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.
8
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.
“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 toodarkto readbyand toobright 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.