speaking into a telephone at the same time. If you could not hear the voices, the people in the newsroom appeared as absorbed in their activities as children at play.
“Tell me, does that look like enough makeup for you to go on-screen?”
he heard someone ask Karen, the anchorwoman, who was sitting on a corner sofa near the door reading from the same lined printout that had been placed in front of every seat around the conference table, until they were removed by Niva, the newsroom secretary, as she shuffled around the table handing out updated copies, her clogs registering a noisy complaint at having been commandeered into action once again. Suddenly, the voice of a child saying the blessing over the first candle of Hanukkah drowned out all the other noise in the room.
Michael raised his eyes to the monitor and saw a dark-skinned, curly-headed child, his hand trembling with excitement as he stood before the glowing menorah. “What’s going on here? Who made it so loud?
Turn down the volume on Channel Two!” Niva shouted, adding under her breath to David Shalit, the police affairs correspondent: “See that?
Channel Two uses an Ethiopian kid, and in another five minutes we’ll be putting a new immigrant from Russia up there. How do you like that? We know how to play the game, too!” David Shalit did not even look up at the monitor, he merely shrugged and pointed to the page he was holding, as if to say there was no need for another one.
“Can’t you see that it says six-forty-nine p.m. on this one?” she asked, indignant. “If you haven’t noticed, this is the latest lineup; the last one was over an hour ago. Look here, see for yourself how much it’s changed.” She scanned the room and called out to Karen. “Have you been to makeup? Where’s Natasha? I don’t understand why she isn’t here!”
“Here I am, I am too here, what do you want?” Natasha responded from a corner of the room and approached the table.
“What’s that you’re wearing?” Niva scolded her. “It’s not at all my job to be worrying about such things.” She tugged the sleeve of a wrinkled woman whose pale hair was gathered into a sloppy bun.
“Ganit,” she said, “you’re a producer, so why don’t you produce already? What’s with Natasha’s blouse?” Niva sighed loudly, spreading her arms and raising her eyes to the ceiling. “Why should I have to worry about this? Natasha, get down to Wardrobe, do you hear me?”
“Did you edit the cabinet meeting yet?” Erez asked the political correspondent, Yiftah Keinan, who nodded.
“It’s almost ready,” he said.
“Well, you’re going to have to do it again, with Bibi and David Levy this time,” Erez said.
“What are you shouting for?” Yiftah Keinan protested as he tucked the shirttails sticking out from under his light blue vest into his trousers. “I only need twenty seconds for the VTR.”
“Yiftah,” Erez said impatiently, “are you prepared to tell me whether to begin with David Levy or with Bibi?”
“I told you already, start with David Levy,” he said as he went over the new lineup. “Just tell me if the VTR covers everything.”
“Yes, yes, it does,” Erez grumbled. “How many times do I have to repeat myself ?”
Once again, Niva raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Why are you people shouting? Why can’t people talk pleasantly to one another for once?”
Hefetz sat at the head of the table, and Michael stood behind him, peering over his shoulder at the lineup, while Erez, at the other end of the table, waved the new page at the language editor, who was quickly and carefully applying lipstick in the corner of the room. “Miri,” he called, “have you gone over this?”
“What am I, God?” she asked bitterly. “When exactly would I have had time to go over it?” Miri snapped her lipstick closed and approached the conference table.
Hefetz was talking on the phone and scanning the pages in his hand.
“So you want to tell me that having one driver under the age of twenty-four is going to push my policy up by two thousand shekels?”
he grumbled into the receiver. “Don’t try and sell me that bullcrap, I’m no sucker and I’m not paying that kind of premium on my car. What?
No, they won’t pay for it from work, of course not.” He raised his head for a moment, and when he noticed Michael, he glanced at the large wall clock, nodded to him to indicate he was aware of his presence, and covered the receiver with his large hand. “You’re going to have to wait,” he told him, “I just can’t meet with you right now —you see what’s going on. That’s the way it is, you can’t make any plans with someone responsible for the news. I can’t stop everything. You’re welcome to wait here, you can sit in that armchair at the side, you won’t be in the way. Or you can go out and walk around, whatever you like.
Take a seat down in the canteen, we’ve got a big mess with the satellite. Let’s wait until she’s on the air,” he said, indicating Natasha.
“We’ve got something pretty big going down, you can stay here if you’re interested. Whatever you want,” he concluded, returning to his phone call.
Erez moved his chair aside, making room for Michael to sit behind him, and said to Hefetz, “It would be nice if we knew what this ‘pretty big thing going down’ was. When exactly are you planning to tell us?
What am I supposed to write on the lineup? How can I edit the news without knowing what—forty minutes to air time, and look what’s written here: ITEM X TWO MINUTES FIVE SECONDS NATASHA. So how do you expect me to give this a title?”
Michael sat down to observe them until Hefetz was free, since you could always learn something about people if you watched them in secret while they were occupied with their own affairs and paying no attention to you. But Zadik, who had entered the room, waved to Hefetz and, just to be sure, hurried over to him. “Where do we stand?”
he asked as he leaned over the table to have a look at the papers.
“What do I see here? You took Yaacov Neeman off the lineup?”
“There’s no room, and I can’t go overtime tonight,” Hefetz said, rising from his chair and pushing it backward. He glared at Zadik. “Can I go overtime tonight or not? No, I can’t. You told me not to go overtime, so—”
“Okay, okay,” Zadik said, disconcerted, and stepped away from Hefetz. “I’m not getting involved,” he said, trying to placate him. “I was just asking. Asking is still allowed, isn’t it?”
But Hefetz ignored him, shouting, “Karen, go to Miri and see about the corrections. Miri, get a move on it, this isn’t a doctoral dissertation.
You’ve still got to approve these corrections, and even then—”
Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 was playing again from inside the large black bag at Michael’s feet, and in an instant Niva was at his side, fishing through it. By the time she had managed to locate her cell phone, it had stopped ringing. “Oh, not again!” she grumbled as she hit the memory button. She bent down next to her bag, very close to Michael, and he heard her heavy breathing as she said, “Mother? What? What?”
And then, after a minute, “Now?! We’re on the air in less than an hour, and I don’t have time to … never mind, in the upper right-hand cabinet … no, not there, on the top shelf … listen to what I’m telling you, why aren’t you listening? Did you find it? Okay, so take it now … no,
not later, God, I’m hanging up—” She turned off the phone and tossed it into her bag, shoved the bag under Hefetz’s chair, and hurried to the computer printer, which was just then producing a new printout, and another, and another.
“Erez. Erez!” David Shalit shouted to the news editor, “come here, we’ve got to make a change in the Jerusalem murder, there’s a gag order on showing photos of the barber and his girlfriend.” He shut his cell phone with a snap and said to Erez, who had joined him, “It’s the hottest story today, he wasn’t just any old barber, he cut the hair of the prime minister’s wife. There may be fallout from this, and I have material filmed by a local television station and also—”
“The prime minister’s wife?” Niva asked, butting in. “Didn’t Bibi say the guy had ‘served’ as his own barber?”
“His precise words were, ‘served in our home,’” David Shalit corrected her. “With a guy like Bibi and all his regal pomposity, even barbers
‘serve.’ Erez, did you hear what I said? About this item, we’ve got to—”
