by Batya Gur
“Absolutely positive,” Rubin answered, his body tense. “I wish I had—this whole situation is completely out of hand, believe me. I was looking for him like crazy before this, before they found Zadik. I wanted to tell him his production of Iddo and Eynam had been approved—that is to say, that he can complete it—but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I haven’t heard from him since yesterday. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, I’m worried about him. I can’t understand how he hasn’t even called me, at the very least—”
“And you have no idea who this person was who allegedly took him away?”
“Why ‘allegedly’?” Rubin asked, incredulous. “That’s what Sarah said. She was there in the house, wasn’t she?”
“Benny Meyuhas and Sarah have a very close relationship,” Michael noted.
Rubin shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “People say that the relationship between a director and his actors is always close.”
“Oh, come on,” Michael said, “we’re not children here, you know what I mean.”
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Rubin countered.
“I’m asking you,” Michael said. “I’m asking you whether he spoke with you about this young woman, Sarah, and I’m asking you to tell me anything that comes to mind about the man who picked up Benny Meyuhas—who you think that could have been, even if there doesn’t seem to be any grounding in fact for your ideas. And I’m also asking you about Benny Meyuhas’s relationship with Zadik, and where you think he might be, because under the present circumstances he is not only a suspect, it’s also possible that his life is in danger. You certainly understand that he is very shaky right now, that he could harm himself. You two are very close friends; this is no time to conceal things.”
“That’s true, we’re very close friends. Even more than that,” Rubin said. “We’re brothers. Benny Meyuhas is my brother.”
“You’re speaking metaphorically, right?”
“A brother you’ve chosen to be your brother is often closer than a biological brother,” Rubin said, lowering his gaze.
“You’ve known each other since you were kids,” Michael stated, his eyes on a photograph in the right-hand corner of the corkboard. It was the same photo of a school field trip he had seen, framed, at Benny Meyuhas’s house, featuring a youthful Benny and Rubin and a third friend, along with Tirzah.
“Since we were kids,” Rubin said, following his gaze. “I’m an only child, Benny, too. My parents were old: Holocaust survivors. My father died when I was twelve. My mother is still alive. Benny’s folks were old, too, I think one side of the family came from Turkey, and the other—I don’t remember, maybe Bukhara. Things were pretty tough in his home. His parents didn’t have any children, and after ten years of marriage his father took another wife and had three daughters with her. Then suddenly Benny’s mother got pregnant and he was born. The father divided his time between the two houses and ran around trying to make a living to support two families. They were poor, we weren’t. We had reparation payments from Germany, they got welfare. Benny would come to my house, I would help him with his homework. We played soccer, that’s how it all started. We became inseparable.”
“And what about Sroul?” Michael asked, gazing at the photograph.
After a long pause Rubin sighed. “Yeah, Sroul, too. Who told you about Sroul?”
Michael did not respond.
“We met Sroul when we were fourteen, in the ninth grade. He was…he came from a Revisionist household, his father had come from Iraq and married a Polish Jew; in Israel he was part of Menahem Begin’s inner circle, a member of the Irgun…I don’t remember exactly, I think he was in the Jewish Underground; wherever Begin was, he was there too. After that Sroul came along with us to the youth movement and the immigrant camps. Caused a big scandal in his house, they wanted him to be in the Beitar Youth Movement and all that….” Rubin fell silent, then after several seconds, added, “But he doesn’t live in Israel any longer.”
“He left after the war,” Michael said. “Because of his injury.”
“He lives in Los Angeles, became ultra-Orthodox,” Rubin said bitterly. “At first we kept in touch, but it’s been years since…” Rubin’s voice faded out but Michael waited in silence. “We haven’t spoken in years,” Rubin said.
“Only Tirzah did,” Michael said simply, as if stating a fact. “She’s the only one who kept in contact with him all these years.”
“Tirzah!” Rubin said, astonished. “No way! What did Tirzah have to do with—”
“She was your girl, not just yours but Benny’s and Sroul’s too. That’s her in this photograph, isn’t it? The Three Musketeers and all that?”
“Sure, she was once, when we were young, but—”
“A month before her death, she visited the United States,” Michael said. “We think she might have gone to meet him.”
“No way!” Rubin said, visibly agitated. “She went for work, two weeks on a business trip. Most of the time she was in New York, she had meetings with producers—I don’t know, I suppose she could have been on the West Coast too…” A note of caution crept into his voice. “I don’t know the details of her trip, I never had a chance to talk to her about it afterward,” he said.
“In fact, she spent three days in Los Angeles,” Michael informed him. “We know this for sure. We have the details on her hotel and her meetings there,” he said without altering the expression on his face; in actual fact, he had no such information. “Don’t you think she would have met up with Sroul there?”
“No, I don’t,” Rubin said. “Do you want some more coffee?”
“Why don’t you think so? Don’t you think that if she’d gotten as far as Los Angeles—even if she was on business—she would have taken the time to try and find someone who had been so very important to her in her youth? In her place, wouldn’t you have tried?”
“If that’s true, she didn’t mention it to me,” Rubin said flatly. “Not to me, and not to Benny. Benny would have told me about it.”
“Do you have Sroul’s address?”
“Why are you so interested in him?” Rubin asked in a tone of wonder, though Michael thought he could discern a hint of agitation, too.
“It seems fairly natural that we would be interested in him, especially since the last person who saw Zadik alive was an ultra-Orthodox man whose skin was badly burned. It only seems natural to think it was your friend Sroul, don’t you think?”
“That’s impossible,” Rubin said after a short silence. “Sroul didn’t have any connection to Zadik, he never even met him. Why would…? And if Sroul had come to Israel, don’t you think we would have known about it?”
“I’m asking you that very question,” Michael said. “That’s exactly what I’m asking you: if he were to come to Israel, would he contact you or Benny Meyuhas?”
“There’s no question about it,” Rubin said. “I would know about it in advance. No question.”
“Tell me,” Michael said slowly. “Sroul’s well-off, isn’t he?”
“How should I—I think he’s done well for himself, maybe in diamonds,” Rubin said reluctantly. “He married an American woman, ultra-Orthodox, her father was in the diamond polishing business. They were rich. She, the eldest daughter, was born with some kind of birth defect; a paralyzed hand or something. I don’t know all the details, but they married them off to one another because, well, she was the kind they had to find someone for.”
“You’ve never met her?” Michael asked, surprised. “Didn’t they invite you to their wedding?”
“No, I’ve never met her,” Rubin said. “I met up with him only twice, years ago, in Los Angeles. He didn’t even bring me to his home, I didn’t understand why. That is, I did understand why. It was because he had a new life, he didn’t want to remember who he had been before. It was strange between us, he…he wasn’t the same person I’d known. He’d become this Orthodox Jew in the full sense of the word, saying blessings before taking a bite from a piec
e of fruit, or when he came out of the bathroom. You know what I’m talking about?”
Michael nodded. “When was the last time you saw him?” he asked.
Rubin thought for a while before answering. “Seventeen years, I think. I’m not sure,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s hard to keep in touch after so many years. We didn’t even exchange greetings at Rosh Hashanah, or talk on the phone for that matter. I felt he wasn’t interested in keeping in touch. That was the feeling he gave me. And he didn’t like what I do for a living.”
“Why not? Because of your politics? Is he politically right-wing?”
“Not exactly,” Rubin said, restless. “He was…he became anti-Zionist. I mean, in his opinion he became a true Zionist, like the Neturei Karta sect, the ultra-ultra-Orthodox kind who don’t think a Jewish state should even have been established in the Land of Israel before its time, before the arrival of the Messiah. Sroul said it was a profanity, that sort of thing. It was unbelievable. Suddenly someone you knew as well as you knew yourself was talking like some evil spirit had gotten inside him. I saw there was no sense talking to him. Our second meeting was a disaster.”
“And what about Benny?”
“What about him?”
“Was he in touch with Sroul?”
“Not at all. Just like me. He met with him more often than I did, maybe four times, because Benny’s stubborn and thought maybe he could change Sroul’s mind. But they broke off contact ten years ago or so, and Tirzah, too.”
“And yet,” Michael said, glancing down at a pile of yellowing newspapers, journals, photographs, and cassettes stacked nearby, “and yet he was the one who financed the production of Iddo and Eynam, and you are the one who solicited the money from him, right?”
Rubin sat up straight in his chair. For a long moment he did not speak, then, clearly rattled, he regarded Michael. “That’s…Benny can’t ever know about that,” he said, his voice choked. “I don’t know how you got hold of that information, nobody in the world knew about it but Zadik and me. And Sroul, of course. Even Tirzah didn’t know, and certainly not Benny or Hagar or anybody else. That was my secret with Zadik; Zadik was a man of his word, he would never have leaked that to you people. Benny’s ego completely depended on the belief that finally his talents had been recognized. You think they would have ever let him do a project like this without outside funding?”
“But it wasn’t seventeen years ago that you were in contact with Sroul, it was more like a year and a half,” Michael stated dryly. “This isn’t the time to hide things like that, and I am asking you to tell me exactly what and how, all the details. And for that purpose,” he said as he placed a recording device on the table, pushed the play button, and stated the date, the hour, and the name of his interviewee, “I will record this conversation.”
“You think the Orthodox Jew who visited Zadik was Sroul,” Rubin said ponderously. “I can’t say I didn’t think of that, but I prefer—”
“I will ask you to tell me in detail how you made contact with him and what monies were transferred for the purpose of the production Iddo and Eynam,” Michael stated pointedly.
Rubin looked around as if hoping to gain time, though this time he did not try to offer refills on coffee. “Okay,” he said at last, “I thought somebody had to help Benny express his full potential. He’s fifty, like me. If a man can’t do what he’s been dreaming of all his life by the time he reaches fifty…you have no idea how many people he approached to produce the Agnon story and how many times he was rejected. I wanted—I’m telling you, Benny is like a brother to me. My only brother.”
“Sroul, too, if brothers are measured in their willingness to come up with two million dollars,” Michael noted.
“In that sense, yes,” Rubin said. “I knew that if I asked him for the money, and if it was for a story by Agnon and not some of the usual political stuff or something too contemporary, that he’d give it.”
“You met with him,” Michael said as he consulted the spiral notebook in his hand, intentionally taking his time; he recalled exactly the dates marked in the secret files from Zadik’s office, but he was listening to Rubin’s heavy breathing and sensed the tension in his body even before Rubin stretched his legs. “You met with him exactly two years ago during Hanukkah, in Los Angeles.”
“I went to his house,” Rubin admitted. “Without phoning in advance. I waited for him, ambushed him really, I had the address from…from family of his in Israel, he had this relative in—never mind, I don’t even remember. I knew he had five kids, I knew all along what was happening with him…you could say I’m the sentimental type, I couldn’t accept the way he’d cut himself off. I don’t take no for an answer, as you know from my work, from my program. My whole life, I’ve set my mind to something—anyway, I went there, waited for him, ambushed him, pleaded with him. He agreed. Even an ultra-Orthodox Jew can perform a good deed for a secular Jew! That’s how he came to be the secret, silent producer. Nobody knew about him, our shadow producer. The agreement was that no one would ever know, and I had no intention of talking about it with anyone, but you already—I don’t know how you found out—”
“You of anyone should know about that sort of thing,” Michael said, indicating the pile of cassette tapes by the foot of the table. “Your work is also based on investigations, and you’ve been at it for a while. You yourself told me how you’d latched onto that doctor, and about the family of that Palestinian kid who was tortured.”
“That’s true,” Rubin said with a sigh. “But I really didn’t want Benny to know about this. Not Benny or anyone else because—you have to understand what a humiliation it is for a director of Benny Meyuhas’s caliber to be dealing with the junk he does here. They’ve given him the worst: religious programming, entertainment, kids—all of it. And once in a few years a film, usually a documentary, something neutral, meaningless, and he’s—”
“How did that happen?” Michael wondered.
“That’s Israel Television for you,” Rubin answered bitterly. “This isn’t exactly Cinecittà here, this place has really come down in the world…. Benny started working for Israel’s official television station right at its inception, and he had high hopes, he thought—at first he really did get to direct a few things, you can see for yourself in the archives, I even have a few of them—there was no video then, no video cameras, so I had them transferred to videocassettes just a few years ago. I can show you what a talented guy he is. But then little by little he got pushed aside, it’s been years since…He wasn’t capable of leaving, he wasn’t the self-starting type. He needed security, he’d pretty much given up; he was just sitting around waiting to retire. You can’t imagine how happy he was when Zadik called him in to inform him about Iddo and Eynam. Suddenly he’d reverted to what he’d been once, like when we were young, it was—”
“So he had no reason to bear a grudge against Zadik?” Michael asked.
“None whatsoever,” Rubin insisted. “On the contrary. I’ve already told you and I’ve told the district commander, Shorer, and I’ve told the police commissioner himself: no one in the world knows Benny better than I do. It’s not just that he could never harm another human being; he wouldn’t even hurt a fly! He didn’t have any reason to kill Zadik, it makes no sense for him to do something like that. There’s no way that Benny’s a murderer, he’d be incapable in any situation. He’d prefer to kill himself before killing anyone else, in fact—well, anyway, in light of the circumstances and everything you know about him, I guess I can tell you that he did try to commit suicide once. He swallowed pills because he thought he was about to be fired. He almost succeeded. You have no idea how worried I am about him right now because—” The telephone rang, putting a stop to his nervous prattle. Rubin fell silent and wiped his face; he stared at the phone, shrugged his shoulders, and let it continue ringing. “In any case, it’s not Benny,” Rubin said to the room at large. “If he calls, it will be to my cell phone.”
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sp; “Who exactly was responsible for…failing to make use of Benny’s talents, or, as you see it, for his humiliation?” Michael asked.
“There’s no one person,” Rubin said after a long moment of silence. “Certainly not Zadik, if that’s what you’re hinting at. It’s more a matter of the state of the world today and the powers that are at work in it, not really about specific people here at Israel Television. It’s a question of ratings and money and compromises and power struggles and the nature and meaning of this medium—television—which has so much power, both to destroy and sometimes to build. And it’s about what’s happened to how Israel sees itself, and what Israel thinks about literature and art, about the writers Bialik and Agnon. And it’s about the fact that Israel Television has become so closely aligned with the government, which wants to believe that most Israelis are stupid and soulless. It’s a good thing that the current director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority was not in charge when the money came in, he never would have given it—he would have confiscated it and used it for some grand spectacle, a big variety show. Or some big Hanukkah party. Oh well, I guess it’s stupid to expect—after all, there’s no real affinity between television and art in the commonly accepted meaning of the terms.”
“Really?” Michael asked. “Do you really believe that? On principle? What about the BBC? What about people like Dennis Potter?”
“No, of course you’re right,” Rubin answered, then added, sadly: “Television can certainly be an incubator for great art. The problem is what’s become of us, and television is the symbol, the place where you can sense it most clearly, the nation’s conscience. Anyone sitting here like me can see it: our conscience has totally calcified.”
There was silence for a moment, then Rubin said quietly, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, it’s all obvious. Did you learn anything new from what I’ve just said?”
“Zadik ran Israel Television for the past three years,” Michael said, “but before him there were—”