by Batya Gur
To her surprise, Ruchama realized that her husband’s words about Tirosh’s poem interested her, were almost comprehensible to her, and she remembered Shaul’s once remarking that Tuvia was the only person who interpreted his poems correctly. Tuvia now took a sip of water, and the young girl sitting next to Ruchama shook out her hand, which had been feverishly noting down every word uttered, took off her glasses, and wiped the lenses vigorously. She resumed writing as he said:
“In conclusion, all I have to say is this: The question is not whether this is a good poem but as what and in relation to what a poem is a good poem. In other words, from the outset there is no point in talking about immanent value, value that is context-free; and this is one of the basic mistakes of those who seek absolute value in a work of literature. I’m not saying anything new when I say that in order for anything to have value, it has to be related to something else, something different from itself. The statement that value is relative does not diminish it. On the contrary, relativity is what makes its existence possible. The question ‘As what is this poem good?’ is concerned with subjects such as genre, type, cultural tradition, and linguisitic tradition on the diachronic axis, and subjects such as the poetics of a particular poet in relation to his period—the specific cultural and historical context of the poem—on the synchronic axis. The words ‘good’ or ‘very good’ in relation to what has been said about ‘A Stroll Through the Grave of My Heart’ are indeed applicable to what I chose to stress in the poem, and they turn what has been said about it into a value judgment; but this evaluation does not derive from the poem itself, it is not logically connected to it. The word ‘good’ is imposed on the descriptive statements from the outside and transforms them suddenly into value judgments: it creates an ostensibly causal connection between description and judgment.”
Davidov leaned toward the cameraman and muttered something. Ruchama saw Tirosh’s green eyes peering at her husband with intense concentration, as if he didn’t want to miss a single word, and she saw Iddo Dudai’s face, whose pallor she ascribed to his excitement at his approaching lecture.
Ruchama turned and caught sight of Sara Amir, listening with great interest. The expression of concentration on her face grew, Ruchama noticed, as Tuvia went on talking. “In my opinion, there is no point in trying to establish a general criterion for the quality of a literary text, either relative or absolute. Every text presents a new case for judgment. I have no rules for the future. I can say which work is good in my opinion, but not which work will be good in my opinion. ‘There’s no arguing about taste’ is a nonsensical statement. Taste should be argued about. And arguing, in fact, is all we can do about it.” Tuvia sat down with an air of exhaustion, and a faint smile appeared on his face at the sound of the applause and the words that Tirosh whispered in his ear as he patted his hand, and again silence descended on the hall as Iddo Dudai stood up to speak.
Later it would be possible to see and hear what the camera had clearly recorded: the terrible trembling of Iddo’s hands, the beads of sweat on his forehead, the shaking and stammering of his voice. Ruchama would remember having noticed the glass of water he swallowed in a single gulp.
Although Iddo Dudai was only a doctoral candidate, his position in the department was assured: Tirosh predicted a brilliant future for him, Tuvia praised his perseverance and diligence, and even Aharonovitz, in his perpetually complaining voice, spoke warmly of “a true scholar, a talmid haham, in the Talmudic sense of the term.”
This was not the first lecture he had delivered to an academic audience, and Ruchama thought that his extreme nervousness must be due to the presence of the TV cameras, although Tuvia argued heatedly against this on their way home, at the end of the evening: “You don’t know him. He’s not interested in things like that; he’s a serious scholar; it’s silly to think that that’s the reason. I knew from the word go that it was going to be a catastrophe. I sensed it. He’s not the same person since he came back from America. We shouldn’t have let him go. He’s too young.”
But Ruchama, still under the vivid impression of the drama that had taken place in the hall, was unable to see for herself the terrible change that had occurred in Iddo, apart, of course, from the fact that he had defied Tuvia’s guru, who was also his own supervisor, and by so doing had endangered his status in the department.
At the beginning of his lecture, Iddo read a poem by a Russian dissident whose work Tirosh himself had published and brought to attention as a sensational example of the preservation of the Hebrew language in the Soviet labor camps. The subject of Iddo’s doctoral thesis, Ruchama to her surprise later recalled, involved underground Hebrew-language poetry in the Soviet Union.
Then he went on to say that there were three levels in literary research. “The first is descriptive poetics,” he said, wiping his brow and looking expressionlessly at the audience. “This is the objective level, whose goal is research,” and once more Ruchama’s mind strayed, and when she began to listen again she heard the words: “The most subjective pole is the pole of evaluation and judgment. And the poem I have just read is one that was written in the tradition of the poetry of allusion—in other words, poetry that relates to an earlier text, in this case a biblical text, and it is impossible not to feel that it fails to transcend the banal and the expected in its description of the figure of Heraclitus the Obscure. Beauty that is easily acquired is not beauty,” said young Dudai, and he paused to take a breath.
A faint stir ran through the audience. Ruchama saw Shulamith Zellermaier smile her ironic half-smile, one hand ceaselessly fingering the brown wooden beads encircling her thick neck. The student next to Ruchama stopped taking notes.
“The poem ingratiates itself by means of kitsch,” Iddo continued rapidly, “and in this case the kitsch lies mainly in its adaptation of isolated elements from symbolist poetry and the plastic art associated with it, art nouveau; in other words, the kitsch lies in the poetic anachronism. This is not a symbolist poem but a structure borrowing external elements of an earlier period, in order to take advantage of the regressive tendencies of the reader.”
“Bravo!” cried Shulamith Zellermaier, and the academic audience began to buzz. The noise in the hall grew louder. Everyone knew how much Tirosh had admired these poems that had reached him by an obscure route and that he had edited and published. Davidov murmured something to his cameraman, who directed his lens to take in the faces of the other participants: Tuvia’s lowered eyes; the expression of surprise and the spasm of anger, immediately suppressed, that crossed Tirosh’s face. Ruchama turned to look behind her and saw the glitter in Aharonovitz’s eyes, the smile of alarm on the face of Tsippi, the assistant lecturer, and the expression of calm surprise on Sara Amir’s face. The girl on Ruchama’s left had resumed writing. And then Iddo continued: “However, in favor of the poem, we have to take into account the fact that it was written in a labor camp, that it was written by a man who had not been exposed to the European culture of the past three or more decades, who never completed his formal education in Hebrew—and this is what makes it remarkable. The circumstances in which it was written, the period, and so forth. If this poem had been written here, in this country, in the fifties or sixties, would anyone of you have considered it a good poem?”
The hand busily writing on her left came to a momentary halt. Ruchama looked behind her and then turned her eyes back to the pale face of Iddo Dudai, who now took off his square-framed glasses with their thick lenses, placed them carefully on the green cloth, and said: “It goes without saying that I agree with Dr. Shai: this is a subjective matter, dependent on circumstances and context, a question of evaluation, taste, and so on.” And then he put his glasses on again and read the latest political poem by Tirosh, a poem that had been published in one of the literary supplements at the end of the Lebanon war and had even been put to music and turned into a mournful ditty that had joined the string of familiar songs sung on memorial days. Iddo read “It’s All the Same to Us” in
a dry, monotonous voice.
Ruchama couldn’t concentrate on the tortuous sentences with which Iddo interpreted whatever called for interpretation in the text, but she remembered the concluding sentences vividly: “This is a poem that betrays its actions. A political poem should never be precious or ironic. A poem of political protest cannot at one and the same time be aware of the act of the poem and of the intellectual virtues of its writer. His cultural assets are of no value when it comes to a poem of political protest. The question is: where is the power that existed in Tirosh’s lyric poems? Where are the deeper levels? Is the man who wrote ‘The Girl with the Green Lips’ and ‘The Moment When Black Touched Black’ the same man who produced the posturing poem before us?”
Tuvia sprang up from his chair—Tirosh had buried his face in his hands, as the camera would testify—seized Iddo’s arm, and almost forced him to sit down, saying in a voice trembling with agitation: “Mr. Dudai doesn’t understand. I disagree with him. The context—he doesn’t understand the context! The context is manifestly political; it refers to all kinds of slogans that appear in the literary supplements and mocks them. It mocks them in their own language.” Tuvia wiped his forehead with his hand and continued passionately: “This isn’t a poem of political protest in the conventional sense, against the Lebanon war. On the contrary! Mr. Dudai has missed the point! This is a protest poem against the usual run of protest poems and their lack of substance! It’s a parody of protest poems! That’s what you failed to see!”
Iddo Dudai looked at Tuvia and said quietly: “I think that a parody that doesn’t clearly read like a parody fails to make its point. All I can say is that if the poem was intended as a parody, then it doesn’t come off.”
The uproar in the hall began to make itself felt. Professor Avraham Kalitzky, the only authority recognized by his colleagues as competent to evaluate the bibliographical basis for any argument whatsoever, raised his hand, rose to his full dwarfish height, and cried in a shrill voice: “We must examine the original meaning of the word parō idia in Greek and not use it irresponsibly!”
But his cry was swallowed up in the growing commotion. All eyes, as the camera recorded, were fixed on Tirosh, who with “admirable restraint,” in Tuvia’s later words, calmed the disputants (“Gentlemen, gentlemen, calm yourselves. It’s only a departmental seminar, after all”). But the camera also caught the stunned look he gave Iddo, as the latter sat down and stared in front of him while Tirosh, in his capacity as chairman, rose to his feet, summed up in a few sentences, glanced at his watch, and said that there was only a short time left for discussion and questions from the audience.
None of the faculty or students of the department said anything, nor did any of the regular members of the audience, those who were never officially invited but never failed to show up at the departmental activities open to the public: three elderly women school teachers who broadened their intellectual horizons by regular attendance at such events; two literary critics who had left the academic world but went on faithfully attacking its members in the slandermongering literary columns of obscure newspapers; and a few Jerusalem eccentrics and culture vultures. No one said anything. Even Menucha Tishkin, the oldest of the three teachers, who always asked something after a long introduction setting forth her professional problems—even she didn’t open her mouth. Something had happened, but Ruchama didn’t know how to define it, and she certainly had no idea of what it portended.
The technicians began packing their equipment and Iddo Dudai left the platform. Violently shaking off the hand Aharonovitz put out to grip his shoulder, he almost ran out of the hall.
Ruchama stood to one side of the exit. As the audience filed past her, she caught snatches of conversation, half-words, but they didn’t sink in. Tuvia still stood behind the table, crumpling the green cloth with his fingers, and from where she stood, he looked to her like one of the Labor party lecturers who used to come to the kibbutz, sitting in the dining room behind a table that had been covered with a green cloth in honor of the occasion. She had detested them.
The water pitcher was empty, and Tuvia, leaning on the table and nodding constantly, listened attentively for several minutes as Shaul Tirosh spoke to him. Finally Tirosh stood up, and together they began making their way to the door. Tirosh smiled at her intimately and said: “Well, did you enjoy it?” Ruchama didn’t reply, and he went on: “Someone should have enjoyed the drama. Tuvia thinks it was an Oedipal rebellion, Dudai’s attack. I disagree with him, although I have no other explanation to offer. In any case, it was certainly interesting. I’ve always thought he’s an interesting fellow, young Dudai, but Tuvia doesn’t agree.” Ruchama caught a new expression in the green eyes, one she had never seen there before, perhaps anxiety, and she herself was suddenly overcome by a feeling of obscure fear. Tuvia said nothing, but his face was clouded and angry.
Together they went down in the elevator to the underground parking garage. Even now, ten years after coming to Jerusalem, Ruchama was unable to get around the campus unaided. The round arts faculty building, each wing of which was painted a different color in order to distinguish it from the others and help people locate themselves, filled her with dread. She only knew her way to the Meirsdorf Building, the university guesthouse, and the elevator to the parking garage. Even when she had to get to the Literature Department wing, she would go there through the labyrinth of the Meirsdorf Building, the only way she knew to reach her destination.
Shaul declined their invitation to come home with them for a late cup of tea, and they accompanied him to his car and then turned toward their own light-colored Subaru, which was parked in a dim corner.
In the underground parking garage, too, Ruchama was always overcome with dread: spaces like these, and also crowded department stores, gave rise to powerful anxieties in her, which were expressed in an immediate nausea. This time the anxiety took on new dimensions. At the sight of the figure suddenly looming up in the corner, she was unable to stifle the scream rising in her throat, and she was reassured only when she recognized the intelligent face of Iddo Dudai. “Tuvia,” said Iddo, “I have to talk to you,” and despite the businesslike gesture with which Tuvia opened the door of the car, whose inside light went on and illuminated Iddo’s tense features, Ruchama sensed the anger, embarrassment, and discomfort in his voice when he said: “Good. I really think we should talk, especially after this evening. Are you free tomorrow?”
“No, tomorrow’s too late. I have to talk to you now,” said Iddo, and listening to the panic in his voice, Ruchama knew that her husband would not be able to refuse. “Then follow us and we’ll talk at home,” Tuvia said.
Iddo looked at Ruchama. She quickly lowered her eyes, and Tuvia said: “Don’t worry. Ruchama will leave us alone. Right?” He turned to her, and she nodded.
In the car, Tuvia spoke without pause, trying to guess what could have been behind Iddo’s behavior. “We should never have let him go abroad,” he said heatedly. “For two weeks now, ever since he came back, he hasn’t been the same.” Ruchama said nothing. She was tired.
Her curiosity was momentarily aroused by the sight of the distress on Iddo’s face as he entered their second-floor flat in the big apartment house on French Hill, but then her weariness overwhelmed her, and she said good night and retired to their little bedroom. She heard Tuvia’s shoes shuffling and the clatter of Iddo’s sandals as he followed him into the kitchen; she even heard the rattling of the cups, and after that Iddo’s question: “How do you turn it on?” but by then she was already in bed, under the sheet, and even that was superfluous, the night was so hot. The open window didn’t help. The air stood still in the yard, dry and oppressive. The last sounds she heard were those of the television sets in neighboring apartments, and then she fell asleep.
2
Do You Have a Regulator?” asked the title of the lead article in Diving News. Michael Ohayon looked at the magazine and smiled. No, he didn’t have a regulator, nor was he going to have one
. He had no intention of scuba diving.
Superintendent Ohayon, head of the Criminal Investigations Division in the Jerusalem Subdistrict, may have been staying at the Diving Club in Eilat, but he was there “strictly as a father,” as he said firmly to his childhood friend Uzi Rimon, director of the club, when the latter tried to persuade him to take the course. “Water exists for drinking, to wash with, and at the most to swim in. I’m a Jerusalemite,” he said, looking with dread at the blue depths in front of them.
“That’s not what I heard about you. They didn’t tell me you’ve turned into such a coward,” said Uzi with a sly smile.
“And what did they tell you? Who told you?” Michael smiled in embarrassment.
“Don’t ask. They say that ever since you got divorced, all the husbands in Jerusalem are keeping their wives locked up at home, and I also heard that when you’re on a case, hardened police officers shake in their boots. They say you’re tough. Pity there isn’t some dame around to see what you really are—chicken!”
And indeed, only those closest to the tall man, whose jutting cheekbones gave his dark, deep eyes a melancholy expression that had melted many hearts, were acquainted with his anxieties. In the view of the others—the men he worked with in the police force, his commanding officers, his casual friends—Michael Ohayon was a strong, clever, cultured man and a dedicated womanizer, whose reputation attracted women in droves. And it was true that even hardened policemen paled at hearing the tapes of some of the interrogations he had conducted, though, as was well known, he never used physical violence against suspects. The loyalty and relaxed atmosphere among the men on his staff was a tribute to the civility and respect with which he treated everyone, to his lack of arrogance, and to the modesty he radiated. His close friends argued that it was precisely his humility that was responsible for his rapid rise on the police force.