A Woman in Jerusalem (24 page)

The human resources manager, having learned the local word for
thank
you
from the consul, murmured it when the boy bashfully offered him a carefully held cup of steaming tea. The boy smiled at him, his delicate, coal-smudged fingers grazing the manager’s own. The sweet beverage hit the spot. He would have liked a second cup, but the sergeant had already taken away the pail. There was nothing left to do but signal the boy to turn out the lights.

“What is this? Boot camp all over again?”

The giggly voice from under the blanket was the weasel’s. The resource manager, knowing that he would have trouble falling asleep and that any banter would only make it worse, shut his eyes. At once his ears were assailed by the snoring of the consul, whose saw strokes were answered by those of a sleeping soldier.

It was 2.30 a.m. As if mesmerized by the flames that illuminated his perfect features, the boy went on crouching by the stove. Now that the others were asleep, the emissary could look at him more closely. Though he knew that the boy was aware of his gaze, he could not take his eyes off him. It’s all because of his mother, he thought. I wouldn’t look at her in the morgue and now I can’t stop looking at her reflection.

He was not the only one. The old sergeant, too, could not sleep. Returning, ostensibly to add coals to the stove, he was soon questioning the youngster and listening to his version of their strange expedition. The conversation took place in low tones, and the human resources manager followed it by watching the boy’s gestures and the white-haired sergeant’s expression. Like others of his age, the sergeant inspired the resource manager’s confidence and trust; he even made him miss the grand old man himself, the company owner. Recollecting that he had been out of touch with him for nearly a day, he rose from his mattress and displayed the satellite phone and its charger to the talking pair, miming the empty battery and notching two fingers for an outlet.

The surprised sergeant took the instrument and held it in his palm while consulting the boy to make sure he had understood. Undaunted by such a challenge in the middle of the night, he seemed pleased to have found a task worthy of him. Without further ado, he stuck the phone and charger into a pocket of his greatcoat and went off.

For a moment, the human resources manager was alarmed. But before he could call the sergeant back, the boy laughingly reassured him in his own language. He smiled back, patting the blond head and returning to the blankets in his corner. The boy, too, appeared to think that it was time to sleep, for he took a mattress and stood debating where to put it. After a while, as if declaring his faith in the man who had approved his mother’s last journey, he set the mattress down beside him, pulled off his shoes, and began removing his overalls. Not only did he not mind the cold, he seemed to enjoy braving it. The resource manager, who had first noticed this at the airport, was not surprised when the boy stripped off his underwear in the heated room and knelt pale-skinned,
smelling
of stale sweat, to spread a blanket.

The human resources manager had a teenage daughter and had always been careful to avoid seeing her or her friends in the nude. Not since his high school days had he been in the presence of a naked adolescent, let alone one so ambiguous,
half child and half adult, so masculine and yet also feminine. The boy had sloping shoulders and delicate feet, and his golden pubic hair had yet to declare itself. Even in the darkness his supple torso, extending from the bare buttocks, could not hide the signs, both recent and old, of scratches and actual bites, fingerprints of the delinquency the consul suspected him of. It was a suspicion confirmed by the look on his face, at once arrogant and desperate. The resource manager wondered if his nakedness was an extortion of payment, not only for his forgotten mother but also for the entire false promise of Jerusalem.

The boy got under the covers slowly, as if reluctant to part from his own naked form. His face was turned towards the man he had chosen to sleep beside. A breath away from him, the resource manager now had a close-up of the eyes that slanted upward from the bridge of a flattened nose. Confident that even the mother’s magic in this boy who so moved him could not shake an inner resolve that had never failed him before, he looked away to avoid misunderstanding and said “goodnight” in Hebrew.

The boy, as if he were determined to expunge from his soul every last word of the language of the country that had killed his mother, merely smiled remotely and languidly shut his eyes. I know you’re just pretending, thought the resource manager. Good night, then, and sweet dreams.

He turned to the wall, over which the flame from the stove cast its shadows until sleep snuffed them out.

For
us,
though,
the
flame
goes
on
burning.
It
entices
us,
whirls
and
spins
us
through
space
and
time,
dream-bearers
for
a
man
in
his
late
thirties,
an
ex-army
officer,
a
divorced
father
of
a
teenage
girl,
a
personnel
manager
charged
with
a
unique
mission,
who
now,
at
the
first
stop
of
his
journey,
in
the
barracks
of
a
once-secret
military
base
that
has
become
a
draw
for
tourists,
lies
on
a
thin
mattress,
wrapped
in
a
foreign
army
blanket.
Although
we
feel
his
urge
to
dream
a
dream,
is
it
possible,
in
all
his
weariness,
with
the
steady
rasping
of
the
sleepers
around
him,
to
give
him
one
that
will
be
meaningful
–
one
that
he
will
remember
and
even
describe
to
others?

That’s
our
job.
We,
the
agents
of
the
imagination,
brokers
of
phantasms,
are
here
to
produce
a
dread
and
marvellous
dream.
Already
we
hover
above
shut
eyelids,
slip
into
the
rhythms
of
the
breath,
stir
forgotten
childhood
wishes
into
the
remnants
of
yesterday,
blend
anxieties
with
fabulous
desires,
mix
jealousies
with
memories
and
longings.
Microscopic
and
transparently
elusive,
we
pass,
tiny
dream
nematodes,
compactions
of
dissimulation,
through
the
tough
outer
membranes
of
the
soul.

And
although
we
are
all
here
for
the
same
purpose,
none
of
us
knows
any
of
the
others.
Incessantly
we
change
our
disguises.
Two
old
childhood
friends
merge
into
a
single
youth.
A
conscript
killed
by
a
stray
bullet
returns
as
a
company
sergeant.
The
former
foreign
minister,
now
a
next-door
neighbour
and
possibly
a
cousin,
is
in
attendance,
too.
And
there
are
others,
total
strangers
with
no
identify
ing
marks,
like
a
woman
our
souls
go
out
to
as
she
passes
in
the
street.

It’s
twitching
into
life,
this
dream
of
ours.
The
eyelids
flutter
as
the
opening
scene
appears.
A
sigh
is
stifled.
A
leg
shoots
nervously
out
from
under
the
blanket,
followed
by
the
other
moving
more
slowly,
as
if
someone
were
taking
a
first
step,
or,
better
yet,
beginning
a
descent.

Good
luck.

At first the dream descends broad, smooth steps. He is back home, visiting a new building on a street near his mother’s in which he has rented a small, attractive apartment that will soon be available. Yet it is so easy to skip down the well-lit staircase that he has missed the prominent exit on the ground floor and gone on descending, at first without noticing that the light is growing dimmer. The steps, too, have changed and are narrower. There are no more apartments. He is exploring some sort of basement. Nor is he alone on the staircase. Old men in fur hats and long, heavy winter coats stride beside him, sighing and muttering. Well, then, the dreamer thinks
excitedly,
I must be in the nuclear shelter and this must be the tour. But where is the tour guide to show me round?

Now, however, the dream takes a more sombre turn. The
tourist site has become a frightening reality. The old men in long coats and fur hats are commissars and secret agents who have hastily launched a first strike and are hurrying to take cover from an imminent counterattack.

The steps are now narrow and steep, the walls around them crooked and constricting. In the depths of the new building stands the bell tower of an ancient church. Although he is a stranger who does not belong in this place, the dreamer wishes to be saved like all the others. Awkwardly pretending to be someone else, he is jostled into the shelter, a small, suffocating chamber filled with people casting angry, desperate glances at a transparent partition – behind which, on a small stage, bustle the leaders who have so flippantly given the dreadful order. Seen through the partition they have the silhouettes of grizzly bears oblivious to the idiocy of their actions; even so, the dreamer thinks he knows them and has run afoul of them in the past – particularly one of them, a blubbery man whose broad chest is covered with medals that look like tongues of blood and flame.

Can this be the whole secret shelter? Its entire legendary depth? Can I have agreed to make a detour here instead of proceeding straight to the village, or to take part in a war of annihilation that has nothing to do with me and that I don’t deserve? Who can survive in a pitiful shelter like this? The enemy, gnashing his teeth amid the havoc we have wreaked, is launching his revenge. It will be terrible. The forked glitter of his counterstrike, it is said, can already be seen. Why stay in an indefensible place that will only draw withering fire? My place was always in the West. Why be killed by it now?

But it is already too late. The counterstrike lands on the building in utter silence. A foul, horrid, asphyxiating smell spreads through the shelter, which is also a gymnasium. Wooden ladders hang on its walls. The panicky leaders scale them to reach a high, narrow window, through which the green tip of a cypress tree is visible. The dreamer remembers the tree from his childhood, though he has never before yearned for it as he does now.

Is it still the same dream? With no interruption other than a turning of his head, a torrid sun now melts a sky of blue. It is the eve of the holiday of Shavuot, the day of the giving of the Law, and schoolchildren with wreaths of flowers on their heads pour through an open gate, racing to show their parents the little Torah scrolls they have made in class.

For whom is he waiting? He has no wife, his daughter is unborn, and no child with a wreath is looking for him. Though grown up, he is a student himself and late for class. Easing out of the rope that ties him to a tree, he flies through the blossoming garden of his old high school, over the stone footbridge that crosses a pond, and up the stairs of the school, flight after flight, until he reaches the classroom. It is deserted.

Has she cancelled the lesson, or have his fellow students skipped the class?

There is no message on the blackboard. On the teacher’s chair is a slide rule brought from her native land. In spite of the holiday, then, she came for their trigonometry lesson, only to be let down by his classmates. He knows that his lateness has made him a traitor too, and so he takes the slide rule, which is warm from the sunshine, hoping that bringing it to her will gain him forgiveness. But the teachers’ room is empty. The foreign trigonometry teacher has been summoned to the principal’s office to be fired. Though only a student, he is certain his love and devotion can save her. And the school secretary is on his side. “Run!” she says. “They’re doing it right now.”