The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  “He was at the Dudais’ two weeks ago, after Iddo came back from America,” Michael explained. “Iddo wasn’t home. There was a short circuit, and Tirosh went down to the basement to change the fuse. Ruth went with him; they weren’t there long. We searched the place thoroughly, but we didn’t find anything.”

  “What did you think you’d find? A carnation?” asked Shorer, grasping the door handle.

  “That’s not the point; I didn’t think he’d leave his signature. But now if we find his fingerprints there, they have no significance.”

  “So we’re back to the need to learn if he got hold of any carbon monoxide,” said Shorer, beginning to get out of the car, “because it’s obvious that something happened there between them.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve already told you, but we found Dudai’s fingerprints on a bottle in Tirosh’s house.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” said Shorer tensely, and resumed his seat in the car. “What bottle?”

  “It was chocolate liqueur.”

  “Chocolate liqueur!” repeated Shorer in disgust.

  “That was the only drink Iddo would take. Ruth Dudai told me that he drank no other alcohol, not even wine. We never found a single print of his in the whole house apart from that bottle.”

  “Well?” grumbled Shorer impatiently.

  “So I heard from Ruchama Shai that Tirosh never touched the chocolate liqueur. He only kept it for guests. And what I think is this: Dudai came back from America two weeks and one day before he died, and during this period, or maybe before he left the country, he was at Tirosh’s house. In any case, some time ago, because the only prints we found there were the ones on the bottle. So either the place was cleaned after that, or I don’t know.”

  “I can’t understand why you didn’t tell me. When did you say he was there?”

  “That’s just it: there’s no way of knowing,” said Michael quietly. “His wife has no idea where he went in the evenings recently; he came and went, and God knows where. But before he left for the U.S., everything was okay; she still knew where he was going. And she also says that he wasn’t in the habit of dropping in on Tirosh at home; it wasn’t a usual event.”

  “That means,” said Shorer decisively, putting his hand on the door handle again, “that they met before the departmental seminar but after Dudai returned from America, that there was a confrontation between them then.”

  Michael was silent, and Shorer added: “And you saw Tirosh’s face in the film? The expression of surprise? As if he was in shock from what Dudai said.”

  “I had the impression,” Michael said hesitantly, “that it was more fear than surprise, as if he wasn’t expecting it in that forum. . . .”

  “Okay,” said Shorer impatiently. “I say again that the only way of knowing if Tirosh tampered with the tanks is to find out if he got hold of the carbon monoxide.” He opened the door, and when he stood outside the car he put his head in through the window and said with a smile: “We’ve done more difficult things in our lives. Have a good night,” and he gave the dusty roof of the car a slap as if to send it on its way.

  At one o’clock in the morning, Michael Ohayon parked his car in the lot next to his apartment building and got out slowly. The voices were still echoing in his ears. He remembered the gray cover of Anatoly Ferber’s book, which now lay next to his own bed, and asked himself what had motivated Iddo Dudai to endanger his whole academic future by adversely criticizing Shaul Tirosh’s political poetry. And to choose the departmental seminar to do it in, he thought as he locked the car door, realizing that there were hours of poetry reading ahead of him.

  It was impossible to see lights from most of his building from outside. The building was on the side of a hill, overlooking the wadi, and only the kitchen windows faced the street. Like many in the Jerusalem suburbs, his apartment, which was reached by descending a flight of stairs, was flooded with light in the morning.

  This was his third apartment since the divorce. He had been living in it for four years, and he did his best to see it as his home. When he left Nira, he knew that he might never have a home of his own, and ever since, he had tried to consider every place he lived in as home. Although he had no plants, he thought, as his eye fell on the cactus in the entrance lobby, which one of the residents watered scrupulously, his apartment was always tidy, there was always something to eat in the refrigerator, and the furniture, acquired bit by bit, had given Yuval, too, the feeling of home.

  There were three rather small rooms, with the living room opening onto a wide balcony that overlooked a stretch of greenery. The living room contained a brown sofa and two armchairs he had bought on sale even though their color didn’t coordinate with the sofa and they were too heavy for such a small room. But they were comfortable, he thought, and one day he would replace the fabric. Next to the blue armchair stood a reading lamp, on the floor was a large, thin rug his mother had given him after the divorce, and a small storage unit in the corner held the stereo system and the television. A small bookcase next to the blue armchair held the books to which he was particularly attached (all of le Carré, in English and in Hebrew; Poems from, Long Ago by Natan Alterman, Practical Poems by David Avidan, Various Poems by Natan Zach, and White Poems by Shaul Tirosh; Madame Bovary, two volumes by Florinsky about czarist Russia, stories by Chekhov and Gogol, a few volumes of Balzac in French, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai, and copies of the historical quarterly Zmanim, in one of which was an article he had written about the Renaissance guilds). Under the telephone were the water and electricity bills.

  In the blue armchair sat Maya, her legs tucked underneath her and her knees peeping out under her light cotton skirt. Only the reading lamp was on in the room, and in its light he saw the reddish tint of her hair and also the threads of gray. She looked at him without saying anything. And in the absolute silence of the flat—she hadn’t even switched on the radio—Michael knew that something had happened.

  Only when she slept was her body still and relaxed. At all other times it was in a state of constant activity. She tapped her feet to music—she listened to music all the time—and cooked even when she had come only for a short while, or she talked without stopping and cooked and listened to music simultaneously. When she was waiting for him in his apartment, he would find her in the kitchen or in bed, knitting her brows as she read a book, her fingers playing with the sheet. Sometimes, when she was tired, he would find her sitting in the blue armchair watching television, a book in her lap. He had never before seen her sitting still with her legs tucked underneath her, staring at the window opposite, as she was now. On her face was an expression he had seen only a few times in all the years he had known her, but then it had come and gone unexplained. Now it was frozen. It was an expression of despair and calm at once, as of a person facing a catastrophe against which there was no defense. Her expression paralyzed him.

  He sat down in the other armchair, the floral one, and put the keys on the little coffee table. He did not dare approach her. For seven years he had been with her, and still there were moments when he did not dare approach her. He lit a cigarette. And he waited. A few moments passed before he asked her what was wrong. When he heard the coldness of his voice and felt the tremor in his hands, he knew how frightened he was.

  Maya looked at him dully and moved her lips several times before she succeeded in saying that they would have to stop seeing each other for a while. This was the first time that she had initiated a break. It was always Michael who tried to cut himself off from her, because he couldn’t cope with the double life she led, the stolen moments with which he had to be content.

  Right at the beginning of their relationship she had made it clear to him that they would never talk about her husband, her married life, or even about the reasons why she would never live with him. Only her daughter, Dana, who was three years old when they met, would she sometimes mention. Michael knew, of course, where she lived, and he even knew h
er husband’s voice from the times when he renewed contact with her after he had broken off relations. On the first evening they met, he had looked her up in the telephone directory. “Wolf, Maya and Dr. Henry, Neurosurgeon,” it said, and ever since, he had imagined their luxurious apartment on Tivonim Street in Rehavia, and her husband, perhaps silver-haired, perhaps older than she was, but without a doubt impressive-looking. During the first year of their relationship he had even been secretly proud that from her magnificent home in Tivonim Street and her surgeon husband (he could even hear the sound of the piano), she came to him, she preferred him.

  After a year he even told her about it, mocking himself. She laughed but didn’t dismiss the picture. He never told her about the times he had stood on a corner of Tivonim Street and waited, about the one and only time he had seen her emerging from the front door arm in arm with a short, thin man who walked slowly, or about going to the neurosurgical ward at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, where her husband worked, and looking at the name tags on the doctors’ chests, without finding him.

  Looking back, he couldn’t pinpoint the moment when Maya had changed from an agreeable adventure into his heart’s desire. Looking back—and he never stopped looking back during the long nights that he had begun increasingly to spend alone, tired of the effort of seeking someone to replace her—he sometimes thought that already on that first night, however innocent it was, but also strange, Maya had become the woman of his life. But even he knew that it was only with hindsight that he could recognize the structure, the processes, the reasons, the patterns of behavior. At the time, when it was actually happening, he could not have been able to predict where it would lead. And to the question “And if you could have predicted the future, would you have changed anything?” he would answer immediately, without having to think, that then, too, everything would have happened in exactly the same way.

  Now he heard himself asking her coldly if she would like a cup of coffee and saw her shaking her head.

  She didn’t want anything. Only his full attention. Things were difficult enough anyway, she said, plucking at the hem of her skirt. It was about her husband.

  Michael was stunned. Maya never before used the words “my husband,” nor did she ever refer to him by name. Michael, too, usually managed to avoid the subject. He had always felt that beneath her gaiety when she came to him there was a deep sadness, that behind the experienced, assured woman was an anxious little girl. But there was nothing unusual about that, he thought. Take any self-assured woman, you’d always find a frightened child. Nevertheless, Maya was different. Underneath the childish insecurity he could clearly sense the presence of another layer, which aroused deep fears in him, a layer of strength and the capacity to endure the worst of all. What “the worst of all” was, he didn’t know, but the perception that she possessed some tragic strength was absolutely clear to him. And this perception now received a verbal, concrete expression.

  “Multiple sclerosis,” said Maya, in a detached, scientific tone. “Up to now the progression has been very slow, but he’s been in a wheelchair for a year, and now it seems that he’ll never get out of bed again.”

  The filtertip cigarette Michael was holding in his hand had no ash left on it. He stared at her in disbelief.

  “You can’t possibly not have known,” she said. “We live in Jerusalem, a provincial town where you can’t not know things. I was sure you knew, that you pretended not to know for my sake. After all, you’re a detective. Although perhaps because of the fact that he’s a doctor, and because of his position, and because of a thousand and one things, it wasn’t really so well known.”

  “And when we met?” asked Michael. She nodded.

  “Ten years. A slow deterioration. He’s forty-seven now.” So Maya was ten years younger than her husband, Michael quickly calculated, and was immediately ashamed of himself.

  “But I wouldn’t have left him even if he hadn’t been so sick, even if he were well, although perhaps I wouldn’t have allowed myself to enter into such a deep involvement with you.” Michael hated the word “involvement” and thought of the arrogance of people who imagined that they could control the depth of their love, but he maintained his poker face and resisted the temptation to speak.

  “Don’t ask me why, but I don’t intend to move him out of the house. I’ll look after him at home, for as long as possible, anyway. And I don’t know if I’d be able to take the transitions from there to here, not to speak of the guilt.”

  He had rarely been as paralyzed as he was at that moment, thought Michael afterward. And again, as in a movie, he ran the scenes of their time together through his mind, from their first meeting on. The opening picture was always the same: One night he was driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and after the turn at Shaar Hagai he saw a car at the roadside, with a woman leaning against its fender. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Michael Ohayon, a newly promoted inspector in the Major Crimes Unit, young and divorced, satiated with sexual adventures but still open to a smile from a woman, stopped and approached her. She smiled, and his headlights illuminated the golden glint in her eyes and the fullness of her cheeks. Then he saw the curved white knees and the wedding ring on her finger. When he asked what the problem was, she explained that she had run out of gas. She didn’t add any of the conventional feminine apologies. For a moment he wondered if he should transfer gas from his tank to hers, but the thought of the taste of the gasoline he would have to suck up at the beginning made him nauseous. There was no gas station open at this hour of night. He offered her a lift home, to Jerusalem, leaving her car where it was. “I’m attached to my Peugeot, the champion of them all,” she said and patted the car as if it were a noble racehorse. “I hope it will be here in the morning.” He hoped so too, he said politely, and opened the door of his car for her. To this day he remembered the autumn air, growing cooler as they approached Jerusalem, the full moon—she said that the moon aroused base desires in people, that you couldn’t be indifferent to it—and the utter darkness beyond his lights.

  Michael fell in love with Maya then without being in the least aware of it, although he should have known. The minute she closed the door, the car filled with her smell, a mixture of lemon and honey, the smell he had been searching for for years, ever since he was eighteen years old. Already then he should have known that there would be no way back. She was wearing a wide blue skirt and a white blouse with wide sleeves, and her face was broad and full of freckles. Her straight brown hair fell to her shoulders, and her voice was slightly husky. She told him, between Shaar Hagai and the Kastel, about her work editing manuscripts at a publishing house, about the concert she was on her way back from (the violinist Shlomo Mintz was “so young and such a devil, a real demon”). He smiled all the way, as if to himself, and by the time they reached Abu Gosh he felt that he had to know if the smell came from her hair, her perfume, or her skin itself. Next to the School for the Blind in Kiryat Moshe, at the entrance to the city, opposite the blinking traffic light, he bent over her and smelled her hair. Then he parked the car in Kiryat Moshe. She stopped chattering, and her face was very serious, but in her eyes—in the light of the streetlamp he saw that they were brown—the golden glints were still twinkling. And when he opened his eyes in the middle of their kiss he saw that her eyes were open too. He wanted, but he didn’t dare, to ask her if she used perfume, and then he took her home. She always afterward reminded him with a smile that he had asked permission to touch her hair, and then permission to kiss her. “I thought people only asked questions like that in the movies and that everyone in the real world was spontaneous,” she said that night, and later on, the remarks about lack of spontaneity returned and became a bone of contention between them. (“Why do you have to ask me? If you don’t know after seven years if you can or not, what are we doing together? To ask your woman permission to kiss her! That’s not good manners, that’s insulting. It means that there’s no intimacy between us.”) He returned to his apartment that night happ
ier than he had ever been in his life. He didn’t know her name, and naturally nothing had been said about their next meeting, but Michael knew that there were no meaningless, accidental events in the world, and he did not doubt that now, having once met her, he would meet her again. But it never occurred to him that it would happen so soon. Three weeks after the drive from Shaar Hagai, he was obliged to attend a private concert given by Tali Shatz, the daughter of the professor who had supervised his M.A. thesis at the university. It was no longer autumn. The rain beat against the windows of the large salon in the new house in Ramot, where, he later learned, the former Israeli cultural attaché in Chicago now lived. Professor Shatz said something about the host being his second cousin. Tali played the violin and her new husband the piano in Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, a work Michael particularly liked.

  When the door opened and Michael heard her voice, he thanked God that he had come alone. She arrived without an umbrella, soaking wet, and left wet marks on the pale carpet covering the vast floor of the salon from wall to wall. The hostess, who assured her that she hadn’t done any damage (“It’s only water”), followed her progress anxiously. Now he could see her in full, bright light. She was wearing a simple black dress gathered at the waist, with a low round neck and long sleeves. You couldn’t say that she was beautiful in a conventional sense, but there was something graceful and appealing about her movements, and something radiant about her face. She even smiled warmly at the host, who was standing and rubbing his hands together in a way that reminded Michael of Anna Sergeyevna in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.”

  She doesn’t recognize me, thought Michael. He was introduced to her next to the large, gleaming table in a corner of the salon. On the table stood an elaborate dessert, and the hostess, with a well-oiled smile, repeatedly informed her guests that it was a “charlotte russe, something I learned to do in preparation for our next posting.” There was a tea set too, “Rosenthal,” the hostess said with veiled reproach to Maya when she dropped a cup of hot tea onto the carpet, though without breaking it. Hurrying to dilute and dry up the spilled tea, the hostess was too busy delivering a lecture on Rosenthal china, and how hard it was to replace, to notice Maya staring at Michael and frowning in an apparent effort of memory, her nostrils expanding and contracting as if they had a life of their own. And suddenly, seeming just to have remembered, or decided how to react, she smiled, and the golden glints danced in her eyes. Michael, sipping his coffee deliberately, noticed that his hand trembled. This in itself, he said to himself, wasn’t anything special. I always get excited and tremble when I meet a woman I want. It’s the same “thrill of the chase” that I’ve felt dozens of times.