Remains of the day

A Woman in Jerusalem
By A. B. Yehoshua
Translated, from the Hebrew, by Hillel Halkin
Harcourt, 237 pp., $25

The great Israeli novelists Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua have long spoken to the notion of the evil inherent in a good: the blindness toward the Palestinians that went with the lucid vision of a Jewish homeland.

By now such painful twofold sight, with its faint (always faint) hope of painful cure, is a crossroads left tragically behind. History, it's true, has a way of circling back to regret if not to resurrect its missed choices. You are right, it tells the cemeteries.

If a dove were a species of taloned kestrel, the combative Oz would be a dove. And Yehoshua would be a dove if it were a species of owl. Figure him at the Last Judg ment. Confronted with its great question, he blinks politely, points sideways, and ventures: ``This surely is also the question."

In ``The Liberated Bride" -- perhaps his masterpiece, along with ``Mr. Mani" -- Yehoshua makes his professor protagonist an archetype of Israeli passion, insight, and myopia. He sends him through a wondrous Arab night-town in a fugue that does not so much illuminate him as, through him, the reader. It is all distraction, all to the point, very funny, and buoyantly dark.

``A Woman in Jerusalem" is a frailer work; its story splashes about, its characters are sketched more than painted. They tend to stand for rather than stand full; but this is elusive. Yehoshua's points are Talmudic (answers as questions), not didactic.

Here his question verges on the shocking, though posed so slyly, distractingly, and with such a touch of extravagant mischief as to veil its impact. It nudges at bedrock belief: Israel as exclusive Jewish homeland.

The hero, a kind of Candide, is the manager of human resources at an industrial bakery whose business flourishes during the suicide bombings, since people nervously eat more bread. His fugue -- the story is mostly fugue -- will take him all around Jerusalem and eventually across the frozen Russian steppe to a remote Central Asian village.

A bakery employee has been killed in a bombing. A newspaper is about to publish an exposé of the company's indifference toward its workers, having failed even to condole, much less compensate. The owner -- a lordly tyrant somewhere between God and Citizen Kane -- orders his subordinate to investigate and remedy any conceivable corporate callousness. Human resources, he insists, includes not just hirings and vacations but also death.

The manager must get onto it, not the next morning (a divorced father, he was supposed to take his visiting daughter to her dance class) but at once. ``The owner was too worried about his humanity to relent."

The manager's secretary makes a series of shrewd inquiries, while another office assistant helps his daughter with her homework. Both display the uninhibited briskness that Yehoshua affords his women, in contrast to his foggily unquiet men.

A bakery foreman confesses the beginnings of an affair with the victim. The manager is smitten by her photograph. Visiting her shabby room, he makes the bed. There is a loopy visit to the morgue. The author treats his peregrinations with irony coupled to faintly awed affection. He is inquisitive, grave, and lighter than air, something like Jose Saramago, whom he oddly resembles. To be human is to be absurd; to be absurd, human.

It turns out that the dead woman is a non-Jewish Russian, and here Yehoshua begins his undermining. Officials make lavish arrangements to fly her her body to Russia. The factory owner assigns the manager to escort the coffin, with no expenses spared. It is unstinted national decency, seemingly.

Genuinely, too; yet there is the germ of something else. The smitten manager begins to pick it up in his wildly picaresque trek through Russia to the Central Asian village where the victim's mother lives.

The journey in a huge army truck is a chaos of events and characters, among them the manager's volcanic food poisoning at the hands of a market woman, a stay at a nuclear installation turned tourist center, dreams, hallucinations, and a discourse on Plato. Taking up the second half of the book, these are a numbing hullabaloo; yet they have a point, even if not entirely the reader's.

Contrasting radically with the nimble ingenuities of the first section, they serve in fact to shake the manager -- already shaken by the slant-eyed Tatar look of the dead woman's photograph -- out of the barbed, scintillant, and enclosed discourse of his Jerusalem world.

Because on reaching the village he finds an outraged mother. Her daughter had made her life in Israel; why does Israel assume this Tatar corpse has no place there? And how, Yehoshua seems to ask, can his country continue to be a homeland only for Jews?

At the end the manager prepares an outlandish reverse ordeal: to take the body back to Jerusalem, and the mother and grandson as well. ``[It] could benefit a city we've despaired of," he tells his outraged boss by satellite phone. And isn't it their right? ``What right are you talking about?" the boss shouts. ``That, sir, is something we'll figure out."

Possibly.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.