Orly Castel-Bloom - Textile

“The enemy,” said Propheta and sniggered. “I’m telling you, every Israeli is an occupier. That’s what they do. And now, seriously, listen Bahat, he’s lost it temporarily, two or three days and then he’ll leave. His wife died. He can’t afford to go on acting like a freaked-out kid stuck in India forever.”

He advised her not to do anything radical for the time being, like bringing in the police, or calling someone in the consulate in New York. The whole thing seemed to him like an aberration caused by grief.

“It’s a pity we can’t put him to sleep and lock him in a suitcase,” said Bahat.

“Yes,” said Propheta and chuckled. “Interesting how stupidity and genius can exist side by side in the same person.”

“Tell that to your students,” said Bahat and put the phone down. Afterward, worried, she went out to her car and wheeled the suitcase back in.

EVERY HALF HOUR or so she went to check if the temporary consent signed by Rabbi Shlesinger was still in the drawer, and that the barrier separating her from society had indeed fallen. At the official ordination, which would take place in New York on the twentieth of the following month, she would have to make a speech. And she would make it. She planned to talk about the first woman rabbi in history, Deborah the wife of Lapidoth, and to say that she was following in her footsteps and nothing more. She felt like being modest because she wanted those responsible to know that not only had she done something for the State of Israel that the time had not yet come to reveal, the importance of which was beyond doubt, but that she was also someone who knew how to move aside when necessary. Moving aside when necessary was in Bahat’s eyes a noble virtue, and when she imagined herself moving aside, for example for the sake of her daughters, she always thought of the great sage Rashi’s mother and how she moved aside and was saved from the pogrom by the opening up of the magic wall of Worms.

IN THE DISTANT Telba-North, Lirit was already beginning to wonder why there was no word yet from her father, and she even had a touching telephone conversation on the subject with Dael. Dael too didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t tell his sister he suspected their father of going AWOL. He expressed the hope that nothing had happened to him. Lirit told him she had checked with the Defense Ministry, and they told her there that he had contacted them by email and said that he was late because he was sitting shivah for his wife in Ithaca.

“Sitting shivah?”

“That’s what they said he said.”

But about an hour after the conversation with her brother, Lirit received a call from America. It was their father, and this time he gave her a phone number, he was very warm, he even called her “my love,” and she immediately melted because he had never called her that before.

Lirit asked him if everything was all right, and he said that obviously nothing was all right, and Lirit was surprised, she never knew that her father was so attached to her mother, and even if he was, it was a strange way to treat her death.

And then she did something that her mother would have done if she had been alive, or if she had been in her place. Lirit asked to speak to Bahat.

IRAD REACHED OUT and handed the phone wordlessly to his hostess.

“What?” asked Bahat.

“My daughter wants to talk to you.”

She took the receiver and said,

“Hello?”

Lirit introduced herself — very politely, clearly a well brought-up girl, the mother had done a good job. Lirit brought Bahat up to date briefly on what Lirit already knew that Bahat knew, and asked her opinion on what was happening.

“What do you mean?” asked Bahat.

“How is he acting?”

“Listen—”

“Is it difficult for you to talk? Can he hear?”

“Every word,” said Bahat.

“Can’t you distance yourself from him a bit? Our cordless phones work over a distance of several hundred feet. How about yours?”

Bahat went down to the ground floor and said:

“I really don’t know. I don’t think that your father can take a long journey. That’s clear. I’ll have to look after him for a while.”

“Is he eating?” asked Lirit.

“Very little. Yesterday he ate soup, and with that he did me a favor. He left half of it. And today a tuna sandwich in the morning, and then he told me he threw it up.”

“Is he drinking?”

“Coffee nonstop.”

“No, I’m asking about alcohol.”

“I don’t keep alcohol in the house, ever since my girls were living here.”

“I understand,” said Lirit. “Okay, look,” she said, “he gave me a phone number, and I’d like to verify it.”

The number Lirit read out to her bore no resemblance to her telephone number.

“The question is whether he’s aware,” said Lirit, and there was a note of profound concern in her voice.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Bahat, “the situation is confusing me too and disrupting my life. Does he have a boss you can talk to? People that can shake him out of it? Friends? A brother? Someone.”

“Of course he has. He’s a person with a lot of friends. But let’s wait, because I don’t want to get him into trouble, if it’s a crisis that will blow over soon then the whole world doesn’t have to—”

“I very much hope so,” said Bahat.

“IF THERE’S SUCH A THING AS REINCARNATION,” SAID DAEL to his sister over the phone, “then in my next incarnation I want to be a tree. But not a cypress. Nothing so exposed. Or you know what, I’d prefer something inanimate. Like a piece of pipe. Something completely useless. And that way I’ll know,” the soldier sniggered, “that anyone who’s my friend is a real friend, because I’m just a pipe rusting in the desert. .” he laughed. “You don’t know what a night I had, Lirit, the world’s worst—”

But Dael was wasting airtime on his sister because she too was very upset. In her last phone conversation with their father, at midnight on the US East Coast, he had dropped a bomb. He told her that he had fallen in love with Bahat, deeply, desperately. It was stronger than he was, it had shaken him to the foundations, and he didn’t know what to do.

Lirit asked her father if Bahat was in love with him as well, and he said sadly that he was the last thing in the world that interested Bahat. Lirit wondered if she should have a frank talk with Bahat, but she thought that it would be a betrayal of her father, and she decided against it. The father said to his daughter that Bahat was now in a place from which “she was looking outward,” to what was beyond loneliness, to people, action, movement, helping others. That she was about to become a Reform rabbi and she couldn’t wait to get started.

Gruber suffered from a disorder of excessive talkativeness, and now, on the phone with Dael, there was no stopping his daughter either. She grabbed the floor from her brother, in the middle of the dialogue of the deaf, and explained to him that as she understood it Bahat was sick of staying at home, and all she wanted was to get out, out of Ithaca to New York, to Mississippi, to Utah, to roam the length and breadth of the USA, to meet people, convert here, marry a Jewish couple there, see the world, live on a very busy schedule, with no time for anything between one thing and the next but getting to that next thing. Just imagine, she’s going to be a rabbi! Our father has fallen in love with a rabbi, and claims he’s never felt like this about a woman before and he has to make the most of his new situation! Such happiness!

THE NEW INFORMATION did not succeed in really penetrating Dael’s mind. He was preoccupied with the event of late last night. If only his mother had been alive, and he could have told her what had happened, she would have been properly astonished.