A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

She listened to him absentmindedly, her eyes on the table, as if doubting whether anything in his account could possibly justify the loss of her beauty sleep. Nor did she want to look at the picture. “What difference does it make?” she asked crossly.

“But it does!” There had been an emotional entanglement. Why not try to understand whether it had to do with real beauty or the mere illusion of it? He himself, for example, though he had interviewed the woman for her job, had not been impressed.

“You interviewed her?”

“Of course. Every new employee has to be vetted by the human resources division.”

“But if you weren’t impressed by her, what does my opinion matter?”

“I didn’t say it did. I’m just curious. Why are you so stubborn? How much trouble is it to look at a photograph?”

His mother made no reply. Her divorced son’s fascination with the picture of a dead woman struck her as unnecessarily morbid. Since it seemed important to him, however, she asked him to fetch her glasses and cigarettes and cautiously opened the folder. She first read the newspaper article, then turned to the résumé in her son’s handwriting, passed from that to the computer printout, and glanced briefly at the face of the blonde woman. She lit a cigarette, inhaled, and asked how old the woman had been.

“I can tell you exactly. Forty-eight.”

“Have you told the morgue what you know?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Right now it’s for internal use. We have to decide how to formulate our response. Until we do I’m keeping it under wraps.”

“Under wraps?” His mother gave a start. “From whom?”

“From that vile journalist who plans to write another instalment, for one.”

“But the morgue needs to know who she is. Why not tell them?”

“It’s only for a day or two. Even then, I’ll talk only to authorized parties. And before I do, I’ll need to double-check my sources. The last thing we want is an exposé of the supervisor’s private life. With weasels like that journalist, you have to watch out … By the way, the owner doesn’t know a thing yet. He went to a concert and let me run myself ragged.”

His mother, enveloped in cigarette smoke, did not like his procrastination one bit. Surely the dead woman must have friends or family who were looking for her.

“I don’t believe anyone is looking for her. But to be honest, who knows?”

He brought her an ashtray.

“Not you, that’s for sure.” There was disdain, even anger, in her voice. “I’m warning you, though. Once you’ve discovered who she is, she’s yours.”

“How come?”

“She’s your responsibility. Keeping it to yourself is not only disrespectful, it’s criminal. Tell me” — she was raising her voice now as if he were once again a small boy — “what’s your problem? Why can’t you phone the hospital? What are you afraid of?”

He removed the dishes from the table, scraping the waste into the bin, placed them in the sink, and rinsed them. “It’s the middle of the night,” he said gently. “A morgue isn’t an emergency room. No one is sitting there waiting to hear from me. Divulging details over the telephone that can end up in the wrong place is worse than doing nothing. If she’s been lying unidentified for a week, she can wait one more night. Believe me, her ordeal is over.”

His mother said nothing. She took off her glasses, stubbed out her cigarette, reached for the review section of the newspaper, and headed for her bedroom. Going into the bathroom to check the water, he discovered it was cold here, too. Well, his mother had not known he was coming. He switched on the old boiler, put some water on for tea, and glanced at the front section of the newspaper. Then, before his mother could turn her light out, he went to ask for the sports section. Had she already thrown it away? He addressed her timidly; even now, their eyes did not make contact.

“You must think something. I mean about that picture.”

She preferred not to answer. “It’s hard to say. It’s so small …”

“Even so.”

She hesitated, weighing her words. “Your boss’s office manager may be right. There’s something about her … especially the eyes … or maybe it’s her smile. It’s like sunshine.”

A wave of chagrin swept over him. For some reason, it grieved him to be told that the woman was beautiful. His mother, who seemed to know this without looking at him, tried retracting her remark, then gave up.

“Should I leave the light on for you in the hallway?”

“Why? Are you going out again tonight?”

“Yes. There’s no hot water for a shower.”

“How was I supposed to know you were coming?”

“You weren’t. I’m not blaming you.” He shifted his weight to his other leg. “While the water is heating, I’ll run over to the morgue. Maybe I can find someone there to take her off my hands.”

“At this hour?” She sat up in bed. “Don’t you think it’s rather late?”

“Not really. It’s just a little after nine.”

“What hospital is she in?”

“Mount Scopus.”

“There’s a morgue there?”

“You’re asking me? So I’ve been told …”

She was beginning to feel sorry for him.

“Perhaps you’re right about putting it off until tomorrow. That wouldn’t be so terrible.”

“ Now you tell me that?” he snapped. “After first making me feel all that guilt?”

He turned out the light.

14

Sometime before 10 p.m. he appeared at our security hut, a stocky man with a hard, weary face. Although the storm had subsided, in his winter overcoat, galoshes, gloves, and yellow woollen scarf he seemed prepared for more bad weather. And yet he was bareheaded. Before he could say a word, we searched him for guns and explosives. “You want the morgue? At this hour?”He said he was looking for our director, assuming there was such a person.

That gave us a fright. Had there been a new bombing we didn’t know about? But no, he had come, so it seemed, in connection with last week’s bombing, which no one remembered any more. He waved a thin folder and said that he had discovered the identity of a woman killed in that bombing.

“We’re sorry, sir,” we answered, “but it’s after visiting hours. You need special permission to be admitted at night.” Yet after he showed us his ID card and told us he managed the personnel department of a bakery that supplied half the country with bread, we said, “More power to someone like you, who with hundreds of people working under him, still comes to ask about a temporary cleaning woman — a deadone, in fact.” He liked that. Thenhe asked again how to get to the morgue.

How could we tell a personnel manager where it was when we ourselves, in all our years of working here, had never been there? We had to call the emergency room and ask for directions.

Although the directions did not seem complicated, he was soon wandering up and down hallways and stopping interns and nurses, who had only the vaguest idea of where the dead were kept. Finally, hoping to find someone who was better informed, he went to the main office. The woman at the desk already knew about him. Not being authorized to receive his report, however, she drew him a map to help him reach the morgue and promised that somebody would be there to receive him.

The map did not, as he had imagined it would, instruct him to descend to the ground floor and look there for stairs to a hidden basement. Rather, it guided him outside to a small cluster of pine trees in which stood an old, stone building, one wing of which, according to a sign, was a stockroom for medical supplies. A second wing housed the department of forensic medicine, while a third, unidentified, was no doubt the one he was looking for. He had to stumble down a dark lane to reach it. Twinkling lights in the distance, which came not from stars but from far-off houses, hinted at a panoramic view by day.