Orly Castel-Bloom - Textile

“It’s not my field.”

“Right,” she giggled. Gruber noticed that she was familiar with all the turns in the winding road and took them automatically.

“I had a serious moral problem with him, but I overcame it. All in all I learned a lot about Rod Serling from him. For example, that he comes from a Jewish Reform family, and that he became a member of the Unitarian church, and also that he was a boxer. Did you know that?”

“No,” admitted Gruber.

“Serling made a movie called Heavyweight Requiem . He was a Renaissance man. He was a paratrooper too. He served in the US army and fought like a hero.”

“Good.”

“And he was only five foot three.”

“Is he dead?”

“He died in seventy-five. But before that he collected six Emmy awards,” she added proudly.

Gruber’s mental condition was desperate. He was convinced that he was being driven by a woman who was not right in her head. But at the same time he knew that this did not contradict the fact that she had the ability to help him in his limping research.

“He’s pro-Arab and anti-Israel big time,” she said as if revealing a great secret.

“Who?”

“Propheta. Whenever the IDF kill someone he calls and barks at me as if I’m the virtuoso mind behind the army’s activities in the territories.”

“Obviously not,” said Gruber.

“But I need him,” she said in the tone of an intimate confession. “I need to speak Hebrew on the phone or face to face. I’m not sexually attracted to him, you mustn’t think. . the fact that he hates Israel makes it impossible for me to see him in that light. I like him, but not that much. Listen to this, in my opinion this is one of the best introductions—”

Again Serling’s voice filled the interior of the car:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man .

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, yes,” Gruber made haste to reply.

It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity .

“If there’s a word you don’t understand tell me.”

“I understand.”

It is the middle ground . .

“The halfway point,” shouted McPhee.

. . between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is . .

Gruber noticed that she was moving her lips together with the tape, and he felt a great sense of detachment.

. . the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call the Twilight Zone .

“My pro-Arab friend from Berkeley has all the episodes that come after these introductions on DVD. Would you like me to get them for you?”

“No, no. We have the same thing in Tel Aviv too.”

“Okay,” she said in disappointment. “I only wanted to help. You know that I only want to help,” she said and gave him a meaningful look, that lasted too long for someone who should have been keeping her eyes on the road. And then she returned her eyes to the road and they drove for a while in silence until she stopped the car, put on the hand brakes, and said in a childish voice, “Here we are.”

Gruber saw a depressing three-storied building. In darkness.

His sense of strangeness instantly deepened and he felt dizzy too, as if his whole body was suddenly operating according to different laws of physics, those of a kind of Twilight Zone. This Israeli woman from the arthropod forum was bringing him to an abandoned building, that she claimed was a fancy French restaurant. With all due respect, he was not yet ready to explore another dimension.

“Come along,” said Bahat, and they both got out of the car, which she locked with a screech of the alarm.

“The entrance is round the other side. Careful how you go. The stones are slippery here from the deluge that came down before you landed. Did you feel it on the plane?”

He didn’t answer, only walked behind her in the dark. They entered the building. Bahat said, “It was once a geriatric hospital.”

They walked down a long corridor, on the right and left were peeling green doors with numbers on them, 212, 213. .

“A French restaurant in a hospital?”

“The hospital isn’t operating, the restaurant is,” said Bahat and opened a brown door, revealing a dimly lit French restaurant full of diners.

“Name please?” a hostess pounced on them.

“McPhee,” said McPhee, and took off her coat, helped Gruber off with his, and handed them both to the hostess.

McPhee smiled at Gruber, and he thought the smile was false and that her teeth were as white as those of a lot of Americans. But he also thought that when he got back to Israel he would have his own teeth whitened, he was a public personality, winner of the Israel Prize, he couldn’t afford to go round with plaque and yellow teeth.

The hostess led them to a table that did not meet with McPhee’s approval, and she requested another table. There was no other table available, and she asked for Rene to be called. Rene arrived during the middle of a lovers’ quarrel at one of the tables, and as a result a table to McPhee’s taste becoming available. As soon as they sat down she said something she had planned to say before, but hadn’t managed to:

“It’s hard to know if there are more pro-Arabs than Arabs at Berkeley. In my opinion there are. But perhaps now it’s balanced out a bit. After all, the pro-Arabs need Arabs next to them so that they can show them that they’re on their side.”

“Presumably,” said Gruber and he looked at the menus and didn’t understand a thing.

“I’ll explain,” said McPhee and she explained all the dishes to him.

Gruber looked at her and realized that never in all his life had he felt so alienated anywhere.

But perhaps it was only the tiredness, he tried to encourage himself, and decided to stop asking himself questions and to start taking an interest in the menu. Suddenly he felt hungry too, and he even said so to Bahat.

“I told you so, the appetite comes with the food.”

Gruber didn’t like having this kind of saying repeated to him. He worked out what time it was in Israel, and he felt like calling someone there now, never mind who, and suddenly he realized that he had forgotten his cell phone in Tel Baruch North, on the bedside table, for some reason on Mandy’s side.

“Oy,” he said sadly.

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot my cell phone at home,” he said.

“Do you want mine? You want to make a call? What time is it over there?”

“What time is it over here ?” He smiled. “No, never mind.” It seemed to him that he wouldn’t be able to produce a single sentence in Hebrew now that would sound authentic. He was probably beginning to take on an American tinge himself, and whoever answered the phone in Israel would notice it at once, and conclude that Irad Gruber wasn’t solid enough and that he changed in accordance with whatever country he happened to be in.

During the course of the meal, which lasted for exactly two hours, McPhee talked without stopping, only pausing when her mouth was full. Gruber ate and nodded, sometimes smiling and sometimes looking serious; there were even moments when he tried to engrave what he was eating on his memory, but his thoughts wandered. All his numbers were in his cell phone memory. If anything here was as it should be, and this woman had important and useful information, he would have to let the Defense Minister and the head of WIDA know immediately. How was he going to do that without the numbers on his cell phone? He was too tired to find a solution, and he ordered crème brûlée and decaffeinated espresso.

Bahat was drunk and asked him to drive back. All the way on the winding road between the forest of tall thin trees he thought about Rod Serling who had written about the beyond and the fifth dimension and the imagination, collected six Emmy awards, and died young.