A woman in Jerusalem

"The Jews take Jerusalem wherever they go, and the more of them take it with them, the lighter it becomes," a character in A. B. Yehoshua's wonderful 1989 novel, "Mr. Mani," explains, speaking of the disjunction between a symbolic Jerusalem and the actual city. The enormous weight of Jerusalem as metaphor is everywhere in Yehoshua's fiction; and can be found again, and powerfully, in his remarkable new book, "A Woman in Jerusalem."

This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece: terse (or relatively so, given that Yehoshua's novels are often long), eminently readable but resonantly dense. Translated eloquently by Hillel Halkin, the book follows a straight trajectory from the heart of Jerusalem to the most remote corner of a former Soviet republic. It has two central characters, one alive and one dead; but only the deceased is granted a name.

Indeed, she is the only character in the novel who enjoys this luxury; although technically, her name is not given but restored to her after a week of anonymity. A recent immigrant to Israel, not herself Jewish, 48-year-old Yulia Ragayev has been killed in a suicide bombing, with no identification on her person other than a pay stub from the bakery where she worked.

A scandal-mongering tabloid journalist writes an expos, about her abandonment in the hospital, headlined "The Shocking Inhumanity Behind Our Daily Bread"; but the newspaper releases the article to the bakery owner for comment before its publication.

The bakery owner, a man of 87, finely described ("his great pompadour of ancient hair swelled in the muted light like the plumes of a royal pheasant") does what any clever boss would do, and passes the buck. He sends his human resources manager - as the nameless main character is called throughout the novel - to identify the woman and figure out how her absence went unnoticed for so long.

Thirty-nine, recently divorced, caught in his own small state of despair, he embarks upon a dogged and epic adventure, first to ascertain the facts, then to restore Yulia Ragayev's humanity and eventually to restore her to her family.

As the one who renamed the bakery's "personnel division" the "human resources division," this weary bureaucrat has the chance to prove both his humanity and his resourcefulness, an irony Yehoshua manipulates to strong effect: the resource manager's very namelessness takes on a poetic force.

The novel's pace is stately but firm, like a funeral procession, as the resource manager moves first through the bakery, where he extracts a pained confession of love for Yulia Ragayev from the night-shift supervisor; then through the city, from the hospital morgue to the woman's home, a garden shack in a downtown neighbourhood.

In the company of the coffin (and, as it happens, the journalist, referred to only as "the weasel"), he eventually leaves Israel and travels to Yulia Ragayev's home country, an unnamed former Soviet republic numbingly cold in its winter freeze.

The visit begins inauspiciously. The resource manager remains trapped for hours in the airport with the coffin. In the face of indifference or hostility from all authorities and kin, including Ragayev's angry teenage son, he decides to return her body to her mother, in a remote village several days' journey away: "What a turn of events," he reflects, "A foreign woman 10 years older than myself, whom I can't even remember, has become my sole responsibility.

National Insurance has closed her file, her ex-husband has turned his back on her, her lover disappeared long ago, and even the consul no longer wishes to represent her. That leaves me in a cold, primitive land in the company of two journalists who think I'm a story, led by a teenage boy I'm not sure I can handle. How could I have known last Tuesday, when I promised to take this woman on my back, that she would weigh as much as she does?"

How, indeed, could he have grasped the weight of his native city - which is what Yulia, in her native country, has come to represent? If in Jerusalem, Yulia is an abandoned corpse, in her native land she carries both the weight of her death and the full metaphorical burden of the place where it occurred.

The resource manager, in his turn, is changed by his epic journey, which includes a turn through an underworld, a subterranean hospital where he recovers from food poisoning. Suddenly an emissary as well as a manager, he transforms from a faceless type into a morally engaged individual, and finally, into a peculiar sort of hero.

"A Woman in Jerusalem" is a novel peopled by ciphers. In his insistence on the namelessness of these characters, Yehoshua explores the significance of each person's humanity, the ways in which seemingly banal details distinguish one anonymous life from another.

At the book's outset, the human resource manager is so detached that he registers surprise that Yulia was thought a beauty: "He switched on his desk lamp and slowly studied the computer image. Was she beautiful? It was hard to tell." This inability to recognize what is immediately clear to others preoccupies him.

It is ultimately what spurs him - surely not unwittingly - into a pilgrimage at once Kafka- and Faulkner-esque, as freighted with symbolism as it is with unlikely, vivid detail. In the end, he has travelled an immeasurable distance, not only physically, but psychically; and with Yehoshua as our careful, philosophical guide, we, too, have made the journey.

"A Woman in Jerusalem" cleaves solely to the resource manager's experience, with the exception of a series of brief italicized passages in which various groups observe the manager in his peregrinations, like a Greek chorus. These interludes are remarkably effective and affecting, and serve both to grant us outside perspective on this story, and to integrate it into the daily worlds of other characters.

Spoken by bakery employees, pubgoers, a clutch of young Orthodox sisters, airport workers or market vendors, these testaments bestow meaning on the resource manager's story, just as he bestows meaning on Yulia Ragayev's. In one, Yehoshua even gives voice to "the agents of the imagination, brokers of phantasms ... here to produce a dread and marvellous dream. ... Microscopic and transparently elusive, we pass, tiny dream nematodes, compactions of dissimulation, through the tough outer membranes of the soul."

Embedded in this simple story are fundamental questions about identity, selfhood, belonging. Yehoshua, long a master of gentle, almost Chekhovian comedy, takes in this instance a deeply bleak premise - Yulia Ragayev's brutal death - and creates from it a work of art by turns absurd, strange and moving.

In the novel's unexpected but also, surely, inevitable conclusion, Yehoshua claims Jerusalem as "everyone's" city. While this is the only moment of metaphorical heavy-handedness in an otherwise perfectly calibrated novel, it is the logical conclusion of a story about a nameless Everyman from a symbolic place, one he believes "exists for me as a bitter reality alone."

Ultimately, unlike "Mr. Mani," this book suggests that while the city's weight may be universally shared, it grows, for each individual, no lighter; and yet, perhaps perversely, it leaves us with a measure of hope.

(The Guardian)