A Woman in Jerusalem (10 page)

“The brain?” said the manager wonderingly. “I didn’t know it could get infected, too.”

“Of course it can. Why not? She lay for two days until nothing more could be done. She was so silent and
anonymous
that everyone was touched by her. The staff did all they could. They wanted so badly for her to regain consciousness, if only to find out who she was. That’s why she was kept in the morgue longer than usual. We hoped there would be someone to hear how we had tried … that she wouldn’t just be forgotten. It’s your luck you didn’t wait until morning. Even if you’re only a personnel manager, we’re counting on you for an identifying clue. Let’s first go to the office and fill out a National Insurance form. No one understood why her place of work didn’t come looking for her.”

The stout lab technician pulled out a key ring and unlocked the front room of the morgue. Although the human resources manager considered saying something about the open back
door, he refrained.
Let’s
see
what
this
fellow
has
to
tell
me
,
he thought. Affably offering him a seat by a stretcher, the technician took out a tattered blue shopping bag from a metal cabinet. Attached to it was a manila envelope with the cleaning woman’s death certificate, a medical report, and the torn, bloodstained pay slip. The technician, who had no doubt been through its contents before, turned it over and shook out two yellow keys tied with a string.

“That’s it,” he declared. “Apart from a few rotten cheeses and vegetables, which we couldn’t keep because of the smell. Let’s get what you know about her down on paper. I hope” – he smiled pleasantly – “that you’re not too squeamish to identify her. If you’re worried about it, let me assure you that you’re fortunate. She’s in perfect condition. Believe me, she looks like a sleeping angel.”

The resource manager turned red and gave the technician, who looked pleased with his metaphor, a hostile glance. He felt sure that this was the “inside source” who had tipped off the newspapers. It’s all because of him, he thought, that I’m still on the job at this hour. Coldly, he set him straight. He wasn’t squeamish in the least. He was quite capable of looking reality in the face, no matter how ugly it was – provided it needed to be looked at. But he was only here to supply the dead woman’s name, address, and ID number, all traced from the pay slip – the existence of which had been irresponsibly divulged to an unreliable journalist instead of being passed on to him, the company’s personnel manager. Although he had to his surprise discovered that he had interviewed the woman and even taken down her CV, this didn’t qualify him to identify her corpse. The company employed three shifts with 270 or 280 employees – 300, if you included the management. Was he supposed to recognize each one of them?

Opening the top button of his overcoat, the resource manager took out the folder, extracted the computerized image, and laid both on an empty stretcher. “Here. All that we know is in this folder. Sleeping angel or not, I have no intention of looking at her. If you think you’re authorized,
you do it. Here’s a photograph to help you.”

The lab technician, flustered, studied the image. “It’s awfully small and blurry,” he grumbled. “But yes, it does look like her. What was her name, Yulia? Well, it all adds up. We thought we might be dealing with a foreigner. Could she really have been forty-eight? We took her to be younger … but yes, it’s definitely her. Look at the Asiatic tilt of the eyes … was she a Tartar? Where was she from? Believe me, the doctors and nurses in intensive care were smitten by her, even though she was unconscious … It’s her for sure. Look, why stand on ceremony? Who’s going to challenge your signature? Let’s have a quick look at her and get it over with. If you ask me, she’d like to leave this place too. Just sign the form and National Insurance will track down her next-of-kin so that we can get her ready for the funeral, whether it’s here or overseas.”

“Why don’t you sign?”

“I’m not allowed to. An identification by a hospital staff member having no previous acquaintance with the deceased is inadmissible. It would only get me into trouble. I’m not even supposed to have looked at her. But you’re a different case. She worked for you. If you came all the way out here on a night like this, what’s stopping you now? If you don’t sign, we’ll have to find an employee of yours to do it, and by then she’ll be at Central Path. That means a whole new
bureaucratic
procedure … maybe more newspaper articles too.”

The resource manager reacted sharply. “Newspapers? I thought so!”

“What’s wrong with them?” The lab technician smiled shrewdly. “The dead make good copy. We’ve already had one journalist here … how else would you have heard about it?”

This was going too far. “You might at least admit that you yourself were the source. Leaking private information about the dead … don’t tell me that’s legal!”

The technician was unfazed. “Nothing is illegal when there isn’t any choice. The only hope of identifying her was by
publicizing her case. But I swear I had nothing to do with the article itself. That was entirely the reporter’s doing. I heard you called him a weasel. Did you actually do that to his face?”

“I did not. Where did you get that from?”

“Well, perhaps you told the weekly’s secretary and she passed it on. Don’t be upset. ‘Weasel’ is too good for him. If I know him, he took it as a compliment. It’s all water off a duck’s back. Weasel, eh? Not bad! But the useful kind. He’s neither dumb nor lazy.”

“Damn it! When did you last talk to him?”

“Right after you did. An hour or an hour and a half ago. That’s why I’m working overtime. I was expecting you.”

“You were?”

“Does it surprise you that we’d like to be rid of her as much as you would? Don’t think that just because we’re used to corpses we enjoy having her stay on here … Well, what do you say? Why not sign for her? Here’s the form.”

The technician’s garrulousness, however, only strengthened the resource manager’s resolve. All that was missing was another article, one accusing him of identifying a woman he didn’t remember.

He made another effort to explain himself. Death didn’t frighten him. Just a few minutes ago, because of a carelessly open door, he had walked into the morgue and stayed calm despite the shock. But sign an official form? Absolutely not! What right did he have to do so?

Aware that he was causing a problem, he wondered at himself. After all, what difference did it make? Everything was perfectly clear. Whom was he punishing? The night shift supervisor? The journalist? The man facing him, who had got him into this predicament? What harm would it do to look at the woman’s face? Was he afraid that he, too, would be smitten? As if he could fall in love with a corpse …

He cautiously reached for the keys and asked if they were definitely hers. The technician shrugged. “In the
pandemonium
after a bombing, you never know. But they were found in her bag, next to the pay slip, so who else’s could they
be? All the other dead have been identified. No missing keys were reported …”

The resource manager nodded and glanced around. Only now did he notice that the room had no windows. The ceiling was high, the kind that made you feel there was too much space above you. A naked, high-wattage bulb shed a cold light.
They
must
need
a
tall
ladder
to
change
it
when
it
burns
out
,
he thought. With a slight smile he turned to the
technician.
“Why insist on a visual identification? We know her address. We can go to her apartment and see if the keys fit. That’s indirect proof, but it’s worth more than the foibles of memory.”

The technician’s eyes gleamed. “And if they do fit?”

“Then I’ll sign the form as if I had done a visual.”

The man took off his beret and tossed it excitedly onto the empty stretcher. Bohemian or Orthodox, he was quite bald.

“Excellent. But who’ll go there?”

“I will,” the resource manager surprised himself by saying softly, as if in a dream.

“You?”

“Yes, me. On condition that you don’t inform the press you think so highly of … What time is it? Not even ten. The address isn’t far from here and should be easy to find. I know my way about Jerusalem. She’s our responsibility until she’s buried, and if nobody else wants to take it on themselves, then we – I mean the company management – have to do it. Perhaps we even have some insurance or compensation fund for dependents like her son … because she does have a son, or at least she said so. If you don’t mind, then, I’ll sign for the keys. You can see that I’m doing my duty – and you can report that to the weasel on my behalf. And just so you don’t think I’m scared of corpses, I’ll allow myself another look at … the back room. I’ll be happy to have you as my guide. You can even explain why nothing smells. That would be good of you.”

The lab technician was only too pleased to open the inner door. He turned on the light in the refrigerated room, dimly illuminating the dozen stretchers the human resources manager had seen before. Each had a corpse on it. The manager shivered, from excitement or cold. His first question was more philosophical than anatomical. At what point, he wanted to know, did a dead body become a corpse? Was it a matter of science or simply of semantics?

The lab technician was startled by the question. Such a conundrum had never occurred to him. After a moment’s thought, he answered categorically: “It’s a matter of time. There are exceptions, though.”

“Such as?”

“Such as battlefield casualties. Time passes more quickly then. It’s condensed.”

He removed the plastic sheet from a stretcher, revealing a woman’s brownish corpse and featureless face.

“I take it these are being kept for anatomy lessons,” the human resources manager said, to reassure himself. Stepping up to the stretcher, he took a long, hard look, to show his guide, but most of all himself, how undaunted he was.

“Exactly.”

“They won’t be used for research?”

“No.”

“And now do tell me” – the question kept nagging him – “why isn’t there any smell here? That’s the worst part of death, far worse than how it looks …”

“Actually,” the technician said, with a slight smile, “there is a smell. You just don’t notice it because it’s so faint. But it does rub off on whoever spends enough time here. You can literally sniff such people out.”

“Still,” the manager begged to know – as if it were a
life-and-death
matter – “how do you neutralize it?”

“Do you want to know the chemical formula?”

“If it’s not too complicated …”

“Complicated? Not especially.”

The technician ticked off the mixture of alcohol, formalin, phenol, and distilled water with which the bodies were injected, four hours after death, after their natural fluids had been drained from them. It was simple and efficient.

The resource manager debated whether to call it a night or to continue his tour. Deciding to press on, he circled the room with small, museum-sized steps. Each stretcher had a number. For some reason, the swaddled corpses repelled him more than did the plastic-sheeted ones. Casting a last,
impersonal
look at them, he prepared to depart with a final question. How long had they been lying in this place?

“A year, at most.”

“A year?”

“That’s the longest you’re allowed to keep a corpse. After that it has to be buried.”

“That’s the maximum?”

“According to the law.”

“Interesting … very interesting. Suppose you show me your oldest corpse. I’d like to see its state of preservation.”

The technician led him down the row of stretchers, from one of which the plastic sheet had fallen of its own accord. The shrivelled but still bearded human figure beneath it was ancient-looking. Its features were distinct. The ecstatically shut eyes still revealed the passionate struggle with death that had taken place nearly a year before. Long forgotten by his survivors, the agony of this struggle lived on in the dead man. A shiver ran down the sturdy manager’s spine. Sticking his gloved hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat, he mused:

“There’s no question about it. A visit here is a must. It gives you a sense of what’s important.”

The lab technician nodded. “And of what isn’t,” he added.

The resource manager noted that the shrivelled man’s skin was the colour of yellowed parchment. It almost looked like the pages of a sacred book.

“Interesting,” he murmured again. “All of this is so very interesting …”

With a glance at the technician, who seemed pleased with him, he asked if he was a believing Jew. No, the man replied. Yet there were times when anyone working here had to believe in something. Otherwise you could lose your humanity, watching so much life drain away.

A large clock ticked on the wall. After a visit like this, the manager thought, no one could accuse him of being finicky. He turned to go, then asked weakly which stretcher the cleaning woman was on. “You know,” he added, for no apparent reason, “she was a mechanical engineer.”

“She isn’t on any of them. She’s in the deep-freeze room. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” the technician asked.

The resource manager was sure. He could never pretend to identify a person he had only met in passing.

In the heated car, skimming the wet, empty streets of Arab Jerusalem, where streetlights were dimmer than in the Jewish half of the city, he again felt an urge to report back to the owner. Although not sure whether the concert was over, he dialled the old man’s home over the car’s speakerphone. The housekeeper told him in cultured, vaguely accented English that the master had not yet returned. The concert would be ending late because of an unusually long symphony in its second half.

“Probably something of Mahler’s,” said the resource manager, who prided himself on his musical knowledge.

The housekeeper, however, was not interested in
composers,
only in the length of their compositions. It was enough to know that the old man would not be home before
midnight.
If the resource manager wished to leave a message, she would take it down.