A Woman in Jerusalem (27 page)

“Would you mind feeling my forehead to see if I have a temperature?”

The photographer shrank back. “I wouldn’t rely on me. You should ask for a thermometer.”

In their day and a half of travelling together, this was the first time the two of them had been alone. The human resources manager noticed that the photographer was older than he had thought, perhaps even as old as himself.

“I’m sorry they took your lens away,” he said, trying his best to break the ice. “You could have photographed me in a nappy, surrounded by chamber pots. It would have made a better cover picture than the boy.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It would have shown your readers what you put me through.”

“What you’ve been through is of no interest to our readers,” the photographer declared dryly. “You’d have to croak to make the front cover.”

“Well, well! I see it’s no accident that you teamed up with a weasel.”

“It’s he who teamed up with me.”

“What does the boy have that I don’t? His good looks?”

“His mother. It’s she who should be on the cover. We simply don’t have a decent shot of her.”

The human resources manager shivered under his blankets.
“I’m warning you too. Don’t you dare open the coffin.”

“Calm down. No one is opening anything. You shouldn’t aggravate yourself when you’re sick.”

“I’d like to ask you something. You’re a professional photographer with a practised eye … what’s so special about her face … or for that matter, about his? Why are we attracted to them? There’s something about the eyes … an arch of some kind … do you think it’s a racial feature?”

“No, it’s not that,” the photographer said with confidence, as if he had already considered the matter. “It bothered me, too. That’s why I kept shooting the boy until I figured it out. It’s an epithelial fold in the corner of the eye. And the high cheekbones add to the illusion …”

“Interesting,” the sick man murmured. “I can see that you’ve thought about it.”

The photographer rose to warm his hands at the brazier. “You didn’t really think our readers would prefer the smell of your nappy to such a face, did you?”

The manager blushed. With a friendly smile the
photographer
said:

“I hope you’re not offended.”

“Offended? Of course not. Just pray that the sergeant gives you back your lens in time for the funeral.”

“Don’t worry. I have a backup camera. The main thing is for you to get better so that we can move on.”

The sergeant arrived with a pitcher of tea. The shifts changed again. Now it was the turn of the elder brother, who arrived with the emissary’s carry-on bag and the leather suitcase.

“You didn’t have to bring them,” groaned the resource manager, who was in too much pain to make himself
understood.
“The suitcase isn’t mine anyway.”

This
is
totally
absurd,
he thought.
Here
I
am
hospitalized
in
an
obsolete
nuclear
shelter,
wearing
nothing
but
a
nappy,
looked
after
by
people
I
can’t
speak
to,
lying
in
light
that’s
too
dark
to
read
by
and
too
bright
to
sleep
in.
He rose rebelliously, went to his bag, and took out a track suit and a sleeping pill. Donning the track suit
over the nappy, he swallowed the pill. In case of another attack, the cramps, he hoped, would wake him in time. Helped by the elder brother, he detached the emergency light by his bed, added another blanket to the pile, and tried falling asleep again.

He awoke too late. Once more he was soiled and soaking wet. Not even the soldier on duty, fast asleep by the brazier, could help him. Time, which had congealed in these depths during the Cold War, turning to a grey sludge between the concrete walls, had now also ceased to flow for the sick man. Had he imagined it or had he really been given a glass of tea by the consul and promised that he would be as good as new in twenty-four hours, as happened with cows, horses, sheep, and goats? And had the weasel, coming to discuss his
dissertation
in the middle of the night, actually spoken of the
daimon,
whose love was more than any woman would want to endure?

Once their journey resumed, he would perhaps find out who had sat by his bed and who had been an hallucination. One way or another, when the sleeping pill wore off and he woke again, weak and drenched in sweat, the ghostly light in the windowless, timeless room heralding no known hour of the day, he knew he was over it. He was purged not only of the poisonous stew from the market but also of many older, forgotten toxins too, going back to his school years and the army.

He undid the last nappy and tossed it into the bag by his bed. Then he cleaned himself one last time and added his track suit to the bag. All out of fresh clothes, he opened a package brought by the sergeant. In it was an assortment of army trousers, shirts, and underwear, bequeathed by unknown soldiers discharged long ago. Picking items that looked his size, he slipped snugly into them. When the soldier sleeping by the bed opened his eyes, he was astonished to see the sick tourist transformed into a private in the Maintenance Corps.

The emissary, who had a normal human talent for
displaying
pain and misery, now deliberated how best to convey
his return to health. In the end, he raised both arms high with a triumphant grin. The soldier understood at once. Since he was forbidden to free the patient without permission, however, he had to go and ask the sergeant.

Thoroughly clean and totally void, the human resources manager asked to go on a tour of the shelter before leaving it. With his satellite phone in the deep pocket of his fatigue pants he strolled through the huge rooms of the hospital. In the spectral light he saw unused blankets lying folded on virgin mattresses piled on rusting iron beds. He entered an operating theatre in which no operation had ever been performed and opened and closed drawers of medicines until, in one of them, he found an astonished little mouse staring at him.

If such a tiny creature going about its business could penetrate the hidden fastness of a nuclear shelter, he thought, could not an ethereal sound wave do the same? Taking the phone from his pocket, he decided to put it to the test.

He had no idea whether it was day or night in this place, much less in Jerusalem. Who could he call there? Certainly not the old owner. Nor the office manager. Nor his own secretary. Not even his mother, whom the story of his illness would only frighten. That left his daughter. Surely he had the right to wake her if her young voice was what the doctor ordered.

The call went through amazingly quickly. The voice at the other end was as clear beneath the ground as it would have been from a mountaintop. It was not his daughter’s, however, but his ex-wife’s. Wide awake and relaxed, she spoke softly. To his surprise, she did not hang up on him.

“It’s me …”

“Yes, I can hear that. What’s wrong? You don’t sound so well.”

“I’m not.” He was touched by how intimately she still knew him. “Not entirely …”

“What’s the matter?”

“I had food poisoning. But I’m better now.”

“Who poisoned you?”

He laughed. “No one. I poisoned myself. I’m better.”

“You always thought you had a cast-iron stomach. It’s time you learned you have your limits.”

“You’re right. It is time.”

“You’re better?”

“Yes. I’m getting over it. I had a rough day. I was a wreck. But I’m better.”

“It takes time. Watch what you eat. It’s best just to drink. A lot.”

“I’m drinking. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For worrying about me.”

“I’m not worrying about you. I’m feeling sorry for you.”

“That’s something, too. Thank you for feeling sorry, then.”

“I don’t feel as sorry as all that. You don’t deserve it.”

“Thank you anyway. It’s nice to hear you being patient. Could I ask you to do me a favour and wake our daughter? I need to hear her voice.”

“You’ve forgotten that it’s Monday. She starts school early today. She’s already left.”

“She has? What time is it?”

“Seven. What happened to you? I’ve known you to lose track of many things before, but never of time.”

“You’re right. The soldiers who took care of me after I collapsed took my watch and haven’t returned it yet. And there’s not a ray of sunlight where I am.”

“Where are you?”

“Buried underground. I’m in a nuclear shelter that’s also a tourist site.”

“
You
’re
buried underground? I thought you went to bury a woman.”

“Yulia Ragayev? She’s still above ground. We’re taking her to her mother.”

“While doing some sightseeing. I thought you were in a big rush …”

“Because of the … corpse? We have time. There’s no need
to worry. There are medical procedures nowadays. It’s not what you imagine.”

“I’m not worrying or imagining anything. I couldn’t care less. I simply don’t understand why you had to travel so far because of some dumb newspaper article. You could have buried her in Jerusalem. It’s probably what she would have wanted.”

“So now you know what she would have wanted. Perhaps you do care after all …”

“I do not! Let’s drop it. I’ve had enough of your wisecracks. I’m sorry I ever mentioned her … Wake up! Who is she to me? Who are you? What do you want? Poisoned or not, go away. Do what you want. Go touring with corpses. Just leave me in peace.”

Without waiting for their lunch, the seven travellers boarded the armoured vehicle, which coughed and shook vigorously before emitting a puff of blue exhaust and lurching from its place with a happy growl. The coffin, its ropes reinforced by a metal cable, bumped along behind it. It was the human resources manager himself who had given the order to depart. Although he’d emerged pale and weak from the depths, a long look at his folded mattress in the empty barracks room from which his two disturbing dreams had vanished – leaving him fancy-free – had convinced him to continue his mission. The consul moved the boy to the front seat, cleared a space amid the luggage for the emissary to lie in, and even coaxed him to wear his wife’s red woollen cap as a head-warmer and general restorative.

Since the army base had no laundry service, the emissary had to go on wearing the second-hand army uniform in place of his own clothes. It was added to the moderate bill he received for their lodging, meals, and tour, which he
augmented
with a tip for all the nappies, hot tea, and sympathy. As before, the sergeant did not want to take the money. His
military pride, he told the consul, would not allow it. But when his troops assailed him for his stubbornness, he flushed, gave the emissary a military salute, shut his eyes tight, and let the money be placed in his hand. The photographer, his lens restored, could not resist popping a flashbulb.

As they climbed slowly back out of the valley, now splendidly lit by a radiant noonday sky, the travellers were better able to appreciate the unique spot they had been in. Hidden in darkness on their arrival, the nuclear shelter’s illusion of pastoral beauty was now visible through the vehicle’s windows. The woods, the simulated quarry, the artificial lake, and the rows of red-roofed houses below them were all camouflage.

The elder brother could read the landscape as closely as a bedouin reads the desert. Once they reached the top of the mountains encircling the valley and started down the other side, towards the junction at which they had left the main road, he pointed out the stroke of luck their detour had been, despite the emissary’s illness. Apart from providing them with rest and good food, it had enabled them to escape the storm that had pursued them to this very junction. Uprooted trees and fallen road signs testified to the ferocity of the assault that had blown itself out in the expanse still ahead of them.

It was this expanse, with its forests and rivers, that they now had to cross. Neither of the two brothers was familiar with it. Although they had consulted the soldiers and been given a good military map, there was no knowing if they would be able to cover ground as quickly as they had done in their journey’s first stage.

Night fell. The darkness didn’t matter; the real problem was the frequent crossroads, whose signs had vanished in the storm or quite simply been turned around. Still, they had no choice but to press on. Their detour had taken longer than they had planned. The old grandmother could well have returned to her village by now and heard about her daughter’s death, the details of which she had a right to know as soon as possible.

As they drove farther into the night, they were surprised to
discover that they were in a populated area. On the first leg of their journey, they had met no other traffic. Now, however, they occasionally passed a slow-moving truck or had to pull onto a shoulder to let a speeding car flash drunkenly by. Once, they stopped for two horses whose harness had become entangled in a wagon shaft. Another time, a large cow blocked the road. To their astonishment they even
encountered
another vehicle exactly like their own. It might have come from the same assembly line or even the same armoured brigade, the only difference being that this one had been turned into a mobile home and its trailer into a kitchen.

From time to time they drove through a town or village. Despite the late hour, the inhabitants were awake and friendly and ready to give and even draw directions. The news that the coffin had come from Jerusalem and was now on its way to the birthplace of a woman killed in someone else’s war caused a stir. More than one local resident doffed his cap and crossed himself as if in the presence of a sacred relic. Their warm reception encouraged the elder brother to listen to the advice of a gas station attendant to take a shortcut through a forest. By following it, he was told, they would reach the river crossing early in the morning in time to make the first ferry, an icebreaker that did not run at night.