A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

He turned to the wall, over which the flame from the stove cast its shadows until sleep snuffed them out.

For us, though, the flame goes on burning. It entices us, whirls and spins us through space and time, dream-bearers for a man in his late thirties, an ex-army officer, a divorced father of a teenage girl, a personnel manager charged with a unique mission, who now, at the first stop of his journey, in the barracks of a once-secret military base that has become a draw for tourists, lies on a thin mattress, wrapped in a foreign army blanket. Although we feel his urge to dream a dream, is it possible, in all his weariness, with the steady rasping of the sleepers around him, to give him one that willbe meaningful — one that he will remember and even describe to others?

That’s our job. We, the agents of the imagination, brokers of phantasms, are here to produce a dread and marvellous dream. Already we hover above shut eyelids, slip into the rhythms of the breath, stir forgotten childhood wishes into the remnants of yesterday, blend anxieties with fabulous desires, mix jealousies with memories and longings. Microscopic and transparently elusive, we pass, tiny dream nematodes, compactions of dissimulation, through the tough outer membranes of the soul.

And although we are all here for the same purpose, none of us knows any of the others. Incessantly we change our disguises. Two old childhood friends merge into a single youth. A conscript killed by a stray bullet returns as a company sergeant. The former foreign minister, now a next-door neighbour and possibly a cousin, is in attendance, too. And there are others, total strangers with noidentifyingmarks, like a woman our souls go out to as she passes in the street.

It’s twitching into life, this dream of ours. The eyelids flutter as the opening scene appears. A sigh is stifled. A leg shoots nervously out from under the blanket, followed by the other moving more slowly, as if someone were taking a first step, or, better yet, beginning a descent.

Good luck.

4

At first the dream descends broad, smooth steps. He is back home, visiting a new building on a street near his mother’s in which he has rented a small, attractive apartment that will soon be available. Yet it is so easy to skip down the well-lit staircase that he has missed the prominent exit on the ground floor and gone on descending, at first without noticing that the light is growing dimmer. The steps, too, have changed and are narrower. There are no more apartments. He is exploring some sort of basement. Nor is he alone on the staircase. Old men in fur hats and long, heavy winter coats stride beside him, sighing and muttering. Well, then, the dreamer thinks excitedly, I must be in the nuclear shelter and this must be the tour. But where is the tour guide to show me round?

Now, however, the dream takes a more sombre turn. The tourist site has become a frightening reality. The old men in long coats and fur hats are commissars and secret agents who have hastily launched a first strike and are hurrying to take cover from an imminent counterattack.

The steps are now narrow and steep, the walls around them crooked and constricting. In the depths of the new building stands the bell tower of an ancient church. Although he is a stranger who does not belong in this place, the dreamer wishes to be saved like all the others. Awkwardly pretending to be someone else, he is jostled into the shelter, a small, suffocating chamber filled with people casting angry, desperate glances at a transparent partition — behind which, on a small stage, bustle the leaders who have so flippantly given the dreadful order. Seen through the partition they have the silhouettes of grizzly bears oblivious to the idiocy of their actions; even so, the dreamer thinks he knows them and has run afoul of them in the past — particularly one of them, a blubbery man whose broad chest is covered with medals that look like tongues of blood and flame.

Can this be the whole secret shelter? Its entire legendary depth? Can I have agreed to make a detour here instead of proceeding straight to the village, or to take part in a war of annihilation that has nothing to do with me and that I don’t deserve? Who can survive in a pitiful shelter like this? The enemy, gnashing his teeth amid the havoc we have wreaked, is launching his revenge. It will be terrible. The forked glitter of his counterstrike, it is said, can already be seen. Why stay in an indefensible place that will only draw withering fire? My place was always in the West. Why be killed by it now?

But it is already too late. The counterstrike lands on the building in utter silence. A foul, horrid, asphyxiating smell spreads through the shelter, which is also a gymnasium. Wooden ladders hang on its walls. The panicky leaders scale them to reach a high, narrow window, through which the green tip of a cypress tree is visible. The dreamer remembers the tree from his childhood, though he has never before yearned for it as he does now.

Is it still the same dream? With no interruption other than a turning of his head, a torrid sun now melts a sky of blue. It is the eve of the holiday of Shavuot, the day of the giving of the Law, and schoolchildren with wreaths of flowers on their heads pour through an open gate, racing to show their parents the little Torah scrolls they have made in class.

For whom is he waiting? He has no wife, his daughter is unborn, and no child with a wreath is looking for him. Though grown up, he is a student himself and late for class. Easing out of the rope that ties him to a tree, he flies through the blossoming garden of his old high school, over the stone footbridge that crosses a pond, and up the stairs of the school, flight after flight, until he reaches the classroom. It is deserted.

Has she cancelled the lesson, or have his fellow students skipped the class?

There is no message on the blackboard. On the teacher’s chair is a slide rule brought from her native land. In spite of the holiday, then, she came for their trigonometry lesson, only to be let down by his classmates. He knows that his lateness has made him a traitor too, and so he takes the slide rule, which is warm from the sunshine, hoping that bringing it to her will gain him forgiveness. But the teachers’ room is empty. The foreign trigonometry teacher has been summoned to the principal’s office to be fired. Though only a student, he is certain his love and devotion can save her. And the school secretary is on his side. “Run!” she says. “They’re doing it right now.”

He runs and is seized by a sweet dread when he sees her by the large window in the dimly lit principal’s office, slumped in an executive armchair in which she has been placed to ease the shock. He now realizes he has always known she is not a cleaning woman but a teacher. Gone are her apron, broom, and cap. She is wearing a flowery, childish summer blouse like the nightgown spread out to dry by the old owner in the shack. The collar is open, revealing a long, strong neck tilted sensuously back and perfect, sloping shoulders of white marble in which there is not a drop of blood.

The dream turns sultry with a passion he has never felt before. Is the bomber on his way to the market? Has the bomb already gone off? He is reminded that he has written down the story, not only of her life, but also of her love for him, which took place long ago when he was a child or perhaps even an infant. They made love as she nursed him. How frightful that not even so ancient a passion can save her! He leans towards the armchair to make certain there is no mistake and that this is indeed the forgotten woman the night shift supervisor was smitten by. Miryam, Miryam, he says, recalling the new, secret Hebrew name on her door. Her photograph, which he displays to others to establish her beauty, excites him. Too distraught to remember that he is only a student, he brandishes the slide rule at the principal and his assistants, who are struggling to extricate the half-dead woman from the armchair and throw her away with the rubbish.