eyes. Both men had sat facing him, and once again he had had to drink coffee even though he was forbidden to do so; he felt the blood humming behind his ears, the throbbing in his head. How the men had pestered him! Was Tirzah well liked, did she have enemies, what was her relationship with Benny Meyuhas like, did one of the Scenery Department workers hold a grudge against her, was Arye Rubin a real Don Juan, could there be women who … they even mentioned Niva and the boy. As for him, he had always hated gossip and slander. How many times had he told them that Tirzah was a fine person, pedantic but fair, and that she had had no enemies, and that anyway, it had been an accident. After that they were all over him, asking him over and over again why he had gone there at night. And he had tried to explain about their work procedures, why it had been necessary for him to go there in the middle of the night to put a stop to the filming. “You don’t understand,” he had said. “We have a certain budget for original drama, and he used it all up. Now he’s filming additional scenes, patching up scenes, and these additions alone are costing fifty thousand dollars.”
“I don’t understand what these additions are,” Eli Bachar said.
“Does it mean he’s shooting the same scenes over again, or new ones?”
“Both, really, along with changes in the screenplay that require reshooting the scene.”
“I’ve heard he’s a perfectionist, Benny Meyuhas. Is that right?” Eli Bachar asked him.
“And how,” Matty Cohen said, then immediately felt he had said too much. The way Benny Meyuhas worked was nobody’s business outside of Israel Television.
“How much have you people invested in this production?” Balilty asked. “What’s the budget for a film like this?”
Matty Cohen hated answering that kind of question and especially disliked discussing the budget with people who had no need to know.
“I don’t recall exactly,” he said at last. “A drama like this costs a lot to produce, believe me. But this isn’t connected to Tirzah’s accident …”
He could feel his shirt growing damp with sweat. It was cold, and rain was falling outside, but inside this room it was too hot, he felt he was suffocating even though he had removed his necktie, folded it neatly, and stuck it inside his jacket pocket. He felt as though he were being choked, as if something had tightly encircled his neck. He did not say a word about how Benny Meyuhas had been shunted aside over the years, how he was only given the unimportant directing jobs: children’s programming and shows about religion, that sort of thing. He said nothing about the charitable foundation that had suddenly popped up from overseas, some anonymous benefactor with a fund
for adapting the masterpieces of Hebrew literature to the screen. Were it not for that fund, Benny Meyuhas would never have been given the go-ahead to start with Agnon. But nothing was good enough for Meyuhas. He had used up all the foundation money as well as the entire budget for original drama.
Balilty was persistent. “How much is ‘a lot’? How much are we talking, a million? Two?” His eyes were twinkling, and it was clear he would never give up.
“I don’t exactly recall,” Matty Cohen answered. No one would force him to give out such information to no end. He was not the type to air dirty laundry in public.
Balilty would not let it go. “I’m asking ballpark, I’m not looking to quote you.”
It was clear this would never end. He had to tell him something.
“Around two million.”
“Dollars or shekels?”
“Dollars, dollars, with productions we talk in dollars, but we write the budget in shekels.”
Balilty whistled.
“That’s not a large budget for a film,” Matty Cohen said defensively.
“Overseas that’s small change, but here in Israel …”
But Balilty looked at Eli Bachar and said quietly, as though Matty Cohen could not hear, “Look what kind of money we’re talking about here. Did you hear that? This is no laughing matter: with sums like that, anything’s possible.”
“That’s not money that someone receives,” Matty Cohen explained.
“That’s money for the film’s budget; no one gets his hands on it.
Everyone’s on salary.”
Balilty did not respond, merely scribbled something on the paper he was holding, folded it, and said, “I’m asking you again: you don’t remember anything about what you saw down below? Who was with Tirzah? Anyway, correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t you agree that at that hour not just anybody could be standing there?”
Matty Cohen explained once again that when he had seen her, he was in a hurry, that he had been on his way out to the roof, and then afterwards, making his way back across the catwalk, he had peered down but could not stop to look because he was rushing home to take his son to the emergency room. All to no avail; nothing helped his cause.
“Don’t worry about it,” Balilty had said as he rose from his chair,
“we’ll help you remember. Come with me, I’m taking you to someone who knows how to make you remember. We’ve got this guy, it’s like he fishes out your memories, he’s an expert in pulling them out from way down deep.”
Now this tall, thin man sitting across from him, whose angular knees were almost touching his own, was fingering his blond, wispy beard and tugging on his pointy nose. “Now just tell me, without giving it any thought: you must have seen his head. Was he wearing a hat?
A skullcap?”
“I don’t think so,” Matty Cohen said as he wiped his face. A wave of cold passed through him, then the shivers, like symptoms of a high fever. His shirt was now completely wet with sweat, but he was cold, and slightly nauseous. His left shoulder was in pain and he had chest pains and he could feel the food rising in his stomach. But what had he eaten? A few cold bourekas and all that coffee. Still, he felt as if he had eaten something rotten.
“So he wasn’t wearing a hat. Was he bald, or did he have a head of hair?” Ilan Katz touched his own high forehead, readjusted his skullcap, tugged at his nose again. He reminded Matty Cohen of a picture of Pinocchio in a book he had had as a child.
“No, he wasn’t bald,” Matty Cohen said, feeling as though any minute he would vomit on the white paper attached to the clipboard perched on the jutting knees of the man sitting across from him.
“How about a skullcap?” Ilan Katz asked while penciling in hair on the taller of the two figures he had drawn. “Straight hair? Curly? Don’t think, just say whatever comes to mind. Quickly.”
“No skullcap,” Matty Cohen told him, mopping his sweaty face again. “Can we take a break? I’m not feeling so well.”
“We’re almost finished, we’re making great progress,” Ilan Katz assured him. The contours of Katz’s arm, which was moving rapidly across the page, dimmed, and suddenly Matty Cohen could see several arms in a blur moving up and down, and heard the voice, filled with
excitement, as if from a great distance and behind a glass partition asking, “Curly hair or straight?”
“Straight, I think,” Matty Cohen said, forcing himself to sit up straight, grasping the sides of the wooden chair for support and breathing deeply, as if a deep breath might drive away the pain he was feeling in his chest. This was a pain he had come to recognize, not just from several years ago but from these past nights, a paralyzing pain, as if someone had clamped an enormous vise on the left side of his chest and was crushing and bending him; a pain that took his breath away, but which he hoped would pass quickly by itself, without anyone knowing what was happening to him.
“Good job, Matty. You’re doing great. Here we go, straight hair.
What do you think? Dark or light?”
Matty Cohen did not respond. Because of the pain he was unable to speak, but the artist was oblivious. “Did you notice his legs? His shoes?
Let’s try the legs. Were they long? Thin? What kind of shoes was he wearing?” Ilan Katz was ecstatic, completely unaware of the man’s labored breathing. Matty Cohen had placed his right hand on his chest.
Ilan Katz drummed his fingers, the pencil tightly pressed to the page in front of him. Suddenly he jumped up from his chair with a start, knocking it backward, and stood in front of Matty Cohen. “You’ve got to tell me quickly, we’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot, it only gets tougher over time. Memory doesn’t get better, only worse. Believe me, every hour we remember less.” He waved one long, slender, yellowed finger in front of Matty Cohen’s
