“Do you take Ritalin?” asked Irad.
“Among other things.”
“I don’t take Ritalin, because it has side effects, especially if you’re post-traumatic.”
“So you are post-traumatic.”
“Apart from my genius — on whose altar you’ll find my nervous system — I am also post-traumatic, correct. I carry that on my back too,” said Gruber, looking serious.
“And what’s the trauma?”
“Moving houses,” said Gruber quietly.
“Ah, yes. We’ve heard that before,” said Bahat dismissively.
“It’s the third most severe trauma in children. After death in the family and divorce.”
“It happened to you as a child?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”
“No, it happened to me two years ago, when we moved to Tel Baruch North. It was a big blow. I didn’t expect it to happen to someone of my age, in my position. Mandy said it would get better with time, she was in a bit of a shock herself. .”
“Why? Where did you live before?”
“In Neve Avivim. 44 Tagore Street. You know it?”
“I don’t know anything about those neighborhoods. What’s the difference?”
“The difference? You’ve been stagnating here too long to understand the differences. You left when Neve Avivim had just been built, which is a long time ago. You haven’t got a hope of getting to the bottom of the difference. In general, Neve Avivim and Tel Baruch North are as far apart as West from East. Aah,” he sighed disconsolately. “Tel Baruch North is a place without a past, with tremendous difficulty in connecting to the present. That’s how I feel anyway. And whoever did the landscape planning for the neighborhood did it without any heritage too. They filled the place with coconut palms! There are no butterflies, never mind honeysuckers. Or hedgehogs. There’s no food chain. And lawns — there aren’t any. Are there?” he tried to remember.
Bahat went to the sink with his plate and almost threw it in with the cutlery. She was really fed up. If he didn’t take his pills, what was she going to do? She decided to call Propheta. Sometimes he gave excellent, spot-on advice.
“You know, Bahat,” continued Gruber, in a more pleasant tone, as if he were a real-estate consultant with life experience. “It’s not a good idea to buy a new apartment in a new location, with new infrastructure, new vegetation, new trees, new stairs, new everything. It’s no good being the first in a certain place. It gives rise to anxiety. I like houses that have been lived in before. It’s less frightening when you’re not the first, when you’re not supposed to determine anything, but there I feel a kind of obligation to the house itself, do you understand? As if I have to give it an ambience, do you understand?” he asked Bahat again.
“Every word,” said the horrified Bahat.
“There’s an overdose of newness there. The apartment, the Jacuzzi, the doors, the neighborhood, the people, the neighbors, the shopping center, the shops in the shopping center, the moving stairs. How much have they already moved? I ask you. Has anyone checked the mileage? Ha?” He grunted in disgust. “I never had an anxiety attack in my life before, and since we moved there I have them all the time. I’d like to live in a house that’s existed for two hundred years. Is that too much to ask?”
He shut up, but only for a minute.
“Have you ever had an anxiety attack, Bahat?” He turned to her and at the same time thought that he really did talk too much, Mandy was right.
Bahat didn’t answer. Her face had begun to fall even before, as soon as he said that he wasn’t going to take the pills, and now she looked weak, with a blue tinge to her skin.
“I don’t like buying directly from the contractor, certainly not from the contractor’s paper,” the guest confessed loudly. “When there are previous occupants, you go into a place that exists, and you merge in quietly, like a side street with a main road. But when you move into a place like my apartment, you get an existential shock. And not only you. I’m sure that everyone who came to live there is in the same boat as me. I don’t think any of them dared to put something secondhand into their apartments. At the beginning Mandy and I were completely crushed. In order to escape from the despair of the place she brought in an expert on feng shui, who warned her against certain corners, and the whole house filled with plants, clay jars to trap the negative energy, twenty wind chimes, dream catchers around the beds, and seven little fountains. Three thousand dollars I laid out for those fountains, which spread seven soothing gurgling sounds throughout the house. The expert also advised us to put all kinds of plants on the porch, mainly tree wormwood, rue, mint, and lavender.
“And you know when Mandy — may they forgive her up there — ordered the movers to bring the containers from the old house in Neve Avivim?”
“When?” asked Bahat in a bored tone.
“The eve of Rosh Hashanah! So she’d have time to arrange everything without losing working days. That year the holiday went on for four-and-a-half days. I thought I’d go crazy with her timing. She wanted me to take part in the excitement of unloading the boxes and arranging the things. I told her she could manage on her own and went to stay with a friend of mine who lives in a seventy-year-old house in the center of Tel Aviv. On the first day, Mandy rang me on my cell phone, and sent me text messages as well, to come and help her. I didn’t answer. On the second day she stopped trying to contact me. She could understand me.”
“And now she’s dead,” said Bahat and almost felt sad, as if she knew her.
“Dead isn’t the word,” said Gruber, suddenly seeing it in a new light.
“Tell me,” continued Bahat, who noticed the change in his tone, “don’t you miss your children?”
“Of course I miss them,” he said.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, when she managed to get away from Gruber for a minute, Bahat phoned Professor Raffi Propheta.
“What I suggest,” said Propheta to his friend on the American East Coast, “is to find him a hotel in Neve Avivim through the Internet, it’s out of season now, there must be a lot of offers. The main thing is for him to go back to Israel.”
“I can’t take any more, Raffi, I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown myself. I have to start preparing my speech for the twentieth of next month, and instead of that I spend the whole day preparing his food,” she said and sat down in an armchair.
She concluded the conversation and said to Gruber through the closed door of his room, in other words, her room, “I’m going to sleep, I’m worn out. Forgive me. If you want to eat you’ll have to heat something up in the microwave. You can take a frankfurter and fries out of the freezer and put them in for five seconds. Whatever it says on the packet.”
And then she shut herself up for three hours in the guest room of her house.
WHEN SHE RECOVERED her strength the world was a different place. Gruber was starting to make a little more sense. Perhaps it was the light at the end of the tunnel, or perhaps it was only the putrefaction reflecting the light of a glowworm.
“What I’m going to do when I get back to Israel,” he said, “is to try to get rid of the apartment. You’ll see how many people will jump at it. I can sell it at an exorbitant price because the neighborhood is very much in demand. You can always find a millionaire couple with a villa in the original Tel Baruch, or in Afeka, who want their son or daughter to live in Tel Baruch North, next to them. People are very keen on the place for their offspring.” Suddenly his face clouded over. “I hope that the two years we lived there didn’t affect the value of the property.”