Textile (24 page)

It took her a long time to understand what was meant by sub-surface drip irrigation, but the minute she understood she thought she was a genius.

Now she was on her way to find what it meant, in terms of threads and money, to get into the market of organic cotton.

Let the workers in the factory carry on making pajamas for the ultra-Orthodox sector until further notice, she said to herself. That was all for the best. And in the meantime she herself would carry on going ahead with her inquiries. It actually suited her for her father to be having some scene with himself and someone else as
crazy as he was, who had also spent years of her life with spiders. Now she, Lirit, was truly free. It was ridiculous what her father was doing with his life when he could be sitting at home and making a decent living from regular textile, without all the sensations and headaches. After all, he wasn’t an idiot, he must know that the safest thing today was to go for textile that already existed, which he had at home.

Lirit was only twenty-two, and look how much experience of life she already had. There was no need to go to America, she added to herself, it was enough to go to Kibbutz Kissufim.

Even though she didn’t say so to herself in so many words, Lirit had been wounded to the depths of her soul by her father’s failure to return to Israel at such a difficult time, and she didn’t know if she could ever forgive him. There were probably cultures where they stoned people for this kind of thing without thinking twice. With all due respect to him and his Israel Prize, this time he had gone too far. She wasn’t going to forgive him.

Lirit had already found an outlet for her anger in the poor seamstresses at Nighty-Night. She took advantage of the atmosphere of anxiety surrounding them, and threw her weight around like a true autocrat, not of these times. Her mother would no doubt have been proud of her. Perhaps it was in her DNA.

And anyway, why shouldn’t they be afraid? What was she supposed to do about it? Life isn’t a picnic, Mandy would warn her whenever she was happy. She too was afraid of upsetting the status quo, especially if it was working well, but the status quo was so boring, and she knew that if she wanted to love this place (i.e. Nighty-Night), she was going to have to march it ahead. In the first place, change its name to something more up-to-date, transfer the production to China, which was several times cheaper than Turkey, and yes, let a large part of the workers go, with or without mercy. Instead of the fired workers, she would bring in ambitious young girls with gel and tattoos, graduates of the Shenkar Textile Design School, or talented foreigners, who had all kinds of weird
ideas on subjects she had never heard of because with old Shlomi from Brosh on the border of Te’ashur she had stagnated. Now she wanted to get back into the swing of things.

The workers at Nighty-Night weren’t living on a cloud either, and they already knew that a big change was about to take place in their lives: perhaps they would join the ranks of the unemployed, and from there slide into the vicious cycle of poverty, from which it was very difficult to emerge.

Lirit thought that she deserved to be congratulated. Her mother died, and she didn’t break. On the contrary. She was strong and she was coping very well. She gave herself “Very good” in a teacher’s handwriting. She was doing everything. Bringing herself up-to-date while also going forward. Yes, indeed. In some sense, life was miraculous. From a disappointment to her parents, a nothing with a boyfriend twice her age—and now she could already admit to herself
boring
, so boring (someone who photographed floods and flowers, with cameras and lenses that nobody dared to show in public anymore)—she had in a few days turned into the industrious and independent owner of a factory, without any additions to her beautiful back, with perfect shoulder blades like the ones her late mother had in her youth, and she was about to enter the Israeli pajama market with something amazing by any standard, organic cotton of the Pima variety grown by sub-surface drip irrigation on Kibbutz Kissufim of the United Kibbutz Movement.

It was going to be a huge success! Because what did people have left to rely on if not their pajamas. Let them too be made of natural materials. Let the stuff that enveloped their natural nightmares be natural too, and fit in with them harmoniously.

They started to play an irritating song on the radio. In general, Lirit didn’t know three-quarters of the songs they played, which in her opinion was a shame and disgrace. She listened carefully to the words of the presenters introducing the songs she didn’t know, as if she was sitting in a math class and had to remember the equations.

She switched to another station and the strains of a different
band began to proudly review the new composition of her life. Suddenly she grew melancholy. What are you doing? You have set aside the whole truth and contented yourself with only a very curtailed version of it. You have just deliberately narrowed your world. In truth, your life is in ruins. Your dearly beloved mother will never return, not even to quarrel with you, and your father has lost his mind somewhere in northern New York.

Lirit addressed herself in the archaic language she had learned from her Grandmother Audrey, whose limited command of Hebrew was of an outdated variety.

Lirit would say something like “look” and her grandmother would say “pray look” and suchlike expressions. Lirit liked talking to herself in this language, because it gave her the feeling of security she used to have with her grandmother as a child.

Grandmother Audrey believed that in order to master a language, you had to first learn a few flowery phrases, and only after that the basics. In this way, even if you weren’t fluent in the language, you learned the best of it, and even if you made mistakes, people would immediately understand how high you were aiming. Audrey Greenholtz repeated this to Lirit dozens of times, perhaps hundreds, until Lirit didn’t have the strength for her anymore, and then either Lirit didn’t answer her or she left the room in the middle of the repetitive speech.

Leave the future to its own devices! she accordingly said to herself. The time and tide will yet present themselves for you to set sail for New York to bring your father home. You have a million things to worry about before that.

Once again she banished from the arena of her thoughts the abandonment of her father and the death of her mother, on the grounds that she already knew the facts and she couldn’t change the situation. It was all down to her, and therefore she had the moral legitimacy to put off grieving. Apart from which, Lirit preferred to think positive thoughts, and she went back to basking in her new status as the director of the pajama factory. If you looked
at it in the long term, it was cruel but true, she had struck it lucky. Mandy’s death had positive aspects too, in relation to Lirit’s freedom of action and her personal growth. Her posture had improved a lot too. Suddenly her neck vertebrae were no longer at an angle to the rest of her spinal column, and her head didn’t droop when she was walking.

Even her self-image had improved in the wake of compliments she had received from a top model she had met in Mikado, and also from her personal psychologist, Inbal Asherov, who she had gone to see on a one-off basis, and who had seemed very pleased with Lirit’s progress.

She turned onto Route Six, the new toll road, and was impressed by its width and the fact that there wasn’t much traffic on it at eleven in the morning. The meeting with the organic cotton grower Oron de Bouton was set to take place at noon at the entrance to Kibbutz Kissufim. It was relatively early and Lirit went over the lesson Mandy had tried for years to teach her and which she had rejected as if it was in a foreign language: the warp is vertical and the woof is horizontal. Fabrics are made of threads. Threads are made of fibers. The carding machine is the machine that combs the fibers. There’s a cotton board, just like there’s a poultry board.

5

“WHAT AN IDIOT THAT PSYCHIATRIST OF YOURS IS,” SAID Irad and added salt to the
shakshuka
Bahat had made him instead of the scrambled egg. He had changed his mind a second before she broke the egg, and after she had served him the hot, bubbling dish of eggs and tomatoes, and he had sprinkled it with salt, he added:

“He’s infantile. Who is
he
to diagnose
me?
Hey? You know what he said to me? No? So let me tell you, because it’s about your elections. He told me that he was depressed, because the Democrats lost. I didn’t know that the Democrats lost.”

“The Democrats lost,” said Bahat.

Gruber waved a scolding finger in the air.

“Your doctor, the psychiatrist, sounds to me like a very disturbed fellow. First of all, his appearance is nebulous and undefined. It’s hard to tell if he’s even handsome or ugly, he’s so volatile. A person who doesn’t take a fee for the initial consultation. Who’s ever heard of such a thing? I don’t think I’ll even take the pills he prescribed me.”

Bahat was horrified.

“What are you talking about? Bill Stanton? He’s considered one of the finest in the entire state of New York! He graduated from Cornell with distinction! And he’s from Ithaca,” she concluded proudly.

“Enough already with that hubris,” said Irad and buttered a slice of bread with which he quickly wiped his plate. Bahat looked at him and thought that he ate fast and a lot, and altogether he
was costing her a fortune, and while they were both silent and he was eating, she calculated how much he had cost her since the moment of his arrival, including the massage and the meal at the French restaurant, and it came to over two thousand dollars. And of course, the five hundred dollars he had offered as a contribution to expenses, he had failed to mention again. Before she had time to take in this interim account another problem revealed itself: the medication. That too would no doubt cost a fortune. She was sorry, but she would have to ask him to share the expenses. She was sick and tired of all the egomaniacs in the world.

“My dear,” Gruber suddenly addressed her with a confusing tenderness she had never come across before in a man of his age. “You shouldn’t have called him in,” he said, chewing another, extra, slice of bread and butter. “It’s a waste of your time and effort. I can tell you myself what’s wrong with me.”

“Yes?” she said, wondering if he was going to tell her anything new.

“I was diagnosed three years ago by a senior psychologist at the Defense Ministry as borderline with a high level of organizing ability. Apart from that, I have a tendency to deep depression. Mandy, my wife, may she rest in peace, understood me very well. She understood that with geniuses, personality disorders, psychological disturbances, whatever you want to call it, are a must. The sensitivity and the ability to see the facts in a different light originate in the nervous system, which is also the first to suffer. What disorder do you suffer from?”

“Attention and concentration disorders and severe communication problems. Sometimes I stutter. That’s why I don’t give lectures as a rule. I begin on a subject, open parentheses and more parentheses, and forget what I’m supposed to be talking about. I’m not a sociable person,” Bahat confessed and lowered her eyes.

“Do you take Ritalin?” asked Irad.

“Among other things.”

“I don’t take Ritalin, because it has side effects, especially if
you’re post-traumatic.”

“So you are post-traumatic.”

“Apart from my genius—on whose altar you’ll find my nervous system—I am also post-traumatic, correct. I carry that on my back too,” said Gruber, looking serious.

“And what’s the trauma?”

“Moving houses,” said Gruber quietly.

“Ah, yes. We’ve heard that before,” said Bahat dismissively.

“It’s the third most severe trauma in children. After death in the family and divorce.”

“It happened to you as a child?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

“No, it happened to me two years ago, when we moved to Tel Baruch North. It was a big blow. I didn’t expect it to happen to someone of my age, in my position. Mandy said it would get better with time, she was in a bit of a shock herself . . .”

“Why? Where did you live before?”

“In Neve Avivim. 44 Tagore Street. You know it?”

“I don’t know anything about those neighborhoods. What’s the difference?”

“The difference? You’ve been stagnating here too long to understand the differences. You left when Neve Avivim had just been built, which is a long time ago. You haven’t got a hope of getting to the bottom of the difference. In general, Neve Avivim and Tel Baruch North are as far apart as West from East. Aah,” he sighed disconsolately. “Tel Baruch North is a place without a past, with tremendous difficulty in connecting to the present. That’s how I feel anyway. And whoever did the landscape planning for the neighborhood did it without any heritage too. They filled the place with coconut palms! There are no butterflies, never mind honeysuckers. Or hedgehogs. There’s no food chain. And lawns—there aren’t any. Are there?” he tried to remember.

Bahat went to the sink with his plate and almost threw it in with the cutlery. She was really fed up. If he didn’t take his pills, what was she going to do? She decided to call Propheta. Sometimes he
gave excellent, spot-on advice.

“You know, Bahat,” continued Gruber, in a more pleasant tone, as if he were a real-estate consultant with life experience. “It’s not a good idea to buy a new apartment in a new location, with new infrastructure, new vegetation, new trees, new stairs, new everything. It’s no good being the first in a certain place. It gives rise to anxiety. I like houses that have been lived in before. It’s less frightening when you’re not the first, when you’re not supposed to determine anything, but there I feel a kind of obligation to the house itself, do you understand? As if I have to give it an ambience, do you understand?” he asked Bahat again.