Textile (13 page)

“THEY WANT TO HIT at the heart of the civilian population, because they know that this is where it hurts the nation most,” the CO told them before the mission, but Dael thought that most of the nation didn’t feel a thing, except perhaps for a faint pang, and because of this he needed a bit of cocaine before they set out: in order to hide the lie from his thoughts.

In that early spring simultaneity became a weapon in the ongoing war. The terrorist organizations competed among themselves as to how many simultaneous attacks they could mount, and every organization had a virtuoso who orchestrated the simultaneity.

The semi-senior wanted man Dael’s force was assigned to liquidate was the virtuoso of the Fatah Eagles, a genius in his field, who according to the intelligence in the hands of the army, was busy planning five simultaneous attacks in different cities, including overseas targets. If the five bombs didn’t explode at exactly the same minute, the attack wouldn’t count as simultaneous. The number of casualties wasn’t important, but the simultaneity was. The competition was over the control of time.

Where the five bombs were supposed to go off the intelligence agencies had been unable to discover, but the CO said in the briefing
that he himself wasn’t interested in knowing because in any case the planner would be eliminated today and he wouldn’t be able to execute his plan.

YOU NEVER KNEW exactly when the shot would be fired. That was how the M24 sniper rifle was designed—in order to prevent the body’s reflexes that could interfere with the execution of the execution. Dael compared the slow squeezing of the trigger to engaging the clutch on an uphill spurt, slowly, carefully, so the engine wouldn’t stall. He had passed the test on his first go and he was an excellent driver. His mother let him have her fragrant car with an almost easy heart.

The lookouts confirmed that the target had been eliminated, together with its intentions to develop itself into five simultaneous explosions, including targets overseas. As for the force, it was already close to base. Dael’s pulse was rapid, he was shaking and he wanted more cocaine. He sniffed his hands and cursed. Now his hands would stink for a week.

As usual afterward, he scrubbed himself for an hour in the shower and then lay down in bed and connected to the place where he had last stopped reading
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal. He allowed himself three pages before moving on to David Vogel. He had ten bookmarks, which Lirit had bought him for his nineteenth birthday, together with this book and another one by Jack Kerouac that was on sale. Was his simultaneous reading an obsession requiring treatment, or was it simply virtuosity, ostensibly superfluous? He remembered that his mother had told him a bookshop opened in Mikado and he wondered if they kept classics, or just the latest best sellers.

2

“WHAT?” ASKED GRUBER, WHO AFTER THE MASSAGE WAS ready both physically and mentally for a sleep of at least ten hours. “A French restaurant? Now?”

“Not just any French restaurant. Rene’s Restaurant,” said Bahat McPhee proudly.

Gruber yawned.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’ve already reserved a table. You have to make a booking there at least a week in advance, if we don’t go now we’ll never be able to go.”

He stared at her, red eyed. Bahat felt guilty.

“Don’t worry, it’s a fantastic place, once you’re there you won’t want to leave,” she said and drove too fast on the winding road.

“And we don’t have to spend half the night there either,” she said. “We won’t stay more than two hours, but Rene’s desserts are something special. You know he reopened the place just recently?”

“No,” said Gruber.

“He had a restaurant that was doing very well, but he shut it down and went to France for a few years. And now he came back and opened it again, but in a different place. You know what, I’ve got something to cheer you up,” she said and put on a tape.

Gruber couldn’t believe his ears. Introductions to episodes of
The Twilight Zone
.

“In my opinion some of them are brilliant.” She pressed stop, so she wouldn’t have to go back after her explanations. “You know
that Serling himself is the narrator in the series?”

“No,” said Gruber in despair. In spite of the great massage, his neck could hardly hold itself up on his spine. If he had been condemned to death by the guillotine, his head would have come off even before the blade had finished its work.

“Listen,” said Bahat and increased the volume to a disturbing degree.

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind
.

Gruber looked at her in horror. Did she really intend playing him the introductions to all the episodes? How far was Rene’s restaurant?

A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, The Twilight Zone!

She pressed stop and said: “Amazing, isn’t it? The man was a genius. I don’t think he’s been given the credit he deserves. There’s a whole society devoted to commemorating him. There was a time when I thought of joining, but it involved going to meetings with other people who admire him and his work . . .” She fell silent. “I don’t like rubbing shoulders with people who only have one subject of conversation. It makes me nervous . . . He was a great artist. Have I already told you that he was a lecturer in communications at Ithaca College, and that my daughters studied there too?”

“Yes you have,” said Gruber without remembering if she had or not.

They went on driving through a forest of tall thin trees. The darkness was absolute. Gruber couldn’t understand how she allowed herself to drive at a speed of ninety miles per hour.

“A friend of mine from Berkeley taped these prologues for me.”

“Very nice.”

“It really was very nice of him. I told him so too. And it was from him that I heard about the Serling commemoration fund. He drew my attention to the fact that for only seventeen dollars you can get a really neat email address. Your name and then
@rodserling.com
. He himself has an address like that. But I think it’s going a bit too far.”

“So do I,” said Gruber.

“But Raffi Propheta doesn’t think so. His admiration of Serling knows no bounds.”

“Who’s Raffi Propheta?” asked Gruber, and for a moment he was afraid he had missed something important.

“My friend. From Berkeley University. He made this tape for me. He teaches Hebrew at Berkeley, and he’s active in the Serling commemoration fund. He’s a very special person. From the moment I heard that he too was a Serling fan he shot up in my estimation. He lives in Berkeley. I never visit him. Not because I’ve got anything against Berkeley, but because I simply can’t leave the spiders for long. It’s enough that I go to the Hebrew Union College in New York. It really makes me nervous to leave the spiders, even though since they stuck me with the Hispanic I’m less nervous about leaving the research without supervision.”

“Clearly.”

“My relations with Raffi Propheta are platonic, there’s nothing between us except for conversations in Hebrew. He’s the only person I know here who I can speak Hebrew to the way I’m speaking to you. Naturally I can find Israeli students in Ithaca, the place is full of them, by the way, but talking to students isn’t much fun. Apart from which, he’s up to date on all the changes in Hebrew slang, and he has a student who’s doing a doctorate in the subject under his supervision. They’ve got a lot of respect for him in Berkeley. You’ve never heard of him in Israel? Raffi Propheta?”

“It’s not my field.”

“Right,” she giggled. Gruber noticed that she was familiar with
all the turns in the winding road and took them automatically.

“I had a serious moral problem with him, but I overcame it. All in all I learned a lot about Rod Serling from him. For example, that he comes from a Jewish Reform family, and that he became a member of the Unitarian church, and also that he was a boxer. Did you know that?”

“No,” admitted Gruber.

“Serling made a movie called
Heavyweight Requiem
. He was a Renaissance man. He was a paratrooper too. He served in the US army and fought like a hero.”

“Good.”

“And he was only five foot three.”

“Is he dead?”

“He died in seventy-five. But before that he collected six Emmy awards,” she added proudly.

Gruber’s mental condition was desperate. He was convinced that he was being driven by a woman who was not right in her head. But at the same time he knew that this did not contradict the fact that she had the ability to help him in his limping research.

“He’s pro-Arab and anti-Israel big time,” she said as if revealing a great secret.

“Who?”

“Propheta. Whenever the IDF kill someone he calls and barks at me as if I’m the virtuoso mind behind the army’s activities in the territories.”

“Obviously not,” said Gruber.

“But I need him,” she said in the tone of an intimate confession. “I need to speak Hebrew on the phone or face to face. I’m not sexually attracted to him, you mustn’t think . . . the fact that he hates Israel makes it impossible for me to see him in that light. I like him, but not that much. Listen to this, in my opinion this is one of the best introductions—”

Again Serling’s voice filled the interior of the car:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man
.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, yes,” Gruber made haste to reply.

It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity
.

“If there’s a word you don’t understand tell me.”

“I understand.”

It is the middle ground
. . .

“The halfway point,” shouted McPhee.

. . .
between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is
. . .

Gruber noticed that she was moving her lips together with the tape, and he felt a great sense of detachment.

. . .
the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone
.

“My pro-Arab friend from Berkeley has all the episodes that come after these introductions on DVD. Would you like me to get them for you?”

“No, no. We have the same thing in Tel Aviv too.”

“Okay,” she said in disappointment. “I only wanted to help. You know that I only want to help,” she said and gave him a meaningful look, that lasted too long for someone who should have been keeping her eyes on the road. And then she returned her eyes to the road and they drove for a while in silence until she stopped the car,
put on the hand brakes, and said in a childish voice, “Here we are.”

Gruber saw a depressing three-storied building. In darkness.

His sense of strangeness instantly deepened and he felt dizzy too, as if his whole body was suddenly operating according to different laws of physics, those of a kind of Twilight Zone. This Israeli woman from the arthropod forum was bringing him to an abandoned building, that she claimed was a fancy French restaurant. With all due respect, he was not yet ready to explore another dimension.

“Come along,” said Bahat, and they both got out of the car, which she locked with a screech of the alarm.

“The entrance is round the other side. Careful how you go. The stones are slippery here from the deluge that came down before you landed. Did you feel it on the plane?”

He didn’t answer, only walked behind her in the dark. They entered the building. Bahat said, “It was once a geriatric hospital.”

They walked down a long corridor, on the right and left were peeling green doors with numbers on them, 212, 213 . . .

“A French restaurant in a hospital?”

“The hospital isn’t operating, the restaurant is,” said Bahat and opened a brown door, revealing a dimly lit French restaurant full of diners.

“Name please?” a hostess pounced on them.

“McPhee,” said McPhee, and took off her coat, helped Gruber off with his, and handed them both to the hostess.

McPhee smiled at Gruber, and he thought the smile was false and that her teeth were as white as those of a lot of Americans. But he also thought that when he got back to Israel he would have his own teeth whitened, he was a public personality, winner of the Israel Prize, he couldn’t afford to go round with plaque and yellow teeth.

The hostess led them to a table that did not meet with McPhee’s approval, and she requested another table. There was no other table available, and she asked for Rene to be called. Rene arrived
during the middle of a lovers’ quarrel at one of the tables, and as a result a table to McPhee’s taste becoming available. As soon as they sat down she said something she had planned to say before, but hadn’t managed to:

“It’s hard to know if there are more pro-Arabs than Arabs at Berkeley. In my opinion there are. But perhaps now it’s balanced out a bit. After all, the pro-Arabs need Arabs next to them so that they can show them that they’re on their side.”

“Presumably,” said Gruber and he looked at the menus and didn’t understand a thing.