The computer was not outspoken about these things. Its code showed only that the woman had been attached to a cleaning team that moved among the company’s different branches. “In that case,” the manager murmured sadly, “she must have fallen between the branches when she died …”
The secretary, a long-time employee to whom the company owed several improvements (it was she who had changed the name personnel department to human resources division and introduced the computerized scanning of faces), begged to differ. “No one disappears around here,” she told the manager, who was still rather dependent on her. “Every employee, even the lowliest cleaning woman, has someone to make sure they punch in and do their job.”
She was so preoccupied with the administrative and perhaps even moral aspects of the matter that she seemed to have forgotten all about the home she hadn’t wanted to leave, the children waiting for supper, and the raging winter storm. As if the owner’s impugned humanity had infected her too, she was now energetically engaged in her next task, extracting last summer’s job interview from a filing cabinet as unerringly as she had accessed the dead woman on her computer. Stapled to the interview was a brief medical report from the company’s doctor. She punched holes in both, did the same with the article and photographs, attached them all together with a clip, and slipped them into a yellow folder that she handed to the manager as Exhibit A — scant evidence, to be sure, but still a start.
The baby began to bawl. Taking it from the resource manager’s arms, the secretary suggested he might want to peruse the file in his office, or look away at any rate while she attended to her child. It had to be fed; otherwise it would not leave them in peace to determine who was to blame for this mess. Before she had even finished the sentence, the top button of her blouse was open, her breast halfway out.
3
At least we now have a clue to work with, the resource manager thought with satisfaction as he entered his office and cleared his desk to make room for the folder. Although there was no need to linger over the snapshot of this forty-eight-year-old woman, her open face and light eyes gave him pause. An exotic arch, northern European or Asiatic, ran from each eyelid to the nose. The neck, exposed in all its perfection, was long and rounded. For a moment he forgot that she was no longer a living being, that nothing was left of her but a bureaucratic indifference to her fate.
He felt an urge to phone the owner and boast of his swift progress, then thought better of it as a new wave of annoyance swept over him. In his obsession with the public’s image of his humanity, the old man had ridden roughshod over the rights of three employees. Let him stew in the juices of his maligned name a little longer! Why give him the pleasure of thinking that his request had been easy, even enjoyable, to carry out?
He glanced at a page listing the woman’s personal details and turned to her employment form, quailing slightly at the sight of her CV, which had been written not in her own hand, as was customary, but in his. He had evidently recorded her words verbatim, as though taking down a confession.
My name is Ragayev. Yulia Ragayev, mechanical engineer. I have diploma. But I was not born in city, was born in small village. Far away. Far, far from big city. My mother lives in village still. I have son too, big boy now, thirteen years. His father engineer also. I am not longer with him. Good man but we separate. I leave him for other man, good too. More old than him. But not so much. Sixty years. His wife is long time dead and he come to work in our city, in our factory. There we meet. I want much he should come to Jerusalem and he say yes, so we come here, I, him, and boy. But he not find good job for important engineer. He not want stay. Why someone like him just clean street or be guard or something? He go back — not to my city, his. He has daughter and granddaughter there. I, no. I want to stay in Jerusalem. Maybe is good here. Because Jerusalem I like. Is interesting place. If I go back, I never come again. First son is here too, but then father say is too dangerous and he must leave. Okay, I say, he go back. I stay and try Jerusalem. Is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I work for who need me, even though I have engineer’s diploma. What does it matter, maybe my son come back. Is such my situation. Now mother in village want to come to Jerusalem, too. Well, we will see, maybe she come.
The next document was a signed statement by the woman, this time dictated by the human resources manager himself. I, Yulia Ragayev, holder of temporary resident card no. 836205, agree to work at any job I am assigned to, including night shifts.
Beneath this, in large letters, was her signature, followed by his comments:
This woman has temporary residence status. She has no family, looks healthy, and makes a good impression. She seems highly motivated. Although first placement should be in a service job, her professional training may enable her at some point to move to the production line at the bakery or in to the paper-and-stationery division.
Beneath this was a laconic note from the doctor: No special health problems. Cleared for all work.
At the reception desk, the secretary was losing no time. While nursing her baby, she efficiently telephoned instructions for the preparation of supper for her children and husband. Then, launching a private investigation of her own, she briskly asked the day shift supervisor over the intercom whether he was aware that a cleaning woman, one Yulia Ragayev, had been absent from work. Without mentioning the woman’s fate, she asked whether she had resigned or been dismissed and, in either case, why the human resources division hadn’t been informed.
Listening from his desk through the open door, the resource manager picked up the receiver in time to catch the day shift supervisor’s reply. Yes, he had a vague memory of the employee in question and had even noticed she was missing. But it would be better to ask the night shift supervisor, who had been her superior. Irked by the tone of this mere secretary, he advised her to have the resource manager contact the night shift supervisor directly.
The mere secretary, however, was not put off by such short shrift. Politely ending the conversation without ever mentioning the woman’s death, as if that were her trump card, she curtly summoned the resource manager. Outside her regular work hours, so it seemed, she was the one who gave orders.
He stepped out of his office to find the nursing successfully accomplished, its certificate of completion a pungent-smelling nappy. While she watched her baby, pink-cheeked and contented, thrash its legs in benediction, the secretary preened herself on her intuition. “You’ll see,” she said. “Even though we issued that woman another pay packet, she was no longer employed by us at the time of the bombing. You can tell that asshole of a reporter and his charming boss that it’s they who should apologize to us. They can take their ‘shocking in humanity’ and shove it. And while you’re at it, tell your own boss to calm down.” She threw a last glance at the cleaning woman on her screen, and said, “It’s too bad. She was an attractive woman,” then switched off the computer.
“Attractive?” The resource manager frowned and opened the folder for another look at the photograph. “I wouldn’t say that. If she were that good-looking, I’d have remembered her.”
The secretary did not reply at once. Deftly putting on a fresh nappy, she threw the old one in the bin, strapped on the carrier, placed her baby in it, slipped into her big fur coat, and threw on the crackling yellow poncho. The baby vanished from sight. With a sharp glance at the human resources manager, as if seeing him for the first time, she said, “Absolutely. More than good-looking. Beautiful. If you didn’t notice when you hired her, that’s because you live inside yourself like a snail. All you see of beauty or goodness is its shadow … But why argue about someone who’s no longer with us? What will either of us prove? I’d better go with you to the bakery to ask the night shift supervisor how an employee can disappear and no one bother to notify us.”