Orly Castel-Bloom - Textile

But he knew that if after he met her and it all turned out to be wishful thinking, he would die in America of a stroke or cardiac arrest. He was already suffering from health problems as a result of the hell of the previous week. An irregular heart beat, an antsy feeling at the tips of his fingers, and shame, great shame. He couldn’t look his biophysicists in the eye. They had spent months prying into the spinning glands of the right spiders, but apparently that wasn’t enough.

Success in the mass production of spider webs was a one-way ticket to eternity, and Gruber longed to leave his mark on eternity, like Copernicus, Galileo, the inventor of the pendulum clock whose name he had forgotten, and the same with the steam engine and the small pox vaccination, Darwin, Michelangelo, and Nobel himself, who invented dynamite.

Gruber knew very well that a Nobel Prize for the invention of the ultimate protective suit was already waiting in Stockholm for the person who came to pluck it. In his mind’s eye he could already see the trivia question: What is the name of the man who removed the sting from war and international terror by inventing the protective suit against deadly weapons?

But at this point reality suddenly intruded again, and the up-to-date facts overcame his being like a natural disaster, and at precisely ten thousand miles above the Atlantic, at a temperature of minus fifty degrees Celsius outside, Gruber fell into a deep depression. He tried to go to sleep but failed. Destructive thoughts ravaged and riddled his brain. His head became hollow.

If he returned from his trip to the United States empty handed. . It would be Titanic three — if Titanic one was the disaster of the Titanic itself, and Titanic two was the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

In his mind’s eye he saw himself coming back with nothing. And the force of the blow made him lose consciousness. The flight attendants and the passengers all thought that the person leaning back with his mouth open was sound asleep, and left him alone until an hour before landing. Only then did they grasp his situation and they shook him until he woke up and found himself looking at a doctor who was asking him if he suffered from epilepsy. Gruber replied in the negative, and the flight attendants pampered him in the hour left before landing.

And during that hour Gruber also pieced together the visions he had seen while his mind was wandering.

He had spent the time in question at a cocktail party with representatives of enlightened countries. They were angry with him and told him that the success of the protective suits, and their distribution worldwide, were paradoxically harmful to the welfare of mankind. The covering of humanity in the work of his hands would damage one of the pillars of war: the dead.

One of the guests volunteered to explain to him that the industry of mourning and bereavement employed many people in the global village, and also that there were countries in the world which were so multicultural, that grief and bereavement were the only things that kept the peace there and prevented civil war from breaking out.

“It’s impossible to establish a new state every two streets and a square,” said the man. And the prophet Isaiah too suddenly appeared to him toward the end of the flight, not in the shape of flesh and blood, but as an inner command, since Gruber knew that in the book of Isaiah, chapter 59, verse 6, it said, “Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works.”

The plane landed. Gruber was as wet as after aerobic activity. He stood up to take the heavy bag containing his laptop computer down from the luggage compartment.

THE ANESTHETIST GAVE MANDY AN ADDITIONAL SHOT IN the vein. Her upper back had already been opened up: two nice, neat cuts to the right and the left, parallel to the spinal cord.

“Unbelievable the things people do today,” said the OR nurse, “a friend of a friend of mine in Ohio had a collarbone implant on both sides to improve her decolletage, and that’s even before what she did to her breasts. It’s insane what people do to themselves. I even heard about someone who had the backs of her hands lifted. The only operation I’d be prepared to have would be a look implant, but nobody’s invented one yet. If they had — I’d like to have it.” And after a second she added longingly, “Aaah, if only there was such thing, a look implant!”

“A look implant?” said Yagoda and a flash of mockery appeared in his sad eyes peeping over the green mask, “What for? To see a better world?”

“No, Professor. So that the look won’t expose the age. All the plastic surgery on the face, and in my opinion on the body too, are useless as long as nobody’s invented a look implant. The look betrays the age. People don’t realize this. You can see everything in a person’s look.”

“Interesting, interesting,” Yagoda tried to make nice, “and will it be possible to choose a different look for every day?”

“For every hour,” giggled the nurse.

“That will come too, wait and see,” he said, just to put an end to the conversation.

Yagoda was a Harvard graduate, and among other things he had learned there how to maintain pleasant relations with the operating team, and how to hum the consonant M in order to give rise to the illusion of interest and attention. On the other hand, he had also learned how to defend himself from total immersion in idle chatter, which was liable to distract him from the ongoing operation. From time to time he had to throw out an indisputable statement of fact, after which there was nothing to say. This defined him as the boss of the given operation, and set him above the rest of those present.

This time he said: “The average person is capable of saying two hundred words a minute, and the average person is capable of listening to one hundred and sixty words a minute. Which means that there will always be those who talk to the air, owing to the limitations of the average person’s ability to listen. There will always be words that are wasted on thin air.”

Silence fell. He didn’t want to seem superior, even though if he hadn’t been superior to a lot of people, he would not have become a plastic surgeon with an international reputation, as well as the assistant director of the plastic surgery department of the biggest hospital in Dresden.

WHEN HE WAS STARTING out over there, and curious and nosy people asked him what had brought him to Germany, he had replied: “Love.” And this reply shut them up. There never was and never would be a more crushing reply, Yagoda knew, when addressing the question of his emigration to Germany.

Monica, whom he had met in Harvard, loved him, and for as long as the love lasted the couple had lived in the city of Hamburg, which he actually detested. He persuaded Monica to move to Cologne, and she agreed, also in the name of love. The young Yagoda felt that he had the moral right to ask her to move from town to town in that country, after he himself had completely given up on Israel, for her sake.

Today Yagoda thought that moving to Cologne had been a mistake. They should have moved to Munich. Cologne had shortened the life of their love, owing to circumstances and coincidences that would never have happened if they had stayed in Hamburg, or moved to Munich.

When the love between him and Monica was over, other loves came, all in this complicated country, loves which also produced children. Yagoda had four children, dispersed in different cities in Germany, corresponding to his loves.

He arrived in Dresden divorced for the third time, shortly after the fall of the wall. They offered him a job in a local hospital, and he made very good progress, even though he had no love there. In fact he was already worn out by relationships and the efforts demanded of him in order to go forward and not get bored in the relationship. He put his heart and soul into fresh approaches and holidays, but there was always friction.