Textile (19 page)

Lirit didn’t like coffee. But a day and a bit after her mother’s death, this was the least she could do in her memory: drink a latte in a mug. She didn’t yet feel pain at the loss. She was indifferent, as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it was the shock, she thought to herself.

Earlier that morning she had quarreled with Dael, who wanted to return to his base. He said that in any case there was no funeral
because their mother had donated her body to science, and no shivah either, and in any case they had lost track of their father in the USA, and they didn’t want to see anybody anyway—so what the point in him staying?

In the end Lirit thought that he was right, and he went back to the field. But yesterday he had managed to take care of placing death notices in the street and in the three newspapers. On the way to the café Lirit passed one of the notices and read it. Lirit thought generally that perhaps she would study graphic design. She had never actually read a death notice before. And one about her mother too.

She looked round and came across more death notices about her mother, as well as one about somebody else whose family had gone for a normal funeral in Kiryat Shaul. What was all this bereavement suddenly? She was angry because it seemed so irrelevant to her family. They whole place suddenly seemed to her like some habitation of ghosts. She had hardly made it to Café au Lait.

It jarred her to see her mother’s name plastered all over Alexander Penn Street, but that was the reality, she reminded herself again. Twice she stopped to read the notices that Dael had composed for the street. The other one he published in the newspapers. While she drank her coffee she went over both of them in her mind:

Our beloved

Amanda (Mandy) Gruber née Greenholtz

Has suddenly left us

And donated her body to science.

Please refrain from condolence calls.

Her dear ones.

And the notice in the newspapers said:

The textile factory Nighty-Night

Bows its head

At the untimely death of its manager

Amanda (Mandy) Gruber of blessed memory,

A warm, diligent, and benevolent woman,

And offers its condolences to the family.

After she finished her coffee she had no idea what to do with herself. She was simply completely paralyzed, but it was clear to her, and this actually helped her, that she wasn’t going to any factory today. At maximum, she would answer the phone in the event that people from the factory, or her father’s jet set, wanted to offer their condolences. But people would want to know how, when, why she died, and Lirit didn’t have the motivation to tell the whole story of her deterioration over and over again. She decided that never mind the gossip and the rumors, she was going to disconnect all the telephones.

But what if her father called? How could she disconnect the phones? But screen the calls, yes. Local calls she could screen, but if there was an unidentified caller, and it turned out not to be her father, she would just say it was the wrong number.

She went back to staring at the fountain with the jet falling onto itself, and she remembered how her mother used to say that it wouldn’t do anybody in the Levant any good, however much they played at being in Europe or Los Angeles, they didn’t have the first idea about aesthetics. “It’s only now that they’re beginning to get it into their heads, Liritush,” she said to her once, “but they’re already in the swing of building a state and they can’t change their style.”

She couldn’t remember if her mother had made any criticisms of Tel Baruch North as well. Lirit actually thought that the fact that there wasn’t a drop of Zionism in the place made it international, and the fact that there wasn’t any socialism made it progressive. True, she didn’t say this out loud, because of Shlomi, who after his one-time visit said that it was enough to look at the people’s faces and see how they behaved to conclude that they were hedonistic
Israelis in a new suburb of North Tel Aviv, interested in nothing but themselves.

And indeed, after sitting there staring for an hour she could see so for herself: women a little bit older than she was, and also of thirty and forty plus, all of them with Ray-Ban glasses, smartly dressed from top to toe, going from shop to shop, and parallel to them, grannies with pigmentation problems running after grand-children, one or two of whom were escaping in the direction of the escalators and standing there wailing at the top of their voices, and in the end the grannies gave in and rode up and down the moving stairs again and again and again. Where was she going to get the patience for all this?

No pause in the routine in memory of the dead Mandy. Everything as usual. Lirit looked at a new clothing store that called itself FREEDOM. Opposite it in a Delta store, there was an end of the season sale of tank tops for toddlers: three for sixteen dollars. She thought that everything here was relatively cute, but she didn’t have the strength for it now. The coffee had not woken her up, it had made her want to go to sleep, or more precisely, to disappear.

She was only twenty-two, and her mother’s death was really too heavy for her. And she hadn’t really taken in the fact yet that she had inherited a pajama factory that marketed its products to the ultra-orthodox sector, and that she had to pick up the pieces and step smartly into her mother’s shoes.

BUT TOWARD NOON she called Nighty-Night on her cell phone, and told her mother’s right-hand woman, Carmela Levy, that she wouldn’t be coming in for the next few days. But of course she wouldn’t be coming in, said Carmela Levy, and Lirit, who was still sitting in Cafe au Lait listened to a few more condolences, including wonder at the fact that the deceased had donated her body to science and had not asked for a civil burial in a coffin, which would have been far more her style, like the soldiers in the IDF. The two of them had talked about it. But now perhaps she too
would donate her body to science.

Suddenly Lirit understood that science benefited from the dead who donated their bodies to it, and that science was actually humanity, and that it was a kind of feedback. She herself didn’t want to be part of this feedback, with all due respect to the cycles in nature. In order to get away from the subject of bodies and science, Lirit said in a gloomy voice that ever since the blow that had come down on them, she couldn’t leave the house, and she even wondered if she should tell Carmela that they had lost contact with their father. But in the end it was lucky that she didn’t tell her, or she would have kept her for another half an hour on the phone.

In conclusion Lirit asked her to convey a message to the workers. She knew—she stressed in a tone that sounded a bit as if she was on television—that her mother would have asked them to carry on. Despite everything. To sew. To work. To produce. Not to let her death confuse them and weaken their resolve. That is what she would have wanted.

“Definitely,” said Carmela in an almost holy tone.

AFTER THE CONVERSATION Carmela retired to some corner in the factory yard behind a tree, and cried, and wiped her eyes with the cloth handkerchief she kept about her person, as her boss had done, God bless her soul. She had learned many delicacies and refinements from her.

She was also anxious about the future. Judging by what she had heard from Mandy over the years, she had good reason to fear Lirit. Lirit was unpredictable. It was Carmela who had given Mandy the advice worth its weight in gold to give Lucas money and send him back to Jamaica. Lately, with Lirit living with someone twice her age, Carmela Levy had waited together with Mandy Gruber for the affair to come to a sticky end.

ONLY ON HER WAY HOME did Lirit realize that she had no more economic problems. It was a reassuring thought, and she made up
her mind not to change anything in the short term, to study the subject even though she already knew it, having spent whole summers helping her mother manage the business.

She thought about the long term when she got home, and considered her sudden freedom. What was she going to do in the long term? She didn’t know. Perhaps she would turn Nighty-Night inside out, perhaps she would at long last renovate the place outside and especially inside, and march it into the twenty-first century.

It wasn’t at all impossible that she would examine, in the long term of course, the necessity of at long last changing the target market for the pajamas, and also of touching on the holy of holies, the five patterns exclusive to Nighty-Night, which had long been out of date. Mandy was as stubborn as a mule: she was prepared for there to be only stripes, in two versions; checks, in a one-and-only version for all ages; one floral pattern; and also a pajama in a plain fabric, but in all colors.

The patterns had hardly changed at all since Audrey’s time and to the new heir they seemed old fashioned and even repulsive, but in the meantime her mother’s ghost prevented her from coming to any decision.

She sat down on the sofa and sank into a black mood.

Is this it? she asked herself. Am I going to be buried in a pajama factory for the ultra-Orthodox from now on? Forever? Is this my life? Is this my vocation? Warp and woof for cold nights with no fear of impurities?

She sighed and tried to comfort herself that it wasn’t the end of the world even though it was the end of the world for her, and that perhaps she should take a bold step and transfer production to Turkey or China, and in Israel she would get someone else to do the marketing and who would work on commission. In the space of five minutes Lirit made a hundred decisions, including selling the factory, running away and leaving everything to Dael and their father, marrying Shlomi and then getting divorced from him. Somewhere or other in the framework of what might be called
Lirit’s Dream, there was also a plan for an exclusive line of organic cotton (that would be without any fear whatsoever of impurities), which went hand in hand with the overall renovation of the factory.

THE PHONE RANG. On the screen of her upgraded cell phone she saw that it was an overseas call. Instead of rushing to reply, she let it ring, and only after seven or eight rings she took a deep breath and answered. A hard task awaited her.

But her father never let the flow of his words arrest itself, and as usual she couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Right off he started talking in a big hurry, as if he was speaking on a pay phone and he had no more change left. All the urgency in the world belonged to him. It was inconceivable that something fateful could have happened somewhere else.

He was sorry for not being in contact for the past three days, but he had forgotten his cell phone in Israel, and also he needed the holiday, especially as it wasn’t a holiday at all, it was work. There wasn’t a lot left, they had already been working for four days. He was taking what he required for the continuation of his TESU research and coming home in a day or two. It was morning where he was now, and what was the time over there? He was very happy and satisfied and eager to get back with the results.

He sounded distant and strange to her. She couldn’t believe that he was the only parent they had left, Dael and she. Would it occur to him to ask how she was? How his wife was? Usually he called to hear himself talking to his family.

Lirit let him finish his monologue down to the last detail, including the fact that he was now in the laboratory with his American colleague, and only then, a second before he was about to say goodbye, she delivered the bitter blow in full.

“Why are you only telling me now?” her father yelled down the line, “What are you saying to me all of a sudden?”

At this point there was silence, as if they had been disconnected,
and Lirit asked twice, “Hello?” and then,

“Daddy, are you all right?”

“I’m here, I’m here,” he said weakly, and suddenly he seemed to wake up, “What do you mean she donated her body to science? Is she crazy?”

“So there’s no funeral, right? Only after six months or something?” he added after another silence.

“Yes,” said Lirit.

“I don’t understand this business of donating to science,” he said, “It isn’t her style.”

“That’s what she wanted,” said Lirit.

Only now he asked how she was bearing up, and without waiting for an answer he asked how Dael was.

She said that she hadn’t taken it in yet. It all seemed like a dream. Everything was falling apart. And how was she going to take her mother’s place at the factory, because that was what Mandy wanted? And altogether, how was she going to go on living without her? And without Shlomi too, because they’d split up. And how were they going to get through this hell by themselves, with him far away?

In the face of so many questions, her father asked her first of all to calm down. After that he gathered his strength and told her that however hard it was—and he knew that it was terrible for her, really devastating, and he too felt very bad about it—she should please, please introduce a little logic into the situation.

“I’m trying, I’m trying,” said Lirit.

In fact, it was clear to her that this would be the first or second thing that he would say, that she should introduce logic into the situation. Anyone whose life went off the rails, and who saw it fit to confide in her father, was told to please introduce logic into the situation.

“Good,” said her father, and added, “Be strong, Liritush. Be strong.”

And then,

“Listen, Liritush, I’m a little stunned and confused, darling, I’ll call again later.”