He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt this woman, whom he regarded as an angel in human form.
The truth was that Propheta was in love with her, but he knew that she couldn’t stand him physically. To him Bahat was a breath of fresh air in his world, and her social isolation touched his heart. She was mistaken in thinking that when she was a Reform rabbi she would meet people in the framework of her routine, and that they would have to be nice to her, that she would make friends with some of them, and then perhaps she would also find some lover she could stand physically and in whom she would find all the qualities her heart desired, at least for a few years because she was already sick to death of being with spiders all day long.
Propheta was also suspicious of the rabbi from Albany, but he had no way of approaching her. What kind of a person was she? How could the rabbi allow this woman — who anyone could see had been disappointed by the world and who was acting out of utter despair — to pour years of her hard work into the hands of the Israelis? If he understood correctly, she was actually giving up her chance for a Nobel here, and perhaps even risking her liberty. Harming the security of the United States was the last thing she needed.
On the other hand, the danger to relations between the USA and the State of Israel didn’t interest him so much as a hair of his mustache, which had once been ginger and was now a yellowish gray. On this point Propheta thought that as a logistics officer in the reserves he was no mean strategist because he was perhaps the only one here who thought things through to the end.
BAHAT SAW THE TRANSMISSION of information to Gruber as an excellent way out of the condition of being buried alive that she had organized for herself over the past few years. When she set the two things opposite each other — the modification of the gene responsible for the activity of the spinning glands in the spiders, opposite the title of Reform rabbi, which meant a lively social life, and what’s more, one without feeling that she was imposing herself on people because she would be serving them by the very fact of her presence — it was very clear to her which of the two she preferred.
The sign that she was doing the right thing she found in the terrible headaches which assailed her before she had decided between the two. As long as they continued, alternating between the left side of her head and then the right, she felt torn between her loyalty to the United States and her loyalty to herself. But the moment she made up her mind, they vanished into thin air.
“I don’t feel like coffee,” she suddenly said sadly, and it seemed that only then she noticed the presence of the parrot that was now perched on the windowsill. But she ignored it.
“Do you want me to make you chai?” asked Propheta happily.
“Yes, but I haven’t got any cardamom.”
“I know you haven’t. I took note of it,” he smiled at her and she smiled back at him, a perfunctory smile, not from the heart but out of embarrassment.
McPhee approached the sofa where Gruber was sitting.
“After the chai we’ll go to visit my spider farm,” she said. “And in the meantime the pills will take effect.”
“What pills do you take?” asked Gruber with affected empathy.
“None of your business,” she said, and he was horrified by her bluntness.
Suddenly breaking news came on the television. A mass terror attack in Geneva. The first pictures. Exclusive.
All three turned their eyes to the screen, two of them as if what was now being shown on the television was an earthquake of seven points on the Richter scale in the third world. There were things that had to be done.
“Is anywhere safe from them?” murmured Gruber in the voice of decent humanity.
Propheta said, “It would be better if I didn’t say what I think.”
“Much better,” said Bahat carelessly.
Propheta was insulted again, but what could he do. This was the path he had chosen.
“I have to phone home. I haven’t spoken to my family since I arrived,” said Gruber urgently, as if the attack had taken place in Israel and his family was in danger.
“It must be night in Israel,” said Propheta without a second thought.
“Ahh,” said Gruber, “my wife must be sleeping. She goes to bed at nine o’clock. My son, if he isn’t sleeping, is taking part in some targeted intervention. And my daughter is singing lullabies to her boyfriend’s organic vegetables in the Negev. I’ll call them in a few hours’ time. So they won’t be worried about me.”
8
IN THE MORNING, AFTER EVERYONE HAD GONE TO WORK, Lirit sat in the shopping center Mikado in Café au Lait, where they only served coffee without milk in special circumstances, and she waited for ages for the latte in a mug she had ordered. Lirit really wanted to complain to the owner, but what good would it do her. She surveyed the scene. In a shallow pool eight disciplined openings gave rise to a meter-and-a-half high jet, which fell dead straight onto itself, God forbid a drop should stray from the regime imposed on it by the designer. They told the designer without a lot of splashing, and he did as he was told. To the left was a pizza parlor called Big Apple Pizza. The shopping center was quite empty, because the children who usually hung out there were in school. At last they had opened a school here in the neighborhood. The mothers had been going crazy from driving their kids to distant schools every morning.
The latte in a mug arrived and Lirit told the waitress that she had been waiting for more than ten minutes. The waitress replied that that was how long you waited here for latte in a mug.
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