The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  “Give me a chance,” said Michael quietly.

  Tuvia Shai looked at him doubtfully, but the need to talk was overpowering. “Do you know why animals have no morality?” he asked passionately. “It’s not that they really have no morality; they do have a certain kind of morality. Their morality consists of one supreme value: the instinct to preserve the race. Ask any geneticist—he’ll tell you. Human beings, too, possess an instinct for the preservation of the race—the human race. In most people it’s expressed in children, in reproduction, in rearing their offspring. But there are a few, a chosen few, who are able to devote themselves to the real thing. The real thing, the only important thing in my eyes, at the level of the preservadon of the human race, is art. It doesn’t matter if Tirosh was a positive or a negative person, if I loved him or I didn’t love him, all that is unimportant and irrelevant. You think Nietzsche was naive? He cherished every kind of human greatness. Nietzsche, too, would have said that Tirosh was a genius and that genius is entitled to special conditions. But when it turned out that he wasn’t a genius but was a mediocre creature, someone who for thirty years masqueraded as a genius by appropriating Ferber’s great poems as his own and publishing his own mediocre poems as Ferber’s, I had to see that justice was done. For the sake of the world, the generations to come, it was necessary to destroy the creature who desecrated the holy of holies.” Michael couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He fingered the tape machine to check that it was working and said calmly: “Good, that’s the ancient dilemma of the conflict between art and morality.”

  “Yes,” Tuvia Shai agreed, and he wiped his lips.

  “In other words,” Michael continued, “we come back to the banal question of whether a genius is exempt from the moral laws that apply to ordinary individuals—whether he can lie, cheat, use other people to his own ends, and so on.”

  “If Tirosh had been a real artist,” said Tuvia Shai, “giving him my wife would have been a small thing. Or giving him myself, for that matter. In any case, the world would have no meaning without great art. Great art is the only thing that advances humanity, and compared to that, individual suffering doesn’t count. I killed him because he didn’t advance humanity but, rather, the opposite. I killed him because he brought great art into contempt. All my life I effaced myself in order to serve the highest expression of the human spirit: it was the justification of my existence. You’re not the only person incapable of understanding that—nobody’s capable of understanding it,” he said in the same tone of bottomless contempt.

  “And yet,” said Michael, “the poems themselves exist. What does it matter, in the light of everything you’ve said, who wrote them? You should have worshiped the poems, not the poet.”

  An expression of irritation appeared on Tuvia Shai’s face. “You’re less intelligent than I thought,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He gazed at the window behind Michael’s back, and Michael waited silently.

  “I wanted to help him.” He went on talking, as if to himself. “I wanted to be there for him so that he would be able to create the things I believed he was capable of creating. Not because he was my friend but because I believed he was a creator. And when it turned out that he hadn’t created anything—and lied at the expense of art—there was no place left for him in the world. He benefited from the highest thing there is and gave nothing. You don’t understand anything! He put himself at the center.”

  “But you did it in a burst of rage, not with the deliberate intention of executing him in the name of some higher justice. How do you reconcile your defense of art, your crusade on its behalf, with this spontaneous outburst of violence?”

  Shai seemed confused, embarrassed. He looked at Michael appraisingly, and for a moment, as if against his will, an expression of something resembling respect flickered in his eyes.

  “Afterward I was sorry,” he said. “It’s the only thing I had any regrets about. You understand, I feel no remorse, no guilt. It’s only that now I’ve got no goal left, that’s all, but I don’t feel guilty.”

  “Perhaps there were personal motives involved nevertheless?” said Michael slowly, with a detached, reflective interest that again aroused Shai’s ire. Above all he wanted the loftiness of his motive to be recognized as such.

  “Rubbish!” screamed Tuvia Shai. “There was no personal motive! I demanded that he confess and make public what he had done, and he thought that was absurd. He made fun of the whole thing. That’s the reason I didn’t plan it carefully, the reason I lost control on the spot. If he had admitted everything to the world, returned the prize and all the rest of it, perhaps I wouldn’t have had to kill him. But in any case, I don’t regret it. Even though it means that I’ll have to pay the price, I don’t really mind paying it, as long as people understand at last that there are some people in the world whose motives are different from the ordinary motives, who don’t act out of jealousy, avarice, revenge, and all the usual petty things.”

  In a paternal voice, Michael said: “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”

  Tuvia Shai looked at him suspiciously. Michael was careful not to change the expression on his face as he said: “We’re speaking now of things that will affect the course of your life, that will determine whether you serve a life sentence for deliberate murder, or are charged with manslaughter and spend a lot less time in prison. I don’t know about you, but the difference seems quite crucial to me.”

  Tuvia Shai wiped his face. It was very hot in the room. He looked around him and began talking in the monotonous voice with which Michael was familiar from previous interrogations.

  “After Iddo came to see me after the departmental seminar, and told me, and played me that cassette, I thought of confronting Shaul. I had seen, like everybody else, that Iddo came back from America in a state of disintegration, as you said. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t have the least idea. I was stunned at the seminar; I couldn’t understand what had gotten into him. And when it was over, he came home with me and told me.”

  “What, exactly, did he tell you?” asked Michael, keeping his tone as casual as he could.

  “That he’d been to see Shaul, at his house. A few days after he arrived back in the country. He told Shaul about his meeting with Boris Zinger, with everything it implied.”

  “And how did Tirosh react?”

  “Iddo said that he maintained a ‘tragic silence,’ but if I know Shaul, he was simply calculating his next moves,” said Shai bitterly.

  “Why didn’t he kill him on the spot?” asked Michael sharply.

  Shai blinked his eyes: “You mean then? When Iddo went to see him at his house?”

  Michael nodded. “How could he have let him go with that kind of information and waited two weeks until the scuba-diving trip? Does that sound logical to you?”

  “You didn’t know Iddo. Shaul asked him to give him time, to promise him not to talk about it to anybody until he decided ‘how to resolve it.’ And Iddo agreed. Anyone who knew Iddo knew that his word could be relied on utterly. With him a promise was a vow.”

  “In other words,” Michael reflected aloud, “Tirosh was waiting for an opportunity, in your opinion? Did he know about the diving in advance?”

  “It was well known that Iddo was going down to Eilat at the end of the academic year to finish the course.”

  “And why did Iddo tell you? In spite of his promise?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tuvia in a broken voice. “I really don’t know. In any case, he couldn’t keep it.”

  Michael sighed. “So what happened when Iddo came to see you?”

  After hesitating a few seconds, Tuvia Shai began to speak again: “Iddo came to me. Naturally, I at first didn’t believe him. My own needs, too, took control of me, but only for a few minutes: until he played me the cassette he’d brought back from America with him. Iddo asked Boris Zinger if he could recite a few of Ferber’s poems onto the tape for him, from memory, and Zinger began reciting Shaul’s lines—ex
cept that they weren’t Shaul’s. Finally I believed him. I had no choice. The changes especially were what convinced me: Zinger used words and names that Shaul had changed and adapted to the local scene. Ferber’s fir trees became pines, and his wolves were turned into jackals. Iddo argued, correctly, that I was the person with the greatest right, the most power, to stand up to Tirosh and bring the truth to light. ‘You’ll bring the truth to light,’ he said that night, and he repeated it until it stuck in my mind. That sentence rang in my head all the next day and the night after it. And now too, when I think of Iddo, I think of the choked voice in which he said that sentence. I promised him that the truth would be brought to light. Iddo demanded it ‘for Ferber’s sake,’ but I had a deeper motive. ‘For the sake of the truth, for the sake of art,’ I said to him. For hours after he left I sat reading and rereading the poems. I then read the introduction Shaul had written to Ferber’s poems. Suddenly it all seemed so despicable. How could anyone make light of such things, I asked myself, to lie and cheat and steal, and for what? I think that murder is a small matter compared to what he did. Really. I have no regrets.”

  In the silence that fell on the room, it was possible to hear footsteps in the corridor. The telephone rang, but Michael ignored it.

  When the silence lengthened and Tuvia Shai looked as if he had withdrawn into himself and forgotten where he was, Michael said: “And then you went with him to his office at the university, after you had lunch together.”

  “Yes,” Tuvia Shai confirmed, and as if he could see the picture before his eyes, he said with a sigh: “It was hard, the department meeting. To see it all with a clear eye, to listen to the mannerisms, to suddenly know that there was nothing behind the facade. And to keep quiet. It was hard. But he was so absorbed in his own affairs that he said nothing about my silence. He spoke about Iddo at lunch. ‘A crisis,’ ‘a nervous breakdown,’ were the words he used. And I’ll always remember how he said to me, like some gossiping housewife: ‘He’s even suffering from delusions, but I don’t want to go into the details.’ He had no idea that I already knew. He said that it would be necessary to ‘discreetly ease Iddo out,’ that ‘it was probably the doctorate that broke him.’ And I sat there and said nothing; I didn’t react. Those hours were the worst. But I wanted to be alone with him in his office. In the day and the night that had passed since Iddo told me, I had structured the whole confrontation. It was all planned. I had no doubt that I would be able to make him do the right thing. I thought, in my innocence, that he would even be relieved at the prospect of exposure. I don’t know what I thought, it never occurred to me that he would have the nerve to refuse me. Hubris. We all suffer from hubris.”

  Again Tuvia Shai fell into a prolonged silence, with a blank, trancelike expression on his face. Michael said slowly: “And then you played him the cassette.”

  “Not right away. We sat in his office. And he said that he had to go and gave me the papers he wanted me to pass on to Adina. He behaved as if there was no doubt in his mind that I would go on running his errands for him. And that’s what I said to him: ‘You’ve got no doubt that I’ll always go on running your errands for you?’ And he looked at me as if I’d gone mad. And then I asked him if he thought that a great artist was entitled to see himself as exempt from moral restraints, and he put on his amused, ironic look, which had never bothered me before but which at that moment infuriated me. I demanded a serious answer, and he looked at me as if I was a sick man who had to be humored, and said: ‘Are you asking if the artist should be bound by morality or if art should be bound by morality?’ And he added that we’d often discussed the matter before and he didn’t have time to talk about it now.”

  After another silence Tuvia Shai turned to Michael and asked him: “What do you think about morality and art?”

  Michael choked. For a moment he thought of smiling and dismissing the question with a joke, or keeping quiet, but he looked at Tuvia Shai sitting opposite him with an expression of strained expectation on his face, and he realized that if he wanted a confession, a serious debate on the question was unavoidable. And there was nothing he wanted more at this moment than a signed confession. Of all the discussions he had ever had during an interrogation, he said afterward to Emanuel Shorer, this was the craziest question that had ever been addressed to him by a suspect, the last thing one would expect in the situation of a police interrogation. But he didn’t have any choice, he said apologetically to Emanuel; he had to answer with perfect seriousness, because Tuvia Shai was testing him.

  “At first,” said Michael later to Emanuel Shorer, “I thought of turning the question back at him, of saying to him: ‘And what do you think about it?’ But then I saw that at the first trick I played, the first wrong word I said, he would clam up and I wouldn’t be able to get another thing out of him. So I really didn’t have a choice,” he apologized in embarrassment to Emanuel Shorer, who listened to the recording of the interrogation and, to Michael’s great relief, did not make fun of what he heard.

  “I don’t think a distinction should be made between the artist and art,” said Michael to Tuvia Shai with a serious expression.

  “In other words?” asked Shai as if he were conducting a class at the university.

  “In other words, the things you said about Nietszche are different from what I’ve always thought. Look, this isn’t the kind of thing I think about every day, like you. I don’t know if I can define my thoughts exactly.” He was silent and tried to concentrate, afraid of exposing his limitations; he wanted to present a thesis that would seem serious and profound. And then he said: “For me art isn’t a matter of such . . . not that it isn’t important to me; it is important. But I’m certain it doesn’t mean to me what it means to you. In general, I think that love of others is the main motive for constructive acts.” There was a silence. Tuvia Shai waited for him to go on, and Michael asked himself: Oh, yes? Is that what I really think? Who says that’s what I think? And aloud he said: “In other words, I think it’s more important for a great artist to love than to be loved. I happen to think the same with regard to people in general. A writer who hurts people unnecessarily all his life isn’t capable of mobilizing the compassion to create characters of flesh and blood.” He remembered something he had once heard in an introductory lecture on twentieth-century literature, and said: “Even Kafka, who depicted human existence as absurd, created a world in his writing, a complete world. And don’t tell me that there’s no compassion in it. I don’t know any work of art that I admire which isn’t based, overtly or covertly, as you people like to say, on love and compassion for humanity.” He hesitated trying to organize his thoughts. “And also, I think that in a great work of art there’s always some recommendation of a way of life.” The trace of an ironic smile appeared on Tuvia Shai’s face. His eyebrows rose but he said nothing. Michael noticed the subtle changes, but he went on talking with the same seriousness: “Even the absurdists present the absurd as axiomatic, and show the humilation and all that so we’ll see ourselves in a mirror and be able to live differently in this absurd world. In my opinion, this is something that demands a certain level of morality. Perhaps deeper than all the others. You have to live in the swamp and know that it’s a swamp. Someone who isn’t moral doesn’t know that it’s a swamp. If he’s a complete cynic, he won’t be able to describe his world and his suffering in a way that will shock others.”

  Tuvia Shai regarded him with a glint that Michael later described to Shorer as a “dangerous look in his eye.”

  “That’s what I really think. Without any relation to Nietzsche,” said Michael, who wondered whether the man opposite him was about to jump up and attack him.

  But Tuvia Shai didn’t move. He said quietly: “A very naive view. I disagree with you completely. I don’t think you understood Nietzsche, or other books you read either. But it’s not bad for someone who works in the police.”

  There were some things about which Michael never spoke to anybody later. Not even to S
horer. For a long time afterward he remembered Tuvia Shai and the things he said. And he kept asking himself the same question. Was there any substance in what he himself had said? Which of them was right, he asked himself, without trying to find an answer. Of one thing he was certain, and he already knew it during the interrogation itself: Tuvia Shai was not insane. Even though Michael was inclined to believe in his own declaration of faith, he felt sure even as he made it that in reality, in human history, there were things that justified Shai’s point of view. Later too he did not come to any definite conclusions.

  “I know you disagree with me,” said Michael Ohayon. “And I know that of the two of us, the expert on aesthetics is you.”

  “It’s not a question of aesthetics and ethics. It’s a question of what I’m prepared to do for the sake of what’s important in my eyes and what you’re prepared to do. You work here,” and Shai waved his hand to take in the room around them, “and live your little life, and you think that you’re making a difference in the world. I, on the other hand, was prepared to efface myself completely, turn my life to dust and ashes, for the thing that was important in my eyes.”

  “But still, you couldn’t control yourself,” said Michael, trying to bring the conversation back to the scene of the crime.

  “It’s not that I couldn’t control myself,” said Tuvia Shai. He had fallen so quickly into the trap that Michael understood how strong his need was to talk, now that the wall of muteness had been breached. “If Shaul had been ready to expose himself and be punished for the sake of the truth,” said Shai, “if he had understood what I was talking about, I would have left him alone. But he laughed. I explained the situation to him, and he laughed. But when I played him Iddo’s cassette he stopped laughing. He had a portable tape machine in his office, on which he sometimes recorded his lectures. I played him Boris Zinger reading what had passed for so long as Shaul Tirosh’s poems, and he stopped laughing. But his face showed a kind of careful cunning, like the expression he had when he was planning to make a play for a woman. And then he said to me: ‘Tuvia, you were always insane. Not everyone knows, but I know that you’re insane. Nothing is important enough to justify your destroying me so completely. I thought you loved me.’ That’s what he said to me. And then I realized that he didn’t understand anything either and that he thought I loved him personally, for what he was. And I told him in so many words: ‘Nothing will stop me from exposing you, but I want you to acknowledge that art is greater than both of us, and truth is greater than both of us, and to do it yourself. I never loved you. You yourself are of no importance whatsoever.’ And then he looked at me very seriously and said: ‘I have no intention of admitting anything to anyone, and you’re leaving that cassette right here in this room. Nor will you expose anything. You can just forget the whole thing.’ And then I took the little statue, quickly, before he had a chance to realize what was happening. He was standing next to the window and looking out—it’s a pose he was particularly fond of—and he turned his face to me, and then I hit him again and again, because he didn’t know the difference between what was important and what wasn’t and he was going to destroy the cassette to prevent himself from being exposed.”