A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

The day passed slowly. The educational detour was taking longer than anticipated. The sick man was allowed only clear liquids. The general opinion was that anyone who had swallowed poison with such alacrity deserved to go on lying underground, wearing a nappy, flanked by two chamber pots. In any case, he wasn’t alone. The old sergeant sat by him and took care of him.

8

Watched over by the sergeant, the emissary surrendered to the chills and spasms that wracked his body. If I’ve actually poisoned myself out of love for a dead woman, the feverish thought passed through his mind, it’s time to take a break and let others look after me.

Since military permission was needed to descend to the underground hospital, a schedule of shifts was set up. Satisfied that the nappies were doing their job, the sergeant let the consul relieve him and went off to rest. The human resources manager, having grown so fond of the ex-farmer that he felt like his lost cousin, gave his tiredness free rein and sank into a profound stupor intensified by the subterranean depths.

Two hours later, his innards torn by a savage new pain that sent him running in a daze to the bathroom, he noticed that the shifts had changed again. The consul was gone, his place taken by the photographer — who, sitting in the shadows by a coal brazier that had been brought to give heat, regarded the emissary’s writhings with disinterest. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked perfunctorily, after the sick man had cleaned himself, changed his own nappy, and crawled back under his blankets.

“No, thanks, I can manage. Actually, you could bring me some water. I don’t want to dehydrate.”

The photographer rose slowly and filled a glass with stale water. Instead of handing it to the sick man, he placed it on a table by the bed as if afraid of catching his poisoning.

“Would you mind feeling my forehead to see if I have a temperature?”

The photographer shrank back. “I wouldn’t rely on me. You should ask for a thermometer.”

In their day and a half of travelling together, this was the first time the two of them had been alone. The human resources manager noticed that the photographer was older than he had thought, perhaps even as old as himself.

“I’m sorry they took your lens away,” he said, trying his best to break the ice. “You could have photographed me in a nappy, surrounded by chamber pots. It would have made a better cover picture than the boy.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It would have shown your readers what you put me through.”

“What you’ve been through is of no interest to our readers,” the photographer declared dryly. “You’d have to croak to make the front cover.”

“Well, well! I see it’s no accident that you teamed up with a weasel.”

“It’s he who teamed up with me.”

“What does the boy have that I don’t? His good looks?”

“His mother. It’s she who should be on the cover. We simply don’t have a decent shot of her.”

The human resources manager shivered under his blankets. “I’m warning you too. Don’t you dare open the coffin.”

“Calm down. No one is opening anything. You shouldn’t aggravate yourself when you’re sick.”

“I’d like to ask you something. You’re a professional photographer with a practised eye … what’s so special about her face … or for that matter, about his? Why are we attracted to them? There’s something about the eyes … an arch of some kind … do you think it’s a racial feature?”

“No, it’s not that,” the photographer said with confidence, as if he had already considered the matter. “It bothered me, too. That’s why I kept shooting the boy until I figured it out. It’s an epithelial fold in the corner of the eye. And the high cheekbones add to the illusion …”

“Interesting,” the sick man murmured. “I can see that you’ve thought about it.”

The photographer rose to warm his hands at the brazier. “You didn’t really think our readers would prefer the smell of your nappy to such a face, did you?”

The manager blushed. With a friendly smile the photographer said:

“I hope you’re not offended.”

“Offended? Of course not. Just pray that the sergeant gives you back your lens in time for the funeral.”

“Don’t worry. I have a backup camera. The main thing is for you to get better so that we can move on.”

The sergeant arrived with a pitcher of tea. The shifts changed again. Now it was the turn of the elder brother, who arrived with the emissary’s carry-on bag and the leather suitcase.

“You didn’t have to bring them,” groaned the resource manager, who was in too much pain to make himself understood. “The suitcase isn’t mine anyway.”

This is totally absurd, he thought. Here I am hospitalized in an obsolete nuclear shelter, wearing nothing but a nappy, looked after by people I can’t speak to, lying in light that’s toodarkto readbyand toobright to sleep in. He rose rebelliously, went to his bag, and took out a track suit and a sleeping pill. Donning the track suit over the nappy, he swallowed the pill. In case of another attack, the cramps, he hoped, would wake him in time. Helped by the elder brother, he detached the emergency light by his bed, added another blanket to the pile, and tried falling asleep again.

He awoke too late. Once more he was soiled and soaking wet. Not even the soldier on duty, fast asleep by the brazier, could help him. Time, which had congealed in these depths during the Cold War, turning to a grey sludge between the concrete walls, had now also ceased to flow for the sick man. Had he imagined it or had he really been given a glass of tea by the consul and promised that he would be as good as new in twenty-four hours, as happened with cows, horses, sheep, and goats? And had the weasel, coming to discuss his dissertation in the middle of the night, actually spoken of the daimon, whose love was more than any woman would want to endure?

Once their journey resumed, he would perhaps find out who had sat by his bed and who had been an hallucination. One way or another, when the sleeping pill wore off and he woke again, weak and drenched in sweat, the ghostly light in the windowless, timeless room heralding no known hour of the day, he knew he was over it. He was purged not only of the poisonous stew from the market but also of many older, forgotten toxins too, going back to his school years and the army.

He undid the last nappy and tossed it into the bag by his bed. Then he cleaned himself one last time and added his track suit to the bag. All out of fresh clothes, he opened a package brought by the sergeant. In it was an assortment of army trousers, shirts, and underwear, bequeathed by unknown soldiers discharged long ago. Picking items that looked his size, he slipped snugly into them. When the soldier sleeping by the bed opened his eyes, he was astonished to see the sick tourist transformed into a private in the Maintenance Corps.

The emissary, who had a normal human talent for displaying pain and misery, now deliberated how best to convey his return to health. In the end, he raised both arms high with a triumphant grin. The soldier understood at once. Since he was forbidden to free the patient without permission, however, he had to go and ask the sergeant.

Thoroughly clean and totally void, the human resources manager asked to go on a tour of the shelter before leaving it. With his satellite phone in the deep pocket of his fatigue pants he strolled through the huge rooms of the hospital. In the spectral light he saw unused blankets lying folded on virgin mattresses piled on rusting iron beds. He entered an operating theatre in which no operation had ever been performed and opened and closed drawers of medicines until, in one of them, he found an astonished little mouse staring at him.