Orly Castel-Bloom - Textile

None of the family tried to defend Lirit. Their father, as usual, was absorbed in himself, and Mandy said that she had a bad case of the flu.

“THEY WANT TO HIT at the heart of the civilian population, because they know that this is where it hurts the nation most,” the CO told them before the mission, but Dael thought that most of the nation didn’t feel a thing, except perhaps for a faint pang, and because of this he needed a bit of cocaine before they set out: in order to hide the lie from his thoughts.

In that early spring simultaneity became a weapon in the ongoing war. The terrorist organizations competed among themselves as to how many simultaneous attacks they could mount, and every organization had a virtuoso who orchestrated the simultaneity.

The semi-senior wanted man Dael’s force was assigned to liquidate was the virtuoso of the Fatah Eagles, a genius in his field, who according to the intelligence in the hands of the army, was busy planning five simultaneous attacks in different cities, including overseas targets. If the five bombs didn’t explode at exactly the same minute, the attack wouldn’t count as simultaneous. The number of casualties wasn’t important, but the simultaneity was. The competition was over the control of time.

Where the five bombs were supposed to go off the intelligence agencies had been unable to discover, but the CO said in the briefing that he himself wasn’t interested in knowing because in any case the planner would be eliminated today and he wouldn’t be able to execute his plan.

YOU NEVER KNEW exactly when the shot would be fired. That was how the M24 sniper rifle was designed — in order to prevent the body’s reflexes that could interfere with the execution of the execution. Dael compared the slow squeezing of the trigger to engaging the clutch on an uphill spurt, slowly, carefully, so the engine wouldn’t stall. He had passed the test on his first go and he was an excellent driver. His mother let him have her fragrant car with an almost easy heart.

The lookouts confirmed that the target had been eliminated, together with its intentions to develop itself into five simultaneous explosions, including targets overseas. As for the force, it was already close to base. Dael’s pulse was rapid, he was shaking and he wanted more cocaine. He sniffed his hands and cursed. Now his hands would stink for a week.

As usual afterward, he scrubbed himself for an hour in the shower and then lay down in bed and connected to the place where he had last stopped reading The Red and the Black by Stendhal. He allowed himself three pages before moving on to David Vogel. He had ten bookmarks, which Lirit had bought him for his nineteenth birthday, together with this book and another one by Jack Kerouac that was on sale. Was his simultaneous reading an obsession requiring treatment, or was it simply virtuosity, ostensibly superfluous? He remembered that his mother had told him a bookshop opened in Mikado and he wondered if they kept classics, or just the latest best sellers.

“WHAT?” ASKED GRUBER, WHO AFTER THE MASSAGE WAS ready both physically and mentally for a sleep of at least ten hours. “A French restaurant? Now?”

“Not just any French restaurant. Rene’s Restaurant,” said Bahat McPhee proudly.

Gruber yawned.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’ve already reserved a table. You have to make a booking there at least a week in advance, if we don’t go now we’ll never be able to go.”

He stared at her, red eyed. Bahat felt guilty.

“Don’t worry, it’s a fantastic place, once you’re there you won’t want to leave,” she said and drove too fast on the winding road.

“And we don’t have to spend half the night there either,” she said. “We won’t stay more than two hours, but Rene’s desserts are something special. You know he reopened the place just recently?”

“No,” said Gruber.

“He had a restaurant that was doing very well, but he shut it down and went to France for a few years. And now he came back and opened it again, but in a different place. You know what, I’ve got something to cheer you up,” she said and put on a tape.

Gruber couldn’t believe his ears. Introductions to episodes of The Twilight Zone .

“In my opinion some of them are brilliant.” She pressed stop, so she wouldn’t have to go back after her explanations. “You know that Serling himself is the narrator in the series?”

“No,” said Gruber in despair. In spite of the great massage, his neck could hardly hold itself up on his spine. If he had been condemned to death by the guillotine, his head would have come off even before the blade had finished its work.

“Listen,” said Bahat and increased the volume to a disturbing degree.

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind .

Gruber looked at her in horror. Did she really intend playing him the introductions to all the episodes? How far was Rene’s restaurant?

A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead — your next stop, The Twilight Zone!

She pressed stop and said: “Amazing, isn’t it? The man was a genius. I don’t think he’s been given the credit he deserves. There’s a whole society devoted to commemorating him. There was a time when I thought of joining, but it involved going to meetings with other people who admire him and his work. .” She fell silent. “I don’t like rubbing shoulders with people who only have one subject of conversation. It makes me nervous. . He was a great artist. Have I already told you that he was a lecturer in communications at Ithaca College, and that my daughters studied there too?”

“Yes you have,” said Gruber without remembering if she had or not.

They went on driving through a forest of tall thin trees. The darkness was absolute. Gruber couldn’t understand how she allowed herself to drive at a speed of ninety miles per hour.

“A friend of mine from Berkeley taped these prologues for me.”

“Very nice.”

“It really was very nice of him. I told him so too. And it was from him that I heard about the Serling commemoration fund. He drew my attention to the fact that for only seventeen dollars you can get a really neat email address. Your name and then @rodserling.com. He himself has an address like that. But I think it’s going a bit too far.”

“So do I,” said Gruber.

“But Raffi Propheta doesn’t think so. His admiration of Serling knows no bounds.”

“Who’s Raffi Propheta?” asked Gruber, and for a moment he was afraid he had missed something important.

“My friend. From Berkeley University. He made this tape for me. He teaches Hebrew at Berkeley, and he’s active in the Serling commemoration fund. He’s a very special person. From the moment I heard that he too was a Serling fan he shot up in my estimation. He lives in Berkeley. I never visit him. Not because I’ve got anything against Berkeley, but because I simply can’t leave the spiders for long. It’s enough that I go to the Hebrew Union College in New York. It really makes me nervous to leave the spiders, even though since they stuck me with the Hispanic I’m less nervous about leaving the research without supervision.”

“Clearly.”

“My relations with Raffi Propheta are platonic, there’s nothing between us except for conversations in Hebrew. He’s the only person I know here who I can speak Hebrew to the way I’m speaking to you. Naturally I can find Israeli students in Ithaca, the place is full of them, by the way, but talking to students isn’t much fun. Apart from which, he’s up to date on all the changes in Hebrew slang, and he has a student who’s doing a doctorate in the subject under his supervision. They’ve got a lot of respect for him in Berkeley. You’ve never heard of him in Israel? Raffi Propheta?”