“Benny says it’s about the missing link in the ancient history of the Hebrews and about the attempt by the Ashkenazi intellectuals, like, to castrate the Eastern Jews, to annihilate the missing link in the ancient history of the Hebrews. He talked to us about it before we started filming. I don’t completely understand, but Hagar says it’s about a woman, and the two men fighting for her, and in the end everyone dies because of the war between them.”
“Everyone?”
“No, I mean, Gemullah dies and Ginat dies and Gamzu buries them, but it’s like, spiritually and emotionally, he dies later, too.”
“So it’s safe to say you have enjoyed taking part in this film.”
“It’s been a real experience.” She pushed her long, shiny hair behind one ear. “It’s a big privilege,” she added, regarding him with large, black, flashing eyes. “He chose me from all those … lots of them …
there were lots of girls at the audition. Singers, too. I wish it wouldn’t end, you have no idea how beautiful it is …”
He glanced at the cassette protruding from the video player and took a gamble. “I see you already have a videotape of it here,” he said as he leaned over and pressed the play button.
“No, no!” she said, mortified. “Don’t touch that, you’re not allowed!
It’s only a working copy to help us correct our mistakes, to show us how we’re acting. I don’t—it’s not edited, and Benny will be furious if someone not involved in the production sees it without—”
The sounds of a song in some strange language filled the room as they emerged from the mouth of Sarah- Gemullah walking along the rooftop railing, dressed in a flowing and lightweight white gown, her arms extended to the sides in sleeves as wide as wings, her black hair shiny and the moon dangling above her. Then the film cut short, and for a moment other images sped by until finally the film returned to the screen. Now a bearded man, tall and very dark, dressed in a heavy silver robe with a sort of breastplate, was carrying something in his arms; it took a few seconds for Michael to realize it was a slaughtered goat dripping blood. Gemullah in her white gown, head bent, stood next to a man in a light-colored suit and top hat before the bearded man. “Who is that?” Michael asked, pointing to the man thrusting his hands into the blood of the slaughtered goat.
“That’s Dr. Gamzu,” she whispered in response, as the man in the top hat smeared a streak of blood on Gemullah’s forehead. “That’s before their wedding ceremony. It’s not in the story, it’s an image that Benny added. You’re not allowed, nobody’s allowed yet—” The scene was accompanied by a high-pitched flute and the vague murmurings of the bearded man.
They did not notice Benny padding down the hall in bare feet and entering the foyer. Michael only caught sight of him when he was standing next to him. Without a word he pressed the button and stopped the player. For a moment the room was filled with the sounds of an orchestra and a group of children sitting around a Hanukkah menorah shouting the answer to a question asked by the host of the show, Adir Bareket, whom Michael recognized thanks to his son. Fourteen years earlier, when Yuval was ten, he had been addicted to the programs hosted by Adir Bareket and had begged his father to take him to participate in one of them, at least as a member of the studio audience. He had mentioned the prizes the kids could win and the exciting surprises and had even used the trick that almost always failed but which he tried again and again, claiming in a teary voice that everyone else had been allowed to go. But Michael, who generally liked to grant his son’s wishes, had stubbornly refused and had not even pretended that there was some technical difficulty. Instead, he had repeatedly explained to his only son who, at that time, he saw only twice a week and every other weekend, what exactly it was he hated about that program: how a few children received prizes and gifts after degrading themselves to the satisfaction of the host and the jubilant cries of the children in the studio, how they exposed their hidden weaknesses or their ignorance or their excessive innocence to the whole world. Now he looked for a moment at Adir Bareket, who preceded the lighting of the first Hanukkah candle with greetings and an insipid joke, and noticed how his face had swollen with the years and his eyes had sunk into the folds of his copious flesh, even though his looks had apparently had no adverse effect on his success: he had become the superstar of a prime-time Friday-evening entertainment program for adults, a show devoted to exposing the intimate relations between couples, as copied from a popular American television program.
“They’re putting a stop to my production,” Benny Meyuhas said with more astonishment than bitterness. “We’re only fifty thousand dollars short, and they won’t let me film the final bits. So how much does a program like Bareket’s cost? Live, with five cameras in the big studio in the String Building, with all the warm-up performances they do with the kids beforehand and the ‘A Wish Comes True’ segment.
How expensive all that is, and how repulsive,” he said derisively. “But that’s what the riffraff wants, that’s the way it is the world over. If it weren’t for the special grant for Eastern Jewish culture, they never would have given me the chance—” He dismissed the rest of what he was going to say with a wave of his hand and fell silent.
“What I saw here was quite impressive,” Michael said hesitantly. “I imagine that—how much money are we talking about here?”
“All in all another fifty thousand,” Benny Meyuhas repeated, adding in a mechanical tone, “for a sum like that they want to put a stop to the largest production they’ve had in the last few years. Anyway, nothing matters now, nothing matters anymore.”
The young woman began to protest but quickly shut her mouth and lowered her head in the manner of a person who knows her place.
“In the end they’ll provide the budget,” she said to Michael in a feeble voice. “In the end—”
“Sarah told me,” Michael said, turning to Benny Meyuhas, “that you explained your interpretation of the meaning of Iddo and Eynam to the participants before you started filming, but she couldn’t quite repeat it.
Perhaps you’d be willing to tell me what—”
“Now?” Benny Meyuhas asked, amazed. “Now I can’t—anyway, why is it relevant?”
Michael looked at him expectantly and did not respond to the question.
“Look,” Benny Meyuhas said, fixing his eyes on the wall behind the monitor as though reading a speech written there. “I do not believe that this story, Iddo and Eynam, is about ancient Jewish documents or the tribe of Gad, which supposedly never returned from Babylonian captivity. I believe that this is a story about Jews of Eastern origin in Israel, and what Zionism has done to them. The East is Gemullah singing her songs to the moon, and Zionism is that which treats her at best like some folkloric finding, and the West is what tries to identify the grammar—grammar, can you believe it?—in these songs, which were created by a man and his daughter. And you know what’s so beautiful about all this?”
Michael shook his head and watched Benny Meyuhas expectantly.
“What’s so beautiful with Agnon is that he really loves what you call
‘communities of different cultures’ and that he doesn’t think they’re perfect—”
“Who?” Michael asked. “Who doesn’t he think is perfect?”
“Eastern Jews. He thinks that they, too, were in a process of degen-eration, that they were sinking. This story is truly a tragedy, and it touches, if you’ll excuse the word, on the mystical nature of our lives here. In my opinion this is the most beautiful and the saddest story about Zionism that exists, and I don’t need to tell you that Agnon was larger than life, perhaps like Shakespeare, and for me—”
Michael wished to respond; what Benny said about Agnon’s attitude toward Eastern Jews had touched him in a way he was not prepared for. It was so far from the gloomy impression that that professor of literature had made on him twenty years earlier. Benny’s words, com-bined with the delicate images he had seen on the screen just minutes before, were so emotionally saturated, so pierced through with deep sorrow and, especially, with honesty, that he had not expected something like that at all, especially not from a production for television.
The chirp from his beeper caused Benny Meyuhas to stop talking and look around, alarmed. Michael waited a moment, but he understood that Benny Meyuhas would explain no more. He glanced at the display on his beeper and asked to use the telephone. Benny Meyuhas nodded his absentminded consent, pressed the remote control, and the screen went black. Michael could hear Eli Bachar’s muffled voice along with the television, reporting the arrests of the laid-off workers from the Hulit factory and their anticipated trial. He listened to what Eli Bachar was telling him and said, “I’m on my way now. First I’ll talk to Zadik.”
“Has something happened?” the young woman asked.
“Yes,” Michael said. He looked at Benny Meyuhas, who was shutting off the video player. “Matty Cohen died
