A. Yehoshua - A Woman in Jerusalem

It was a distinguished delegation. Its armoured vehicle was so big and old that it needed two drivers, and its story was so long that it needed two journalists, and even its leader needed someone to interpret what he said.

At first we didn’t know that the white-faced man in the old army uniform was the leader. But he was a man without guile and we understood as soon as he spoke, Holy Mother, that he was the answer to all our questions.

This is what he said:

Villagers do not fear the passing of time. The body of your fellow villager has returned to you embalmed like an Egyptian princess. Therefore, be in no hurry to bury her. Time will stop and wait patiently for her mother to return and bid her farewell. If you are afraid to lay her in her childhood bed, or in the church, and to pray next to a corpse which is neither a statue nor an icon, put her in the school in which she studied as a young girl, because that is where we all waited for our own mothers. And when it is time for her funeral, know that she has been brought back to you as whole and unblemished as a sleeping angel and do not fear to lift the lid of her coffin.

As for me, I am not a messenger who comes and goes. I am a human resources manager whose duty it is to remain with you until the last clod of earth has fallen on my employee’s grave, before returning to the city which is for me only a bitter reality.

11

The peasants, though reluctant at first to put a coffin in a schoolhouse, quickly came to the conclusion that it was the most logical and reasonable place. One way or another, the delegation needed a place to sleep, and so the villagers decided to give the children a few days off school. Anything to avoid leaving an untended coffin in their midst.

The ropes were untied and the coffin was moved from the trailer to the teachers’ room, the door of which was firmly locked. The tables and chairs were pushed together in the classrooms, the floors were covered with fresh straw, from the houses came mattresses, blankets, and pillows, and the delegation was soon ensconced in the little schoolhouse. Calm returned to the village. A few peasants remained by the bonfire, so they could greet the returning pilgrim, who they feared might by now have an inkling of what awaited her.

Yet the messenger managed to bring the old woman back without arousing her suspicion. In fact, so uplifted was she by her visit to the monastery, with all its prayers and masses for the New Year, that she returned wearing clerical robes and a monk’s hood. When the human resources manager, the consul, and her grandson were hurriedly brought to her late at night, they were startled to be confronted by a round little monk with kind eyes and a gentle voice.

The villagers, it seemed, had lacked the fortitude to inform her of her daughter’s cruel death and had left it to the emissary to break the news, with the full authority of the company — indeed, of the entire city of Jerusalem — behind him. First, though, they had tactfully presented the old woman with her grandson. Although she had not seen him for years, she recognized him at once and understood that something grave must have happened to have brought him from afar. At once she tore off her hood, revealing in full the original face from which such a captivating pair of copies had been made.

The frightened boy was already regretting the journey he had insisted on. Pointing to the schoolhouse in which his mother lay, in a stammering voice he told his grandmother of the Jerusalem bombing. The shocked old woman grasped it all immediately. Yet it was not just the grandson’s story that shocked her. She was also aghast at the idea that the body of her daughter had been transported all this way for no good reason. Why, she asked angrily, had the dead woman not been given a funeral in the city she had chosen to live in, in Jerusalem? It was her city. It was everyone’s.

“Everyone’s?” The emissary whispered the word wonderingly to the consul. “In what way?”

“In no way,” the consul snapped, baring a temper he had kept concealed until now. Without asking for the opinion of the human resources manager, he sternly explained that Jerusalem was out of the question.

The old woman reacted like a wounded animal. Sensing that the delegation’s true captain was not the elderly man with the silver curls but the younger one in the uniform with the pallid face and weary eyes, she threw herself heartrendingly at his feet, pleading that her daughter be returned to the city that had taken her life. That way, she, too, the victim’s mother, would have a right to it.

The grandson was bewildered by this unexpected appeal. He bent to pull the old woman to her feet, only to be pushed angrily away. Sprawling in bitter grief in the dirt by the campfire, she all but rolled on its coals. Several villagers had to seize her and bring her back to her cottage. Her feet barely touched the ground as they carried her; she seemed to skim through the air.

The human resources manager felt devastated at having been the bearer of doubly disappointing tidings. All his good intentions — all his daring generosity — had led to a completely unintended result. Perhaps, he suggested, the consul might come with him to the cottage to help explain that he wasn’t to blame.

For the first time since he had made his acquaintance, however, the manager could feel that the ex-farmer was hostile. Adamantly, almost insultingly, the consul rejected the request.

“That will do! We’ve had enough of your guilt. You’ve gone much too far with it. You can’t involve the whole world in your obsession with a dead cleaning woman.”

Coming from someone so friendly and considerate until now, this rebuke left the emissary too stunned to speak. Deeply hurt, he turned and retraced his steps towards the sleeping travellers in the schoolroom.

Near a pile of chairs and tables, not far from the blackboard, the journalist and the photographer lay wrapped in their blankets. As usual, the human resources manager thought, they’ve missed the critical, excruciatingly human moment. When they wake, they’ll make up for it by staging some tear-jerking scene.

He looked balefully at the consul, who was spreading a blanket before crawling under it. You’ve forgotten that I hired you, he wanted to say. You’re under contract. But thinking better of it, he took the leather suitcase and left the schoolroom.

The long northern winter night showed no sign of ending. The death having been announced and all unanswered questions answered, the peasants had dowsed the fire and gone to bed. In the morning they would prepare the church for the funeral service.

He walked along snow-covered paths, among darkened cottages. For the first time since setting out from Jerusalem, he felt the weight of his own solitude. Yet he was sure that he could find the old woman’s cottage and let her know that he alone found nothing strange in her request.

A light shone in a window. That’s hers, he guessed, reminded of Yulia Ragayev’s little shack in Jerusalem. Coming closer, he could see through the fogged window that the old woman was not by herself. Her grandson was at her side, and she was surrounded by friends. Although he had no way of making himself understood, he could no longer depend on the consul. He entered the cottage silently and handed the old woman the suitcase as if he and she were family and no words were necessary between them.

12

At noon he joined the consul and the two drivers in the line of villagers waiting to pass before the coffin. Something in him, however, balked. I have seen her, he thought, in my dreams — in torment, faint from weariness, but alive. I have even been tempted to love her. What need have I to see her corpse?