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 whomare 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.