The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  Ruchama had never succeeded in taking Aharonovitz’s statements seriously; she always had to stop herself from smiling. She couldn’t decide whether his style of speaking was part of a deliberate act or if perhaps he hadn’t noticed that other ways of communicating were available. She was particularly amused by the way in which he pronounced certain words in the old-fashioned, Ashkenazi way.

  At the time, Tuvia had said: “What does it matter? Why worry about such insignificant details? What’s important is that he’s a great poet, that he knows far more than any of us, that he’s the most brilliant teacher I for one have ever had, with an unsurpassed ability to distinguish good from bad. So let’s assume he has some need to turn himself into a legend: why should it bother you?” That’s what Tuvia said then, with the simplicity and directness that were so characteristic of him, before a huge, heavy shadow darkened his world, before he lost his way.

  The conversation took place when Tuvia still liked Aharonovitz, when he still trusted him enough to entertain him in their home. “True, true, I won’t deny it,” Aharonovitz had replied, “but there are other problems too. I cannot endure the adoration he inspires in the fairer sex, the way they dance attendance on him, the fascination, the hypnotized expression in their eyes when he looks at them.” And with a deep sigh, he added: “True, the man knows how to distinguish between a good poem and a bad one. True, too, that he plays the role of protector and spiritual father to the younger of our poets—but, my friend, don’t forget, only on condition that they find favor in his eyes; only then. If they don’t, God help them. If he in his wisdom decides to call a poet “mediocre,” the miserable wretch might as well put on sackcloth and ashes and seek his fortune elsewhere. I once happened to witness this noble gentleman rejecting a supplicant for his favors. His face was sealed and his expression like stone when he announced: ‘Young man, this isn’t it. You are not a poet and you evidently never will be.’ And I ask you, how could Tirosh know? Is he a prophet?” And here Aharonovitz turned to Tuvia with his eyes even redder than before, and a gob of spit flew in Ruchama’s direction as he shouted: “You’ll never believe who he did this to!” And he mentioned the name of a rather well-known poet, whose work had never appealed to Tuvia.

  “And then there was that affair of the sonnet—have you heard about the affair of the sonnet?” And he didn’t wait for an answer; there was no stopping him.

  “After the appearance of Yehezkiel’s first book, a literary party was given in his honor in the Habima Theater cellar in Tel Aviv. There were readings of his poetry, speeches, and afterward we retired to a café—the fashionable café of the hour, needless to say, habituated by the poets—and we were a large group of people, poets too; I could mention the name of someone whose poetry Yehezkiel very much admires.”

  “Who?” asked Tuvia.

  “What do you mean, who? The gentleman under discussion, Tirosh, the object of your worship. Well, Yehezkiel was the happiest of men. But our friend is not the man to see someone else happy and hold his tongue, he has a sacred obligation to tell the truth, this is his claim to greatness, and for a glass of cognac he sold Yehezkiel’s birthright and composed two perfect sonnets, one after the other, and all in order to prove that there is nothing remarkable in composing a sonnet.”

  “Just like that, on the spot?” asked Tuvia with undisguised admiration.

  “Just so, then and there, after reading aloud Yehezkiel’s sonnet and smiling his well-known smile. And after he smiled he announced: ‘For one glass of cognac I’ll write you a perfect sonnet, like this one, in five minutes, what do you say?’ And the people around him smiled too, and he wrote, not in five minutes but in two, two sonnets according to all the rules, and everybody knew that they were in no way inferior to Yehezkiel’s poems. Is it conceivable? And for whom? To impress people he himself calls poetasters?”

  And Aharonovitz turned to look at Ruchama, who tried without success to look shocked, and then returned to Tuvia and asked: “And you still consider him worthy of admiration? Why, it’s pure decadence!”

  After sighing profoundly, Tuvia explained that the other side of the coin was the courage to expose himself that Tirosh possessed. The courage to state his opinion in university seminars, the courage to say the emperor has no clothes, to give his courses titles that any other lecturer would blanch at the very thought of. “And the fact that his classes are always packed, and the fact that he always presents a fresh, original, innovative point of view: these are things you can’t dismiss,” said Tuvia, and he got up to make more coffee, while Aharonovitz replied: “Theater, it’s all theater.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Tuvia from the kitchen, “it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he’s a great poet, that there’s no one else like him, except perhaps Bialik and Alterman. Even Avidan and Zach aren’t as good as he is, and that’s why I’m prepared to forgive him everything, or at least a very great deal. The man’s simply a genius. And geniuses have different rules.” And then he returned with the coffee and changed the subject to the examination for which he had been preparing for the past two weeks.

  It was their first year in Jerusalem. Tuvia had requested a year’s leave from the kibbutz in order to study with Tirosh, a request that was followed by a request for time to complete his M.A. He had already met Aharonovitz when Tuvia, still a teacher on the kibbutz, was studying for his B.A., and when they arrived in Jerusalem, Aharonovitz was a junior lecturer, teaching on a temporary basis in the department and trying desperately to obtain tenure. Tuvia had willingly acceded to his attitude of patronage and paternalism.

  Now Tuvia stood up to speak. Ruchama hadn’t been home when he left for the departmental seminar, but she had anticipated that he wouldn’t change his clothes. His short-sleeved shirt revealed two pale, slender arms and barely covered his little paunch. Beads of sweat were visible on his high forehead, which was fringed with wisps of thinning hair of a nondescript color.

  He had been chosen to give the first of the prepared lectures. The speaker after him would be Iddo Dudai, one of the youngest lecturers in the department, whose doctoral thesis, written under Professor Tirosh’s supervision, had given rise to great expectations.

  In comparison to Shaul, thought Ruchama, not for the first time, Tuvia looked like a skinny version of Sancho Panza. Except that Shaul, of course, was not Don Quixote. Even his voice, she thought in despair, his voice alone, was enough to make the difference between them.

  The voice of her husband, who had begun to address himself to the topic “What Is a Good Poem?” was high, and it broke with the intensity of the pathos with which he read Shaul Tirosh’s famous poem “A Stroll Through the Grave of My Heart.” In this poem Tirosh expressed, in the opinion of the critics, his “macabre-romantic view of the world.” The critics had stressed the “stunning originality of the imagery” and spoken of “linguistic innovations and new themes by means of which Tirosh revolutionized the poetry of the fifties. Other poets, too, contributed to this revolution, but Tirosh was by far the most striking and outstanding of them all,” recalled Tuvia in his monotonous voice.

  Ruchama looked around her. The tension in the hall had slackened, as if the lights had gone out. People listened with studied attention. On the faces of the women, including the young ones, the impression left by the previous speaker was still evident, and their eyes were still fixed on him. You couldn’t say they weren’t paying attention, but it was a polite attention to expected, predictable things. The poem chosen by Dr. Tuvia Shai, a senior lecturer in the department, was one you could have guessed in advance he would choose as a good poem to exemplify his argument. With half an ear, Ruchama listened to the learned asseverations she had already heard many times before when her husband held forth passionately about Tirosh’s poems.

  It would have been impossible to conceive of greater loyalty and admiration than Tuvia Shai felt for Shaul Tirosh. “Adoration”—that was the word, thought Ruchama. There were those who spoke in terms of an �
��alter ego,” or a “shadow,” but everyone agreed that you had better not utter a derogatory word, a word of criticism or mockery, about Shaul Tirosh in the presence of Tuvia Shai. Tuvia’s cheeks would flush, a gleam of anger would ignite in his mousy eyes, if anyone dared to express anything less than reverence for the head of his department.

  During the past three years, in which he had shared her with Tirosh, the gossip had grown, as Ruchama perceived by the silences that fell in rooms as she came into them and at parties given by faculty members, by the knowing smiles of such as Adina Lipkin, the department secretary. She also sensed an added dimension to the gossip: the outrage caused by Tuvia’s persistent relationship with Tirosh.

  But Tuvia did not change his attitude, not even on the day when he found her with Tirosh on the sofa in the living room of their own apartment, she with her blouse undone, buttoning it with trembling fingers, Shaul lighting a cigarette with an unsteady hand. Tuvia had smiled in embarrassment and asked if they would like something to eat. Shaul steadied his hand and joined Tuvia in the kitchen. They spent a quiet evening around the table, with the sandwiches prepared by Tuvia. Nothing was said about the hastily buttoned blouse, about the dark jacket lying on the armchair, the tie on top of it. They had never spoken of it, neither then nor later. Tuvia didn’t ask, and she didn’t explain.

  In the depths of her heart, Ruchama enjoyed the thought that she was at the center of a mystery whose details the faculty of the Literature Department and literati all over the country would have loved to discover. No one dared to question the actors in the drama themselves. At the age of forty-one, Ruchama Shai still had a youthful, boyish appearance. Her cropped hair and childlike body gave her the air of an unripe fruit, one that was about to wither without ever having ripened. She had noticed the two deep lines that had begun to run downward from the corners of her lips, emphasizing what Tirosh called her “weeping clown look.”

  She knew that she did not look her age, thanks partly to the blue jeans she wore, the men’s shirts, the absence of makeup. She was different from the “feminine women” with whom Tirosh had been associated before her. He himself never mentioned his previous affairs, or the ones he was still conducting. Not long before, she had seen him through the window of an out-of-the-way little café, running his fingers through his silver pompadour while gazing into the eyes of Ruth Dudai, Iddo’s plump young wife.

  How well Ruchama knew the look of suffering concentration on his face. The face of his companion, who was a doctoral student in the Philosophy Department, was invisible to her. He didn’t notice her, and she immediately moved on, feeling like a voyeur.

  Despite the intimacy of their relationship, there were some things about which she couldn’t talk to him. She never discussed her feelings for Tuvia or her married life with him, and she never talked to him about his relationship with her husband and the exclusivity of the ties between them. The few attempts she had made to get him to say something about the nature of this special bond had come to nothing. He simply didn’t react. He would fix his eyes on the “invisible distance,” as he called it (after a well-known book of poems), and say nothing. Once, when she was wondering aloud about “the situation,” as she referred to the complicated triangle, he pointed to the door, as if to say: I’m not forcing you; you’re free to go.

  On social occasions, the three of them were always together, although once in a while she would go alone with Tirosh to his meetings with young poets. He spent a lot of time cultivating the latter—especially, some people said nastily, since he had stopped writing himself. These people, who were so careful in Tuvia’s presence, lost all restraint with her. It was their way of compensation for not saying a word to anyone about her relationship with Tirosh.

  The truth was that she was naturally reserved and that she lacked all interest in literature, as she had explained to Tuvia long before, when they were still living on the kibbutz. She read a lot, but not poetry. She was unable to derive from poetry the sublime enjoyment Tuvia experienced. Poetry was a closed world to her, enigmatic and unintelligible. Above all, she liked reading detective stories and spy stories, and she devoured them indiscriminately.

  She had no close women friends, only colleagues, like the women she worked with at the admissions office of Shaarei Tzedek Hospital. Her ties with them were confined to office hours, and they tended to see her passivity as a rare gift for listening and empathy, and told her all about their family troubles.

  Over the years, she had come to realize that the people around her interpreted her lack of vitality as a profound melancholy, and that many saw her as interesting and tried to solve her mystery. The women she worked with, especially Tzipporah, a buxom, motherly woman who plied her with cups of tea, apparently thought that this “melancholy” was due to her childlessness. But Ruchama herself was not grieved by it.

  Until ten years before, when she first met Tirosh, she had lived with Tuvia on the kibbutz and worked wherever the member in charge of the roster put her, renouncing in advance any hope of the unexpected.

  The move to Jerusalem, so that Tuvia, who had initially attended the Oranim Kibbutz Seminar and then the University of Haifa, could complete his studies at the Hebrew University, was the most dramatic event of her life, mainly because of meeting Tirosh, whose colorful personality had captured her heart. She immediately recognized that he was her polar opposite. Even his style of dress aroused her admiration, and when they grew close she often felt, like the heroine in The Purple Rose of Cairo, that the cinema screen had turned into reality in front of her eyes and the hero of her dreams had stepped out of it. Since she never shared her inner world with anyone, not even Tuvia, she remained a mystery to the faculty of the Literature Department. The presence of the mute, boyish figure who entertained guests in silence, who was always accompanied by Tuvia and afterward also by Tirosh, gave rise to the need for endless interpretations. “They’re writing the Babylonian Talmud about you there,” said Tirosh once, when he had asked her opinion about something and she silently shrugged her shoulders.

  There were many attempts to breach the wall of silence, attempts by members of the faculty and by the poets into whose company she was dragged by Tuvia and Tirosh at the Tel Aviv café where she was referred to as the Mystery Woman, even to her face; to this, too, her only response was a smile. She never ordered anything there except black coffee and neat vodka—at first because pronouncing the words to the waitress gave her a thrill, and later on, even when she would have liked to order something else, because she found that the role she had established for herself obligated her and that she had become a captive to the silent, austere figure she had created.

  Nobody wondered what Tuvia saw in her, but she was aware that many wondered, with incomprehension, envy, and hostility, why Tirosh was attracted to her.

  She herself didn’t really know the answer. Once, he told her that the colorlessness of her personality threw the colors of another into relief. She wasn’t offended. For a long time she had suspected that the secret of her charm lay precisely in her passivity, which Tirosh called “the way you enable the person next to you to be reflected in the sharpest possible outline, as against a white background.” With regard to her own motivation, she also had no answer. What attached her to Tuvia, to Tirosh, to anyone, to anything? What was the force binding the invisible cord thanks to which she went on existing? These questions went unanswered.

  She was not a depressed person nor an apathetic one; she only lacked passion. “Alienation” was the word faculty members would have chosen to describe her way of looking at the world. “Defeatism,” Tirosh himself once said, when he took the trouble to try to explain her lack of any wishes for herself, her renunciation of any goal whatsoever.

  At first Tuvia had directed her life. It was he who had chosen her, and she consented because he had persisted more stubbornly than others, who had despaired of her reserve and retreated from the field. It was Tuvia who had led her, who had brought her here, and now there
was Tirosh. If he wanted her to change her life, she once said to him, he would have to pull the leash. That’s how things had been until recently, when something began to crack.

  “What’s happened to you?” was Tirosh’s response when she asked him why he didn’t want to be with her all the time. There was a note of astonishment in the question. Ruchama had never expressed a wish or desire before.

  “The text describing the vision, in the poem before us . . . ” She heard Tuvia’s voice and realized with a shock that he had been speaking nonstop for twenty minutes without her taking in a single word. “Is a hermetic text, in the simple meaning, which is close perhaps to the original meaning of the word: it is composed as a secret text, an occult book—like the hermetic literature of the Egyptian priests. But what distinguishes this poem by Tirosh is the fact that the secret text is not a recipe for a potion conferring immortality, a set of instructions for the construction of a golem, or a secret formula governing the structure of the spheres; it is not a schematic outline but a detailed description. More than that, it is a description of a view, and the reader can follow it and construct in his imagination the whole picture, move in its space and time, which are detached from any concrete reality, populate it with characters and a hero, and sense through it the spiritual and emotional and even the social and political condition. The poem moves with great tension between the concreteness and the sensuality of the materials and the abstraction and spirituality of what is produced by their combination: especially between the ‘secretness’ of the text and the ‘revelation’ of the vision it describes. The situation of the reader in relation to the text is one of constant effort. As he reads, his understanding is constantly perfected. The structure of the text forces him to perform a complete transformation of his modes of relating to words. And thus, gradually, the theme is developed: this is a poem about the spiritual and existential situation of a human being.”