A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

“I’m not anxious and don’t you be, either,” the resource manager replied. “I never thought this mission would be simple. Take all the time you need. I’m fine for now.”

He looked for the light switch. Unable to find it, he put the two cartons on top of the suitcase, propped his feet on them, covered his eyes with the black eye mask he had been issued on the aeroplane, and lay back to get some rest.

10

The eye mask did its job, which was fortunate, because it took the consul’s husband a while to get him released. The suspicious officer, fearful of being saddled with another coffin, was loath to exchange his foreign hostage for a local one.

The resource manager was dozing when he felt a friendly hand on his shoulder. It belonged to the consul’s husband, a sturdy man of about seventy with a head of grey curls, who had come to keep his promise. An ex-farmer with hearty looks and a bluff manner, he seemed to have come straight from the fields. Pulling off his boots and shaking the snow and mud from them, he removed several layers of clothing, spread them casually on the coffin, took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, whipped out the weekend edition of a Hebrew paper that had arrived on the flight from Tel Aviv, and declared his readiness to settle in for the duration. Only then did the officer, persuaded the substitution was genuine, permit the emissary to exchange the gloomy terminal for a foggy morning.

Climbing back up to the ground floor, he found himself locked in a second time, the small airport having been shut down between flights. A key had to be sent for before he could exit and join the group waiting for him beneath a small canopy. A flashbulb popped as he cautiously made his way between banks of black slush. He looked up to see the grinning photographer. He was not, he thought ruefully, going to have much privacy on this trip.

The tall consul, dressed in a black fur coat, a red woollen cap, and galoshes, made him think of a fairy godmother — or of an old peasant, like her husband, magically transported from some penurious henhouse or barn to a position of state. Underneath the canopy, which stood in an icy expanse devoid of a single building or tree — or anything at all except an old, one-winged military aeroplane — she embraced him warmly, apologized for the treatment he had received, declared that the authorities’ apprehensions were nevertheless not unfounded, and introduced him to the deceased’s husband, Mr Ragayev, a tall, gaunt engineer with dull eyes in a haggard face. His obsequious bow suggested that he had been informed by the consul or her husband, or perhaps even by the weasel, of the compensation sent by the bakery from the land of horrors he had left behind. And yet even though he had since remarried he seemed in no mood to forget the grief and insult meted out to him by the woman who had abandoned him and was now returning in a metal box. Since she was deaf to his complaints, he was forced to voice them to her chaperone.

“Tell him to be quick,” the resource manager whispered to the consul, who was translating. A brightening dawn flung glittering swords at a low, leaden sky. He was only now beginning to grasp what the arctic cold of this country was like. Moreover, the consul was finding it difficult to be concise, since she felt compelled to defend the country she represented against the ex-husband’s bitter reproach that that country had irresponsibly extended the visa of a woman to whom it would offer only poverty, solitude, and death. Once that peculiar friend of hers had fled back home in disappointment, the gaunt engineer complained, his ex-wife should never have been allowed to remain only to perish in a blood feud that was none of her concern. And the most absurd part of it (the consul was translating as fast as she could) was that he was now expected to take charge of the body of the woman who had two-timed him! He realized, of course, that the consul’s government was paying the costs. But this was the least it could do after causing the needless death of a foreign worker whom it had neglected to expel … and who would pay for all his time and mental anguish? He was a busy engineer and not in the best of health; truth be told, it wasn’t sorrow or compassion that he felt for his ex-wife, but anger and humiliation. Of course, he was a grown man and could cope. But what about his son? The boy was so devastated by the death of the mother who had sent him back to his native land that he had refused to bury her without the presence of his grandmother, thus forcing him, the father — as if he hadn’t got enough on his mind! — to twist the boy’s arm for the sake of a woman who had let him down …

His grievances listed, the gaunt man seemed content. The shadow of a smile flitted over his pale face as he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew out perfect smoke rings. A moment later, however, the cigarette had flown from his mouth and lay glowing on the ice. Shutting his eyes, he turned red and doubled over in pain, racked by a fit of coughing that caused him to leave the cover of the canopy, tear open his jacket, vest, and shirt, and bare his gasping chest to the elements.

“Don’t let him fool you,” came a whisper as the paroxysm continued. It was the weasel — who, in all the excitement, had forgotten the resource manager’s warning to steer clear. “It’s just an act to make you up the ante.”

“But where is the boy?” the emissary wondered. He was the only person there without a hat and his bare, closely cropped head was pounding from the cold.

The journalist took him by the arm, turned him around, and steered him towards a parking lot on the far side of the canopy. He now saw that the small airport was near a city: a skyline of buildings, spires, and domes gleamed through the fog. Cheered by these signs of civilization, perhaps even of culture, he followed the journalist to a van where a driver was dozing at the wheel. In the back seat, he glimpsed through a grimy window a young passenger in overalls, sitting with his head tossed back not in sleep but in a rigid gesture of defiance.

At long last, thought the resource manager. Her own flesh and blood!

The journalist’s heavy, padded boots, part of an outfit he had purchased against the polar weather, crunched the ice. Approaching the van, he rapped lightly on its window to let the boy know someone wished to meet him.

But the boy seemed in no mood to meet anyone or even to leave the car — and when scolded for his indifference by the man at the wheel, he merely looked away and jammed down the earflaps of the old pilot’s cap he was wearing. At this, the driver stepped outside, opened the back door, yanked his young passenger from the car, and disdainfully knocked off his cap. In silent fury, his eyes filled with tears, the boy threw himself at his assailant and pulled his hair.

The emissary’s heart went out to the youngster. So this was the young man mentioned in the job interview he had conducted. In the midst of the fracas he made out a winsome Tartar tilt to those light-coloured eyes, the harmonious product of a rare racial mixture. My secretary is right, he scolded himself. I live inside myself like a snail, beauty and goodness passing me by like shadows.

“What was that?” the weasel asked, sensing his agitation. “Did you say something?”

“No, nothing.” He shrank from the probing antennae that, instead of keeping their distance, were latching onto him more and more.

His coughing fit concluded, the boy’s father hurried over to break up the fight. Yet the boy, too enraged to acknowledge defeat, now threw himself in despair at his father. The tall consul, confident of her powers, went over to lend a hand. The father did not need assistance, though. Dragging his son to the edge of the parking lot, he subdued him single-handed. The photographer, convinced, so it seemed, that nothing was real unless filmed, popped flashbulbs at them as they wrestled.