The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  “Eroticism again!” protested the woman in the headscarf. Shai ignored her and continued: “Another outcome of the syntactical discontinuity is the additional attribute accorded to Absalom, ‘the reason for David’s love,’ which is equated with the hair—in other words, Absalom’s beauty. In other words: David loves Absalom for his beauty!” And then: “And this ‘glorious hair’ is the ‘perfect motive’ for everything—the uprising and afterward the death.” Now Tuvia Shai clasped his hands behind his back and turned to the window. His words had been deeply engraved in Michael’s mind, and they went on echoing there all day long. What did you learn today? he asked himself after listening to them over and over on the tape, especially the final words: “The poem reveals a hidden layer that deals with the tremendous effect beauty has on people. The emphasis, both in the biblical story and in the poem, is on Absalom’s beauty as a characteristic that ostensibly explains the terrible crime—the threat of patricide, the realization of incest—and ostensibly justifies the incomprehensible behavior of David. The explanation stems from the unique power possessed by the beauty that admires itself without any conflict, hesitation, or doubt. The average person is limited in his capacity for relating to his own realized, physical beauty. And at the same time he has a longing, a yearning, for concrete beauty. This yearning leads both to pining after manifestations of such beauty and to an attitude of exaggerated respect for them. People long to identify with such beauty, partly because the identification creates the illusion that the beauty of the object of the identification is imparted to the identifier. A person who shelters under the shade of such beauty and identifies with it feels, too, that some of it rubs off on him.” Tuvia Shai then sat down, bowed his head, and continued in a monotonous voice: “In other words, the speaker in the poem sees Absalom’s beauty as a beauty that possesses a terrible power, stronger than everything else—stonger than the evil and the coldness of Ahitophel, stronger than the father and king, sweeping away everything with it. This is an inhuman beauty, not superhuman but inhuman, and therefore it cannot be withstood. The uprising is presented here as the power of the flesh. As if this revolt is the opposite of human. This is a beauty that cannot be controlled by moral values. It causes the outbreak of primordial forces. The revolt against the father-king is presented in the poem as the inevitable result of Absalom’s superior beauty. The sublimity of his beauty puts him outside human values. The realms of the absolute are inhuman. ‘And afterwards the terebinth’—the triumph of beauty and youth ends in the gallop to perdition.”

  He raised his head and looked at the students, who stopped writing, and then with particular compassion at the freckled girl, who gazed back at him with eager eyes. Michael asked himself if she, at her age, could understand what had been said. He himself felt full of a great respect for the poet Natan Zach and for Tuvia Shai. Something had turned over in his stomach as he listened to this interpretation. He knew, too, that Shai had exposed something vital that related to himself, but Michael felt unable to tie up the connecting threads.

  “The speaker exposes himself through his understanding and not-understanding. He is not moved by the gap between Samson’s miraculous strength and his weakness. The superiority of divine over human power does not move him. He is moved by destructive, devastating beauty, not by the emanation of divine power from human beings. Samson’s strength does not have the inertia of destruction, and therefore it does not impress, it has no meaning for the speaker. Samson’s strength does not destroy basic relationships like that of father-son, king-subject, and so on. The destructive power that appeals to the speaker’s heart is an unrestrained destructive force, which reaches the primordial level in the hearts of people who usually obey a moral code but cannot withstand this irresistible force and are swept by it to perdition. This perdition,” and Tuvia Shai looked straight into Michael’s eyes—“is not only Absalom’s. We remember the twenty thousand people killed in the war in the forest, we remember Ahitophel, who committed suicide, we remember David’s terrible lament—the most powerful lament in the Bible—for his beloved son. In order to put an end to David’s lamentations, Joab is obliged to rebuke him by saying that he would have preferred all his subjects to die if only Absalom had lived.” There was a silence, until Tuvia Shai went on: “Do you understand, ladies and gentlemen? That’s the third text. Thank you.” And he sat down.

  “But who’s the poet?” asked the woman in the turban.

  “Zach,” said the clear-eyed young man, looking lovingly at the booklet next to him. The woman in the turban began to write. “Natan Zach?” she asked again. Nobody replied.

  Michael remained seated. He saw the pretty freckled girl leaning over the seated Tuvia Shai and heard her say: “The seminar paper on allusion,” and then the older man say something to him about a signature on his attendance record for the Education Ministry, and someone ask about a tutorial that was held during the first semester, and someone else inquire about the bibliography. Tuvia Shai had already resumed his dull, lifeless expression. Michael asked himself what force of devastating, destructive beauty Tuvia Shai worshiped. Suddenly he understood how Shai could see the relations between his wife and Tirosh as justified. He lowered his eyes to the poem, the booklet still open on the writing arm—the older man was standing next to Tuvia Shai, who was writing something on the slip of paper the man had handed him—and then he noticed something else. Yes, he thought, but not everybody admires that beauty the way you described. It’s not exactly the way you said. Joab, for example, doesn’t admire it and isn’t bowled over by it. Why? Because he’s an army captain. He’s a hero, without any feelings of inferiority. There’s nothing weak or wretched about him.

  He looked again at Shai, who gathered up his papers as he listened to the older student. The picture grew clearer. Michael felt that the time he had spent in the class had clarified for him above all Tuvia Shai’s view of the world.

  Who admires it, that beauty? King David, and Ahitophel, and the speaker in the poem, and you too, Tuvia. Why? Because you dread above all the wretchedness of existence, the awareness of the wretchedness of existence, that’s what’s at the bottom of it. The identification with beauty, the yearning for the sublime, these things enable you to deny the non-beautiful. Now I understand the role Tirosh played in your life. I still have to find out if you were capable of murdering the source of your identification with beauty. I have a feeling that you weren’t. But go and explain all that to Ariyeh Levy. I wouldn’t even be able to explain it to Shorer. Or maybe I could.

  Michael left the room before Shai had time to get up and come over to him. He gave up the idea of the interrogation. Accelerating his pace, he made for the public telephone he had previously noticed in the corridor.

  12

  When Tzilla finally answered the phone, she had nothing new to tell him. Eli Bahar had not yet returned from Tirosh’s house; the polygraph technician was testing Yael Eisenstein. “Ariyeh Klein’s looking for you,” said Tzilla. “He phones every hour and begs to talk to you—he sounds desperate. I had to restrain myself from telling him where you were.” Michael promised that he would contact him. “He’s at home all day, till half past three, and then he’s coming here for the polygraph,” she reminded him. Michael was on the ground floor of the Humanities Building. Near him, at another telephone, a young girl was standing and whispering into the mouthpiece. He looked at the silk trousers and T-shirt she was wearing, and she sensed his eyes on her and turned around.

  And what have you got to tell me? he thought as he dialed Ariyeh Klein’s number. The initial digits identified the neighborhood as Rehavia. Naturally, where else, he thought, with a mother in Rosh Pinna, salt-of-the-earth, pioneering stock—where else would he live but Rehavia? The line was busy; Michael remembered that Ariyeh Klein had three daughters, and he asked himself how long it would take to get through. He looked at his watch and waited. Fifteen minutes later, at a quarter past one, the line was free and Ariyeh Klein answered the phone. “Mr. Ohayo
n,” he said with a sigh of relief. “I’ve been looking for you since yesterday; it’s of the utmost importance that we should speak.” Michael noticed the pure, correct Hebrew of a native of Rosh Pinna. But he also remembered the friendly informality of Klein’s lectures, their meeting in the corridor on Mount Scopus after the discovery of Tirosh’s body, his terror in the face of death, and the clever eyes of this big man—all this banished the hostility aroused in him by Rosh Pinna and Rehavia and the polished Hebrew. The main reason why Michael accepted Klein’s invitation to go to his house in El Harizi Street was curiosity, the childish curiosity that came from not yet having overcome entirely the teacher-pupil relationship between them. He didn’t deny to himself his wish to become familiar with the man, although he knew that this was not the reason he would give to his teammates if they were to ask him.

  Alfandari said nothing when Michael informed him: “We’re going back. I’ll take my own car from the Compound. See that Tzilia gets today’s material; I want it typed up right away, and I want Tuvia Shai brought in for another polygraph test. I never said anything to him about it being inconclusive.” By the way Raffi tightened his lips, Michael knew that he was being criticized. “You think we should arrest him,” he said.

  Alfandari stared ahead at the road, as if he were driving in the dark.

  “He’s not going to run away,” Michael consoled him.

  Only after parking the station wagon in the lot at the Russian Compound did Alfandari say: “No. I know he’s not going to run away,” and added hesitantly: “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

  Michael smiled at him and hoped that the smile did not betray his embarrassment. “Tell Tzilia I’m at Ariyeh Klein’s place,” he said as he turned toward his car.

  He found the house easily and took the path through the back garden, which led to the entrance. As he rang the bell, he felt his breath coming quickly. He was tense, constantly fingering the little recording device in his shirt pocket. The morning’s fatigue was gone. He seemed to be hearing sounds from the house, but he wasn’t sure until the door opened and he identified a string instrument and a piano. He was not familiar with the mysteries of chamber music. When he was sixteen, Becky Pomerantz, his first lover, had told him that this type of music demanded a certain maturity, and she had played only one such record for him—the “Trout” Quintet by Schubert. He didn’t know the music now being played in Ariyeh Klein’s house, but he could tell that it wasn’t coming from a record. As if to confirm this, the music stopped, and loud, girlish voices took its place. When Ariyeh Klein led him to his study, next to the entrance hall, he remarked, “My daughters are practicing,” in an apologetic tone that tried to disguise his pride, and then he shut the door of the room behind them.

  “The door is usually left open; the women of the household are in the habit of popping in and out,” said Klein, “and to tell the truth, I’m usually glad of it.” To close the door, he had to pick up the stack of books acting as a doorstop and move them away. Then he sat down heavily in the chair behind the big desk, which was covered with papers, open books, offprints, and coffee cups.

  Books were everywhere: on the shelves lining the walls, stacks and stacks of them on the sunken floor tiles, some next to the shabby armchair where Michael sat, gratefully sipping the strong coffee Klein had prepared. A large window opened onto the garden, and the air in the room was laden with the scents of damp earth and flowers mixed with the aroma of a vegetable broth. Compared to the heat outside, it was pleasantly cool in the room, the coolness characteristic of the high-ceilinged rooms in the old houses of Rehavia.

  On Klein’s big face Michael read perplexity and pain, and the gentleness and vulnerability there contrasted oddly with his size. The upper half of his body rose broad and sturdy above the desktop, and Michael looked at the thick arms, the gray hair above the high forehead, and the large hands with their long, delicate fingers.

  “We didn’t send them back to school; it didn’t seem worth it in the middle of June,” apologized Klein when the strains of a violin were heard again. It was the first violin in the family quartet, he explained with suppressed pride after sending away his youngest daughter, a girl of about eight, with fair hair and milky skin, who had knocked stubbornly on the door until he opened it and whispered a few words in a firm tone, after which she disappeared, waving the undersized violin she was holding in her hand. His wife, Klein explained, played the cello, and the eldest daughter played the piano. The middle daughter, he said, smiling, refused to take any interest in classical music and fought for her right to play pop music—“but,” he concluded complacently, “we nevertheless have a quartet—I can handle both the violin and the viola.”

  Michael struggled between the wish to behave in a businesslike manner and the desire to get to know Klein. Michael had fulfilled the requirements of what in his day was called “basic studies” by taking courses in the departments of Hebrew Literature and French Language and Literature. He had landed in Klein’s course by chance. It would never have occurred to him to take medieval Hebrew poetry, but he had been advised to attend Klein’s lectures as a complement to a tutorial on Muslim conquests in the Middle Ages, and since the hours had suited his schedule, he had found himself in the big, crowded hall attending the introductory course. During the first lecture he had realized, once more, the truth of the cliché that the subject didn’t matter: what mattered was the teacher. Thanks to Dr. Klein, Michael had learned that there was life in the poems of Shlomo Ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi, texts that had seemed lifeless and tedious to him in high school, and so, in his third year, he had also attended a seminar conducted by Dr. Klein. Now he looked around him, stunned by the chaos of empty coffee cups and scattered papers; there was even a child’s dress lying on one of the bookshelves and an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the floor, and he breathed in the delicious aroma of the vegetable soup that wafted in around the closed door. He noticed the Persian miniature on the desk, and the fruit trees outside the window beyond Klein; he remembered the flower beds in the front garden and felt a mixture of envy and disbelief. The shadow of a thought along the lines of “It’s too good to be true” crossed his mind. There was an incongruity between the lived-in warmth of the room and the earnestness all the books signified. He managed to read Carmina Romana, the title of the book lying face upward on top of the pile next to the armchair. Underneath it he glimpsed Cyrillic letters on the brown and dusty spine of another book. All this testified to a breadth of culture that gave rise in him to an unwilling reverence. He looked at Ariyeh Klein and thought that he was looking at a modern Renaissance man: a man of letters, an intellectual who was also a family man, a gardener, and a cook (he offered Michael a bowl of his vegetable soup with the same simplicity with which he had offered him a cup of coffee and the glass of cold water he had put before him without even asking), and in the final analysis, thought Michael, the complete opposite of Tirosh.

  Now he had to find out, he thought, the significance of Klein’s specialization in the Middle Ages and how this choice expressed the contrast between him and his murdered colleague. In his ears he heard the rich, musical voice of Tirosh, as opposed to that of Klein, the clear, strong, passionate voice he remembered from the lectures in the big lecture hall in the Mazer building on the old Givat Ram campus.

  Klein coughed, looked at him across the desk, and said hesitantly: “Um, I’ve been looking for you since yesterday because there are certain things I have to tell you,” and with an apologetic smile, he added: “I remember you from the seminar on Hebrew and Arabic poetry of the twelfth century.”

  Michael looked at the thick lips, which quivered slightly before Klein went on speaking.“I wasn’t sure, um, that the people I spoke to would take what I had to say seriously. Perhaps that was unjust. I thought they were too young to be familiar with the vicissitudes of academic life.” Again he coughed, in evident discomfort, then he continued: “I’m afraid I have certain prejudices with regard to policemen, whi
ch I find it difficult to overcome.”

  Michael blushed but said nothing.

  “It’s all very vague. I don’t have anything you might call meaty, only impressionistic trivia,” warned Klein.

  In the distance, loud female voices and the sound of breaking glass were heard. Ariyeh Klein inclined his head, smiled apologetically, and took a gulp of coffee from a cup without a handle.

  “I wanted to tell you that Iddo visited me in New York, he even stayed with us in our house at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx. A big old wooden house on the shore of Long Island Sound; my uncle, who was in Israel at the time, lives there. Iddo stayed with us twice: for a week at the beginning of his trip to America, and for three days before his return.”

  “How long was he there all told—a month?”

  Klein nodded.

  “He was there in connection with his Ph.D.? For only a month?”

  Klein briefly explained the research grant from the Institute for Contemporary Judaism that Tirosh had obtained for Iddo. “He spent the first week at libraries and meeting specialists in the problems of minorities in the Soviet Union, especially Jews, of course. He met refuseniks too. He was busy and excited,” said Klein with a tolerant smile, and added: “as we all tend to be when we discover new source materials in our field of research.” And then he resumed in a brisker tone: “During the last week of his stay, Iddo traveled south, to North Carolina, to meet a jurist active on behalf of refuseniks and dissidents in the Soviet Union. The lawyer had a lot of material concerning the people in whom Iddo was interested, particularly Ferber. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ferber’s poetry.”