over the top. I was looking at the frame, wasn’t I?”
Benny Meyuhas, lost in his own thoughts, was as usual deaf to the noise around him. He looked at the monitor and reiterated: “She isn’t close enough to the edge. It’s not frightening enough. I want her at the edge, I want it scary, so you think she’s going to fall, I want a few breath-stopping seconds before you see she’s okay. Sarah,” he called to the crouching young woman hugging her gaunt body with thin arms that poked out from the wide sleeves of her gown. “I want you to come right up to the edge.”
“But I could fall that way,” Sarah said, standing. She looked around until her eyes met Hagar’s, who was approaching her. “I could …” she muttered, “it’s …”
“Don’t worry, you won’t fall,” Benny Meyuhas told her. “After all, in the rehearsal, you remember? We saw that you won’t … Hagar,” he called to his producer, “take her to the edge and stand there with her.”
Hagar zipped up her windbreaker, wrapped her arms around the girl’s trembling shoulders, and led her back to the improvised railing, a stone balustrade they had had designed especially for the edge of the roof.
Benny Meyuhas looked up in search of the moon and noticed the antennas protruding from the String Building—a funny nickname for the long, rectangular edifice that had once been a string factory. In the meantime all kinds of temporary staircases and wobbly wooden gal-leries had been tacked on to it; the building sported secret entrances from the parking lot used only by the lucky few who knew of them, and rooms and large halls and even underground passageways that perhaps led to the main building, whose original name only a handful of people remembered: the Diamond Building. Leaning on the red-painted metal railing and looking outward from the roof, it was impossible to imagine what treasures and expanses the String Building held: not only Tirzah’s office and the scenery storerooms that occupied most of its space, but also a carpentry shop and wardrobe storerooms and lighting and sound systems and even the magnificent Nakdi Studio, used for filming comedies and the big variety shows. And the small storerooms under the stairs—which only the most veteran employees knew about—where a remarkable number of things were hidden, and the hallways in which the largest scenery stood, among them scenes from the hometown of Agnon’s heroine Gemullah (designed by Tirzah), including a village and hills and flocks of sheep that looked like the real thing … and clouds and a sun and even the moon, round and yellowy; Tirzah had drawn them all. And the room that Max Levin discovered in the dig he initiated there, a sealed ground-floor room, hidden behind a wall, that contained an entire world: ten years earlier, when there had been a power failure and Max Levin had tapped on the wall, the sound he heard was hollow, so he tore a hole in the wall, peered inside, stood there, amazed—that was how Tirzah loved to tell the story each time she repeated it—and he walked away without a word and returned with a shovel-tractor that excavated the space, and that was how the huge hall where they filmed the big Friday-night variety programs came into existence. Later it turned out that this hall had been an ancient and empty well that had served a spacious German home long since razed. They filmed there, and thanks to Max Levin they also strung pipes along the roof and invested in an air-conditioning system that Max controls himself to this very day. Even a new, state-of-the-art editing machine—cutting-edge, Max promised when he submitted the price quote to the Accounting Department and watched the horrified face of Levy from Accounting—
was stored there, in the room next to the carpentry shop. There, in the large halls used for painting scenery, the huge pillars that Tirzah built were stored, a few leaning over the door to the lighting room. It was Tirzah who had suggested using the scenery storeroom and the metal staircase to film the first meeting between Ginat and Gamzu, the heroes of Agnon’s story, as a means of skimping on a set location. In this huge area, which was entirely the realm of Tirzah and Max Levin, head of Props, Benny Meyuhas’s heart raced anew every time he entered. He wished he could use the whole space, every inch of it.
There was even a den of sorts where they rested during breaks, with a
huge poster of Kim Basinger hanging over the sofa on which the king of the stagehands lay most hours of the day. The long row of rooms on the interior side was known as the “transit camp,” for its resemblance to the shanties erected for new immigrants in the early years of the state, and in one room—the coolest—they kept the sandwiches and beer. Benny had been working at Israel Television for thirty years and there were still secret places in the building he knew nothing about, but, as Schreiber said with a grin, as if joking, what is a television director anyway? The lowest rung on the totem pole. It was of no consequence to Benny Meyuhas, especially now that they had finally let him do what he really wanted. In any case, Max and Tirzah were the only two who knew every corner.
Tirzah. She was giving him hell—a full week she had refused to utter a single word to him about anything, good or bad. Two people living in the same house for eight years already, because they love one another, bound together by love and nothing else, nothing formal or external, no children, no property, no certificates signed by rabbis—
and now she refused to exchange a single word with him. Every time he tried to explain, she … but she had in fact finished the scenery, even the huge marble pillar—smooth and perfect, as if it had come from an open-air castle, just waiting to be filmed—which Tirzah polished and placed next to the scenery flats. Stunning. Who would believe that someone could deface it with red graffiti: THIS IS AN ASHKENAZI WHOREHOUSE? Some people don’t even care about defacing beauty. On the contrary: to deface beauty is exactly what they want. It would even seem that the instinct to mutilate is awakened in people—even intelligent, cultured people—precisely in the face of great beauty. That was, after all, the theme of Agnon’s Iddo and Eynam. There, too, beauty was destroyed, as if destruction could decipher its secret.
Benny Meyuhas looked to the corner of the roof. Max Levin was the one who had suggested filming Gemullah’s promenade on top of the scenery building. The moon lit up the cactus in the rusty bucket they had moved to the side so that it would not appear in the frame, along with the paint-spotted rooftop they had covered in sand. From a corner of the roof, the scent of smoke wafted upward from a grill. The first time Benny Meyuhas had come up to the roof with him and had stared in wonder at the charred grill and the remains of charcoal and the pile of thin bones that cats were gnawing nearby, Max Levin had been embarrassed, as if he were sorry he had brought him to the inner sanctum of his realm. “One of the crew members,” Max explained apologetically in his strong Hungarian accent, “he has a hobby, he keeps a chicken coop next to the compressor, so at night and sometimes in the early morning the guys, you know, while they’re waiting, they fry a few eggs from the coop, and sometimes they roast a chicken, not a whole one from the coop, just wings, or a steak on occasion.”
“You people have a whole life up here, don’t you?” Hagar had said with a grin. She was standing at the corner of the roof, checking the paint spots. “Turns out that here at Israel Television,” she had said to the sky, “the head of Props is lord of the manor.” Max Levin had grimaced, his face a study in denial and opposition that worried Benny Meyuhas. Benny always tried to remain nonconfrontational with them all: “Maintaining good relations is half the job,” he would say to Hagar and anyone who would listen to him at the start of every production.
“We’ll have to cover this with something, maybe sand,” Hagar had said as she wrote herself a note on the second page of her legal pad. “You want this place?” she had asked after Benny stood surveying the roof for several minutes. “Over there by the edge,” she had added, “they have a basketball court, too. They’ve got it great up here, and we had no idea!” Benny had nodded his head, yes, he wanted the place. And to his great good fortune—he didn’t even know why—Max Levin was being cooperative.
“Cut!” Benny Meyuhas was now calling, looking again at the film and then at the door to the roof. “Hasn’t he come back yet?” he murmured as if to himself.
“Who?” asked Schreiber.
“Avi,” Hagar answered from the corner of the roof. “Benny’s waiting for Avi, he went to bring the sun gun.”
“But we have enough moonlight,” Schreiber protested.
“A while back, when he went, we didn’t,” Hagar said, glancing at her cell phone. “He’ll be back soon,” she said, consoling Benny, “and Max will probably be along soon with the horse.”
But she was wrong. For more than ten minutes Avi, the lighting technician, had been standing in front of the guard booth at the entrance to the elongated building, a sun gun in his hand, trying to convince the guard to let him in. “Identification,” the new guard repeated in his odd accent. “No ID, no enter.” Nothing helped. There was no point in phoning Hagar on the roof to come down and save him, since they were in the middle of shooting and she would never answer.
Avi looked around, one-thirty in the morning, not a soul about.
Only a persistent new guard, Russian perhaps, or maybe an Argentinian, who chased after him, fought him in his feeble attempt to get past him, unwilling to believe a word he said. Suddenly, at last, a car screeched to a halt
