A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

18

The human resources manager watched the first key turn in the lock and felt certain the second would open something too. It’s mission accomplished, he thought. I’ve got the right woman. And she’s still ours, the personnel division’s. But why are these sweet little girls still standing around me, shivering in their long nighties? One of them must be my daughter’s age. What do they want from me? Now that I’ve opened the door, they must be waiting for me to go and look for what I promised to take to the hospital.

He beamed at them and said:

“Darlings, thank you for your help. It’s awfully wet and cold out here. And very late, too. Run along now and go to bed before you catch cold.”

Although all six sisters, from the biggest to the smallest, were startled by his strict, if fatherly, tone, they wavered for a moment, as if unsure whether an irreligious stranger need be obeyed. Then, all at once, like a flock of birds warned of danger by a single wing flap, they flew off without looking back. Stepping into the shack, he entered a cool, dark space whose smell of ancient sleep seemed never to have been aired.

He switched on the overhead light. The bulb was weak and he had trouble seeing even after lighting a small table lamp. The bed was rumpled, as if a bad dream had made the sleeper jump out on the last morning she had risen. Behind the pillow was another lamp, attached to the wall. Now there was enough light to survey the room.

For a second, he recoiled. Who had given him permission to be here? Yet he quickly collected himself. The company’s humanity was under attack; it was time for compassion, concern, and involvement, not apologies. If he were to dispose of this woman’s belongings and try to arrange compensation, he had to find a human link to her. Yes, compensation. Why not?

A doll in the form of a barefoot monk lay at the foot of the bed. It had a black robe and a beard of flax, dyed black, on its face. The resource manager held it up to see what it was made of before placing it on a shelf beside a small transistor radio, which he could not resist turning on, hoping to catch the end of the concert. Removing his gloves, he fiddled with the stations. For a while, there was a confusion of sounds; then he found the wavelength of the unknown, sonorous symphony; the wind section was now trumpeting a solemn slow movement. Carefully holding the little radio, he removed, with a twinge of emotion, a flowery blouse from a wobbly straw armchair, sat down, and shut his eyes.

Back in his days as a salesman, when he’d spent many a night in hotels and lived in constant fear of insomnia, he had made a point of never going to bed before midnight. Now, after leaving his wife and moving in with his mother, he had developed the habit of taking a short but sound nap every evening, when the TV news came on. This helped him stay fresh for a night of bar hopping in the smart new establishments in town, where he hoped to meet someone new. Tonight, though, the nap would have to be symbolic, hastily snatched in the room of the departed cleaning woman.

Although both the door and the main window were shut tight, it was bitingly cold in the shack even with his coat and scarf on. The reason, he saw when he went to look for it, was another, small, open window in the bathroom. A laundry line ran from it to a nearby fence. Visible in the light of the cloud-stalked moon, clothing flapped lightly in the breeze.

If he couldn’t find some friend or relative to take possession of this woman’s disrupted domesticity, the resource manager thought, he would have to ask his secretary to do it. He was sure she would welcome any task that took her away from the routine of her computer. Meanwhile, he decided, he would at least close the window. He put his gloves back on and — after ascertaining that the symphony would not be ending for a while — went out into the yard. Going to the rear of the little shack, which suggested a fairy-tale hut in its wintry setting of old boards and implements, he detached the laundry line from the fence and gently gathered the rain-drenched, mud-and-leaf-spattered articles, which felt light and intimate to the touch. Back inside, he put them in the sink, wondered briefly whether he had the right to rinse them, then turned on the tap, which surprised him by running hot at once. The neighbour whose storeroom this had been had connected its plumbing to his own. Wouldn’t the night shift supervisor love to be here! But he mustn’t have anything to do with this. His infatuation had caused enough problems.

The music on the other side of the thin bathroom wall was showing the first signs of resolution. He shut the tap and left the laundry in the sink, already regretting having taken it from the line. He mustn’t touch anything else: no drawers, no documents, no photographs. Suppose the sought-for friend or relative were to turn up and accuse him of theft? What would he say? “Where have you been?” “Why didn’t you take any interest in her until now?”

He sat down again in the chair, one ear on the symphony that was now slowly but surely winding down, and surveyed the dead woman’s domain. Apart from the bed, which she had perhaps intended to return to that fateful morning, everything was neatly arranged. Though poor, she had had good taste. A clean plate lay on the table beside a folded napkin, mute testimony to a never-eaten last meal. Two anemones stood in a thin vase, still fresh-looking although the water had evaporated.

The walls were bare except for a single, unframed sketch. There were no photographs — none of the son whisked away by his father; none of the boyfriend who had left her; none even, of the old mother in the village who had hoped to join her. The sketch, done by an amateur — herself? — in charcoal, depicted a small, deserted alleyway — in Jerusalem’s Old City? — that curved gently to meet the silhouette of a domed and minareted mosque.

The solemn music had become trapped in a frightful dissonance from which it was struggling to escape. As the little radio, in turn, struggled to transmit this, he guessed the composer in a flash. There’s no doubt of it, he thought, conducting with one arm. Who but that stubborn, pious old German would ever be so tedious?

He was pleased at having figured it out. When he phoned the old man, he would surprise him not only with his detective work but also with a discussion of the concert. “Believe it or not, I listened to it while on the job. I just couldn’t tell if it was the Seventh or the Eighth.”

Something about the shack, tucked away in a backyard in a semi-Orthodox neighbourhood in the centre of town, appealed to him. He wondered how much rent its owner had got away with charging. “Yulia Ragayev, Yulia Ragayev,” he declaimed to the empty room. “Yulia Ragayev, Yulia Ragayev.” The death of this beautiful woman a few years his senior, who had passed so close to him without his having noticed her magical smile, saddened him greatly.

The dark, earnest notes of the German symphony, which had reached its final coda, were interrupted by the jingly melody of his cell phone. Fortunately, the caller had patience, since it wasn’t easy to find the tiny instrument in the many pockets of his overcoat. “Hang on,” he shouted as he turned down the music. Yet when he returned to the phone, it was only his mother. Unable to sleep, she was calling to ask if he had been to the hospital and found someone to deal with the dead woman.

“Yes,” he replied with a sigh. “I was in the morgue on Mount Scopus. On top of everything, they wanted me to look at the corpse.”

“And you agreed?” she asked in consternation.

“Of course not. I’m not that naïve. You tell me: how can I identify someone I don’t remember?”

For once, she was pleased with him. “You were right to put your foot down. It’s none of your business. At last you showed some sense. Where are you, in a bar?”