Textile (3 page)

She was afraid that her daughter would repeat the mistake that she herself had made when she married Irad Gruber. Although it
was true that in his youth he had been great looking, a real charmer with a full head of hair, not like today with his receding hairline, but as a kibbutz leaver he suffered from a lack of earning ability. She had spent a fortune on financing his doctorates and living expenses for the duration. In the course of the years he had progressed and traveled the world, while she stayed stuck with the 100 percent cotton pajamas with no fear of religiously prohibited impurities.

And even after he had completed all his degrees in biology, technology, and engineering, as well as postgraduate courses in personnel management and administration, Irad Gruber remained a financial burden on his wife. Without funding from any outside agency he applied himself to all kinds of inventions in every possible field, conveying to all and sundry the sense that he was about to make an important breakthrough.

“It’s hard to support a genius,” she would joke, without raising a laugh from anyone, including herself.

AND INDEED, after a not insignificant number of years the spiral escalators invented and designed by Irad Gruber gained worldwide recognition and distribution, and the Ministry of Culture, Science, and Sport (CSAS) intervened and provided funding, and Gruber gave Israel’s reputation a boost at a terrible time, when most of the world disapproved of its policies. Many air-raid shelters throughout the world acquired the spiral escalators, as did airports and shopping malls. Much space was saved by this Israeli with his brilliant invention, which in certain places prevented the chopping down of forests or other environmental destruction.

He made many millions for the state, and a few for himself. Mandy fell on the money and invested it in profitable ventures. Gruber was disdainful and didn’t object. Money wasn’t his field, he liked to say.

On the fifty-fourth anniversary of the establishment of the state, he was awarded the Israel Prize for bringing credit to the country
in difficult days and injecting important foreign capital into its resources. On the fifty-fifth anniversary of the state he was granted the honor of lighting a torch at the official Independence Day celebration on Mount Herzl.

A WEEK AFTER the attack on the Twin Towers, Gruber was approached by the Weapons and Infrastructure Development Administration (WIDA) at the Defense Ministry and invited to a meeting with important people from the highest echelons. It upset them to see a local, homegrown talent wasted for the benefit of random crowds, coming and going in international airports and shopping centers, while what people desperately needed now was simply to stay alive.

He had a series of meetings at the Defense Ministry with various VIPs, and in a brief and to-the-point conversation in a cafe in the London Ministore, between the deputy defense minister and Irad Gruber, the ministry hired the services of the gifted man to design and produce special, lightweight protective suits that would not limit the movements of the people wearing them, unlike the armor worn by medieval knights, or the heavy flak jackets of our own day issued only to those on the front line.

These important suits were known by the code name “TESU,” or T-suits (in other words, terror suits). The plan was to issue them to all the troops on active service and also to the reserves, and later on to supply them to the entire civilian population, in the event of a terrorist attack.

This was a formula that suited the needs of Irad Gruber down to the ground. The escalators had brought him money, a local prize, international fame and respect, and the new suits would bring him the Nobel Prize. The government provided him with all the conditions for the manufacture of the T-suits. Mandy thought that she would have to attach a catheter to her husband’s head to drain off all the piss that had gone to it since he had received the Israel Prize. Otherwise it was liable to burst with self-satisfaction.

There were about sixty patents registered in Gruber’s name, and he had started work on some of them before being approached by the Defense Ministry. Mandy feared the success of more grandiose projects. What he had already achieved was enough for her. But from Irad’s point of view this was an opportunity to prove that he wasn’t just a mercenary publicity hound, as a certain newspaper had claimed, but also a great humanist. He set all his other ideas aside, and for three years he had devoted himself exclusively to the ultimate rescue suit—the TESU.

AMANDA HAD ALWAYS raised the children alone, without any help from Irad. As soon as she recovered from the shoulder blade surgery, she planned to drop in to the Steimatzky branch in Neve Avivim and pick up a few books to prepare her spaced-out daughter for the psychometric tests. And as a girl who had grown up on lowbrow juvenile literature, she would get her a few magazines too, to look at when she was resting from her studies.

Mandy liked going to the shopping center in Neve Avivim, because she had done her shopping there for twenty years when she was living in a penthouse at 44 Tagore Street.

She usually bought the classics Dael asked her to get for him there too, although she sometimes ordered them for him on the Internet. She had heard, from Aya Ben-Yaish again, that immediately after a targeted assassination her Dael was left with the smell of gunpowder on his hands, never mind how often he washed them and what soap he used, and only immersion in very high literature distracted him from the smell.

The child therefore took advantage of the long lulls between ambushes and liquidations in order to read the classic of world literature: Stendhal,
Madame Bovary, Don Quixote
, Thomas Mann, Turgeniev, Tolstoy,
Crime and Punishment
, Kafka, and so on. He didn’t ignore the classics of Hebrew literature either, and was particularly fond of Mendele Mocher Seforim and all kinds of old books with titles that began with the words “The Collected Works
of . . .” He also had a notebook that was very precious to him, in which he wrote down Hebrew words that were unfamiliar to him because they were no longer in use, and on weekends, after surfing his favorite porno sites, he would translate them into contemporary Hebrew and enter the site of the Language Academy to offer his suggestions.

He had developed a method of reading in breadth, in other words he would read a number of books at once. Breadth reading demanded a special effort and distracted him from current affairs. He would also test himself to see that he wasn’t getting mixed up between the plots of the novels and putting a character from one book into another book by mistake. These tests were also excellent etudes for the mind, enabling him to maintain thinking in breadth as opposed to his linear thinking as a sniper, and he thought that in this way he saved himself, because when all was said and done Dael was a very sensitive boy.

Mandy didn’t know that her son read several books at once, sometimes as many as five, and nevertheless she correctly interpreted his intensive reading as an act of
balance
. After shooting someone, he felt the need to connect with something uplifting, and she was very willing to respond to this noble need.

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE the important conversation, two weeks before the surgery, Mandy sat in her car in the car wash and prepared herself. Soap from thin boring pipes sprayed the car, and giant brushes emerged from hiding and scrubbed energetically, until the dark red car was completely covered with a thick layer of white foam.

Inside the foam, from which she was protected by the car, Mandy wondered what would be the most effective way of appealing to her daughter to make her agree to leave Shlomi in the Negev, and their natural farm based on a number of “ideals” she couldn’t remember at the moment, and take on the burden of being Mandy Gruber for ten, maximum twelve, days.

The mother aimed herself at a balance between forcefulness and tenderness, and got ready for the very possible contingency in which Lirit would begin to yell and go berserk. In this case, she would cut off the conversation and call again later. That was the advantage of these cell phones, which sometimes disconnected.

On the other end of the line, long rings repeated themselves without a human or nonhuman response. They must be digging up the beets, thought Mandy.

The car had emerged from the tunnel shining and beautiful since she had had it waxed. She waited at the stop sign before the right turn, without noticing that the road was empty and she could go. She was busy listening to the long dial tones somewhere in the Negev.

Finally Lirit answered.

“What did I take you away from?”

“Shlomi wanted me to come and see something.”

“What?” She turned right as if there was a traffic light there and it had just changed to green.

“What?” Lirit was surprised at the interest.

“Yes, what?”

“That tree bark prevents weeds from growing, and there’s no need to spray anything. We’re going to collect tree bark in a minute.”

“I understand, enjoy yourselves,” said Mandy, and added, “Darling.”

Lirit was sure that her mother was encouraging her in her way of life, and she was surprised and happy, but a second later she realized that it was only the preamble to a serious request.

Mandy told Lirit that
this time too
she would have to come up north during her hospitalization in order to stand in for her. In other words, as she was well aware, this wasn’t the first time that she had had to stand in for her. Both in her previous home and in this one Mandy had called on her. It couldn’t be helped. It was an emergency. She should see it as a war. She would have to sleep in the
luxurious triplex in Tel Baruch North, and not in the ruin where she was living now. To disconnect and activate the alarm system, to keep an eye on the Columbian so she wouldn’t steal her cosmetics, like the one before her and the Filipina before that, who had made long distance calls to all her friends in Manila. To arrange for the Columbian to get the key and return it. And above all: to take herself every day to the family pajama factory in Netanya and manage it to the extent that Lirit was capable of managing anything.

She asked her first-born to make an effort on her behalf, because this time she really needed this operation. Carmela would help Lirit with whatever she required. “It’s all arranged, my sweet. He’ll manage without you for a few days. Sometimes it’s healthy to take a break,” she hurried to soften the impression.

“I can’t believe that you’re actually going through with this insane operation,” said Lirit.

“What’s insane about it?” asked Mandy and passed the turnoff to Tel Baruch North by mistake. “My shoulder blades have become eroded, and I’m having replacements implanted. They’ve already done three thousand of them to date. I’m not prepared to look at my back and see sunken skin where my exquisite shoulder blades once were.”

At this moment Shlomi came in and lay down on the sofa without doing anything. Lirit’s mother went on talking to her, she said that she had only left her a few little tasks that she could take care of easily, but Lirit’s attention had already been distracted. Negative vibrations were reaching her from the tired man with the slow movements who was lying on the sofa. Altogether, he had been giving off a lot of negative energy recently, and sometimes it seemed to her that he was aiming it straight at her, because she had forgotten to water their organic vegetable garden a few times and things had died. In addition to which, the carrots had failed, the cucumbers had holes in them, and the pumpkin had rotted.

Lately he hardly spoke to her, as opposed to periods when he even talked too much. And she, who suffered from severe attention
deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), was unable to listen to such long speeches of at least an hour against globalization and destruction and the exploitation of Africa and the children in Southeast Asia. The communication between these two suffered from severe limitations, since in addition to Lirit’s ADHD, Shlomi’s verbal skills were poor. He would sometimes begin sentences with the word “what,” and the words that followed were not always in the right order, and he added unnecessary similes, and repeated them several times, and all this verbal inflorescence was supposed to be connected to the initial “what.”

Lirit said “Good,” and “No problem” to her mother, in order to get the conversation over. And even before she had succeeded in taking in the gist of her mother’s words, before she had started to examine in theory the possible effects of leaving the farm or her relations with Shlomi, the latter rose from the sofa, took a few steps, walked past her, went outside, and called her to come and see something, this time at the bottom of the garden. The red worms had multiplied and fattened in the compost heap. She hurried over and expressed exaggerated admiration for the compost and the size of the worms, whatever it took to stop him sulking and to moderate this negativity of his.

AFTER SHE HAD EXPRESSED such enthusiasm for the work of the worms, Shlomi smiled his good smile at her and she breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t sulking and he wasn’t cross with her, he was simply absorbed in himself, as people sometimes were absorbed in themselves, he explained to her on his own initiative without her asking. She sat down on the old sofa and Shlomi went to fetch his latest photographs. One of his photographs had once been published in
The Voice of the South
for twenty-seven dollars.

Shlomi was not only an idealistic organic farmer, but also a gifted photographer, and he was trying to get into the journalism market in the south of the country. This time he dwelled only on
his latest photographs, especially of the floods in the Negev, and Lirit sat on his lap and said: