Authors: Orly Castel-Bloom

Textile (25 page)

“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.

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
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