Textile (14 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Oy,” he said sadly.

“What’s wrong?”

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My mother’s not doing too well.”

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

“Why?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, that’s a rhyme.”

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

There was an oppressive silence.

“Good,” said Shlomi.

“Good,” repeated Lirit.

“That’s it”’ said Shlomi.

“That’s it?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Okay.”

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

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

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