“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 consummation — 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.