The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  In the fog that enveloped her, the fog in which only the painful grip of Sara Amir had any reality, Racheli sensed a constant stream of movement, a terrible din of voices, and then she found herself back in the department secretary’s office, where Tuvia Shai was shouting into the telephone, “Get an ambulance, the police, hurry!” and only then did the smell begin to haunt her.

  For some minutes the interior of the room was blurred, and then the fog began to lift, and Racheli saw Aharonovitz, his lips pursed and a look of horror in his eyes, holding out a glass of water to Adina, who was sitting slumped in her chair with her legs stretched out in front of her. Adina’s eyes were closed, and drops of water trickled down her thick neck and rolled onto her large bosom, which was tightly enclosed in a blouse made of fine tricot, now soiled with vomit.

  Shulamith Zellermaier’s face twisted when she heard what Dita Fuchs said to her; she stood up and gasped for breath, and her eyes bulged more horribly than ever.

  It was impossible to stay in the little room, and it was impossible to stand outside it in the dark corridor, whose curves now looked so terrifying, and all Racheli wanted was to get away from there. But she didn’t have the strength to stand and wait for the elevator, or to descend the six flights of narrow steps to the parking garage. And next to the door, Kalitzky was still standing, and the smell, which would remain with her for months to come, began to grow palpable, to cling to her body, and Dita Fuchs, who was leaning against the wall with a gray face, kept saying: “What’s going on? What’s it all about? I don’t believe it,” and she began screaming hysterically that she had to get out of there. Sara Amir held her and murmured unintelligibly, and it was clear from her voice that she was frightened too, and only Yael went on sitting, without saying a word, like a Madonna Racheli had once seen a picture of in a book about the Middle Ages. Dita Fuchs walked over to the window and took a deep breath, and Tuvia Shai went on shouting into the telephone, in bursts of words that sounded to Racheli like a foreign language, and then the sight she had seen in Professor Tirosh’s large, elegant office came back to her in all its vivid reality, causing her to collapse on the floor, next to Tsippi Lev-Ari.

  A crowd of people had gathered outside the door, demanding to know what was going on, but nobody answered them, and in the midst of the uproar a tall, fat man, who looked like a giant to Racheli from her vantage point on the floor, pushed his way into the room and roared in a jovial voice: “Adinaleh! What’s everybody doing in here? I’ve only been away ten months, and just look at the mess!” And when Adina raised her head, opened her eyes, looked at him, and burst into tears, Racheli knew that Ariyeh Klein was back.

  Tuvia Shai looked at the big man in astonishment and cut short his telephone call. The receiver was still in his hand when he said: “But what are you doing here? You wrote to me that you were arriving the day after tomorrow.”

  “All right, if you object to my coming home early I’ll go back immediately.” And then he realized that something was wrong, and in an alarmed voice, from which all the joviality had disappeared, he asked: “What’s happened here?”

  They all looked at one another in silence. The people at the door waited in suspense. In his reedy, nasal voice, which was more breathless than usual, Kalitzky announced: “Iddo Dudai was killed yesterday in a diving accident, and Shaul Tirosh has just been found dead in his office.” Although he was standing close to Ariyeh Klein, his pointy head almost touching the larger man’s chest, Kalitzky spoke in a shout. Outside the room, cries of astonishment and horror were heard, and Ariyeh Klein looked around him incredulously. Then he sprang to Adina’s desk, raised her to her feet, gripped her by the shoulders, and shook her, as he asked in a strangled voice: “Is it true, what he says? Tell me, is it true?” And Adina looked at him and blinked.

  “I want to see,” said Ariyeh Klein, and he looked directly at Aharonovitz, who shook his head and said quietly: “Believe me, you don’t. He looks—” and his voice broke.

  Klein opened his mouth, his thick lips quivering as if he was about to protest, but at that moment university security officers appeared in the doorway, followed by two uniformed policemen and two men in green gowns, and the security officer in charge of the Humanities Building, well known to Racheli, asked: “Where is he, Adina? In his office?” Tuvia Shai replied for her and left the room after the new arrivals. Gently pushing Ariyeh Klein aside, he elbowed his way through the crowd outside the door, as security officers demanded: “Everybody clear the corridor. Go back to your rooms and stay out of the way.” Doors began to open and close along the adjacent corridors, and Ariyeh Klein, who seemed uncertain and looked at Aharonovitz again, said: “I’m going there anyway,” and made for the open office door, coming face-to-face with the tall, handsome man to whom Racheli raised her eyes, and in spite of everything, she thought in dismay, she even noticed his dark eyes, which scanned the occupants of the room. In a calm, authoritative voice, he asked: “Excuse me, did anybody here report a death? We’re from the police,” and Klein said: “Follow me,” and waited a few seconds for the policeman, who looked around him, his eyes resting particularly, as Racheli noticed, on Yael, who had not stirred from her seat, as if her spirit were wandering in some other place.

  5

  There was no doubt in Superintendent Michael Ohayon’s mind that Shaul Tirosh himself would have been horrified at the thought of looking like that. As for the stench, even the neatly ironed handkerchief Ohayon held to his nose did not succeed in keeping it out.

  It was impossible to connect this bloated body, the blurred features of the face, the trickles of blood that had stained the white shirt and the gray suit and had congealed under the nose and earlobes, with the figure that Michael, once a student in the History Department, taking a course in the development of poetry since the period of the Hebrew Enlightenment, remembered so well—the long, elegant figure standing on the platform in that striking pose, hands at his sides, utterly relaxed, and speaking fluently, without looking at his notes, in the big lecture hall in the Mazer Building on the old Givat Ram campus.

  In the corner of the room where the ruins of that glory were now revealed, a withered brown carnation lay on the floor in grotesque testimony to the aesthetic perfection once possessed by the bloated corpse now revealed to the experienced but still unhardened eyes of the policeman.

  “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once,” thought Michael, and for a moment he feared that he had spoken the Prince of Denmark’s words aloud, but it was Ariyeh Klein, his thick lips pale and quivering, who broke the silence of the encounter with death. Wordlessly, and without quoting anybody, the literature professor uttered a throttled cry and stumbled out of the room.

  Superintendent Ohayon signaled to Eli Bahar, who went out and came back and reported that “they’re all on their way.” Michael stood in the corner of the room, next to the window, which he had already opened carefully, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief that he removed from his nose, holding his breath as he did so.

  On this side of the corridor the offices were larger and grander; they were probably the preserve of the most senior professors, he thought as he looked outside and breathed in the hot air and looked at the golden dome of the Al-Aksa mosque and at the Old City, which seemed to be lying right under the window. Then he stole another look at the corpse, shuddered, and immediately turned back to the view.

  “They’ll have to take him down to the parking garage in the basement,” said Eli Bahar. He was standing on the threshold and holding the door open a little, in the evident hope of getting a bit of air into the room. “There are elevators nearby,” said Michael dryly. “They won’t need to walk far.”

  Holding his nose, Eli Bahar gingerly approached the corpse, which was still lying between the big desk and the radiator. Crouched behind the shoulder of the pathologist, who was bending over it, he took a look from close up. “Don’t touch!” warned Michael mechanically, without turning his head—knowing that his words were su
perfluous.

  Long moments passed before the young doctor—whose face grew greener all the time, until it resembled the color of his pale-green gown—opened his mouth. And then, at last, he said in a whisper: “Someone really went to town here,” and Michael, who had not met him before, saw the youthful face and its lack of experience, and felt compassion and affection for the pathologist, who had not yet learned to protect himself by using professional terminology. After a while the pathologist said that they would certainly find fractures of the skull, and with his eyes still fixed on the corpse, he asked if they had noticed that the victim’s tie had been used to strangle him, “among other things, although it’s clear that that wasn’t the cause of death, I can say almost definitely, even before the autopsy, that this man didn’t die of suffocation, not by strangulation, anyway. Look, you can see over here,” and he turned to Eli Bahar, who looked obediently at the neck, which was swollen around the tight knot of the tie, and immediately averted his face and nearly tripped on his way back to the door.

  From his position by the window, Superintendent Ohayon observed the pathologist’s face closely. He saw the little creases at the corners of the eyes and realized that the man couldn’t be as young as he had supposed, and in a quiet voice he asked him how long, in his opinion, the body had been lying there, and the pathologist replied: “Okay, we still have to do all the tests, but if you want a rough estimate”—Michael nodded—“then I’d say about forty-eight hours at least,” and he pointed to the suit, which looked small and shrunken on the swollen body. Michael asked if he had indeed been physically assaulted before death. “It looks like it. I’d say someone hit him in the face, maybe with his fist, although I’d be inclined to think with a blunt instrument or perhaps a chair.” The doctor wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead with a rubber-gloved hand. He looked at Michael, a trace of anxiety in his eyes, and Michael was about to ask for more medical details when the door opened.

  The brisk smiles on the faces of the mobile forensics team—who in the course of their work had seen everything—froze even before they saw the corpse. Michael could tell that his expression betrayed the horror of the sight—that this time he had not succeeded in putting on what Tzilla affectionately called his “poker face”—when he exchanged glances with Pnina from the Criminal Identification Division. Behind her, Zvika, the photographer, bounded in, and the wisecrack he had been about to deliver was nipped in the bud and turned into a sharp whistle, accompanied by a hand flying up to block his nose.

  By the time the measuring and photographing were under way, all the “brass,” as Eli Bahar called them, were already there: the Jerusalem Subdistrict commander, the Jerusalem police spokesman, and the departmental investigations officer. They crowded in and stared at the corpse, and they even bore the stench with heroism, anything “to be in the picture,” and Ariyeh Levy, the Jerusalem police commander, remarked that “there’s never been anything like this before, a murder at the university. Maybe it’s the work of terrorists—what do you say, Ohayon?” And Michael, whose throat was parched, replied, “Maybe,” and waited impatiently for the corpse to be removed from the room, asking himself if the sweetish smell of decomposing flesh would ever disappear from this room, whose window overlooked the most beautiful view he had ever seen. He knew that it would certainly take days for the smell to go away and that it would linger in his own nostrils for a long time, because he had once known him, the dead man, because he had often enviously remembered his easy posture as he lectured, his long, elegant silhouette.

  The mobile lab people were busy taking fingerprints. He watched them, dimly aware of their voices, as they worked, noticed the expression of concentration on Eli Bahar’s face, heard the murmur of the pathologist, who finally replaced his instruments in his bag and left the room. The lab crew were still busy with the fingerprints, and then, in flagrant violation of the unwritten rule that demanded his presence at the scene of a crime as long as the forensics people were still there, Michael went out to the corridor, where he leaned against the wall and waited for them to finish their job. Actually he hoped that outside the room with the corpse in it, he would be able to breathe. But the long, angular hallway was airless. He walked along it until he came to a juncture of three corridors, which, like a traffic island, constituted a kind of little square surrounded by purple walls, and he sat down on a wooden bench, on the other end of which sat Ariyeh Klein, his head buried in his hands.

  Klein raised his head and looked at the policeman. The professor’s eyes were gray, deep and wide-set, and their expression was sad and fearful. Michael Ohayon lit a cigarette and offered the pack to the big man sitting next to him. Klein seemed to hesitate, and then he shrugged, took a cigarette, and leaned toward Michael, who lit it for him. For a few seconds the two men sat and smoked in silence. It was surprisingly quiet. There were no doors in the purple walls, only mailboxes, bulletin boards, and two benches. Michael felt as if a part of him had separated off and was standing enclosed in one of those balloons that hold the words spoken by the characters in cartoons. This miniature version of himself looked at him and at Professor Klein sitting and smoking, their faces clearly reflecting the secret solidarity of people who had not yet succeeded in putting up the barrier against the feeling of fear, which was stronger than anything else.

  Ariyeh Klein’s massive, sturdy body shifted uncomfortably on the narrow bench, and his face turned toward Michael, who found himself looking into his eyes and also at his lips, which began to move. When he finally heard the voice of the professor of medieval poetry, which had once thundered in the biggest hall in the Mazer Building, it was whispering: “It’s never possible to imagine correctly what’s going to happen.” And then, as if he had heard the policeman’s mute question, he went on to say: “I would have imagined I would feel pain and sorrow, maybe shock too, but more than anything I feel fear. Just like a child, as if that corpse had a vitality, a strength of its own, and it could get up and jump on me. I don’t understand it.”

  Michael stretched his legs out in front of him and said nothing. He looked straight ahead, but he knew that Klein knew he was listening to every word. “There’s nothing that resembles him, Shaul, as I knew him as a living man. He’s not even someone else, only something else. That’s why we’re so afraid, I think,” said Ariyeh Klein, and he ground his cigarette into the standing ashtray, a tin cylinder covered with paper that matched the wall. Michael reflected in silence. “What I mean is that I saw the man I’ve known for so many years, and all of a sudden he’s a repulsive, stinking corpse, and all the suits and carnations in the world won’t help him anymore. And he didn’t even have a child. And I can’t feel any sorrow. Only fear, not sorrow. A man looks out for himself, and above all he fears death. And I don’t mean the end of life; I mean the actual encounter with the dead.”

  Michael couldn’t find it in him to take advantage of the moment in order to gather what the professional jargon called “preliminary information.” He preferred not to break the spell of the intimacy, the accord he felt with this bulky man who had always looked to him like one of the founders of the first Hebrew colony.“I suppose,” said Klein, rising to his feet, “that a policeman who comes across things like this in the course of his work has ways of defending himself against the fear.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Michael, as he, too, stood up. “Certainly not in the first moments.” They were the same height, and their eyes met again. Michael nodded his head, put out his cigarette and returned to the room with the corpse.

  He watched them taking measurements and notes, combing every centimeter for evidence. And soon it was all over. The Jerusalem Subdistrict commander left the scene of the crime, followed by his entourage. The stretcher was brought in, and the lab crew put away their instruments and collected objects from the room in big plastic bags; the corpse was removed, and the police filed out and began making their way to the Humanities Building’s superintendent’s office, descending narrow, winding flights
of stairs that looked as if they led nowhere yet led to a different floor in another wing. Michael Ohayon suppressed a smile at the unexpected thought that the place looked like the background for a drama of international espionage, an association that made him wonder at himself.

  Again he thought of the old Givat Ram campus. Of sitting on the lawn on sunny days, of the miniskirts, of his ex-wife Nira’s legs and the impulse to stroke them one warm spring day, when both of them were sitting bent over their books on the lawn—an impulse that had been the direct cause of Yuval’s birth. He often thought of his first years at the university, almost always with longing for the lawns of Givat Ram, for the intimacy of the buildings. In his imagination he could see the cover of the basic textbook by La Monte, on which all the students in the History Department were tested. How many marriages, he wondered, had sprung from that medieval-history exam? He asked himself how on this campus on Mount Scopus, with its marble and stone buildings that the sun never penetrated, couples came together. And the cafeteria, he thought . . . they didn’t even have a decent, crowded cafeteria here, like the one on Givat Ram; there were only spaces for drinking coffee, supposedly inviting but actually alienating, like everything else here.