Textile (7 page)

“A look implant?” said Yagoda and a flash of mockery appeared in his sad eyes peeping over the green mask, “What for? To see a better world?”

“No, Professor. So that the look won’t expose the age. All the plastic surgery on the face, and in my opinion on the body too, are useless as long as nobody’s invented a look implant. The look betrays the age. People don’t realize this. You can see everything in a person’s look.”

“Interesting, interesting,” Yagoda tried to make nice, “and will it be possible to choose a different look for every day?”

“For every hour,” giggled the nurse.

“That will come too, wait and see,” he said, just to put an end to the conversation.

Yagoda was a Harvard graduate, and among other things he had learned there how to maintain pleasant relations with the operating team, and how to hum the consonant
M
in order to give rise to the illusion of interest and attention. On the other hand, he had also learned how to defend himself from total immersion in idle chatter, which was liable to distract him from the ongoing operation. From time to time he had to throw out an indisputable statement of fact, after which there was nothing to say. This defined him as the boss of the given operation, and set him above the rest of those present.

This time he said: “The average person is capable of saying two hundred words a minute, and the average person is capable of listening to one hundred and sixty words a minute. Which means that there will always be those who talk to the air, owing to the limitations of the average person’s ability to listen. There will always be words that are wasted on thin air.”

Silence fell. He didn’t want to seem superior, even though if he hadn’t been superior to a lot of people, he would not have become a plastic surgeon with an international reputation, as well as the assistant director of the plastic surgery department of the biggest hospital in Dresden.

WHEN HE WAS STARTING out over there, and curious and nosy people asked him what had brought him to Germany, he had replied: “Love.” And this reply shut them up. There never was and never would be a more crushing reply, Yagoda knew, when addressing the question of his emigration to Germany.

Monica, whom he had met in Harvard, loved him, and for as long as the love lasted the couple had lived in the city of Hamburg, which he actually detested. He persuaded Monica to move to Cologne, and she agreed, also in the name of love. The young Yagoda felt that he had the moral right to ask her to move from town to town in
that
country, after he himself had completely given up on Israel, for her sake.

Today Yagoda thought that moving to Cologne had been a mistake. They should have moved to Munich. Cologne had shortened the life of their love, owing to circumstances and coincidences that would never have happened if they had stayed in Hamburg, or moved to Munich.

When the love between him and Monica was over, other loves came, all in this complicated country, loves which also produced children. Yagoda had four children, dispersed in different cities in Germany, corresponding to his loves.

He arrived in Dresden divorced for the third time, shortly after the fall of the wall. They offered him a job in a local hospital, and he made very good progress, even though he had no love there. In fact he was already worn out by relationships and the efforts demanded of him in order to go forward and not get bored in the relationship. He put his heart and soul into fresh approaches and holidays, but there was always friction.

Yagoda preferred Dresden to all the other cities in Germany.

In the Second World War the allied forces had bombed this city very thoroughly, and most of it was new, in relation to other big cities.

The absence of history was convenient for him.

And nevertheless he reminded himself from time to time that he was a Jew, and repeated to himself that if he had been alive then, he would have stopped being alive a long time ago.

Since coming to the city of Dresden, the doctor flourished and even if he had no love there, he didn’t see it as a tragedy. Here and there he had a fling with a married nurse, and he was satisfied with this.

HE FINISHED MAKING ROOM for the new shoulder blades. According to the concept of the state-of-the-art operation, there was no need to remove the old shoulder blades, since they were so worn out anyway, and they could even serve as a bed for the
new ones.

The new ones would hide the old ones as long as she lived.

The two prosthetic shoulder blades were brought on a tray, boiling with sterilization. They were made of tough plastic material, in a shade of very pale light green. Their size and sharpness had been decided by Mandy weeks before the operation, according to examples he had sent her on the Internet.

Dr. Yagoda was about to put them in place, join them to the muscles, and the muscles to the bones and tendons, as required—and then to close up Mrs. Gruber, one of many who could not, on any account, face the effects of the passing of time.

IT WAS NOT LONG since Mandy had buried her mother Audrey, who was eighty-two when she died. With her own eyes she had observed the process of her decline, and if she so wished, she could also have documented it in a special notebook. She had noticed how Audrey grew shorter and shorter, and how the little hump on her back made it increasingly bent, although it never reached the terrible angle of ninety degrees. She saw the hair on her head dwindling to a tuft that no hairdresser in the world could set into a hairdo that lasted more than ten minutes.

Even though she saw her mother almost every day, and everybody knows that if you see someone so frequently, you don’t notice changes, Mandy noted to herself that her mother’s face was shrinking further and further toward some unknown point. Her neck too, once the most magnificent neck in Rhodesia, and then in the Levant, was shrinking fast, while at the same time the handsome contours of the south of her face melted into the skin of a wobbly double chin.

All this was accompanied by the retreat of the mind of a woman who until the age of sixty-something could multiply seven hundred and forty-eight by nine-point-nine in a matter of seconds in her head. She herself reported on a fog that was gradually covering
her lucidity, and said that she had to rely on “ever-diminishing areas” in order to communicate her thoughts.

In the last two years of her life, Audrey Greenholtz agreed to leave the apartment at 18 Arlozorov Street and move into a renovated old-age home on Einstein Street. But once she was there she never stopped complaining about how miserable she was, and how she suffered from the mere presence of the other old people, who made her feel depressed and hopeless. She claimed that their appearance alone was enough to age her and even to kill her, and rebuked her daughter for removing her from her home.

Mandy reminded her that she had offered to get her “someone” to help her day and night, and that she was the one who refused and preferred the retirement home. But Audrey ignored her.

“There are some people who, even when they grow old, nobody throws them out of their homes,” she said to her daughter and made her feel guilty. And she also said that she had wandered the world enough, and the proof of how far she had traveled was that she came from a country that only existed on old maps.

After a short time, as if to close ranks with the other Einstein residents, she deteriorated greatly, until in the last year of her life it happened—not often, but it happened—that she forgot the nature of her relationship to her daughter. Were they sisters? Was she her neighbor from 18 Arlozorov, who had come to visit her yesterday, the one whose husband was a compulsive key-holder collector?

Audrey’s imagination housed marginal characters from the past, who were suddenly illuminated from a new angle, such as, for example, the Singer technician with whom she had been in love at the end of the seventies, something which so far as Mandy knew had never actually happened. Sometimes she would ask Mandy when she had returned from Detroit, because a textile conference had once taken place there years ago and Mandy had attended it on behalf of the factory to pick up ideas for fabrics which they would then commission from the textile factory they worked with without fear of impurities or fear of anything else.

When Mandy was supposed to fly home, a big strike broke out and her return was delayed, and Audrey was very worried about her. Lirit was then twelve years old, Gruber was wrapped up in himself, and the grandmother was afraid that Mandy would never return and the burden of caring for the two children would fall to her.

This wasn’t completely irrational, because for a few days there was no telephone connection with Mandy, and it was only with the help of the Israeli consulate in Detroit that they succeeded in locating her.

It was a very big strike, although there have been bigger ones since. In any case, when it came to an end, the economy was no longer the same as it was before.

ON THE LAST NIGHT of her life, after she had sentenced Mandy to not being the third generation of female loneliness, and even threatened her that she would haunt her from heaven if she introduced radical changes in Nighty-Night, she murmured the names of outstanding members of the ultra-Orthodox clientele of the pajama factory in the sixties and seventies.

After she died, Mandy sank into a permanent state of depression. It seemed that she did everything with an apathetic shrug of her shoulders, without a real smile. Suddenly she understood that nature was cruel and it didn’t give anybody a discount, not even her. To her increasing annoyance and resentment she discovered that the contours of the bottom of her face, too, were disappearing into a new chin, which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, with no justification, after all her efforts not to put on weight. And she also discovered that a layer of fat of more than a centimeter thick had grown on her back, making her beautiful spine hollow and disappointing. Her vision too was deteriorating. When she looked at the notices she had published in the papers announcing her mother’s death, the small letters and even some of the big ones were blurred.

At the optician’s office next to her house, they told her that she was plus two in her right eye and plus one and three-quarters in her left eye, and she needed bifocals for driving and reading.

In order to compensate herself, Mandy bought gorgeous glasses for $675.

ABOUT A YEAR after her mother’s death Mandy went back to cherishing the vain hope that while the march toward extinction was self-evident, and it was clear that she would grow old and die like everybody else, perhaps
she
would be given special consideration “over there,” wherever that might be, and the process would be softened in her case. “Over there” they must know how important external appearances, aesthetics, were to her, and therefore they would meet her halfway. Perhaps because of her CV: after all, she had been second to the queen of the class in primary school, and quite popular in high school too.

At the same time she began to change her diet to a strict regime: no milk, meat, fish, eggs, bread, or coffee—only fruit, vegetables, and some seaweed or other. In the morning she drank wheat grass that she pulverized and made into juice herself, and during the day she made sure to swallow all the most up-to-date vitamins and omegas on the market.

Before she embarked on the series of plastic surgeries, she gave the cosmetics companies a chance, and spent a fortune on their promising products, especially one which was made of caviar (Creme Caviar), which she ordered on the Internet from a store in Los Angeles and paid $1,570 for.

In those days the home page on her computer, at home and at work, was the website of a famous and innovative cosmetics company, and she even downloaded screen savers from their site with all kinds of variations on the company’s logo.

Dael’s conscription sent her back to her ordinary news site home page and to a simple Nivea face cream, having put the rest in the hands of her chosen plastic surgeons. She chose them with
great care after investigation, and she also made inquiries as to anesthetics, but since she was unable to get her hands on any, she made do with various tranquilizers, which she took care to vary after a few months because she thought that this way she would save herself from getting addicted.

To date Mandy had spent $68,000 on plastic surgery, and it was clear to her that as long as Dael was in the army and he still had time to be served—this was what her life would look like. About her death, she refrained from thinking.

IN THE MEDICAL FRONTLINE OR there was unexpected stress. The saturation level of the oxygen in Mandy’s blood began to drop. Seventy-five. There were a few minutes of very professional and controlled alarm, and in the end the operating team succeeded in stabilizing the patient and the operation continued.

But so far as Dr. Yagoda was concerned, those stressful moments during the course of the surgery on Mrs. Amanda Gruber concluded a chapter in his life. He would no longer perform plastic surgeries in Israel. He would no longer come to Israel at all, not even for the Passover Seder or Rosh Hashanah with his sister in Nahariya. His connection with the State of Israel was at an end.

Yagoda was so alarmed because for the first time since he had been living on his own without any love, he had nearly lost a patient on the operating table. He connected the drama in the OR to the country in which it had taken place, and to the grievous cardiac condition of its inhabitants, and decided to return to Germany the next morning. He considered giving up surgery altogether, and restricting himself to pre-operative consultations in a private clinic.