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Every day at dawn they did an hour of yoga on the lawn. Lightly and flexibly, they executed all kinds of positions (asanas) which released energetic blocks, including head stands without a wall. For a long time the two of them were capable of remaining upside down between heaven and earth, thereby enabling the blood to reach every capillary in their brains, steeping themselves in a pleasant relaxation. In the morning hours they would cook vegetarian food for the children who attended the Alliance Israelite school, and around noon they would go to open the doors of Splendor on the Lawn.

Their daughters Bahat and Shoham were obliged to become parasites insofar as they always went to visit their friends, but
never invited their friends home because they were afraid that their mother or their father would suddenly stand on their heads, and they would become pariahs.

The yoga kept the family together, but isolated the two girls.

Financial security made it possible for the parents to develop the art of conversation between themselves, and to pass on to their students what they discovered or invented. And indeed they invented various expressions to convey to their students what they should do and feel.

For example, the Segals were the first in the country to say, “I’m speaking from a place of . . .” They were the ones who invented the culture of “place” in the Hebrew language, and it was from there that they spoke to their students during the lesson and after it. All kinds of abstractions turned into places. There was a place of pain, a place of loneliness and frustration, a place of wanting to help, a place of compassion, and so on. They were the first to recognize that someone speaking from a place of anger was unable to talk to someone speaking from a place of acceptance. The widespread use of this term indirectly helped hundreds of psychologists throughout the country to communicate with their clients, and vice versa. Neither the state nor the Language Academy saw fit to reward the Segals for their efforts, but they were serene and it didn’t bother them.

Their dream, which came from a place of daydreams, was of course to go to India for as many years as possible, and there to learn how to live to the ripe old age of ninety-something.

ON THE DAY that Shoham received an exemption from guard and kitchen duty due to her terror of spiders—arachnophobia—Madeleine and Reudor set out for Mysore in India to learn and internalize another brand of yoga (Ashtanga).

Bahat was already planning her post-army trip.

At first things in India were almost perfect, but after a few weeks the Segals met a local yogi called Helen. Three months after
they landed in India, Reudor ran away to Rishikesh with his new love Helen, who was also a guru.

Helen was more supple than Madeleine and more advanced than her in yoga, even though she was eight years older than Madeleine. She had been born in India, and had practiced from the age of three. Her parents had arrived there as colonialists in the framework of the expansion of the British Empire, and they had all returned to England in the framework of its contraction, after India received its independence. Helen had returned with them, but after a decade she wearied of the West and went back to India for good.

Her loneliness, her wisdom, her smile, and her agility captivated Reudor, who in any case was beginning to be bored to death with his wife.

After the separation from Reudor, Madeleine suffered a terrible crisis, which she overcame under the devoted care of nuns in Mysore. When she recovered her prana, she returned to Israel and to her daughters with the intention of cherishing them and remedying the injustices of the past. But Bahat had already set out on her coast-to-coast trip to America with her high school friend, Hagit, and Shoham had studied to be a midwife, and gone to work in the Yoseftal Hospital in Eilat.

This being the case, Madeleine Segal took up residence on her own in the ground floor apartment in green Ramat Aviv, and she made no attempt to renew the glory days of the yoga school, with the result that she soon fell into severe economic distress—something she had never experienced before.

And then the third blow fell. Bahat, who had set out for no more than a three month coast-to-coast trip, did not return to Israel, having fallen in love with a local boy from some university town in the far north of New York State. One daughter in Eilat, one daughter in northern New York, a husband in India—thus Madeleine summed up her achievements in life.

She spent hours on the phone to Bahat, imploring her to leave her local lover and return to her motherland and her mother, to
what was left of her mother, she really needed her, and what did she have to do in upstate New York anyway. But Bahat was determined to be independent and even more original than her parents.

When Bahat’s traveling companion Hagit returned to Israel, she went to visit Madeleine and told her how Bahat’s desertion had come about. Madeleine recognized pure evil in her, but she sat quietly and listened to the wicked girl.

The two girls had been on their way to New York, to spend their last week there. Hagit just wanted to pass through Ithaca, because she was a bookworm addicted to useless knowledge. She had read in the thick guide book that they had bought at the beginning of their trip, which was already tattered with use, that little Ithaca was full of secondhand bookshops, and she wanted to pick up a few classics. Her English was excellent, much better than Bahat’s, even though she had never lived in an English speaking country.

For some reason Hagit was interested in the history of the United States, and at this point in the conversation she explained to Madeleine that in the past Ithaca had been called the city of sin, and even Sodom, because in its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, all kinds of lowlifes had lived there. Only after the Civil War between the North and South did the licentious town become a place of refinement, education, and beauty, with a highly developed community life, churches, and a great awareness of the importance of education in the life of the individual and the town. Ithaca’s educational institutions, especially Cornell University, were well-known today all over the world.

As far as Hagit knew, Bahat’s lover, Randall McPhee, a good-looking guy with long, curly hair, was going to study at Cornell University, science or Italian, after graduating from college with distinction.

“What does the place look like?” asked Madeleine.

“It’s a beautiful place. Lots of atmosphere. There’s a big lake with a stormy river running out of it. Huge waterfalls. Lots of green. It’s very cold in winter. Randall promised your daughter she
wouldn’t be cold. But there’s something strange about the place. It’s hard to explain. Have you ever heard of Rod Serling?”

“No.”

“Do you watch
The Twilight Zone
on television?”

“Sure,” said Madeleine, who saw everything there was to see on television.

“It’s he who wrote the script for the series, and he based it on the atmosphere there.”

“What do you say!”

“Do you know Nabokov?”

“The writer?”

“He taught at Cornell.”

“And what did you say was Bahat’s boyfriend’s name?”

“Randall. It’s a Southern name. The family is originally from Texas. You don’t know how hard I tried to persuade her to come back to Israel and not to stay in that place, and with a Texan too. Look, Mrs. Segal, your daughter slept with a lot of men in America, and when she met Randall I thought it was just another fling. I didn’t know it was eternal love.”

“Eternal love?” asked Madeleine.

“That’s what your daughter said.”

“Do you think they’ll get married?”

“I’m sure they will,” said Hagit.

“Do you think I should go there and try to persuade her to come home?”

“I can’t really see the point, Mrs. Segal. I tried everything. Your daughter’s head over heels in love with him. And you know her. There’s nothing anyone can do. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and come home, and maybe not. But I promise you that
I’ll
come and visit you sometimes,” she said when she spotted a tear in Madeleine’s right eye.

“I haven’t even got the money for a plane ticket. And I don’t want to go there and impose myself on them. Reudor took everything,
everything.” Now the tears were streaming down her face.

Hagit stayed in the little apartment on Shimoni Street for another half-hour and ate dried fruits past their sell-by date. She didn’t have anything encouraging to say to Madeleine, and so she promised her again that she would come and visit her once a month. This promise brought no consolation, especially since her daughter’s traveling companion forgot about her promise and failed to keep her word.

MADELEINE SANK into profound melancholy with fits of apathy, and spent the rest of her life watching television, which improved a lot over the years. The number of channels rose from one to two, and then to many, and together with this expansion the interchannel competition increased as well. Madeleine put on a lot of weight, and needless to say, she no longer did any twists or stretches, and standing on her head was obviously out of the question, even against a wall. Her head could no longer bear the weight. Things worked out well for Shoham in Eilat, she completed a course in deep-sea diving, talked all the time about corals and coral reefs, and said that when she had a daughter she would call her Coral. On the rare occasions when she came to visit her mother, she noticed that the thin, supple woman had turned into an overweight couch potato. She tried to talk her into moving to Eilat to be close to her, but she knew there was no chance. She would not move from that couch until her dying day.

6

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTIES, STANLEY AND SAMANTHA McPhee, Randall’s parents, came to Ithaca from a little town in Texas, because they wanted to give their children a good, Northern, enlightened education, without the oppressive complexes of
the history of the South
. They didn’t want their children to grow up with inferiority complexes, and to have to change their southern accent whenever they met anyone from the North and encounter forgiving, patronizing looks.

After years of practice in the prestigious town, Stanley and Samantha succeeded in almost completely effacing their accent, and planned that the next generation, headed by Randall, would bury it forever.

Stanley and Samantha wanted to invest in the northern branch of the McPhee family, and so they wanted five children, including Randall. But the only child born to them was Randall, because six or seven times Samantha miscarried in the third month of her pregnancy.

The doctors in the Woman’s Health Center in Ithaca could not explain why such a healthy woman was unable to bring her pregnancies to term. And the doctors in New York they consulted for a second opinion couldn’t explain it either.

THE FAMILIES OF BOTH Stanley and Samantha McPhee (née Griffith) were members of AHS (American Hibiscus Society), and in Texas where they lived, the members of these families
were considered fanatics on the subject. After their day jobs they devoted themselves to breeding improved new strains of the
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
, and to inventing other exotic strains, in shades of near-black or pure white, with hearts that changed color three times over the summer.

Stanley and Samantha had met at a big exhibition of new hibiscus strains, and fallen in love.

When they moved to Ithaca, they took with them a few fine rare strains for their large garden, but most of them died in the first frost of November.

Samantha was furious with her new husband for not thinking about it in advance and not setting up a hibiscus hothouse equipped with the heaters and humidifiers required for a tropical plant originating in Hawaii.

In spite of her pregnant state, she carried the big pots containing the surviving bushes into the house, and instructed her husband to set up the above-mentioned hothouse in the big backyard and equip it with everything required.

Setting up the hothouse and operating it cost the couple a fortune, and in order to pay for it and also to earn a living, they opened a florist shop in downtown Ithaca, and next to it a secondhand bookstore. They called the florist shop Some Flowers and the bookstore Book Report. The income from the two stores minus the high costs of the hothouse provided the couple and their son Randall with a good living, but they still felt an inexplicable emptiness.

Accordingly they threw themselves heart and soul into a purpose—Samantha into Randall, and Stanley into the search for a hibiscus unlike anything ever seen before: as blue or black as possible, with a psychedelic heart.

RANDALL MCPHEE KISSED Bahat Segal for the first time among the strange blooms produced by his father Stanley. Two days later Bahat drove her friend Hagit to the Syracuse airport to fly to New
York City and from there to Israel. They didn’t speak the whole way.

Randall’s parents weren’t crazy about their only son’s choice and stayed aloof. Bahat wasn’t bothered. After her alternative childhood in Shimoni street in the green suburb of Ramat Aviv, and in San Francisco, she was a girl full of self-confidence and she knew very well how to get along on her own, and she even took a historical masochistic pleasure in the stupid condescension of her Presbyterian mother-in-law.

Her father-in-law, Stanley McPhee, admired Richard Nixon with all his heart and soul, and a portrait of Nixon went on hanging in their home even after the Watergate scandal broke out. Bahat saw that her in-laws were hardcore Republicans, and nevertheless she went to study botany at Cornell University because she thought, who knows, perhaps one day
she
would succeed in creating new strains of hibiscus, to the delight of Stanley and Samantha, leading to the fall of the interracial barrier that Bahat actually did her best to encourage: she saw it fitting to begin many critical remarks about their thinking and way of life with the words, “We Jews . . .”