Textile (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gruber nodded.

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

6

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

“You want chai?” he asked Gruber.

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

“You want another cup?”

“No, thank you.”

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

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

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

“Your wife is very wise,” said Propheta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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