“Out?” David Shalit was astounded. “How can you pull a story like that? A guy knifes someone just because he complained about the noise from his car horn? Does that seem like a normal everyday occurrence to you? As far as I’m concerned, that should be our top story!”
“Can’t do anything about it,” Erez said nonchalantly. “We’re going with Moshe Leon instead. Hey, did someone turn off the heating? It’s freezing in here.”
“Niva!” shouted Zivia, one of the assistant producers. “We don’t have a studio in Tel Aviv. Did you hear me?”
David Shalit called out to Erez, “You want the text for your lead?
You’re going to have to write it yourself.”
“Oh come on, give it to me now and I’ll write it down,” Erez said.
“I don’t want to now,” said David Shalit defiantly. As he turned his head he blinked his small blue eyes— which appeared even smaller behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses—and caught the glance of Eliahu Lutafi, the correspondent for environmental affairs. Lutafi had been around for years, and his hesitant speech gave him an air of helplessness, which invariably brought out a certain malaise in Zadik, a feeling of guilt for not having promoted him all these years. “Did you want something from me, Eliahu?” David Shalit asked.
“No, nothing. I mean, that is, if … if you’re not giving him the lead just now, if you’re free for a minute, I’d like you to see the report I’ve prepared on rubbish on the Tel Aviv shoreline,” Eliahu Lutafi requested. “I could use some feedback.”
Niva picked up the receiver. “It’s Liat on the line, she’s having trouble with the satellite, I can’t—”
“‘A stinking mess like this is inhuman,’” Erez read aloud. “It’s from the text of the report on garbage,” he explained to Zadik.
Zadik pored over the new page that Niva had handed him. “Miri,”
he called out without looking up, “have you gone over this yet?
There’re no markings to indicate you’ve been over this.”
The language editor rose heavily from her place and went over to Zadik.
“This text,” Zadik said, incredulous, “is even more subversive than last night’s. You people can’t talk that way about the Likud World Congress.” But Miri did not hear the end of Zadik’s sentence, because at that very moment the telephone next to which she was standing rang and Benizri, who was positioned next to another phone and rolling his eyes to the ceiling in dramatic desperation, was talking into the mouthpiece as if to a deaf person or an idiot. “I won’t wink at you, I’ll simply adjust my tie—” But the rest of his sentence was obscured by Niva, who was shouting, “Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Look!” Something in her tone caused everyone to fall silent and look toward the monitors on the wall. Doors to the adjacent rooms opened, and Tzippi, Zivia, and Liat, the assistant producers, stood watching, along with Irit, an intern with the foreign correspondents.
Tamari, the graphic artist, was standing in the doorway to the graphics room. “On Channel Two they’re saying there are some terrorists in the tunnels on the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc road,” she said.
“I heard they’ve taken a hostage,” said Ye’elah, the cultural affairs reporter who had just rushed in, breathless, to the newsroom.
Everyone in the room was staring at the monitors: not their own Channel One, which was showing a studio with an interviewer and two guests—an older man and a young woman—but rather the com-petition, Channel Two, which was showing a reporter in a military parka with a microphone, interviewing a policeman.
Hefetz slapped his thighs in anger. “Channel Two beat us to it again,” he complained aloud.
No one moved to turn up the volume. At the bottom of the screen there was a caption: SUPERINTENDENT MOLCHO. “Where is this?
What’s going on?” Niva asked, agitated.
“Can’t you see? Look, it’s the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc road,” David Shalit said impatiently.
“So, what’s happening there?” Aviva asked. The caption now read, ENTRANCE TO THE TUNNEL ON THE JERUSALEM–ETZION BLOC BYPASS
ROAD.
For a moment there was utter silence in the room. The loud ringing of a telephone was the only thing to break it.
“The telephone’s ringing, are you people deaf ?” Niva asked. “It’s the hotline, someone’s got to answer it. Is someone picking up? Aviva, answer it, it’s the hotline!” When the telephone next to her began ringing too, she picked it up without taking her eyes from the television screen.
“I don’t understand,” she was saying into the mouthpiece. “Talk clearly.
Are they from Hamas or what?” Just then the opening notes of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 rang out noisily from a mobile phone, sending Niva scrambling for her large black leather bag. After fishing through it madly, she managed to extricate a silver cellular telephone, took a look at its display panel, pursed her lips, and said, “Yes, Mother, what is it?”
Zadik stood in front of the wall monitor, watching the interviewer and his two guests, whose lips were moving soundlessly.
“What are you doing at the supermarket on Agron Street?” Niva shouted into her phone. “Oh, Mother, we agreed that you wouldn’t leave the house until I get there!”
“Hello?” Aviva said into the receiver of the hotline. “Hello? Yes, he’s right here, just a minute. It’s for you,” she said, handing the phone to Zadik.
Zadik listened for a moment, raised his head and announced,
“Quiet, everyone, you can calm down; it’s not terrorists.”
Only then did someone raise the volume on the monitor so that it was possible to hear the military correspondent from Channel Two summarizing the turn of events: “And so,” he said, facing the camera, clearly emotional, “we now have official confirmation. This is not a terrorist attack. To sum up events, we know that at six-forty-five this morning a tunnel on the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road was blockaded by four trucks parked inside the tunnel. It appears that the car of the minister for labor and social affairs is trapped—”
“Turn down the volume!” Zadik shouted. “I don’t understand why Zohar isn’t on the air! How is it that their military correspondent is there but ours isn’t?”
“As of now you no longer need a military correspondent there,” Aviva said spitefully, as she removed her makeup kit from her purse. “Didn’t you hear him? It’s not a military maneuver, it’s just some strikers, and they’ve kidnapped what’s-her-name, Madame Minister Ben-Zvi.”
“Yeah,” said Hefetz, “but we didn’t know that until now. Zohar was on his way there, now I get where he was headed so fast before. He should be right there with their correspondent. Never mind. Benizri, get down to the studio, we’ll interrupt programming. Go on, get down there!”
“Here, here he is!” Aviva announced, and everyone looked to the Channel One monitor, where they could see Zohar, microphone in hand, a thick gray wool scarf wrapped around his neck. He was speaking into the camera, but there was no sound. A second later the image disappeared, and in its place a caption: TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAY TUNED.
“Naturally,” Tzippi scoffed from the doorway. “Were we really expecting a problem-free broadcast? We’d all go into shock!”
“Just tell me how we expect to make the ratings with shoddy work like this?” David Shalit grumbled.
“What I can’t understand,” Hefetz said despairingly in a hoarse voice, without taking his eyes from the monitor, “is why it always happens at moments like these. Sometimes I swear it feels … it feels like it’s on purpose …”
“I totally don’t get why a military correspondent is there,” said Danny Benizri to Hefetz. “You heard them: if it’s really a bunch of unemployed workers, then I’m the one that should be there, don’t you think?”
“Listen, buddy,” Hefetz said, cutting him off, “where’s your jacket?
Get yourself down to the studio right now, we’re breaking in to the program. You read me?”
“Me?” Benizri protested. “There’s no reason for me to be in the studio. I told you, I should be—”
“You will do what you’re told to do!” Hefetz bellowed. “And one more thing: Niva, are you listening? Get me the documentary about the Hulit workers, the one Benizri showed on Rubin’s program about a year ago. Get it fast.”
