A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

“I’ll pay handsomely.” The emissary was moved. “I’ve had faith in you from the moment I met you.”

The consul smiled and put another dumpling on her husband’s plate. “If you have faith in me too,” she said, “you’ll pull up a chair and eat some solid food. Do you hear that wind? It’s getting stronger and whispering, ‘It’s time to get going.’”

1

Tell us, you hard people: After desecrating the Holy Land and turning murder and destruction into a way of life, by what right do you now trample on our feelings? Is it because you and your enemies have learned to kill each other and yourselves with such crazy impunity, bombing and sowing endless destruction, that you think you can leave a coffin, with no explanation or permission, in the courtyard of an apartment building in someone else’s country and disappear without so much as a by-your-leave?

How could you have failed to think of our children, suddenly faced, among garbage cans and gas canisters, with an anonymous death not hallowed by flowers or prayers? Didn’t you think of the nightmares they might have? Of the questions they might ask us? Heartless though you are, you must know that only a clever neighbour with the wits to shield them kept their play from turning into horror.

And what were we supposed to do? How were we to protect ourselves? By calling some numskull of a policeman and bribing him to believe that we had nothing to do with it? How could we prove that a corpse that turned up one Saturday afternoon in our courtyard belonged to no one?

There was nothing to do but clench our teeth and look out of our windows until you returned. At dusk you came breezing back in an armoured vehicle from some ancient war. We recognized you at once: hardened foreigners, a raceof cunning wanderers who — again without explaining yourselves — loaded the coffin ontoa trailer and disappeared into the darkness. The dictators who ran our lives until recently behaved the same way.

And even afterwards, oddly enough, we felt no relief. A faint, inexplicable sorrow continued to gnaw at us. We still didn’t know whose body it was or how it had died. Where had it come from? Where was it going? Our biggest grievance against you is: Why did you make off with it so quickly?

It wasn’t easy for the two journalists to set out on such short notice from a small hotel in which they had made themselves at home. Yet in a winter like this they could never have managed to reach the grandmother’s village on their own. Moreover, they knew that a coffin’s voyage over distant steppes, undertaken at the whim of an orphaned boy, would grip their readers more than a mere grieving old woman reunited with her dead daughter.

The transportation offered them was better than they had expected, the driver having convinced the consul’s husband — now promoted by the human resources manager to full acting consul — to rent, not a minibus, but a converted army-surplus personnel carrier. Square and steel-plated, it had huge wheels that kept it well off the treacherous ground; to enter it they had to use a ladder. Though its exterior was still combat grey, great pains had been taken to refashion it comfortably within. It had been stripped of its battle stations and given wide, well-upholstered seats, baggage racks, and overhead lights. Inside, all that remained of its military past were the silent green dials on its dashboard and two tripods welded to the floor. The trailer bearing the woman’s coffin had no doubt once been used to transport a heavy mortar or ammunition crates.

The driver had been reinforced as well. The acting consul, who wore his wife’s warm red wool cap as the badge of his promotion, had acceded to the young man’s request and drawn on the emissary’s generous expense account to hire a second driver, who just happened to be the first driver’s elder brother. An expert navigator and mechanic, he urged the group to set out without delay and use the night time to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the approaching storm.

The resource manager, unfamiliar with local prices, had no idea what all this would cost. Yet the fact that the pittance he had paid the embittered ex-husband had sufficed to make the man drop all complaints encouraged him to think that in this case, too, the expense would not be great. For a reasonable sum he would restore the owner’s humanity, which had been maligned by the journalist who now joined the photographer in admiring the converted carrier.

“But where’s the child?” the resource manager asked anxiously, concerned that the handsome youngster might have vanished at the last moment.

“Child?” The new consul objected to the term. “Is that what you take him for? Wait till you see where we’re about to pick him up. You can tell me then whether you think he’s a child …”

The city’s streets were broad and deserted. There were few pedestrians and the shops were closed, because of the night or, perhaps, the storm. The high-placed headlights of the vehicle were reflected by the stairways and entrances of monumental buildings decorated with turrets and spires and guarded by bearded sentinels in sheepskin coats. A group of middle-aged, snugly wrapped women with shopping baskets stood silently on a corner, awaiting transportation back to their village.

On the outskirts of town, the party entered a parking lot. It belonged to an abandoned factory, beside which piles of unidentifiable raw materials lay rotting. A loudspeaker attached to a tall chimney blasted earsplitting disco music. The powerfully built mechanic, doubting the consul’s competence in such matters, went inside and emerged a few minutes later with the delicately built boy in tow. The young man’s face had an alcoholic flush; he carried a small backpack and was dressed in the same pilot’s hat and overalls he’d worn that morning. They seated him in the back among the bags and suitcases and told him to keep an eye on his mother’s coffin, which, though firmly connected to the trailer, might be jolted loose.

The boy glanced with wonder at the vehicle, pleased at having brought so elaborate a scheme into being. He still had the same sour smell. The weasel made a face. “Gentlemen,” he murmured, “if we don’t make this young Adonis take a bath at our first stop, we’ll have to cease breathing.” The emissary saw the boy redden. We have to be careful, he thought. He must still know some Hebrew from his time spent in Jerusalem. “ Shalom ,” he said, giving the youngster a friendly smile to make him feel at ease. “I’ll bet,” he added, “that’s one word you still remember.” Yet the boy only grew redder and said nothing, and cast his handsome eyes glumly downwards as if even one word from the city that had killed his mother was too much for him. Slowly he turned to look behind him, as much at the first dark signs of the storm, which was now blotting out the fading city on the horizon, as at the coffin bobbing up and down in the reddish glare of the taillights.

From the outset, the older driver took the younger one, who seemed glad to yield to his authority, under his wing. It was clear that he would decide on their route, which he did by choosing a longer one with better and more-travelled roads. Once assured that his brother had mastered the controls, he turned his attention to the decommissioned dials on the dashboard, determined to put them back in working order. The consul, having had experience with machinery as a farmer, joined in the effort and soon brought a dial back to life; although its purpose remained a mystery, its steady flicker cheered them all. Although the vehicle handled roughly and noisily, its gears letting out a double groan when shifted and its huge wheels jouncing for no apparent reason, they felt they had embarked safely on a real adventure. Not even the yellow gleam of the distant storm in the rearview mirror, which the mechanic pointed out as if he were a radiologist reading a worrisome X-ray, could dampen their spirits.