A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

The technician ticked off the mixture of alcohol, formalin, phenol, and distilled water with which the bodies were injected, four hours after death, after their natural fluids had been drained from them. It was simple and efficient.

The resource manager debated whether to call it a night or to continue his tour. Deciding to press on, he circled the room with small, museum-sized steps. Each stretcher had a number. For some reason, the swaddled corpses repelled him more than did the plastic-sheeted ones. Casting a last, impersonal look at them, he prepared to depart with a final question. How long had they been lying in this place?

“A year, at most.”

“A year?”

“That’s the longest you’re allowed to keep a corpse. After that it has to be buried.”

“That’s the maximum?”

“According to the law.”

“Interesting … very interesting. Suppose you show me your oldest corpse. I’d like to see its state of preservation.”

The technician led him down the row of stretchers, from one of which the plastic sheet had fallen of its own accord. The shrivelled but still bearded human figure beneath it was ancient-looking. Its features were distinct. The ecstatically shut eyes still revealed the passionate struggle with death that had taken place nearly a year before. Long forgotten by his survivors, the agony of this struggle lived on in the dead man. A shiver ran down the sturdy manager’s spine. Sticking his gloved hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat, he mused:

“There’s no question about it. A visit here is a must. It gives you a sense of what’s important.”

The lab technician nodded. “And of what isn’t,” he added.

The resource manager noted that the shrivelled man’s skin was the colour of yellowed parchment. It almost looked like the pages of a sacred book.

“Interesting,” he murmured again. “All of this is so very interesting …”

With a glance at the technician, who seemed pleased with him, he asked if he was a believing Jew. No, the man replied. Yet there were times when anyone working here had to believe in something. Otherwise you could lose your humanity, watching so much life drain away.

A large clock ticked on the wall. After a visit like this, the manager thought, no one could accuse him of being finicky. He turned to go, then asked weakly which stretcher the cleaning woman was on. “You know,” he added, for no apparent reason, “she was a mechanical engineer.”

“She isn’t on any of them. She’s in the deep-freeze room. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” the technician asked.

The resource manager was sure. He could never pretend to identify a person he had only met in passing.

17

In the heated car, skimming the wet, empty streets of Arab Jerusalem, where streetlights were dimmer than in the Jewish half of the city, he again felt an urge to report back to the owner. Although not sure whether the concert was over, he dialled the old man’s home over the car’s speakerphone. The housekeeper told him in cultured, vaguely accented English that the master had not yet returned. The concert would be ending late because of an unusually long symphony in its second half.

“Probably something of Mahler’s,” said the resource manager, who prided himself on his musical knowledge.

The housekeeper, however, was not interested in composers, only in the length of their compositions. It was enough to know that the old man would not be home before midnight. If the resource manager wished to leave a message, she would take it down.

The resource manager decided not to. Why let the old man sleep in peace by telling him the job was done?

Crossing the invisible, yet ineradicable, line between the two halves of the city, he switched on the radio to listen to the concert. No, it wasn’t Mahler. Yet it did seem to anticipate him. The oboe and clarinet were almost Mahleresque. A sudden rhythmic tattoo of repeating notes inspired him to conduct the music with one hand as he sped through the neighbourhood of Talbieh. He passed his mother’s building and turned a corner by his old high school. Whose symphony was it? He might figure it out if only he could go on listening. Yet Jerusalem was too small a city to fit a whole symphony into, and he was already nearing the market that had been the scene of the bombing. Usha Street, where the dead woman had lived, was down the hill ahead of him. Rather than risk getting trapped in a maze of one-way streets and dead ends, he switched off the music, and parked on a main road. Then he detached his cell phone from its speaker and put it in the pocket of his overcoat.

When we heard the knock on the door we were already in our nightgowns, all except Big Sister, who was still wearing a dress. Although our parents had warned us before they set out for the rabbi’s wedding that we must never open the door after nine o’clock for anyone, not even our own grandma, we were so excited that we ran to see who it was. We were sure it was Grandma come to watch over usin our sleep. Wedidn’t evenask, ‘Isthat you,Grandma? Have you come for the night?’ but opened the door right away. We almost fainted. A stranger was there, not even a religious Jew, a big strong man with short hair like our mother’s when she takes off her wig before going to bed. He asked if we knew where Yulia Ragayev lived, because he had looked for her everywhere, upstairs and down, and couldn’t find her. And though we should have shut the door and put on the chain and talked through the crack the way our father taught us, we all answered in a chorus: “She doesn’t live here anymore, not upstairs and not downstairs. She’s moved to the backyard, to the shack that was our neighbour’s storeroom.” Big Sister, who doesn’t like us to answer in her place, hushed us and said, “She’s not there now, because she works night shifts in a bakery. Sometimes she brings us a sweet challah for the Sabbath,” and Middle Sister, who knows everything, began to yell, “That’s not so, that’s not so, don’t listen to her! Yulia was fired, and Father thinks she must have leftJerusalem,because he’s been lookingfor her high and low.”

The stranger smiled and explained in a soft voice that he was the manager of the bakery and that Yulia hadn’t been fired. Did we remember the bombing in the market a week ago? She had been badly injured in it, and now she was in hospital, and he’d come with her keys to get something for her. He jangled them in the air for us to see.

We couldn’t control ourselves any longer. Every child in the building knew Yulia. She was a nice, quiet woman, even if she wasn’t religious, and we all screamed, “Oh, no, O God, what happened? What hospital is she in?” We were sure our parents would want to visit her, because it’s a commandment in the Torah.

But the stranger lifted a hand and said, “Easy does it, girls. She’s very ill and can’t be visited right now. Just tell me: Has anyone been looking for her?”

“No,” we all said. “No one. We’d have seen anyone who came.” He nodded and asked where the light switch was and how to get to the yard. We had so forgotten about being careful that Big Sister jumped up and said, “Come on, I’ll take you there. I’ll show you everything.” And to us she said, “That’s enough, girls. Now go to bed.”

But how could we go to bed when Big Sister was out in the yard with a stranger who wasn’t religious? And so all five of us, Little Three-Year-Old Sister, too, ran into the cold in our flannel nighties to be with them. It was pitch black and there was mud and puddles everywhere between the old boards and old tools. We ducked beneath the laundry lines and showed the man the shack. Yulia’s old nameplate had been ripped away by the storm and only the new one was left, the one with the Hebrew name we had given her, because we took it from the Bible and put it on her door, and she just smiled and let us do it.