The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  Everyone looked at Tuvia, and he said that the last time he had seen Tirosh was on Friday, when they had lunch together after the department meeting. “I think he said something about going to Tel Aviv, but I’m not sure.”

  Racheli, who persisted in her observation games, convinced that she was doing important scientific research, noticed even then that Tuvia “was not himself,” that he was both detached and uncharacteristically efficient, as he began speculating, in a voice louder than usual, firmer than usual, about how they might locate Tirosh. A few faculty members were already in the room when Tuvia burst in, and Racheli noticed especially his uneasy reaction when Aharonovitz, who was unusually quiet, even withdrawn, said that perhaps Adina should go into Tirosh’s office and see if he hadn’t left a message there.

  It seemed to Racheli that they had already spent hours in the department office, a room too small to hold them all, on the sixth floor of the purple wing in the Humanities Building on Mount Scopus, one of the insane edifices housing the Hebrew University, of which Tirosh said, in an often quoted remark: “The man who designed this building should be shot, hospitalization won’t help here; the only thing that will do any good is murder.” Until that Sunday, it was quoted with a smile, whereas afterward it was repeated with an accompaniment of statements full of hindsight about fate and about tragic irony, a concept with which Racheli had became familiar in the secretarial office of the Literature Department.

  From time to time someone left the room and returned with a cup of black coffee; from time to time the murmurs were interrupted by a hesitant knock on the door, and a student’s head would peep in, see the assembled lecturers, and quickly disappear before Adina managed to get in a word about the cancellation of consulting hours.

  They gathered as if by chance, the department teachers, having come to hand in examination forms, to collect seminar papers, but they all remained in the little room, bound by their shock and sorrow for Iddo. The usual tensions seemed to have vanished. Everyone liked Iddo, Racheli knew. Occasionally someone broke the silence. Sara Amir asked how Ruth was going to manage—“the baby’s not even a year old”—and Dita Fuchs, who had taken off her purple hat and was now sitting on the edge of Adina’s desk, because there weren’t enough chairs for everybody, once more demanded to know: “What did he need it for, that diving?” On any other day Adina would have told her off for sitting on the desk, but today she heroically ignored it. Racheli looked at Dita Fuchs with interest, breathed in the scent of her perfume, and remembered the rumors that she had been Tirosh’s longest love affair. Years ago, Racheli had heard, they were always at each other’s side, and even when the affair was over, they remained close. Dita Fuchs’s face showed lines of suffering and traces of feminine charm, a combination that produced, especially this morning, an expression of pathos that contradicted the patronizing amiability with which she treated everyone around her.

  It was there, in the department office, that Dita Fuchs first heard the news. Racheli had witnessed the unrestrained weeping, she had seen the slender hand holding her throat as she repeated: “I knew it would end in catastrophe, that diving of his. Such a gifted boy! What did he need it for?” Adina had made her a cup of strong tea and even stroked her arm. Normally their relationship was one of unmitigated hatred, which was expressed by the saccharine cordiality with which they treated each other, and by the highly sophisticated bureaucratic difficulties that Adina heaped on Dr. (as she was always careful to call her) Fuchs’s students. By the time Tuvia arrived, Dita Fuchs had calmed down, and when he came into the room she was sitting on the corner of Adina’s desk, her hands ceaselessly smoothing invisible creases in her narrow skirt. “Where’s Shaul?” she asked helplessly, and Racheli thought that they needed some kind of big daddy to “take charge of things,” to make all the “arrangements.” It wasn’t clear to Racheli exactly what the arrangements were that had to be made, but something of the general malaise infected her, too, and clouded the lucid judgment of which she was usually so proud. It was terrible to see mature, adult people in such distress, not knowing what to do or say.

  Sara Amir was the first person in the room to mention the name of Ariyeh Klein. With her famous directness, she exclaimed in a moment of silence: “What a shame that Ariyeh’s not here. He would know what to do. Thank goodness he’ll be back the day after tomorrow.” Dita Fuchs sighed, and Adina chimed in with her automatic response to the mention of his name: “What a mensch!” repeated three times.

  Racheli had yet to meet Professor Klein, who had been on sabbatical at Columbia University in New York for the whole of the academic year that was now drawing to a close. Hardly a day had passed during the ten months, from September to June, that she had been working in the department, without Adina mentioning his name. On days when a letter arrived from him, and especially when the letter referred explicitly and personally to Adina, Racheli could leave the office for a cup of coffee without any danger of being picked on for it. Adina would smile to herself as she read the letter over and over again, sometimes even reading passages aloud.

  Thanks to the happy smiles that broke out on people’s faces whenever his name was mentioned, Racheli had begun to admire Professor Klein in advance. “He’s due back the day after tomorrow?” confirmed Aharonovitz, and he added: “In that case, he may be in time to attend the funeral.” Again the oppressive silence descended on the room, and Tuvia Shai ran his fingers through his hair—a gesture that was so graceful in Tirosh and so grotesque in Tuvia, whose pink hand raked the mousy, thinning hair and left it sticking out in all directions.

  Shulamith Zellermaier’s heavy tread, even in her trademark padded sandals, was audible even before she entered the room. Racheli held her breath as she waited for the woman she privately called the Dinosaur to appear. Although she thought she had once read that dinosaurs were not aggressive, Racheli had always been afraid of them, even in pictures. Zellermaier terrified her, with her bulging eyes, her sharp tongue, her unrestrained outbursts, her perfectionism. Even when she lingered in the office to relate an “anecdote,” as she called it, Racheli would wait tensely for the punch line and her deliverance. When the woman came in now, closed the door behind her, and contemplated her colleagues in silence, Racheli let out a sigh of relief. Shulamith Zellermaier had already heard the news and was quelled. Her head on one side, without the sarcastic half-smile, she said only: “It’s terrible, just terrible.” Racheli immediately stood up, to free her chair for the heavy body, which lowered itself with a sigh.

  Again the door opened, and in came two teaching assistants, Tsippi Lev-Ari, in a translucent white caftan, and behind her Yael Eisenstein, who as usual caused Racheli to feel elated.

  “It’s not just ordinary prettiness,” she would say to her friends before calling their attention to the “phenomenon,” as she called her. “Well, what do you say?” she would ask immediately after they had seen her. And she was always furious at the male response. All the women were properly admiring, but the men recoiled. “How could you touch her?” said Dovik. “She’d break. Why doesn’t she eat?” Even Tirosh treated her with an uncharacteristic gentleness: in her presence, his voice became soft and protective, and he never flirted with her.

  Yael was slender as a stalk, her face was white and pure, her blue eyes held all the sorrows of the world, and her big, fair curls, “completely natural,” as Racheli would emphasize to anyone interested, fell to her shoulders. Today, as always, her slender body was draped in a thin, flowing black knit dress, and her slender, nicotine-stained fingers were holding a cigarette, whose strong smell filled the room. “She smokes only Nelsons, constantly, and she constantly drinks black coffee. I’ve never seen her eat, and she only travels in taxis: she’s afraid of crowds. Her family’s very rich.” So Racheli had been told by Tsippi, who was striving to reach “the ineffable spiritual quality that girl possesses. She’s pure spirit, without a body. Once I was at her house, trying to persuade her to join our group, and I peeked into her ref
rigerator. There were two yogurts and some goat cheese, that’s all. And don’t think she ever wore anything else, either. I’ve known her from the beginning, from her first year as a student, and she never wore anything else, and nobody dared speak to her. One day I simply started talking to her, and she’s really a nice person. Not in the least snobbish, only shy and lacking in self-confidence. Ever since I’ve known her, and ever since I first set eyes on her, years ago—an unforgettable occasion—she’s never worn anything but those black outfits of hers. Even when the fashion was short and wide, she wore a narrow black knit skirt, and those blouses, thin sandals even in winter, and always Nelson cigarettes, and she never hung out on the lawn, she was always in the library, she only went out to smoke, and breaks in the cafeteria she spent at a table in the corner, and never with anything but coffee. What can I tell you? She’s really something!”

  It was obvious, as Tsippi entered the office, that she hadn’t heard the news. She waved the papers in her hand and announced: “That’s it! No more classes for me this year! I swear I’ll never teach bibliography again!” And then she registered the silence in the room and the grave faces, and she asked: “What’s everyone doing here? I only came to hand in the exam questions. What’s up—has something happened?” and she advanced into the room, followed by Yael.

  Both were in the midst of writing their doctoral dissertations. Tsippi’s was about the status of women in folklore, and she was “Aharonovitz’s,” as they put it in the department. Yael, whose subject was the Hebrew makama, the comic medieval narrative poem, was regarded as the exclusive property of Ariyeh Klein.

  Of the ten doctoral candidates in the department, only four had been chosen as teaching assistants. Although they dealt with different subjects, all had been told that as a result of budget cuts, only one of them would be able to follow the smooth course of a tenured academic career. The senior lecturers saw them as their spiritual heirs and particularly as concrete expressions of their own success as scholars. And though all knew that only one of them would be appointed to the post of lecturer in the department upon completion of their Ph.D.s, they succeeded in sustaining close, warm relations and never put each other down. Racheli had often asked herself if this might not offer a subject for scientific study.

  Sara Amir smoothed her floral dress. Her intelligent brown eyes looked at Tsippi and then rested on Yael—Racheli noted the glint of anxiety in them—and finally she said, without taking her eyes off Yael: “Iddo’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” demanded Tsippi, and her hands began to shake, but everyone was looking at Yael, whose white face had become translucent and whose eyelids had begun to flutter. “She’s not too strong psychologically,” Racheli remembered Dita Fuchs once remarking, and she looked around at the people in the room, who seemed to stop breathing when Sara Amir said straight out: “He’s been killed in a diving accident.”

  Adina opened her mouth, and Racheli prepared herself to hear again the familiar lines about not knowing the details, etc., but Adina changed her mind under the annihilating look Aharonovitz gave her. He then took Yael’s arm with uncharacteristic gentleness and led her to the open window, which no breath of air traversed. He propped her against his shoulder and gently patted her arm, while Adina hurried into the corridor for a glass of water. Nobody took any notice of Tsippi, who dropped the papers she was holding and burst into loud, harsh sobs. At the window, Yael stood still and silent, her body frozen. Adina uselessly held out the water to her and after a while turned to Tsippi to make her speech about the details and the funeral. She concluded by asking her whether she had seen the department head. Tsippi shook her head and mumbled through her sobs: “I’m looking for him too. I’ve just come from his office, but he’s not there and the door’s locked, and we had an appointment this morning.”

  With a single movement, Yael extricated herself from Aharonovitz’s hold, and in her bell-like voice—Tirosh had once said in Racheli’s presence that it was a pity Yael hadn’t studied singing, adding that if he closed his eyes when she spoke, he could hear the pin aria from The Marriage of Figaro through her words—in that bell-like voice she said: “But there was a bad smell there, near his office.” Racheli began to suspect that Yael was just plain crazy after all, and here was the proof.

  In the ensuing silence, Tuvia Shai looked at her in terror, then asked: “What are you talking about?” and Racheli felt her eyes darting from one face to the other. Suddenly they all resembled giant vultures ready to swoop on an unknown prey; Yael, in her black dress, looked like a lost gosling as she elaborated: “I don’t know; a smell like a dead cat.” And as usual it was Sara Amir who recovered first; she stood, picked up her chair, put it next to the window in the narrow space between the wall and Adina’s desk, and sat Yael down on it. Then she turned to the desk and decisively opened the drawer. Adina didn’t even have a chance to protest when she took the keys from the place where everyone knew they were kept, though no one ever dared to lay hands on them. Rapidly she selected one of the keys, turned to Adina, and asked her in a clear, forceful voice: “This is the master, right?” Adina nodded her head and, distractedly, told Avraham Kalitzky—whose funny little figure was now blocking the doorway, and whose confused face, the face of a Talmudic scholar detached from this world, looked even more confused than usual when he saw that the room was full—to come in immediately and shut the door behind him, because there was a draft and everyone would catch cold. Though the khamsin had already lasted for a week, and there wasn’t a breath of air in the room, nobody smiled.

  It was only then that Adina said: “I don’t know, I’ve been phoning everywhere I could think of, since yesterday, and until I got through . . . And now it’s one o’clock already, and I haven’t heard a word from him. But I don’t dare go into his room without permission; he doesn’t like it at all, you know yourselves, and afterward I’ll have to take the responsibility. I phoned all the colleges and publishers, and nobody’s seen him anywhere, and now I just don’t know.”

  “Good,” Sara Amir said. “Now it’s not your responsibility any longer. I want to know where to get hold of him and who’s with Ruth Dudai now. We have to put a notice in the paper, we have to look after Ruth, and maybe he left a note in his room. We have to start doing something; we can’t go on sitting here and twiddling our thumbs. Tuvia, are you coming with me?” she asked impatiently. Tuvia Shai started from his seat as if from a dream and looked at her in alarm. “Don’t look at me like that—you know his office better than I do—and Adina had better come too—I’ll take the responsibility, Adina. We’ve got an emergency on our hands. Do you understand, Adina? An emergency!” Tuvia Shai looked around him with a dazed expression. Racheli remembered how fond he had been of Iddo, and suddenly she was flooded with pity. Perhaps, she thought, Iddo had been a substitute for the son he never had; Tuvia looked like a person who had lost his son and had not yet taken in the news. The burst of energy that he had shown earlier had died down completely, she noted, and he simply made her want to cry as he stood there, helpless and paralyzed, until finally he moved from the corner where he had been leaning against the wall and submissively followed Sara Amir and Adina Lipkin, whose distress was evident in the fact that she failed to close the door behind her.

  Shulamith Zellermaier cocked her head and sighed; her protruding eyes glittered for a moment with the pure spite that Racheli had dreaded from the moment she walked into the room. “He’s probably shut up in some house or other, pursuing his affairs,” she said in her hoarse voice, but Dita Fuchs gave her a new, threatening look. Dr. Zellermaier stopped talking, the spiteful gleam faded, and the only sound in the room was that of her heavy breathing as she took a cigarette from the packet of Royal filtertips in the pocket of her wide skirt and lit it. The cigarette had a sweetish smell that Racheli found repugnant.

  Again Racheli looked around at the people in the room, and her eye fell on Professor Kalitzky, who still stood next to the door, completely at a loss. Rac
heli noticed how tiny his feet were in the padded sandals he wore. His toes wriggled inside his thick socks, and she remembered the stories she had heard about him, about his notorious pedantry when it came to recording bibliographical details, about the student who had once shouted in Adina’s office that the two points Kalitzky had taken off the grade of his seminar paper, because of some fault in one item in the bibliography, was the only thing preventing him from going on to do his M.A. Helpless in the face of Kalitzky’s obduracy, the student had raised his voice and demanded to know how he could improve his grade. Kalitzky had looked past his shoulder, ignoring the question, and resumed studying the form in his hand with the same vague look, through the thick lenses of his hornrimmed spectacles that he now directed at Racheli, who, for the first time since she had started working in the department, felt sympathy for him too. He suddenly seem so human in his helplessness, his sorrow and shock, and then in the childish question: “Where’s Professor Tirosh?” She shook her head to indicate that she didn’t know, and she turned to look at Tsippi, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the room, sobbing without restraint and occasionally wiping her nose, and then to look at Yael, sitting motionless on the office chair at the window. Behind her stood Aharonovitz, and Kalitzky addressed his question to him, and his answer was interrupted by a scream.

  Although nobody had ever heard her scream before, they all knew that the scream came from Adina Lipkin, the department secretary. And indeed, she was standing and screaming continuously at the open door of Shaul Tirosh’s office. It was close to the secretarial office, just beyond the first turn in the corridor, on the opposite side, the one that overlooked the view of the Old City. Racheli raced to the spot, but she was overtaken by Aharonovitz, who pushed her aside and caught Adina in his arms as she said: “I feel sick—oh, God, I feel sick,” and proceeded to vomit all over Dita Fuchs, who was standing between her and Racheli. She didn’t even apologize, before being carried back to her office in Aharonovitz’s arms. Racheli, who stood rooted to the spot for a moment without understanding what had happened, entered Tirosh’s office. She saw the sight before Sara Amir seized her brutally by the arm and pushed her out of the room. As Sara Amir led her away, Racheli saw Kalitzky peering into the room with a curious, frightened expression. She saw his face turn green and then saw Tuvia Shai burst out of Tirosh’s office and rush past them. All along the curving corridor, doors began to open, people began popping out, their faces full of alarm, and asking questions, which Sara Amir ignored.