For the first time she noticed that for a while now he had been calling her by her first name, and it pleased her because he pronounced the h so beautifully, with a lot of aspiration, and didn’t turn her into Bay-hat like the Americans did.
He went on:
“All you have to do, Bahat, is to understand that this is the reaction of a very sensitive man, whose ship of life has reached the gulf of oblivion. I myself haven’t yet taken in this duality, that on the one hand you’ve given me the data, and on the other hand my wife is dead and I’m a widower, can you believe it? Me? A widower? I feel as if the laws of physics have changed.”
He rested his brow on his hand, and what could Bahat say?
After a silence he added:
“I think that five hundred dollars a week, including food and laundry, would be very reasonable. Can you wheel my suitcase back in from the car?”
Bahat froze in her place, still confused.
“Irad Gruber, you are a very unusual person,” she said in the end, taut as a spring. Her nervous system reacted before she did. “Who else is like you? And who do you really care about?”
“Obviously I care about my children and my work. And my poor wife. And myself of course. But I can’t move until I restart, do you understand?”
“And you think,” she said and began pacing round the room, “that you have some special right to an absolutely deluxe restart, while others can restart in the heart of their distress?”
“I don’t think I have the right. I simply know that there’s no other way for me to get over my wife’s death except by staying a few more days in the diaspora and not jumping right back into the fray in Israel. In the past months I’ve been working so hard, and the pressure I’m under could give me a stroke on the spot, and then what? Who would take care of everybody? I’ll restart, and then I’ll check all the errors and fix them one by one, on a linear model. And you can simply relate to me as if I’m the pilot who fell into your house, and you’re the little princess who stays with him during the difficult moments until he fixes the plane.”
Bahat blushed. He’d read Saint-Exupéry?
He asked for a towel and went into the bathroom. Bahat quickly called Professor Propheta in Berkeley, and caught him on his cell phone. She apologized for turning him out, and told him about what was going on in her house. Now she understood that it was a critical mistake. She should have let him stay, and he would have helped her. They would have been two against one, now she was absolutely alone facing—
“The enemy,” said Propheta and sniggered. “I’m telling you, every Israeli is an occupier. That’s what they do. And now, seriously, listen Bahat, he’s lost it temporarily, two or three days and then he’ll leave. His wife died. He can’t afford to go on acting like a freaked-out kid stuck in India forever.”
He advised her not to do anything radical for the time being, like bringing in the police, or calling someone in the consulate in New York. The whole thing seemed to him like an aberration caused by grief.
“It’s a pity we can’t put him to sleep and lock him in a suitcase,” said Bahat.
“Yes,” said Propheta and chuckled. “Interesting how stupidity and genius can exist side by side in the same person.”
“Tell that to your students,” said Bahat and put the phone down. Afterward, worried, she went out to her car and wheeled the suitcase back in.
EVERY HALF HOUR or so she went to check if the temporary consent signed by Rabbi Shlesinger was still in the drawer, and that the barrier separating her from society had indeed fallen. At the official ordination, which would take place in New York on the twentieth of the following month, she would have to make a speech. And she would make it. She planned to talk about the first woman rabbi in history, Deborah the wife of Lapidoth, and to say that she was following in her footsteps and nothing more. She felt like being modest because she wanted those responsible to know that not only had she done something for the State of Israel that the time had not yet come to reveal, the importance of which was beyond doubt, but that she was also someone who knew how to move aside when necessary. Moving aside when necessary was in Bahat’s eyes a noble virtue, and when she imagined herself moving aside, for example for the sake of her daughters, she always thought of the great sage Rashi’s mother and how she moved aside and was saved from the pogrom by the opening up of the magic wall of Worms.
IN THE DISTANT Telba-North, Lirit was already beginning to wonder why there was no word yet from her father, and she even had a touching telephone conversation on the subject with Dael. Dael too didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t tell his sister he suspected their father of going AWOL. He expressed the hope that nothing had happened to him. Lirit told him she had checked with the Defense Ministry, and they told her there that he had contacted them by email and said that he was late because he was sitting shivah for his wife in Ithaca.
“Sitting shivah?”
“That’s what they said he said.”
But about an hour after the conversation with her brother, Lirit received a call from America. It was their father, and this time he gave her a phone number, he was very warm, he even called her “my love,” and she immediately melted because he had never called her that before.
Lirit asked him if everything was all right, and he said that obviously nothing was all right, and Lirit was surprised, she never knew that her father was so attached to her mother, and even if he was, it was a strange way to treat her death.
And then she did something that her mother would have done if she had been alive, or if she had been in her place. Lirit asked to speak to Bahat.
IRAD REACHED OUT and handed the phone wordlessly to his hostess.
“What?” asked Bahat.
“My daughter wants to talk to you.”
She took the receiver and said,
“Hello?”
Lirit introduced herself — very politely, clearly a well brought-up girl, the mother had done a good job. Lirit brought Bahat up to date briefly on what Lirit already knew that Bahat knew, and asked her opinion on what was happening.
“What do you mean?” asked Bahat.
“How is he acting?”
“Listen—”
“Is it difficult for you to talk? Can he hear?”
“Every word,” said Bahat.
“Can’t you distance yourself from him a bit? Our cordless phones work over a distance of several hundred feet. How about yours?”
Bahat went down to the ground floor and said:
“I really don’t know. I don’t think that your father can take a long journey. That’s clear. I’ll have to look after him for a while.”
“Is he eating?” asked Lirit.
“Very little. Yesterday he ate soup, and with that he did me a favor. He left half of it. And today a tuna sandwich in the morning, and then he told me he threw it up.”
“Is he drinking?”
“Coffee nonstop.”
“No, I’m asking about alcohol.”
“I don’t keep alcohol in the house, ever since my girls were living here.”
“I understand,” said Lirit. “Okay, look,” she said, “he gave me a phone number, and I’d like to verify it.”
The number Lirit read out to her bore no resemblance to her telephone number.
“The question is whether he’s aware,” said Lirit, and there was a note of profound concern in her voice.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Bahat, “the situation is confusing me too and disrupting my life. Does he have a boss you can talk to? People that can shake him out of it? Friends? A brother? Someone.”