A Woman in Jerusalem (8 page)

“So now
she
has to know everything, too?”

“No,” the resource manager said. “She doesn’t and she won’t. And I’ll see to it that
he
won’t, either.” As if the old man were floating in the sky, he pointed to the spark-flecked smoke rising from the bakery’s chimneys. “Your story stays with me – with the personnel division, or the human resources division, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Well,” murmured the supervisor, reluctant to part with his confessor, now a partner in his love, “if you need anyone … I mean to identify the corpse … I’m always available … that is, if there’s no one else …”

The resource manager felt a slight wave of revulsion. No, he did not need anyone. The case was closed. So was the option of responding in the local weekly. “The less we dwell on this story, the better. Our biggest mistake would be to make it bigger than it is.”

Arriving at his former home, he was surprised to find it so warm and brightly lit. A fresh smell of wet umbrellas and coats filled the hallway. The living room smelled of pizza. The apartment, which had been a grim place through the past year, now had an air of merry practicality. His twelve-year-old daughter sat on a pillow in a chair at the head of the large dining table, flushed and wide awake. Scattered on the table among slices of pizza, knishes, empty bottles, and coffee cups were textbooks and notebooks, a ruler, and a compass. The office manager had been as good as her word – twice as good, in fact, since her husband, whose long, flattened bald head resembled a rugby ball, was sitting beside her happily solving maths problems.

“Back so soon?” his daughter asked, with a hint of
disappointment
even though she was happy to see him. “We still have lots of
home
work to do.”

For the first time since his summons to the owner’s office that afternoon, he let out a laugh. “You can see which of us has the real talent for human resources,” he told the office manager. “I’m sorry I’m late. The night shift supervisor wouldn’t stop talking.”

But the office manager was so thoroughly enjoying her new role that she was prepared to continue it. If the resource manager needed more time, she said, or wished to get to work on his response to the weekly, she and her husband were prepared to stay and help his daughter finish her
homework
.

“More time again!” he grumbled. “The night is over. The
case is closed. Everything is clear now. I’m just too tired to explain it all.”

“Of course,” the office manager agreed, slightly miffed. She would wait until the morning, when she would in any case have to type the response. Her husband was now solving the last maths problem, after which she would check the English vocabulary assignment. In the meantime, the resource manager might as well sit down and warm up. He looked cold and must be starving. There was food on the table and she would make him a hot drink. Why not be a guest in his own home?

“My ex-home,” he replied with a bitter smile. Slipping out of his wet coat, he removed his damp shoes and switched on the solar heater’s electrical backup for some extra hot water.

It had been agreed that in his ex-wife’s absence he would spend the nights here with his daughter rather than have her come to his mother’s, where he was staying until his newly rented apartment became available. Naturally, he didn’t use the double bed he had been banished from; he slept on the living room couch. Two shelves in the bathroom were reserved for his toilet articles and pyjamas, with additional space for underwear, a fresh shirt, and a pair of clean trousers.

He passed his wife’s darkened bedroom, which not long ago had also been his. Shutting its half-open door against the ever present temptation to peek, he locked himself in the gleaming bathroom. He had presided over its renovation just a year ago, choosing the tiles and taps and ingeniously relocating the sink and toilet, without dreaming how soon he would be brutally expelled. Yet he still regarded this room as his own. Uncertain how quickly the electricity would do the job of the sun that had hidden all day long, he took off his rumpled clothes and sat naked on the edge of the tub to test the warmth of the water.

He was still thinking about the night shift supervisor’s
confession.
He would have to decide how much to tell the old man and how much to suppress out of respect for that clandestine and abruptly ended infatuation. It saddened him that he would never meet the woman whose identity he had
deciphered. A quick glance from afar was all he would have needed to get a sense of her. Like all of the company’s employees – even the old man himself, who drew a monthly pay packet in addition to his dividends – she had been the responsibility of his division. What had gone through her head when she realized that although she had lost her job she was still being paid for it? Had she assumed it was the supervisor’s continued declaration of love for her, or did she take it to be a clerical error that she could not afford to correct?

I’ll
never
know
…

And
yet
what
does
it
matter?

I’ve
already
wasted
enough
energy
on
this
mess.

It’s
time
to
call
it
a
day.

The water flowing from the tap showed no sign of warming up, evidence of how little sunshine there had been that day and how slim the hope for a hot shower was. He sat shivering on the edge of the tub, naked in his former home, while the two substitute parents gave a last flurry of attention to his daughter, who was being worn down by the growing tensions between him and his ex-wife. As far as he was concerned, he thought, switching on the electric heater while gently
massaging
his body, they could help her with her homework as much as they liked. Perhaps before going to sleep he would find a quiet time to tell her about his evening. Hearing about the pretty woman with the smile who had spent a week in the morgue as a nameless corpse might make her realize that there were other people to feel sorry for besides herself.

There was a sharp knock on the bathroom door, followed by his daughter’s strained voice:

“Abba, if you haven’t showered yet, don’t! Ima just called to say she’s coming home because of what you got yourself into. You have to let her have her parking place. So please, Abba, if you haven’t begun to shower, there’s no time …”

He knew how she suffered from the savage rift between her parents and did not wish to make things worse for her – and so, overcoming his repugnance at having to get back into his dirty clothes, he turned off the tap and rejoined the office
manager and her husband. They were already in their
overcoats
, holding their folded umbrellas. A khaki stocking cap, the kind worn in simpler times by Israeli soldiers, was pulled jauntily down over the husband’s rugby-ball head. Here was a couple who felt good about themselves and about their contribution to the world.

“You didn’t have to say goodbye,” the office manager said. “You’ll see me in the morning.”

“But not your husband,” he replied. He shook the hand of this jaunty man, who whispered a gentle scolding:

“You should have more patience with her maths. She has too many gaps in her education.”

The human resources manager reddened and laid a hand on his heart. Then, slipping into his windcheater, he
accompanied
the two to the street. When, he asked the office manager, did she think the concert would be over?

“You don’t intend to call him tonight!”

“Why not? After all the fuss he’s made, he deserves some kind of report.”

“And you’ve really cleared everything up?”

“I think so.”

She regarded him sympathetically. “In that case, you can call until midnight. Don’t worry if he sounds half asleep. He dozes off and wakes up all the time. He’ll sleep better tonight if you calm him.”

“I’m not sure I will,” said the resource manager. He parted from them warmly, as if they were newly discovered relatives; moved his car from the building’s parking lot to the far pavement; and returned to the apartment, where he devoured the remains of the pizza and told his daughter the story of the cleaning woman. He even showed her the woman’s
photograph
in the folder, curious to see how it struck her. Yet she did not seem to have an opinion or even to be listening. Gripping his arm, she pleaded:

“Abba! Ima will be here any minute. You’re both tired. Why fight again now?”

“Who says we’re going to fight?”

She bit her lip and said nothing, while he stroked her curly head to still her fears. In his heart, he cursed the old owner for spoiling their evening. Slipping back into his damp
windcheater
, he borrowed an umbrella and went out into the rain. Standing in the dark entrance of the house next door, he waited to make sure that his wife arrived.

The rain was now a fine drizzle. You couldn’t tell whether it was falling or rising, or whether the strange red glow in the sky, appearing behind a large antenna, was natural or
man-made.
Shivering from cold and fatigue, he stood waiting patiently for the large car that was still registered in his name to swing into the street and pull violently into the vacated parking space. Its driver, apparently unconvinced that the man she hated had departed, left the headlights beaming and stepped out to glance at the apartment, as if to judge from the glow in the windows, or perhaps some other sign, whether he was still there. They hadn’t met face-to-face for weeks. From her silhouette he could tell that despite the weather she was wearing high heels. No doubt she had on an elegant dress beneath her winter coat. And yet, he thought sadly, finding a new man wasn’t easy for her. Whoever she had gone out of town to meet that day must have left her feeling disappointed.

Well, that wasn’t his problem.

He needn’t feel guilt for her bottomless anger.

Or for her sexual frustration …

Assured at last that he had left, she switched off the car lights and took out a small suitcase. Then, before pressing the remote control, she glanced up once more.

Even though there were only a few metres between them, she did not notice him standing in the darkness. Yet had she sniffed a familiar scent? Whatever it was, she suddenly stopped and looked suspiciously around before hurrying up the stairs.

Although it was only nine o’clock, the human resources manager assumed that his mother, who was not expecting him
that night, would already have gone to bed. He had noticed that she was sleeping a great deal lately, and since she claimed that her first hours of sleep were her best, he was determined to enter quietly and not disturb her. He had forgotten, however, that in his absence she always put the chain on the door. Locked out, he had to call her on his cell phone and explain what he was doing there.

She was in no hurry to let him in. As if he were a lodger rather than her only son, she slowly put on a robe and paused to comb her hair before unchaining the door with painstaking reluctance. He had turned her apartment into a transit camp, burdening her not only with his clutter but also with his divorce, which she had done all she could to prevent. For the first time since his childhood, she did not look at him when they spoke.

Now she took his unexpected arrival as evidence that he had caused yet another family mishap. Instead of helping to put his supper on the table, she went to her bedroom, gathered the still-warm sections of the day’s newspaper from her sheets and blankets, dumped them on the kitchen table for him, and excused herself to return to her interrupted sleep.

He felt almost insulted. What was the hurry? he asked. The night was young. And he had a story to tell her, something from the office that he wanted to discuss, something on which he would like to have her opinion.

She had no choice but to listen to the tale about the cleaning woman, whose death in the latest bombing had led to a vicious article being scheduled in the local weekly where his photograph was to appear as well as mention of his divorce. It couldn’t be stopped. That’s what the press was like these days: it always went for the jugular. And yet, he said with a smile, proudly relating his discovery of the supervisor’s strange infatuation, he had already managed to get to the bottom of it. Placing the folder on the table, he showed his mother the picture and asked whether she, too, found the woman alluring or attractive.

She listened to him absentmindedly, her eyes on the table, as if doubting whether anything in his account could possibly justify the loss of her beauty sleep. Nor did she want to look at the picture. “What difference does it make?” she asked crossly.

“But it does!” There had been an emotional entanglement. Why not try to understand whether it had to do with real beauty or the mere illusion of it? He himself, for example, though he had interviewed the woman for her job, had not been impressed.

“You interviewed her?”

“Of course. Every new employee has to be vetted by the human resources division.”

“But if you weren’t impressed by her, what does my opinion matter?”

“I didn’t say it did. I’m just curious. Why are you so stubborn? How much trouble is it to look at a photograph?”

His mother made no reply. Her divorced son’s fascination with the picture of a dead woman struck her as unnecessarily morbid. Since it seemed important to him, however, she asked him to fetch her glasses and cigarettes and cautiously opened the folder. She first read the newspaper article, then turned to the résumé in her son’s handwriting, passed from that to the computer printout, and glanced briefly at the face of the blonde woman. She lit a cigarette, inhaled, and asked how old the woman had been.

“I can tell you exactly. Forty-eight.”

“Have you told the morgue what you know?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Right now it’s for internal use. We have to decide how to formulate our response. Until we do I’m keeping it under wraps.”