by Batya Gur
“Yes, I do,” Rubin said with a sigh. “I recognize him. Chief rabbi, head of the movement. Where is this? Is it the airport? Was this filmed at the airport?”
“Yes,” Natasha said, straightening up. “At the airport, on his way overseas, dressed as a Greek Orthodox priest. It looks like his clothes were taken from Wardrobe or something…. Admit it, Rubin, this is really something.”
“Okay,” Rubin said, “I’ll admit, it’s really something. But what is it exactly?”
Natasha announced gaily that she had been trailing Rabbi Elharizi for quite some time. “I figured out that once a week he meets with people, in some, like, restaurant in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem—”
“Why ‘like’?” he asked irritably. “‘Like’ he meets with people or ‘like’ a restaurant?”
“There’s this place in French Hill, I’m not going to tell you where, that’s like, well, it’s not exactly a restaurant, it’s sort of a coffee shop, and that’s where he meets once a week with these people. I don’t know who they are. But he goes in and comes out of there with this sort of black briefcase, like…here, have a look,” Natasha said as she rewound the video, stopping at a frame in which Rabbi Elharizi could be seen holding a small, thick black suitcase. “Like that,” she said, “no, not like that, that’s exactly the one. And look: the suitcase is attached to his wrist with a metal chain, did you see that?”
Rubin nodded; he had seen it. “So they meet in this restaurant, and—?”
“That’s just it,” Natasha said, “I don’t know exactly what. But a lot of money passes hands there. I peeked inside once. Money, bills, dollars, everything. And I also know that Rabbi Elharizi has been traveling regularly to Canada, he’s been there three times in three months and he always takes the suitcase with him. So what do we learn from that? Somebody’s giving him money, which he then moves to Canada!”
“So?” Rubin said, looking at Natasha expectantly.
“What do you mean, so?” Natasha said, annoyed. “Like you really think that’s normal. What’s so normal about getting money and transferring it to Canada?”
“Maybe he came into an inheritance. Or sold his house.”
“No way!” Natasha shouted. “I know exactly where he lives, he hasn’t sold his house and he hasn’t come into any inheritance. And anyway, look,” she said as she fast-forwarded the tape and stopped at a frame showing Rabbi Elharizi in priestly garb again. “He’s moving money to Canada for something big—big and illegal—look at this getup, that means something, doesn’t it? I’m telling you, it’s something big and illegal. That much I’m sure of.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Rubin,” Natasha said with a laugh, “you yourself taught me: I do not divulge my sources, I’ve got my source and I’m sure not giving it out. But I need you to help me. I need you to persuade him to give me a crew, I want to get to the bottom of this thing.”
“Persuade who? Hefetz?” Rubin asked, surprised. “You want me to persuade Hefetz? Who could possibly persuade him better than you? You certainly don’t need any help when it comes to Hefetz. You know that nobody has more influence over him than you do.”
“Listen, Rubin,” Natasha said, her lips trembling as if she were about to burst into tears, “you’re wrong. And as one who…never mind, you’re totally wrong. That’s insulting. I don’t have any influence over him, you’re talking stereotypically.”
“Ah,” Rubin said with a wan smile. “Stereotypically? I get it…”
“Don’t patronize me, Rubin,” Natasha said, pulling on the sleeves of the oversized sweater she was wearing. “You’re thinking in terms of stereotypes, like in American movies or something, but it doesn’t work that way in real life. On the contrary…”
“Enlighten me,” Rubin said, folding his arms across his chest and pushing his chair back. “Explain how it works in real life.”
“All right. I know you have experience, I know that you yourself have already…never mind,” she said, slapping her thigh as if to close the subject. “I didn’t say that…never mind, Hefetz won’t ever help me, he won’t help me—”
“Natasha,” Rubin said, making an effort to sound fatherly and patient, “how can I possibly bypass the news chief to help you? Explain that to me. Especially when you and he—”
“On the contrary,” Natasha implored him. “It’s exactly the opposite of what you think: if a man like Hefetz sleeps with a woman, he doesn’t think she’s worth much anymore. He knows how to talk nice, I guess, but you’ll never catch him taking me seriously, treating me like my work has any value. I think that…in general, if a person of his rank screws around with a nobody, a new reporter, do you really think he’s going to promote her because of that?!”
Rubin grimaced. “I don’t like…why are you talking like that? Why do you talk about yourself with such disdain? This isn’t a matter of getting it on the sly, it’s totally clear that you two have had something serious going for quite a while.”
“It’s not important what we have going,” Natasha said, cutting him off. “It doesn’t matter what Hefetz says, he can talk about love from morning to night. I’m telling you, if a married guy messes around with a girl half his age it’s called screwing, that’s all it is, and I don’t have any intention…in your case maybe it…but in any case, it’s over.”
“Aha. Over. Now it’s all clear to me,” Rubin said, raising his eyes to the ceiling.
“What’s clear to you?” Natasha demanded to know, and with a trembling finger she pressed the button that slowly ejected the videotape. “Because it’s clear to me…that you don’t want…”
“Oh, come on, Natasha, don’t be so touchy, at least spare me that,” Rubin said, grabbing tightly the bony hand that held the tape.
“So do you admit it’s explosive?”
“Explosive?” He pursed his lips as though tasting the word. “All right, I’ll give you that. Or at least it’s the start of something explosive, if we must use such words. But an explosion is also destructive, they may not even let you screen it, especially if that’s all you’ve got—”
“I got two more,” Natasha said, bending down to her canvas bag.
“You have two more,” Rubin said, correcting her. He gazed toward the window pensively. “Since when?”
Natasha stood next to him, gazing out the window. “Look,” she said, alarmed, “what is all this? All those flashing lights, police vans, maybe…something must have happened, something awful. Look,” she said, moving aside.
Rubin looked. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to see from here. Shall we go down and check it out?”
“Maybe we can just call and ask. Here you go,” she said, holding out the videotapes. “I have two tapes that I am now giving you, I know how much you like it when I speak properly. What do you mean, ‘since when’?”
“Since when is it over between you and Hefetz?” he asked, ignoring the tapes in her outstretched hand.
“Since today, since now, a half-hour ago,” she answered as she inserted the video into the monitor and rewound it. “Anyway, his wife is coming back tomorrow. During the two weeks she was gone I understood…okay, never mind. I’m already twenty-five, I can’t waste my whole life on…”
In her worn jeans, her thighs seemed gaunter than ever, the look on her face vacant.
“You’ve got something there,” Rubin said. “I’m in favor of family, kids.”
Natasha chuckled. “Sure you are,” she said with a smile. “That’s why you’ve got a family and children.” As soon as she said it, she shut up and looked at him with misgivings. She had overstepped the boundary.
Rubin did not respond.
Natasha was dismayed. She knew that since the breakup of his marriage to Tirzah eight years earlier, there had been no other woman in his life. Everyone noticed that he was careful not to get mixed up in any kind of binding relationship with a woman. Rubin, who had been known at Israel Television throughout his marriage to Tirzah as a re
al Don Juan, as someone who always maintained two or three relationships with women “of every age and every color,” as Niva, the newsroom secretary, put it, had been uncharacteristically discreet in the past few years. No one knew to whom he was giving “limited, no-illusion pleasure,” as Daphna from the film archives quoted him as describing it. With all the women he had had affairs with, according to rumors, Rubin maintained good, cordial—even friendly—relations. With everyone, that is, except perhaps Niva; Natasha had twice glimpsed Niva trying to speak with Rubin, who would brush her off. Everyone—in the canteen and the newsroom and the hallways—everyone talked about the child, how he resembled Rubin. Rubin thought no one knew about the boy, and Natasha had no intention at all of being the one to tell him what people said behind his back. Only a few days earlier Niva had said something about a gift for the kid’s seventh birthday. Natasha wondered whether Tirzah knew about the boy. People said Rubin refused to see him. They said Niva had tricked him, set a trap, that she had thought if she had a baby, Rubin would agree to live with her. But the opposite had happened, sometimes that is how things play out. Natasha was dismayed: maybe now that she had reminded Rubin that he himself had no family or children, she had ruined everything.
“You look awful, Natasha,” Rubin said, and in his voice she was surprised to discern not anger, but compassion. “Have you eaten anything today? You look anorexic, no, no, no, don’t light a cigarette here, the windows are closed because of all this rain and my throat is already killing me. Come tell me what you think is really going on with Rabbi Elharizi, what you think he’s plotting to do with all that money and that getup and Canada. Let’s try to guess what could be going on there and why, and then together we’ll figure out what to do about it.”
CHAPTER TWO
Here’s the lineup. In spite of everything, we managed to get it done on time,” Niva said as she placed a sheet of paper with the list of news items for the evening program on the table in front of Zadik. “Just look at them,” she added incredulously, handing an identical sheet to Erez, the news editor, who was sitting next to Zadik, and placing another in front of the empty seat next to him. “Unbelievable. I can’t get over the fact that everyone’s already here. I’ve never seen this place so full this early in the morning.”
Zadik sat at the head of the long conference table. Pale light penetrated the room through the large window spotted with dried raindrops, throwing light on his short gray hair and the last traces of night in his red eyes and in the dark circles under them, which gave his full, round face the look of an exhausted playboy. He looked at the serious expressions of all those present, then glanced up at the clock hanging on the wall opposite, behind the two monitors broadcasting Channel One and Channel Two, respectively. He intended to reply to Niva—the veteran secretary of the News Department, known for her sharp tongue—with something witty, but his own secretary, Aviva, beat him to it. As usual, she was sitting behind him in a comfortable chair as though not even listening, scrutinizing the dark line she had drawn around her full lips, then placing the lipstick and the small, round mirror inside her makeup kit and the makeup kit inside her purse. She zipped up her purse with a flourish, placed it under her seat, and said, “It’s just too bad that somebody had to die around here for people to show up for the morning meeting on time.” She stretched one long leg to the side and added, “And it’s already eight-twenty, even today we’re running late,” then examined her calf and the narrow ankle below it.
Zadik pulled the perforated edges from the paper, went over the lines of the chart and the air times for each item with the pen he had just banged on the table to call the meeting to order, and added two exclamation points after the words “gaining momentum,” which appeared next to the headline STRIKE TODAY. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Niva’s pink scalp peeking through her short and wispy red hair. She had arrived at work a few days earlier with this new red haircut in place of the disheveled gray curls she had had previously. She leaned toward Aviva, touching her shiny red shoe. “New?” she asked.
“Can you believe it, one hundred and twenty shekels, Italian leather, and look how nicely it shows up my leg,” Aviva said, smiling, as she meticulously straightened the sleeves of her thin blue sweater, folded her arms, and stretched her body so as to show off her breasts. For a brief moment Zadik regarded these two women, so different from one another; he had often thought about Niva as a woman who had “let herself go,” an expression he had learned from Rubin that meant she did not make an effort to cultivate her femininity. It was Rubin who had explained to him once, on a trip abroad, that women who stop dyeing their hair or watching their figures, the ones who hide their bodies in flannel shirts and thick wool socks, can claim a thousand times that they are in favor of the “natural look” and that they are tired of looking like Barbie dolls and that they are fighting to free women from all the bullshit that men have conditioned them to, but the truth is that these are women in despair of ever attracting men again. And worse: these are women who have given up on the need to appear as if they believe there is still a chance that someone could love them, given up even on the need to pretend that they hope they will find some such man. It stood to reason that Niva would be jealous of Aviva, or mock her, because in appearance Aviva was her total opposite, a gorgeous blonde who, according to Zadik’s calculations, had to be at least forty years old but did not look a day over thirty-five. Her fluttering eyelids, her long, long lashes, her laughter that rang out everywhere, the fulllipped smile she had for every male, the way she touched one long red fingernail to the edge of her lips in a way that promised…had he not known her as long as he had, he might have…but it was better not to think of such things, they would only bring trouble. Instead, it would be a good idea to get the lineup started. Every morning he had to remind them how important it was for them to be present and focused at the morning meeting, and how important it was to begin the critical summary of the previous evening’s program on time and to move on quickly to that day’s first lineup, which was bound to change twenty times. But nothing helped. For three years he had had to clap his hands and yell and shout, and suddenly disaster had struck, and at least this: they had all assembled around the table—or nearly all of them. “It’s too bad that it takes a disaster,” he said, removing his glasses, “for everyone to be here at eight-twenty in the morning.” Again he banged his pen on the table. “People, people,” he called. “Quiet, please!”
“What’s all your shouting about?” Niva quipped as she placed a mug of coffee next to the page in front of him. “It’s as quiet as a cemetery in here.” She was immediately sorry and threw him a look that begged forgiveness. “Excuse me,” she said, lowering her gaze.
Aviva waved her hands in the air, and she too shouted, “Quiet!” then moved her chair to the side so that Hefetz, director of the News Department, could squeeze by to get to his seat between Erez, the news editor, and Zadik. Zadik cleared his throat, and just then, with all eyes upon him, the room filled with the noise of a drill and the pounding of a jackhammer, the kind used to break walls down. Through the glass partition he could see the profile of a maintenance man in the foreign correspondents’ office next door, a large drill in one hand, his mouth covered against the dust.
“I don’t believe it,” Zadik muttered. “Now? Right now? This is absurd, like…like some Marx Brothers movie.”
“Stop right now!” Niva shouted. “Keep quiet a minute!” she exclaimed as she ran to the window and pounded it with her fists. The maintenance man stopped working and the drill fell silent. The jackhammer pounded twice more, and there was the sound of a wall crumbling before it, too, ceased.
“People,” Zadik said in a low, hoarse voice as he scribbled lines on the page in front of him, “first and foremost I want to say a few words about this tragedy that has befallen us. A tragedy,” he said with a sigh. As he raised his head he caught the eye of Danny Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs, who was sitting at the far
end of the table, near the corner, his chin in his hand. “A tragedy, there is simply no other word to describe it. We have lost our Tirzah. Anyone who worked with her knows what a tragedy this is. That woman…what can I say? If you say ‘Tirzah Rubin,’ you’ve said it all. Isn’t that true?”
The telephone rang stubbornly and incessantly; Niva pounced on the receiver, speaking in a loud whisper: “What do you mean, ‘it needed a double cutting’?” Zadik took in Danny Benizri’s long, dark, narrow face as he straightened up, rubbed the thin pink scar that ran from his right eyebrow toward his ear, and nodded in confirmation.
“One could even say there was a certain symbolic meaning in the way Tirzah…,” Zadik said, now refusing to allow the telephone or Niva or anything else to prevent him from saying what he had prepared and practiced since six o’clock that morning, “…by a scenery flat, near the scenery room. A terrible accident, but…” Just then he noticed the murmuring around him, sentence fragments ringing in his ears: “Did it happen quickly?” Miri, the language editor, asked Aviva. Karen the anchorwoman butted in. “Yes. She didn’t suffer.”
Zadik raised a finger to each temple and pressed hard. He had not slept all night. Only at four a.m., after he had sat with a police officer and answered all his questions, had he informed Rubin. After that he sat with Rubin for an hour or longer while Rubin, pale and trembling, shook his head, buried his face in his hands for a long moment, straightened up, wiped his forehead, and said angrily, “How could you have let Benny see her like that? Why didn’t you call me? I was in the editing room, you didn’t even try to find me. Who was with him? I’ve got to get over to Benny’s, I’ve got to see him.”
Zadik could not for the life of him understand how someone like Arye Rubin could mourn a woman who had left him years earlier, or how he had remained best friends with Benny Meyuhas, the man she had left him for. No one even understood why Tirzah had left Rubin. It was clear how much he loved her, even if she’d been no raving beauty, even if he’d had dalliances with other women. Rumor had it that women were crazy about Rubin. He, Zadik, himself had seen Rubin in action more than once, most notably on a business trip they had made together to England ten years earlier; he would never forget the way the young assistant to the director of the BBC archives had looked at him. She was a platinum bombshell, like Jayne Mansfield—who remembers Jayne Mansfield today?—with the body of a starlet. Rubin and the girl had disappeared that same evening for twenty-four hours. To this very day, if he needed something from the BBC, he asked Rubin to use his connections there. He’d heard that the young lady had been appointed to an important position there and that she had had two husbands since then, but for Rubin she was willing to toss everything aside and meet him at any opportunity, even once during a stopover Rubin made on the way to the United States. Rubin had never told him all this, but someone had seen him; maybe it was Matty Cohen himself, he couldn’t be sure. But with Tirzah it was something altogether different; everyone knew it was she who had left Rubin, and not vice versa, though no one knew why. If it was because of other women, well, Rubin had always had someone on the side, so that was nothing new. Maybe, in fact, Tirzah hadn’t actually known about the other women and had suddenly heard about them from someone for the first time. Maybe someone had informed her.
