention of leaving her alone with any devious Israelis. If she didn’t realize that she was being exploited, then thank God he was here. The woman was about to give away to Israel information she had worked on for years, often at the expense of her social life. He thought that if she was really going to give them the right answers, then she had to demand money in return. And there was no reason for her to tell the rabbi from Albany about it. Not everyone had to know everything about everybody.

But he knew that McPhee was set on feeling noble, and that if she took even a single dollar from the Israeli she would feel as if she had betrayed herself.

Bahat, in the end, was a very lonely woman. People who used to be her friends and who used to call her occasionally had deserted her out of consideration because they had persuaded themselves that they didn’t want to disturb the genius at her research. Because of everything she had gone through in her life, and because of her years of loneliness, she tended to lose her sense of proportion and she needed someone to supervise her judgment. Which is where he, Propheta, came into the picture.

He held the opinion that she had been through enough, by which he meant the affair with Emily Boston, and the whole mess that came after it when Randall left her his parents to take care of until the day they died.

He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt this woman, whom he regarded as an angel in human form.

The truth was that Propheta was in love with her, but he knew that she couldn’t stand him physically. To him Bahat was a breath of fresh air in his world, and her social isolation touched his heart. She was mistaken in thinking that when she was a Reform rabbi she would meet people in the framework of her routine, and that they would have to be nice to her, that she would make friends with some of them, and then perhaps she would also find some lover she could stand physically and in whom she would find all the qualities her heart desired, at least for a few years because she was already sick to death of being with spiders all day long.

Propheta was also suspicious of the rabbi from Albany, but he had no way of approaching her. What kind of a person was she? How could the rabbi allow this woman — who anyone could see had been disappointed by the world and who was acting out of utter despair — to pour years of her hard work into the hands of the Israelis? If he understood correctly, she was actually giving up her chance for a Nobel here, and perhaps even risking her liberty. Harming the security of the United States was the last thing she needed.

On the other hand, the danger to relations between the USA and the State of Israel didn’t interest him so much as a hair of his mustache, which had once been ginger and was now a yellowish gray. On this point Propheta thought that as a logistics officer in the reserves he was no mean strategist because he was perhaps the only one here who thought things through to the end.

BAHAT SAW THE TRANSMISSION of information to Gruber as an excellent way out of the condition of being buried alive that she had organized for herself over the past few years. When she set the two things opposite each other — the modification of the gene responsible for the activity of the spinning glands in the spiders, opposite the title of Reform rabbi, which meant a lively social life, and what’s more, one without feeling that she was imposing herself on people because she would be serving them by the very fact of her presence — it was very clear to her which of the two she preferred.

The sign that she was doing the right thing she found in the terrible headaches which assailed her before she had decided between the two. As long as they continued, alternating between the left side of her head and then the right, she felt torn between her loyalty to the United States and her loyalty to herself. But the moment she made up her mind, they vanished into thin air.

“I don’t feel like coffee,” she suddenly said sadly, and it seemed that only then she noticed the presence of the parrot that was now perched on the windowsill. But she ignored it.

“Do you want me to make you chai?” asked Propheta happily.

“Yes, but I haven’t got any cardamom.”

“I know you haven’t. I took note of it,” he smiled at her and she smiled back at him, a perfunctory smile, not from the heart but out of embarrassment.

McPhee approached the sofa where Gruber was sitting.

“After the chai we’ll go to visit my spider farm,” she said. “And in the meantime the pills will take effect.”

“What pills do you take?” asked Gruber with affected empathy.

“None of your business,” she said, and he was horrified by her bluntness.

Suddenly breaking news came on the television. A mass terror attack in Geneva. The first pictures. Exclusive.

All three turned their eyes to the screen, two of them as if what was now being shown on the television was an earthquake of seven points on the Richter scale in the third world. There were things that had to be done.

“Is anywhere safe from them?” murmured Gruber in the voice of decent humanity.

Propheta said, “It would be better if I didn’t say what I think.”

“Much better,” said Bahat carelessly.

Propheta was insulted again, but what could he do. This was the path he had chosen.

“I have to phone home. I haven’t spoken to my family since I arrived,” said Gruber urgently, as if the attack had taken place in Israel and his family was in danger.

“It must be night in Israel,” said Propheta without a second thought.

“Ahh,” said Gruber, “my wife must be sleeping. She goes to bed at nine o’clock. My son, if he isn’t sleeping, is taking part in some targeted intervention. And my daughter is singing lullabies to her boyfriend’s organic vegetables in the Negev. I’ll call them in a few hours’ time. So they won’t be worried about me.”

8

IN THE MORNING, AFTER EVERYONE HAD GONE TO WORK, Lirit sat in the shopping center Mikado in Café au Lait, where they only served coffee without milk in special circumstances, and she waited for ages for the latte in a mug she had ordered. Lirit really wanted to complain to the owner, but what good would it do her. She surveyed the scene. In a shallow pool eight disciplined openings gave rise to a meter-and-a-half high jet, which fell dead straight onto itself, God forbid a drop should stray from the regime imposed on it by the designer. They told the designer without a lot of splashing, and he did as he was told. To the left was a pizza parlor called Big Apple Pizza. The shopping center was quite empty, because the children who usually hung out there were in school. At last they had opened a school here in the neighborhood. The mothers had been going crazy from driving their kids to distant schools every morning.

The latte in a mug arrived and Lirit told the waitress that she had been waiting for more than ten minutes. The waitress replied that that was how long you waited here for latte in a mug.

Lirit didn’t like coffee. But a day and a bit after her mother’s death, this was the least she could do in her memory: drink a latte in a mug. She didn’t yet feel pain at the loss. She was indifferent, as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it was the shock, she thought to herself.

Earlier that morning she had quarreled with Dael, who wanted to return to his base. He said that in any case there was no funeral because their mother had donated her body to science, and no shivah either, and in any case they had lost track of their father in the USA, and they didn’t want to see anybody anyway — so what the point in him staying?

In the end Lirit thought that he was right, and he went back to the field. But yesterday he had managed to take care of placing death notices in the street and in the three newspapers. On the way to the café Lirit passed one of the notices and read it. Lirit thought generally that perhaps she would study graphic design. She had never actually read a death notice before. And one about her mother too.

She looked round and came across more death notices about her mother, as well as one about somebody else whose family had gone for a normal funeral in Kiryat Shaul. What was all this bereavement suddenly? She was angry because it seemed so irrelevant to her family. They whole place suddenly seemed to her like some habitation of ghosts. She had hardly made it to Café au Lait.

It jarred her to see her mother’s name plastered all over Alexander Penn Street, but that was the reality, she reminded herself again. Twice she stopped to read the notices that Dael had composed for the street. The other one he published in the newspapers. While she drank her coffee she went over both of them in her mind:

Our beloved

Amanda (Mandy) Gruber née Greenholtz

Has suddenly left us

And donated her body to science.

Please refrain from condolence calls.

Her dear ones.

And the notice in the newspapers said:

The textile factory Nighty-Night

Bows its head

At the untimely death of its manager

Amanda (Mandy) Gruber of blessed memory,

A warm, diligent, and benevolent woman,

And offers its condolences to the family.

After she finished her coffee she had no idea what to do with herself. She was simply completely paralyzed, but it was clear to her, and this actually helped her, that she wasn’t going to any factory today. At maximum, she would answer the phone in the event that people from the factory, or her father’s jet set, wanted to offer their condolences. But people would want to know how, when, why she died, and Lirit didn’t have the motivation to tell the whole story of her deterioration over and over again. She decided that never mind the gossip and the rumors, she was going to disconnect all the telephones.

But what if her father called? How could she disconnect the phones? But screen the calls, yes. Local calls she could screen, but if there was an unidentified caller, and it turned out not to be her father, she would just say it was the wrong number.

She went back to staring at the fountain with the jet falling onto itself, and she remembered how her mother used to say that it wouldn’t do anybody in the Levant any good, however much they played at being in Europe or Los Angeles, they didn’t have the first idea about aesthetics. “It’s only now that they’re beginning to get it into their heads, Liritush,” she said to her once, “but they’re already in the swing of building a state and they can’t change their style.”

She couldn’t remember if her mother had made any criticisms of Tel Baruch North as well. Lirit actually thought that the fact that there wasn’t a drop of Zionism in the place made it international, and the fact that there wasn’t any socialism made it progressive. True, she didn’t say this out loud, because of Shlomi, who after his one-time visit said that it was enough to look at the people’s faces and see how they behaved to conclude that they were hedonistic Israelis in a new suburb of North Tel Aviv, interested in nothing but themselves.

And indeed, after sitting there staring for an hour she could see so for herself: women a little bit older than she was, and also of thirty and forty plus, all of them with Ray-Ban glasses, smartly dressed from top to toe, going from shop to shop, and parallel to them, grannies with pigmentation problems running after grand-children, one or two of whom were escaping in the direction of the escalators and standing there wailing at the top of their voices, and in the end the grannies gave in and rode up and down the moving stairs again and again and again. Where was she going to get the patience for all this?

No pause in the routine in memory of the dead Mandy. Everything as usual. Lirit looked at a new clothing store that called itself FREEDOM. Opposite it in a Delta store, there was an end of the season sale of tank tops for toddlers: three for sixteen dollars. She thought that everything here was relatively cute, but she didn’t have the strength for it now. The coffee had not woken her up, it had made her want to go to sleep, or more precisely, to disappear.

She was only twenty-two, and her mother’s death was really too heavy for her. And she hadn’t really taken in the fact yet that she had inherited a pajama factory that marketed its products to the ultra-orthodox sector, and that she had to pick up the pieces and step smartly into her mother’s shoes.

BUT TOWARD NOON she called Nighty-Night on her cell phone, and told her mother’s right-hand woman, Carmela Levy, that she wouldn’t be coming in for the next few days. But of course she wouldn’t be coming in, said Carmela Levy, and Lirit, who was still sitting in Cafe au Lait listened to a few more condolences, including wonder at the fact that the deceased had donated her body to science and had not asked for a civil burial in a coffin, which would have been far more her style, like the soldiers in the IDF. The two of them had talked about it. But now perhaps she too would donate her body to science.

Suddenly Lirit understood that science benefited from the dead who donated their bodies to it, and that science was actually humanity, and that it was a kind of feedback. She herself didn’t want to be part of this feedback, with all due respect to the cycles in nature. In order to get away from the subject of bodies and science, Lirit said in a gloomy voice that ever since the blow that had come down on them, she couldn’t leave the house, and she even wondered if she should tell Carmela that they had lost contact with their father. But in the end it was lucky that she didn’t tell her, or she would have kept her for another half an hour on the phone.

In conclusion Lirit asked her to convey a message to the workers. She knew — she stressed in a tone that sounded a bit as if she was on television — that her mother would have asked them to carry on. Despite everything. To sew. To work. To produce. Not to let her death confuse them and weaken their resolve. That is what she would have wanted.

“Definitely,” said Carmela in an almost holy tone.

AFTER THE CONVERSATION Carmela retired to some corner in the factory yard behind a tree, and cried, and wiped her eyes with the cloth handkerchief she kept about her person, as her boss had done, God bless her soul. She had learned many delicacies and refinements from her.

She was also anxious about the future. Judging by what she had heard from Mandy over the years, she had good reason to fear Lirit. Lirit was unpredictable. It was Carmela who had given Mandy the advice worth its weight in gold to give Lucas money and send him back to Jamaica. Lately, with Lirit living with someone twice her age, Carmela Levy had waited together with Mandy Gruber for the affair to come to a sticky end.

ONLY ON HER WAY HOME did Lirit realize that she had no more economic problems. It was a reassuring thought, and she made up her mind not to change anything in the short term, to study the subject even though she already knew it, having spent whole summers helping her mother manage the business.

She thought about the long term when she got home, and considered her sudden freedom. What was she going to do in the long term? She didn’t know. Perhaps she would turn Nighty-Night inside out, perhaps she would at long last renovate the place outside and especially inside, and march it into the twenty-first century.

It wasn’t at all impossible that she would examine, in the long term of course, the necessity of at long last changing the target market for the pajamas, and also of touching on the holy of holies, the five patterns exclusive to Nighty-Night, which had long been out of date. Mandy was as stubborn as a mule: she was prepared for there to be only stripes, in two versions; checks, in a one-and-only version for all ages; one floral pattern; and also a pajama in a plain fabric, but in all colors.

The patterns had hardly changed at all since Audrey’s time and to the new heir they seemed old fashioned and even repulsive, but in the meantime her mother’s ghost prevented her from coming to any decision.

She sat down on the sofa and sank into a black mood.

Is this it? she asked herself. Am I going to be buried in a pajama factory for the ultra-Orthodox from now on? Forever? Is this my life? Is this my vocation? Warp and woof for cold nights with no fear of impurities?

She sighed and tried to comfort herself that it wasn’t the end of the world even though it was the end of the world for her, and that perhaps she should take a bold step and transfer production to Turkey or China, and in Israel she would get someone else to do the marketing and who would work on commission. In the space of five minutes Lirit made a hundred decisions, including selling the factory, running away and leaving everything to Dael and their father, marrying Shlomi and then getting divorced from him. Somewhere or other in the framework of what might be called Lirit’s Dream, there was also a plan for an exclusive line of organic cotton (that would be without any fear whatsoever of impurities), which went hand in hand with the overall renovation of the factory.

THE PHONE RANG. On the screen of her upgraded cell phone she saw that it was an overseas call. Instead of rushing to reply, she let it ring, and only after seven or eight rings she took a deep breath and answered. A hard task awaited her.

But her father never let the flow of his words arrest itself, and as usual she couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Right off he started talking in a big hurry, as if he was speaking on a pay phone and he had no more change left. All the urgency in the world belonged to him. It was inconceivable that something fateful could have happened somewhere else.

He was sorry for not being in contact for the past three days, but he had forgotten his cell phone in Israel, and also he needed the holiday, especially as it wasn’t a holiday at all, it was work. There wasn’t a lot left, they had already been working for four days. He was taking what he required for the continuation of his TESU research and coming home in a day or two. It was morning where he was now, and what was the time over there? He was very happy and satisfied and eager to get back with the results.

He sounded distant and strange to her. She couldn’t believe that he was the only parent they had left, Dael and she. Would it occur to him to ask how she was? How his wife was? Usually he called to hear himself talking to his family.

Lirit let him finish his monologue down to the last detail, including the fact that he was now in the laboratory with his American colleague, and only then, a second before he was about to say goodbye, she delivered the bitter blow in full.

“Why are you only telling me now?” her father yelled down the line, “What are you saying to me all of a sudden?”

At this point there was silence, as if they had been disconnected, and Lirit asked twice, “Hello?” and then,

“Daddy, are you all right?”

“I’m here, I’m here,” he said weakly, and suddenly he seemed to wake up, “What do you mean she donated her body to science? Is she crazy?”

“So there’s no funeral, right? Only after six months or something?” he added after another silence.

“Yes,” said Lirit.

“I don’t understand this business of donating to science,” he said, “It isn’t her style.”

“That’s what she wanted,” said Lirit.

Only now he asked how she was bearing up, and without waiting for an answer he asked how Dael was.

She said that she hadn’t taken it in yet. It all seemed like a dream. Everything was falling apart. And how was she going to take her mother’s place at the factory, because that was what Mandy wanted? And altogether, how was she going to go on living without her? And without Shlomi too, because they’d split up. And how were they going to get through this hell by themselves, with him far away?

In the face of so many questions, her father asked her first of all to calm down. After that he gathered his strength and told her that however hard it was — and he knew that it was terrible for her, really devastating, and he too felt very bad about it — she should please, please introduce a little logic into the situation.

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” said Lirit.

In fact, it was clear to her that this would be the first or second thing that he would say, that she should introduce logic into the situation. Anyone whose life went off the rails, and who saw it fit to confide in her father, was told to please introduce logic into the situation.

“Good,” said her father, and added, “Be strong, Liritush. Be strong.”

And then,

“Listen, Liritush, I’m a little stunned and confused, darling, I’ll call again later.”

ACROSS THE OCEAN Bahat looked at Irad with great compassion, but also with concern. She didn’t understand much from what she could gather from the telephone conversation. Only that someone, perhaps a close friend of his daughter’s, had died and had donated her body to science, and that his daughter was in a state of total collapse. Would he shorten his stay here in order to be with her? He refused to answer her repeated question, what happened, and returned immediately to the computer. But his silence was suspicious. Was she witnessing a new chaos breaking into her life? Were all her plans about to blow up in her face? It had taken her two days before she succeeded in tactfully getting rid of Propheta, that Jew who was sick with some mental disease that didn’t interest her. He had appointed himself her bodyguard and prevented them from getting on with their work. Only yesterday and today were they finally making progress.

She looked at Gruber, who went on browsing in the depths of the computer as if nothing had happened, but who looked as if he was going to faint.

“I’ve had a terrible shock,” he said suddenly. “I feel giddy. My pulse must be racing. Maybe I’m going to faint. Maybe I’m starting a heart attack.”

“Maybe you’ll tell me at last what exactly happened?” asked Bahat and came closer.

“My wife died from plastic surgery,” he said.

“So that’s it! How terrible! Would you like a glass of water?”

“Please,” mumbled Gruber and held his heart.

She went to fetch him a glass of water.

“There’s no need to sink into the deep mire,” she said from a distance, “It’s a terrible shock, but there’s no need to descend into a low dungeon. You’ll go home and attend to things. At times like this you should be strong and practical. Do you understand me? You need to introduce logic into the situation. You need to be strong in order to take care of your children, who must be in a bad way. You said that she donated her body to science? So there’s no reason to get pressured about the funeral. .”

Gruber had already fainted on the floor. Bahat was in a panic. Leah Shlezinger, the Reform rabbi from Albany, was supposed to come the next day to get Gruber’s signature on the secret document that would enable Bahat to obtain her title in exchange for transmitting information to Israel. The two of them were supposed to confirm to the rabbi that Bahat hadn’t received any kickbacks and that she had performed an act of pure charity for the sake of the State of Israel.

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

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

He opened his eyes.

“Did I faint?” he asked.

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

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

“Did you call an ambulance?” he asked.

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

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

“I have to go back!” he said.

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

She hurried to bring him cold water. He drank.

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

“What an idiot. .” mumbled Gruber.

“Who?” asked Bahat apprehensively.

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

9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” said Lirit. “I live opposite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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