by Batya Gur
About fifteen years ago, Klein said—he could work out the exact date if it was important—he was coming out of a classroom in the Mazer Building on Givat Ram, when he found a young girl dressed in black waiting for him next to the gallery balustrade. He remembered exactly where she was standing, he said, running his tongue over his lips. She wanted to talk to him. He had never met her before, and he invited her into his office because she had an air of desperation about her. She told him how she had met Shaul. “When she mentioned his name,” said Klein, smiling, “I thought she was one more victim, like all the others who were always falling in love with him. But she seemed younger than the rest, more vulnerable, and, in general, different.”
You mean more beautiful than all the rest, Michael interpreted. Klein went on to tell him about the period when Tirosh’s girls would come and cry on his shoulder and he would comfort them. Michael’s lips tightened for a moment, and he asked himself if he was jealous, but he said nothing and listened patiently to the story of the “special young girl” whom Tirosh married during his sabbatical in Canada, after he had made her pregnant, how he had withdrawn into himself, and how, without saying anything, he had forced her to have an abortion, to let go of him, and to return to Israel alone and humiliated. “He treated the whole thing like a game,” explained Klein in astonishment. “He invited her to Canada, and then he changed his mind, he simply changed his mind.” He shook his head in incomprehension.
Michael asked why Yael had wanted to talk to him that first time.
“As soon as she had recovered from the abortion, she got on a plane and flew back to Israel; she simply ran for her life. Apparently she felt the need for support from someone who was close to Shaul Tirosh. I gave her all the support I could, I spoke to her for hours, in the end I even wrote to Shaul about her. I had the impression,” he explained apologetically, “that I had influence over him, that Shaul respected me.” Yes, Shaul had cooperated and had not opposed the divorce, but ever since then the barrier between Tirosh and himself had grown higher. And he had always had a special relationship with Yael after that, as if he felt guilty toward her. Klein’s face clouded over.
Michael asked for an explanation of this guilt.
“It’s true,” stammered Klein, “she wasn’t the only one he made pregnant—there were two other two cases—but she was so young and so anxious, so fragile,” and Michael remembered the gentle voice that had answered: “just something years ago,” when she was asked about her relations with Tirosh.
Aloud, he contented himself with asking why she had kept it a secret.
Klein shrugged his shoulders and replied that Tirosh didn’t like being reminded of his guilt and Yael had suffered a severe trauma then, what with the abortion and the humiliation, “even though afterward she behaved as if it was all over and forgotten.”
Again there was a silence, which Klein broke by saying philosophically that there were people who were unable to bear the ugliness of existence. People like Yael, he explained, suffered at the sight of a trash can. Dirty dishes in the sink, blood, body secretions, the smell of sweat in a bus, beggars, a peeling wall—“all these things are ugly to her,” he said passionately. “You can’t just put it down to self-indulgence. If you knew the way she reacted, you would understand. Sometimes I ask myself how she manages to exist at all. There are people like that,” he said persuasively, “and there are others who live for beauty, like Tuvia Shai, which is a completely different phenomenon.” Michael felt his body stiffening and asked for an explanation.
“A few years ago I was with Tuvia at an academic conference in Rome, and I went with him to the Capitoline Museum. We were looking at the busts of the Roman emperors, and I turned to Tuvia to say something to him about the face of Marcus Aurelius, and Tuvia wasn’t there. I looked around and saw him standing next to the ‘Dying Gaul.’”
Michael nodded. He remembered the statue, the smoothness of the marble, the muscles in the arm of the figure trying not to fall to the ground.
“I didn’t dare approach him,” said Klein. “I stood to one side and looked at the expression on his face. It was one of utter self-abandonment. I’ve never seen his eyes so alive, so full of expression, as they were at that moment in the gallery, when he was alone, on his own, carefully stroking the marble. I understood a lot of things then.”
“What, for example?” asked Michael brutally, and stole a look at his watch before fixing his eyes on Klein again.
“His attitude to Shaul, his joy in his company. Tuvia isn’t moved by the beauty of nature—a mountain landscape or a sunset at sea. He seeks the perfection of art. At lunch after our visit to the gallery he could speak of nothing else but that—the perfection of art. He paid no attention to the food, he drank the wine as if it were water. He spoke like a man trying to revive a memory connected to a beloved woman,” and Klein stopped himself—perhaps he felt exposed—and fell silent, directing at Michael a sad and mocking look.
“You alluded before to Tuvia’s private life,” Ariyeh Klein continued hesitantly. “Not many people would be capable of understanding the situation. Perhaps now you’ll be able to see the well-known facts in a different light, perhaps you’ll be able to understand Tuvia Shai’s total self-abnegation vis-à-vis Shaul Tirosh the poet, his willingness to give his all. He would have given Shaul his life, if he had wanted it, never mind his wife.”
“I wanted to ask you something else, in the light of what you’ve told me about Iddo Dudai,” said Michael, as if he had not heard what Klein had just said.
Klein looked at him and waited.
“Did Iddo Dudai play you the tapes of his interviews in America?”
“No,” said Klein carefully. “He only told me that he was going to record them.”
“And he never played you a tape or a copy of one?” Michael peered intently at Klein.
Klein shook his head a few times and then said, “No.”
“Because we have the tapes, and there’s no interview with a lawyer in North Carolina; there’s nothing like that at all.”
“Perhaps he didn’t record that interview?” ventured Klein.
“Why should he record everything else and not that?” insisted Michael, staring at Klein, who appeared embarrassed and confused.
“I have no idea,” said Klein. “Would you like me to look for the lawyer’s number now? It could take hours in this mess.”
“Not necessarily this very second, but sometime today.” Michael reflected for a moment and then added: “When you find it, call me. If I’m not there, give the number to Tzilla Bahar.”
There’s something genuine about you, despite all the lofty talk. But why do I have the feeling that you, too, are hiding something? thought Michael as he started his car and looked back at Klein, who was standing at the window. And then he remembered that all the time he had been with Klein, he hadn’t thought once of Maya, and he felt a sudden pang of loneliness. Again he looked at the flowered curtain waving in the window, and then he put his hands on the blazing-hot steering wheel.
13
Inside the Russian Compound building the heat was as stifling as it was outside. Michael went into his office and found Eli Bahar rummaging through papers that he was extracting from a big plastic bag.
“Is there anything new?” asked Michael, and he took a swig from the bottle of juice Eli handed him. “I’ve got something new to tell you,” he went on, without waiting for an answer, and put the bottle down. Eli Bahar looked at him expectantly.
“You remember the boxes of cassettes? With the space for one more?”
Eli nodded.
“He had an encounter that either he didn’t record or that he did and the cassette’s missing.”
“Klein told you?”
“Yes. He knows about a meeting that Dudai traveled eight hours there and back to go to. He returned in a state of collapse, and I’ve no idea why.”
“And Klein doesn’t know what went on there?”
“No. He only k
nows that he met a lawyer and some Russian Jew who was staying with him.”
“Okay,” said Eli with a sigh. “You want me to leave this stuff and go and search the place again?”
Michael nodded. “And search his office on Mount Scopus again too.”
“But we’ve already taken all this stuff from there,” said Eli in despair.
“Take Alfandari with you. I want to talk to Ruth Dudai again too, so you can go and get her and bring her back here with you first.”
“Assuming she’s there,” said Eli doubtfully.
“She’ll be there. She won’t be going anywhere in this heat with a baby,” Michael assured him.
Michael spent the next hour going through the transcripts of the cassettes that had been found in the home of Iddo Dudai. He scanned the typewritten pages filled with place names, dates, and the complicated names of people unknown to him. Only when Tzilla came in did he realize how much time had passed.
“She’s here,” said Tzilla.
“Can you wait for Balilty in the conference room? I’ll manage with Mrs. Dudai on my own,” said Michael, and handed her the transcripts. Eli Bahar brought Ruth Dudai into the room and practically deposited her in the chair opposite Michael. “I’m off,” said Eli.
At six o’clock there was nothing left to do. The interview with Ruth Dudai had led nowhere, Eli Bahar had not yet returned from Mount Scopus, Tuvia Shai was undergoing a second polygraph test, and Michael sat idly in his office. The telephone didn’t ring. The polygraph man can report to Tzilla, he said to himself as he went down to his car.
The air was cooler, but his movements were slower than usual, and he turned into Jaffa Street with cars hooting behind him and drove mechanically to Givat Ram, where he parked in front of the almost empty campus.
He walked slowly through the gate and stared at the well-tended lawns, where no one sat anymore, and the old pictures rose before his eyes—the dozens of liberal arts students who used to lie sprawled on the grass between lectures or who were on their way from the library to the cafeteria, the green grass dotted with their bright clothing, the paths where everyone would stroll, as if there was all the time in the world then. Then, before they moved the humanities to Mount Scopus. Only five years ago, thought Michael, you never saw science students here on the lawn; they were all in the back wing of the university, poring over their experiments in the laboratories. And now that all the buildings had been turned into laboratories, the science students walked on the paths with a brisk, purposeful efficiency that made Michael wonder what purpose people could have in a world that no longer seemed to have purpose. He stopped to look at the new name on what had once been the Lauterman Building: it was now the Berman Building. There were piles of broken chairs in the entrance lobby, but he didn’t go inside, remembering that on a previous visit he had seen that the rooms had been converted into offices. What had been wrong with this campus that they found it necessary to build the monster on Mount Scopus and turn Lauterman into a ghost building? What kind of generation was growing up inside that stone fortress? he asked himself again, and then he shook himself and hurried toward the National Library building.
The first thing that struck him was the smell. The same smell of books and bindings and wood and people still permeated the catalogue room, and then he noticed the boxes of cards, the red cards for the general reading room and the blue cards for the Judaic and Oriental Studies reading room. There were innovations too—computer terminals stood on the round black counter, and behind them sat middle-aged women who answered questions patiently and politely. His movements grew swifter as he stood in front of the catalogue cupboards and pulled out the drawer labeled “Ti-Tr” and began writing the names and catalogue numbers of poetry books on the request cards. Remembering his student years—when he would wait eagerly for some rare item, only to find a red slip awaiting him in the reading room with the words: “Not found in the stacks”—Michael Ohayon ordered all the copies, taking particular care to request the reserved copy, marked by the letter R; he asked for Tuvia Shai’s A Commentary on Tirosh as well, inserted all the cards into the slot with the word “Requests” engraved above it in black letters, and asked how long it would take for the books to arrive. The student behind the counter said: “At least an hour,” and Michael sighed—that hadn’t changed. He turned toward the stairs leading up to the library floor and then retraced his steps to the catalogue room and searched feverishly through the works of Agnon. He ordered two copies of Shira, one of them the first edition, and went back to the stairs. In the library, the ghostly atmosphere of the campus disappeared, although the old cafeteria on the ground floor was no longer there, and his heart again suffered a pang. And it was in the Judaic Studies reading room—where he paged through various literary journals, reflecting on Israeli endeavors to be part of the international scene and wondering at the tides of the articles, which seemed utterly obscure to him (“Semiotic Connections and Bound Combinations,” “Emotive Functions of Free Indirect Speech”)—it was there that he was seized by murderous rage against Maya and her husband and the world at large, and for this he didn’t reprimand himself. Only anger, Michael Ohayon knew, would help him to mobilize the energy required to investigate this case, and he would have to mobilize all his powers of concentration, to be at his best, in order to succeed in penetrating an academic discipline of which he was almost completely ignorant—because a common reader like himself, he knew, was ignorant indeed of the mysteries of contemporary literary criticism.
For hours Michael sat in the reading room, poring over articles and footnotes. Once, he raised his eyes and saw before him Professor Nechama Leibowitz, whom he regarded as one of the giants of the old world, and when he saw her walking toward the librarian’s counter, inclining her head, with its eternal brown beret, and heard her gruff voice attempting to whisper to the librarian: “But it doesn’t mean me, that’s not my book, it must be my brother’s,” and saw the kindly smile illuminating her face as she returned to her place, he sighed a sigh of relief and went back to studying the critical and interpretive essays on Tirosh’s poetry and the essays by Tirosh on other poets, especially unknown ones. He paid particular attention to Tirosh’s column, devoted to criticism of contemporary literature, in the quarterly Directions—it was entitled, often only too aptly, “Notes from a Poisoned Pen”—and applied himself to understanding the aesthetic criteria of the man who had heaped praise on poets who were completely unknown at the time and with whose names and work even Michael was now familiar. And the venomous barbs directed at poets of whom Michael had never heard, these, too, he studied.
Not all the poems praised by Tirosh spoke to Michael’s heart. Some of them seemed to him a conglomeration of unintelligible words. But he recognized Shaul Tirosh’s power to determine the “poetry map” of Israel, and acknowledging this power induced in him a tension he could not understand.
On a sheet of paper he had obtained from the young librarian, he wrote down the names of the poets and writers whom Tirosh had attacked with ruthless cruelty.
In the first numbers of the magazine Literature, Michael found two articles by Tirosh, which examined, with his customary seriousness, the poet Shaul Tchernichowsky. The opening paragraphs reviewed the criticism of Tchernichowsky’s poetry, and in a few lucid sentences Tirosh demolished the accepted interpretations of his lyrical poems and set forth a new critical direction, which to Michael’s own surprise caught his interest. Then he opened the first-edition copy of Agnon’s Shira and saw that the last chapter was indeed missing. He leafed through the unfinished novel, set the volume aside, and turned to the fifth edition, the additional copy he had ordered out of habit in case the other copies were out. He glanced mechanically through the book, not expecting to find anything. But as he turned the pages, he suddenly saw the heading: “Last Chapter.” While he read the chapter, Aharonovitz’s words rang in his ears. He also read attentively the note by Emuna Yaron appended to the new edition: “At the same time that my f
ather was writing Shira he also wrote the story ‘Forevermore.’ After Shira was published, Raffi Weizer of the Agnon Archives came across a handwritten page connecting ‘Forevermore’ with the novel. In other words, at some stage ‘Forevermore’ was taken out of Shira and turned into a separate story. In ‘Forevermore’ the scholar Adiel enters a lepers’ hospital and never comes out again; he stays there forevermore.”
Michael was horrified. The description of Manfred Herbst entering the lepers’ hospital filled him with terror. He thought of the accidental way in which he had discovered the chapter and wondered why he hadn’t continued to discuss the question of the last chapter with Klein. He sensed that there was something he needed to understand in what he had read, but he didn’t know what it was. Above all, what confused him was the feeling that this last chapter described something terrible, almost revolting. Agnon had not left in the connecting bridge to the last chapter, and so although Michael knew what the end would be, he was unable to explain why. I don’t understand how it connects with Tirosh, he thought as he passed through the periodicals reading room, after indicating the pages he wanted to copy.
In the periodicals reading room, he found the literary supplements in whose pages Aharonovitz and Tirosh had waged war for months on end. The war had begun with an academic argument about Yehuda Amichai’s lastest book of poetry, and it continued in bitter personal attacks by Aharonovitz on Tirosh’s method of criticism, which went so far as to include a remark expressing explicit reservations about his poetry, alongside a general appreciation of its value. (“There is no need for any further evidence in order to point out the flawed nature of his poetry, poetry whose importance, of course, is not in any doubt. The essential flaw that undermines his poetry and sets it on feet of clay—or, to use his own imagery, on ‘feet of melting snow’—is the lack of any organic connection between its parts, any affinity between its structures and its contents, which may, in themselves, be compared to a conglomerate—a terrifying but random collection of details from every field and corner of the world. . . .”) Michael noted the difference between the style of Aharonovitz’s writing and the Talmudic style of his speech, and he smiled to himself.