Zadik said to himself with a start; that bright green is out of place after what happened last night. Niva raised her foot, which was ensconced in a thick wool sock, from the heavy wooden clog she was wearing and brought it to rest on the chair next to her.
“Listen up a minute,” David Shalit said as he reached into his black turtleneck to scratch an insect bite protruding from his skinny neck.
“About Bassiouny, I heard an item about him on the radio, and they mentioned the name of the doctor that woman took to court, but not her name. She’s allowed to sue for a million shekels and drag everyone through the mud—Bassiouny and that doctor who examined her—but then only she gets to come out smelling like a rose? I say let’s not release the name of the doctor.”
“Why? What for? What’s it to you?” Hefetz asked. “What do you care about the doctor? Do you care about that doctor? He ever do anything for you? You ever get anything from him? You never got anything from him. You don’t owe him a thing.”
“What’s it to me? What do you mean, ‘What’s it to me’? What’s going on here?” David Shalit asked, enraged. “Here’s this woman who claims she’s in distress—a victim, she says—and drags everybody through the mud, and only she comes out clean? Let’s either violate the gag order on revealing her identity or drop the doctor’s name.
Otherwise, all the men get screwed.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I want to get something straight here,” Zadik said, bending forward and looking straight at David Shalit, who had thrust his fingers into his reddish curls, pulling them down over his forehead. The young reporter tugged at his turtleneck again, scratching at the itchy spot and making it bulge even larger. He leaned back in his chair as Zadik said, “What exactly are we talking about here?”
“She’s suing them both, Bassiouny and the doctor,” David Shalit said, banging the table. “Both of them! There’s no gag order on their names, she’s free to ruin them. But as for her, not a spot of dirt on her!
Imagine tomorrow some chick popping up and claiming that I … that you …”
“First of all, it was the judge who gave the order. Are you responsible for that? No, you are not responsible. Did you give the order? No, you did not give the order. The judge did,” Hefetz said, stealing a glance at Natasha.
“So, he gave the order!” David Shalit was shouting now, his face redder than ever. “For once let’s just blow it off. I’m sick of all these girls who fuck like rabbits and shout, ‘Rape, rape!’ These days any chick can say she was raped and ruin some guy’s life even though she was the one who—”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Zadik said, cutting him off.
“When the story was first broadcast, Bassiouny’s name and the doctor’s were revealed. As I’ve already mentioned, we’re Israel’s official television station, we’re the last ones who can violate—”
“Right, but the court says there’s no factual basis for the case, so now she claims they’ve slandered her and she’s taken them to court—”
Tzippi, one of the assistant producers, opened the door from the reporters’ room next door to ask which translator was due in. “The Turkish defense minister still needs to be translated,” she informed them.
David Shalit stood up and moved to a chair against the wall, next to the junior secretary who was taking the minutes. “Stay right here, we’re not finished yet,” Hefetz ordered. He wiped his large face with his hand. “It’s so damn hot in here. Will someone turn the heating down?”
“You want me to call Maintenance?” Niva asked in mock innocence as she removed her foot from the chair and returned it to her clog.
“Suddenly you’ve forgotten that we have no control over the heating?”
“I can hear just fine from over here,” David Shalit said, “and as for speaking, there’s no point in me saying anything. Nobody’s listening anyway, and I’m not the one who makes the decisions around here.”
“What’s this about ‘military documents’ written here?” Zadik queried. “What’s the story about military documents?”
Hefetz leaned forward and massaged the back of his neck. “I told you about this,” he said, fatigued. “I told you: they found some top-secret military documents in the garbage. We’ve shot it, but there’s still no text. Look, I’ve given it eight seconds, two words per second.”
The door to the reporters’ room opened again and Tzippi plodded toward Hefetz, buttoning with difficulty the plaid flannel shirt that barely covered her burgeoning belly. “You could die from the heat in
here,” she complained. “This temperature is definitely not for pregnant women.” She repeated her need of a translation from Turkish of the report sent in by the military correspondent.
The telephone rang again. “Hefetz,” Niva called, “Bezalel’s on the line. What do you want to ask him? Hefetz, I’m talking to you, what did you want to ask him? Hefetz, are you listening? I’m talking to you, am I not? Answer me already!” Her tone was that of a petulant child, her thin lips set in a crooked slant of dissatisfaction.
“Just a minute,” Hefetz shouted. “I need to make a calculation here, don’t I? What’s he got for us? Ask him if he’s got anything new before we finish the lineup. When we’ve heard from him we can put out an updated lineup, ask him exactly … here, let me talk to him.”
All at once the sights and sounds grew indistinct to Zadik. As if under water, he could hear people talking around him, as if through a sheet of glass he could see the news director pull Karen aside, he could hear the assistant producer phoning Turkey from the foreign correspondents’ room and Erez verifying the details of a survey done on the Popolitika talk show and Karen asking, “What’s this about Clinton?
Why is ‘Clinton’ written here?” And Erez, answering her before turning away: “No clue.”
“People,” Zadik said authoritatively, because this is what they were waiting for, for him to say something— anything—authoritative. “Let’s keep on track, stick to our timetable, there’s no going overtime because Popolitika is going to be longer than usual today.”
“So is the lineup okay? You haven’t said,” Erez complained.
“Other than the piece about Moshe Leon, your stories are garbage,”
Zadik answered.
“Those are heartrending human stories!” Erez cried out, agitated.
“Heartrending? They’re garbage, a big heap of—”
Suddenly, both television monitors began broadcasting from the wall opposite the conference table. “Turn down the volume,” Zadik instructed Aviva. “We should only have the pictures, why is there sound? They should be silent now.”
“Why is it always me?” Aviva grumbled. “I don’t even have the remote, Erez took it, he wanted to see something on Channel Two.
Turn down the volume on the monitors,” she said, looking at Erez.
A voice shouted in from the graphics room. “What time are we lighting the first Hanukkah candle this evening, before or after the broadcast?”
“Are you kidding? Before, of course it’s before, every year it’s before,” Niva shouted back as she retrieved a sheet of paper from the computer printer. “Here’s the updated lineup,” she announced, pulling the perforated edges off the page.
Danny Benizri stood up and stretched, and Zadik caught sight of his profile, his flat stomach. That’s the way he had looked when he was Benizri’s age: twenty years earlier when he tucked his shirt into his trousers, nothing showed, certainly not this mountain of a belly under his shirt and jacket that precedes him wherever he goes.
Danny Benizri straightened the hem of his black knit sweater.
“What about the people laid off at the Hulit factory? Why did you make that item number twenty-seven?” he asked bitterly. “I’m talking to you, Erez, don’t pretend you don’t hear me.” Benizri shot Erez an angry look, which Erez returned with a shrug of his narrow shoulders and a nod of his head toward Hefetz. Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs, glanced at Hefetz. “Tell me, Hefetz, did you notice that?” he demanded to know.
“That,” said Erez, “is out of the lineup completely today. No layoffs at Hulit, we’ve already got enough stuff on the strike.”
“And what about the murder in Petah Tikva?” David Shalit asked.
“Last night I brought you eyewitness reports from the neighbors and all that, it’s not anywhere in the lineup.”
“The murder in Petah Tikva is out,” Erez answered indifferently as he fiddled with the zipper on his blue sweater.
