“That might be just as well.” The emissary’s deep sorrow surprised him. “With a reputation for devotion to corpses, no living woman will want to touch me.”
“I’m not so sure,” the weasel said with a smile, laying a consoling hand on the shoulder he had promised to steer clear of. “You’ll see that your devotion will win you many admirers. You won’t have to look for them in out-of-the-way bars any more. They’ll come looking for you … and who knows, perhaps for me too …”
10
Since hearing the bitter news from Jerusalem, which we had imagined existed only in the Bible, we couldn’t stop tormenting ourselves. Holy Mother, give us the heartfelt wisdom not to err!
At once we sent a messenger to tell the old woman to come home from the monastery. We made her promise to say nothing about the tragedy. Fournights and fivedays went bywithout a wordfrom her. Although the storm had washed away roads and knocked down bridges, we lit a bonfire every night to make sure she could find her way back.
Ah, what would we do if the dead daughter arrived before the mother was here to mourn for her? Should we bury her or wait? And if we waited, where was the most dignified place to keep her? Should we break into the old woman’s cottage and put her daughter in the bed she was born in? Or should we place the coffin, as we always do for funerals, by the altar in the church? But dear Jesus, how long could we pray with a corpse lying beside the holy icons? And how could we, who are usedto the deadfaces of agedpeasants, look into a coffin with a mangled bodyfrom Jerusalem?
And who would speak at the funeral? We hadn’t seen her for years and knewnothing about her. Allwe had were distant memories of a quiet, delicate child who went everywhere with her mother — to the fields, to the market, to the church — until some man fellin love with her and carried her off to the big city. Atfirst her mother usedto travel all the way there to see her. She said her daughter was an engineer and had a beautiful baby. Butoncewe were connected to the telephone lines, she stopped going. Could the poor woman have been in touch with her daughter in Jerusalem without telling us?
For five nights we knew no peace. And then came the news that the coffin had crossed the river on the ferry, with an armoured vehicle and a big escort — and still no signof the mother. What were we to do? What were we to tell the delegation that was bringing usan engineer who had died as a cleaning woman in someone else’s war?
Holy Mother, we asked and asked and got no answers.
And so, when the big wheels came to a halt by our fire, we didn’t know what to believe. We even hoped that the coffin might be empty and that your silence had foretold a miraculous resurrection. For a second, but no more, we actually thought that was her climbing down from the vehicle, as young and beautiful as ever. But as we approached in joy and trembling, we saw that it was only her son, a tall boy who had brought his mother home to his grandmother for her to turn despair and anger into sorrow and pity.
It was a distinguished delegation. Its armoured vehicle was so big and old that it needed two drivers, and its story was so long that it needed two journalists, and even its leader needed someone to interpret what he said.
At first we didn’t know that the white-faced man in the old army uniform was the leader. But he was a man without guile and we understood as soon as he spoke, Holy Mother, that he was the answer to all our questions.
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.
11
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.