A. Yehoshua: A Woman in Jerusalem

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.”

He regarded her affectionately, pleased with her down-to-earthness. Taking his windcheater from the hanger, he put it on and had already turned out the light when it occurred to him to ask if there was anything cold in the fridge.

“You want a cold drink now ?” She opened the little refrigerator, in which there was nothing but a carton of long-life milk for coffee.

There wasn’t any choice. Fighting back nausea, he slowly sipped the cold liquid.

4

Whereas an hour ago she had argued and pleaded against having to return to the office, now, wrapped in her winter gear, with a satisfied baby snuggled close to her, she was in high spirits as she trotted beside him along the paved path leading from the administration building to the huge, windowless bakery with its pencil-thin chimneys. From the overhang of the handsome tiled roof cascaded not one storm but many, each more torrential than the last. It was as if the earth, having lost all hope of emptying the sky in a single downpour, was draining it in stages.

The human resources manager was thinking of the office manager, now parenting his daughter. He felt confident that she would be at the dance studio on time to keep her ward from taking a perilous bus home; nowadays, you couldn’t trust even the rain to deter a would-be bomber who had said his farewell prayers and set out to kill and be killed. How curious, he reflected, moved by the thought, that a foreign cleaning woman remembered by no one could cause a wave of solidarity among the company’s employees. In a gesture he was generally careful to avoid, he laid a friendly hand on his secretary’s shoulder while shouting above the wind:

“I tell you, you’ll smother that baby yet!”

“Not on your life!” the secretary shouted back with full assurance, wiping raindrops from her face. “I can feel his every breath. Right now he’s sending you his warmest regards.”

Meanwhile, as dusk fell in that rain squall, our entire night shift arrived. There were ninety of us, men and women: silo workers, millers, flour sifters, dough kneaders, lab technicians with their yeast and additives. The technicians roamed the large work spaces, checking the dials that monitored the baking cycle in the hugeovens — great sealed steel compartments beside which stood the production crews, supervising the golden loaves to make sure they stayed on their conveyor belts. And there were also the collectors, the sorters, and the packers of the products that the assembly line spewed out: whole and sliced loaves, pitas, bagels, rolls, challahs,flatbreads,croutons, bread crumbs. Ina shedoutside, the forkliftoperators were noisily joined by the lorry drivers, who would transport the goods all over the country. The late-to-arrive cleaning crews were also pressed into action, dressed like the rest of us in white smocks and net caps that would keep the least strand of hair from getting into the circulating dough. Swinging their buckets and dragging their brooms, they scrubbed the burned crusts from the day shift’s baking pans while sneaking a glance at the wall clock to make sure that Time was alive and well and would not desert them before the night was over.

It was then that we saw the two dripping wet people from personnel — a sturdy man and a stout woman in a black furcoatand a yellow poncho. Before they could say a word we stopped them at the entrance and made them put on caps.

The human resources manager donned the cap willingly and drifted towards the warmth of the steel ovens in the middle of the work floor. Through his old job he knew the paper-and-stationery branch across the street very well and preferred to meet with its workers on the premises; the employees of the bakery, on the other hand, he generally received in his office when they came to ask for a pay increase or discuss some problem. Now, as he faced the bakery’s many ovens with their long, mysterious cycles that churned out endless crates of breads and rolls, he was reminded of those times he was dispatched as a child by his mother to make some purchase in the local grocery.

Nevertheless, on this rainy evening he felt grateful for the fragrant warmth that greeted him at the end of this long workday, ahead of which stretched a dizzying night. His anger at his ex-wife and feelings of guilt towards his daughter were muted by the familiar sight of the dough rolling by at eye level on its way to the sorting and leavening stations and from there to the hidden fires. While pleasurably taking in the bakery’s sounds, smells, and sights — as though he had a share in his secretary’s lusty baby — he proudly watched its golden head emerge from the depths of her fur coat. Some workers, their curiosity piqued by the unexpected visit, hurried to get the night shift supervisor, while the secretary warned him in a stern whisper not to mention the death that had brought them here. It, too, she seemed to think, was small enough to be hidden beneath a coat.

The supervisor, a tall, lanky, swarthy man of about sixty appeared quickly. Besides his smock and cap, he had on a blue technician’s apron. There was apprehension in his fine-featured, sensitive face. A sudden visit from the personnel division at this time of day couldn’t possibly bode well.

“Does a cleaning woman named Yulia Ragayev still work here?” the secretary asked, hurrying to pose the question before the resource manager could ignore her warning and blurt out that the woman had been murdered, thus putting the supervisor on his guard. “She’s been missing from our roster for a month.”

The supervisor reddened. He seemed to sense a trap, though he could hardly guess that death was lurking in it. With a worried glance at the cleaning crew crowding around him, he signalled them to disperse. Though they took a few backward steps, like sleepwalking bears, they continued to surround him, intrigued by the situation and the mysterious baby.

“Ragayev?” The lanky man spread his hands and regarded them as if the missing worker might have been hiding there. “Actually … no. Yulia left a while ago.”

The intimacy with which he uttered the dead woman’s first name gave the human resources manager a start. The secretary persisted, stubborn as an attack dog. Left? How? Of her own accord? Orwas she laidoff? Andif so,why?Forwhat infraction? Who replaced her? None of the human resources division’s records showed a decrease in the number of cleaning personnel — and in any case, begging the night shift supervisor’s pardon, a long-serving employee like him should know that any change in the work force had to be reported and approved. This was necessary to avoid confusion and damage.

“Damage?” The swarthy man scoffed. “What damage can a temporary cleaning woman’s departure do?”

The resource manager, unprepared for the secretary’s cross-examination, was waiting to see when she would reveal that the woman had died. She was taking her time about it. She gave the supervisor, towards whom she appeared to have developed a strange antagonism, a suspicious look, as if he were her prime suspect.