A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

The lab technician, flustered, studied the image. “It’s awfully small and blurry,” he grumbled. “But yes, it does look like her. What was her name, Yulia? Well, it all adds up. We thought we might be dealing with a foreigner. Could she really have been forty-eight? We took her to be younger … but yes, it’s definitely her. Look at the Asiatic tilt of the eyes … was she a Tartar? Where was she from? Believe me, the doctors and nurses in intensive care were smitten by her, even though she was unconscious … It’s her for sure. Look, why stand on ceremony? Who’s going to challenge your signature? Let’s have a quick look at her and get it over with. If you ask me, she’d like to leave this place too. Just sign the form and National Insurance will track down her next-of-kin so that we can get her ready for the funeral, whether it’s here or overseas.”

“Why don’t you sign?”

“I’m not allowed to. An identification by a hospital staff member having no previous acquaintance with the deceased is inadmissible. It would only get me into trouble. I’m not even supposed to have looked at her. But you’re a different case. She worked for you. If you came all the way out here on a night like this, what’s stopping you now? If you don’t sign, we’ll have to find an employee of yours to do it, and by then she’ll be at Central Path. That means a whole new bureaucratic procedure … maybe more newspaper articles too.”

The resource manager reacted sharply. “Newspapers? I thought so!”

“What’s wrong with them?” The lab technician smiled shrewdly. “The dead make good copy. We’ve already had one journalist here … how else would you have heard about it?”

This was going too far. “You might at least admit that you yourself were the source. Leaking private information about the dead … don’t tell me that’s legal!”

The technician was unfazed. “Nothing is illegal when there isn’t any choice. The only hope of identifying her was by publicizing her case. But I swear I had nothing to do with the article itself. That was entirely the reporter’s doing. I heard you called him a weasel. Did you actually do that to his face?”

“I did not. Where did you get that from?”

“Well, perhaps you told the weekly’s secretary and she passed it on. Don’t be upset. ‘Weasel’ is too good for him. If I know him, he took it as a compliment. It’s all water off a duck’s back. Weasel, eh? Not bad! But the useful kind. He’s neither dumb nor lazy.”

“Damn it! When did you last talk to him?”

“Right after you did. An hour or an hour and a half ago. That’s why I’m working overtime. I was expecting you.”

“You were?”

“Does it surprise you that we’d like to be rid of her as much as you would? Don’t think that just because we’re used to corpses we enjoy having her stay on here … Well, what do you say? Why not sign for her? Here’s the form.”

The technician’s garrulousness, however, only strengthened the resource manager’s resolve. All that was missing was another article, one accusing him of identifying a woman he didn’t remember.

He made another effort to explain himself. Death didn’t frighten him. Just a few minutes ago, because of a carelessly open door, he had walked into the morgue and stayed calm despite the shock. But sign an official form? Absolutely not! What right did he have to do so?

Aware that he was causing a problem, he wondered at himself. After all, what difference did it make? Everything was perfectly clear. Whom was he punishing? The night shift supervisor? The journalist? The man facing him, who had got him into this predicament? What harm would it do to look at the woman’s face? Was he afraid that he, too, would be smitten? As if he could fall in love with a corpse …

He cautiously reached for the keys and asked if they were definitely hers. The technician shrugged. “In the pandemonium after a bombing, you never know. But they were found in her bag, next to the pay slip, so who else’s could they be? All the other dead have been identified. No missing keys were reported …”

The resource manager nodded and glanced around. Only now did he notice that the room had no windows. The ceiling was high, the kind that made you feel there was too much space above you. A naked, high-wattage bulb shed a cold light. They must need a tall ladder to change it when it burns out ,he thought. With a slight smile he turned to the technician. “Why insist on a visual identification? We know her address. We can go to her apartment and see if the keys fit. That’s indirect proof, but it’s worth more than the foibles of memory.”

The technician’s eyes gleamed. “And if they do fit?”

“Then I’ll sign the form as if I had done a visual.”

The man took off his beret and tossed it excitedly onto the empty stretcher. Bohemian or Orthodox, he was quite bald.

“Excellent. But who’ll go there?”

“I will,” the resource manager surprised himself by saying softly, as if in a dream.

“You?”

“Yes, me. On condition that you don’t inform the press you think so highly of … What time is it? Not even ten. The address isn’t far from here and should be easy to find. I know my way about Jerusalem. She’s our responsibility until she’s buried, and if nobody else wants to take it on themselves, then we — I mean the company management — have to do it. Perhaps we even have some insurance or compensation fund for dependents like her son … because she does have a son, or at least she said so. If you don’t mind, then, I’ll sign for the keys. You can see that I’m doing my duty — and you can report that to the weasel on my behalf. And just so you don’t think I’m scared of corpses, I’ll allow myself another look at … the back room. I’ll be happy to have you as my guide. You can even explain why nothing smells. That would be good of you.”

16

The lab technician was only too pleased to open the inner door. He turned on the light in the refrigerated room, dimly illuminating the dozen stretchers the human resources manager had seen before. Each had a corpse on it. The manager shivered, from excitement or cold. His first question was more philosophical than anatomical. At what point, he wanted to know, did a dead body become a corpse? Was it a matter of science or simply of semantics?

The lab technician was startled by the question. Such a conundrum had never occurred to him. After a moment’s thought, he answered categorically: “It’s a matter of time. There are exceptions, though.”

“Such as?”

“Such as battlefield casualties. Time passes more quickly then. It’s condensed.”

He removed the plastic sheet from a stretcher, revealing a woman’s brownish corpse and featureless face.

“I take it these are being kept for anatomy lessons,” the human resources manager said, to reassure himself. Stepping up to the stretcher, he took a long, hard look, to show his guide, but most of all himself, how undaunted he was.

“Exactly.”

“They won’t be used for research?”

“No.”

“And now do tell me” — the question kept nagging him — “why isn’t there any smell here? That’s the worst part of death, far worse than how it looks …”

“Actually,” the technician said, with a slight smile, “there is a smell. You just don’t notice it because it’s so faint. But it does rub off on whoever spends enough time here. You can literally sniff such people out.”

“Still,” the manager begged to know — as if it were a life-and-death matter — “how do you neutralize it?”

“Do you want to know the chemical formula?”

“If it’s not too complicated …”

“Complicated? Not especially.”