Textile (4 page)

“How lovely,” and “That’s amazing,” and “This one is to die for.”

“Tell me,” Shlomi asked his girlfriend, and shook her off him because her embrace was a little suffocating and he felt hot, “do you think I could offer these pictures to the Gates of the Negev local council as a calendar? That means hundreds of dollars. What I’ve got here isn’t only the floods, in other words ruin and destruction. Take a look at this one . . .” He showed her a close up of flowers. “And this one . . . and this one . . . I think we’re going to have a fantastic spring this year, by the way.”

“If not Gates of the Negev, then some other local council,” said Lirit. “A person would have to be an idiot not to take them.” She stood up, changed into her smoking clothes, and went outside, accompanying the entire process with facial grimaces that related to her conversation with her mother shortly before.

She knew that her mother wanted her, when the day came, to inherit the factory and continue the tradition, and she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to, but in the meantime no need had arisen for her to express any wish in the matter. Her mother was a strong, healthy woman. It only annoyed her that Dael showed no interest in the pajama factory, and that it was so clear to their mother that she was the one who would take command of the family concern while Dael was expected to charge ahead. The guy had already acquired a profession in the army, not like her, who in her army service had only learned how to grab hold of collapsing people a minute before their bodies hit the floor or some piece of furniture.

And indeed, Dael had organized a future for himself after the army. The day after his discharge he was going to fly straight to Hollywood and become a paparazzi to the stars. Judging by his success as a sharp shooter, the Hollywood stars were in for a big surprise. Dael thought that after he made his first fortune from his photos he would open a school right there in Los Angeles for
paparazzi photographers, who would have to pass strict tests in order to be accepted, and whose year-long studies would cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

THE NIGHTY-NIGHT pajama factory had been founded by Audrey Greenholtz, Mandy’s mother, in the middle of the sixties, soon after the two of them arrived in Israel from the former Rhodesia, when the child was eight.

For years Audrey held to the opinion that the factory should serve only the ultra-Orthodox population, since the ultra-Orthodox population was the most stable thing in Israel. Any deviation from this target population would spell the end of the factory, in the opinion of its founder.

Difficult life circumstances had made Audrey Greenholtz into a fighter as well as a schemer. She thought it was a mistake for mothers to be soft on their daughters, and she raised her daughter to be tough, drilling it into her that giving in wasn’t an option, no matter what.

When the Rhodesian police came to the Greenholtz family home and informed the mother that the body of her husband, Aaron Greenholtz, had been found headless on the roadside, she did not collapse or start screaming, but carried on resourcefully. This resourcefulness she tried to pass on to her daughter Mandy, who tried to pass it on to her daughter Lirit, with diminishing success from generation to generation.

When Audrey died in 1989, and Mandy took charge, she put up a dummy tombstone to her father, Aaron Greenholtz, in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery, according to whose inscription his memory would never fade. But the truth was that his memory didn’t exist. Mandy had forgotten him completely.

In the middle of the nineties, Mandy thought of adding another line to her father’s tombstone, something along the lines of “Murdered in race riots in Rhodesia, 19—” but she didn’t do it.

AUDREY COULDN’T STAND Israel and she never stopped telling her daughter and the few friends she had here that it was only Aaron’s death that had forced her to come to the Levant, and that nothing but terrible distress would have brought her to a place of no distinction, full of men with weak characters. She was enraged against Israeli men, who gave her the cold shoulder because she already had a daughter from a marriage that had ended in death, and who regarded her as irrelevant.

During her first days in Israel, Audrey acted out of character—and collapsed. She barely brought herself to acquire a three-roomed apartment in Arlozorov Street in Tel Aviv. She was told that this was classic North Tel Aviv, and that it would always remain classic.

But six months after arriving in Israel, Audrey got out of bed and she never fell again. She called in renovators, who turned right into left and ceiling into floor. During the period of the renovations the two of them stayed in the old Sheraton Hotel, which no longer exists and today there is a big hole where it used to be. Every morning she set out from the hotel to take three or four buses to Netanya, to the factory she set up there in the industrial zone.

Audrey herself invented the name Nighty-Night. Her knowledge of the Hebrew language was nothing to write home about, and she thought the name was clear enough for people in the Levant. She acquired a few classic Singer sewing machines, and insisted on handwork even when technology made faster and more efficient machines available.

Only in this way can the connection of the material with the thread be felt, while the movement of the foot accelerates the blood circulation and improves the concentration of the workers, Audrey explained her conservatism.

There was also the factory outlet that was opened before the holidays, and then—what a flood! Religious women bought pajamas in bulk and paid in cash, and the child Mandy got a kick out
of being in charge of the cash register of the outlet, which also, of course, sold second-class goods for those who could not afford to buy first-class pajamas.

The adolescent Mandy was very happy when the government changed the currency and varied her life behind the cash register. She liked counting the change out loud, sometimes also in Yiddish, for the women in the wigs, and seeing the notes piling up in the compartments of the cash register made her feel really good, because she saw how happy it made her mother.

“Come and see,” she called her, and her mother would call back from the distance: “Nice work!”

IN THE BEGINNING there were about a dozen seamstresses working in the factory, but today, still on Singer machines but new electric ones, there are sixty, most of them ultra-Orthodox, and others from different sectors of religious and secular Judaism. After the death of her mother, Mandy didn’t change a thing in the factory, partly because she was afraid it would bring bad luck, but mainly because it was her mother’s will, and she complied as usual.

Thus it happened that at the dawn of the third millennium there was a factory in Israel where people worked almost like once upon a time. From Audrey’s deathbed, Mandy was delivered another fatal blow. Instead of occupying herself with her death and parting from this world, the dying woman issued instructions as if tomorrow morning she would be opening another twenty branches of Nighty-Night. First of all, she ordered Mandy not to be tempted to change the machines. And she also forbade her to change the system of locking up the factory: eight heavy locks on the gate without any remote control. In addition she commanded her daughter not to remain alone in the event that “he,” God forbid, should die before his time (she always called Irad “he,” never mind how many prizes he got or how many inventions were registered in his name with the patents registrar as intellectual property). And if
she ever got it into her head to divorce him, Audrey warned her, it would mean three generations of lonely women in the family, since her mother too had raised her alone, because her own father died young from typhus or malaria.

“You hear? We don’t get divorced!”

Mandy almost fainted at the sound of this sudden announcement. She knew that her mother was opposed to divorce, but not for a moment could she have guessed that on her very deathbed she would slam her with an ace like this. She had planned to run to the rabbinate and open divorce proceedings as soon as the seven days of mourning were over and now after the dying woman’s veto the only place she could divorce Irad was in her imagination, which she didn’t have.

She sank into melancholy, and everyone around her, even Carmela, attributed her sadness to her parting from her mother.

LIFE WITH THE GENIUS Gruber became more and more difficult as the years went by, and the task of putting up with the man fell mainly on Mandy. He never listened to anyone and talked without stopping while at the same time apologizing for being a nuisance and saying that he knew he was a nuisance but he couldn’t help it. It didn’t depend on him. His genius mind was unable to stop inventing unique inventions that nobody had ever thought of.

Over the course of the years he stopped needing any kind of intimacy, and Mandy couldn’t see an end to all this ego trip. The children had become immune in their childhood to his long speeches, which could go on for hours because he liked to think out loud, and accordingly only Mandy was left to supply him with an audience. Again and again she was forced to listen to simulations of presentations he planned to present to capitalists so they would invest in this or that invention produced by his brilliant mind, and she had to make comments even if she didn’t have any and even if she sometimes stopped paying attention.

NOT LONG AFTER Dael’s bar mitzvah, which was held in the Neve-Kodesh Synagogue in Neve Avivim and considered a highly successful affair, came Gruber’s success with the spiral escalator, and she enjoyed a little respite from the headaches he gave her.

But the comeback arrived in the interval between the spiral escalators and the special protective suits. During this period Gruber experienced emptiness and boredom, and all that remained to entertain him was to hone in on Mandy again. Accordingly Mandy found herself spending unnecessary overtime in the factory. But then he would drive her up the wall worse than ever over the weekends, following her all over the house and telling her about his thoughts and ideas. Sometimes she would shut herself in the lavatory, but he would stand behind the door and go on talking.

His genius bordered on mysticism. In order to give expression to his many talents all he needed was a pencil and a piece of paper. “The genius with the pencil” he was called in many places, including at the Ministry of Defense. At home they had a large collection of pencils with erasers and without, for in the course of the years Gruber had developed a fear that an idea would come to him and he wouldn’t have a pencil to write it down and it would escape his memory.

AFTER DAEL WAS DRAFTED into the army, Mandy began the business with the plastic surgery, and most of the time her face was bandaged. Gruber told her that she looked like the heroine in Georges Franju’s movie,
Eyes Without a Face
. The father of the heroine was a sadistic surgeon who performed experiments on his daughter and ruined her face.

Obviously she couldn’t show herself at the factory like this, and once more Carmela came into the picture. Every night Mandy would sneak into their garage in Tel Baruch North, start the car, and drive to Netanya, to the pajama factory. There was something inhuman about the woman with the bandaged face racing alone in the American car on Highway 4. Once the police stopped her for
speeding, and the policemen were very embarrassed. Mandy told them that her face had been burned when she was making chips for the children, and the explanation satisfied them and they even let her off and only told her to be careful not to exceed the speed limit in future.

In the factory Carmela would be waiting for her with all the paperwork, and they would go over all the events of the day together. The official version given to the workers was that due to intolerable tension stemming from some mental crisis or other, the boss had developed a skin disease, which was definitely not terminal, but until further notice prohibited her from exposing herself to the sun.

How would Mandy have survived the endless operations without the boundless loyalty of Carmela, who was so kind hearted that she even released Mandy from the burden of gratitude? Day after day she simply repeated the words, “Now it’s my turn. You helped me, now I’m helping you.”

And every time Mandy would throw her eyes up to heaven and say:

“There’s no comparison . . .”

ONCE SHE DARED to arrive at the factory with her face bandaged not at night, but at dawn. She had to approve fabrics she had ordered, with new colors and patterns, and she needed daylight in order to see the main shade of the fabric properly and to feel it. Feeling the fabric by daylight was an essential stage in its acquisition and Mandy, like her mother, was able to tell the quality of the knitting, of the warp and woof of the material, in the blink of an eye, and how it would withstand frequent laundering.

After she had approved the fabrics, she turned toward the parking lot, but before she could get there and drive rapidly away, five seamstresses arrived early for work. They didn’t know whether to pretend not to see her, or to go up and ask her how she was. They didn’t know what the right thing to do was in a case like this. Suddenly
one of them burst out laughing, and tried in vain to stifle her laughter, because the last thing Mandy was capable of arousing in her present plight was fear. The others sniggered too. And when they disappeared from sight she heard all five of them laughing.

Two hours later, after returning to the triplex on the corner of Yocheved Bat-Miriam and Alexander Penn Streets, she sent all five notices of dismissal by SMS, and they complained about it to the labor tribunal. The case is still under review, but a photograph of the five women has already appeared in the press under the heading: “Dismissed by SMS.”