by Batya Gur
“So speak to me now,” Michael said, and this time he looked aside. It was one thing to look at a suspect during an interrogation, and another to look into the eyes of someone whose behavior causes you deep shame.
“Don’t talk to me like that, in that tone of voice,” Eli said, and carefully rolled the slip of paper he had read from earlier into a little scroll, rolling it and rolling it until it was as thin as a toothpick. “You haven’t heard it from me yet, and definitely the person you heard it from doesn’t know what I know.”
“I’m listening,” said Michael, “and they’re waiting for me in the little room.”
“I heard. I saw. He can wait for a few more minutes,” said Eli Bachar with the calm of someone who has nothing to lose. “I told you, don’t talk to me like that. I’m not just another one of your suspects.”
Things that Tzilla had said, on their way from the synagogue, echoed in his mind now—“Did you see how she talks to her husband? That’s the worst, when you talk in such an ugly way to someone close to you, and that’s the way she talked even before she knew he was lying. People . . . People don’t understand that even between people who are close there has to be respect and courtesy. What am I saying ‘even’ for? Even more. Between people who are close there has to be even more respect and courtesy”—as he looked at Eli Bachar’s face. “You met with Orly Shushan,” said Michael.
Eli crumbled the rim of the plastic foam cup he had pulled from the edge of the desk. “And I can also imagine what they said to you, and who said what to you. And I also know who told you. And the person who told you”—he looked at Michael with an insulted expression—“whose name I don’t want to mention now, no doubt told you that I did this because of some . . . because I was annoyed or angry or to screw everything up.”
As Tzilla fastened her seat belt, she was still shaking her head and saying: “People act disgustingly to the ones who are close to them. They’re sure they have them in their pocket, and that’s what’s nice about you. Maybe the thing I love about you,” she said, and her silver earrings tinkled as she leaned over to pick up the bottle of mineral water on the floor of the car, “is that you never think you have anyone in your pocket. What I hate most is when people think . . . that they don’t need to make an effort anymore. You’d never talk that way to anyone you love,” she said, and took a long sip from the bottle, then wiped its rim and offered it to Michael. “People just don’t like it when people relate to them as if they’re taken for granted. You must never stop making an effort for someone who is important to you.”
Making an effort now meant not to be mean and sneaky, he reminded himself as he looked at the open window behind Eli’s back. From the direction of the entrance to the Russian Compound came the distant, threatening roar of a chorus of rhythmic voices. Seven o’clock in the morning and the Arab women from Sakhnin and Nazareth were already standing and shouting into the Russian Compound. All night long they sat there with their bundles next to the wall, after they had come from their cities to protest the arrest of the men who had participated in the demonstration: their husbands, their brothers, their sons. Then their voices were swallowed up in the sirens, more and more sirens, as if all the police cars were sounding their sirens, one after the other. The place is going up in flames, he mused, and he is busy with one journalist and an ugly, petty story.
There is no point in beating around the bush with a person who is close to you. There was no call here for the cunning that Balilty had recommended. He would gain nothing from it, and anyway it was impossible to turn back the clock. And if there was some chance of working things out with Eli, even the shadow of a chance, it would be better to do it the right way.
“Balilty heard from his sister-in-law who heard from the woman who owns the café,” said Michael finally. “I have no intention of interrogating you or anything. Cards on the table. I thought we were close. I didn’t know that I had to be careful about you, too.”
“Close?” Eli Bachar repeated the word with sarcastic emphasis. “Apparently we don’t think the same thing about what closeness means. There are people who think you can do anything to someone who is close to you. Not I. But that’s a different story and it doesn’t have anything to do with . . .” He stopped speaking for a moment, took a long breath and exhaled noisily. Then he turned around and shut the window. “I’ll tell you exactly how it happened,” said Eli Bachar, “and I’ll tell you the whole truth. I haven’t got anything to hide. This wasn’t the way that I intended . . .” He wriggled uncomfortably in the chair.
Michael crushed out the cigarette before he had smoked it halfway. Eli Bachar had respiratory troubles, and the room was already filled with the smell of cold smoke when Michael crossed his arms.
“She came here, that Orly, looking for you and you weren’t here. I don’t remember where you were, maybe with the girl’s mother, maybe with Yigal Hayoun’s Arab . . . No, I think you were talking to the couple who live opposite, the architect and the ceramicist, nu, Shalev, or with . . . It doesn’t matter. I can’t remember, but you couldn’t be disturbed. She came here and sat down in the corridor. I didn’t want her to see us running around like that and all the details, she . . . I went up to her, I spoke to her and she asked to accompany me on the investigation. I told her to forget it. She said that she had received a complaint about a humiliating attitude toward an Arab. She knew he was called Imad and she knew that he was from Ramallah and with Yigal Hayoun and that he had been arrested because he didn’t have a permit to be here and that this, she said, was just an excuse. She had been told, she said, that you had beaten him during the interrogation and had extracted information from him by force, just because he’s an Arab, and even from before that she knows that you’re a tough interrogator—‘brutal in interrogations,’ that’s what she said. I saw that we weren’t going to get out of this if I didn’t give her something . . .”
“I don’t get it,” said Michael in a strangled voice, not from fear but from anger. “If all those years that we’ve been together . . . You couldn’t come and ask me? You couldn’t have waited? She scared you so much?”
“Yes. No, she didn’t scare me, but I didn’t want . . .” Eli Bachar looked around, and his eyes scurried from side to side just the way Balilty’s did when he was caught sinning. “If I hadn’t. . . . She said that in any case she was going to mention you and that whole story with Imad in the article, and that she also has connections with the television, that she could make a big deal of it and that it was better if you cooperated, because otherwise she will write whatever she knows, and I . . . I didn’t want her . . .” Eli lowered his eyes and did not speak.
Michael did not manage to control the sarcastic tone of his voice. “Uh-huh,” he said with deadly calm. “I get it. It’s only because . . . So for the sake of my reputation you met with her alone, and for my own good you gave her the entire story of my life and—”
“That’s not so!” protested Eli loudly. “That’s not how it was. I didn’t tell her all the things that are in the article, I just—”
“What do you mean you ‘didn’t tell her’?” shouted Michael. “It’s written in a way that it’s clear that everything came from someone, and from inside.”
“Tell me,” Eli asked, and leaned toward Michael from the desk chair that was his, “how come you—aren’t giving me any credit? What am I? Someone off the street? I’m telling you something, I’m telling you that. . . .” The questioning tone turned accusing. “You’re considered an intelligent person, but in certain things you act like . . . a baby. Where do you think you’re living? Have you ever even read anything she’s written?”
“No, never. I never have,” admitted Michael. “I’ve never . . . Until this thing.”
“So you don’t know anything,” Eli said, and turned around and this time opened the window wide. “It’s a technique,” he said, and glanced outside. “That’s the way they write. You don’t say anything and she gets to it through her sources and puts it
in as though you’ve said it. Even me—if Balilty hadn’t told me how she works, I wouldn’t have known that it . . . it’s slanted so that people will think that you spoke to her yourself and gave her all the information.”
“You’ve read this trash. There wasn’t a single word there about Imad or about my brutality in the article,” argued Michael. “Nothing about beating people up or interrogations or anything. Not a word about the whole thing.”
“I fell into a trap,” Eli said gloomily, and crushed the cup, “and believe me I’ve really been eating my heart out about it since then.”
“So what did you say to her, then? And why did you fall into the trap? What are you, a little kid?”
“I was tired,” Eli said, and turned his eyes away.
Michael lit another cigarette and with a mouthful of smoke he said: “I want us only to tell the truth—let’s say not all of it, but with no games. You’re talking with me, not with some . . . And don’t tell me any stories.”
In silence Eli spread out the thin scroll he had rolled and smoothed it with his hand in rhythmical movements as he spoke: “I gave her just the main details—that you’re divorced, that you have a son, that women adore you, that . . . I said . . . I made you a star . . . I thought . . . I thought that if we ever really do leave here and set up the partnersh . . . and set up an office or something . . .”
“You thought you would use this for public relations?” said Michael in astonishment. “Is that what you thought? That if you gave her a piece of my love life or about how successful I am, you could cut it out of the newspaper and hang it up in the office? How exactly did you think that—”
“No,” protested Eli. “I’m not an idiot. I can’t tell you exactly. Maybe it was also because I was annoyed just then, and tired, and she pressured me, so I told her I would talk to her later, and I thought I wouldn’t have to tell her anything, just general stuff and she got the rest out of—God knows whom. Not from me, I swear to you. You can ask her if you don’t be—”
Michael snorted scornfully. “Ask her? Have you gone completely out of your mind?! You’re talking like . . . as if you haven’t understood a thing. I mean, you yourself have seen what she does when you’re nice to her.”
“She really is a bitch,” whispered Eli, “and this is just the first article in a series.”
“She’s not even a bitch,” said Michael. “She’s just your average survivor. That’s what your average survivors look like. She does her job, she thinks it’s what they want from her and she goes for it with all her might, just like us. She puts her hands deep into the shit . . . Never mind, she doesn’t matter to me at all.” He heard his voice break. “She’s not the issue. You’re the issue. And even though it won’t clear things up, I have to tell you that for me . . . that as I see it . . . that I feel that this thing, what you’ve done, as violence. Just plain violence. And I’m asking myself how thick-skinned I can be if I didn’t know that that’s how you feel and that—”
“Like that? So simple?” Eli interrupted him. “Since when are you so simplistic? That’s your question, isn’t it? Isn’t it you who’s been explaining to me from the beginning how people don’t act out of a single motive, especially when it’s a matter of something out of the ordinary? You yourself always explain to me—”
“Yes,” admitted Michael. “It’s simplistic, but when people hurt you, the first thing you ask yourself is why they hate you, why they betrayed you . . . what you’ve done to deserve it and how you ignored A and B and C that were . . . Never mind, it’s not important . . . No, in fact it is important, but we aren’t going to resolve this right now. I don’t know what I did to make you . . .” However, he felt that in fact he did know, but this knowledge, which was vague and refused to be put into words, embarrassed and shamed him; and it necessitated the recognition of an infantile side that had been revealed in Eli Bachar and the recognition of his own insensitivity. “What else did you talk to her about apart from my love life? I want to know what is going to be in the next articles.”
“I told her,” said Eli Bachar, and a ray of sun illuminated locks of gray in his curly black hair, “the truth about the Arab, that you . . . I told her how angry you were at Balilty when . . .” His voice faded. “But I didn’t tell her who . . . I didn’t say ‘Balilty.’ I didn’t mention any names to her, only . . . only that you really didn’t . . .”
“But she somehow understood that it was Balilty?” said Michael coldly. “I’m sure she figured it out somehow.”
“She asked me whether it was someone from the special investigation team,” admitted Eli Bachar, “and I said . . . I think I didn’t answer . . .”
“Did she record the conversation?”
“What am I? A child?”
Michael tilted his head. “They always record, just to be sure, for backup and in case there are complaints . . .”
“I told her,” said Eli heatedly. “That was my condition for talking to her at all and she took notes the whole time about what I agreed that—”
“That you didn’t see a tape,” Michael interrupted him, “doesn’t mean there wasn’t any.”
“I looked really hard,” insisted Eli Bachar. “I saw that she put her bag aside, really far away.”
“But she wears those big shirts. There’s room for—”
“What do you want from me? To do a body search on her? And anyway, she was wearing a tight sweater, black, with a low neckline,” said Eli Bachar. “She even made eyes at me, or at least it seemed to me she did, stretching and giving me sidelong glances, asking how it was for me and my wife to work together, being together all the time, but I didn’t take it personally. I thought it was part of—”
“You could at least have exploited the situation to get something out of her,” Michael said bitterly, and glanced at his watch.
“She digs into everyone’s life there,” said Eli. “I don’t think she has anything sensational. You see what she writes there—she doesn’t even mention Avital by name, just a married man who is one of the suspects, with whom Zahara Bashari purportedly had an affair, and that we questioned him and arrested him. I asked her about that and she said, ‘I was told,’ but she wasn’t prepared to give details and I’m sure that she doesn’t know any more than that.”
For a moment there was silence, and Michael was aware of his temple throbbing and the dryness in his throat and mouth. This conversation hadn’t brought any relief, any sense of release. Maybe it would have been better had he said something about Eli’s jealousy, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak about this because of the embarrassment, and because he could imagine Eli’s voice, scornful and dismissive, saying to him: “Jealous? Me? What woman?” Or he would say to him: “What do you think you are?” He undid his watch strap, set the watch down in front of him and rubbed his wrist, and instead of asking whether Eli was jealous of his relationship with Yair, he heard himself, despite himself, because he felt that the question would be invasive and insulting, ask: “Tell me, what really happened? Tell me what . . . What have I done to you?”
Eli Bachar shrugged. “To me?” he said. “You haven’t done anything to me. Not a thing.”
“I thought that we’d manage to talk truthfully, frankly,” said Michael without disguising the note of disappointment. He put his watch back on, stuck the cigarette packet in his jeans pocket and pushed back the chair.
Eli also got up. He put his hands in his pants pockets and looked as though he had something else to say. Michael looked at him for a moment without speaking and went to the door.
“Do you think that this is it?” burst out Eli. “That we’re done with it?”
Michael stopped and turned around. Astonished, he looked at Eli’s narrow, tanned face, which had now faded, and at the two dark circles under his eyes. “Do you think that between one thing and another, for the meantime, it’s possible to make everything all right?” whispered Eli without looking at him. “Do you think that first you’re going to make air out
of me and promote . . . that baby and leave me . . . and put me on the shelf and then you’re going to come along and tell me you’re ‘hurt’ and ‘aggression’ and ‘violence,’ and I’m going to go down on my knees? You’ve put me aside—so I’m sidelined. What do you think, huh? To ‘talk truthfully’? That I’m in your pocket?”
“Oh, so that’s it. That’s what’s the matter,” said Michael quietly. “In the end you let it slip out.”
“It has nothing to do with it!” yelled Eli in a higher voice than ever. “It has nothing to do with it. It was just a coincidence that—”
“There is no such thing as coincidence,” said Michael, and suddenly he sensed something else in his own expression, something he did not understand and had not expected. A kind of film was shed from his eyes, and sorrow looked out from them, and some other deep emotion, as if in Eli’s hurt he had heard something else, more important and heartbreaking than all that had been said between them. And then, with embarrassment, and as if with no strength, he held out his hand and softly touched Eli’s shoulder, and left.
The corridor was not empty and his footsteps were not the only ones that echoed. Doors opened and telephones rang and people hurried past him. Somebody tapped his arm and someone else said, “What’s up, Ohayon?” Apparently what had happened in his room was obvious on his face, because there was no doubt that Tzilla, who was standing in the corridor with her hand on the door handle, was alarmed when she asked as he came up to her: “What happened?”