The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  I’ve never really understood Samson’s hair:

  its immense secrecy, its ascetic mystery,

  the prohibition (perfectly understandable) against talking about it,

  the constant fear of loss of locks, the endless dread

  of Delilah’s light caress.

  But I have no trouble at all with Absalom’s hair.

  Obviously it’s beautiful, like the sun at high noon, like a red

  vengeance moon.

  Its fragrance is sweeter than the perfumes of women.

  Conniving cold Ahitophel can’t bear to look

  when he sees before him the reason for David’s love:

  It’s the most glorious hair in the realm, the perfect motive

  for every uprising and afterwards the terebinth.

  Tuvia Shai looked out and said: “The class has begun,” and he read the poem aloud. The room was still: apart from his voice, there was no sound to be heard. Michael looked at the face of the man reading. He immediately noticed the color spreading over his cheeks, and his voice, no longer monotonous. Michael understood that Shai loved the poem, and soon he also knew that he loved teaching as well.

  He finished reading and turned to the students. The matter-of-fact way with which he had opened the lesson prevented them, Michael sensed, from thinking about the events of the past few days and made it possible for them to come immediately to grips with the material.

  “What is it that sustains this poem? What is its deep structure? What does it rely on?” asked Tuvia Shai. A hand went up hesitantly, and one of the young men, the bespectacled one, began talking before being given permission to do so. “There are two references to biblical stories here, two allusions,” he said in an eager, animated voice.

  The young woman in the turban interjected: “Judges thirteen to sixteen and Samuel Two, chapters thirteen to nineteen.”

  Tuvia Shai nodded and enunciated: “So what do we do with it? We’ve had poems with allusions before, but this time we’ve got two biblical texts in one poem; where do we go from here? We’ve identified the allusions—what now?”

  “We should discuss interpretations of the texts alluded to,” said one of the older women after examining the papers spread out in front of her.

  “Remind me,” said Shai, and for a moment his face assumed the empty, lifeless expression so familiar to Michael. “Who undertook to prepare something?” He dropped his eyes to the papers in front of him, and Michael glanced at his watch. Only ten minutes had passed. Again he looked at the poem before him; it aroused his curiosity, he even liked it, but he didn’t know why. He understood hardly anything about it, but he had always liked the story of King David and Absalom’s revolt. Sometimes the words of the lament: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom my son, my son!” used to come into his mind in moments of inexplicable sadness, long before he himself had become a father.

  As if through a veil, he heard the voice of the middle-aged woman, with traces of an unidentifiable accent, something Eastern European, reading from her notes the story of the birth of Samson and the events of his life. Then she took off her reading glasses for a moment and asked: “The interpretations now?” Shai nodded, and Michael sensed the lecturer’s tension, his growing excitement as the woman resumed reading. She quoted the rabbinical exegetes in a deliberate voice, and as she proceeded, Tuvia Shai’s fists tightened. Finally she said, “That’s all as far as Samson is concerned,” and Tuvia Shai opened his mouth and said, in the kind of voice one would use to tell children a story: “What’s it really about, the story of Samson? Have you ever thought about it?” Michael followed the students’ eyes. Some of them looked at the door and some shifted uneasily, but Shai didn’t wait for an answer. “Have you ever thought about the contradictions in his character? Have you thought about the fact that he is a secret Nazarite consecrated to God, both a judge and a man who hides his light under a bushel? I want to remind you”—his voice rose and he waved his finger in the air—“that he doesn’t tell his parents about the lion, he doesn’t boast about it anywhere.” He looked at the students and then at the window, which should have overlooked a distant view but actually faced nothing but another building. “Have you thought about the fact that he is an adulterer who is betrayed twice in the same way by two different women, his wife and Delilah, and that this contradiction reaches a climax—when? Where do we find the climax of the contradiction in his character?”

  “In his death,” said the second young man quietly, looking down at his feet and then lifting his clear blue eyes to Shai, who smiled at him affectionately, confirmed his words with a nod, and said: “Yes, in death his figure takes on almost mythical proportions. Think about it, the blind giant, surrounded by mocking Philistines, praying for one last consolation before his death. Picture it: there’s certainly an element of the sublime, the tragic, in the picture.” He looked at the students as if to make sure that they understood. Michael didn’t take his eyes off him but didn’t succeed in catching his eye: the man behaved as if Michael weren’t there.

  “What I want us to think about here is that in the Bible, the figure of Samson the Hero is presented on the one hand as a Hercules and on the other as slightly ridiculous.” Michael observed the students. They were writing feverishly. The man sitting next to him kept his hand under his chin and gazed straight ahead: he wasn’t taking notes. “What I want us to keep in mind”—Shai’s voice rose again after a momentary pause—“is that the Bible presents Samson’s hair as a metonymy—a part representing the whole—for his special bond with God, the bond that gives him his supernatural strength. In the mind of the reader, the hair comes to represent the strength itself. Samson’s bond with God, along with his weakness regarding women, a weakness expressed in foolishness or at least naïveté, creates a stunning contradiction. Twice”—Tuvia Shai held up two fingers—“twice he is betrayed by women he loves. This isn’t simply stupidity; there’s conceit here too—it never occurs to Samson that his strength can be taken from him. What the Bible is actually describing is a man who has undergone a certain process over the years. A process as a result of which he comes to identify the divine strength in him with his own personality and forgets its divine origin.” Again Shai looked around him and Michael saw the hands arrested as the students stopped writing, and the sudden light shining in the young male student’s blue eyes. “For Samson,” said Shai in a low voice, “the loss of his hair means the loss of his bond with God, the breaking of his ascetic vows, this is what the loss of his hair means to him, and consequently, ladies and gentlemen, consequently also the loss of his supernatural, superhuman strength.”

  Tuvia Shai looked around him with what could only be described as a look not of triumph but of pride, by someone who has solved a complicated riddle and shed light on his surroundings. “I can’t see the connection,” protested a young woman. Her broad back, the only part of her Michael could see, moved irritably, and the light in Tuvia Shai’s face went out for a moment. “Patience,” he said to her and smiled. “We won’t leave until you can see the connection. We’re deciphering a multidimensional structure here, we’re looking for the third text, let me remind you. It takes time.”

  “Can you tell us the name of the poet?” asked a young woman in a green headscarf, and Tuvia Shai’s face became animated again as he said in an amused tone: “Not yet; to avoid prejudice, only at the end, although I’m sure that some of you know already.” And then he went on to talk about Absalom. The man next to Michael searched feverishly through papers he had taken out of the briefcase standing on the floor between his legs, and then, in a calm, deliberate voice, read a summary of the plot of Absalom’s revolt. Ancient echoes awoke in Michael, echoes of things he had thought he knew but now realized that he had never understood. With a feeling of shock, he heard the details of “Ahitophel’s counsel” and understood the meaning of the words “So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto
his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel”; he stole a look at the open booklet on the writing arm of the chair on his left and again saw the words “Conniving cold Ahitophel,” and the poem began to stir with life, to stir with something he had not seen in it before. Something evil and terrible, which he wanted to understand.

  Tuvia Shai’s voice, too, seemed to be conniving as he said: “You’ve got all the data now; all you have to do is see the picture clearly,” and he confronted the students sternly. They waited, their pens poised. When he wasn’t examining an invisible point on the wall or the text on his table, Tuvia Shai would bring light into the blue-eyed student’s eyes by looking at him. “Absalom,” said Shai, “Absalom killed Amnon for raping Tamar. The act had been planned for a long time; it is not the act of a hot-tempered man. He broods about it for two years, and at last, when he avenges his sister Tamar, only then does it become clear how much rage there is in him. But isn’t it also clear that he performs the act that should have been performed by his father, King David?” He glanced at the poem and whispered: “Three years! For three years David’s beloved son sits in exile in Geshur, and then it’s Joab who initiates his return to Jerusalem, Joab and not David! And the reconciliation between them is particularly cold, something that is stressed by the repeated use of the words ‘the king’ in the description of this exceedingly chilly reconciliation.”

  Michael touched the tiny microphone in his shirt pocket. He wondered what Alfandari, sitting in the car and recording the voices, thought about all this. Then he considered the monotonous voice of the Tuvia Shai he thought he knew, the one he had interviewed in his office. Now the same man was suddenly full of life, of emotion. And the things he was talking about! But, he reminded himself, this lesson was prepared long before anyone here had been murdered. Look at him, though: wouldn’t he be capable of smashing someone’s face in in an attack of rage? Was this the man without qualities? And was he really unaware of his, Michael’s, presence? Was it possible that he didn’t realize the side of his character that was being exposed here? The potential? Tuvia Shai’s eyes, pale and watery, looked straight into Michael’s, as if he had read his thoughts. There was no fear in them; the emotion was unmistakable: it was happiness, excitement at the solution, at the ability to put everything into words.

  “The end of Absalom is a tragic and ironic end,” said Tuvia Shai. “He who was so in love with his hair dies precisely because of this hair.”

  “There’s a midrash about it,” said an older woman who had been silent up to now. She was sitting in the middle of the horseshoe, and Michael saw the excitement in her face.

  “Yes,” said Shai happily. “Do you remember it?”

  “The sages say, in the tractate Sotah, I think,” said the woman, in a pleasant voice, “that ‘Absalom took pride in his hair and therefore he was hanged by his hair,’” and Tuvia Shai nodded vigorously. It was unmistakable: his face virtually beamed with happiness.

  “Now we can get into the poem itself,” said Shai, and Michael found himself listening to a long discussion of a figure of speech. “Zeugma,” wrote Shai on the blackboard, and explained at length how the meaning of the poem was a product of its syntax and structure. “Despite the syntactical facts, which are ostensibly intended to emphasize the presence of the speaker in the poem,” said Shai, wiping the chalk off his hands, “we get the sense that the subject of the verse is to be found precisely in the syntactically subordinate part of the sentence: Samson’s hair, Samson’s life. And the speaker disappears from the awareness of the reader. In other words, the object clauses in the poem are substantivized—that is, they become substitutes for the noun.” Michael didn’t understand exactly what Shai was talking about. He felt confused; his interest in the poem slackened. The others seemed completely absorbed in a world he thought he had understood, where people were now speaking a different language. Tuvia Shai spoke enthusiastically, and the students wrote energetically. One of them lifted her head, made a face, hesitated, and then raised her hand. “Just a minute,” said Shai, “I’ll be finished soon,” and speaking almost at dictation speed, he continued: “Samson’s hair is the object of reference, and everything else relates to it. It’s the initial phrase—‘I’ve never really understood’—to which everything that follows is grammatically subordinate; it’s this phrase that enables the sentence not to exhaust its energy.” Then he turned to the student and with a gesture gave her permission to speak.

  She was sitting opposite Michael, a girl in her early twenties with a pretty face. Her nose was full of freckles, and her eyes, dark and shining, were revealed as she pushed a fringe of hair off her forehead and said in an agitated voice: “I don’t know how the others feel about it, but it simply ruins the poem for me, all this talk about syntax.”

  Tuvia Shai didn’t smile. With a completely serious expression, he said: “First of all, we haven’t finished yet, and second, Tamar”—it was the first time he had addressed anyone by name—“we’ve been talking about syntax all year, and third, I promise you that if this poem is worth anything, nothing will ruin it for you, not even a syntactical analysis. But perhaps you’ll tell us your opinion again at the end?”

  Someone in the room sighed, someone else smiled kindly. The two women in the headscarves exchanged a glance of mutual understanding and then regarded the young woman with indignation and contempt. She blushed, pouted, and said crossly, “I don’t know,” and looked down at her pen.

  “It’s the speaker, Tamar, it’s the speaker,” said Shai as if revealing a great secret. Michael looked at him, and gradually he began to understand. “It’s the speaker in the poem who confronts the biblical stories and questions them. The statement, ultimately, is about the first-person speaker, and it is made by means of the choice of details from the biblical story and their setting between the opposition ‘I’ve never understood . . . I have no trouble . . .’ We learn about the speaker, about his character, through the change in the status of the allusion, and its being understood by the speaker or not understood by him. Do you remember the essay by Culler?” The clear-eyed young man nodded, and Tuvia Shai looked at him and said: “When a certain intention is declared by the speaker, we have a point of gravity, which dominates the interpretation.” The room held a silence of concentration. Tuvia Shai pointed to the booklet and, taking a deep breath, said: “The poem places in a situation of choice a sequence of details that ostensibly—I stress ostensibly—follow necessarily from each other. In other words, an examination of the change in the status of the allusion on its way from the Bible to the poem and its location in the architectonic structure of the poem will enable us to understand what the speaker is saying about himself.”

  And what are you saying here about yourself? Michael asked silently, and again his eyes met those of the lecturer, who didn’t blink but embarked on the lengthy statement the entire lesson had clearly been leading up to. “Only now that we’ve done all the spadework—investigating every allusion and all its possible interpretations, examining the use made by the poem of syntax and structure, and the way it selects the details of the biblical stories—only now are we in a position to decipher the change in the status of the allusion within the poem. The only element of the biblical story of Samson introduced into the poem is the ‘immense secrecy’ and ‘ascetic mystery’ of his hair”—now again Michael heard words like “signifier” and “signified” and wondered wearily what Shai was getting at. Then his attention was recaptured by: “‘the constant fear of loss of locks’—this fear is not expressed in the Bible, either directly or indirectly. The presentation of the fear in the poem is a result of the point of view of the speaker, who thinks that if all his own strength came from his hair, he would be afraid to lose it. The poem changes Samson’s weakness in the face of female temptation into a real fear of women, a fear that contradicts the risks taken by the biblical Samson. The poem interprets Samson’s weakness with regard to women not as the inability to withstand temptation but as castratio
n anxiety! Samson is presented as someone whose fears are for his own virility!” Again the triumph in his eyes, very like that of Balilty when he had discovered some detail or other, the triumph of the successful detective. Michael would never have imagined that Tuvia Shai could experience this feeling. “The subject of castration,” continued Shai, “comes out clearly in a second reading: why the taboo against talking about his hair? Is it a sexual organ? And that dread of his, whenever Delilah lightly strokes his hair, characterizes Samson as a man constantly preoccupied with guarding his hair. In other words, the poet perceives Samson’s strength as primitive, infantile, despite the mystic element inherent in it.” Even the possessor of the freckled nose looked at Tuvia Shai with intent concentration, making an effort to understand.

  “Excuse me,” said the turbaned woman. “Would you mind repeating the last sentence?”

  “What was the last sentence?” Tuvia Shai asked with a bewildered expression, as if he had been awakened from a hypnotic trance.

  “I didn’t understand it properly,” the woman in the turban insisted.

  Tuvia Shai repeated the words “castration anxiety” and “metonymy” a couple of times and went over his last sentences again. She nodded her head and wrote energetically, saying: “I understand,” in a tone that made it clear to Michael that she hadn’t understood a thing but had given up trying.

  One of the women in a headscarf whispered something to her neighbor, who smiled and said something in reply that made her blush and fall silent. Shai resumed his lecture.

  Michael listened attentively to the exposition describing the “change in the status of the biblical story of Absalom in the poem.” Tuvia Shai stressed that Absalom’s hair was red, which connected him by association with David, who was “ruddy and fair of countenance,” and in the end he said: “All the feelings and qualities attributed to the hair in the poem are additions to the source. We don’t find them anywhere in the biblical text.” And then: “By connecting the associations evoked by the allusion to Ahitophel’s attitude toward Absalom, which is expressed in the averting of his eyes from his hair, the poem creates an explicit erotic link between Absalom and Ahitophel.”