A Woman in Jerusalem, page 10
2
At first we didn’t notice he was there. When we did, we assumed he must be from the secret service, one of those characters who turn up now and then to scrounge for information, for another intimate detail or two about the dead, not all of whom are always innocent passers-by. We didn’t bother to talk to him. He seemed happy enough in his corner, listening carefully to social workers, pathologists, psychologists, assessors, and municipal clerks, all of whom had something to say about the dead, the injured, and their families. Believe it or not, we still have cases ten or more years old whose files we haven’t been able to close.
Yet after a while our curiosity got the better of us and we asked him who he was and whom he represented. He apologized for crashing our meeting, which he had only done, he said, to reveal to us the identity of a terror victim. He spelled her name and recited her visa number as if it were his own ID.
At first we didn’t realize what this woman had to do with him. Neither her name nor her number meant anything to us. But then someone remembered the unidentified body from the previous week’s bombing, which had since been overshadowed by a subsequent one. We had been certain that this body had been transferred to Central Pathology and that we were no longer responsible for it. Now we learned that it was still in Jerusalem. An article that had appeared, or was about to appear, in a local weekly had led this well-meaning man to make the identification. He repeated the name and visa number.
Naturally, we wondered about him. Was he a relative? A friend? A neighbour? Perhaps a lover? Such people sometimes surface posthumously. We’ve run into all of them before. Yet in this case it was none of the above. To our surprise, the man had not even known the deceased. He was the personnel manager of the Jerusalem bakery in which the victim, an unattached temporary resident, had found work as a cleaning woman. For days no one had noticed she was missing, and the company now wished to make up for the oversight by helping with the funeral arrangements.
The man’s request that we allow the bakery to be of assistance, discreetly and without publicity, was more than welcome; it lightened our otherwise gloomy meeting. We immediately directed him to another room with a representative of the Immigration Ministry, who elicited all he knew about the dead woman and took down his phone number and address for further contact. Later we learned that he was divorced and living with his mother – hardly an earthshaking revelation.
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.
3
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.
4
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?
Anyway, he’s sitting in his corner with two girls, the one who has a smile for everyone and the good-looking junkie the owner can’t get rid of, and an older man, that cultivated fairy who likes to talk to him, when his coat starts making these sounds. It was obvious he didn’t hear it and we yelled, “Hey! Don’t you know your own cell phone?” He jumped up as if bitten by a snake and answered in the nick of time. “Hang on a second, Miss,” we heard him shout, “there’s this awful music here.” He ran outside, then came back after a while and asked for his bill. We haven’t seen him since.
The call had come from the representative of the Ministry of Immigration; she had remembered to keep him in the picture. Despite the late hour, she thought he should know the latest developments. The ex-husband had been informed and was demanding that the woman be buried in her native soil. Although he had neither the time nor desire to arrange for the funeral of someone he no longer cared about, he wanted it done for his son’s sake. He personally didn’t care if they buried his former wife where she had died. Yet since he had had the good sense to get their son out of “that hellhole,” as he scathingly referred to Israel, he felt the boy deserved to have his mother’s grave nearby rather than in a distant and permanently dangerous place.
“That’s the latest,” the efficient immigration ministry representative told him. She had already passed the information on to the National Insurance hotline, along with a request to have the body transferred immediately to Central Pathology, which alone was equipped to prepare it for a long journey. Barring unexpected complications at either end, it should be on its way in forty-eight hours, on a late Friday-night charter flight.
“I see you people know how to get things done.” Shivering from the cold, the human resources manager praised her with professional objectivity. Then, pressing the phone to his ear, he retreated to a side street to hear better and to avoid the curious stares of the pub’s security guard.
“Yes, we do,” the immigration ministry representative replied with a contented sigh, the golden traces of the exotic voice of her childhood accentuated for him the dreams night brings. Alas, she continued, in the past three years her section of the ministry had amassed much experience – although, to tell the truth, it was rare for a body to remain unidentified for so long. It had taken ten days from the time of the bombing to find her next-of-kin. That was far too long. It smacked of chaos and was bad for the country’s image. Now they had to make up for lost time, which was why she must know immediately whether the resource manager and his superiors still wished to be involved, even though the government could finish the job without them. There was a budget for such things and a competent staff, and since nobody in the woman’s country had heard of the bakery or of any blunder on its part, there was no need for compensation or even an apology. If the resource manager and his company wanted to drop out now, no one would think any the worse of them. If they wished to be part of it, however, National Insurance and her ministry were both in favour of that. It was a lot to have to carry the burden of so much bereavement by themselves. She would appreciate an answer by tomorrow, plus a practical proposal if that answer was yes.
