Safekeeping (12 page)

She brought a hand to her forehead, looking dizzy. He hoped she wasn't going to faint again.

He stammered, “Eyal . . . said it would be okay.”

“Well, it's not
okay
. I'm working on something.”

He could hear the German accent now. He hadn't heard it outside the dining hall. He loved that accent. Some people might think of Nazis when they heard it, but he thought of Zayde and the other old people from their building.

“It'll only take five minutes, tops. I've been waiting three days to talk to you.”

She took a deep breath. “And then you promise you'll go away?”

Go away? Eyal wasn't kidding: his mother was rude.

“Yes, ma'am. And then I promise to go away.”

Ziva stepped back, allowing him inside. As soon as he was through the door, she turned and left, mumbling something about tea.

Adam edged into the room, hands clasped, feeling ill at ease. The place had little in the way of furnishings beyond the shabby green couch and chair, which were of the uncushiony variety found in waiting rooms. The walls were bare except for the yellowed banner that presumably said the same thing in Hebrew as it did in English:
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE
! Aside from the well-used writing pad on the coffee table and the two picture frames on the wooden sideboard, the tabletops were clear, void of coasters, remote controls, magazines, bowls of candy.

It was so quiet. No sound of the old lady fussing in the kitchen. He wandered over to the old black-and-white portraits. One showed a smiling woman, thirty years old or so, with a storm of curly dark hair. She wasn't pretty exactly, but she had presence. She stood in short shorts—who knew people wore them so short back then?—meaty legs apart, one hand on one hip, the other grasping the rifle strap crossing her chest. Despite the youth, the smile, the vigor, Adam recognized this was the old lady. It was the eyes that gave it away, peering into the camera with confidence, excitement, like she had just dared the photographer to do something. The very handsome man in the other picture stared off to the side, as was the fashion for portraits. A thin blond mustache traced a firm mouth, but his clear, light eyes were kind. This handsome man had probably been Ziva's husband, Eyal's father. He'd never seen a picture of Zayde young. Not one. He wondered what he and Dagmar had looked like at this age.

“All right, tell me why you're here.”

Adam spun around. The old woman had returned without any tea. Had she gone into the kitchen and then forgotten why?

He gestured toward the armchair. “May I?”

“If you must.” The old woman perched on the far end of the couch. “You said this would be quick.”

Adam lowered into the chair, crossed his legs, then uncrossed them. This old woman really put him on edge. “I'm trying to find someone who used to live on the kibbutz. Someone named Dagmar.”

Her gaze dropped from him to the ground. At first she seemed to be struggling to remember, but then her eyes became glassy. She offered no information. Had she forgotten what he asked her?

Adam tried to sound natural, as if he weren't feeding her the question again. “Do you know what happened to Dagmar? Where I might find her now?”

She raised her head, peered sideways at him. “Why are you asking me?”

“Because I know she lived here in 1947, and you've been on the kibbutz longer than anyone.”

“I'm not sure that I . . . remember a Dagmar.” She straightened the work shirt over her strange, pregnant-like belly. “May I ask why you're looking for her?”

For the last three days, Adam had been counting on this old woman remembering Dagmar. He should've known when he saw her blank out
onstage that she might prove less than helpful. It wasn't fair to be frustrated with her—it wasn't her fault her mind was going—but frustrated he was. And what was he supposed to tell her? That he came all the way to Israel to give this Dagmar, his grandfather's long-lost love, their precious family heirloom? That made him sound like a saint, the very opposite of what he was. He answered through his teeth. “That's between me and Dagmar.”

The old woman glared at him, and he regretted snapping at her. He softened his voice. “Dagmar was my grandfather's girlfriend. Or whatever you called girlfriends back then, after the war. Maybe you said ‘sweetheart'? You might remember my grandfather, a Holocaust refugee. Franz Rosenberg?”

The old woman, eyes still beholding him with distrust, slowly shook her head.

He hated to push her, but he had hoped her face would light up at his grandfather's name, that she would have stories for him. “I know we're talking fifty years ago, but you must remember him. He was on the kibbutz for three whole years. Until 1947, when he moved to New York.”

She said the name slowly, as if trying it on: “Franz Rosenberg.”

Was it coming back to her? Adam sat forward. “He probably looked a lot like me. Thick black hair, dark eyes. Taller though. A real dapper guy. Always wearing a fedora, a straw one in summer, felt in the winter. I guess I can't say for sure that he wore one here, but in New York, always. Oh, and he worked in the cotton field. Said I wouldn't believe the way cotton grew on bushes, looking just like it did in the bags at the pharmacy. That always sounded very, I don't know, magical to me, cotton balls growing on a bush.”

“He told you about the cotton fields?” Wearing a sad smile, the old woman's eyes gazed over his head, as if at the long-gone field.

“Yeah, a few times. Eyal said the field's gone, that there's a plastics factory there now.”

“Your grandfather, does he like it in New York City? I'm only asking because . . . New York City, cotton fields, they're very different.”

“He's dead.”

“Oh.”

“Died a month ago. I guess he liked New York. I mean, I can't picture him living anywhere else. It suited him.”

“I'm so sorry . . .” She did look sorry, the corners of her lips pulling down. Sorrier than he would have expected for someone she didn't remember.
Was it just depressing to have everyone your age dying around you? He hoped Dagmar wasn't dead.

“So, Dagmar. That name really doesn't ring a bell?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No. We've never had anyone named Dagmar on this kibbutz.”

Adam wanted to ask how she could be so sure when she couldn't remember his grandfather, and he had definitely been here. “Well, if you remember her, please let me know. I work in the dishwash—”

“I won't suddenly remember her. There's nothing wrong with my memory. I have a perfect memory.”

Adam insisted as gently as he could. “I don't mean to say there's anything wrong with your memory, but . . . there was a woman named Dagmar on this kibbutz. And she wasn't here temporarily as a Holocaust refugee. She was a kibbutznik. I know this for a fact.”

The old woman bared her lower teeth. “Do you know how rude you're being, young man? And how ridiculous? Flying in here from New York City and telling me who was on my kibbutz thirty years before you were even born?”

He had hurt the old woman, and he was sorry, but the joke of
her
calling him rude!

“Thanks for your time.” He stood. “And now, as promised, I'll go away.”

He headed for the door, thinking there were still the archives. He'd call that Barry guy right now. He probably wasn't back from reserve duty, but he'd leave a message so that when he did come home, no time would be wasted.

The old woman hobbled beside him. “I am sorry, though, to hear about your grandfather. I hope he wasn't in too much pain in the end?”

Oh, he was in pain.

“No, he wasn't. He had a heart attack. Happened”—Adam snapped—“just like that.”

Adam opened the door and found night had fallen, the lollipop lamps glowing. He walked away from the old woman's apartment with that pain in his breastbone again. How did disappointment, dread, regret, sadness, feelings that had no physical existence, press against the back of the breastbone like that, as if they were as real as tumors? He took a deep breath, but the air felt low on oxygen.

An eerie green light shone out of the bomb shelter. He slinked up to the open door and peeked down. At the bottom, above the second steel door, the safety lights had green bulbs, making the concrete stairwell glow.

The door opened and out came a young woman, as well as a thumping techno base and a walloping smell, the smell of trouble and intoxication and sweet numbing relief. The smell of the only thing in the world that could—in seconds—get those feelings to back off of his breastbone. The girl waved at Adam and stood on her toes to hook the door open to the wall.

Adam stepped back and raised his head to the sign above the bomb-shelter door. Three black letters on a blond piece of wood. He summoned what little he could remember from his bar mitzvah to sound them out: pei, aleph, bet. Pe . . . ah . . . bbb.

P-U-B.

Two guys in their twenties passed him on their way down the green-glowing hatch. They could. It was no big deal for them. This was probably where Ulya went every night. A bomb shelter—could there be a more perfect place to get wasted? Underground. Windowless. Shielded from the world. But he couldn't go down there, not even just to see the place. Tomorrow he'd have six days clean. Almost a week. How many chips for one week “Clean & Serene” were in his desk drawer back home? Fifteen? More.

The first time he got drunk was Passover 1980, a few months before his bar mitzvah. They didn't normally have a Seder, but Mrs. Silver moaned about being alone again for the holiday, and Zayde invited her to do it with them. Mrs. Silver was one of the few who hadn't fled the city for New Jersey over the last couple of years, who had stayed in the building and, like Zayde, bought her apartment for a song.

“Why couldn't you go to California for the holiday?” Adam had asked as they took their seats at the kitchen table. They almost never had someone in the third chair. Living up to her name, the old woman had silver disks pinned to her ears and silvery roots that betrayed her dyed black bob.

“I don't fly. My son knows that.”

Zayde read from the English side of the Haggadah in his German accent: “Blessed are you, Eternal One our God, who gave us life, and kept us strong, and brought us to this time.”

Adam sat with his elbows on the table, head propped in his hands. Other kids shared a Seder table with not only a grandfather and some old
lady from their building, but a mother and father and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins. Why had they no family? And what was going to happen in a few years? The old man wasn't going to live forever.

Zayde lifted his glass. “The first cup.”

Adam raised his eyebrows at Zayde, making sure he was really supposed to drink.

“You don't need to drink it all. Drink a quarter.”

Bringing the glass to his face, Adam got a waft of his mother, in bed, at night, making him feel guilty, because he never remembered her without also remembering how little he had mourned her. What eight-year-old didn't care that his mother had died? Before he'd even finished the quarter of a glass, a wonderful warmth was blooming in his stomach. It was that immediate.

The Seder continued—breaking the matzah, parsley dipped in metaphorical tears, talk of slavery, freedom. By the time Zayde invited them to drink the fourth glass, Adam couldn't understand why he had been so unhappy with this Seder. He brimmed with love for Zayde, a love he always harbored for him, but was usually buried under the sad promise of him dying some day. He had him now—that's what mattered. He even felt love for shiny Mrs. Silver, and why not? Didn't she always give him her leftover candy the day after Halloween? He loved this small kitchen, the old building, the lively street outside. He'd no idea how much dread he carried in his chest until, for the first time, it was dispersed.

The bomb-shelter bar switched from electronica to Bob Marley. A young couple skipped down the green stairs, the girl smoking, the guy with a finger hooked on her jeans. Adam delved his hand into his pocket, clutched the brooch, and turned away.

There, he thought, crossing the square. That wasn't so hard, was it? Though to be safe, he would avoid the main square at night, when the bar was open.

When he reached the bottom of the steppingstones, Golda charged at him and ran circles around his legs while he marched for his room to grab the phone tokens and directory. He ducked around the tree, all its flowers gone. Instead it bore greenish-brown balls, the size and shape of small lightbulbs.

The blue pay phone, shared by all the volunteers, hung on the wall outside the classroom where the Russians studied Hebrew. The phone token,
a silver coin with a hole in the middle, reminded him of the subway tokens from his childhood with the Y of NYC punched out in the middle. He dropped the
asimon
in the phone and dialed Barry's number. Dagmar had to be in those archives.

An answering machine picked up. After a Hebrew message came an English one in a British-y accent. Maybe New Zealand?