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.”
12
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:
“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 homework 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?