Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom Read Free Book Online

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 usethe 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