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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ORLY CASTEL-BLOOM is a leading voice in Hebrew literature today. Her postmodern classic Dolly City has been included in UNESCO’s Collection of Representative Works, and was nominated in 2007 as one of the ten most important books since the creation of the state of Israel. She has received the Tel Aviv Foundation Award, the Alterman Prize for Innovation, the Prime Minister’s Prize three times (1994, 2001, 2011), the Newman Prize, the French WIZO Prize for Human Parts, and the Leah Goldberg Prize. Her books have been translated into eleven languages.
The Feminist Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.
See our complete list of books at feministpress.org, and join the Friends of FP to receive all our books at a great discount.
Also Available from the Feminist Press
Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writer’s Series:
A Joint Project with the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute
Whatever is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist
Helène Aylon
Growing up an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn, Helene Aylon spends her Friday nights in a sea of extended family as the Sabbath candles flicker. She dreams of escape but marries a rabbi and becomes a mother of two. Suddenly her world splits apart when she is widowed at thirty. Aylon finds a home in the burgeoning environmental art scene of the 1970s—creating transgressive works that explore identity, women’s bodies, the environment, disarmament, and the notion of God. Eventually she asks of Judaism what she never dared to ask as a child: Where are the women?
eISBN:9781558617698
ISBN: 9781558617681
And the Bridge is Love
Faye Moskowitz
And the Bridge is Love is a timeless collection of life stories about growing up in a Jewish family in Detroit during the Depression and becoming a writer in Washington DC.
eISBN: 9781558617711
ISBN: 9781558617704
Hold on to the Sun
Michal Govrin. Edited by Judith Miller.
In this portrait of the artist as a young woman, Michal Govrin–one of Israel’s most important contemporary writers—offers a kaleidoscope of short stories and personal essays. Populated by mysterious and real people, each tale is a search for meaning in a post-Holocaust world.
eISBN: 9781558616745
ISBN: 9781558616738
Shalom India Housing Society
Esther David
In this novel set inside a fictional housing complex, a true-to-life story unfolds of a steadily disappearing sect of Indian Jews who live out their mixed identity with longing, joy, and humor.
eISBN: 9781558616455
ISBN: 9781558615960
If a Tree Falls: A Family’s Quest to Hear and Be Heard
Jennifer Rosner
A memoir of a woman learning her family’s secret history; imagining the lives of her deaf ancestors in the enclaves of Eastern Europe; and, with her husband, making hard decisions for her deaf children.
eISBN: 9781558616912
ISBN: 9781558616622
Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, An Exile’s Journey
Joyce Zonana
In a memoir of traditions lost and found, a flooded city, and the healing power of food, Joyce Zonana (an Egyptian Jew by birth) finds a sense of self among people and places as far from Cairo as Oklahoma and Katrina-stricken New Orleans.
eISBN: 9781558616264
ISBN: 9781558615731
Dearet Anne: A Tale of Impossible Love
Judith Katzir
Best-selling, internationally recognized Israeli novelist Judith Katzir recreates an artist’s coming-of-age during the 1970s as she explores the concealed, erotic relationship between a teenager and her married teacher Michaela.
eISBN: 9781558616370
ISBN: 9781558615755
Ar
guing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers
Edited by Rhea Tregebov
From the superstitions and conviviality of the shtetl to the mysteries of the New World; from rebellion in Russia to the Holocaust, these stories show what it meant to be a woman, a Jew, and a writer in turbulent times.
ISBN: 9781558615588
Textile Page 19