It was going to be a huge success! Because what did people have left to rely on if not their pajamas. Let them too be made of natural materials. Let the stuff that enveloped their natural nightmares be natural too, and fit in with them harmoniously.
They started to play an irritating song on the radio. In general, Lirit didn’t know three-quarters of the songs they played, which in her opinion was a shame and disgrace. She listened carefully to the words of the presenters introducing the songs she didn’t know, as if she was sitting in a math class and had to remember the equations.
She switched to another station and the strains of a different band began to proudly review the new composition of her life. Suddenly she grew melancholy. What are you doing? You have set aside the whole truth and contented yourself with only a very curtailed version of it. You have just deliberately narrowed your world. In truth, your life is in ruins. Your dearly beloved mother will never return, not even to quarrel with you, and your father has lost his mind somewhere in northern New York.
Lirit addressed herself in the archaic language she had learned from her Grandmother Audrey, whose limited command of Hebrew was of an outdated variety.
Lirit would say something like “look” and her grandmother would say “pray look” and suchlike expressions. Lirit liked talking to herself in this language, because it gave her the feeling of security she used to have with her grandmother as a child.
Grandmother Audrey believed that in order to master a language, you had to first learn a few flowery phrases, and only after that the basics. In this way, even if you weren’t fluent in the language, you learned the best of it, and even if you made mistakes, people would immediately understand how high you were aiming. Audrey Greenholtz repeated this to Lirit dozens of times, perhaps hundreds, until Lirit didn’t have the strength for her anymore, and then either Lirit didn’t answer her or she left the room in the middle of the repetitive speech.
Leave the future to its own devices! she accordingly said to herself. The time and tide will yet present themselves for you to set sail for New York to bring your father home. You have a million things to worry about before that.
Once again she banished from the arena of her thoughts the abandonment of her father and the death of her mother, on the grounds that she already knew the facts and she couldn’t change the situation. It was all down to her, and therefore she had the moral legitimacy to put off grieving. Apart from which, Lirit preferred to think positive thoughts, and she went back to basking in her new status as the director of the pajama factory. If you looked at it in the long term, it was cruel but true, she had struck it lucky. Mandy’s death had positive aspects too, in relation to Lirit’s freedom of action and her personal growth. Her posture had improved a lot too. Suddenly her neck vertebrae were no longer at an angle to the rest of her spinal column, and her head didn’t droop when she was walking.
Even her self-image had improved in the wake of compliments she had received from a top model she had met in Mikado, and also from her personal psychologist, Inbal Asherov, who she had gone to see on a one-off basis, and who had seemed very pleased with Lirit’s progress.
She turned onto Route Six, the new toll road, and was impressed by its width and the fact that there wasn’t much traffic on it at eleven in the morning. The meeting with the organic cotton grower Oron de Bouton was set to take place at noon at the entrance to Kibbutz Kissufim. It was relatively early and Lirit went over the lesson Mandy had tried for years to teach her and which she had rejected as if it was in a foreign language: the warp is vertical and the woof is horizontal. Fabrics are made of threads. Threads are made of fibers. The carding machine is the machine that combs the fibers. There’s a cotton board, just like there’s a poultry board.
5
“WHAT AN IDIOT THAT PSYCHIATRIST OF YOURS IS,” SAID Irad and added salt to the shakshuka Bahat had made him instead of the scrambled egg. He had changed his mind a second before she broke the egg, and after she had served him the hot, bubbling dish of eggs and tomatoes, and he had sprinkled it with salt, he added:
“He’s infantile. Who is he to diagnose me? Hey? You know what he said to me? No? So let me tell you, because it’s about your elections. He told me that he was depressed, because the Democrats lost. I didn’t know that the Democrats lost.”
“The Democrats lost,” said Bahat.
Gruber waved a scolding finger in the air.
“Your doctor, the psychiatrist, sounds to me like a very disturbed fellow. First of all, his appearance is nebulous and undefined. It’s hard to tell if he’s even handsome or ugly, he’s so volatile. A person who doesn’t take a fee for the initial consultation. Who’s ever heard of such a thing? I don’t think I’ll even take the pills he prescribed me.”
Bahat was horrified.
“What are you talking about? Bill Stanton? He’s considered one of the finest in the entire state of New York! He graduated from Cornell with distinction! And he’s from Ithaca,” she concluded proudly.
“Enough already with that hubris,” said Irad and buttered a slice of bread with which he quickly wiped his plate. Bahat looked at him and thought that he ate fast and a lot, and altogether he was costing her a fortune, and while they were both silent and he was eating, she calculated how much he had cost her since the moment of his arrival, including the massage and the meal at the French restaurant, and it came to over two thousand dollars. And of course, the five hundred dollars he had offered as a contribution to expenses, he had failed to mention again. Before she had time to take in this interim account another problem revealed itself: the medication. That too would no doubt cost a fortune. She was sorry, but she would have to ask him to share the expenses. She was sick and tired of all the egomaniacs in the world.
“My dear,” Gruber suddenly addressed her with a confusing tenderness she had never come across before in a man of his age. “You shouldn’t have called him in,” he said, chewing another, extra, slice of bread and butter. “It’s a waste of your time and effort. I can tell you myself what’s wrong with me.”
“Yes?” she said, wondering if he was going to tell her anything new.
“I was diagnosed three years ago by a senior psychologist at the Defense Ministry as borderline with a high level of organizing ability. Apart from that, I have a tendency to deep depression. Mandy, my wife, may she rest in peace, understood me very well. She understood that with geniuses, personality disorders, psychological disturbances, whatever you want to call it, are a must. The sensitivity and the ability to see the facts in a different light originate in the nervous system, which is also the first to suffer. What disorder do you suffer from?”
“Attention and concentration disorders and severe communication problems. Sometimes I stutter. That’s why I don’t give lectures as a rule. I begin on a subject, open parentheses and more parentheses, and forget what I’m supposed to be talking about. I’m not a sociable person,” Bahat confessed and lowered her eyes.