by Batya Gur
“Hey, do you need to interrogate me, too?” Niva asked Michael with a frown, as if a conversation with him was the very last thing she needed at that moment.
He understood, however, that she very much wished to have her say, and since Hefetz was still tied up, he said, “It could be very helpful. I figure that you’re the person who knows better than anyone else—”
“So let’s go sit over there,” she said with false displeasure, pointing at one of the rooms, to which he followed her. Just before she closed the door he could hear a man shouting: “Don’t try and sell me Agnon. They only did Agnon because they got a grant. Benny Meyuhas personally received money for this project—”
Michael had not really intended to speak with Niva at this stage, and had in fact thought to pass her off to Lillian, since he assumed that women were more likely to open up to other women (there were those who accused him of being a chauvinist because of this, and Tzilla had said once that it was a primitive assumption that had no factual grounding in his own experience); but Niva clearly wished to speak.
“Listen,” she said the moment he had taken a seat, “There’s a lot I can tell you. But what do you want to know?”
“First of all,” Michael said, “Tirzah’s death during the filming of Iddo and Eynam, I wanted to—”
“What? The alleged accident?” Niva asked impatiently.
“Why ‘alleged’?” he asked, taken aback. “It wasn’t an accident?”
“No, no,” she said quickly, catching herself. “I didn’t mean anything by that, that’s just what you always hear them say on police shows. So, you want to hear about the accident?”
“The accident, too, but first of all, what…did you have occasion to work with her? Did you know her well?”
“Tirzah Rubin kept her distance from all this,” Niva said, indicating the newsroom. “It didn’t interest her. She really should have been working in theater, but because of Rubin…they used to be married. First she was married to Rubin, then to Benny. So it was only natural that whenever Benny had a production, which wasn’t all that often, she would work with him.”
Michael asked if she was of the opinion, as were many others, that relations between Benny Meyuhas and Arye Rubin had not been damaged by their love triangle.
“Well,” Niva said, “that’s thanks to Rubin, that he’s such a bighearted person and so—how shall I say it—unconventional. He’s different, you can’t help…everyone respects him.”
“You, in any event, are a great admirer,” Michael said cautiously.
“Yes, absolutely,” she gushed.
“How about Benny?”
“He’s, well, he’s an artist. They’re different. He wasn’t involved in the news, either, and always…for years now they haven’t given him…he was like the director for religious programming, and programs about language issues, sometimes even children’s programming, that sort of thing, where the role of the director is pretty marginal. He just says where to point the camera and that’s it, a television director isn’t—”
“How did that happen?” Michael asked. “Wasn’t he considered talented?”
“Oh, very,” she exclaimed. “Nobody said he wasn’t. But talented at what? Directing Agnon? That’s not for television, he only wanted to direct, well, at the very least, a documentary about some famous author. I remember, even before Zadik’s time, something really—who was that author? Maybe S. Yizhar. But they didn’t let him do it. And once there was this Palestinian poet, from Ramallah I think, a poet of exile. They didn’t let him do that either, and right they were, if you ask me. I mean, what is this? Don’t we already have a bad enough name around the world? Do we really need a film about some poet who hates Israel? And anyway—oh, never mind, they didn’t let him do it. And then he started coming up with all kinds of weird projects. He wanted to make a film from some new experimental fiction, I don’t remember who the author was. They nixed that one too. He always wanted these hoity-toity projects, and it was like they purposely stuck him with all the garbage until finally, after years of sitting on the shelf, they let him do Agnon, and then only thanks to—” She fell silent.
“Thanks to what?” Michael asked.
“I heard they came up with a big sum for this production,” Niva said, “like one-point-five million dollars or something like that, from someone in the U.S., some special fund. I don’t know any of the details, but something was—they never would have given him a project like this from the Drama Department budget. And still he used up the entire annual budget because he wasn’t prepared to compromise on anything. He was just lucky that it was Zadik who made the decisions. If it had been Hefetz—” she said, falling silent again and casting a worried glance toward the newsroom through the glass partition.
“Hefetz would not have approved such a production if he had been director of Israel Television?”
“Never!” Niva guffawed, thrusting her fingers into her cropped hair and swiveling her head from side to side. “Never in a million years.” Then she added, with restrained satisfaction: “It was Benny’s good fortune that Hefetz didn’t get the appointment.”
“Did he want it? Did he want to be director of Israel Television?” Michael asked.
“He would have killed to be director,” she answered, openly gloating. “I hope he never—if he were appointed, everything would—he doesn’t get along well with people like—with him everything’s a matter of honor. He’s a man with a chip on his shoulder, a guy who thinks he’s been exploited by the whole world. But,” she said, suddenly snapping out of it, “why am I talking about this? It’s irrelevant.”
“We were talking about it because of the production of Iddo and Eynam,” Michael reminded her.
“Yeah,” she said, relaxing. “I think Rubin had something to do with getting that money, set it up for Benny somehow. It doesn’t matter. But for Benny Meyuhas, well, he’s got this discrimination complex, too. His parents…he grew up in…well, not exactly with a silver spoon in his mouth. He wished he’d been born to European parents and all that. Never mind, it’s not important. This was his big chance to do something that—and then, Tirzah—”
“Tirzah’s death put a stop to the production,” Michael mumbled, hoping to leave her room for elaboration.
“Yes, exactly. Tell me,” she said, bending her head and looking in the direction of the glass partition, “was it for sure an accident?”
“What do you mean?” Michael asked as if he did not understand the question.
“Well,” she said, taken aback, “it’s just that I heard, I mean someone said to me that there were marks on Tirzah’s neck—” She fell silent and wiped her face dry. “Around this place there are always rumors flying. Everyone’s saying—”
“You think there were people who did not like Tirzah,” Michael noted.
Niva said nothing. Then she looked at him and said, “Yes, there were. But you have to promise me this will remain just between the two of us.”
Michael did not react.
“You’re not willing to promise?” she asked defiantly. “Well, I’m not willing for people to know that I’m the source of something bad in connection to Tirzah. Especially not me, because—never mind.”
Michael nodded.
“What?” Niva exclaimed. “They’ve already said something to you about me and Rubin?”
“Only about the boy,” he answered reluctantly. “About the son you have with—” He pointed vaguely toward the newsroom.
“He thinks no one knows,” Niva said. “It’s like some state secret.”
Michael gazed at her, quite certain that she was the one who did not allow the secret to remain a secret. “So you and Arye Rubin were romantically involved. Was it serious?”
“Yes, like—well, it wasn’t very long-term, just, he had this moment of, how shall I say it? Anyway, it just happened. Then I got pregnant, and I thought about not telling him, but I did. Tell him, that is. I don’t believe in tricking people. He could have ha
d me fired, but he didn’t, he didn’t even try. I said to him, ‘Arye, I’m thirty-nine years old,’ because that’s what I was then, thirty-nine, ‘and this is my first pregnancy,’ which nobody thought would happen, because I have only one ovary. Anyway, I said to him, ‘Arye, I have no intention of aborting.’”
“And he didn’t put up a fight?”
“He never said a word about it. He said he’d help me any way he could, money and that sort of thing, if I would keep quiet about it, because of Tirzah. Like, not to hurt her.”
“But now that Tirzah is gone, things could be different, don’t you think?”
Niva shrugged. “I don’t know how Rubin feels about it,” she said dreamily.
“I would think you know exactly how he feels about it,” Michael said quietly. “After all, you’ve already spoken to him about the boy.”
“What? When?” she said, startled.
“A few hours ago, no?” Michael said, taking a chance on the fact that he had seen them chatting in the corner of the hall.
She glared at him, clearly rattled. “People are already talking about it?”
Michael said nothing.
“This building…,” she muttered bitterly, hastening to add, “I don’t, I don’t exactly—we, only for the boy, he’s already seven, and I thought—”
Michael said nothing.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, biting her lip. “You shouldn’t think I would kill Tirzah for that. Do you understand?”
Michael nodded.
“What?” she said, taken aback. “Do you think I would come to blows with Tirzah Rubin in order to have Arye as some sort of…some sort of—”
Michael said nothing.
“Well, the answer is no. No,” she said definitively. “And it wouldn’t have helped me. In any event, he can’t stand me.”
Michael was hard-pressed to hide his surprise at hearing this. “Is that what he told you?” he asked.
“Of course not. He didn’t say anything at all, he’s a gentleman. But I’m no fool, even though you can’t tell by the way I come across,” she said bluntly. “You’re surprised, aren’t you?” she asked, pleased. “You thought I was figuring Rubin was just waiting for the opportunity—anyway, I didn’t mean we should live together or anything, I just wanted—I just wanted him to spend time with Amichai. He’s named for a friend of theirs who was killed in the Yom Kippur War, I thought Rubin would appreciate that. I was hoping that at least my kid could know who his father is. At the end of the day I’m doing Rubin a big favor, he doesn’t have any other children,” she said, blinking. With a half-smile she added, “Anyway, none that I know of. As long as Tirzah was alive, he didn’t want to, like, hurt her. But now…she’s not here anymore…”
Michael said nothing.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Niva said angrily. “I didn’t kill her or anything. You can even check, I never left the newsroom until one, one-thirty at night. Everyone saw me. I can’t believe I’m even saying this.”
“Who is ‘everyone’?”
“Everyone. Hefetz, Natasha, the woman who monitors Israeli radio broadcasts. She can even tell you I was here after one, because she came in at ten minutes past to give a news report from Army Radio. What, are you seriously expecting me to answer you?”
“The woman who monitors Israeli radio broadcasts?”
“Yes. Shula’s her name. Little tiny woman. She was on duty and she’d just brought her police communications report in. How funny, like you don’t know we listen in on your communications twenty-four hours a day. What else could we do? Wait around for you to let us know what’s happening?”
“But the monitoring room is pretty far from here,” Michael noted.
“Far? So what? There are people wandering around here all the time. I saw the guy who monitors the foreign radio broadcasts in here after one, too, or maybe it was before one. In any event, I never saw Tirzah, or anybody from that production. How could I even get over to the String Building when we’re tied up with getting the lineup ready for the next day? What would I have business over there for? Why don’t you ask those people?”
“While we’re on the subject of Tirzah,” Michael was saying when someone knocked on the glass partition. He turned his face to see Hefetz watching him with an expression of curiosity on his face. Michael signaled to him that he would be finished in just another minute, to which Hefetz screwed up his face in complaint, as though he had been waiting hours for Michael. He opened the door and said, “I’ll wait for you here, but I’ve only got fifteen minutes. After that I’ve got to get to work on tomorrow’s lineup.” Michael nodded, and Hefetz closed the door.
“There are people,” Niva said with loathing, “who are always scheming. It doesn’t even matter what or how. You just know that they’ll always take care of their own interests.” She fell silent.
“Are you talking about Hefetz?” Michael asked.
“No—yeah—no. I don’t know. It’s not something—”
“Something specific?”
“No, it’s just that now he’s so full of complaints. He’s probably dying to know what information I’m passing on to you. I’m going to tell him you wanted to know where I was when Tirzah was murdered. Otherwise, he’ll make my life miserable, he’ll be dissatisfied, and when Hefetz is dissatisfied, he’s impossible. Beyond impossible. He’ll never stop nagging me.”
“Does that have anything to do with the business with Natasha?”
“No, forget about it. It’s not her. I mean, if it wasn’t Natasha, it would be some other girl. He sleeps with all the new ones, he’s been hot under the collar for a few years now. And them? These girls think that if the big boss wants to screw…never mind. Believe me,” she said, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, “I feel sorry for her. All in all, Natasha’s a good kid, all alone in the world. She came to Israel from Russia at the age of fourteen, her father stayed behind with some woman. Her mother, at the beginning she neglected her, then she fell in with the ultra-Orthodox and became a born-again Jew and they married her off to a widower with six little kids. So Natasha grew up all alone. Imagine, she finished her matric exams by herself, went to university, came here. She sat around for days, she was willing to do anything, any job. Mop the floors, whatever you asked her to do. I would send her down to the archives or to bring coffee from the canteen, or to fetch the mail. She did it all without a word. Schreiber’s the one who brought her here, I think, found her somewhere one night and brought her in like a lost kitten. He dug up a job as assistant researcher for her, he’s got good connections in personnel. And now? She’s finished, and all because—”
“Does it have anything to do with Tirzah?” Michael asked.
“No,” Niva admitted. “Truth is, it has nothing to do with Tirzah. It’s just that I feel sorry for Natasha. Even Rubin won’t be able to help her now.”
“And what about Tirzah?” he asked.
“I just want you to know that it’s not true that everyone was crazy about her.”
Michael folded his arms across his chest.
“It bugs me that everyone talks about her like she was a saint. It’s not true.”
“Anything specific?” Michael asked.
“Decent people with high moral standards are not always well loved, if you get my meaning,” she said, and her tone of voice surprised him. He had not expected her to sound so quiet and reflective. “You think I hated her because of Rubin, but I didn’t, I actually didn’t. I didn’t have anything against her, but she was annoying, believe me. Decent people with high moral standards,” she continued contemplatively, “sometimes go too far. I mean, they become too decent. Annoying, if you get my drift.”
He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“They—if they demand a certain ethical standard, let’s say they check everything twice, don’t report overtime hours, won’t let you cheat the government out of a penny. Well, that can get to be a drag. It’s so sanctimonious. People like that expect
to impose their standards on everyone. So they make enemies. That’s what I wanted to tell you, because I heard—” She fell silent.
“Yes?” he asked, his interest piqued. “What did you hear?”
“People are saying it wasn’t just some accident, and I felt it too—how can I say it? I heard that someone else was there, in the corridor of the String Building. I heard that Matty Cohen, poor guy…and that makes me nervous. Is it true?”
“Is there anyone specific you’re referring to when you mention ‘enemies’?”
She glanced under the table in search of one of the clogs she had let slip to the floor the moment they had sat down. “I uh, I don’t feel comfortable,” she said, her eyes on the glass partition. “Hefetz is snooping around like some—”
Michael did not turn his head to look. “Anyone specific?” he repeated.
“No,” she said after a long pause. “No one specific.”
“But you yourself weren’t crazy about her.”
She shrugged but did not respond.
“You want to come to my office?” Hefetz grumbled when Michael exited from the inner office. “Or would you prefer the canteen?”
“Let’s sit in your office,” Michael suggested. He stood as far away as possible from Hefetz, who was at least a head shorter than he, in order to blur the difference between their respective heights. “If you’re ready.”
Hefetz led the way through the newsroom, stopping to watch the monitor. “Turn up the volume for a minute,” he ordered. The room filled with the voice of one of the inner-circle participants of the live-broadcast political affairs program. A bleached-blond young man was shouting, “She’s not even her biological daughter,” as he fingered the row of earrings that ran the length of his left ear. “Mia adopted her with her previous husband, André Previn, when she was like eight years old. Woody Allen is absolutely right, in his place I would have left that hysterical Mia Farrow, too.” There was applause from the audience, and raucous laughter. “In any event,” the young man said, “it’s really cool how they got married in Venice, it’s so romantic, and—”
