At this point he raised his voice again,
“So what do we have here, Mrs. McPhee? We have denial of reality — what it stems from has yet to be ascertained.”
“And if the pills don’t take effect in three weeks?”
“Then we’ll try the post-traumatic treatment.”
“Because of the death of his wife?” Bahat insisted.
“No,” said Stanton. “He reacted to his wife’s death by falling obsessively in love with you.”
“I understand,” said Bahat. “In other words, six weeks maximum?”
“More or less,” said the doctor.
“I don’t believe it,” said Bahat, with tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand.”
Stanton decided to invest a little more in this woman; he laid his hand on her shoulder and said:
“My bet is that he’s post-traumatic, but I want to eliminate the depression first. And then get him onto a post-traumatic protocol. The medication for depression works faster than the post-trauma medication, and we should try to shorten the period of uncertainty as much as possible.”
“Interesting,” murmured McPhee.
Stanton continued, “He told me that they recently moved into a new neighborhood. That’s the trauma. There’s a certain tree there, a type of palm, that he detests. He prefers their old house, but he and his wife, the one who died, have already sold it.”
“So what do we do now?” she asked. “On the twentieth of next month I have an ordination. It’s a very serious ceremony. I have to prepare. I have to write a speech. He makes so much noise. I can’t put up with it.”
“I’ve already told you what I can suggest. Now I must go. There’s no lack of trouble in the world.”
He left.
BAHAT TRIED Lirit again, without success. She toyed with the idea of sending him out to buy bread in the hope that he would get lost. But on second thoughts she decided that she didn’t want to endanger the special status she had gained in the eyes of Schlesinger, the Albany Reform rabbi. If this man wandered round outside, she was almost sure that with his extroversion, even Schlesinger would hear that he was still in America and understand that the Israelis had not yet made any use of the classified information, and then the whole loneliness-alleviating project would go down the drain.
She dropped onto the living-room sofa in despair. From Gruber’s room on the second floor she heard Edith Bunker’s voice screeching “Ar-chie!”—and the intruder’s hoarse wheezing laugh.
She switched on the television and stared at the National Geographic channel. Yes, she would be better off letting the anarchy rage around her, and watching something more organized, such as the nesting of the condor.
She fell asleep for a few minutes, and when she woke up she saw Irad standing and looking at her. He was unshaven and even from a distance reeked of every possible kind of odor, perhaps he had even brought some of them with him from Israel. He said, this time without a hint of demand,
“I’m hungry.”
“Eat something.”
“I don’t know how to cook for myself, but I’ll keep you company while you cook. That’s what I used to do in the old house. Sit in the kitchen and talk to Mandy. There was room in the kitchen there.”
“And in the new house there isn’t any?”
“There isn’t any room, and Mandy isn’t there either,” he said and sank into despair.
“Omelet or scrambled egg?” asked Bahat with forced brightness and made for the kitchen.
“Scrambled,” said Irad.
4
LIRIT TRIED ON HER MOTHER’S BURGUNDY BRA. SHE wanted to see if Mandy was right when she said in the Ramat Aviv mall that from the point of view of gravity they were both equal. Mandy’s bra was too big for her. Her mother was mistaken. She had only had a breast lift, not a breast reduction.
Now she was about to set out for a very important meeting on Kibbutz Kissufim, and she dressed with an elegance suitable to Israel, without too much joie de vivre. After exhaustive inquiries, in the course of which she had encountered the usual wall of silence encountered by people trying to clarify something (it being human nature to retreat when faced by the possibility of clarification, for all kinds of reasons of survival), she had reached a certain Oron de Bouton, who for some years had been growing organic cotton of the Pima variety on Kibbutz Kissufim, by sub-surface drip irrigation.
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.