The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Also by Batya Gur

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Because it was led by Shaul Tirosh, the departmental seminar was being documented by the media. In the small hall, the television camera and the microphone of the radio crew were already in position. The camera clearly captured the nonchalant stance, the hand in the pocket, and the red tones of the tie. The first shot on the as yet unedited film would be a close-up of his hand, holding a glass of water. He took a long drink of water and then ran his hand, in the gesture so characteristic of him, through the pompadour of smooth silver hair. Then the camera focused on the old book now in the long-fingered hand, showing the pristine white cuff peeping out of the sleeve of the dark suit, and moved in on the binding’s gold lettering: Chaim Nachman Bialik. Only then did it take in the table as a whole.

  Glancingly it recorded Tuvia Shai’s bowed head, his hand sweeping invisible crumbs from the green tablecloth, and young Iddo Dudai’s profile raised toward Tirosh’s long, narrow face.

  This isn’t the first time, people in the hall were saying; Shaul Tirosh has always been a media star.

  “Fact,” said Aharonovitz. “Would anyone have dreamed of recording an event like a departmental seminar for posterity unless Shaul Tirosh’s name was connected with it?” And he let out a snort of contempt.

  Even later, after it was all over, Kalman Aharonovitz wouldn’t be able to hide his loathing for the eccentricity, the “cheap theatricality,” that had distinguished Tirosh’s every act. “And I mean every act,” and he stole a critical and apprehensive glance at Tuvia’s wife, Ruchama.

  The technicians and the host of the radio literary program, the reporters and the TV people—for whom Ruchama had given up her usual seat on the right-hand side of the front row—were there for Tirosh’s last departmental seminar.

  The recording equipment, the TV lights, the cameraman who had been scurrying to and fro for an hour before the seminar started, stirred up excitement in her, beneath her trademark expression of bored indifference. From the end of the second row, Ruchama’s view differed from the image recorded by the camera. She had to strain to see the group of lecturers beyond the intervening mop of curls belonging to Davidov, the host of “Book World,” the TV program on which every novelist and poet dreamed of appearing.

  Davidov’s presence excited Tirosh too. A year earlier, he had quarreled with the television personality during a tribute on the occasion of his being awarded the Presidential Poetry Prize, and they had not spoken since. At the beginning of that program, after reading aloud Tirosh’s famous poem “Another Sunset” and explaining to the viewers that it was his “visiting card”; after listing his various degrees and the prizes he had won; after repeating that Professor Tirosh was the head of the Hebrew Literature Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a patron of young poets, and after displaying the cover of the contemporary-literature quarterly edited by Tirosh, Davidov had turned to the poet dramatically and asked him to explain his silence during the past six years. This was a question no one till then had dared to ask him.

  This program now also returned to Ruchama’s mind, as Davidov’s tangled curls obliged her to shift in her seat in order to attain an unimpeded view of the tall figure holding the book. She recalled Davidov’s passing his hand over the four slim volumes of poetry scattered on the table in the TV studio and asking without any hesitation how Tirosh accounted for the fact that a poet who had broken new ground, established a new style, who was the undisputed spiritual father of the poetry that had been written after him . . . how had it happened that this poet had not published even one new poem in recent years—apart from a few verses of political protest, he added with a dismissive wave of his arm.

  Ruchama well remembered the long interview, which had turned into a verbal duel between the two men, and as soon as she saw Davidov next to the cameraman this evening she had felt rising tension. Now she looked intently at Tirosh’s face above the green cloth and pitcher of water that reminded her of cultural evenings in the kibbutz dining room, and she recognized the strained expression she knew so well, a combination of excitement and theatricality, and although she was unable to see his eyes clearly from where she was sitting, she could envisage the green gleam flashing in them.

  When Tirosh rose to deliver his lecture, she too, like the camera, registered the movement of the hand smoothing the silver pompadour and then hovering over the book. At first she couldn’t see Tuvia’s face, which was obscured by the cameraman and by the radio technician, who was checking his equipment for the umpteenth time.

  Afterward, when she was obliged to look at the unedited film, she was unable to stop her tears at the sight of the precision and clarity with which the camera had caught Shaul Tirosh’s mannerisms—the seemingly relaxed posture, the hand in the pocket—and the red tones of the tie, so striking against the pure white of the shirt and doubtlessly chosen to harmonize with the bright red of the carnation in the lapel buttonhole.

  She had always experienced difficulties in concentrating, especially when Tirosh was the speaker, but she succeeded in taking in the opening sentences: “Ladies and gentlemen, our last departmental seminar of the year will deal, as you know, with the subject ‘Good Poem, Bad Poem.’ I am aware of the excitement aroused by the theoretical possibility that this evening, from this platform, a set of principles will be proclaimed setting forth clear and unequivocal criteria for distinguishing what is good as opposed to what is bad in poetry. But I have to warn you that I am doubtful if that will be the outcome of our discussion this evening. I am curious to hear what my learned colleagues have to say on the matter, curious but skeptical.” And the camera, too, caught the ironic, amused glance he cast from his lofty height at Tuvia’s face, and after that the long look he gave Iddo Dudai, who sat with his head bowed.

  Ruchama lost the thread. She was unable to connect the words and made no effort to do so. She gave herself up to the voice, to its gentle melody.

  There was silence in the hall, where latecomers stood in the doorway. All eyes were fixed on Shaul Tirosh. Here and there a smile of excited anticipation appeared, especially on the faces of women. A young woman was sitting next to Ruchama, taking down every word. When she stopped writing, Ruchama became aware of the rhythmic sound of Tirosh’s voice, reading one of the national poet’s most famous works: “I Did Not Win Light on a Wager.”

  She heard Aharonovitz breathing heavily behind her and rustling paper. His pen had been poised to comment even before the entire audience had taken their seats. Aharonovitz’s notepaper was resting on the shabby brown leather briefcase, resembling a schoolboy’s satchel, that was one of his trademarks. A sour, old smell rose from him, mingling with the excessively sweet perfume worn by his neighbor Tsippi Lev-Ari, née Goldgraber, his promising young assistant, whose efforts to efface any traces of her Orthodox past were presumably the reason for the flamboyant colors of her clothing: flowing, brightly dyed garments about which Tirosh had been heard to remark that they were no doubt de rigueur in the cult she belonged to, for whose sake she had also changed her n
ame.

  On Tsippi’s left, Ruchama noticed Sara Amir, a senior professor and one of the pillars of the department, who had not succeeded, even on this special evening, in disguising her housewifely appearance. Her best dress, encasing her heavy thighs in its floral silk and encircling the wrinkles of her neck with its brown collar, failed to dismiss the suggestion of chicken soup that followed her everywhere and was the basis of surprise when anyone who didn’t know her perceived the intelligence she invariably displayed on any subject.

  “I have read Bialik’s poem to you in order to bring up, among other things, the question of whether a work of this standing is still a candidate for aesthetic judgment at all. Might we not be mistaken in taking it for granted that the poem articulates the process of creation in an original way? And is its originality, to the extent that it exists, a guarantee of its merit? Is the image of the poet quarrying in his heart, which we all understand as a metaphor, really . . . original?” Tirosh had taken a long sip of water from his glass before stressing the word “original,” which caused an audible murmur in the hall.

  People looked at one another and shifted in their upholstered seats. Davidov, noted Ruchama, signaled to the cameraman to focus on the audience. From behind her she heard the scratching of a pen: Aharonovitz was writing furiously. Ruchama looked back and saw Sara Amir’s narrow brows arch and a frown appear between her eyes. The student next to Ruchama scribbled even more diligently. Ruchama herself couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but this was nothing new. She had never succeeded in understanding the passion aroused in faculty members and their hangers-on by questions of this nature.

  Dr. Shulamith Zellermaier, who was sitting in the first row of the semicircle facing Ruchama, had started smiling as soon as she heard the first words: a half-smile, with her chin resting on her thick hand, an elbow as always planted on her crossed knee. Her unkempt gray curls made her appear even more threatening and masculine than usual, in spite of the feminine two-piece outfit she was wearing. She turned her head to the right, and the lenses of her glasses glittered in the fluorescent light.

  “I wanted to challenge a poem whose canonical standing is never questioned,” were his next words—and again there were smiles in the audience, “because among other things, the time has come”—he took his hand out of his pocket and looked straight at Davidov—“for departmental seminars to deal directly with controversial subjects, subjects we never dare to bring up because we haven’t got the guts, and so we escape into theoretical and so-called objective discussions, which sometimes lack all substance and are often so boring that our best students leave us, to yawn outside this hall.” The young girl next to Ruchama was still writing down every word.

  Again Ruchama stopped listening to the words and concentrated on the voice that held her spellbound with its softness, its melodiousness, its sweetness. There are some things, she thought, that cameras and recording equipment will never succeed in capturing.

  Ever since she met him, ten years before, she had been enchanted by the voice of this man, the theoretician and literary critic, the academic with the international reputation, and “one of Israel’s greatest living poets,” as the critics, with rare unanimity, had been saying for years.

  Once more she was seized by the impulse to stand up and announce in public that this man belonged to her, that she had just left his dim, vaulted bedroom and his bed, that she was the woman with whom he had eaten and drunk before he arrived here.

  She looked around her, at the faces of the audience. The hall was flooded with the dazzling TV lights.

  “I’ll take on Bialik—that’ll make them sit up,” she had heard him saying, half to himself, while he was preparing his introductory remarks. “Nobody would expect an evening like this to open with Bialik of all people, and surprise is the main thing. They all assume I’ll read something modern, contemporary, but I’ll show them that Bialik can be surprising too.”

  Loud, sustained applause greeted the end of his lecture. Later she would be able to listen to a tape, or to the radio program, Ruchama consoled herself when she realized that the lecture had come to an end while she was absorbed in images of their afternoon, in memories of the afternoon before that, and the night last week, and their trip to Italy together, and the thought that next month it would be three whole years since their affair began, since the moment when he first kissed her in the elevator of the Meirsdorf Building and afterward, in his office, had told her that despite all the women he had known, he had always wanted her, her of all people, but had never believed that she would be interested in him. Her well-known reserve had prevented him from trying to break through the door. And he thought, too, that her devotion to Tuvia would make her inaccessible.

  Again she stared dreamily at his hand holding the open book, at his long, dark fingers. The heavy khamsin hanging over Jerusalem tonight, dry and debilitating as nowhere else, had not prevented him from wearing his usual dark suit. And of course, the inevitable red carnation in the buttonhole, which together with the suit and the silver pompadour gave him the cosmopolitan, European air that had conquered so many women and made him a legend.

  “Who washes Tirosh’s shirts? How does a man who lives alone manage to look like that?” Ruchama had once overheard a female student wondering in the queue outside his office, after he had walked past and gone inside. Ruchama couldn’t hear the answer, because she had hurried in after him, to take from him the key to the house, his house, where she would wait for him when his conference hour was over.

  None of his students had ever dared to ask him a personal question. Even she didn’t have answers to most of the questions, though, like Tuvia and the rest of the select few who had been permitted to cross his threshold, she knew that he kept the red carnations in his little refrigerator, their stems cut off, a pin stuck in each flower, ready for immediate wear.

  His attention to minute details charmed her. Whenever she was in his house she would rush to open the refrigerator door, to see if the red carnations were still there in the small glass vase. There were never any other flowers; there wasn’t even another vase. To her question as to whether he liked flowers he had replied in the negative. “Only artificial ones,” he said with a smile, “or those that are utterly alive, like you,” and he prevented further questions with a kiss. On the rare occasions when she had dared to ask him directly about his dramatic mannerisms, his style of dressing—-the carnations, the tie, the cuff links, the white shirt—she had never received a serious answer. Only jokes, at most an inquiry as to whether she didn’t like the way he looked, and once an explicit statement to the effect that he had begun wearing the carnations for fun and had continued to do so as an obligation to his public.

  Tirosh had no accent to betray the fact that he was not a native of the country. “Born in Prague,” it said on the back of his books; he had emigrated to Israel thirty-five years before. He told her about Prague, “the most beautiful of the European capital cities.” After the war, he had gone with his parents to Vienna. About the war itself he never spoke. He had never told anyone how they survived the Nazi occupation, he and his parents, or even how old he was when they left Prague. Only of the times before and after was he prepared to speak. About his parents he had said on more than one occasion, “Delicate, spiritual people, who couldn’t even survive the move from Prague, noble souls.” In her imagination she saw a dark, slender woman, his mother, with rustling silk dresses, bending over the silhouette of a child. She had no clear picture of Tirosh as a boy; all she could envisage was a scaled-down, miniature version of him as he was now, playing on English lawns among flowers with intoxicating scents. (She had never been to Prague or to Vienna.) About his childhood he volunteered only a few details, mainly about a “series of nursemaids called Fräulein—you know, nannies, like the ones you read about in books. They actually brought me up, and I consider them responsible for the fact that I’m still a bachelor today.” He had said that to her once in a rare moment of self-ex
posure, when she had wondered about his compulsive habits of neatness and cleanliness.

  He was only twenty when he arrived in Israel, and nobody remembered ever seeing him dressed differently.

  “And what does he do in the army?” Aharonovitz once asked Tuvia, not sneeringly but with a kind of sour admiration. “How does he maintain his sartorial style in the army? And it’s not only the clothes I wonder about; his eating habits pose a problem too, the white wine with meals we hear about and the brandy in the appropriate glass at the end of the day. I ask myself what makes this important personality honor us provincials with his presence, instead of the world at large, in some real metropolis, such as Paris, for example.”

  And Rnchama remembered the noises Aharonovitz made then as he slurped his coffee, before going on to say with a smile: “On the other hand, in a place like Paris, nobody would notice every sneeze and yawn his honor deigns to emit, while in our tiny little country, in the words of the bard, the man becomes a legend, the press rushes into print to record the event whenever he sets foot in somebody’s salon.” Tuvia was then only a graduate student, not yet Tirosh’s teaching assistant, and the relationship between them had not yet been established.

  “The man’s a foreign plant in our landscape, even though he’s condescended to give himself a Hebrew name.” This remark of Aharonovitz’s had caused Ruchama to hide a smile. “Shaul Tirosh! I wonder if anyone remembers his original name. I have no doubt that remembering it affords its owner little pleasure: Pavel Schasky. Did you know that?” And Aharonovitz’s red, blinking eyes turned to Tuvia. Those were other times, before people stopped talking about Tirosh in front of Tuvia, before they started treating him as if he were ill with a fatal disease.

  “Pavel Schasky,” repeated Aharonovitz with unreserved enjoyment, “that’s the name he was born with, and he doesn’t cherish the memory. Who can tell—perhaps he imagines that there isn’t a living soul left who remembers his name. Those in the know aver that it was his first act on reaching these shores: changing his name.”