The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  Michael laid the photocopy of the will in front of her. At first she stared at it uncomprehendingly, and then she bent her head and peered at it. Then she picked it up with a trembling hand and raised it to her eyes. Laying it on the desk again, she groped inside her gray leather bag, removed a pair of eyeglasses in square black frames from their case, put them on, and resumed reading. Finally she put the document down on the desk. The glasses gave her face a more mature, intelligent look, and she looked straight at him, her blue eyes clear and focused. It was impossible not to see the anger in her face. Again her lips tightened with the movement that had already become familiar to him.

  “You knew nothing about this?” asked Michael, and he replaced the document in the brown envelope without taking his eyes off hers.

  She shook her head. “But I’m not surprised, not at all,” and a spurt of tears blurred the lenses of her glasses.

  “Why are you crying?”

  She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand. Nobody would.”

  Michael sighed. “So explain it to me. Maybe I’ll understand if you explain.”

  “He couldn’t leave me even my hatred. He had to make an apparently noble gesture—how typical. As usual, he wasn’t thinking of me, only of himself—despite what he writes here about his unfailing admiration for me. Who’ll believe me?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m afraid,” said Michael, leaning forward, “that we’ll have to do a polygraph test again; perhaps this time it will be different: we’ll know exactly what to ask. You have nothing to fear—if you’ve told the truth, of course.”

  She wasn’t afraid, she said, she was ready for it, if only they believed her.

  “We’ll let you know the exact time. This time you’ll be asked about painful subjects: your marriage, divorce, pregnancy, the poems, the will. Nobody wants to humiliate you, but we’re investigating a murder here, two murders.”

  She nodded and asked hopefully: “Is that all? Have we finished here?”

  “For today we’ve finished,” said Michael. He stood up, his hands and legs trembling, as if he had lifted a heavy load.

  She reached for the black cardboard file.

  “I’m afraid that will have to remain here, for the time being,” he said apologetically.

  “But you won’t show them to anybody,” she said anxiously. He walked to the door and she followed him hesitantly, glancing back at the poems lying on the desk.

  Klein was waiting at the door, looking like a man who has entrusted his daughter to the mercies of a witch doctor. He looked at her face, at the traces of tears evident on the white cheeks, and Michael said: “I’d like to talk to you, if you can spare a moment.”

  Klein looked at Yael, as if seeking her permission.

  “We can take her home, if that’s the problem,” said Michael.

  “She can go home by herself,” said Yael, taking off the glasses and pushing them into the gray bag hanging over her arm. Her eyes were quiet lakes again, her look was vague.

  Klein looked at her in concern and said: “I’ll accompany you outside.”

  Michael Ohayon went back into his room and turned on the tape recorder. He was tired to death and his body ached, but with nothing of the pleasantness that comes after physical labor. He looked despairingly around the bare room and asked himself when he would be able to get into bed and not hear another sound. It was only two in the afternoon.

  15

  As I recall,” said Klein, beginning to clear the pile of books and papers from his desk, “I wrote the number in the address book we had in the States: not the address, just the telephone number. But God knows where I put it,” he muttered, and opened the desk drawer.

  He examined every piece of paper he took out of the deep drawer, occasionally smiling or raising his eyebrows in surprise. “As a rule,” he said to Michael, “I remember where everything is, but I haven’t had time to sort out my papers since we returned, what with all the commotion and the fact that my wife and the girls only arrived on Saturday night, but I remember seeing it, the address book, and I know for certain that I put it somewhere here in this room. I just don’t remember where.”

  It was three in the afternoon, and Michael sat and smoked while Klein searched slowly for the telephone number of the lawyer whom Iddo Dudai had met in America. The house was still. Michael pricked up his ears, but he couldn’t hear the female voices or the sounds of music.

  “I’m surprised that she didn’t show the poems to me; I thought I we were close,” said Klein, raising his head from the drawer. “Maybe because she knew that I would spare her, that I would be tactful in my criticism,” he concluded, and resumed rummaging.

  Michael contemplated the big man, whose papers were piling up on the desktop, and thought of Klein’s first reaction to the poems an hour earlier in the Russian Compound, when he returned after accompanying Yael outside. He remembered the big face, flushed and sweating from the heat, over the black cardboard folder, the big hand delicately turning the pages, the grimace with which he had slammed down the poems on the scratched wooden desk, and then the impatient expression in his eyes as he waited for Michael to explain. Now, smoking in the still house while he watched the slow search for the address book, Michael remembered their conversation.

  “Do you know these poems?”

  Klein leafed through the flimsy pages again, shook his head, and said: “No. Am I supposed to know this stuff?”

  “I thought she’d shown them to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Yael Eisenstein; she wrote them.”

  Klein looked at him with conspicuous disbelief and studied the poems once more. Finally, when he raised his head again, Michael saw in his eyes the embarrassment and insult of not having known. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “You can ask her yourself.”

  Klein wiped his face with his hands, took a sip of water from the yellow plastic cup Michael had brought him when he entered the office, and stared at him sadly.

  “I thought she was talented,” remarked Michael.

  “Very, very talented,” said Klein enthusiastically. “Serious, thorough, perceptive, discriminating, and very clever.”

  “In that case, how do you account for this?” said Michael doubtfully.

  Klein banged the plastic cup on the table, sending drops of water flying, and replied: “What’s one thing got to do with the other? She’s talented at research, not at creative writing. They’re two separate things.”

  “Yes, I realize that. Obviously, that’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” asked Klein wearily.

  “I meant her taste: how come she didn’t see for herself how bad these poems are?”

  Klein nodded and smiled. “It’s got nothing to do with talent,” he pronounced. “A person can’t judge the value of his own creations, except, sometimes, with the perspective of hindsight. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, especially when it’s a question of literature, and especially when it’s the first time, there’s no way of knowing. The writer is too absorbed by what he is writing, too involved with his feelings, and so on. You need a certain distance in order to be able to judge your own creation. But,” he said, wiping his brow, “don’t jump to any conclusions. She’s a very gifted scholar, and it doesn’t diminish her a bit”—he took another sip of water—“that she aspires, like the rest of us, to create.” His voice died away gradually and then rose again as he said passionately: “I believe in the value of scholarship in the field of art in general and of literature in particular, but inside every good scholar there’s a frustrated artist; in other words, every good literary critic dreams of writing ‘real’ literature himself.”

  Michael suppressed the urge to ask if he, Klein, too had tried his hand at writing something “real.”

  “Sometimes they try, usually when they’re younger,” Klein continued, “and there’s often an inverse proportion: the more sophisticated the scholar
, the more involved he is in his research, the harder it is for him to create. And that’s what astonished me so much about Shaul. His artistic judgment, his powers of discrimination, his profound literary understanding—and at the same time he produced great poetry. What more could a man wish for himself?” He gazed sadly at the window behind Michael’s back.

  “What do you mean, astonished you?”

  Klein played with the yellow cup. Once or twice he opened his mouth and took a breath, as if about to speak. At last he slowly said: “I knew Shaul Tirosh for over thirty years. For a whole year we lived together in one apartment, when we were students. So I don’t doubt that there were years when he was close to me, very close.” He bowed his head and examined his hands. “And I want you to know that I’m saying this precisely because I was fond of him. Shaul had a lot of charm, the kind of charm possessed by people who use the whole world as one big mirror to confirm the fact of their own existence, which is why they go to so much trouble to charm it. But at the same time he possessed a surprising degree of self-awareness. He was capable of not relating to himself seriously. In spite of the facade of theatrical gestures, in spite of the total nihilism, he had the rare ability to see himself in an ironic light. I well remember moments when we were alone together, when we were still young. ‘We know you, Shaul, my friend,’ he would say to himself in my presence. ‘You’ll sing her a serenade under her window, in order to watch yourself serenading a woman under her window.’ And don’t forget, either, how interesting and erudite he was, how discriminating his taste was. But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about. What were we talking about?” He paused for reflection. “Yes, we were talking about the rare combination in one man of eminent scholar, critic of contemporary poetry with a rare understanding of literature, and great poet into the bargain. In my opinion, it is a contradiction in terms—and then, on top of it, think of his nihilism.”

  “Nihilism.” Michael repeated the word reflectively.

  “His women, for example,” said Klein, and fell silent.

  Michael waited.

  “People say that Shaul loved women. But that isn’t so. I’ve never understood—ahem—the psychological roots of the phenomenon, but of one thing I’m certain: Shaul didn’t love women. But what can I say, after everything that’s been written about Don Juan—except that in his case we’re not even talking about hatred of women as such. I don’t know, I’d say there was a constant search for new stimuli, there was something hungry there, a hunger for confirmation, confirmation of his worth. There were moments when he would be filled with anxiety that he didn’t exist. The big riddle here is the poetry. I don’t understand how out of that abyss, that void of negation, great poetry could be created.”

  Michael then asked him if he had ever seen Tirosh’s will.

  “No,” said Klein, “but Yael told me about it just now, on the way to the taxi.”

  “And what do you think about it?”

  “Well, I was surprised, of course, but not for long. On second thought, there’s nothing surprising about it. I find it hard to believe that Shaul felt any real guilt toward Yael, but he was capable of generous gestures from time to time, outbursts of generosity that sometimes were embarrassing. When my first daughter was born, he bought us the furniture for the nursery. Or Nathaniel Yaron’s poetry collection, which he published at his own expense, I’ve never understood why.”

  And then he seemed to understood what Michael was driving at, and he said carefully: “I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions, if you asked me.”

  “I am asking you.”

  Klein shook his head emphatically from left to right. “She couldn’t conceive of anything even approaching murder. If you spent a few hours with her in ordinary circumstances, you’d realize that I’m right.”

  “Not even if he demolished her poetry? If he humiliated her?”

  “No. She’s capable of harming only herself, her own body, and she’s actually tried it a few times.”

  “Professor Klein,” said Michael slowly, “do you always have such close relations with your female students?”

  Klein was not taken aback; his face did not change color; he smiled good-naturedly and looked at the policeman with a fatherly, almost pitying look. “Ahem, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions here either. I think that on the rare occasions when our lives touch the lives of others, we should accept the contact and welcome it. What else does a man have in the world but relationships with others? I mean real relationships, affection and understanding and friendship, consolations of that kind.” Again he wiped his brow. “I don’t intend to try to convince you of how ‘pure’ my relations with Yael are. She is a significant person in my life from many points of view, and I have no intention of discussing them now. I presume you aren’t implying that I committed murder for her sake. Obviously you could say that I’m not objective about her, but you’re not objective either, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Is there anyone, in your opinion, who would be capable of committing murder for her sake?”

  Klein made a face and said something about her loneliness, her reclusiveness. “And altogether,” he said impatiently, “I haven’t the faintest idea who could have murdered Shaul. And I certainly haven’t any idea who could have murdered Iddo. I couldn’t even begin to imagine.”

  Really? Michael silently wondered. Couldn’t you really begin to imagine? Or perhaps you’re afraid of even imagining it? Then he began to discuss details of the Iddo Dudai case. Klein knew about Shaul Tirosh’s early medical studies, but he attached no importance to them.

  “And in the matter of your polygraph test,” said Michael casually, although Balilty’s remark, which he had noted at the back of his mind and verified with the polygraph technician, had been nagging at him all day long, “you know that it hasn’t been proved conclusively that you’re telling the truth?”

  Klein nodded. “He told me, the man who did the test, that the results were inconclusive.” Michael looked into his eyes but could find no anxiety or tension there. “I can’t explain it,” said Klein in embarrassment, “but naturally I won’t object to being tested again, it goes without saying.” Michael sensed himself inclining his head and examining the big face, the body language, and coming to the conclusion that there was nothing out of the ordinary. It could wait until the next day, after the polygraph was repeated, he said to himself.

  When Michael asked him about the telephone number of the lawyer whom Iddo Dudai had met in the United States, Klein gave him a startled look. “Oh, I forgot,” he said in confusion. “It completely slipped my mind. Is it really so urgent?” He stressed the word “so.”

  “You yourself said that he came back in a state of shock,” Michael reminded him as he stood up, “and when he returned to Israel his behavior had changed. It’s clear that something happened there that’s in some way connected to his death. Not to mention the fact that there’s no tape of his meeting with that lawyer.”

  “Tape?” asked Klein in confusion, and recollected: “Ah, you mean that tape.”

  “You yourself told me that he recorded all his meetings. We found seven cassettes, all of them with labels saying when they were taped, who took part in the interview, and where it took place. We listened to them all. There’s nothing there about a lawyer in North Carolina or a friend of Ferber’s.” Klein opened his mouth as if to say something, but Michael continued: “It’s not only that. He had two of those boxes for storing cassettes, with room for four cassettes in each—they’re supposed to protect them—and one of them has only three cassettes. The fourth one’s missing.”

  Klein said nothing, his face thoughtful.

  “Among other things, I want to ask you if you know anything about the meeting between Dudai and Tirosh.”

  “What do you mean?” said Klein in surprise, reviving. “Of course they met. Are you referring to some specific meeting?”

  “I’m referring to Dudai’s visit to Tirosh’s house. He told you he wanted to speak to Ti
rosh first, didn’t he? Do you know if he spoke to him?”

  Klein shook his head. “I wasn’t here; you’ll have to ask the others.”

  I did ask the others. I thought they might have told you things they didn’t tell me, Michael had thought again when they were in the car, on their way to Klein’s house in Rehavia. Now he heard Klein’s voice thundering in the study.

  “I don’t understand,” he cried in despair. “Where could I have put it? It was a little notebook with a red cover, and I didn’t send it by air freight with the other things. I remember that Ofra, my wife, made a special point of it. It was in one of my suitcases. I unpacked it right here in this room. It contained all the papers that I didn’t want to send on ahead. And I remember that I put it somewhere in this room.” Michael followed his eyes, and the books scattered everywhere, the crammed shelves, the old typewriter with a sheet of paper in it, standing on the floor near the desk, filled him with apprehension.

  Klein did not remember the lawyer’s name. “But,” he said, with sudden animation, “Ruth Dudai will know!”

  Michael explained that she didn’t know anything about the meeting, and he remembered her tears when he had aggressively asked her: “How did you interpret the change in his behavior? The change in his attitude toward Tirosh?” Weeping, she said that she had thought the changes were due to her relationship with Tirosh and that she had preferred not to say anything and not to ask any questions.

  “And among his papers? Iddo’s papers?”

  “We didn’t find a thing, not a clue,” replied Michael, and he knelt down next to a pile of books. There was no other possibility, he insisted; they had to find the address book.

  “Maybe it’s somewhere on the shelves, between the books,” said Klein hopefully, and Michael looked at the bookshelves. “You can help me,” said Klein, and suggested that they begin with the shelves next to the desk. For the next hour they ran their hands over the dusty books on the shelves, but there was no address book to be found.