by Batya Gur
He couldn’t help enjoying Tirosh’s retaliatory articles. Again he sensed the mockery, the venom, the cold, ironic stance indicating the writer’s remote invulnerability. After reading the comments accusing Aharonovitz’s academic work of triviality, Michael marked these passages, too, for copying.
Then he went to the general reading room, where he was greeted by the librarian, a buxom, pleasant-faced brunette, who remembered him from his student days. She handed him the pile of books he had requested; they had all arrived, with the result that he found himself with three copies of White Poems by Tirosh and two of A Commentary on Tirosh by Tuvia Shai. He began leafing through the latter, dwelling particularly on the introduction, which was completely impersonal and listed the accomplishments of the poet and his unique contribution to Hebrew poetry. “An entire generation of poets,” wrote Shai, “sees itself as belonging to the poetic tradition created by Shaul Tirosh.” And then he saw the dedication: “To Shaul, if you find it worthy.”
Quite by chance Michael remembered the story Maya had told him about a manuscript of “The Waste Land,” which T. S. Eliot had apparently sent to Ezra Pound along with the words “if you want it.” And he remembered Maya’s interpretation too, her shining eyes as she asked: “Don’t you think it would make a wonderful dedication?” No, he didn’t think so. He also thought that Tuvia Shai’s version of this expressed his utter abnegation before Tirosh, an abasement that aroused Michael’s anger and made him feel uncomfortable.
He left the reading room, sat down opposite the painter Ardon’s huge stained-glass window, lit a cigarette, stretched out his legs, and tipped his ash into the only ashtray in the entrance hall, ignoring the annihilating stare of the well-known professor who walked past him and looked pointedly at the “No Smoking” sign.
The unfamiliar sweet aroma of another cigarette wafted toward him from the end of the row of chairs. He turned his head and saw Shulamith Zellermaier, a cigarette between her lips and what appeared to be a professional journal in her hands. A pile of papers lay on the chair next to her. She sat with her legs apart, the hemline of her blue skirt failing to hide her thick thighs, and he saw the profile of her round face and her untidy gray curls. She sighed loudly, put the journal down with a thud on the adjacent chair, and turned her face toward him. Her eyes met his, her face took on a confused expression, and then, recognizing him, she asked loudly from the other end of the row: “Aren’t you the policeman?” Michael nodded, then stood up and moved over to sit on the chair next to the pile of papers. “So what are you doing here?” she asked, and without waiting for a reply, she added: “I’ve already had the polygraph. A curious business, the lie detector or, in other words, truth machine, which is of course an oxymoron, if not pure nonsense.” Michael tried to remember what “oxymoron” meant, and as if in response, she went on: “It’s a contradiction in terms. How can it be possible for a machine to measure an idea as abstract as truth? Especially in view of the fact that the word ‘poly’ means many, and the etymology of ‘poly-graph,’ from the Greek, is ‘to write a lot,’ and as the man explained to me, the machine measures and writes down physiological reactions such as pulse rate, perspiration, blood pressure, and similar variables in order to identify the psychological state of the person taking the test. But what has this to do with truth? Can’t you see to it that people refer to it correctly as a polygraph and abolish the fallacious notion of a truth machine?” Before Michael had time to reply, she continued: “I understand that you are in charge of the investigation?” Michael nodded and lit another cigarette, whose smell prevailed over the sweet aroma of Dr. Zellermaier’s brand.
“There’s an article of mine in here,” she said, her fingers playing with the wooden beads around her neck. “I found five misprints. What’s the point in proofreading?” Angrily baring her large, prominent teeth, she handed him the American journal containing her article, “Death Motifs in Talmudic Literature.” He glanced at the article, and when he handed back the magazine he asked her how long she had been teaching in the Hebrew Literature Department.
“A long time; almost as long as you’ve been alive. And if you want to discuss the tedious question of why I’m not a professor,” she said without looking at him, “you can ask Mr. Tirosh, may he rest in peace, who never recommended me once on behalf of the department. In spite of all my publications.”
Michael asked her why Professor Tirosh had opposed her professional advancement.
“Och!” she said and pursed her lips over her protruding teeth. “He treated me like a curiosity, and my specialty, popular literature, like a collection of old wives’ tales. Every year he would propose cutting the lectures down to one or two hours a week, on the grounds that the subject wasn’t scholarly enough. But he never succeeded in obtaining a majority for his proposal, which in my opinion stemmed from nothing but a desire to torment me personally. He liked seeing me angry. He said so on numerous occasions. I can still hear his voice: ‘Shulamith, you’re magnificent when you’re angry,’ and then he would go on to quote Alterman: ‘Your magnificence, alewife, exceeds that of elephants, your girth overflows, and who dares embrace it?’ He never quoted any further. I don’t know if you’re familiar with ‘An Evening in the Old Inn of Poems and a Toast to the Alewife.’” With her projecting eyeteeth, she really was magnificent in her anger, thought Michael.
“In any case,” she went on, looking into his eyes, “I didn’t kill him. Even though there was no love lost between us, as you’ve no doubt gathered, although I must say that I always respected him.” Michael asked: “And who do you think did kill him?” and Shulamith Zellermaier closed her legs, lit another cigarette, and answered in her gruff voice: “I’m more interested in who killed Iddo, and although I’m a detective fiction fan, I haven’t the faintest idea.” She tightened her upper lip and fell silent.
Michael caught her eye and said: “Not even after the last departmental seminar?” and was rewarded with an appreciative look, which he could not help enjoying. He liked her, this big woman, who had something both masculine and virginal about her.
“At the last departmental seminar,” she said reflectively, “Iddo criticized Tirosh’s poetry, which no one had ever done before him. Although in my opinion, too”—she lowered her voice—“his political poetry isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. This shows you that Iddo Dudai was a true intellectual and a brave man.”
“And the attack on Ferber?” asked Michael, and she pulled her pleated skirt up and straightened her legs as she said: “It wasn’t exactly an attack. It was a question of something Tirosh had discovered, which is a separate matter. When he was still a new immigrant, a student at the university, still struggling with Hebrew and as yet unpublished, he went to visit his mother in Vienna, and he told me more than once about how he met a Russian émigré who gave him the pieces of paper on which Ferber had written his poetry, and how he had deciphered it. You have to understand that poems hidden in a labor camp require a lot of work to ready them for publication; I know from my own field how much work you have to invest in those bits of paper. The fact that the poems are mediocre, perhaps even a little primitive, didn’t stop Shaul from marveling at the fact that they had been written at all, in Hebrew, by a young man in a labor camp in the Soviet Union—it made a terrific impression on him. He didn’t even address the question of their artistic value, which was most unusual for him. You know, I once showed him some poems by a blind student of mine, first poems, and he gave them back to me with expressions of polite disdain. The circumstances were of no interest to him, probably because it wasn’t his student. Iddo questioned something that was supposed to be self-evident, that the historical circumstances made the accepted poetic criteria irrelevant, and he was right to question it. But who could have murdered Iddo? Tirosh was already dead, and so was Ferber.” She smiled as at a private joke, and then her face clouded. “And Tuvia,” she began hesitantly, and then went on confidently. “Tuvia would have tried to convince Iddo of his mista
ke, he would have been angry, he was angry, but Tuvia isn’t capable of harming a fly, and he certainly hasn’t got the sophistication to tamper with gases and air tanks and so on. The boy who questioned me yesterday and the day before told me about it; he asked me if I knew anything about scuba diving.” She snorted in amusement. “But Tuvia is a tragedy of another kind.” Again her face clouded. “Don’t make any mistake about Tuvia: he’s a complex person with high moral standards; you shouldn’t be misled by cheap gossip,” she said reprovingly and sank into thought. Then she roused herself and stood up with a profound sigh. “Time to get back to work,” and with surprising agility she collected her papers and the two old books buried beneath them, threw the cigarette into the black cylinder that served as an ashtray, and without another word strode off in the direction of the Judaic Studies reading room.
Michael returned to Tirosh’s poems. Like a diligent student, he copied out sentences and underlined images with a compulsiveness that mystified him. The fact that his own library included all Tirosh’s poetry had no meaning for him now. When he walked into the Judaic Studies reading room, he had entered the temple of the Hebrew Literature Department. He knew that he had to immerse himself in the world of these people, knew it was there that he would find the solution. The more he read, however, the more he felt that he was learning nothing pertinent to the investigation, that there was something almost self-indulgent in remaining there. But, he reminded himself, there’s still the business with Shira. Tirosh took hardly any interest in prose; why did he write “the last chapter” on that notepad? Was he really going to write an article about it? At least I know now that there is a last chapter, and I also know what it’s about. But that’s all I know. Yet an inner voice, faint and frightened, told him that there was something else he had understood from reading the chapter, something that was related to Tuvia Shai’s class that morning, something connected to Herbst’s ability or compulsion to follow Shira into the lepers’ hospital. There are some people who follow things through to the end, he thought, but why does he connect it to leprosy?
He read in Tuvia Shai’s book and then returned to the poems. Again he had the feeling that only there would he find the end of the thread. He knew that he would not be able to share this feeling with the other members of the investigation team; they wouldn’t see the connection. He himself couldn’t define it either, but ever since watching the film footage of the departmental seminar, he had sensed its existence, sensed that the poems were alive and breathing, sensed their power, as if they were the blade of a knife. Slowly a feeling of dejection seeped into him. You’re deceiving yourself, he scolded himself as he read. There’s nothing here, nothing new. And from time to time he raised his eyes and stared up into the spaces of the reading room, and the pictures rose before his eyes again. He didn’t fight them.
The sight of Ruth Dudai at her husband’s funeral, her face during questioning, her tearful voice as she admitted that she had waited for a phone call from Shaul Tirosh ever since Friday afternoon, the details about the baby-sitter she had asked to come, how she had sat and waited with her in the flat, how at last she had sent the girl home when, by ten o’clock, he still had not called. How she had called his home every hour and heard only the phone ringing in an empty house. “It began not long before Iddo went to America,” she said in the tearful voice, “but I was never actually with him.” And he remembered the cold voice in which Eli Bahar had asked her: “You mean you never went to bed with him?” and the hurt look she gave him through her tears, the blush on her round cheeks and the embarrassed nod, when Michael himself repeated Eli’s question. “It began when I asked him to help me with my Ph.D. thesis, because I wasn’t getting any real help from my supervisor,” she said, and described the subject of her thesis, which was something in the field of aesthetics. “He had offered to help me ages ago, but I felt uncomfortable about accepting, and I was afraid of him too. He came to visit us once when Iddo wasn’t at home, and he sat on the armchair and leaned back,” and she launched into a detailed description of how he had crossed his hands behind his head, of the gesture with which he had raked his fingers through his hair, the anguished look he had given her, the embarrassment and anxiety she had felt, how her hands had trembled when she was making him coffee; how he had hinted that his relations with the opposite sex had nowhere left to go, and she knew that he was talking about Ruchama. And then she quoted his statements about his loneliness, and Michael now heard her voice echoing in his ears as she asked if he understood how flattered she had been when he appealed to her as the one who would “rescue him from his loneliness,” and he remembered, too, how he had believed her when she said: “It’s absurd to ask me if I killed Iddo. We only got married quite recently, and we were good friends until he went to America. It was that trip that spoiled everything: nothing would have happened with Shaul if he hadn’t gone away in the first place; and then he came back so weird—up to then he was a very square person; and I’m not exactly a free spirit either. But I don’t believe that I would ever have become seriously attached to him, to Shaul; it was more like a spell he cast on me, something hypnotic. The truth is,” she continued in the same imploring voice, “that I felt relieved when he didn’t call on that Friday, five days ago, only five days ago,” and she burst into tears again. Sitting in the reading room now, Michael remembered how they had asked her repeatedly about Iddo’s experiences in America—Eli Bahar’s persistent question: “What happened to him over there?” and her ceaseless sobbing and her answer: “I don’t know, I really don’t know. I asked him and he didn’t say anything, really.” And then the pile of cassettes to which Eli Bahar and he himself had listened, seven tapes of interviews with refuseniks and Jewish dissidents, poets and intellectuals living in the United States. As they listened to heavy voices reading poetry into Iddo Dudai’s recording machine, he could visualize the serious, attentive young man whose intelligent face he had seen in the film—the same face he had seen on the beach in Eilat, bloated and dead. Each tape was labeled with the place, date, and time, as well as the name of the speaker. Hours of recordings that shed no light on anything.
“How many cassettes did he have?” Eli Bahar asked Ruth Dudai, holding the two boxes.
“I don’t know; I didn’t count.” Michael remembered the reply and the helpless tone in which it was given. “There’s room here for eight, and we only found seven,” insisted Eli. Michael had been listening in the next room. “I don’t know,” repeated Ruth Dudai, and she mumbled it over and over: “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Again Michael thought of all the hours of fruitless searching, of the neat files he had found in the Dudais’ bedroom, of the big desk that took up most of the space in the room—of the overcrowded bedroom that doubled as a study—and he returned with a sigh to Tirosh’s articles.
When they were about to close the library, he felt a gnawing hunger and remembered that he hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. The new canteen that had been opened in the Levy Building, close to the library, was shut, and Michael found himself returning to the parking lot. The air was cooler, but his car was still hot, and he heard the radio crackling through the closed window even before he inserted the key in the door. Control reported that Tzilla wanted him to get in touch. He returned to the campus and dialed the number in the administration building’s public telephone alcove. Tzilla answered, her voice anxious. “I couldn’t find you anywhere,” she complained. “All of a sudden you disappeared, and I’m stuck here with all the papers and the tapes; everyone’s gone.”
“I’m on my way,” said Michael reassuringly, as he looked into the darkness beyond the glass door. He went back to his car thinking about gas cylinders, air tanks, carbon monoxide poisoning, and the possibility that Tirosh might have murdered Dudai.
But why? he asked himself. A tenured professor, a famous poet, an intellectual and an aesthete, doesn’t murder his doctoral student simply because he attacks his poetry at a departmental seminar. However gi
fted Iddo was, he could hardly have posed a serious threat to Tirosh’s position. Had there really been some kind of confrontation between them? And if Tirosh was the one who had poisoned Iddo’s air tank . . . who had murdered Tirosh? And how would Tirosh, the intellectual and poet, have come by the necessary know-how? And where had he obtained the carbon monoxide?
By then Michael was already in the Russian Compound lot, and he parked his car and glanced at the building and the illuminated squares of the windows and walked with measured steps up to his office. Tzilla was sitting there under the fluorescent light, poring over the papers from the same plastic bag Eli had previously been dealing with. She looked at him with an exhausted expression. “Why don’t you go home and rest,” said Michael gently. “It won’t do anyone any good if you kill yourself.” She raised herself from the chair with an effort and looked at him uncertainly. “Go on!” he scolded, and she smiled and left the room.
At three o’clock in the morning, the black telephone rang, causing him to jump up from his chair. Excited and out of breath, Eli Bahar said: “I couldn’t wait to come up and tell you in person. We found it!”
“What? What did you find?” asked Michael nervously.
“Come and see, we’re downstairs, me and Alfandari, next to the conference room, we found a safe.”
“Where? Whose safe? Talk like a human being, can’t you?”
“We’ve got the papers here. Tirosh had a safe-deposit box at the bank.”
“Where did you find the papers?”
“We’re here, downstairs, come and see. In some file of poems. It was with the stuff from the office, not the stuff from the house,” explained Eli breathlessly.
