Orly Castel-Bloom - Textile

“My mother’s not doing too well.”

And thus she succeeded in forcing Shlomi to take an interest in the health of her mother, who he couldn’t stand anyway. Only after he had complied with the demands of common humanity, he turned to the personal: quite simply, he wanted to split up with Lirit. It was quite simple, he said again. He needed to live by himself for a while, it wasn’t an absolute separation, but it was definitely a separation. Quiet detachment.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m going through a very difficult period with myself,” she heard him say. “I’m over forty, and I haven’t achieved anything in my life. I haven’t even got a house of my own. Or a profession. The world’s getting harder and harder. I can’t adjust to it and I ask myself why.”

“And because the world’s getting harder and harder you want to separate from me?” asked Lirit.

“Yes, Lirit. It doesn’t suit me to be with you when I don’t value myself. You deserve better. Tell me, what am I to you? An aging loser who hates what he has become. I have to take it in spite of the wound to my ego, and to think about what to do next.”

“You’re not a loser,” said Lirit in a raised voice, but it didn’t help her to suppress the thought that he actually was. Shlomi was a loser according to plenty of criteria, except perhaps for those related to Buddhism or Zen-Buddhism.

“I thought that with you far away in the north, it was an excellent opportunity to tell you what I’m going through,” he said.

“Don’t you love me anymore?” Lirit asked him glumly, since neither Shlomi’s career nor his satisfaction with himself interested her, but only how he felt about her.

“I don’t know what love is. I only know that you can’t swim in the same river twice and that what’s past is past. If our relationship is to continue it has to be something new, and only after I know more about myself.”

“And isn’t it possible,” the girl from Telba-North made bold to ask, “for me to be at your side while you think? I’m quite quiet,” she said suddenly. “I won’t disturb you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“No-no-no,” pronounced Shlomi. “I’m not making it easy on myself. If I wanted to, I could go and stay with my mother in Sefad. I intend to stay here on my own and to break my head alone.”

“Hey, that’s a rhyme.”

“It came out by accident,” he said wearily.

There was an oppressive silence.

“Good,” said Shlomi.

“Good,” repeated Lirit.

“That’s it”’ said Shlomi.

“That’s it?”

“That’s how it is.”

“Okay.”

She hung up quickly because she didn’t want him to hear her cry. True enough, the guy was broken down and boring. But if she lost him — what would she do then?

Loss suddenly broke into Lirit’s life. Her mother had taught her that in situations that were impossible to bear, simply impossible, because the nightmare was larger than life, there was no alternative: you anesthetized yourself. At the moment it was clear to the former NCO-Casualties that she was stuck in a busy junction, without any traffic lights, not even blinking ones, and the situation was really scary. And so she detached herself from it.

She went to the medicine cabinet and found her mother’s kits arranged in little bags of cocktails: a bag with five Clonex zero-point-fives and two Vabens of ten milligrams and a Bondormin or two. Another bag contained one Clonex of two milligrams and six Bondormins, without Vaben, and so on, about twenty little bags with cocktails for anesthetizing sensation, consciousness, personality, and the body that contained all the above.

She chose a cocktail that was more or less pure Clonex, with just one Bondormin, and calculated that when she woke up, she would be able to cope with the sudden emptiness in her life where being part of a couple used to be, but in the meantime she went to the handsome kitchen, filled a disposable glass with too-cold water from the mineral water container, and swallowed the cocktail with its help.

Afterward she closed all the electric blinds in the house, not God forbid in anger, but with the decisiveness of a woman doing something that had to be done, and returned to her parents’ suite, which was as clean and tidy as a hotel suite because the Columbian cleaner had been there in the morning. First of all, she switched off her cell phone. Disconnected it completely, rather than putting it on mute, so that whoever called would get it in his face that the subscriber was not available and he should try again later. By this blunt treatment of the instrument she also denied herself the desire to look at the little screen and see how many calls — or, God forbid, what if none at all, which was also possible — had gone unanswered.

The young woman was well aware that the reality of her life was undergoing a process of change and that she had to get ready to deal with it differently. If Shlomi broke her heart — something she was no longer so sure would happen — she would cry only after she had taken care of her mother, and after her father had returned to Israel, and after Dael had survived the army, when life got more or less back on track, or found a different track.

She got into her parents’ beautiful comfortable bed, and the pills she had taken put her to sleep in five minutes.

RITA, THE INTENSIVE CARE NURSE IN ICHILOV HOSPITAL, tried every possible means of contacting the family of the patient Amanda Gruber, who had arrived straight from Medical Frontline in critical condition.

She got the phone numbers from Amanda herself, but there was no answer from the patient’s home, her daughter’s cell phone announced immediately that the subscriber was not available, and her son’s cell phone rang and rang to no effect.

Dael didn’t answer because he didn’t answer unidentified numbers on principle. His father, Irad Gruber, had instilled an aversion to unidentified numbers in him because all the numbers at WIDA were unidentified, apart from his own. Gruber preferred to remain identified, and thus to know if he was being screened.

While Rita was desperately calling him and his sister by turn, the outstanding sniper was busy on his base somewhere in the country, surfing the Internet by means of an upgraded cell phone belonging to a friend. He was searching for schools for paparazzi in the United States.

He found one in Santa Monica, one in Santa Barbara, one in Santa Fe, and one in Santa Cruz, and in another six places without Santas. He copied the addresses into a notebook where he wrote down sentences from important books. Only after repeated rings, when he could no longer overcome his curiosity to discover the identity of the insistent anonymous caller, he answered the phone.

And then— go wasn’t the word. He shot like a missile to his CO, who commanded him to make for his mother pronto, and volunteered to drive him to the station in time to get the last train to Tel Aviv. From the CO’s car he tried to get his sister at his parents’ home, but there was no answer, and her cell phone was silent too.

He couldn’t take the news that his mother was in critical condition single-handed, and he felt as if he was collapsing into himself.

While he was waiting for the train, he remembered his sister’s number at Shlomi’s, and when he called it, Shlomi answered, and Dael asked him if he had heard anything.

Shlomi had always been cool to him, because he thought that Dael had blood on his hands, that he was nothing short of a murderer, and that he should have refused to obey orders. This time Shlomi was really nasty, and only after Dael explained how grave the situation was, Shlomi volunteered the information that he had spoken to Lirit a few hours before, and added that since Dael was suddenly so worried about Lirit, he was beginning to feel worried too and asked Dael to keep him informed of further developments.