Schreiber the cameraman was standing in the second-floor hallway, his back to the row of offices and his fingers tapping nervously on the railing. On his way to the newsroom, Michael passed a room whose door was halfway open, and when he peered inside, he saw Natasha. Her back was to the door, and she was facing a row of cubbyholes, emptying the contents of one of them and shoving them into her canvas bag.
Standing quite close to her was Hefetz, who was speaking to her, his tone imploring. When he noticed Michael, he hastened to say, “I’ll be with you in a minute, wait for me in there,” indicating the newsroom.
Michael continued very slowly down the hallway, managing to catch a groan and some low tones followed by, “Don’t you believe I’m looking after your interests?” Natasha’s response—if there was one—was inaudible to Michael.
Very few people were in the newsroom, and those who were spoke quietly, as if in the wake of a tragedy. Niva was sitting next to the fax machine extracting page after page and taking notes. “‘Haim Nacht …
receives a stipend … has not passed away, H.F.’… Does anyone know what the initials ‘H.F.’ stand for?” A voice from one of the inner rooms responded: “Heaven Forfend!” Niva continued pulling pages from the fax machine, raising her eyes to the monitor from time to time. She watched the start of a live weekly political affairs program, whose regular host had been replaced by a journalist known for his seriousness and restraint, and his slow, careful way of speaking that emphasized every syllable. He told the viewers he wished to say something about the exceptional nature of the upcoming program, and even before introducing the regular participants or the guests, he announced that time would be “set aside for remembering Tirzah Rubin, head of the Scenery Department at Israel Television, who was killed in an on-the-job accident.” In a voice choked with emotion, he added, “One could even say she was killed in the line of duty,” and then he mentioned Matty Cohen, head of the Production Department, “who, behind the scenes, financed this great enterprise.” It seemed that no one in the newsroom was paying attention to the broadcast until one of the regular participants, an old and corpulent journalist whose claim to fame was the vociferous complaints he issued on the program, interrupted the host to mention the sins of the ultra- Orthodox population and the disgrace of Natasha’s failure, which he called
“missing a rare opportunity, which happens with the Israel Television News all the time.” The studio audience applauded, and the journalist looked around with a haughty smile.
Niva raised her head from the pile of papers she was moving from one side to the other. “Oh, shut your face already,” she said after glancing for a moment at the screen. “In another minute you’ll say something about how you were a kid in the Holocaust.” Just then, not a moment later, the bloated face of the journalist grew serious, his haughty smile faded, he cast a dirty look at the camera and once again interrupted the host. “I am very sorry,” he declared, “as for me, I’m not going like a lamb to the slaughter again—we’ve already lived through Auschwitz!” And once again the audience burst into applause, and he bowed his head as though reliving his terrible memories. The camera panned around the table and came to rest on his fat neck.
“Shut your big mouth already,” Niva demanded. “Someone turn down the sound,” she shouted.
No one reacted. “Where’s the remote control? Hey, Erez, let me have the remote, will you?” she said as she pulled the remote control from under a pile of papers next to her, and turned off the sound. The man’s mouth was still open and his fat lips were moving but his voice could not be heard.
The political affairs correspondent protested. “I need to hear what they’re saying. Any minute now they’ll mention the Jerusalem murder, and I’ll have to report to the studio, too. They’ll give me a heads-up, but I want to know what’s going on.” He took the remote control and increased the volume just as one of the regular participants on the show was saying, “Who says we don’t respect Jewish heritage? It’s a fact that Israel Television, which everyone would agree is a secular institution, is filming a story by Agnon. What is Agnon, if not Jewish heritage?” she asked excitedly, straightening her pillbox hat.
“Oh, I love this one, too,” Niva interjected, “with that upside-down pot on her head, every week a different pot.” She stuffed her feet into
her heavy clogs. “I’ve been here for forty-eight hours,” she announced.
“I’ve slept maybe two or three. That’s enough, I’m closing shop.”
“Hey, do you need to interrogate me, too?” Niva asked Michael with a frown, as if a conversation with him was the very last thing she needed at that moment.
He understood, however, that she very much wished to have her say, and since Hefetz was still tied up, he said, “It could be very helpful.
I figure that you’re the person who knows better than anyone else—”
“So let’s go sit over there,” she said with false displeasure, pointing at one of the rooms, to which he followed her. Just before she closed the door he could hear a man shouting: “Don’t try and sell me Agnon.
They only did Agnon because they got a grant. Benny Meyuhas personally received money for this project —”
Michael had not really intended to speak with Niva at this stage, and had in fact thought to pass her off to Lillian, since he assumed that women were more likely to open up to other women (there were those who accused him of being a chauvinist because of this, and Tzilla had said once that it was a primitive assumption that had no factual grounding in his own experience); but Niva clearly wished to speak.
“Listen,” she said the moment he had taken a seat, “There’s a lot I can tell you. But what do you want to know?”
“First of all,” Michael said, “Tirzah’s death during the filming of Iddo and Eynam, I wanted to—”
“What? The alleged accident?” Niva asked impatiently.
“Why ‘alleged’?” he asked, taken aback. “It wasn’t an accident?”
“No, no,” she said quickly, catching herself. “I didn’t mean anything by that, that’s just what you always hear them say on police shows. So, you want to hear about the accident?”
“The accident, too, but first of all, what … did you have occasion to work with her? Did you know her well?”
“Tirzah Rubin kept her distance from all this,” Niva said, indicating the newsroom. “It didn’t interest her. She really should have been working in theater, but because of Rubin … they used to be married.
First she was married to Rubin, then to Benny. So it was only natural that whenever Benny had a production, which wasn’t all that often, she would work with him.”
Michael asked if she was of the opinion, as were many others, that relations between Benny Meyuhas and Arye Rubin had not been damaged by their love triangle.
“Well,” Niva said, “that’s thanks to Rubin, that he’s such a big-hearted person and so—how shall I say it— unconventional. He’s different, you can’t help … everyone respects him.”
“You, in any event, are a great admirer,” Michael said cautiously.
“Yes, absolutely,” she gushed.
“How about Benny?”
“He’s, well, he’s an artist. They’re different. He wasn’t involved in the news, either, and always … for years now they haven’t given him … he was like the director for religious programming, and programs about language issues, sometimes even children’s programming, that sort of thing, where the role of the director is pretty marginal. He just says where to point the camera and that’s it, a television director isn’t—”
“How did that happen?” Michael asked. “Wasn’t he considered talented?”
“Oh, very,” she exclaimed. “Nobody said he wasn’t. But talented at what? Directing Agnon? That’s not for television, he only wanted to direct, well, at the very least, a documentary about some famous author. I remember, even before Zadik’s time, something really—who was that author? Maybe S. Yizhar. But they didn’t let him do it. And once there was this Palestinian poet, from Ramallah I think, a poet of exile. They didn’t let him do that either, and right they were, if you ask me. I mean, what is this? Don’t we already have a bad enough name around the world? Do we really need a film about some poet who hates Israel? And anyway—oh, never mind, they didn’t let him do it.
And then he started coming up with all kinds of weird projects. He wanted to make a film from some new experimental fiction, I don’t remember who the author was. They nixed that one too. He always wanted these hoity-toity projects, and it was like they purposely stuck him with all the garbage until finally, after years of sitting on the shelf, they let him do Agnon, and then only thanks to—” She fell silent.
“Thanks to what?” Michael asked.
“I heard they came up with a big sum for this production,” Niva said, “like one-point-five million dollars or something like that, from
