minister?” “I told you,” he retorted, “it’s from yesterday, and yesterday there was a meeting of the board of directors with the minister. I couldn’t …”) And now he was watching the monitor, his hands folded across his enormous belly. Eli watched him with interest, trying to figure out how people could let themselves go to the extent that their breathing sounded as if they were choking on their own corpulent flesh. This Matty Cohen did not even look very old, not much beyond forty.
“Give us a few minutes while we figure out what’s going on there,”
Zadik had told him when he had left him in the little office. But Eli Bachar was no clueless little schoolboy: he refused to sit alone in a closed room. That was why he was now standing in the doorway, listening to Matty Cohen say, “They’ve gone completely insane,” without taking his eyes off the screen. “Who’s ever heard of such a thing?”
“They’re not insane at all,” retorted Niva, the newsroom secretary, who was leaning on Aviva’s desk perched like a stork, one foot in a wool sock removed from its heavy clog and resting on her other calf.
“They’re not insane, because you really can’t get anywhere without resorting to violence.”
“But they won’t gain anything!” Hefetz, the newsroom chief, shouted at her. Earlier, Eli had watched him trying to speak with the girl standing in the doorway, biting her fingernails while staring intently at the door to Zadik’s office. She appeared to be the only one there uninterested in what was happening in the tunnel, her only interest being Zadik’s door, as if she were awaiting some redemption from there. “What will they gain? Will they gain anything this way? No, they won’t gain anything!”
The telephone rang, but Aviva did not answer. Her eyes did not move from the screen; she was transfixed.
“Listen.” Matty Cohen was speaking to him suddenly in a quiet voice.
“I want to tell you something, when this,” he said, indicating the monitor, “is over. Zadik told me you’re, well, looking into what happened last night, and I—” He looked around suspiciously, then waved his hand as if sorry he had said anything at all. “Later, I’ll tell you later, when this is over,” he repeated, wiping his shiny forehead and loosening his tie.
There are rare moments when the news media bring about true, immediate, and visible changes in reality itself. Such was the moment when Danny Benizri metamorphosed from a reporting correspondent or even a negotiator between warring camps into an active factor in attaining an agreement between the workers and the Finance Ministry.
Thus, as Eli stood watching the monitor, he saw how, all at once, the broadcast moved from the television studio to the tunnel, where Danny Benizri was acting as spokesman to the workers. “You’re standing there,” he would tell Ohayon later, “and suddenly you see how the director general of the Finance Ministry has been pushed into a corner on live television! I couldn’t believe my eyes! He had no way of getting himself out of it! All at once you see Shimshi dictating to Benizri, and on a split screen, what can I tell you? I felt like, I just couldn’t believe my eyes! I’m telling you, we were all standing there watching, everybody who was in that room, and not one of us was breathing!”
Not only in Aviva’s office, but in the halls and the canteen and the control rooms and the foyer; everywhere in the building and, it would appear, everywhere in the country, people had stopped to watch and listen. Shimshi, his voice hoarse with smoke, dictated the text of the agreement that the director general would sign, which Danny Benizri repeated word by word. Utter silence reigned in Aviva’s office when the monitors broadcast Danny Benizri, seen standing next to the labor minister’s car, saying, “Nehemia, perhaps the director general will take a pad of paper and write …”
“Danny,” the studio host said, cutting him off, since just then the camera had returned to the studio, and the director general of the Finance Ministry was whispering something to Nehemia, who nodded and said to the camera, “Can you hear us?” while the director general hastened to say, “This is no way to handle matters.”
One of the people present in Aviva’s office could have been expected to interject a sarcastic comment in response to the words of the Finance Ministry’s director general, but they all remained silent, as Danny Benizri returned to the screen from inside the tunnel.
“You have no choice, sir,” Danny Benizri said, hunched over with cold. He gestured to the gray Volvo. “Mrs. Ben-Zvi has got to be taken out of here quickly, her condition is …” As he spoke, the camera returned once again to the studio, where someone had entered and was, at that very moment, placing a pen and paper in front of the director general.
“I don’t believe it,” Matty Cohen whispered without removing his eyes from the monitor. He wiped his face again.
The monitor was showing the tunnel again, Benizri and Shimshi standing next to the trucks. Shimshi’s face could be seen clearly as he issued a warning: “He’d better be writing this down, ’cause I’m not gonna repeat myself.” Shimshi turned to the men behind him and shouted, “Quiet, keep it down!” To Benizri he said, “Go on, get started. Tell him to get started.”
In spite of all the preparations, the people crammed into Aviva’s office were stunned to listen to the television correspondent reciting in rhythm, as if dictating. “The director general of the Finance Ministry promises to …” Benizri turned to Shimshi for confirmation.
“Personally promises,” Shimshi added.
“Personally promises,” Danny Benizri repeated, his pale face filling the screen for a moment before the camera returned to the television studio and the shocked face of the Finance Ministry’s director general.
“Will you look at that,” Niva mumbled, still leaning on Aviva’s desk,
“the DG is actually writing.”
Benizri and Shimshi returned to the screen. Danny Benizri was dictating straight to the camera: “… and will carry out in full within twenty-four hours all agreements regarding salary and severance pay signed by the director general himself seven months ago but never implemented.”
Behind him, Shimshi’s voice could be heard. “I want to see the agreement in writing.”
“How are they going to show it to him?” Aviva asked, startled, her eyes on the monitor.
Benizri said to the camera, “Show us the studio.”
As he stroked his neck, Eli Bachar could hear Matty Cohen’s noisy breathing. “What a production,” Matty Cohen said as the screen split into two again: the right side showed the studio, the camera focused on the director general as he leaned over the paper in front of him and signed; the left side of the screen showed the group of workers huddled around Danny Benizri, looking into the monitor in front of him.
“Okay, Danny,” Nehemia said from the studio, holding up the paper to the camera. “The director general has signed, now it’s time for your side to act.”
On the left side of the screen Shimshi’s hand could be seen fluttering over the paper, hesitating, then finally signing. One of the men had leaned over, and Shimshi was using his back as a desk. Then Benizri took the paper from his hands and held it up to the camera.
Everyone in the secretary’s office applauded and cheered, except for Aviva, who hurried to dig about in her large purse as though she had been waiting for the moment she would be free to do so. Just then the door to Zadik’s office opened, and Zadik stood there, radiant, and called to everyone standing nearby: “Don’t say we always screw up.
Did you see who saved the day?”
Hefetz, who was standing quite close, said with a big mirthless grin, his eyes blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses, “Good work, everybody, great job. A big day for the News Department.”
“I don’t know what you’re all so excited for,” Aviva grumbled as she pushed her purse aside in anger. “Nothing good will come of it, you’ll see. Remember what I said. Remember, Niva. Are you listening?”
“Why do you always have to be such a killjoy?” Niva said, offended.
She returned her foot to her clog. “You always have to put a damper on everyone’s happiness, as if—”
“It’s not my fault,” Aviva said irritably. “That’s life.”
Arye Rubin emerged from Zadik’s office and approached the young woman in the doorway. Eli Bachar could only hear him say, “It’ll be fine,” saw Rubin place his hand on her shoulder, watched her face brighten. He also noticed Hefetz watching them. For an instant it seemed to him, to Eli Bachar, that Hefetz’s dark face paled when the young woman embraced Rubin.
