Orly Castel-Bloom - Textile

He tried to stand up, packed in between two sleeping sons of ex-Israelis from Chicago, and in the end he was obliged to climb over one of them, and then to take five or six steps to the tail of the plane and join the line. Although he took care to count the people in front of him, he wasn’t sure that he had kept his place. As soon as he entered the little cubicle and shut himself in, the plane shook and the light instructing passengers to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts went on again. There was an extension of the fasten seatbelt light in the toilets. Gruber actually felt rather relieved at not having to fasten any seatbelt, and he reassured himself by imagining that he wasn’t in a plane in the sky but in a train in Israel traveling to Beersheba, which explained the swaying left and right.

Now he looked around at the most popular place on the flight. Everything was wet from the urinating of his all predecessors, down to the first generation. He vomited his modest meal, flushed the toilet (which made a noise, as the warning notice in Hebrew and English warned), washed his face, and again felt the stab in his irritable bowels, which symbolized anxiety with regard to the future, and outrage at what had already happened and could not be changed.

The source of the genius’s agony was the sudden, simultaneous death of four thousand golden orb weavers ( Nephila maculata ), known for their strong, flexible golden webs, from which he had hoped to produce the T-suits and turn Israel into a Security Textile Power.

In the tropical regions where Nephila maculata originates, the inhabitants succeeded in exploiting their strong webs to make fishing nets and lines, and in South America there were attempts to use the webs of this talented spider in the manufacture of safety nets for circus acrobats.

Gruber went further.

He emerged from the toilet pale and swaying. His exhaustion was evident to all, and he himself felt that he could no longer stand being himself. A genius, sensitive, vulnerable, the joke of the week, a complete floor rag. The two Chicago youths did not wake up in the course of his efforts to return to his seat, and he collapsed into it with a sigh.

All the hopes of the Israeli scientist were pinned on an American colleague by the name of Bahat McPhee, an ex-Israeli he had met on the Internet, in the international forum of arthropod lovers. The relationship between Irad Gruber and Bahat McPhee was one of the strangest and most complicated ever formed between an Israeli living in Israel and an American-Israeli colleague.

In the beginning they asked each other ordinary questions, such as, when and where were you born, why did you leave Israel, what’s new in Israel and in America, what school did you go to, what did you do in the army, how did you come to dedicate yourself to the study of the arthropods, etc.

In one of their conversations, Irad let slip to Bahat, without paying attention and without thinking, his birth date: the twenty-fifth of December. From that moment on Bahat changed her attitude toward him and became full of reverence and respect, exceeding anything he could remember even in the days when he was awarded the Israel Prize.

The meaning of the glory with which she showered him after discovering his birth date, he learned directly from her. She worshipped Rod Serling, she wanted to set up an Internet site in his memory, at the moment she didn’t have the time, but soon she intended to go into low gear and do it.

“Who’s Rod Serling?” asked Gruber hesitantly.

“The genius who wrote The Twilight Zone . You remember the series? Didn’t you watch television when we were children?”

“Aah, I saw it,” he said.

“You and he were born on the same day, albeit not the same year. He died in seventy something, and you’re still alive.”

“I’m still alive,” Gruber confirmed.

After Bahat McPhee discovered that Irad Gruber and Rod Serling were born on the same day (you can never know what biographical detail will connect a man to his fellow), she not only treated him with great affection, she went much further and disclosed secrets to him. She too was working on increasing the productivity of the spinning glands of the golden orb weavers, and her goal was his goal: to manufacture a lightweight protective suit, flexible and effective, in an era of uncertain personal security.

The prestigious Cornell University, situated in the town of Ithaca, together with the municipality of that same town, in conjunction with other bodies she preferred not to talk about on the Internet, were funding her research. She asked who was funding his research, and he didn’t mind telling her.

DURING THE PAST terrible week when all his spiders died at once while he was investigating the genome of their silk proteins, he had not spoken to her, because he was afraid she would make fun of him. Everyone knew that the spider was not a social animal, and collecting four thousand of them in a single space, however big, was asking for trouble. He knew this, but for some reason he hoped it would work out, that the spiders would not let him, Dr. Irad Gruber, down. After their death he also asked that the possibility of the spiders having been deliberately gassed be investigated, but he didn’t know if anyone had bothered to check it out.

In the nights following the death of the four thousand Nephila he suffered from insomnia (exactly like Rod Serling), and on the third night he called her up on the ordinary telephone and told her about the catastrophe. To his astonishment she did not laugh or mock, but listened with empathy, and when he concluded his confession, she went so far as to volunteer to help him and fill him in on all her research findings to date. “You are not alone,” she said to him, and his heart filled with hope. She added, “Get on a plane and come here. You won’t be sorry. It’s a beautiful place too.”

Gruber didn’t think twice. He would have traveled to any godforsaken hole in the world to save his project from capsizing. He applied to the defense minister to approve a trip to New York State, in order to meet an ex-Israeli American who for mysterious reasons was willing to donate her research findings on the golden orb weaver free, gratis, and for nothing. The defense minister was a forgiving man and he approved the trip, which seemed to him an act of despair and an escape from reality.

Gruber knew that the ministry had already approached his rivals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who were working with biophysicists from Munich on producing extremely strong spider webs without spiders. From an article published in Current Biology he learned that the Jerusalemites had succeeded in transferring the web-producing genes, albeit not in commercial amounts, to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster . The flies had begun to produce spider webs from their saliva glands, which are equipped with giant chromosomes.

Clearly, therefore, the Jerusalemites too were intent on the mass production of spider webs, and in light of the new circumstances, they were likely to get there before him.

McPhee claimed to have made far more significant progress, but she was not willing to go into detail on the Internet or on the phone, but only face to face. He hoped all this wasn’t some day-dream, even though he was afraid she might be somewhat eccentric, because of her attitude toward Rod Serling, and especially because she was so proud of the fact that for a number of years he had taught communications at one of the excellent colleges in her town, Ithaca. There was something boastful too in her claim that everyone knew that Ithaca provided the best educational services in the world, about which she bragged as if she was one of the founding fathers.