A Woman in Jerusalem (14 page)

The representative of the Immigration Ministry, a woman with flashing eyes and fluent but accented Hebrew, led her visitor to a side room. Since he refused to part with his yellow folder, she had to copy out the deceased’s personal details and
CV. When she did not react to the cleaning woman’s picture, he took the liberty of asking if she thought the woman was beautiful. “Why shouldn’t she have been?” she answered, none too logically, shutting the folder and handing it back to him – a gesture that made him aware of the scent of her perfume. A shiny cell phone appeared in the palm of her hand; into it she relayed his information to her office. “You’ve done your part,” she said to the resource manager. “We’ll locate her family and find out how they want us to proceed.”

The resource manager gripped her hand lightly. “Just a minute,” he said. “My part isn’t over yet. I represent a large company that wishes to be involved in this tragic matter and can afford to be. It’s in our interest. Our public duty requires us to value every employee, even a temporary cleaning woman. We wish to make it clear that we expect to participate with the government in paying our last respects. You see, we’ve been attacked in the press and even accused of
inhumanity
.”

“Inhumanity?” She regarded him curiously. The resource manager, who did not want yet another woman to go unremembered, made a mental note of her delicate features while he briefly summarized the article due to appear. Of course, he left out the night shift supervisor’s infatuation. It was all just a clerical error.

“Perhaps we’re overreacting,” he said. “But in times like these, we have to be strict with ourselves and not just with others.”

He took down the phone and fax number of her office and, most important, the number of her little cell phone, which quickly vanished into her handbag.

The administrative wing was silent when he arrived at his office early that afternoon. His secretary’s coat and handbag were not in her room. A note on his desk said: “The baby
isn’t well. Back tomorrow.” She was lying, he thought. Nothing was wrong with the baby. She was taking her revenge for the keys.

He leafed through the papers on his desk. After all the horror stories he had heard that morning at the National Insurance meeting, the usual personnel problems seemed dull and trivial. Not until he stepped into the corridor to ascertain why everything was so quiet did he remember, on hearing muffled voices behind the owner’s upholstered door, that a conference had been scheduled to discuss a step-up in
production
due to a closure imposed on the Palestinian territories – a measure that invariably meant an increase in the
consumption
of bread, as opposed to more expensive foods. The destruction by the army of several small Palestinian bakeries suspected of harbouring bomb makers had only added to the shortage.

He hesitated before opening the door of the smoke-filled room, where the entire senior staff was gathered around a table set with refreshments – shift supervisors, marketing executives, engineers, transport directors, and several
secretaries
to record the proceedings. Perhaps, he thought, he could slip inside without arousing attention. But the old man noticed him at once.

“Well, well, at last!” he exclaimed. “We need you. Your secretary has disappeared, and I’ve made a botch of calculating the cost of extra help.”

Although the resource manager signalled that he would prefer to sit in a corner, the owner insisted that he be seated next to him, and immediately asked him about the National Insurance meeting. Once informed of the government’s promise to locate the dead woman’s family and arrange for her funeral, he relaxed and returned to the subject of bread.

Conscious of the night shift supervisor’s anguished gaze, the resource manager took a pen and calculator from his pocket and was soon demonstrating his proficiency at estimating the overhead costs of adding new workers, costs that could be kept down by juggling the bakery’s shifts. What more do you
want from me, he addressed the supervisor mentally. Didn’t I refuse to look at that dead woman’s face to avoid the slightest complicity with you? With two sharp pen strokes he crossed out the owner’s provisional and totally unrealistic figures.

After the meeting, he returned to his office to work out a more accurate projection. When he phoned his secretary to check on some data, he was told that she was not at home. In a deep, sleepy voice her older son, who seemed to have only the vaguest recollection of having a baby brother, said he didn’t know where she was.

The light grew dim outside his window as he worked. The dead cleaning woman was forgotten. So were her lingerie, stockings, flowery nightgown, and thin slip that the owner had set out to dry. So were the National Insurance people and the dozen claylike corpses in the morgue on Mount Scopus. All faded into oblivion as he wrestled with the problem of reorganizing the bakery’s three shifts.

Outside, without warning, it began to hail. For a moment he sat there, transfixed by the white pellets striking his desk. Then he slowly rose to shut the window and phoned his ex-wife to make another date with his daughter. She,
however
, claimed not to know where the child was or when she would return. “What do you want from her now?” she asked impatiently. “Your day with her was yesterday. If you had someone substitute for you, that’s your problem, not mine. She and I have plans to spend today and tomorrow together. You can wait for your turn again next week.”

“You’re being vindictive. We had a terrible accident here. I told you. An employee of ours was killed …”

She hung up.

He returned to his calculations, but his concentration had gone. His ex-wife’s success at packing more and more
violence
into her sentences was positively frightening. Taking out the phone numbers he had copied down, he dialled the young lady from the Immigration Ministry. Her cell phone identified him at once.

“You’ll have to be more patient,” she scolded by way of
saying hello. “We’ve only just managed to trace the name of the woman’s former husband, her son’s father. We’re looking for someone at the embassy to track down his address and arrange to have him informed in person. We’ve had bad experiences with phone messages getting lost, so please bear with us.” She hoped that the authorities would know by the end of the day what to do with the body.

“Of course,” he apologized warmly. He dealt with human resources himself and knew these things took time. But that wasn’t why he was calling. There was something important he had forgotten to mention. The woman’s keys were in his possession. He had been given them by the morgue. If anyone at the Immigration Ministry or National Insurance had need of them, he wanted her to know that he had them.

But the Immigration Ministry did not need the woman’s keys. The one urgent matter was deciding where to bury her. Her clothing and personal effects could wait.

“You might try looking for the man who came with her to this country.”

“Her Jewish friend, you mean …”

“Precisely. You’ve done your homework. Friend or lover.”

“Lover?” She had a refreshing laugh. “What could we do with a lover? We need a next-of-kin who’s legally responsible. The only one we know of is her son.”

“Isn’t he a bit young?”

“Young people can participate in decisions, too, you know.”

“You’re right. How could I have forgotten him? Yes, that’s logical. We’ll have to locate him. Just keep me – I mean us – in the picture.”

“Don’t worry. We can use every bit of assistance. You’re in our computer.” Graciously, she ended the conversation.

Today’s world, the resource manager reflected, could be run perfectly well by secretaries, computers, and cell phones. He was about to return to his figures when he was summoned to the owner’s office.

The owner was out, having gone for a medical
examination.
At his computer sat his office manager, composing the company’s response to the weekly. The editor had agreed to display it in a sidebar if it was kept to eighty words.

Looking over her slim, hunched shoulder, the human resources manager read with a sinking heart and eyes blurred with anger.

I
wish
to
thank
the
distinguished
journalist
for
his
shocking
and
instructive
exposé
of
our
company’s
shameful
oversight
regarding
the
death
of
one
of
our
temporary
employees
in
the
recent
market
bombing.
A
thorough
investigation
has
revealed
the
failure
to
be
due
to
administrative
and
human
errors
by
our
personnel
manager.
In
his
name
and
mine,
and
that
of
the
entire
staff,
I
wish
to
apologize
and
express
my
deep
sorrow.
I
have
given
him
instructions
to
cooperate
closely
with
National
Insurance
in
all
arrangements
and
matters
of
compensation
having
to
do
with
the
dead
woman
and
her
family.

He pointed a finger at the screen and counted the words under his breath.

“Ninety-nine,” he said. “Since we’re limited to eighty, I’ll tell you exactly what to do. Delete that unfair, inaccurate, unnecessary sentence that makes me want to scream. Here, this one blaming me for what happened. You’ll be left with exactly the right number of words.”

He ran his finger across the lines on the screen, this time counting out loud.

The office manager turned to look at him. She had a gentleness that set her off from the brash young secretaries.

“But how can I? If there’s an apology with no explanation, we’ll be admitting our inability to locate the source of our error.”

“In that case,” he hissed, “do me a favour and skip the sidebar. You can publish a full response in next week’s edition – an accurate and detailed one. I’ll dictate to you verbatim the full story of an elderly night shift supervisor’s cowardly infatuation with a lonely foreign worker.”

“God, no!” She laid a restraining hand on his arm. Her pale, wrinkled face had the remains of an ancient, forgotten beauty. “We couldn’t possibly say anything so embarrassing.”

“But why accuse me?”

“In the first place, I’m not accusing you.
He
is.”

“Then why is
he
picking on me?”

He
was doing it, said the office manager, because he wanted the resource manager to be his full partner. Hadn’t he promised to make the woman his business? Then let the blame be his business, too. After all, not only was it in his jurisdiction, he was still young – here today and gone tomorrow, if offered a better job elsewhere. Who would remember any of this when he was gone? It wouldn’t harm him to take some of the responsibility. The owner, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere – at least not until the Angel of Death delivered the coup de grâce, as he once put it. His world began and ended in this room, from which he could see the chimneys built by his ancestors. He mustn’t be left with the guilt, especially since he was already so tormented by it.

The resource manager listened attentively. Instead of arguing, he felt his outrage yielding. Although he had known the office manager to be an efficient organizer, he had never imagined her to be capable of an original thought. For a moment his mind dwelt on her tall, jaunty husband, whose eyes twinkled with humour. Was it he, with his rugby-ball head, who was behind all this? What, he asked her, changing the subject, were her husband’s impressions of his daughter?

“He told you. She has too many gaps in her education.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said impatiently. “I’m not talking about maths and trigonometry. I’m talking about her.”

The old office manager smiled awkwardly. How much time, she parried, had they spent with her?

But the resource manager was insistent. “I liked your husband,” he said. “He’s a real person.”

Her lined face lit up with pleasure. She looked down at the desk, choosing her words carefully.

“I think that he … like me … thinks your daughter is a lovely child and far from … unintelligent. It’s just that …”

“What?”

“She seems to give up too quickly, to surrender without a fight …”

“Give up on what?”

“Herself … the world … perhaps you too. It’s
self-destructive
. My husband says you have to fight for her harder, not to despair of her so easily.”

“Despair of her?” The human resources manager was startled. Yet before he could protest, they had slipped past his defences. “I see,” he sighed. “I understand … in fact, I agree. He’s right.”

Anxious to get away from this tactful, truthful woman, he dropped his objections to the response to the local weekly.

In
the
Old
Renaissance,
we
heard
the
jingle
of
his
cell
phone.
If
we
hadn’t
alerted
him
to
it,
he
would
have
missed
an
important
call,
because
he
left
at
once
and
didn’t
return.
That’s
how
it
is
with
our
customers’
cell
phones.
We
bartenders
are
so
used
to
the
deafening
music
the
proprietor
blasts
us
with
that
we
no
longer
hear
it,
so
we
do
hear
the
cell
phones.
Usually
this
particular
customer
(he’s
been
a
regular
these
past
months)
is
so
tied
to
his
phone
that
he
always
puts
it
down
right
next
to
him,
bright
and
shiny,
between
his
beer
and
his
peanuts
while
waiting
for
the
women
to
show
up.
This
time,
though,
he
forgot
to
take
it
from
his
overcoat,
which
we’ve
never
seen
him
wear
before.
Did
he
actually
think
it
was
going
to
snow
just
because
it
was
forecast?