A Woman in Jerusalem (26 page)

Peasants and stall holders had surrounded him, gawking as he emptied the mug. Some were scolding the woman and trying to overturn her pot. Yet she did not seem intimidated. Brandishing an iron ladle, she kept them at bay while laughing heartily and breaking into a little song. The human resources manager, regarding her more closely, decided that she suffered from Down’s syndrome.

Well
,
he thought, comfortingly,
even
if
she
fed
me
carrion,
I’ll
puke
it
up
in
the
end.
But
the
baby
is
a
lost
cause.
I
can’t
play
with
it
in
front
of
all
these
anxious
women.
It’s
time
to
move
on.

Several women followed close behind him. Although he could feel their fear on the back of his neck, he made no sense of it. Quickening his pace, he hammered on the iron gate. The soldiers recognized him and let him in, shutting the gate behind him.

He
swallowed
it
before
we
understood
what
he
wanted.
There
was
no
way
to
warn
him
because
he
couldn’t
speak
our
language.
That’s
why
we
followed
him,
to
tell
the
soldiers
he
had
to
throw
up.
The
problem
is
that
they
don’t
open
the
gate
any
more
unless
you
have
a
ticket.
What
an
army!
Our
parents
worked
themselves
to
the
bone
digging
a
shelter
for
the
imbeciles
who
ran
this
country,
and
now
we
have
to
pay
to
visit
it!

What
will
happen
to
him
now?
He
doesn’t
know
what
he’s
eaten
or
who
made
it.
In
the
end
they’ll
accuse
us
of
poisoning
him
and
shut
down
the
market.
We
were
too
kind
to
that
madwoman,
all
because
of
her
baby.
No
more!
You’ve
made
a
mockery
of
us
long
enough,
you
lunatic!
Say
goodbye
to
your
pot
and
your
fire
and
take
your
baby
that
doesn’t
know
its
father
and
go
sing
to
it
by
the
lake.
And
watch
out
that
some
wolf
or
fox
doesn’t
eat
it
by
mistake.

At first he thought the stew had a fishy saltiness. Then it was a cloying sweetness. Furtively, so as not to offend the guards, he spat on a rock. His spittle, though tasting like blood, was green.

I should have swallowed it more slowly, he scolded himself. Nevertheless, he had faith in his digestive system. When all the cooks in the army had failed to poison him, how could a market vendor succeed?

The old sergeant was still at his post outside the barracks, making tea on a kerosene burner. The human resources manager, grateful for the charging of his battery, nodded hello. Although he would have liked to wash the nauseating taste from his mouth with some hot tea, he thought it best to rejoin the sleeping travellers.

Either their sleep was dreamless or their dreams were very quiet. The manager put a finger to his lips to warn the consul not to disturb them. “Everything’s fine,” he whispered reassuringly, though the consul did not look in need of
reassurance.
Drawing a curtain on the window to keep out the morning light, he went to his corner, covered the bare feet of the boy with an unthinking movement, lay down on his mattress, bundled up in two blankets, and hoped for a
dreamless
sleep himself.

In fact, he had no dreams. He had only a terrible, stabbing pain, as if someone were hacking at his intestines. Three hours later he awoke, jumped to his feet, and doubled over. Fortunately – it was late and the daylight was bright – there was no one else there, because the needs of his body had overcome its inhibitions and he had fouled his pants and
bedding. He was barely able to stagger to the bathroom. It was a dismal WC without a toilet seat or window, its only toilet paper strips of old newspapers, and once there he had an attack of chills. Filthy and shivering, he writhed on the cold concrete floor, not caring that the door was unlocked.

As though the woman he had fallen in love with in his dream had passed on her condition to him, he felt more dead than alive. Yet despite his agony, he could still laugh at himself. I’m obviously not a general, he thought, because even a squad leader would know enough to lock the door before deciding what to do about this mess. Still, I’m in a foreign country and will never meet anyone from it again, so what do I care? Let the journalist and the photographer see the state I’m in, too. Take a good look, you weasel. It’s the Eros of your
Symposium
,
a thick-skinned, unwashed
daimon
linking the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal …

He didn’t even try to reach the sink. It was as if getting to his feet would make him responsible for himself when all he wanted was to be a helpless baby whose mother would change his soiled clothes.

As an officer, he had seen enough cases of food poisoning in his troops to know that this one had only just begun. The blithely swallowed stew had not yet had its last word. He mustn’t leave the bathroom before he was sure he could control his bodily functions. Exhausted and in shock, he stripped off his pants and underpants and lay shaking and
half-naked
, waiting to see what his body would do next.

A long while passed before he heard the door handle rattle. Not knowing which was worse, being found by a stranger or by someone he knew, he looked up to see, in a patch of light framed by the doorway, the Tartar boy. The light eyes beneath the pilot’s cap observed him with a maturity beyond their years. Although he knew the young man had wiped all knowledge of Hebrew from his mind, he addressed him in it firmly to explain that, as bizarre as it seemed, he was looking at a case not of insanity but only of food poisoning, for which a doctor had to be summoned at once.

The boy did not, as might have been expected, run to the consul, who was enjoying a hearty breakfast in the hotel dining room. Rather, he went to get the old sergeant. A quick look at the half-naked emissary on the bathroom floor was all the sergeant needed. Leaving at once, he came back a few minutes later with three soldiers and a stretcher. They rolled the sick man onto it, where he lay like a wet, filthy rag; covered him with blankets; and carried him to a service elevator that slowly descended to the hospital deep in the ground.

The sergeant’s quick response, taken without consulting his commanding officer, was not just the consequence of his natural sympathy for the emissary, whose paratrooper’s boots bespoke a military past. The opportunity to perform an emergency manoeuvre in a base degraded by tourists appealed to him equally. True, the underground hospital was no longer what it had been. Less military activity meant fewer medical problems, and those who suffered from them nowadays preferred the civilian hospital in a nearby town. Why take one’s chances with a questionable army medic in the bowels of the earth?

Hence, the hospital’s burned-out light bulbs had not been replaced, its leaky taps continued to leak, and its central heating had been despaired of long ago. Yet its emergency lights still functioned, a legacy of the Cold War, and the sergeant was able to find his way around. Knowing that food poisoning needed no antidotes, only time to purge the system, he ordered his men to place a bed, equipped with two large chamber pots for sudden exigencies, near the toilet. Then he removed the blankets, took off the last of the emissary’s clothes, and cleaned him carefully with wet washcloths. The boy, the emissary rejoiced to see, did not shrink from lending a helping hand and even wiped his feet with a cloth. What an irony, he thought. We all said he would have to bathe at our first stop, and now he’s bathing me.

But what was the emissary to wear? His dirty clothes needed to be laundered and there was little point in wasting fresh ones on a man in his condition. At each new attack he jumped to his feet, determined to reach the toilet in time, only to leave telltale traces on the floor. The old sergeant, well aware of the danger, put his troops on full sanitary alert, took a torch and followed its beam to the maternity ward, and came back with some towelling nappies, faded but clean, that had been meant for Cold War infants born in a nuclear heat wave.

The mortified emissary fought with the soldiers in silence. The sergeant and his men were still swaddling him when the boy, who did not seem daunted by the sight of the struggling adult, laid a white hand on his forehead and said in Hebrew:

“No worry … is all nothing.”

The words calmed him enough to let the soldiers finish knotting the loose ends. He even smiled back without correcting the boy’s grammar.

Now that the nappy was in place, the emissary was made to drink some stale underground water to prevent dehydration. The blankets were then piled back on top of him until they formed a small mountain.

The situation was under control. The troops were dismissed and the boy was sent to inform the travellers. The sergeant appeared to regard the sick man as his personal responsibility. Drawing up a chair by the bed, he filled a humpbacked little pipe and sat awaiting the next eruption.

It was not long in coming – and it came with unanticipated ferocity. The sergeant kept calm. He changed the nappy and cleaned the patient, by now too exhausted to offer any resistance. The emissary’s head weighed a ton and his eyes shut of their own accord.

It was in this position that the consul, who had interrupted his breakfast, found him. Listening in astonishment to the story of the stew, he was soon joined by the two journalists. The human resources manager lay so passively that he would not even have protested had they photographed him in his nappy for the weekly.

Yet nothing could have been further from their minds, which were elsewhere, dwelling on the immense
underground
shelter the travellers had just visited. Had fortifications like these, they argued between themselves, allowed the old regime to be brutal and aggressive – or had they been, on the contrary, demonstrations of weakness and fear? Room after dark room and row upon row of hospital beds lay beyond a door that the old sergeant had left open. As obsolete and rusty as the medical equipment was now, it had been sophisticated in its day, designed for every eventuality. The photographer could hardly be blamed for snapping pictures with abandon until the sergeant lunged at him, snatched the camera from his hands, removed its lens, and stuck it in his pocket.

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.

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.