A Woman in Jerusalem (7 page)

And so, swallowing the last of his no longer hot tea, the supervisor gropingly told his story. The resource manager said nothing. Only once, noticing that the kitchen workers had finished setting the tables for breakfast, did he plead with a hand signal for their patience until the confession, which he did not believe would be long, was complete.

In theory, he should have been right. The man confessing was a mechanically minded fellow who had come to the bakery straight from the Ordnance Corps without continuing his education. Although he could have opened a small business
of his own, he had preferred to take a low-paying job that gave him the opportunity to learn the ropes of the baking trade. From job to job and division to division, he had been promoted steadily until his appointment six years ago to night shift supervisor. This was the busiest and most important of the shifts, the only one that baked for the army, which demanded a high level of quality control …

The lights were going out in the cafeteria. One by one, the workers left for home. Only two, an old Jewish waiter and a young Arab dishwasher, stayed behind to lock up. The
supervisor
, still extracting a first thread from the tangle of his story, was candidly describing the fascination that the swan-necked cleaning woman had had for him. It was this fascination, he now understood, that had allowed him to dismiss her and keep her employed at the same time.

It certainly hadn’t been her looks. As one senior staff member to another, he swore again that nothing had
happened
between them. It was a purely emotional matter, the exact nature of which he seemed reluctant to describe, as if that might make his guilt or sorrow grow. Their first meeting, which had also been their longest, had had to do entirely with work. It had taken place in late autumn or early winter, after the woman had been transferred, at her request, to the
better-paying
night shift.

The supervisor had a strict rule: no matter where new workers came from or what their previous experience had been, he personally briefed them on all safety regulations. And the cleaning crew were briefed the longest, not only because they were generally the least educated and least attentive, but also because they cleaned everywhere and everything. They had to be warned of the dangers of the ovens and the milling blades, the cantankerous dough mixers and the intricate
conveyors.

It was already after midnight when he’d found time for the new recruit. Although she was familiar with the bakery from her job on the day shift, he gave her the entire tour. Had he known she was an engineer, he would undoubtedly have cut
the briefing short; even then he would have insisted on a tour.

The night shift supervisor had many women working under him and was accustomed to setting boundaries that prevented complications. The new cleaning woman, who followed him obediently while listening to his instructions with a bright smile, her smock and cap making her look middle-aged and bulky, had been no exception. And yet he could sense his own reluctance to finish the briefing and send her back to her mops and brooms. This woman, even just her proximity, seemed to promise something he had always known about but never dreamed of for himself. He had lectured her on the bakery’s strict hygienic standards, as he guided her through the dark, hidden corners behind the ovens (which as a rule he didn’t do), and all the while he had felt a twinge of sweetness at the sight of her smile, which somehow, after it left her lips, continued to shine in her unusual Tartar, or perhaps Mongol, eyes.

“Tartar or Mongol?” The human resources manager thought this was overstating it. The tilt of her eyes, which he recalled from the computer image, was actually quite delicate and subtle.

But the supervisor, though he had never known a Tartar or a Mongol, repeated the comparison. He was now working his way deeper into his confession. What captivated him most had not been the woman’s smile or even her charm, but the contradictions of a fair-complexioned Asiatic, with whom he had suddenly fallen – passively and with no hope of
con
summation
– in love.

The waiter, who had been waiting impatiently with his coat and boots on, came to bid them good night while assuring them that they could stay as long as they wished, since the dishwasher had decided to sleep in the cafeteria and would make them coffee to get them through the rest of the night.

“The night?” Once again the human resources manager was having whole nights thrust on him. “We don’t need it. We’re almost finished …”

And yet, like the resource manager’s secretary – who after
resisting returning to the office had plunged into the case to the detriment of her home and family – the supervisor had apparently forgotten all about his shift and even about the screeching oven. What had happened to him, he wanted his younger colleague to understand, had been complicated, even dangerous. The Tartar woman had got under his skin …

Worse than that. Even had he sought to stamp out the flames by returning quickly to the work floor, his own employees – the technicians, the storeroom chiefs, the bakers – would have prevented it. Over the years they had learned to respect not only his wishes but his feelings, and they now conveyed to him that they were well aware of his inner state. Refraining from badgering him with the usual pressing matters, they had let him take his time with the smiling woman who walked, gently nodding, past their assembly lines. Their unspoken complicity surprised him. All he could imagine was that they desired to assist him – a sombre, domesticated man with three grandchildren – to live out a kind of infatuation that he had no longer deemed himself capable of.

The next morning, in the quiet of his bedroom, at an hour generally devoted to sleep, he had awakened with a delicious discomfort and anxious thoughts about the night ahead and his second encounter with the new employee now under his wing.

He was talking unprompted now, encouraged by the silence of the human resources manager, who realized that this story, which had seemed simple enough that afternoon in the old owner’s office, was getting more involved as the night wore on. Not even the aromatic Turkish coffee brought by the Arab dishwasher could hasten its denouement. Indeed, it only prolonged it.

On the whole, the supervisor continued, he had no direct dealings with the cleaning staff, whose requests and complaints were handled by the floor foremen. In the bakery’s open work space, constantly crossed by dozens of employees, there was no way to exchange even a few words with the new
woman without being immediately noticed. The knowledge that he was being watched disconcerted him. Yet it was flattering that his workers cared for him not only as their superior but also as a person in his own right, however grey and ordinary. Although at first he’d thought their concern merely served as a distraction from the tedium of work, he soon realized that they hoped his falling in love would soften his hard edges, which they had learned to fear.

The resource manager stole a glance at his watch. Although the fine-featured man in the stained work garb was baring his soul with an unnecessary thoroughness, the death he was leading up to made it inadvisable to interrupt him. It still remained to be seen where the slip-up – the unterminating termination of employment – had occurred …

The thought, real or imaginary, that the entire night shift wished him to be in love had only made the supervisor’s position even more difficult, more untenable. He knew well that his attraction to the new worker, even if its painful intensity remained unexpressed, might end tragically.

“Tragically?” The resource manager was troubled by so fraught a word. What exactly did the mechanically minded supervisor, the former Ordnance Corps soldier, mean by it?

By the second night, the supervisor went on, he was aware that he could locate the new woman by a single glance at the dozens of workers around him. And the more he tried to conceal it, the more he kept track of her movements with a second, inward glance, physical and incorporeal at once, even when he was inside an oven or bent over a mixer. He demanded nothing of her – only to know that her bright smile, which kept renewing itself for no reason as she scrubbed the burned crusts of dough from the day shift’s bread pans, was still there.

Yet this, too, did not escape those workers who knew him best and cared the most for him. Nonchalantly, casually, in the early hours of the morning, when the minds of night shift workers sometimes wander, they let slip details about her. Despite her vivaciousness and charm, she was a lonely
woman. An elderly friend had accompanied her to Israel; then, however, disappointed at not having found a decent job, he had returned to Russia, as had her only child, an adolescent boy whose father, her ex-husband, did not want him living in a dangerous city. She alone, for some reason, had insisted on staying, which made it necessary for her to look for a new male protector …

The resource manager was momentarily tempted to tell the supervisor that all this information existed in his own
handwriting
in the dead woman’s file. It was unfortunate, he thought, that someone of the supervisor’s standing was forced to depend on work floor gossip, when he could consult the file of any worker on his shift.

Or could he? Glad he had said nothing, the resource manager made a note to ask his secretary or, better still, the old owner – who was by now enjoying the opening bars of the concert and had no idea with what determination his staff was defending his humanity …

And that, the supervisor said, the words now tumbling out of him, was what he had been waiting for. Her radiant solitude made him want to protect it. He wasn’t looking for a love affair. He was too old for that, besides being too busy and set in his ways. All he asked for was the right to serve as the new worker’s invisible custodian until she could stand on her own two feet. His children were independent and no longer needed him, and his quick glances at the Russian cleaning woman told him that, as cheerful as she tried to be, life was hard for her in the depths of the night. She never joined the other workers. Leaning on her broomstick with her head on her hands, she would stand exhausted in a corner, her eternal smile playing on her lips. How pure it was, precisely because it was meant for no one! How she needed protection, and how easily he could give it to her!

It was dangerous. Of course it was. Who would guard its boundaries? Certainly not the workers on his shift, who wanted his heart to melt with a new emotion. And how did he know she wouldn’t be overwhelmed? Would she be
content with what he could give her and understand what he could not? It had been obvious to him from the start – unless this was just wishful thinking – that he appealed to her, although he was no longer young. She was always sweeping the floor in his vicinity, wiping the oil from machines he was working on, cleaning up after him in the men’s room, tasks that were hardly required of her.

He was experienced enough to know that the night could entrap even its oldest denizens, especially in the hours before dawn, when the most nocturnal souls were prone to foolish lapses of concentration that could cause accidents and
sometimes
disasters. This was why, half joking and half seriously, he urged workers he encountered at that hour to take a cold drink from the fountain, splash water on their faces, or just step outside for a breath of air. It was perfectly natural for him to do this with the new employee too. Sometimes they exchanged a few words that pierced him to the quick. He tried to hide it by chatting with the other workers just as much, especially the cleaning staff.

By now he knew she sensed what was happening. It pleased her that he acted his age and was discreet, even that he had a family and grandchildren, because she wasn’t looking for a new husband or boyfriend. She was resigned to the loss of both. Nor did she need another son. All she wanted, plain and simple, was a patron, someone quiet and sympathetic, and to such a man she was quite ready to grant physical favours without jeopardizing the labour of his life.

Nevertheless, since she turned up in the night shift this smiling, lonely engineer, or whatever she was, had become more dangerous than any woman who had ever worked for him, since her loneliness was an invitation not only to having fantasies but also to acting them out. Aware of how he, a man on the verge of retirement, was being encouraged to live out an impossible dream, one that was given greater legitimacy only by the desperate times the country was going through, he’d decided to dismiss the woman, but without running the risk of someone else taking her place. He’d persuaded her to
leave her job and look for a better one but had kept her on the payroll, so that if she failed to find anything, or if he missed her too much, she could always return …

“In short” – the human resources manager broke his long silence with a single laconic sentence that contrasted starkly with the supervisor’s emotional outpouring – “you thought you could make your own rules.”

Although the two men who rose from the table had taken longer than they’d expected, they had barely made a dent in the night. The resource manager, unaware that he, too, still had a night shift ahead of him, offered the dishwasher a ride to the bus station. The young Arab, however, was happy to have the cafeteria to himself. He preferred to get a good night’s sleep there without having to worry about the three
humiliating
checkpoints he had to pass through on the way back from his village every day.

The resource manager turned to go. Satisfied at having solved the case, he was eager to get home. Yet when the supervisor, raising the collar of his army jacket, followed him to the parking lot, he understood that the man still needed to talk. He had no choice but to say, after unlocking his car and cleaning the wet leaves from the windscreen:

“I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry to relieve my secretary. She’s looking after my daughter this evening.”

The night shift supervisor, who had never imagined that so many staff members would have to be mobilized because of his falling in love, asked in distress: