“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.

“Who died?” asked a driver who’d stopped his car.

“A foreigner,” the undertaker said. “Allah yirachmo, a foreigner. A foreigner.”

The man drove off and the undertaker turned to me. “That’s it, they’re burying him,” he said. “If you’d like, you can leave a little something for the young men.”

“Yeah, let the little fucker pay,” one of the young men said as he walked with the coffin toward the grave. His partner laughed.

“Shut up,” the undertaker yelled at them, his face showing sorrow and disappointment.

“Of course,” I said, and I took two fifty-shekel notes out of my wallet.

“Thank you very much,” the undertaker said, parting from me quickly and walking toward the cemetery. I heard him say, “You’re making me look bad,” to the two men as they lowered the coffin into the ground. I got back in the car and started the engine. From afar I could see the heads of the two young men bending down to the ground and the undertaker directing them with his hands. I imagined that they had laid out the usual five blocks and that they were placing them on the body and then filling in the ditch with sand, spade by spade. I sat there and watched them work. One of the young men spat into the grave and laughed.

UNDERGROUND PARKING

The lawyer parked his car in the lot above King George Street. It was nearly nine in the morning. He turned off the engine and stayed in the car. The lawyer was scared. Where had all of this come from? He was afraid that this uncontrollable feeling would destroy his life and his career, make him lose his clientele and his livelihood. What was he worth without them? A month or two without any good cases and his life would start to unravel. The salaries, the mortgage, the car payments, taxes, shopping, his son’s nanny, his daughter’s school. The lawyer could see his life begin to crumble. Why had she done this to him? Didn’t she see that he’d been working like a mule to support them? He was always apprehensive that a young lawyer would come up and knock him off the top spot, but who would have thought that he’d be undone by matters of love and betrayal? Instead of showing up in court and representing an important client against charges of unlawful possession of a firearm, he was out and about on the streets, prowling around for his wife’s car like a jealous teenager.

There were five floors of underground parking at the Ministry of Social Affairs’ west Jerusalem office in Talpiot, and the lawyer drove slowly along the avenue of parked cars, eyeing each and every one.

Having not found his wife’s car, he made a U-turn and started back to the ground-floor exit. As he approached daylight, his phone announced two messages. The lawyer looked at the screen and saw that he had missed two calls while underground. One from Samah and one from his wife. He called his wife but once again she did not answer. The lawyer left Talpiot and drove toward the mental health clinic where his wife worked two or three days a week. What did she do there exactly? he wondered as his phone rang again.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. “I saw you called but I couldn’t answer because I’m in a meeting and my phone is on silent. I just stepped outside. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” the lawyer said. “What kind of meeting?”

“A staff meeting.”

“At the mental health clinic?”

“Yes. There’s a staff meeting every Sunday. We present cases. If everything’s okay then I’m going to go back in. You sure everything’s okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine. I’m just stuck in traffic.”

And still the lawyer drove to the clinic to look for her car. But even when he saw it, he felt that it was possible that his wife had deceived him and that she had parked there and then taken a taxi. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and exhaled. He was sweating. He tried to loosen up, stretch his muscles. He was not thinking logically anymore, he seemed to be losing his mind.

There’s no reason for this, he told himself, there’s no reason to act like this. Your life is fine. Your life is in order. You are heading into an office that is humming with work; you will always have clients. Your caseload and your income have gone up each year. Clients don’t just melt away, nothing has changed.

“He’s dead,” Samah announced when the lawyer walked into the office.

“Who?”

“Your guy.”

“What? That’s not possible,” he said, putting down the little cardboard tray and the three cups of coffee. The phones rang.

“Lawyer’s office, please hold,” Samah said, laying the phone down on the counter. She pulled a piece of paper out of the fax, handed it to the lawyer, and got back on the phone. “Sorry for the wait, how may I help you? Hello, Abu Ramzi, how are you?” Samah looked at the lawyer and he shook his head, making clear that he could not take the call. “No, I’m sorry, he’s not in the office right now. He’s in court. Yes, of course, I’ll give him the message. ’Bye.”

The lawyer sat down on his office couch and looked at the fax from the population registry. Amir Lahab, born in Tira, 1979. The lawyer took out the note Samah had given him with the ID number she had received from the outpatient clinic in east Jerusalem and made sure that the numbers matched. According to the population registry, this Amir Lahab had died on Thursday, a little over a week ago. What kind of coincidence was that? Now, while he was searching for him, the guy just happens to die?

Impossible, the lawyer thought, something is wrong. There’s no way he’s dead. Just yesterday he had spoken with the man’s mother, who did not seem to suffer from mental illness, and she had said she had spoken to him over the course of the past week. The lawyer leaned back on the couch and ran his hands back and forth through his hair.

“What’s wrong?” Samah asked, coming into the room with the lawyer’s cup of coffee.

“Nothing,” the lawyer said. “Nothing.”

“Did you know the deceased?”

“What?” It took him a moment to understand her question. “Oh, no, no. Listen,” he said, sitting up straight and pulling two books out of his briefcase, One Hundred Years of Solitude and the one featuring the work of Egon Schiele. He flipped through the first pages of the novel and showed Samah the signature, Yonatan. “Scan this page, please,” the lawyer said, “and this one,” he said, showing her the signature on the art book, “and send them to the graphologist. Tell him it’s very urgent. And that there’s no need for an official report.”