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EVA TAKES no notice of any of this preening. She works through her lunch break, tapping away at the keyboard with her right hand, holding her sandwich with her left. You eat lunch at your desk too, just as you have ever since you started working here, and having watched her turn down her fourth invitation to lunch you say to her: “Just tell people you’re a loner. That’s what I did, anyway.”
Eva doesn’t look away from her computer screen and for a moment it seems as if she’s going to ignore you but eventually she says: “Oh… I’m not a loner.”
Fair enough. You return to your own work, the interpretation of data. You make a few phone calls to chase up some missing paperwork. Your company exists to assist other companies with streamlining their workforce for optimum productivity; the part people like you and Eva play in this is attaching cold, hard monetary value to the efforts of individual employees and passing those figures on to someone higher up the chain so that person can decide who should be made redundant. Your senior’s evaluations are more nuanced. They often get to go into offices to observe the employees under consideration, and in their final recommendations they’re permitted to allow for some mysterious quality termed potential. You aim to be promoted to a more senior position soon, because ranking people based purely on yearly income fluctuations is starting to get to you. You’d like a bit more context to the numbers. What happened in employee QM76932’s life between February and May four years ago, why do the figures fall so drastically? The figures improve again and remain steady to date, but is QM76932 really a reliable employee? Whatever calamity befell them, it could recur on a five-year cycle, making them less of a safe bet than somebody else with moderate but more consistent results. But it’s like Susie says, the reason why so many bosses prefer to outsource these evaluations is because context and familiarity cultivate indecision. When Susie gets promoted she’s not going to bother talking about potential. “We hold more power than the consultants who go into the office,” she says. That sounds accurate to you: The portrait you hammer out at your desk is the one that either affirms or refutes profitability. But your seniors get to stretch their legs more and get asked for their opinion, and that’s why you and Susie work so diligently toward promotion.
But lately… lately you’ve been tempted to influence the recommendations that get made. Lately you’ve chosen someone whose figures tell you they’ll almost certainly get sacked and you’ve decided to try to save them, manipulating figures with your heart in your mouth, terrified that the figures will be checked. And they are, but only cursorily; you have a reputation for thoroughness and besides, it would be hard for your boss to think of a reason why you’d do such a thing for a random string of letters and numbers that could signify anybody, anybody at all, probably somebody you’d clash with if you met them. You never find out what happens to the people you assess, so you’re all the more puzzled by what you’re doing. Why can’t you choose some other goal, a goal that at least includes the possibility of knowing whether you reached it or not? Face it; you’re a bit of a weirdo. But whenever you feel you’ve gone too far with your tampering you think of your grandmother and you press on. Grandma is your dark inspiration. Your mother’s mother made it out of a fallen communist state with an unseemly heap of valuables and a strangely blank slate of a memory when it comes to recalling those hair-raising years. But she has such a sharp memory for so many other things — price changes, for instance. Your grandmother is vehement on the topic of survival and skeptical of all claims that it’s possible to choose anything else when the chips are down. The official story is that it was Grandma’s dentistry skills that kept her in funds. But her personality makes it seem more likely that she was a backstabber of monumental proportions. You take great pains to keep your suspicions from her, and she seems to get a kick out of that.
But how terrible you and your family are going to feel if, having thought of her as actively colluding with one of history’s most murderous regimes, some proof emerges that Grandma was an ordinary dentist just like she said. A dentist subject to the kind of windfall that has been known to materialize for honest, well-regarded folk, in this case a scared but determined woman who held on to that windfall with both hands, scared and determined and just a dentist, truly. But she won’t talk about any of it, that’s the thing. Cannot you could all understand, or at least have sincere reverence for. But will not?
Your grandmother’s Catholicism seems rooted in her approval of two saints whose reticence shines through the ages: St. John of Nepomuk, who was famously executed for his insistence on keeping the secrets of the confessional, and St. John Ogilvie, who went to his death after refusing to name those of his acquaintance who shared his faith. In lieu of a crucifix your grandmother wears a locket around her neck, and in that locket is a miniature reproduction of a painting featuring St. John of Nepomuk, some tall-helmeted soldiers, a few horrified bystanders, four angels, and a horse. In the painting the soldiers are pushing St. J of N off the Charles Bridge, but St. J of N isn’t all that bothered, is looking up as if already hearing future confessions and interceding for his tormentors in advance. Boys will be boys, Father, St. J of N’s expression seems to say. The lone horse seems to agree. It’s the sixteenth century, and the angels are there to carry St. John of Nepomuk down to sleep on the riverbed, where his halo of five stars awaits him. This is a scene your grandmother doesn’t often reveal, but sometimes you see her fold a hand around the closed locket and it looks like she’s toying with the idea of tearing it off the chain.
Suspect me if that’s what you want to do.
What’s the point of me saying any more than I’ve said… is it eloquence that makes you people believe things?
You are all morons.
These are the declarations your grandmother makes, and then you and your siblings all say: “No, no, Grandma, what are you talking about, what do you mean, where did you get this idea?” without daring to so much as glance at each other.
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YOU WERE IN NURSERY school when your grandmother unexpectedly singled you out from your siblings and declared you her protégée. At first all that seemed to mean was that she paid for your education. That was good news for your parents, and for your siblings too, since there was more to go around. And your gratitude is real but so is your eternal obligation. Having paid for most of what’s gone into your head during your formative years there’s a sense in which Grandma now owns you. She phones you when entertainment is required and you have to put on formal wear, take your fiddle over to her house, and play peasant dances for her and her chess club friends. When you displease her she takes it out on your mother, and the assumption within the family is that if at any point it becomes impossible for Grandma to live on her own you’ll be her live-in companion. (Was your education really that great?) So when you think of her you think that you might as well do what you can while you can still do it.
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