Orly Castel-Bloom: Textile

There were about sixty patents registered in Gruber’s name, and he had started work on some of them before being approached by the Defense Ministry. Mandy feared the success of more grandiose projects. What he had already achieved was enough for her. But from Irad’s point of view this was an opportunity to prove that he wasn’t just a mercenary publicity hound, as a certain newspaper had claimed, but also a great humanist. He set all his other ideas aside, and for three years he had devoted himself exclusively to the ultimate rescue suit — the TESU.

AMANDA HAD ALWAYS raised the children alone, without any help from Irad. As soon as she recovered from the shoulder blade surgery, she planned to drop in to the Steimatzky branch in Neve Avivim and pick up a few books to prepare her spaced-out daughter for the psychometric tests. And as a girl who had grown up on lowbrow juvenile literature, she would get her a few magazines too, to look at when she was resting from her studies.

Mandy liked going to the shopping center in Neve Avivim, because she had done her shopping there for twenty years when she was living in a penthouse at 44 Tagore Street.

She usually bought the classics Dael asked her to get for him there too, although she sometimes ordered them for him on the Internet. She had heard, from Aya Ben-Yaish again, that immediately after a targeted assassination her Dael was left with the smell of gunpowder on his hands, never mind how often he washed them and what soap he used, and only immersion in very high literature distracted him from the smell.

The child therefore took advantage of the long lulls between ambushes and liquidations in order to read the classic of world literature: Stendhal, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote , Thomas Mann, Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Crime and Punishment , Kafka, and so on. He didn’t ignore the classics of Hebrew literature either, and was particularly fond of Mendele Mocher Seforim and all kinds of old books with titles that began with the words “The Collected Works of. .” He also had a notebook that was very precious to him, in which he wrote down Hebrew words that were unfamiliar to him because they were no longer in use, and on weekends, after surfing his favorite porno sites, he would translate them into contemporary Hebrew and enter the site of the Language Academy to offer his suggestions.

He had developed a method of reading in breadth, in other words he would read a number of books at once. Breadth reading demanded a special effort and distracted him from current affairs. He would also test himself to see that he wasn’t getting mixed up between the plots of the novels and putting a character from one book into another book by mistake. These tests were also excellent etudes for the mind, enabling him to maintain thinking in breadth as opposed to his linear thinking as a sniper, and he thought that in this way he saved himself, because when all was said and done Dael was a very sensitive boy.

Mandy didn’t know that her son read several books at once, sometimes as many as five, and nevertheless she correctly interpreted his intensive reading as an act of balance . After shooting someone, he felt the need to connect with something uplifting, and she was very willing to respond to this noble need.

A FEW MINUTES BEFORE the important conversation, two weeks before the surgery, Mandy sat in her car in the car wash and prepared herself. Soap from thin boring pipes sprayed the car, and giant brushes emerged from hiding and scrubbed energetically, until the dark red car was completely covered with a thick layer of white foam.

Inside the foam, from which she was protected by the car, Mandy wondered what would be the most effective way of appealing to her daughter to make her agree to leave Shlomi in the Negev, and their natural farm based on a number of “ideals” she couldn’t remember at the moment, and take on the burden of being Mandy Gruber for ten, maximum twelve, days.

The mother aimed herself at a balance between forcefulness and tenderness, and got ready for the very possible contingency in which Lirit would begin to yell and go berserk. In this case, she would cut off the conversation and call again later. That was the advantage of these cell phones, which sometimes disconnected.

On the other end of the line, long rings repeated themselves without a human or nonhuman response. They must be digging up the beets, thought Mandy.

The car had emerged from the tunnel shining and beautiful since she had had it waxed. She waited at the stop sign before the right turn, without noticing that the road was empty and she could go. She was busy listening to the long dial tones somewhere in the Negev.

Finally Lirit answered.

“What did I take you away from?”

“Shlomi wanted me to come and see something.”

“What?” She turned right as if there was a traffic light there and it had just changed to green.

“What?” Lirit was surprised at the interest.

“Yes, what?”

“That tree bark prevents weeds from growing, and there’s no need to spray anything. We’re going to collect tree bark in a minute.”

“I understand, enjoy yourselves,” said Mandy, and added, “Darling.”

Lirit was sure that her mother was encouraging her in her way of life, and she was surprised and happy, but a second later she realized that it was only the preamble to a serious request.

Mandy told Lirit that this time too she would have to come up north during her hospitalization in order to stand in for her. In other words, as she was well aware, this wasn’t the first time that she had had to stand in for her. Both in her previous home and in this one Mandy had called on her. It couldn’t be helped. It was an emergency. She should see it as a war. She would have to sleep in the luxurious triplex in Tel Baruch North, and not in the ruin where she was living now. To disconnect and activate the alarm system, to keep an eye on the Columbian so she wouldn’t steal her cosmetics, like the one before her and the Filipina before that, who had made long distance calls to all her friends in Manila. To arrange for the Columbian to get the key and return it. And above all: to take herself every day to the family pajama factory in Netanya and manage it to the extent that Lirit was capable of managing anything.

She asked her first-born to make an effort on her behalf, because this time she really needed this operation. Carmela would help Lirit with whatever she required. “It’s all arranged, my sweet. He’ll manage without you for a few days. Sometimes it’s healthy to take a break,” she hurried to soften the impression.

“I can’t believe that you’re actually going through with this insane operation,” said Lirit.

“What’s insane about it?” asked Mandy and passed the turnoff to Tel Baruch North by mistake. “My shoulder blades have become eroded, and I’m having replacements implanted. They’ve already done three thousand of them to date. I’m not prepared to look at my back and see sunken skin where my exquisite shoulder blades once were.”

At this moment Shlomi came in and lay down on the sofa without doing anything. Lirit’s mother went on talking to her, she said that she had only left her a few little tasks that she could take care of easily, but Lirit’s attention had already been distracted. Negative vibrations were reaching her from the tired man with the slow movements who was lying on the sofa. Altogether, he had been giving off a lot of negative energy recently, and sometimes it seemed to her that he was aiming it straight at her, because she had forgotten to water their organic vegetable garden a few times and things had died. In addition to which, the carrots had failed, the cucumbers had holes in them, and the pumpkin had rotted.