by Batya Gur
“I don’t know,” said Tuvia, and he sat up.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ruchama, and got no answer. “Anyway, she said you should phone her before you go in. She said you were supposed to be there today. Have you got a class?”
“It’s the last big class of the year,” said Tuvia, his voice wearier than usual. “This is the last week of the year. I’ve only got two more seminars to give.”
“Good. Then talk to Adina. I think I’ll go back to work today.”
Tuvia didn’t react. He went on staring absently.
Ruchama looked at him in growing panic. He must have told him; there was no other explanation.
Tuvia shook himself and straightened his legs. The little room was crammed with books—on the shelves lining the walls, on the desk, on the floor. Some were open, others had bits of paper sticking out of them. Every book in the room looked as if it had been handled repeatedly. “Felt books—they’re always being felt,” Tirosh had once said affectionately to Tuvia.
Ruchama saw that he had slept in his clothes, and there was a sour smell in the air of the room. His face was pale and strained when he said: “All right, then, I’ll phone her. Otherwise she’ll be after me all day. I really haven’t the strength to talk to her.”
The moment the telephone next to Tuvia’s sagging white sofa was plugged in, it began to ring deafeningly. Tuvia lifted the receiver and held it far from his ear. His faded, thinning hair was rumpled, and his scalp was exposed. The sight revolted her.
At the other end, a man’s voice, a voice Ruchama knew, could be clearly be heard, shouting into the phone. Standing next to the door, she made out almost every word.
“Where is Tirosh?” shrieked Aharonovitz, and, without waiting for an answer: “Have you spoken with Adina this morning?”
Tuvia said in a whisper that he had not yet spoken to anyone.
“So you know nothing of what has occurred?” shouted Aharonovitz.
His voice anxious, Tuvia asked what had happened. He pressed the receiver to his ear, and the small veins on his face turned blue as he listened in silence to what was being said at the other end of the line. “Okay. Tell her I’ll be there right away,” he said, and slammed down the receiver.
Suddenly he looked at Ruchama, as if for the very first time in his life. He looked at her in wonder, with a remoteness she had never seen in his eyes before, and said: “Iddo Dudai has been killed in a scuba-diving accident.”
Ruchama stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Yes. He was taking a diving course and he had to complete two more dives to get his diploma. He went down to Eilat the day before yesterday, right after the department meeting. It happened yesterday—I don’t know the details. If anyone wants me, say I’m at the secretary’s office. She’s been trying to get hold of Shaul since last night.”
“Who? Who’s been trying to get hold of him?” asked Ruchama with a feeling of obscure dread.
“Ruth Dudai notified Adina, in the end, and Adina tried to reach him last night, from home, but he wasn’t there.” Tuvia began feverishly searching for his car keys, and finally he found them under the typescript of the first chapter of Iddo Dudai’s doctoral thesis. He shuddered, muttered something about irony, and left the house.
For a while, Ruchama remained standing where she was, and then she sat down on the sofa. She hadn’t taken off the long T-shirt that served her as a nightgown since Thursday. She looked mechanically at her exposed, bony knees. Slowly and dreamily, as if she had been sedated, she placed her hands on her knees and stared at the short, slender fingers. “A child’s hand,” Shaul would sometimes say and kiss the wart that habitual sucking had left on her thumb. Ruchama now stuck her thumb in her mouth. The old sweet, soothing taste had disappeared. Then she began to look around her, as if she were in a strange place.
Gradually she became aware, at one end of the sofa, of the titles of Shaul Tirosh’s poetry books: The Sweet Poison of the Honeysuckle, A Stubborn Nettle, Necessary Poems.
The titles rang meaninglessly in her ears. The colors of the books’ covers, two of which had been illustrated by Yaakov Gafni, Tirosh’s favorite painter, seemed unbearably bright.
Without knowing why, she began to collect the books into one pile. When she knelt down, she saw another book, not by Tirosh, hidden under the edge of the cushion. Poems of a Gray War was the title, with the words “by Anatoly Ferber” underneath it and, at the bottom of the cover: “edited and with an introduction by Shaul Tirosh.”
He’s told him: the thought flashed through her mind. Shaul had told him everything. Confessed. And Tuvia was considering whether to break off relations with him. And perhaps also with her. Ruchama stood up. Her knees were dusty. It was months since Tuvia had cleaned the room. There were woolly balls of dust in the corners and next to the desk. Absentmindedly she began gathering them into one big ball.
The telephone startled her. At first she didn’t pick it up; it went on ringing persistently, stopped, and then began again, as if it intended to go on ringing forever. Finally she picked up the receiver, which was still damp and sticky from Tuvia’s hands, always sweaty.
“How are you feeling, Ruchamaleh?” asked Tzipporah with motherly concern.
“Better,” said Ruchama, and she pulled down the hem of her T-shirt, sank to her knees, and began collecting a new ball of dust in her free hand. In her imagination she saw the black telephone, the admissions office in Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, Tzipporah’s hand polishing the Formica countertop as she spoke.
“Do you still have a fever?” she inquired, and Ruchama saw the heavy body, the swollen feet, the ankles blue with the effort of bearing the body (“Varicose veins, from the first time I gave birth, that’s what I got from them,” said Tzipporah once, at the time her son brought his girlfriend home and announced his intention to marry her. “What’s his hurry, he’s only twenty-three years old, and getting married already. What good will it do him? What good did it do me?”), and replied that no, she didn’t have a fever.
“Are you taking anything? Aspirin—listen to me—aspirin and lemon tea and a lot of chicken soup,” said Tzipporah, and sniffed. Ruchama said nothing. She wasn’t going back to work today, she decided. She was staying in bed.
“Well, I don’t want to disturb you any longer. Go back to bed, that’s the most important thing, not to get up too soon; you can’t imagine the complications that can come of it. What we’ve seen here in the past few days! Only yesterday a young girl came in, hardly more than a child, a soldier, I don’t know what they’re thinking of there in the army.”
And Ruchama began paging through the book of poems by Anatoly Ferber, “one of the outstanding dissidents in the Soviet Union since the Stalin era,” as Shaul Tirosh wrote in his introduction. “Born in Israel, then Palestine, in 1930, he emigrated to Moscow with his mother at the age of sixteen, and died in 1955, under unclear circumstances, in a labor camp in the town of Perm, in the Ural Mountains,” she read, and suddenly she heard Shaul Tirosh’s voice thundering behind Tzipporah’s, as if he were reading the introduction aloud to her.
The alarm that seized her galvanized her into saying, in a weak voice that miraculously penetrated the stream of Tzipporah’s words: “I’m tired; we’ll talk at work tomorrow. Goodbye for now, Tzipporah.” Then, gently, she replaced the receiver, let the big ball of dust fall from her hands, and lay down on her back, staring at the ceiling. Finally she closed her eyes, and when she awoke, it was three o’clock in the afternoon.
The house was quiet, the windows were closed, there was a smell of dust in her nostrils. Tuvia was nowhere to be seen. Neither in the kitchen, the shower, the bedroom, nor the little living room, sparsely furnished with items they had brought with them from the kibbutz, which, until she met Shaul Tirosh, had looked elegant enough to her. Suddenly she remembered that Iddo Dudai had been killed; Tuvia had said so before he went out. The phrase “Iddo Dudai has been killed” echoed in her mind, but it didn’t melt the block of ice that
enclosed it. Later she remembered the words “in a scuba-diving accident” and she gripped her throat tightly as she saw the deep-blue water before her eyes and thought of the lack of air. She was standing in the kitchen, with the bread knife in her other hand, but she didn’t have the strength to slice the hard, stale bread. Tuvia hadn’t shopped. She looked at the big clock on the wall, a present from Tuvia’s parents. It was ten to four, and she thought that after Shaul’s confession, perhaps Tuvia wasn’t ever coming back. This thought no longer caused her any anxiety. Again she fingered her throat. Something else, not Tuvia’s absence, perturbed her. She didn’t know what it was; she only felt that it was hard for her to breathe, and she sat down on a vinyl chair. She buried her face in her arms, resting on the kitchen table, a Formica surface covered with dust, and struggled against an image of Shaul Tirosh’s face, with the mocking smile growing ever more twisted until the mouth gaped in a scream and turned into the dead face of Iddo Dudai.
4
The Literature Department faculty came into the secretary’s office, one after the other, all morning, and Racheli could tell by their faces whether they had heard the news or not. Tuvia Shai’s face gave her gooseflesh. His watery eyes were bloodshot, as if he had spent the night on the town, but even Racheli, the department secretary’s assistant, knew that Dr. Shai did not spend his nights on the town. His bursting through the door, the haunted, desperate look in his darting eyes, and the broken voice in which he asked if they had heard any more details, confused Racheli.
This quiet man, normally so unassuming as to be boring, now seemed exposed, as if he were naked. His rumpled clothes appeared to have been slept in, a gray stubble covered his cheeks, his thin hair cried out for a comb. Adina Lipkin registered his appearance but refrained from comment—after all, she would probably have said, a tragedy had taken place.
It wasn’t her sense of humor that saved her, said Racheli to Dovik, who had found her the job, when he marveled at the fact that she had stuck it out for so long. “Ten months! In the past two years Adina’s had five assistants. Nobody can stand it,” said Dovik, who worked in the university’s personnel department.
A sense of humor wasn’t enough to cope with Adina Lipkin’s compulsiveness for almost a year. Greater ironists than herself, argued Racheli passionately, had broken down in the office and screamed with rage the moment they left it. “It was only scientific curiosity, the fact that I got permission to take part in the psychopathology tutorial, my seminar paper on the compulsive personality, that made it possible for me to put up with her,” she explained.
Racheli, a third-year psychology undergraduate, continued apologetically: “And it’s a convenient job, really: I’m free to attend classes. In any case, she doesn’t like anybody else to be in the office during consulting hours. But what I really can’t stand is the pitying looks of the other secretaries on campus. Whenever I go into some office and say that she sent me, people panic and get rid of me as fast as they can, and afterward they look at me as if I’m returning to some gulag.”
Actually, Racheli noted to herself in an attempt to remain detached from the catastrophe, Adina’s functioning today had been exemplary. At eight o’clock in the morning she had already pinned up a prominent notice: DUE TO UNEXPECTED CIRCUMSTANCES THERE WILL BE NO CONSULTING HOUR TODAY. Then she locked the door. Racheli sat behind her desk in one of the five corners of the office with a pile of green files—which had been there since Friday—in front of her. This morning she was supposed to continue erasing the names of the courses and their computer codes, which Adina always recorded in pencil at the beginning of the year, and rewrite them in ink. Needless to say, Adina regarded the computer as an appliance introduced for the express purpose of making her life difficult. (“At the beginning of the year they haven’t really made up their minds, and they change courses, and I write it all down with a pencil, so as not to have to spoil the page. But later on, if they comply with the requirements and hand in their papers, I correct it in ink, because otherwise it fades, the pencil, that is, and it’s true that it doubles the work, but this way the file stays clean, which you won’t find in other places I could mention.” A meaningful glance at the window, overlooking other university buildings, accompanied the explanation of the task, and Racheli sat down and addressed herself to the files.)
The green covers had greeted her this morning when she entered the room. Adina was already there, naturally enough; she always arrived at seven. Her eyes were red, and her desk was empty, all the papers cleared away. She hastened to inform Racheli of the news and added: “I won’t be able to get any work done today. I never closed my eyes all night. What a loss! Such a promising young man!” Racheli warned herself not to condemn Adina for her clichés. She had to accept things as they were and hold her tongue.
She sat at her desk and admitted to herself that although she had liked Iddo Dudai and was shocked by his death, the news had not upset her to the extent of incapacitating her for work. After all, she had only met him in the department office, and she had never spoken to him about anything that wasn’t connected to her work there. She assumed a diligent look, an effort that turned out to be redundant, since Adina didn’t even look her way.
The department secretary herself did not succeed in sitting still for a minute. Every time she sat down, it was only to jump up from her chair again. Her desk stood to the left of the only window in the room, opposite the door, at which, and every couple of minutes, someone knocked. Three students who risked everything and came in, one after the other, to inquire about something were greeted initially by the usual lecture: “First of all, this isn’t the consulting hour, please come during the consulting hour, what have we got a consulting hour for?” followed by the special addendum: “Apart from which, there won’t be any consulting hour today, as it says right here on the door.”
The facial expression of the last student sent away empty-handed remained etched in Racheli’s mind as that of someone confronted by bureacratic whims presented as force majeure, one who knows he has been tricked and should protest but remains helpless in the face of ostensibly logical arguments. The departmental secretary always made her actions seem logical and always spoke politely to her victims.
When it came to the junior members of the faculty, to the teaching assistants, the arguments took on a more personal note: “I’ll have to ask you to wait outside until I finish talking on the phone. I can’t talk and think about you and your problems at the same time. No. You can’t sit down and wait inside; it makes me nervous.”
She caused the most eminent professors to assume an expression of Christian humility before they even crossed the threshold. When she saw them in the doorway her voice would grow shriller, her eyes become panic-stricken, and a ritual would be enacted: First she ostentatiously cleared her desk (there was always a neat pile of papers and files on the corner, which she had every intention of tackling “as soon as they let me get on with my work”). Then she would place her soft hands on the desk in front of her and raise her eyes, as if to say: Here I am, at your disposal; all I want in the world is to attend to your needs. But nobody was taken in by this performance: the hidden message shrieked through the apparent one: Get out—you’re disrupting my routine.
Racheli would be reminded then of her aunt Tzesha: of the plastic sheets spread over her living room furniture, of the two children forced to spend most of their time outside the house, so as not to ruin or dirty anything inside it. Sometimes Racheli would find herself letting out an actual sigh of relief when the tension relaxed with the departure from the office of an eminent professor.
The previous week, Aharonovitz had stood in the doorway like a timid student and hesitantly asked if he could trouble her, and at that moment, Racheli decided on the subject of her seminar paper: “The Effects of a Compulsive Personality on the Behavior of Colleagues in the Workplace.” This morning, trying to predict how the department secretary would react to the unusual circumstances, she had assumed that A
dina would cling to her daily routine even more desperately than usual; but she was wrong.
Adina’s expression conveyed an abandonment of any attempt at normal functioning. She must be exceedingly upset by the news, thought Racheli. And after all, Iddo Dudai had enjoyed a special status in the secretary’s office. He had aroused Adina’s maternal feelings. He was also the only one who had listened with interest to her stories about her grandchildren, who had exchanged ideas with her about medicinal herbs, potted plants, and recipes, especially dietetic recipes. Adina had forgiven Iddo his slovenly attire and had even allowed him to stay in the room when the telephone rang.
This morning the department secretary looked as if she had resolved to be efficient, quiet, and, above all, discreet. She dealt firmly but patiently with the students who attempted to invade the office despite the notice displayed prominently on the door, and she showed them out without so much as mentioning the accident. The container of yogurt and the cucumber she customarily allowed herself until lunch she pushed into a bottom drawer with an expression of disgust, and Racheli remembered a remark Tirosh had once addressed to the room at large on catching sight of Adina’s cucumber in its neatly secured plastic bag: “For twenty years I’ve known her, and for twenty years she’s been on a diet.” And then Racheli’s thoughts wandered to Tirosh, whom Adina was still feverishly trying to locate. “I tried until midnight, from my house, even though I had guests, and I’ve been here since seven this morning, and I haven’t been able to get hold of him yet.” Again Racheli wondered at Adina’s state of calm, which even the stormy entrance of Tuvia Shai failed to undermine. To him too, for the tenth time that morning, she gave the same explanation, speaking calmly and slowly: “We don’t have any details. I’m in contact with Ruth, and his parents have been informed. The cause of death is still being investigated. They suspect there was a fault in the diving apparatus. But they’re checking it. I don’t know anything about the funeral arrangements; they’ll let us know as soon as they can.” Her expression was serious, even solemn, as if to say: You see, when something really terrible happens, I can be businesslike and efficient. And then came the obsessive question about Tirosh.