The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  “Yes.” Michael heard his own voice on the tape player in his hesitant high school English. “Yes, but why did they believe that they could trust you then?”

  Lowenthal had studied Russian history for his B.A. He was very eager to visit the Soviet Union, and when the thaw set in in 1956, there was a big youth festival, and he went to Moscow for the first time in his life. It wasn’t a good time for an American to be in Moscow, but he went anyway. Laughter. It was a peace and friendship festival—again Lowenthal uttered a shrill, nervous laugh, which was intended to be ironical—and there were students there from all over the world. In Gorky Park the Jew approached him.

  You had to understand, he said heatedly, that he was completely green; he not only took insane risks but also was full of fears. You had to beware of traps, but to the same extent you had to beware of aiding and abetting reactionary groups. He wasn’t out to destroy the Soviet Union; he was only interested in the issue of human rights, especially where Jews were concerned. His parents had emigrated to America from Russia; he had family there. The Jew who approached him in Gorky Park knew that he was Jewish, and he knew his family. It was this man who told him that Boris Zinger was responsible for Ferber’s manuscripts, that Ferber had died in prison and that Boris was still alive. The young man worked in a publishing firm and knew Lowenthal’s cousin. The same publisher brought out One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but this of course only happened later. When the man first came up to him in Gorky Park, he only told Lowenthal to be at a spot in Sokolniki Park the next day at five. Lowenthal fell silent, as if reconstructing the episode. The next day he received a bundle of Russian newspapers, with an envelope inside them. In the envelope were masses of poems, in dense, tiny handwriting. He still remembered the hurried, tense voice of the Russian Jew and his pale face, his frightened, darting eyes and broken English, as, for the first time, he heard the names Ferber and Zinger. Actually, when you came to think of it, that was the start of his profound involvement with the lives of Soviet Jews. It was then that he began to take an interest in the fate of Boris Zinger, began to exert pressure for his release. It took a long time, and in the meantime Boris was moved from one prison to another, but in the end Lowenthal succeeded, and they let him go. After thirty-five years, he said with a sigh, but then his eyes gleamed again: it was really tough to get anyone out of the country, yet he had finally managed it, and they had saved him at the last minute, his poor health having been a factor in his release.

  Michael remembered the suspicious look that appeared in Lowenthal’s eyes when he asked why they hadn’t passed the poems to someone from the Israeli delegation to the festival.

  “But they were under surveillance all the time,” he replied impatiently, as if it was too obvious to need saying. “It would have been too dangerous.”

  From Moscow, Lowenthal had flown to Vienna, and there, he said, dropping his eyes, he had met Tirosh. It would never have occurred to him then, he said furiously, that someone like Tirosh . . . These days, for example, he notified people at the other end immediately of the receipt of a parcel, and they kept tabs on everything, but at that time he knew nothing. “How could I have known?” he pleaded. “I was so young too, and he looked so European, so refined and respectable. I was so glad when the book came out; how could I have known that it wasn’t the right book?” Michael did not comfort him.

  He would have the entire statement translated into English, said Lowenthal before they parted, and get Boris’s signature on it in front of police witnesses. If Boris survived the shock. He hoped that Michael would be able to spare Boris the shock of exposure to these painful matters, but as a man of the law, said Lowenthal with a little smile, he could not withhold his cooperation. Especially since he felt guilty, responsible. God knows, Tirosh had seemed so reliable, so serious, so charming, and Lowenthal had only been a young student. How could he have known? So who was actually the author of the poems in Ferber’s book? he asked suspiciously.

  Michael shrugged his shoulders and carefully, slowly spoke a sentence he had often read in English-language books: “Your guess is as good as mine.” Lowenthal remained silent.

  And then, in parting, he said words that echoed in Michael’s mind at three o’clock in the morning in the Carolina Inn as he sat in front of the silent tape player. “There’s no fate worse than that of a mediocre artist,” said Lowenthal dispassionately, in a tone of melancholy philosophical wisdom.

  Michael remembered the pained expression on Shaul Tirosh’s face when Iddo Dudai asked the audience at the departmental seminar: “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?” and he knew now who had written the poems published in Israel under Anatoly Ferber’s name.

  He closed the window and thought that if he succeeded in falling asleep, he would be able to sleep for five consecutive hours before returning to the hospital.

  20

  They all spoke at once: “Tell him we found prints on the car,” said Balilty insistently. “What do you care? What have you got to lose?” “I still don’t think it was because of the poems,” said Alfandari looking around in embarrassment as Tzilla trod heavily from chair to chair and set an additional sheaf of papers in front of them. Eli Bahar repeated the question “What can we do now?” and Ariyeh Levy peered again at the pile of papers in front of him and rubbed his hands on the table. Suddenly his shout silenced them: “Maybe we could hear from the head of our team? Maybe he’s got some suggestions—eh, Ohayon?”

  Everything was blurred: the voices on the tapes buzzed in his head, and his feet still didn’t feel firm on the ground. He tried to shut himself off from the voices in the room, but they continued to penetrate the thick fog. He remained silent.

  “You can say what you like, and you can go on talking until tomorrow, but there’s no meat,” said Ariyeh Levy in a strained voice. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just another lead. You want me to tell you how it’s going to sound in court? With what you’ve got, we can’t hold him for more than forty-eight hours—or maybe you’ve forgotten where you are?” Michael maintained his silence.

  “What do you intend to do?” roared Ariyeh Levy. “Has the cat got your tongue—or are you afraid we won’t understand what you’re saying after all the time you’ve spent hobnobbing with poets and university professors?”

  “I’m not sure how to go about it,” said Michael at last. “He’s not the kind of guy that if I said something to him about fingerprints and so on, that’s what would break him.”

  Not even the C.O. spoke now. A few seconds went by, until Balilty, who could never endure a prolonged silence, asked in a measured tone: “So what will break him?”

  “Something else,” replied Michael slowly, and saw the fog in which he was enveloped spreading to the others. The excitement in the room now became a hum of suppressed suspense, the voices growing more restrained.

  Eli Bahar said despairingly: “Look, I was with him for forty hours all told over the past three days. The guy’s out of it. I’ve never seen anything like it. You saw for yourself, from the tapes; you heard it all. It’s impossible to get through to him. You talk and talk and he’s not there.”

  “There’s a way to reach him,” said Michael, “and I intend to take it. But don’t ask me for any explanations in advance; you’ll have to trust me.”

  “But what about his wife?” protested the C.O. “Why can’t you talk to him about her? What’s going on here?”

  Balilty nodded vigorously and then raised his head to the ceiling and said: “In the last analysis, whichever way you look at it, that story with his wife had to get to him. With all due respect for all your theories, it’s just not possible that a man—”

  “Okay. Bring him in and we’ll see what happens,” said Michael, ignoring the critical looks of his colleagues. Ariyeh Levy expressed the general skepticism: “I want something. I want proof. I want him to break down and confess—I’ve had enough s
ubtleties. Think of a court of law, not a university,” he said, and left the room.

  Michael looked at Shaul, who activated the recording devices. “We don’t want to miss anything,” warned Balilty, and Michael felt the whole wing of the building turn into one giant ear.

  He switched on the tape player. Boris Zinger’s hoarse, trembling, excited voice filled the room. Tuvia Shai folded his hands, but he couldn’t stop them from shaking. He listened to the recording, and as the flood of words poured forth, his face paled. When Zinger’s groans of pain rose from the tape and the question “What is this?” echoed in the room in the Russian Compound, Michael leaned back and examined Shai’s face, which remained blank.

  “You see,” said Michael after a long silence, “I know the whole story.”

  “What story?” inquired Tuvia Shai, pursing his lips.

  “As soon as I came into possession of the evidence, I asked myself about the motive. When the interview with Zinger was over, I asked myself who would be hurt most by the theft, the fraud perpetrated by Shaul Tirosh. Who would be really devastated by it, I asked myself, to the extent of an outburst of violence leading to murder? The only answer to my question was you. When I thought of how you had given up your life, and not only your own life: your wife’s life too; how you had become wiped-out people . . . ” Michael collected the papers strewn over his desk and arranged them in a neat pile in front of him. He waited for a reaction, but Tuvia Shai remained silent.

  “I know that Iddo Dudai spoke to you and played you the tape of his interview with Zinger,” said Michael. “I can imagine how you must have felt after your conversation with Iddo. When it became clear that Iddo had been murdered, you knew who was guilty. You knew very well that Iddo had spoken to Tirosh, that there had been a confrontation, but you only found out about it on Wednesday night, after the departmental seminar. Iddo was broken by it, but not you. The only people who knew about the plagiarism were you and Iddo, and this is the common factor that explains both cases, both the murder of Tirosh and the murder of Dudai. The plagiarism. When Iddo confronted him, Tirosh denied everything and said that any lunatic could say anything. Iddo turned to you and asked you to help him prove it—after all, it’s not every day that the recipient of the Presidential Poet Prize is exposed as a fraud.” Michael carefully examined the pile of papers in front of him. Shai looked at him and said nothing.

  “Once, a few years ago,” said Michael slowly, “I knew a girl who was studying philosophy.”

  Tuvia Shai looked at him patiently.

  “This girl,” Michael continued, weighing every word, “was studying Kant. She was very keen on Kant. There’s no question about it, he was great, right?”

  Shai looked at him in bewilderment but nodded faintly.

  “I’m not telling you this because of the philosophy,” said Michael, glancing around him. “I’m telling you because it’s relevant to what we’re talking about.”

  “I imagine so,” said Tuvia Shai skeptically.

  “This girl knocked on my door one day and told me in tears that Kant was right. She said that ‘everything is transparent’ and spoke about the impossibility of knowing ‘things-in-themselves.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  There was no mistake about it: a new expression flickered on Shai’s face, part interest and part embarrassment. He shifted in his chair.

  “Then I understood,” Michael went on carefully, maintaining a friendly, undramatic tone, “that there are some people who internalize abstract subjects like philosophy, internalize them so profoundly that they come to govern their lives.”

  Tuvia Shai said nothing, but Michael knew that he was listening to every word.

  “You know this yourself,” stated Michael, “but what I couldn’t decide was whether she had simply gone out of her mind or whether . . . ”

  “She hadn’t gone out of her mind,” said Tuvia Shai with an authority which he had not possessed even at the departmental seminar, in the lecture Michael had seen on the television film.

  “I ask myself,” said Michael, and he felt his mouth becoming dry, “if you, too, haven’t gone crazy.”

  A faint flush appeared on the pale cheeks, and the lips began to tremble.

  “You understand,” said Michael Ohayon, and leaned forward, “when I think of how someone must feel who’s devoted his life, his wife, his whole being, to one man, and his idol turns out to have feet of clay—I think that all he can do is go mad. Lose control over his actions.”

  “Nonsense,” said Tuvia Shai heatedly. “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “You understand,” Michael went on as if he hadn’t heard, “after I spoke to Boris Zinger I realized that a thing like this could drive a person out of his mind. Not everybody, but some people, people who take their principles seriously.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tuvia Shai’s voice shook.

  “I thought: How does Boris feel? He did it for Anatoly, devoted his whole life to him, and you heard yourself what he had to say. Nobody in the world knows better than you how Boris felt, although, as distinct from you, he was deceived not by the man he loved but by somebody else, and I’m sure that you’re moral enough to agree with me that this injustice, at least, has to be rectified.”

  Tuvia Shai raised his head. In a muffled voice and with an expression of contempt, he said: “Let’s leave morality to those who have nothing else to pride themselves on.”

  “Your alibi’s weak,” and Michael looked into Shai’s eyes. “And the polygraph, you know—it’s hard to lie successfully in a polygraph; it works on five parameters at once, nobody can overcome them all. When you succeeded in controlling your sweat and your pulse rate, your blood pressure rose. I have to tell you that according to all the polygraph tests, you were lying. But I didn’t arrest you until I had the whole story. You murdered Shaul Tirosh because he made a fool of you. Because he exposed the fact that you had devoted your life to something that was a lie.”

  Michael looked at the new face of the man sitting opposite him. Gone was the lifeless expression of a faded man. There was a power in his face that Michael had never seen there before. Tuvia Shai said furiously: “Who do you think you are? You understand nothing. You don’t know what you’re talking about. My life isn’t so important; neither is yours. And Tirosh’s life wouldn’t have been so important either, if I hadn’t believed that he was the high priest of art. But how can I expect you to understand such things? A person who belongs to a body that hands out traffic reports and breaks up demonstrations can’t understand such things.”

  Not for the first time that morning, Michael thought about Dostoyevsky, about Porfiry and Raskolnikov. Am I like Porfiry? he asked himself as Tuvia Shai spoke. The only thing motivating me now is getting proof that will stand up in court—and my own curiosity. But you couldn’t say that I don’t feel any sympathy for him; there’s something about him that demands respect, he thought as he looked at the man’s face and listened to his words. But I mustn’t show it so openly, he warned himself. I have to get him to talk. To give him the feeling that I really don’t understand but that it’s in his interest to make me understand, since I already know.

  Tuvia Shai went on talking: “I’m not interested in petty things, the private lives of people like you and me, which doesn’t mean that I’m in a hurry to go to jail—why should I be? But my motives and Boris Zinger’s aren’t the same. I understand him, but unlike me he’s bound by the rules of ordinary morality, and he was Anatoly Ferber’s disciple. I was never a blind disciple. I didn’t give a damn for all your rules and conventions, and Shaul Tirosh the man didn’t interest me in the least. I wasn’t jealous of my wife, and I didn’t kill him because he left her. All that presupposes that I put him or her, or myself as the disciple of some person or some theory or other, in the center. I don’t put myself in the center. You didn’t even realize that I don’t feel guilty. You think I’m a psychopath? I’m not. If I’d killed him for personal revenge, I
would have felt guiltier. I have no pangs of conscience. I’m sure I did the right thing, even though nobody will understand what I’m talking about—I’m used to that by now. It never bothered me all those years, the image I had as Shaul’s shadow. You think I didn’t know what people thought? But there’s something bigger than all of us. And it’s true what they said to you there in the U.S., that thanks to art, human beings are able to rise above the vanities of this world. To put it simply, I gave all of myself for the real thing. I don’t expect you to understand my morality; because you represent the police, the blind robot of the law, you wouldn’t understand what it’s all about.”