“A’rib?” the man in charge of burials in Beit Safafa asked over the phone.
“A’rib” I answered in Arabic. Stranger.
“So then it will be a small funeral,” he said.
“There will be no funeral,” I said.
“You have permission for burial?”
“Yes, I got it from the hospital.”
“You know where to bring him?”
“No.”
“You know the small mosque near the cemetery?”
“I’ll ask.”
“Okay, bring him there,” he said. “Ask anyone in the village and he’ll direct you there. Everyone knows where the cemetery is.”
“Okay, thank you very much.”
“Allah Yirachmo,” God have mercy, said the man to whom death was a livelihood.
Equipped with the signed certificate of death and the ID card, I set out in Ruchaleh’s car for the morgue at Shaare Zedek, where Yonatan’s body was being stored. An older nurse looked at my paperwork and made a feeble attempt at empathy.
“How are you taking him?” she asked.
“Ambulance,” I said right away, and she nodded.
“Should I order one for you?”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay, you can wait over there,” she said, pointing her chin in the direction of a small waiting room. Then she picked up the phone and began to dial.
A small TV, resting on a metal arm that protruded from the wall, showed soundless footage from the government channel. Two stern-looking men spoke to one another. One, who looked like the guest, was religious, with a black yarmulke, a thick beard, a white shirt, and a black jacket. The man who looked like the host wore a knitted yarmulke and a blue dress shirt. His beard was trimmed and sculpted. Every once in a while a few passages from the Bible appeared on the screen and then disappeared. The two men were visibly excited, waving their fists, punctuating with their hands, making expansive gestures, smiling at the camera, twisting their faces into occasional grimaces, underscoring again and again their wonder at the potency of Biblical verse.
“Shalom,” the Arab ambulance driver said to me in halting Hebrew, perhaps on account of my clothes and perhaps on account of my physical appearance.
“Shalom,” I responded, rising to my feet.
“You’re accompanying the body, right?” he asked with no preamble and no superfluous attempts at commiseration.
“Right.”
“To Beit Safafa?”
“Yes, to the small mosque near the. .”
“Yeah,” the driver said, handing me a copy of some paperwork, “I know the place. I’m from there. You going to follow me?”
The driver lit a cigarette on the way to the ambulance, giving his younger assistant time to walk over to the stretcher and the enshrouded body and push it toward the ambulance. The driver opened the back doors and the younger man pushed a button on the stretcher and shoved it into the ambulance, the legs of the stretcher folding into the track.
They drove slowly, and I followed. For some reason I felt a burning desire to take photographs. It seemed to me like the only reasonable way to pass the next few minutes, behind the lens of a camera. To press, swivel, document, hide, distance myself from the events. But even if I had brought the camera with me, I doubt I would have had the nerve to use it. On Army Radio a famous Israeli singer spoke about his experiences during the past week, softening his voice, making it sound thoughtful, trying to enliven the banal conclusions that he had reached regarding his life.
“This next song has accompanied me during sad and happy days alike,” he said after he had finished his little speech and before he let the music speak for itself.
The ambulance entered the village and immediately drew the attention of the locals. Kids on bikes trailed behind the ambulance and pedaled furiously in their attempts to overtake the two-car convoy. The driver opened his window and told them something, probably that nothing exciting was happening, that this was just the body of a stranger being brought to burial, not someone from the village. A crowd tumbled out of the small mosque near the cemetery. The men stopped and stared at the ambulance and waited to see what was going on. I berated myself for forgetting that there was this little thing called Friday prayers and that it was the absolute worst time for a clandestine burial. I parked behind the ambulance and stayed inside the car. The driver turned around and threw me a look. Three men, one of whom seemed like the man in charge and the other two his helpers, came up to the ambulance driver and shook his hand, smiling. They exchanged a few words and looked over at me. A few of the worshippers came over and spoke with the men, whispering, and once they realized that it was not a villager who was being brought for burial and their curiosity had been satisfied, they left and went to report back to their friends that there was nothing to see.
I got out of the car only after all of the worshippers had dispersed. The driver’s assistant pulled Yonatan out of the ambulance and wheeled him toward a small room adjacent to the mosque, the two young men from the burial society trailing behind him.
“He can go to hell,” an elderly man said to me in Arabic as I stood there. “Who’s going to pray for this dog?”
“Shalom,” the man in charge of the burial service said to me in Hebrew. “Don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of this. You staying here?”
“Yes,” I said, not understanding exactly what was happening.
“He has no family members?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
A little kid on a bike circled around us and yelled in Arabic, “How long are they going to bury collaborators here? How long?” The man in charge barked at him to get lost. “Sure,” the kid yelled. “What do you care? For you it’s good business. You couldn’t give a damn.”
“Get out of here, now,” the undertaker yelled, “or the first place I’m going to go after I’m done here is your father’s house. Get out of here.”
The kid pedaled off and the ambulance driver laughed and said the kid was right. “They’ve turned our cemetery into a garbage dump for foreigners,” he said in Arabic, and the undertaker looked at him apprehensively. “Don’t worry about it,” the driver said, looking at me. “He doesn’t understand a word, this one.” The stretcher was brought back to the ambulance and the driver and his assistant shook hands with the undertaker, bid him farewell, and drove off.
“You’re not a family member, right?” the undertaker asked me.
“No.”
“So, what is this, your job?”
“Yeah, among other things,” I found myself responding.
“You know how this works?”
“No.”
“The boys are washing him now. Then he goes into the mosque for a brief prayer and then we bury him. The grave has already been dug.” He pointed to a far-off corner of the cemetery. “Everything’s ready. You want some coffee?”
“No,” I said. “Thank you.”
The washing ceremony was brief. The two young men emerged with the body in a wooden coffin and hurried into the mosque.
“Just a second,” the undertaker said to me and jogged over to them. No prayer for the dead had been recited, of that I was sure. The coffin hadn’t been inside the mosque for more than a minute and the two men were coming out, carrying the coffin, walking briskly across the street that separated the mosque from the cemetery.