“Of course he has. He’s a person with a lot of friends. But let’s wait, because I don’t want to get him into trouble, if it’s a crisis that will blow over soon then the whole world doesn’t have to—”
“I very much hope so,” said Bahat.
2
“IF THERE’S SUCH A THING AS REINCARNATION,” SAID DAEL to his sister over the phone, “then in my next incarnation I want to be a tree. But not a cypress. Nothing so exposed. Or you know what, I’d prefer something inanimate. Like a piece of pipe. Something completely useless. And that way I’ll know,” the soldier sniggered, “that anyone who’s my friend is a real friend, because I’m just a pipe rusting in the desert. .” he laughed. “You don’t know what a night I had, Lirit, the world’s worst—”
But Dael was wasting airtime on his sister because she too was very upset. In her last phone conversation with their father, at midnight on the US East Coast, he had dropped a bomb. He told her that he had fallen in love with Bahat, deeply, desperately. It was stronger than he was, it had shaken him to the foundations, and he didn’t know what to do.
Lirit asked her father if Bahat was in love with him as well, and he said sadly that he was the last thing in the world that interested Bahat. Lirit wondered if she should have a frank talk with Bahat, but she thought that it would be a betrayal of her father, and she decided against it. The father said to his daughter that Bahat was now in a place from which “she was looking outward,” to what was beyond loneliness, to people, action, movement, helping others. That she was about to become a Reform rabbi and she couldn’t wait to get started.
Gruber suffered from a disorder of excessive talkativeness, and now, on the phone with Dael, there was no stopping his daughter either. She grabbed the floor from her brother, in the middle of the dialogue of the deaf, and explained to him that as she understood it Bahat was sick of staying at home, and all she wanted was to get out, out of Ithaca to New York, to Mississippi, to Utah, to roam the length and breadth of the USA, to meet people, convert here, marry a Jewish couple there, see the world, live on a very busy schedule, with no time for anything between one thing and the next but getting to that next thing. Just imagine, she’s going to be a rabbi! Our father has fallen in love with a rabbi, and claims he’s never felt like this about a woman before and he has to make the most of his new situation! Such happiness!
THE NEW INFORMATION did not succeed in really penetrating Dael’s mind. He was preoccupied with the event of late last night. If only his mother had been alive, and he could have told her what had happened, she would have been properly astonished.
Now all that was left him was to imagine himself telling her, and her murmuring intently: That’s terrible! That’s shocking, Dael! That’s incredible, Dael! Mainly she would have repeated his name again and again, Dael, Dael. She was the one who had chosen this name. Gruber had chosen Lirit’s name, and she had insisted on Dael’s.
They had an assassination. Everything proceeded according to plan until the moment when Dael shot at the center of the mass, saw the guy taking the bullet and not falling, shot again, and saw him taking the bullet and not falling, until in the end he fell. In the meantime they were being shot at, and he and his friends ran under fire to confirm the kill, and saw that the target was padded round the chest with a belt of Yellow Pages from every area of the country.
Dael had almost been killed by the shots fired at them. Do you understand? To die right after you, mother?
This was why he preferred to be a useless piece of pipe, etc.
At the end of this imaginary conversation he called Aya Ben-Yaish, in the hope that she would listen to him, and say something, maybe that it was a miracle he was alive, because it really was a miracle. Aya Ben-Yaish was not available, and Dael went to continue his breadth reading of Scott Fitzgerald, Homer, a biography of Moshe Dayan, and Primo Levi.
AT THE END of her morning conversation with her brother, Lirit felt a great emptiness. She didn’t have Mandy’s talent for throwing the right slogans into the air and bringing the man home in the space of a few hours.
Later on she raced north on the coastal road. The traffic was less heavy now than at eight, and she, unlike her mother, had no intention of getting up at the crack of dawn and arriving at the factory at half past six, seven. Those days were over. On the radio too they said that the northbound traffic was proceeding unimpeded, but that at some junction, not connected to her, oil had been spilled on the road.
Why had he fallen in love all of a sudden? What was really going on there? In the end, contrary to her previous decision, she called Bahat, even though over there it was maybe five in the morning. And the latter answered immediately, and listened to the young Israeli, who was trying to preach to her from a distance, and then Bahat said, “Honey, your father and I have only spent two nights together. I wanted to cheer him up, and I’m a woman too. Believe me, we both needed it. Your mother hasn’t had sex with him for years. He told me. Did you know? Did she have a lover?”
“Can I talk to him?” asked Lirit, who simply couldn’t believe her ears.
“He’s sleeping.”
“When he wakes up, tell him to call the factory urgently, or me on my cell phone!” she said, and only when she arrived at Nighty-Night, she noticed that the left-hand outside mirror had been ripped off the car.
SHE PARKED the big Buick next to the Singer technician’s Fiesta. What could you do? Class divisions were class divisions. The commotion at the entrance to the factory signaled anarchy. After she entered the air-conditioned interior, and the beads of sweat on her forehead stopped forming pools, she saw Carmela Levy trying to get the panic-stricken seamstresses to calm down. Only the Singer technician was nowhere to be seen, and she concluded that he was busy oiling the machines. She would introduce advanced technology, for God’s sake! Far more efficient sewing machines had already been invented; she had leafed through the textile journal Mandy subscribed to and seen sophisticated models there. She wondered how much they cost.
Carmela hushed the girls, and Lirit realized that Carmela had organized them under her wing, and she was sheltering them.
Although this wasn’t the first time she had visited the factory after the death of the boss, the girls’ faces looked distraught due to the uncertainty, and rightly so. It seemed that in spite of the facade that everything was under control (by intuition or from television, she knew that she had to show authority), it was clear to the workers that she too didn’t know what she wanted.
“Assembly in the canteen in half an hour,” she said and went up to Mandy’s office. Carmela asked if she wanted her to come upstairs to the offices with her, and Lirit understood that the first thing she had to do was to fire this woman, and she said to her, “No need.”
No hand but Mandy’s, or somebody authorized by her, touched the office and the special things she kept there in glass-fronted cabinets, such as the collection of dolls from all over the world. Carmela was the only person she permitted to dust her delicate collections, for some of the knick-knacks were breakable, or broken and put together again. The collection of dolls from all over the world Mandy had inherited from her mother Audrey Greenholtz, the founder of the factory.
When Lirit was little, her mother had strictly forbidden her to touch these dolls, as if they were cursed or something. Afterward there was a period when the curse was lifted, and Mandy let her, but two years later when she was at about the age of fifteen, madam had decided that Lirit’s hands had become clumsy due to the surge of hormonal energy, and she was relegated to her previous status with regard to the collections.