Textile

1

GRUBER’S FLIGHT TO NEW YORK (JFK), AND FROM THERE TO Israel by El Al, was supposed to depart from Ithaca at six in the morning. At four forty-five Bahat woke him up, full of a joy the likes of which she had not known for a long time. A new era was opening. She was smartly dressed and made up, as if she was going out on a date, not driving to the quaint Ithaca airport.

So intense was her desire for Gruber to be gone that if she could have she would have flown him as far as Cyprus herself. Anything further than that she considered too dangerous.

She went up to the guest room where the guest was sleeping. The door was slightly ajar. She went in and called his name three or four times. When he didn’t answer she came closer to the bed and even shook him, until he opened red eyes and said,

“Leave me alone, Bahat. Let me sleep.”

“But your plane leaves at six. You have to go to the airport now. Come on, your suitcase is already in the trunk, I packed it myself. You fell asleep with your clothes on, so just get up and freshen yourself up and let’s go. I found you a new toothbrush because I already packed yours.”

“Five more minutes,” said Gruber and went back to sleep.

Five minutes passed, and the story repeated itself until in the end Gruber sat up in bed with his eyes closed and sighed bitterly. Bahat thought he was groaning in pain and her heart went out to him.

“My dear,” she said gently, “we undergo hard things in our lives. But we have to carry on. You must get up,” she bent over him. “You have responsibilities.”

“Yes, but there’s no funeral, right? So I’ll leave on the next flight. It isn’t a tragedy. You know why?” He stood up, his eyes still closed, and his clothes smelling of alcohol, sweat, and other smells banned by international conventions. “Because the tragedy has already happened. The tragedy is behind us.”

“You have a responsibility to your children to be united with them in your grief. To seclude yourselves.”

“What business is it of yours in the first place?” asked Gruber in a kind of illumination and he opened his eyes for a minute. “Where do you get off telling me to seclude myself. Why should anybody in the world tell me how to behave in a time of trouble? What’s important is where I can go on sleeping now. All the bedclothes are stinking. I need fresh clothes. I sweated like a pig last night.”

“If you like I’ll change your bedclothes right now,” said Bahat on her way out of the room.

“Why change the bedclothes!” Gruber called after her. “Just bring me some dry tracksuit. And hurry up, I don’t want to wake up, or I won’t be able to get back to sleep.” He sat down and closed his eyes again.

“Okay,” said Bahat and hurried to the walk-in closet. She still didn’t get where the Israeli was going with this, or maybe he was simply broken up and he wasn’t going anywhere. She came back with an Adidas tracksuit. Gruber was already waiting for her half naked, having thrown his dirty shirt onto the floor like a boy.

“Give it to me,” he said. He put on the tracksuit, and went back to sleep.

Bahat thought it was a question of aftereffect and delayed reaction. At the most, he would miss this flight and leave tomorrow. The airport was open tomorrow too. It wasn’t the end of the world. Nevertheless, she wasn’t cut out for decadent enigmas, but for charging ahead.

She sat down in the living room and waited. There was nothing more for her to do. There was no longer any need or point to escaping into the spider research. She went to her Jewish bookshelf and took down a volume of the Talmud and tried to read it, but she had zero focus.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Irad came downstairs and apologized profusely. He said that he was simply no longer capable of distinguishing between what was important and what wasn’t important. Bahat said that it was only human to behave strangely in situations of distress, and that it was impossible to expect everyone to be at their best every day, what he had done yesterday was enough, he was definitely head and shoulders above the average person.

She put his coffee down in front of him.

“How about a snack? Something sweet?” she asked.

“No thank you,” he replied, and after a minute he said:

“I’ve come to a conclusion.”

“Yes?” asked Bahat curiously.

“I’m not going back to Israel. At least not soon. I need more time before I go back there. I’m staying here in the meantime, if you don’t mind. I really like your bedroom and the direction of the view; it faces east, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s change, just for a few days. You get the morning sun. I don’t want to get rickets. My room doesn’t have a serious window.”

Bahat wanted to react to the criticism and tell him that she didn’t see any need for enlarging the window in the guest room since she hardly had any guests, and certainly not for long enough to make them worry about the shortcomings of the room.

“I’d like to stay in your room for a few days,” said Gruber, “and for you to sleep in the room you gave me. Just for a few days. .”

“But your children, and the terror suit project — what do you call it — the TESU.”

“My children,” he said and wrung his hands. “They have already received the blow. And now they’re ready to absorb the next one. I won’t let them know. They’ll understand for themselves. This way they’ll get it into their heads gradually. Not in a boom. I won’t answer the phone, and you’ll say that I’ve gone and you don’t know where. No,” he paused, “that’s too dramatic, I will speak to them. If they ring, I’ll talk to them.”

“And the project?”

“Last night I sent the defense minister an email. That there’s news, there’s a breakthrough, and the critics and slanderers can shut their mouths. I didn’t go into detail, so he wouldn’t take the credit at my expense. I said I was on my way. That doesn’t mean I have to be there to kowtow to him in two days’ time. Let him crawl a bit himself. There’s no question about it, Bahat, it’s a great achievement.”

For the first time she noticed that for a while now he had been calling her by her first name, and it pleased her because he pronounced the h so beautifully, with a lot of aspiration, and didn’t turn her into Bay-hat like the Americans did.

He went on:

“All you have to do, Bahat, is to understand that this is the reaction of a very sensitive man, whose ship of life has reached the gulf of oblivion. I myself haven’t yet taken in this duality, that on the one hand you’ve given me the data, and on the other hand my wife is dead and I’m a widower, can you believe it? Me? A widower? I feel as if the laws of physics have changed.”

He rested his brow on his hand, and what could Bahat say?

After a silence he added:

“I think that five hundred dollars a week, including food and laundry, would be very reasonable. Can you wheel my suitcase back in from the car?”

Bahat froze in her place, still confused.

“Irad Gruber, you are a very unusual person,” she said in the end, taut as a spring. Her nervous system reacted before she did. “Who else is like you? And who do you really care about?”

“Obviously I care about my children and my work. And my poor wife. And myself of course. But I can’t move until I restart, do you understand?”

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

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

Bahat blushed. He’d read Saint-Exupéry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sitting shivah?”

“That’s what they said he said.”

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

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

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

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

“What?” asked Bahat.

“My daughter wants to talk to you.”

She took the receiver and said,

“Hello?”

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

“What do you mean?” asked Bahat.

“How is he acting?”

“Listen—”

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

“Every word,” said Bahat.

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

Bahat went down to the ground floor and said:

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

“Is he eating?” asked Lirit.

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

“Is he drinking?”

“Coffee nonstop.”

“No, I’m asking about alcohol.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I very much hope so,” said Bahat.

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s sleeping.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You and I are actually in the same position as far as gravity is concerned,” Mandy said to her on the same occasion, having just undergone breast-lifting surgery.

After they had each bought two bras, and they went down to the underground parking garage, they heard people in the elevator talking about some new outrage that had taken place an hour ago. Mandy was stressed out until she extracted the information vital to her from the passengers in the elevator: the casualties were civilian.

“I don’t even care about civilians anymore,” she said when they got out of the elevator, “only about soldiers. You know?” she looked at her nodding daughter. “About children and babies I don’t feel anything anymore. I don’t want to know anything about them. Not four year olds and not one year olds. Or one month. But when a soldier dies, I die. I think about his mother. Naturally after I find out that I’m not his mother. If it happens to my son, I’ll kill myself on the spot. I’m sure a lot of mothers feel the same way. My life’s not worth living without Dael.”

“And without me is your life worth living?”

“You’ll manage very well without me,” said Mandy and pressed the remote that opened with a shriek the car whose beauty stood out even among the cars of the shoppers at the Ramat Aviv mall.

“And Daddy?”

“Your father doesn’t need anyone,” said Mandy and made her way through the parking garage to the exit to Einstein Street.

She dawdled a bit, because it was their old neighborhood, and they even passed their old house at 44 Tagore Street, and sat and looked for a moment at the place where they used to live, and then they continued driving east on Keren Kayemet Avenue.

While Lirit was remembering all the above, Bahat was trying to call her, but Lirit didn’t hear the ring because she was playing a tape very loudly to herself. The radio had been tuned to a station playing Hebrew songs, but Lirit had soon put a stop to that.

Accordingly, Bahat was obliged to remain with the facts seething inside her, without an outlet in Israel.

She wanted to complain to Lirit, or anyone, about the phenomenon of Gruber, and she wanted to demand that Lirit come and get him. No, enough was enough, she couldn’t stand him anymore.

It was the little things that broke her. Gruber left the bathroom in a disgusting state, even if he only went in to brush his teeth and comb his hair. He behaved as if seven chambermaids were following him around wherever he went. And in the toilet, the way he urinated annoyed her. It was many years since she had had to clean leftover urine from the toilet bowl. And now that she had to do it again, she felt great annoyance.

The man, it turned out, raised the toilet seat, but failed to lower it again, and sometimes, albeit rarely, he didn’t even take the trouble to raise it, and this, in her opinion, was the height of chutzpah. Who did he think he was, an animal? He finished the toilet paper and didn’t change the roll. And he still had the nerve to argue that Mandy had allowed him not to change it, because he had trouble with the spring. What kind of an argument was that? Was that the way he behaved with his wife, or did he think that his wife’s laws were valid for her as well?

She began to detest the guest more and more, and he, for his part, grew more and more demanding and dependent, and was convinced that everything he did stemmed from his outburst of feelings for Bahat. All this was not at all what the enthusiastic Reform rabbi had in mind. The prayer shawl, and the big skullcap, which she hadn’t yet decided whether to wear or not, were in a drawer in her closet, folded up.

For three nights now she had been sleeping in the rarely used guest room, while he lay sprawled on her comfortable bed. He sweated so much at night, because of the objective situation, that she was obliged to change his sheets every day. He asked to be involved in the choice of sheets, because he claimed that Bahat’s bed linen was depressing.

She was also repelled by his negligence, by his failure to return to Israel with the information she had given him in order to continue his experiments with the requisite urgency. Every day that passed claimed more victims who could have been saved if he hadn’t thought only of himself, and she patted herself on the shoulder, noting that her thoughts were becoming more and more moral.

From time to time he said to her, “I love you,” in English. And also “I love you very much.” It was impossible to tell anything from these declarations because they were in blatant contradiction to his behavior. It was clear to her that he had completely freaked out, and she only hoped that his love would be short-lived, like that of the Hispanic Salazar: two weeks of sensual intoxication, and after that as if nothing had happened, coolness lacking in tension, but empathy and outstanding efficiency.

Bahat had a theory that her latest discoveries about the silk protein were made possible by spare libido, at least on her part. As for Salazar, she had no idea what motivated him, but his ideas were brilliant.

In the end she despaired of her attempts to contact Lirit and she decided to take things into her own hands. As long as the seven days of mourning for his wife lasted (Gruber began the shivah from the moment he was informed of her death), she would show restraint. After that she would assert herself.

3

ON THE NIGHT BETWEEN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH DAY of mourning, Gruber wet the bed. Since Bahat was sleeping in the guest room she was spared the direct experience, although he did call her in the middle of the night to change the sheets.

As far as Bahat was concerned this was a sign to phone a psychiatrist and request an urgent home visit. The effort of persuading the squatter to leave the house and go to the psychiatrist’s office seemed to her an investment of energy that she needed for herself and which she wasn’t about to put at Gruber’s disposal, not even out of philanthropy.

She opened the Ithaca Yellow Pages and looked up the number of the well-known medical center of the town. There she obtained the name of a psychiatrist who she assumed, like every other psychiatrist in the world, received private patients as well. She spoke to his secretary at his official place of work and found a pretext for getting his home and cell phone numbers out of her.

The man’s name was Bill Stanton. A healthy instinct led her to the conclusion that Gruber should on no account be seen by a female psychiatrist. Stanton said that he would drop in on his way to work. No, he didn’t take money for the first consultation, only for the second. She asked if a home visit had to be paid for anyway, and he said that in this case too he only took money for the second visit. This was his conception, he said and laughed, he believed that it was enough for a person to have to see a psychiatrist, he didn’t have to pay for it as well.

But McPhee was suspicious of this argument because she had heard of the new community founded by one thousand of the twenty thousand whites (20,893 white citizens, who constituted 71.3 percent of the population of the town). Anyone in Ithaca could be a member of the new community, even if he was one of the 460 Puerto Ricans in the town, or one of the 125 Vietnamese. Whether he was man over eighteen of any race and color (13,433), or a woman over eighteen of any race and color (13,149).

This community had set itself the goal of increasing the goodness inherent in all human beings, of all sectors and genders, and it was called the Goodwill Community. All the members happened to be whites who lived on the outskirts of the town and provided themselves with all the services they required not for money, but through a system of barter. And as for the rest of the inhabitants of Ithaca, whether they belonged to the 1,555 Hispanics (or Latino-Americans, according to the accepted usage of the day), or the 1,965 Afro-Americans, or Chinese by origin (1,659), or of any other race (356), they were all entitled to significant reductions. They enjoyed the services of the Goodwill Community for a symbolic fee, which was itself donated to charity.

The fact that Dr. Bill Stanton turned out to be a member of the Goodwill Community bothered Bahat, because she was afraid she would hesitate to ask him for all kinds of extras on his home visit.

McPhee wasn’t prepared for charitable freebies. She wanted an accurate diagnosis, but at the same time as comprehensive as possible.

DR. BILL STANTON arrived the same day. He spoke to Gruber in his room for a long time, and afterward he came out to Bahat, who was waiting in suspense in the hallway.

He told her that he was hesitating between a diagnosis of recurrent major depression with symptoms of compulsive behavior (including the symptom of his falling in love with her), and post-traumatic stress disorder, in which case his depression, and all his bizarre behavior, including the falling in love, were only a side effect of the disorder.

He had no doubt that Gruber was a borderline case, and in view of his other doubts regarding the diagnosis, he asked for permission to use the telephone in order to consult a colleague, since the medication for the two conditions was different.

“Medication?” asked Bahat.

“Yes.”

He spoke for about five minutes on the phone and then he explained:

“We try one kind of medication, and if it works, we continue, and if it doesn’t, it’s a sign that it’s the second possibility, and in this way we arrive at the right medication, in the hope that it is indeed right. In any case, it will take two or three weeks, or even more, to see what works, and judging by what works we’ll know what’s wrong with him.”

“Dr. Stanton,” said Bahat with all the restraint at her command, “this man is an Israeli. He isn’t an American citizen. He has no visa to stay here. Who knows if he even has medical insurance. His presence here is actually illegal. He came here to give me information. I received the information. He can go back to his own country. And as for the trauma, it’s simple: his wife died a little over a week ago, and that’s the whole trauma.”

“The trauma predates the death of his wife,” said Stanton. “This isn’t a fresh trauma. I can recognize a fresh trauma when I see one.”

“I can recognize a fresh trauma too,” said Bahat, red in the face with rage, “this person simply went crazy in front of my eyes and he needs to be committed to an institution! He has two children waiting for him in Israel. Two motherless children. They don’t understand what’s going on. Give him an injection and we’ll send him back to where he came from.”

Stanton laughed.

“Mrs. McPhee, we don’t use those methods here. And speaking personally I don’t think I could do it either,” he added. And then he said quietly, “As far as I’m concerned, as soon as I turn my back you can throw him into the street. Where he’ll be arrested for vagrancy. There are policemen everywhere now. There was fighting among the Natives (there are 289 Native Americans in Ithaca) and the police are patrolling all the streets. I’m sure he’ll be arrested for vagrancy, and I have no doubt that in his condition he doesn’t really remember your address. .”

At this point he raised his voice again,

“So what do we have here, Mrs. McPhee? We have denial of reality — what it stems from has yet to be ascertained.”

“And if the pills don’t take effect in three weeks?”

“Then we’ll try the post-traumatic treatment.”

“Because of the death of his wife?” Bahat insisted.

“No,” said Stanton. “He reacted to his wife’s death by falling obsessively in love with you.”

“I understand,” said Bahat. “In other words, six weeks maximum?”

“More or less,” said the doctor.

“I don’t believe it,” said Bahat, with tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand.”

Stanton decided to invest a little more in this woman; he laid his hand on her shoulder and said:

“My bet is that he’s post-traumatic, but I want to eliminate the depression first. And then get him onto a post-traumatic protocol. The medication for depression works faster than the post-trauma medication, and we should try to shorten the period of uncertainty as much as possible.”

“Interesting,” murmured McPhee.

Stanton continued, “He told me that they recently moved into a new neighborhood. That’s the trauma. There’s a certain tree there, a type of palm, that he detests. He prefers their old house, but he and his wife, the one who died, have already sold it.”

“So what do we do now?” she asked. “On the twentieth of next month I have an ordination. It’s a very serious ceremony. I have to prepare. I have to write a speech. He makes so much noise. I can’t put up with it.”

“I’ve already told you what I can suggest. Now I must go. There’s no lack of trouble in the world.”

He left.

BAHAT TRIED Lirit again, without success. She toyed with the idea of sending him out to buy bread in the hope that he would get lost. But on second thoughts she decided that she didn’t want to endanger the special status she had gained in the eyes of Schlesinger, the Albany Reform rabbi. If this man wandered round outside, she was almost sure that with his extroversion, even Schlesinger would hear that he was still in America and understand that the Israelis had not yet made any use of the classified information, and then the whole loneliness-alleviating project would go down the drain.

She dropped onto the living-room sofa in despair. From Gruber’s room on the second floor she heard Edith Bunker’s voice screeching “Ar-chie!”—and the intruder’s hoarse wheezing laugh.

She switched on the television and stared at the National Geographic channel. Yes, she would be better off letting the anarchy rage around her, and watching something more organized, such as the nesting of the condor.

She fell asleep for a few minutes, and when she woke up she saw Irad standing and looking at her. He was unshaven and even from a distance reeked of every possible kind of odor, perhaps he had even brought some of them with him from Israel. He said, this time without a hint of demand,

“I’m hungry.”

“Eat something.”

“I don’t know how to cook for myself, but I’ll keep you company while you cook. That’s what I used to do in the old house. Sit in the kitchen and talk to Mandy. There was room in the kitchen there.”

“And in the new house there isn’t any?”

“There isn’t any room, and Mandy isn’t there either,” he said and sank into despair.

“Omelet or scrambled egg?” asked Bahat with forced brightness and made for the kitchen.

“Scrambled,” said Irad.

4

LIRIT TRIED ON HER MOTHER’S BURGUNDY BRA. SHE wanted to see if Mandy was right when she said in the Ramat Aviv mall that from the point of view of gravity they were both equal. Mandy’s bra was too big for her. Her mother was mistaken. She had only had a breast lift, not a breast reduction.

Now she was about to set out for a very important meeting on Kibbutz Kissufim, and she dressed with an elegance suitable to Israel, without too much joie de vivre. After exhaustive inquiries, in the course of which she had encountered the usual wall of silence encountered by people trying to clarify something (it being human nature to retreat when faced by the possibility of clarification, for all kinds of reasons of survival), she had reached a certain Oron de Bouton, who for some years had been growing organic cotton of the Pima variety on Kibbutz Kissufim, by sub-surface drip irrigation.

It took her a long time to understand what was meant by sub-surface drip irrigation, but the minute she understood she thought she was a genius.

Now she was on her way to find what it meant, in terms of threads and money, to get into the market of organic cotton.

Let the workers in the factory carry on making pajamas for the ultra-Orthodox sector until further notice, she said to herself. That was all for the best. And in the meantime she herself would carry on going ahead with her inquiries. It actually suited her for her father to be having some scene with himself and someone else as crazy as he was, who had also spent years of her life with spiders. Now she, Lirit, was truly free. It was ridiculous what her father was doing with his life when he could be sitting at home and making a decent living from regular textile, without all the sensations and headaches. After all, he wasn’t an idiot, he must know that the safest thing today was to go for textile that already existed, which he had at home.

Lirit was only twenty-two, and look how much experience of life she already had. There was no need to go to America, she added to herself, it was enough to go to Kibbutz Kissufim.

Even though she didn’t say so to herself in so many words, Lirit had been wounded to the depths of her soul by her father’s failure to return to Israel at such a difficult time, and she didn’t know if she could ever forgive him. There were probably cultures where they stoned people for this kind of thing without thinking twice. With all due respect to him and his Israel Prize, this time he had gone too far. She wasn’t going to forgive him.

Lirit had already found an outlet for her anger in the poor seamstresses at Nighty-Night. She took advantage of the atmosphere of anxiety surrounding them, and threw her weight around like a true autocrat, not of these times. Her mother would no doubt have been proud of her. Perhaps it was in her DNA.

And anyway, why shouldn’t they be afraid? What was she supposed to do about it? Life isn’t a picnic, Mandy would warn her whenever she was happy. She too was afraid of upsetting the status quo, especially if it was working well, but the status quo was so boring, and she knew that if she wanted to love this place (i.e. Nighty-Night), she was going to have to march it ahead. In the first place, change its name to something more up-to-date, transfer the production to China, which was several times cheaper than Turkey, and yes, let a large part of the workers go, with or without mercy. Instead of the fired workers, she would bring in ambitious young girls with gel and tattoos, graduates of the Shenkar Textile Design School, or talented foreigners, who had all kinds of weird ideas on subjects she had never heard of because with old Shlomi from Brosh on the border of Te’ashur she had stagnated. Now she wanted to get back into the swing of things.

The workers at Nighty-Night weren’t living on a cloud either, and they already knew that a big change was about to take place in their lives: perhaps they would join the ranks of the unemployed, and from there slide into the vicious cycle of poverty, from which it was very difficult to emerge.

Lirit thought that she deserved to be congratulated. Her mother died, and she didn’t break. On the contrary. She was strong and she was coping very well. She gave herself “Very good” in a teacher’s handwriting. She was doing everything. Bringing herself up-to-date while also going forward. Yes, indeed. In some sense, life was miraculous. From a disappointment to her parents, a nothing with a boyfriend twice her age — and now she could already admit to herself boring, so boring (someone who photographed floods and flowers, with cameras and lenses that nobody dared to show in public anymore) — she had in a few days turned into the industrious and independent owner of a factory, without any additions to her beautiful back, with perfect shoulder blades like the ones her late mother had in her youth, and she was about to enter the Israeli pajama market with something amazing by any standard, organic cotton of the Pima variety grown by sub-surface drip irrigation on Kibbutz Kissufim of the United Kibbutz Movement.

It was going to be a huge success! Because what did people have left to rely on if not their pajamas. Let them too be made of natural materials. Let the stuff that enveloped their natural nightmares be natural too, and fit in with them harmoniously.

They started to play an irritating song on the radio. In general, Lirit didn’t know three-quarters of the songs they played, which in her opinion was a shame and disgrace. She listened carefully to the words of the presenters introducing the songs she didn’t know, as if she was sitting in a math class and had to remember the equations.

She switched to another station and the strains of a different band began to proudly review the new composition of her life. Suddenly she grew melancholy. What are you doing? You have set aside the whole truth and contented yourself with only a very curtailed version of it. You have just deliberately narrowed your world. In truth, your life is in ruins. Your dearly beloved mother will never return, not even to quarrel with you, and your father has lost his mind somewhere in northern New York.

Lirit addressed herself in the archaic language she had learned from her Grandmother Audrey, whose limited command of Hebrew was of an outdated variety.

Lirit would say something like “look” and her grandmother would say “pray look” and suchlike expressions. Lirit liked talking to herself in this language, because it gave her the feeling of security she used to have with her grandmother as a child.

Grandmother Audrey believed that in order to master a language, you had to first learn a few flowery phrases, and only after that the basics. In this way, even if you weren’t fluent in the language, you learned the best of it, and even if you made mistakes, people would immediately understand how high you were aiming. Audrey Greenholtz repeated this to Lirit dozens of times, perhaps hundreds, until Lirit didn’t have the strength for her anymore, and then either Lirit didn’t answer her or she left the room in the middle of the repetitive speech.

Leave the future to its own devices! she accordingly said to herself. The time and tide will yet present themselves for you to set sail for New York to bring your father home. You have a million things to worry about before that.

Once again she banished from the arena of her thoughts the abandonment of her father and the death of her mother, on the grounds that she already knew the facts and she couldn’t change the situation. It was all down to her, and therefore she had the moral legitimacy to put off grieving. Apart from which, Lirit preferred to think positive thoughts, and she went back to basking in her new status as the director of the pajama factory. If you looked at it in the long term, it was cruel but true, she had struck it lucky. Mandy’s death had positive aspects too, in relation to Lirit’s freedom of action and her personal growth. Her posture had improved a lot too. Suddenly her neck vertebrae were no longer at an angle to the rest of her spinal column, and her head didn’t droop when she was walking.

Even her self-image had improved in the wake of compliments she had received from a top model she had met in Mikado, and also from her personal psychologist, Inbal Asherov, who she had gone to see on a one-off basis, and who had seemed very pleased with Lirit’s progress.

She turned onto Route Six, the new toll road, and was impressed by its width and the fact that there wasn’t much traffic on it at eleven in the morning. The meeting with the organic cotton grower Oron de Bouton was set to take place at noon at the entrance to Kibbutz Kissufim. It was relatively early and Lirit went over the lesson Mandy had tried for years to teach her and which she had rejected as if it was in a foreign language: the warp is vertical and the woof is horizontal. Fabrics are made of threads. Threads are made of fibers. The carding machine is the machine that combs the fibers. There’s a cotton board, just like there’s a poultry board.

5

“WHAT AN IDIOT THAT PSYCHIATRIST OF YOURS IS,” SAID Irad and added salt to the shakshuka Bahat had made him instead of the scrambled egg. He had changed his mind a second before she broke the egg, and after she had served him the hot, bubbling dish of eggs and tomatoes, and he had sprinkled it with salt, he added:

“He’s infantile. Who is he to diagnose me? Hey? You know what he said to me? No? So let me tell you, because it’s about your elections. He told me that he was depressed, because the Democrats lost. I didn’t know that the Democrats lost.”

“The Democrats lost,” said Bahat.

Gruber waved a scolding finger in the air.

“Your doctor, the psychiatrist, sounds to me like a very disturbed fellow. First of all, his appearance is nebulous and undefined. It’s hard to tell if he’s even handsome or ugly, he’s so volatile. A person who doesn’t take a fee for the initial consultation. Who’s ever heard of such a thing? I don’t think I’ll even take the pills he prescribed me.”

Bahat was horrified.

“What are you talking about? Bill Stanton? He’s considered one of the finest in the entire state of New York! He graduated from Cornell with distinction! And he’s from Ithaca,” she concluded proudly.

“Enough already with that hubris,” said Irad and buttered a slice of bread with which he quickly wiped his plate. Bahat looked at him and thought that he ate fast and a lot, and altogether he was costing her a fortune, and while they were both silent and he was eating, she calculated how much he had cost her since the moment of his arrival, including the massage and the meal at the French restaurant, and it came to over two thousand dollars. And of course, the five hundred dollars he had offered as a contribution to expenses, he had failed to mention again. Before she had time to take in this interim account another problem revealed itself: the medication. That too would no doubt cost a fortune. She was sorry, but she would have to ask him to share the expenses. She was sick and tired of all the egomaniacs in the world.

“My dear,” Gruber suddenly addressed her with a confusing tenderness she had never come across before in a man of his age. “You shouldn’t have called him in,” he said, chewing another, extra, slice of bread and butter. “It’s a waste of your time and effort. I can tell you myself what’s wrong with me.”

“Yes?” she said, wondering if he was going to tell her anything new.

“I was diagnosed three years ago by a senior psychologist at the Defense Ministry as borderline with a high level of organizing ability. Apart from that, I have a tendency to deep depression. Mandy, my wife, may she rest in peace, understood me very well. She understood that with geniuses, personality disorders, psychological disturbances, whatever you want to call it, are a must. The sensitivity and the ability to see the facts in a different light originate in the nervous system, which is also the first to suffer. What disorder do you suffer from?”

“Attention and concentration disorders and severe communication problems. Sometimes I stutter. That’s why I don’t give lectures as a rule. I begin on a subject, open parentheses and more parentheses, and forget what I’m supposed to be talking about. I’m not a sociable person,” Bahat confessed and lowered her eyes.

“Do you take Ritalin?” asked Irad.

“Among other things.”

“I don’t take Ritalin, because it has side effects, especially if you’re post-traumatic.”

“So you are post-traumatic.”

“Apart from my genius — on whose altar you’ll find my nervous system — I am also post-traumatic, correct. I carry that on my back too,” said Gruber, looking serious.

“And what’s the trauma?”

“Moving houses,” said Gruber quietly.

“Ah, yes. We’ve heard that before,” said Bahat dismissively.

“It’s the third most severe trauma in children. After death in the family and divorce.”

“It happened to you as a child?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

“No, it happened to me two years ago, when we moved to Tel Baruch North. It was a big blow. I didn’t expect it to happen to someone of my age, in my position. Mandy said it would get better with time, she was in a bit of a shock herself. .”

“Why? Where did you live before?”

“In Neve Avivim. 44 Tagore Street. You know it?”

“I don’t know anything about those neighborhoods. What’s the difference?”

“The difference? You’ve been stagnating here too long to understand the differences. You left when Neve Avivim had just been built, which is a long time ago. You haven’t got a hope of getting to the bottom of the difference. In general, Neve Avivim and Tel Baruch North are as far apart as West from East. Aah,” he sighed disconsolately. “Tel Baruch North is a place without a past, with tremendous difficulty in connecting to the present. That’s how I feel anyway. And whoever did the landscape planning for the neighborhood did it without any heritage too. They filled the place with coconut palms! There are no butterflies, never mind honeysuckers. Or hedgehogs. There’s no food chain. And lawns — there aren’t any. Are there?” he tried to remember.

Bahat went to the sink with his plate and almost threw it in with the cutlery. She was really fed up. If he didn’t take his pills, what was she going to do? She decided to call Propheta. Sometimes he gave excellent, spot-on advice.

“You know, Bahat,” continued Gruber, in a more pleasant tone, as if he were a real-estate consultant with life experience. “It’s not a good idea to buy a new apartment in a new location, with new infrastructure, new vegetation, new trees, new stairs, new everything. It’s no good being the first in a certain place. It gives rise to anxiety. I like houses that have been lived in before. It’s less frightening when you’re not the first, when you’re not supposed to determine anything, but there I feel a kind of obligation to the house itself, do you understand? As if I have to give it an ambience, do you understand?” he asked Bahat again.

“Every word,” said the horrified Bahat.

“There’s an overdose of newness there. The apartment, the Jacuzzi, the doors, the neighborhood, the people, the neighbors, the shopping center, the shops in the shopping center, the moving stairs. How much have they already moved? I ask you. Has anyone checked the mileage? Ha?” He grunted in disgust. “I never had an anxiety attack in my life before, and since we moved there I have them all the time. I’d like to live in a house that’s existed for two hundred years. Is that too much to ask?”

He shut up, but only for a minute.

“Have you ever had an anxiety attack, Bahat?” He turned to her and at the same time thought that he really did talk too much, Mandy was right.

Bahat didn’t answer. Her face had begun to fall even before, as soon as he said that he wasn’t going to take the pills, and now she looked weak, with a blue tinge to her skin.

“I don’t like buying directly from the contractor, certainly not from the contractor’s paper,” the guest confessed loudly. “When there are previous occupants, you go into a place that exists, and you merge in quietly, like a side street with a main road. But when you move into a place like my apartment, you get an existential shock. And not only you. I’m sure that everyone who came to live there is in the same boat as me. I don’t think any of them dared to put something secondhand into their apartments. At the beginning Mandy and I were completely crushed. In order to escape from the despair of the place she brought in an expert on feng shui, who warned her against certain corners, and the whole house filled with plants, clay jars to trap the negative energy, twenty wind chimes, dream catchers around the beds, and seven little fountains. Three thousand dollars I laid out for those fountains, which spread seven soothing gurgling sounds throughout the house. The expert also advised us to put all kinds of plants on the porch, mainly tree wormwood, rue, mint, and lavender.

“And you know when Mandy — may they forgive her up there — ordered the movers to bring the containers from the old house in Neve Avivim?”

“When?” asked Bahat in a bored tone.

“The eve of Rosh Hashanah! So she’d have time to arrange everything without losing working days. That year the holiday went on for four-and-a-half days. I thought I’d go crazy with her timing. She wanted me to take part in the excitement of unloading the boxes and arranging the things. I told her she could manage on her own and went to stay with a friend of mine who lives in a seventy-year-old house in the center of Tel Aviv. On the first day, Mandy rang me on my cell phone, and sent me text messages as well, to come and help her. I didn’t answer. On the second day she stopped trying to contact me. She could understand me.”

“And now she’s dead,” said Bahat and almost felt sad, as if she knew her.

“Dead isn’t the word,” said Gruber, suddenly seeing it in a new light.

“Tell me,” continued Bahat, who noticed the change in his tone, “don’t you miss your children?”

“Of course I miss them,” he said.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, when she managed to get away from Gruber for a minute, Bahat phoned Professor Raffi Propheta.

“What I suggest,” said Propheta to his friend on the American East Coast, “is to find him a hotel in Neve Avivim through the Internet, it’s out of season now, there must be a lot of offers. The main thing is for him to go back to Israel.”

“I can’t take any more, Raffi, I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown myself. I have to start preparing my speech for the twentieth of next month, and instead of that I spend the whole day preparing his food,” she said and sat down in an armchair.

She concluded the conversation and said to Gruber through the closed door of his room, in other words, her room, “I’m going to sleep, I’m worn out. Forgive me. If you want to eat you’ll have to heat something up in the microwave. You can take a frankfurter and fries out of the freezer and put them in for five seconds. Whatever it says on the packet.”

And then she shut herself up for three hours in the guest room of her house.

WHEN SHE RECOVERED her strength the world was a different place. Gruber was starting to make a little more sense. Perhaps it was the light at the end of the tunnel, or perhaps it was only the putrefaction reflecting the light of a glowworm.

“What I’m going to do when I get back to Israel,” he said, “is to try to get rid of the apartment. You’ll see how many people will jump at it. I can sell it at an exorbitant price because the neighborhood is very much in demand. You can always find a millionaire couple with a villa in the original Tel Baruch, or in Afeka, who want their son or daughter to live in Tel Baruch North, next to them. People are very keen on the place for their offspring.” Suddenly his face clouded over. “I hope that the two years we lived there didn’t affect the value of the property.”

“No chance,” said Bahat confidently. In her childhood in green Ramat Aviv she had often heard the weighty phrase “the value of the property”.

“I don’t care if I lose money,” said Gruber decisively, in an animated tone.

“I’m not prepared to go back to that rootless place. Sometimes I actually feel that I don’t exist there. I wonder if we have a psychiatrist in the neighborhood, and what he thinks of it. It really is interesting — is there a psychiatrist who actually receives clients in the neighborhood?”

“Of course there is,” said Bahat.

Gruber poured himself glass of cider, drank it and went on:

“It’s very clear to me now. Mandy helped me a lot with the trauma of moving house, and her death released the trauma from its latency.”

Gruber’s nagging wore Bahat out to such an extent that she forgot the positive feelings she had begun to feel toward him ever since he called her “my dear.”

THERE WAS A LONG SILENCE which lasted until Bahat said, “So what now?”

“I have to go back to Israel. To carry on with the project. To carry on with life.”

“Oho!” cried Bahat, but the cry contained a measure of regret, since she had already grown accustomed to this character, and now she would return to her loneliness. But not for long, she encouraged herself, only until the twentieth of next month, and then into the field, to mingle, to laugh, to eat, drink, and be merry with people of her own age.

And this weekend the girls were coming. It would be a lot more convenient for her to receive them without him.

“The chain must continue, and the watch is not yet over!” he declared.

“Of course the watch isn’t over yet and the chain isn’t finished! You’re still before the peak. After you complete the T-suit you’ll be famous, I will read about you and what you’ve achieved in your life, and I will tip my hat to you. You could still get the Nobel Prize. You deserve it now. Are you so abnormal that you would turn your back on that?” Bahat was already smiling.

THE TWO OF THEM spent the last night in the same bed, in Bahat’s original room. Both of them shared the view that life was short, and the fact that they wouldn’t see each other again ignited a great and passing lust between them.

In the first half of the night they talked and became very close. Irad told Bahat about embarrassing scenes he had had with executives from Singpore, Thailand, India, China, and Japan, due to differences in mentality between the Levant and the Far East. The woman from Ithaca split her sides laughing. It was a long time since she had laughed so much. She leaned on his flabby white chest, and hung on his every word like a child listening to faraway fairy tales.

At one o’clock in the morning he said that he had to sleep, he had a flight to New York in the morning. She ordered a wake-up call for four in the morning, but she hardly slept. At five o’clock they set out for the friendly little local airport. On the way there McPhee said to Gruber that if for any reason Tel Baruch North upset him, he should go to a hotel in Neve Avivim.

“There isn’t a hotel in Neve Avivim,” he said.

“Then go to some other hotel. You’re so sensitive, and you’ve been through experiences that in my opinion demand rehabilitation. A remedial experience, perhaps.”

He told her not to worry, and at the terminal he also thanked her for everything, but everything, including her sympathetic attitude toward his crisis, and of course for handing over the important information, and added that he hoped he hadn’t gotten on her nerves too much with his demanding presence.

He shook her hand with a warmth she hadn’t encountered for years, to such an extent that she thought that perhaps he had a fever, and that all his behavior since hearing about Mandy’s death was the result of some virus. Gruber turned away to go through the security check, but stopped and turned round.

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“What?” she looked exhausted.

“Why did you really give away your research? You could get the Nobel Prize for it yourself.”

She was relieved that this was the question, and she replied:

“That’s exactly what I feared. I felt that I was on my way to a Nobel, and I didn’t want to go on. I’m not built for the Nobel, I want ordinary friends, not admirers. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you very well,” he said, and she tried not to let him see her farewell tears.

He waved to her and she waved to him, and that was it. She never saw him again.

SHE DROVE HOME and phoned Lirit and told her that her father was on a plane to New York, and that she hoped he would reach home safely. Perhaps she should find him temporary accommodation in Neve Avivim, or in Tel Aviv. He had a mental problem with returning to their new neighborhood.

Lirit wrote down the numbers of her father’s two flights to New York and Israel, and thanked Bahat for all she had done.

After she put the phone down Bahat drank the half can of Coca-Cola left in the house from Gruber’s visit and got rid of a few prominent signs of his presence, although it was clear to her that a more thorough cleaning would be required. She stripped the sheets from the double bed on which they had let themselves go a little wild the night before, dropped them into the laundry basket, threw a clean sheet onto the bed, took off her clothes without any strength and dropped them on the floor, put on an old flannel nightgown, and got into bed. In spite of the superficial cleaning she had done, Gruber’s smell was still in the room, and she got up and drizzled geranium oil in all the corners, and indeed the pleasant scent absorbed Gruber’s smell and she could forget him.