look. “Natasha’s been waiting—” He glanced toward the door.
“I know, I know, she’ll have to keep waiting,” he said impatiently.
“I’ve got to tell her something, anything. First, to put her out of her misery,” he said, passing his hand over his cropped gray hair. “And second, Zadik, she’s onto something pretty big.”
It was hard for Eli Bachar to hide his excitement. He wondered whether Michael remembered that Arye Rubin was Tzilla’s hero. He had to admit that up close, live, Rubin was even more impressive than on the television screen. The man didn’t seem to have an inflated ego, he seemed like he was just some regular guy. He really did inspire esteem.
Esteem and modesty, humility and quiet admiration: these feelings accompanied Eli Bachar on his way to the car and after he had seated himself inside it. The radio was on, and the chirping noises from the transmitter did not drown out a live radio report about the laid-off workers, who were at that moment alighting from the police van in handcuffs, their wives waiting in ambush at police headquarters. The reporter mentioned Danny Benizri, too, “the hero of the day,” he called him. “He’s with us right now. Hello, Danny Benizri.”
“Hello, Gidi.”
“Danny Benizri, what now? Where will you go from here?” he asked theatrically. But Eli Bachar did not hear what the television correspondent answered, since at that moment Michael was telling Rubin how important he thought his weekly program, The Justice of the Sting, was.
Then he said, “I’ve been curious for a long time about the name The Justice of the Sting. Where does it come from?”
“It’s the title of a poem I loved,” Rubin said.
“Which?” Michael asked.
“It’s by Dan Pagis, and it’s about wasps. But the wasps are really only a parable,” Arye Rubin muttered, looking out the window.
“Never mind how it’s connected, but it does connect to the program.”
“It’s a program with balls,” Eli Bachar dared to say from the back seat. Even as they reached Benny Meyuhas’s house and Rubin was saying in his deep, unique voice, “Maybe I should go in alone first and then you can come in in another minute, what do you think?” Eli was thinking how he would tell Tzilla about meeting him. He wanted to remember every detail.
“Sounds like a good idea, you’re his good friend,” Michael said.
“That’s what I understand, right? Zadik told us you’re very close.”
“From the age of ten, from grade school,” Rubin said. “We did everything together. Benny is … like my own flesh and blood.” He got out of the car. “I’ll call you in a few minutes,” he promised.
c h a p t e r f i v e
After about a quarter of an hour waiting, Eli Bachar lifted the brass knocker under the ceramic nameplate decorated with birds and flowers, in the middle of which was written R
-
UBIN MEYUHAS, and
knocked on the wooden door. A gaunt young woman whose long black hair enveloped half her pale face opened the door. For a moment she stood there, silent, blinking her eyes and rubbing one black-stockinged foot against the other. She glanced over her shoulder seek-ing confirmation, and when this did not come she shrugged as if to say,
“I’ve done all I could,” and, eyes lowered, whispered, “you can come in, it’s very cold outside.” She stepped aside to let them pass.
“We’ve been waiting out in the rain for nearly half an hour,” Eli Bachar said by way of reproach when they were inside the apartment.
“Rubin said he would call us after a few minutes, but it’s already been more than twenty.”
“I’m just … ,” the young woman began, clearly embarrassed, “this isn’t my house, I can’t—”
“Who are you?” Eli Bachar asked sharply.
“I … my name’s Sarah,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “I …
I’m an actress, I’m in Benny’s film. I play Gemullah, but my real name’s Sarah.”
Pale light that filtered into the foyer through a large arched window lit up the dark wall painted in deep blue, as well as the model house built of wood that stood on a sheet of plywood with a small sign af THE
fixed to it:
HOUSE OF GREIFENBACH. Michael looked at the wooden house, at the windows and grilles and doorways and hallways that connected one wing to another, at the lighted rooms between the wings, at the darkened rooms. Painted sheets of plywood covered the open spaces on the upper level of the house, creating surfaces—roofs of different heights that were, at certain spots, bordered by dark railings. Between one railing and the next or one wing and the next there were ramps without railings.
On a bookstand next to the model house a video monitor stood lit, the screen filled with blue light and no picture.
“What is this?” Eli Bachar whispered to Michael, “a doll house? I didn’t know they had any little kids. Look, it’s got real working lights and everything.”
“This,” Michael said, “is a maquette, a model of the house in Iddo and Eynam. That’s the way it looks, or is supposed to look, in the film they’re shooting.”
“How do you know that?” Eli Bachar asked, his expression one of annoyance and awe all at once.
“I remember it from my studies. In my first year at university I took Introduction to Agnon, I’ve told you this, don’t you remember? It was an elective course. I studied this story, Iddo and Eynam.” He looked at Eli’s face and hastened to add, “To this very day I don’t understand it.
It’s a beautiful story, but dense, unclear. A very strange story full of symbols. I remember the lecturer explaining them, and even then I didn’t completely understand, or really, I didn’t want to understand what the man thought Agnon was saying. But I remember the name of the house,” he said, pointing at the sign. “Greifenbach. And there’s this young woman who walks around at night on the roofs and sings the hymns of Iddo and Eynam.” He did not mention Dr. Gamzu and Dr.
Ginat, the book collector and the folklore researcher, whom he remembered well, or the description of Gemullah’s meeting with Ginat. More than anything he recalled the frightening ending; he could still hear the echo of the professor’s murky voice calling out with great emotion: “What is it that caused Ginat to sabotage his own handi-work, destroying in a short period of time things that he had toiled over for a great many years?” Occasionally over the years that question would return to him, bubbling up when he witnessed, with his own eyes, the destruction that human beings were capable of bringing about in a single action against what was most dear to them.
From the kitchen a woman in her forties dressed in shabby jeans suddenly appeared. It was clear from the disheveled locks of silver hair,
the terribly lined face, and the narrow gray eyes that regarded the visitors with suspicion that she was the exact opposite of the other, younger woman. “It’s because of me, it’s my fault,” she told them, unabashed. “Arye Rubin asked me to call you, but I wanted to wait until—” she gestured with her head toward the closed door at the end of the wide hallway. “Benny isn’t up to—I thought it could wait,” she concluded.
“Are you a family member? His sister or something?” Eli Bachar asked.
“My name’s Hagar,” she said as she shook out her hair and placed a hand on her neck.
“Hagar what?” Eli Bachar persisted, while Michael looked around and noticed, close by, a row of framed photographs, all of them black and white, hanging on the wall opposite the front door. One in particular stood out, a large photograph of three young men dressed in hik-ing boots and kaffiyehs and khaki shorts and shirts, their sleeves rolled sloppily up their tanned arms. Between them stood a girl, thin and tan, in dark shorts and a white shirt, who was fingering the fringes of a white kaffiyeh wrapped around her neck. Her long, fair hair was blowing in the breeze, one lock of it touching the tallest of the three boys, whose arm was resting on the girl’s shoulders.
