important intersections: the checkpost in Haifa, and Glilot and Shalom junctions in Tel Aviv, and the entrance to Jerusalem, and Danny Benizri is nowhere to be found. Disappeared. It took four hours to find him and, after all, he’s their man, the workers’
rep. I still don’t know where he was all that time, but it was a sign for what was going to happen all day. The first sign.
“Then Zadik tells me, ‘Aviva, get me Benny Meyuhas on the line.’ So I started looking for him. I looked everywhere. No luck, the guy had disappeared. Even Rubin didn’t know where Benny Meyuhas had gone, and he’s his best friend. Even before, before—can I have some water, please?
Sorry, with all these pills I’m not sure … but every time I picture … never mind, Benny disappeared before all that, before Zadik … excuse me …
I’m sorry for crying. It’s just when you’ve been working with someone for ages, and then suddenly he’s gone … like … I still can’t believe it. To find Zadik like that, and he’s not just some nobody—we’re talking about the director of Israel Television! In the office, all that blood. Slaughtered, how can you slaughter a person just like that? He lives a full life, and then suddenly in a single minute … Did you see how he was slaughtered?
I’m sorry for being like this. All in all he was a good man, not someone who … never mind. I swear, from the very first minute I opened my eyes this morning, I was already sure it was going to be a bad day. Do you believe that some people can feel things before they happen? Not everybody, but there are people, sensitive ones, who sense vibrations, and I’m one of them. Call it whatever you like, I felt something. First thing in the morning. I got to work this morning at seven-thirty, because Zadik—
excuse me, could I have some more water please? Zadik asked me to come in early because he had his weekly editorial meeting and he was expecting trouble because … never mind, it doesn’t matter now. Anyway, Zadik asked, and I … for years we’ve been … I’ve known him … Don’t think this is something dirty, there was nothing between us. It’s just, how can I say it? At first his wife was uptight. When I became his secretary, she came around to check me out. You know how it is, I’m, well, not ugly, and his wife … anyway, I’m pretty successful where men are concerned, but with Zadik there was nothing. You understand? Still, we’ve known each other for like fifteen years, I was the secretary of three of his prede-cessors. I’ve never gotten it on with the bosses. I’m against that sort of thing on principle, it only brings trouble. I’ve known Zadik since the time he was just a regular old reporter, I was—oh, never mind, anyway, he asked me to come in at seven-thirty. It’s winter, all dark outside, and rainy. On the radio they were already reporting traffic jams, they weren’t even talking about the factory women yet. And my car, first it won’t start, then it starts, finally, when someone pushes me, but I still made it in by seven- thirty, exactly seven-thirty, you can check to see when I punched in: seven-thirty-seven. I came in the back way, no traffic. I figured there was no getting into the city, what with all the bottles those women dumped.
Tell me, how did they manage it? In the middle of the night, and no spring chickens, those women! How did they get those trucks all over the place? You’ve got to hand it to them, dumping all those bottles and grind-ing them up in the intersection. Really, you’ve got to give them credit, it’s just like in Naples … never mind, they’ll have endless trouble from all this … I was in the office at seven-thirty, everything dark outside, rain and winter and all that. But at Israel Television there are always people around. You know, not just the security people and the radio monitors.
The canteen was already … I went down and got a cup of coffee and a hot, fresh doughnut. Not for me, I don’t … I’m on a diet, I brought it for Zadik. It wouldn’t hurt him to take off a little weight either, but never mind … it doesn’t matter anymore … I’m sorry for crying, I can’t control myself, it’s those pills or the shot, or whatever they gave me. I’m telling you everything, just like you asked, every detail. But it’s hard for me to concentrate. And I’d really like to be a help …”
Aviva stopped talking for a minute and regarded Michael expectantly. “I can see that it’s important to you,” he hastened to assure her.
“And I understand how hard this must be for you. We really appreciate this very, very much.”
She breathed in deeply and exhaled noisily. “You asked for all the details,” she said with a pout. “And that takes time.”
“We have as long as it takes,” Michael said reassuringly, willing himself to sound as fatherly as possible. “You have a terrific memory, and you are clearly a sensitive person.”
A cloud of satisfaction passed over her face; as if to conceal it, she sighed and continued talking. “The guy from maintenance showed up at eight, I’ve been pestering them for a week now, you know how it is: you ask them to come, they say they’ll be there in an hour, and then no one shows up, you phone again and again, and in the end they tell you, Stop being a pain in the butt, Aviva. You get that? They don’t deliver, but you’re the pest! Anyway, the maintenance man showed up, an electrician, he needed to do something to the outer wall of Zadik’s office because it’s damp, it’s been shorting out the electricity. I called him a week ago, but with maintenance if you don’t … never mind, it was a new electrician, nice guy, I’ve never met him before. He seemed pretty young, no older than thirty- something. He wore a wedding ring. The nice guys are always married. So he arrived at eight, well, more like five minutes after eight, I can’t be sure about the exact minute, I mean, I had no idea I would need to know later… . Anyway, he came in and got started working. And the very minute he started, Zadik opened his door and started shouting. ‘What’s going on here? Are you people crazy? Stop, stop immediately!’ That’s the way it was: Zadik shouting at me and at the electrician. So I told him he couldn’t talk to the guy that way, like he was some … never mind, it doesn’t matter. I told Zadik to give the guy a quarter of an hour, until his meeting started.
But Zadik said, ‘No. Have him go away and come back later.’ So this electrician, who had finally gotten started on the job, was already on his way out. He’d managed to open up the wall, and now he was leaving. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. I was pretty worried that the whole thing would stay like that, a big hole in the wall and lots of dust, and then he wouldn’t come back. But he laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll come back after eleven. I’m leaving all my tools here, my drill, everything.’ What can I tell you, sometimes life is so … maybe if he hadn’t left his drill and all those tools … in the end, it was that drill …
if he hadn’t left it … maybe Zadik would still be alive. All that blood.
Look how I’m shaking. It’s the shock of it. I’ll be traumatized for the rest of my life by it. Someone who sees something like that is changed forever. Don’t you think so? You can never be quite the same. From now on I’ll never be able … oh, never mind, it’s not important.
“All morning the telephone didn’t stop ringing. There were all sorts of calls. Everyone was looking for Danny Benizri. They finally found him. He wasn’t at home, he wasn’t answering his cell phone or his beeper. His wife told me, ‘He came home late and left early, I didn’t even see him.’ Later it dawned on me he must be with the wives of those workers, maybe they even, like, called him from the beginning, brought him in from the start. I don’t know, I heard Zadik shouting at him. The door was open, he was shouting at him over the telephone just before the meeting got started. From Zadik’s shouting I understood that Benizri had no clue about what was happening. Still, they managed to get him on toward the end of the morning program. They interrupted the regular program just before nine for a live broadcast.
Channel Two scooped us, though, so Zadik chewed him out over the phone. ‘A full fifteen minutes ahead of us,’ he shouted, ‘and you’re supposed to be the workers’ man!’ Of course he was shouting at Benizri; who do you think he was shouting at?
“So anyway, there was this block of time when Benizri had disappeared and nobody knew where he was, but that was before … later, they came to interview Zadik about the role of television during a period of financial crisis, with Benizri serving as an example of a journalist who’s become more than just a journalist. How did she put it, that interviewer, one of the famous ones, the one preparing the story?
She called it journalism that ‘takes an active role in influencing reality.’
Those words of hers, they stuck with me. I mean, what’s she talking about, ‘influence’? Like Benizri is really influencing somebody? Some hero he’s become! I don’t have anything against him—Benizri’s a nice guy, a good guy—but I wouldn’t want all this to go to his head. She’s preparing a character profile of him! So then Zadik says to the electrician, ‘That’s enough, quit working and come back after eleven. Eleven-fifteen is even better, just to be sure. That’s when I have an appointment with the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority.’
The maintenance man shoots me a look; he’s only just put his overalls on, and here he is taking them off again. I mean, it wasn’t such a big deal, he was wearing them over his jeans and everything. And a mask,
too, to protect his eyes. But still. He shoved the overalls into a corner and left everything there: his tools, the drill, everything. How could I know? Nobody could have known. I even asked him, ‘Will you be coming back?’ And he
