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.
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