do? In the end you get to the point where even when you haven’t done anything … She asks you where you’ve been, with whom, when … in a line of work like mine, try explaining that you weren’t … After all, I’m a man with a past, and Tirzah, I can understand … being in the position of the suspicious wife who spies on her cheating husband, well, there’s something humiliating about all that, that role didn’t suit her. In the end we split up, we couldn’t find another way. So then … Benny had always loved her. I prefer … I preferred that she be with someone who really loved her. He’d remained faithful to her all through the years, without hope or expectations, he simply never married, even though he had plenty of opportunities.”
Rubin’s voice faded to nothing, but Michael remained silent until he resumed. “He had girlfriends, women, but nothing ever worked out.
He waited and waited, and in the end he got Tirzah. I’ve already told you, he’s not a flexible person. He can’t compromise. On anything. He prefers having nothing at all to compromising in order to survive. This isn’t something he’ll tell you himself, but I know what I’m telling you is true. I know the man. Believe me, he hasn’t harmed anyone.”
“What about Sroul?” Michael asked.
“What about him? If he’s in Israel, I don’t know anything about it.
He hasn’t made contact with me.”
“According to our records,” Michael said on a hunch, pretending to read from the spiral notebook, but in fact watching Rubin tense up from the corner of his eye, “he entered Israel two days ago, the day after Tirzah was killed.”
“Maybe he wanted to come to the funeral,” Rubin said. “I have no idea how he would have known about it, maybe from the newspaper—
but I didn’t see him there, at the funeral. You can check the video, since the funeral was filmed—”
“Did you inform him about Tirzah?”
“The truth? No, I didn’t,” Rubin said, looking very guilty. “I didn’t have time. I didn’t manage it—”
“But somehow it seems he heard about it.”
“Maybe from Benny,” Rubin said, openly doubtful. “I don’t see how …
Benny wasn’t in touch … but maybe if Tirzah was in touch with Sroul, then Benny might have phoned him.”
“Why, in fact, was she in contact with Sroul?” Michael asked.
“No idea,” Rubin responded. “I swear. Maybe to get money from him to finish the film up. Don’t forget, she was in effect Benny’s wife. I think she loved him, too.”
“Did she know that the funding for the film had come from Sroul?”
“No way,” Rubin answered emphatically. “No chance, she didn’t know a thing. But maybe she got it into her head. Wait a minute,” he said as he looked at his watch and turned up the volume on the monitor. “I’d like to see this, not on the screen but live. Come with me downstairs to the studio if you want to or if you have to. They’re making the announcement about Zadik, and Hefetz will speak. I want to watch it in the studio. Why not join me if you’re planning to stick around?”
They stood waiting for the elevator, but Rubin quickly grew impatient and was about to take the stairs when the elevator arrived, and Rubin flung open the narrow door. Inside stood Hefetz, bare from the waist up, just shoving his arm into the sleeve of a dark blue shirt. Next to him stood a wild-haired, blushing young woman, a man’s dark suit jacket flung over her shoulder and a makeup kit in her hand. “First put your shirt on,” they heard her saying before Rubin waved the elevator on and closed the door.
“Let’s take the stairs, that thing’s only got room for two people anyway,” he said to Michael as they ran down the stairs. Out of breath, he added, “That wasn’t what you think, if you thought Hefetz was fooling around. He’s going on air, he was getting dressed, she was putting his makeup on, that’s the way it happens sometimes in an emergency, you get dressed on the way.” When they reached the ground floor Rubin turned toward the canteen, stopped at the doorway, and watched the monitor hanging there. The canteen was nearly empty except for two tables in opposite corners: at one sat a group of workers in blue overalls eating quietly, and at the other, Natasha and Schreiber watching a soundless monitor broadcasting the five o’clock Channel Two news.
As the broadcaster mouthed his lines, a picture of Benny Meyuhas appeared with the caption: BENNY MEYUHAS, DIRECTOR. THE POLICE
REQUEST PUBLIC ASSISTANCE IN LOCATING HIM. When she spied Rubin, Natasha let her small hand drop from her chin and rose from her chair, but he signaled her to wait. “Later,” he called to her quietly. She returned to her chair and sat down and only then nodded hello to Michael.
“If the canteen is that empty, and there are still doughnuts to be had, then the situation really is awful,” Rubin said as he walked slowly toward the stairs. “This is where you really get the feel for what’s going on—the canteen is the heart, the very center, of this place. Everything happens here. Everything. Since Israel Television began. See that wall over there? It was built while we sat here eating. I remember it like it was yesterday, Zadik—” Suddenly he coughed as though choking, and his eyes filled with tears. He slowed his steps, and Michael followed him to the studio.
Rubin instructed Michael to take up a position in the lighting technicians’ room, where he stood sandwiched between the computer and the desk and watched through the glass partition. The communications minister sat in the studio, having her face made up; Hefetz sat to her right, nervously tightening his dark blue necktie. Karen, the anchorwoman, sat to the left of the minister, who was now answering a question: “Israel Radio and Israel Television do not stop broadcasting except on Yom Kippur,” she responded fervently. “Shutting down Israel’s official television station in the event of a disaster—and murder is certainly a form of disaster—would only be giving in to …”
Michael had left the lighting technicians’ room and gone to stand in a corner of the control room just as the director was saying, first to himself and then into a microphone, “Come on, get her out of there already, we’re done with her, Karen, tell her, ‘Thank you very much, now shut your face.’” That was why Michael failed to hear the end of the communications minister’s sentence. “Ready with camera two,”
Tzippi the assistant producer said, her hand on her huge belly, rubbing.
“Someone turn on the upper monitor! Ready with camera one, Danny,” the director shouted. Erez, the editor, stood silently in the back. He shot an openly critical look at Danny Benizri, who had come racing into the control room, torn off his sweater, shoved his arms into a black shirt he removed from a hanger, and turned his face to the makeup artist, who was on her way out of the room. She frowned—
“You’ve already been made up,” she said—but powdered his forehead nonetheless. “He thinks he’s some American movie star,” Erez muttered to himself. “Runs around all day, shows up at the very last minute, does his little striptease, undress and dress, undress and dress.”
“Are we finished with the videocassette?” asked a young man sitting at the video machine as he switched cassettes. No one answered him.
“Ready camera two, Hefetz,” the director said. Hefetz felt for the transmitter behind his ear through which he could hear the instructions and took a sip from his cup. The atmosphere in the studio reminded Michael of an operating room or a command room in wartime. It’s easy to forget that no lives depend on what happens here, he thought to himself as his eyes carefully scanned the people in the room, all of whom were tense and nervous and wasted no words.
“Thirty seconds … final words ‘can continue … cannot continue,’ ten seconds on the word,” said the producer to Karen. “Can I have a profile over the window?” the director shouted. “I told you, get her out of there already,” he repeated, angry that the interview with the communications minister had not yet ended.
Three television cameras were pointed at Hefetz, and in spite of the fact that the makeup artist had applied more powder to his forehead and chin just before the lights went on, his face was shiny with perspi-ration. On one side of the monitor Michael watched still photos of Zadik flash one after the other from a prepared videocassette, pictures from his childhood and his youth, pictures of him in the white dress uniform of the Israel Navy, a picture of him in the news studio. In the background Hefetz’s shaky voice could be heard: “Today we have suffered a great loss. A terrible loss. For me, this is a personal loss. I have been together with Shimshon Zadik from the beginning of his career as a junior reporter through his job as editor of the News Department”—on the screen appeared a photograph of Zadik leafing through papers and talking on the telephone at the head of the conference table in the
