A Woman in Jerusalem (29 page)

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.

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.

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?

He silently signalled the consul and the drivers to step ahead of him. The journalist and the photographer were already inside the church and had seized the best vantage points. Although he had forbidden him to take pictures, the human resources manager was sure that the photographer would strike silently, without his flashbulb, to fill the pages between the rentals and the used-car ads. The weasel and the
rattlesnake
hadn’t made this journey together in order to miss their true subject: the alluring face of Death.

The last villagers disappeared through the large wooden door of the church. The human resources manager did not follow them. He turned and walked down a narrow path to the little village graveyard. At its end was an ice-covered wall that seemed to mark the limits of the universe.

There wasn’t a sound. He wandered past new and old tombstones, looking for a fresh grave. None was visible. The old woman must be insisting on the coffin’s return to
Jerusalem.
Perhaps the villagers, afraid of her wrath, were planning to bury it secretly, at night.

A sound of voices reached him from the church, along with a thin, stifled wail. Then came the deep baritone of the village priest. It began with words and changed to music, to a slow, ancient, ecstatically chanted dirge. The villagers joined in, piercing the emissary to the quick. Although he knew a
place of honour had been prepared for him and he would have liked to express his condolences, he was determined to remain outside. He did not want to see her, not even from a distance.

It’s time to say goodbye, the human resources manager whispered, wiping away a cold, unexpected tear. He paced back and forth by the icy wall, touching it warily, while the old woman’s complaint went on pursuing him. Did we make a mistake? Were we too hasty? An engineer like that doesn’t come to Jerusalem just for work. She comes because she feels that the shabby city is hers too. Her Jewish lover gave up and left, and she stuck it out. If the night shift supervisor hadn’t fired her out of love, she would still be working in our bakery.

He was too distraught to tell whether he was trembling from cold or excitement. If it was noon in this place, it was 10 a.m. in Jerusalem. He took out his satellite phone and dialled the company owner.

The office manager was delighted to hear the human resources manager’s voice. She had been thinking of him, she said. Had he reached his destination? Was he already on his way back? Everybody was asking when he would return.

“Soon,” he said softly, astonished once again by how close the phone made her sound. Right now, he needed to talk to the old man.

“Have you forgotten that it’s Wednesday?” She was
surprised
that he hadn’t remembered. “He’s on his weekly tour of the bakery.”

“In that case,” the manager said, “put me through to him there.”

“Wouldn’t you rather wait until he returns to his office?”

“There’s no time,” he said firmly. “We have to make some decisions.”

She transferred the call to the bakery. Above the old man’s gnarled voice, he could hear the purring of ovens and the rattle of production lines.

“I have something urgent to discuss with you.”

“Ah, my dear fellow! I’ve been looking forward to this
conversation. But I’m in the middle of making the rounds with the shift supervisors. Can’t it wait?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s hard to concentrate with all this noise.”

“Yes, sir, I can hear it. It doesn’t bother me, because there’s not a sound where I am. I’m standing by an icy wall with nothing beyond it. It feels like the end of the world. It’s comforting to know that the bakery is still running. But perhaps you can’t hear me.”

“Don’t worry about that, young man. I’m used to the sounds of the bakery. I’ve been hearing them since I was an infant at my parents’ knees. It’s like the sound of waves to a fisherman.”

“Well, then, I’ll get to the point. It’s complicated. We have some decisions to make. The grandmother returned to the village this morning. Right now she’s looking at the open coffin and confirming it’s her daughter.”

“I thought that might be necessary. I should have warned you that you might have to look, too.”

“I didn’t look at anything, sir. Nor do I intend to. There’s no need. That woman is inside me by now. I even dream about her.”

“As you wish, my friend. You know that I trust your intuition. When will the funeral take place?”

“That’s just it. We’ve got to the painful part, but not to the end. You were right to worry about that. It turns out that the end hasn’t ended. The old woman doesn’t want to bury her daughter in the village. She’s upset that we didn’t bury her in Jerusalem. She says it’s her city, too.”

“Hers? How?”

“That’s a good question. We’ll have to think about it.”

“But who the devil is she, this grandmother?”

“An old woman. I’d say about your age. And she’s strong and stubborn like you. This morning she came back from a pilgrimage dressed as a monk. It was a sight for sore eyes.”