pregnant she didn’t stop smoking. And Rosie, with her legs swollen from diabetes. If you looked at them, all you would see was—there was no denying it—a sorry bunch of women. And the children, what would be with them? Better not to say a word about what she thought about that, what would happen to their children. She already knew what would become of their men, whether Danny Benizri managed to help them or not: they would wind up in jail, every last one of them. Her Shimshi and Fanny’s Gerard and Simi’s Meir and Esty’s Avram. To leave behind a woman in her first pregnancy after all those troubles and run off in the middle of the night with a bunch of old men who have nothing to lose; that’s what she herself said to Shimshi when she caught him trying to slip out of the house at two in the morning without her noticing, thinking she’s some old lady who doesn’t hear well anymore. You’re an old man, she’d told him, you don’t have the strength for these kinds of wars anymore. That’s exactly why, he’d answered: because I’m old I have nothing to lose. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand him: and how she understood him. But when a guy like him, with his intelligence, someone who cared about his kids and grandkids, about little Dudy just one month away from his bar mitzvah; how could he have planned all that—fire and smoke, kidnapping the labor minister—without breathing a word of it to her? Only someone bent on self-destruction would kidnap the minister of labor and social affairs and set an ultima-tum for blowing himself and everything else up. Here in her living room the girls are shouting. What are they shouting about? she wonders. Only God can help them now, only He knows what will happen.
In the backseat of the mobile communications van speeding toward the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road, Danny Benizri changed out of his blue shirt and into a black turtleneck he had in his bag, calculating that he had twenty minutes until he would be on the air again, twenty minutes until they would reach the tunnel. In those twenty minutes he would have to have a word with Tikvah, and calm his mother down. He knew he could not appear too elegant or self-satisfied; that would come off very badly on-screen if he were reporting from the field or even inside the tunnel, with all those explosives and everything. He was glad he had his khaki windbreaker along; it looked good, as though in the hustle-bustle of an emergency he had not had time to get it all together. Before he had even finished shoving his arm into his sleeve, his cell phone rang and he knew exactly what to expect. “What is it, Tikvah? What’s wrong?”
he asked, feigning ignorance, because perhaps she had not heard the news yet and did not know what was happening. For a long moment he listened to the cries of Danny-I’m-so-frightened she managed to slip in between sobs, and then said, “Tikvah, calm down. First of all, calm down. Pretty soon the baby will start crying too. Oh, there, she’s started up, see what you’ve done? There’s nothing to be frightened about, you know Shimshi and his whole family, they won’t do a thing to me. Not to me or anybody else.”
For a moment she stopped wailing, but she reminded him what Shimshi had said on television, how he had threatened to blow himself up with everyone.
“So he said he was going to blow himself up,” Danny said dismissively. “So what if that’s what he said. Haven’t you learned anything yet? It’s all for the purpose of attracting attention. Tell my mother, tell her … calm her down, tell her everything’s just … tell her not to …
not to call me now.” Quickly, before she had time to start crying again, he asked about the vaccinations and the visit to the Mother & Child Clinic and the droplets of salt water that Tikvah had tried to drip into
the baby’s nose on the recommendation of the pediatrician Tikvah adored and he could not stand. After that he looked at the rain-washed streets out the window of the van as it raced through the city. Who could have guessed that the morning would pass thus, beginning with talk about Tirzah’s death and ending with a mad dash to the bypass-road tunnel. Then again, the day was not over yet, nothing was over yet: at the entrance to the tunnel, not far from the parked police vans, black smoke was billowing from within, where Moshe Shimshi, in a gray woolen cap and blue dungarees, was waiting for him.
Zohar, the military correspondent, moved aside, his mouth askew.
“The asshole won’t let me in,” he whispered to Danny Benizri. “He knows I’m from Israel Television, but he won’t let me in. They’re waiting for you—and only you—like you’re the messiah.”
Danny Benizri spread his arms in a gesture of humility as if to say he had not brought about any of this, then eyed Zohar with suspicion, slapping him on the back. “Good job, Zohar, you did really nice work here,” he said. It is easy to stir up envy in someone you work with without ever doing anything to provoke it, without even noticing it at all, and then one day you find yourself with another enemy, just because once someone asked only for you. What could he do about it?
After all, he had not intended to take anything away from anyone. It was not his responsibility. On the other hand, to lose an opportunity like this would be simply inhuman. “Listen,” he said, clearing his throat, “I don’t … ,” but Zohar had already turned away and was gathering his belongings.
“Go on already, get in there,” Zohar said as he climbed into the van.
“I’m leaving this guy here for you,” he added with a grin as he put his hand on the shoulder of Ijo the cameraman. “You owe me one: they caught us with our pants down, no soundman, nothing. Ijo is your whole crew.”
“Will they let him in with me?” Danny Benizri called to a policeman armed with a megaphone who was standing near Moshe Shimshi.
The policeman shrugged, turned to Shimshi, and pointed to Ijo.
“Are you willing to let the cameraman in, too?” he asked.
“Just Benizri,” Shimshi answered, his eyes downcast. “Only him and nobody else.”
“If you need me, I’ll be waiting right here,” Ijo said, handing Benizri the video camera and the monitor he had taken from the van. Danny Benizri approached Shimshi cautiously, fearful of his reaction to the camera or the monitor. But Shimshi took a long, silent look at him and said, finally, “You see? You didn’t come visit us at home, so we’re meeting here.”
Benizri forced a smile. He knew there was nothing to fear, he had known Shimshi for years, way back from the time he was a junior television researcher and Shimshi was already active in the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor. It seemed funny to be wary of Shimshi at all, but still he felt a certain panic awaken in him. Maybe it was Shimshi’s quick, noisy breaths, or Shimshi himself, who looked like he was stuck inside some sort of nightmare. It is a known fact that fear can turn a harmless creature into something quite dangerous when it is pushed into a corner.
“Listen,” Shimshi said as he pulled him into the tunnel. “We have a problem here.”
Benizri’s palms grew moist, the handle of the monitor sticky in his hands. Shimshi ran ahead into the tunnel, and he followed suit, the monitor and the video camera slowing him down. From a distance he could see the two trucks that were blocking everything behind them.
A group of men in blue dungarees and wool caps stepped aside to make way for him to pass by. A gray Volvo was parked on the far side of the trucks, and already from a distance he recognized Azriel, chauf-feur to Timnah Ben-Zvi, the minister of labor and social affairs, who stood with his elbows on the roof of the car, his head between his hands. Shimshi came to a sudden halt at the car. Azriel straightened up, ignoring Shimshi, fixing his large bright eyes on Danny Benizri and rubbing his heavy chin with a trembling hand.
“Where’s the minister?” Benizri asked.
Azriel indicated the back seat of the Volvo with his head. “She’s not in good shape,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”
Shimshi cleared his throat. “That’s it, what I was telling you,” he explained to Benizri. “We have a problem, she doesn’t … how should I say, she doesn’t feel so well. Better we should finish this business
quick.” He removed his wool cap and thrust his fingers into the thinning gray hair plastered to his scalp.
“What’s wrong with her?” Benizri asked, alarmed. He breathed deeply and coughed as a cloud of black smoke filled the tunnel.
“She didn’t feel well,” Shimshi said as Benizri laid the monitor at Azriel’s feet and rushed to look inside the car.
The minister of labor and social affairs lay crumpled on the backseat of the car. Someone had placed her purse under her head. Her eyes were closed. Benizri squeezed inside the car. “Is she conscious?”
he asked.
“She passed out!” Shimshi called.
“My ass, she passed out!” shouted one of the two workers standing nearest the car. “She’s just pretending. It’s all a big act.”
Benizri pressed her wrist; her pulse was faint and irregular. He looked at her ashen face and listened to her
