ready for the next day? What would I have business over there for? Why don’t you ask those people?”
“While we’re on the subject of Tirzah,” Michael was saying when someone knocked on the glass partition. He turned his face to see Hefetz watching him with an expression of curiosity on his face.
Michael signaled to him that he would be finished in just another minute, to which Hefetz screwed up his face in complaint, as though he had been waiting hours for Michael. He opened the door and said,
“I’ll wait for you here, but I’ve only got fifteen minutes. After that I’ve got to get to work on tomorrow’s lineup.” Michael nodded, and Hefetz closed the door.
“There are people,” Niva said with loathing, “who are always scheming. It doesn’t even matter what or how. You just know that they’ll always take care of their own interests.” She fell silent.
“Are you talking about Hefetz?” Michael asked.
“No—yeah—no. I don’t know. It’s not something—”
“Something specific?”
“No, it’s just that now he’s so full of complaints. He’s probably dying to know what information I’m passing on to you. I’m going to tell him you wanted to know where I was when Tirzah was murdered.
Otherwise, he’ll make my life miserable, he’ll be dissatisfied, and when Hefetz is dissatisfied, he’s impossible. Beyond impossible. He’ll never stop nagging me.”
“Does that have anything to do with the business with Natasha?”
“No, forget about it. It’s not her. I mean, if it wasn’t Natasha, it would be some other girl. He sleeps with all the new ones, he’s been hot under the collar for a few years now. And them? These girls think that if the big boss wants to screw … never mind. Believe me,” she said, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, “I feel sorry for her. All in all, Natasha’s a good kid, all alone in the world. She came to Israel from Russia at the age of fourteen, her father stayed behind with some woman. Her mother, at the beginning she neglected her, then she fell in with the ultra-Orthodox and became a born-again Jew and they married her off to a widower with six little kids. So Natasha grew up all alone. Imagine, she finished her matric exams by herself, went to university, came here. She sat around for days, she was willing to do anything, any job. Mop the floors, whatever you asked her to do. I would send her down to the archives or to bring coffee from the canteen, or to fetch the mail. She did it all without a word. Schreiber’s the one who brought her here, I think, found her somewhere one night and brought her in like a lost kitten. He dug up a job as assistant researcher for her, he’s got good connections in personnel. And now?
She’s finished, and all because—”
“Does it have anything to do with Tirzah?” Michael asked.
“No,” Niva admitted. “Truth is, it has nothing to do with Tirzah. It’s just that I feel sorry for Natasha. Even Rubin won’t be able to help her now.”
“And what about Tirzah?” he asked.
“I just want you to know that it’s not true that everyone was crazy about her.”
Michael folded his arms across his chest.
“It bugs me that everyone talks about her like she was a saint. It’s not true.”
“Anything specific?” Michael asked.
“Decent people with high moral standards are not always well loved, if you get my meaning,” she said, and her tone of voice surprised him. He had not expected her to sound so quiet and reflective.
“You think I hated her because of Rubin, but I didn’t, I actually didn’t. I didn’t have anything against her, but she was annoying, believe me.
Decent people with high moral standards,” she continued contempla-tively, “sometimes go too far. I mean, they become too decent.
Annoying, if you get my drift.”
He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“They—if they demand a certain ethical standard, let’s say they check everything twice, don’t report overtime hours, won’t let you cheat the government out of a penny. Well, that can get to be a drag.
It’s so sanctimonious. People like that expect to impose their standards on everyone. So they make enemies. That’s what I wanted to tell you, because I heard—” She fell silent.
“Yes?” he asked, his interest piqued. “What did you hear?”
“People are saying it wasn’t just some accident, and I felt it too—
how can I say it? I heard that someone else was there, in the corridor of the String Building. I heard that Matty Cohen, poor guy … and that makes me nervous. Is it true?”
“Is there anyone specific you’re referring to when you mention ‘enemies’?”
She glanced under the table in search of one of the clogs she had let slip to the floor the moment they had sat down. “I uh, I don’t feel comfortable,” she said, her eyes on the glass partition. “Hefetz is snooping around like some—”
Michael did not turn his head to look. “Anyone specific?” he repeated.
“No,” she said after a long pause. “No one specific.”
“But you yourself weren’t crazy about her.”
She shrugged but did not respond.
• • •
“You want to come to my office?” Hefetz grumbled when Michael exited from the inner office. “Or would you prefer the canteen?”
“Let’s sit in your office,” Michael suggested. He stood as far away as possible from Hefetz, who was at least a head shorter than he, in order to blur the difference between their respective heights. “If you’re ready.”
Hefetz led the way through the newsroom, stopping to watch the monitor. “Turn up the volume for a minute,” he ordered. The room filled with the voice of one of the inner-circle participants of the live-broadcast political affairs program. A bleached-blond young man was shouting, “She’s not even her biological daughter,” as he fingered the row of earrings that ran the length of his left ear. “Mia adopted her with her previous husband, Andre Previn, when she was like eight years old. Woody Allen is absolutely right, in his place I would have left that hysterical Mia Farrow, too.” There was applause from the audience, and raucous laughter. “In any event,” the young man said, “it’s really cool how they got married in Venice, it’s so romantic, and—”
“He could be her grandfather,” a woman on the other side of the table shouted. “He’s thirty-five years older than she is!”
“More power to him!” the young man said. “It’s more natural that way. There have been studies that show that an older man with a younger woman—”
“That’s a senseless generalization,” someone from the outer circle shouted. “Don’t make generalizations.”
Hefetz waved his hand as if to dismiss them all. “Israel’s on fire—the president’s brother has been taking bribes, concessions are being granted on Channel Two—and these people are preoccupied with who Woody Allen is screwing. I’ve never been able to stomach the guy, he’s a boring old windbag. Come on,” he said, turning to Michael,
“we’ll leave them to it.” At the entrance to his office he was still on the topic. “You see what they’re dealing with? And that’s a political program, not just any old show. Things sure wouldn’t look like that if I were in charge. That’s—that’s the flagship of Israel Television!”
c h a p t e r n i n e
How insignificant is a parent’s ability to ensure his child’s happiness. When they are young, you still have a chance, but at the end of the day—which comes sooner than expected—they must shake off your protection, must stand on their own, both for their own good and for yours. Like Yuval, Michael’s only son, who for quite a long time had been disastrously involved with a young woman who was “making his life a misery,” but could not or would not break up with her. (Michael often wondered, every time that formulaic expression entered his mind, whether she was really the one who had made Yuval’s life a misery; as always, a cloud of distress and sorrow enshrouded his son’s name in his consciousness.) No fatherly influence would improve matters in this case; Michael was incapable of helping Yuval, nor could he teach him from his own experience. After all, his own life was no shining example in
