and Max Levin stepped out. Short and chubby, he left the car door open as he approached the guard booth, his glasses hanging from a metal chain around his neck, his head inclined to the side. “Max!” Avi cried with joy. “Tell him, tell him I’m with you people on the production.”
“He won’t let you in, why should you come in? Don’t let him in,”
Max instructed the guard. He walked in and waited until Avi’s face had completely fallen, and only then returned, smiling, and said something in Hungarian to the guard, who pushed his long, straggly hair back from his eyes, answered Max, and let Avi pass.
“Iggen miggen?” Avi said as they passed inside the building, mocking the Hungarian he had just heard. He lit the way with the sun gun.
“If I were you I wouldn’t spit into the well you are drinking from,”
Max said. “Especially if Benny is waiting for that sun gun of yours. If I were you I wouldn’t be making jokes at all.”
“Tell me something,” Avi said. “Tell me what all this is about.
Fetching this and fetching that at one in the morning. You’d think he was the king of England, with all due respect … and what about you?
What are you doing here at this hour?”
“A blue horse,” Max answered. “I have to bring him a blue horse.
Come here, shine that light into the storeroom, there’s not enough light in there,” Max said as he stuffed his rotund body inside the enclosed space under the metal staircase.
“I don’t understand anything anymore, nothing at all,” Avi the lighting technician said, as if to himself. “Where you got a plug here? Think you can find it in the dark?” As he spoke he felt along the wall, unraveling the cord. He stuck the plug into a socket he had located and aimed the sun gun toward the inside of the storeroom, turned it on, and pointed it at the black shadows cast on the low walls by blurred objects. “I don’t understand how they keep shooting when there’s no budget, and how he can send us to bring things when Matty Cohen’s on his way here.”
“What are you talking about, on his way here?” Max asked, alarmed, as he extricated a large blue wooden horse from the storeroom. “Now?!
You think Matty Cohen would show up here at this hour?”
“You talk as if you don’t know what Matty Cohen’s capable of,” Avi said, lowering the sun gun to his side. “What’s with the horse, anyway?” He did not wait for Max to respond. “I heard in the canteen.
Someone leaked to Matty Cohen, whispered the big secret to him about them filming at night, and he wants to catch ’em red-handed.
Maybe it’s already too late, maybe there’s nobody to bring your horse and my sun gun to, because maybe Matty Cohen already shut the whole thing down and everyone took off. That’s what I heard in the canteen.”
Max looked at Avi; there was a half-smile on the lighting technician’s face. “What are you so happy about?” Max scolded him. “This is Israel Television’s most important production, and to you it’s a laughing matter.”
“What’s the big deal? What’s so important about it, huh?” Avi protested. “Everyone’s tiptoeing around here, going on and on about Agnon. I mean, it’s just Agnon! Tell me, who’s gonna watch it, anyway? The ratings’ll be zero.”
“You’ve been working on it for six months, and you don’t even know what it’s about? Shame on you.”
“What is there to know, huh? It’s just about some broad from India.”
“Not from India,” Max explained. “I don’t read Hebrew all that well and Agnon is difficult language, and what’s more, everyone says this story, Iddo and Eynam, is impossible to understand anyway, but she isn’t Indian, that much I’m sure of. She’s from an oriental Jewish tribe.”
“Like Ethiopian?” Avi reasoned.
“Something like that, I guess, some ancient Jewish tribe,” Max said.
“She’s a somnambulist, which means she walks around at night singing her songs. Her father marries her off to some intellectual, a researcher, who brings her to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem she wanders the rooftops and sings, that’s all I know.”
“My sister’s daughter … ,” Avi began, pulling the electrical cord from the wall and stepping to the side to make room for Max to pass.
“Shine the light over here,” Max urged him. “What’s wrong, you afraid of using up the battery?”
Avi shone the light down the hallway ahead of them as he continued talking. “My sister’s daughter had moonsickness, the sleepwalking disease,” he announced to Max’s back as he walked quickly behind him, trying to keep up. “She’d wander around at night, and once I woke up and found her standing next to my bed. God, was that scary! I was still a kid myself, I didn’t know what moonsickness was, but I sure knew what it was to be scared!”
Now he was shining the light on the scenery flats and the pillars.
“Hey, come here, there’s someone … ,” Avi whispered. “Look, over in the corner next to the pillar, someone’s there.”
Max, too, saw the white boot, and then the whole leg in dark pants.
Only when they drew near and stood next to the pillar did he bend down for a closer look. Avi shone the light on the face, and a muffled scream escaped his mouth. In a swift movement he turned his head and the sun gun wobbled in his hand, shining in the far corners, on the ceiling, and then it fell to the floor, landing next to the wall and shining on a dark puddle.
“It’s Tirzah. Tirzah,” Max Levin whispered. “What’s wrong, Tirzah?” he asked hoarsely, crouching to touch her arm. “It’s Tirzah,”
he said, stunned. He raised his head and looked to his hand. “There’s blood, a lot of blood. Her face … look at her face …”
Avi did not respond.
“Listen,” Max called out, choking on his words, “I think something fell on her … the pillar … call an ambulance, she doesn’t have a pulse, call an ambulance, quick.”
Avi did not respond. He coughed and coughed, then Max heard him retching. There was blood all around them. Again Max heard Avi vomiting, and with a very cold hand he felt for the cell phone clipped to his belt, and dialed.
At that very moment it started raining harder, a heavy downpour that pounded at the windows of the building. But neither the rain nor the pel-lets of hail that were beating the thin walls made a difference to anyone, not even to Shimshon Zadik—head of Israel Television—who arrived after the police, nodding at Max Levin, who was waiting for him at the entrance as if he had not noticed the rain at all. Dripping water, Zadik stood for a moment in front of the entrance to the String Building and looked suspiciously into the brightly lit hallway. “There was a terrible accident on the way here, just outside of Mevasseret Zion,” he said. “You can’t imagine… . There’s still a two-hour backup, I made a detour… . It was terrible … two kids … destroyed the car, totaled it, they had to cut the car open with a saw to pull them out, I saw the whole thing with my own eyes …” His face, wet with rain, glowed in the blue light from atop the police van, while the headlights of the ambulance lit up the puddles on the asphalt parking lot. Water flowed from his leather jacket and from his close-cropped hair and from the collar of his shirt, and every step he took down the long hallway lit by spotlights belonging to the team from forensics left a wet footprint in its wake. (“Hold on, hold on a minute,”
the guard shouted as he ran after Zadik. “I need your ID!” he had yelled when Zadik first stepped out of the car until Max Levin, who was smoking a cigarette at the entrance to the building, grabbed hold of his arm and said kindly, “Quiet now, it’s all right. That man is the head of Israel Television.”)
Water pooled under Zadik as he stood near the body, turning his face away as he murmured, “Tirzah, God, Tirzah!” A police officer whispered something in his ear, and Zadik glanced at the huge pillar lying near the body, and at its bloodstained capital. He bent down and tapped on the pillar. “I don’t believe it!” he shouted. “This is real marble, where would she have gotten real marble? What is this, Hollywood?” he asked, choking. Zadik rose to his feet and looked around him. “This is terrible, terrible,” he muttered. “What was she doing here in the middle of the night?”
He shifted his gaze from Avi the lighting technician, who was crouched in the corner, to Max, standing next to
