Safekeeping (14 page)

“How often do you do reserve duty?”

“Every three years or so. This was probably my last. Funny, for years I hated going, and now . . .” He smiled, shrugged. “Well, I suppose we all get too old for something. So you're looking for a woman named Dagmar, eh? Who lived here in, what was it? Forty-seven? Dagmar, sounds Swedish. Or maybe German?”

Disappointed that yet another person didn't remember Dagmar, Adam said, “Not sure,” before recalling the
liebster Liebling
and all the German in the goodbye note. “Sorry. Definitely German. Don't have a last name though.”

“Not a problem. The kibbutz was tiny back then. We'll go through the papers of everyone who became a member in the forties.”

Barry's sport sandals squeaked on the linoleum as he walked to the front of the room and ran a finger down a dusty cabinet. Tall metal filing cabinets lined every wall, most topped by cardboard filing boxes. Barry pulled out the bottommost drawer and returned with a stack of files. “Do you read Hebrew?”

“I can sound out the letters.”

He jotted four letters on a scrap of paper. “That's ‘Dagmar.' Look for it here, on the top line of each form.”

Barry set half the stack down in front of Adam and took a seat with the other half. Adam dropped into a chair and eagerly searched the papers. Every time the passport-sized black-and-white photo stapled to the forms revealed a young woman, Adam compared the name to Barry's jotting twice, three times if she was pretty.

When Adam reached the last form without success, he looked to Barry, who shook his head. “No luck here either. We can check the files from the thirties, but those people, the pioneers who founded the kibbutz, are legendary. I would have heard of Dagmar if she were among them.”

As Barry carried the file back to the cabinet, Adam contemplated Dagmar's name written on the scrap of paper. The four letters, though somewhat familiar from Hebrew school, were foreign enough for it to seem strange that these squiggles—
—could represent a human being. Please, please, he thought, let these squiggles be in this next batch of files.

Barry settled behind his desk with a manila file too thin to need two people to leaf through. Adam, hands clasped on top of the desk, leaned
forward while Barry's eyes skimmed the papers. A moment later, he removed his reading glasses and shook his head again.

Adam sat back. “This makes no sense. She was my grandfather's girlfriend when he was here. She was a kibbutznik. I have a letter from her, addressed from the kibbutz.”

“I don't know what to tell you. I made aliyah in sixty-seven, after the Six-Day War, so I can personally say there hasn't been a Dagmar since then. And she just isn't in the records from before that.”

Adam dropped his head. He had accepted that Dagmar no longer lived here, that it had been naïve of him to think that she did just because she had written she would be here “for the rest of her life.” How many people lived the lives they planned for themselves when they were young? Now he had to swallow that she had never lived here. He would have to start looking for her elsewhere. But where?

Barry tapped the desk. “I have an idea. If you're sure she was a kibbutznik, you could write the United Kibbutz Movement. One letter, and you could find out if she's living on any of the three hundred kibbutzim in the country. Unless you think she might be religious. Religious kibbutzim are under a different umbrella.”

In the note she had scoffed at the world to come, and he couldn't imagine his grandfather with an orthodox woman. He used to get a chuckle out of the wigged women fitwalking over the Williamsburg Bridge in their long skirts and opaque nylons. “No, she wasn't religious . . . Can we first look up my zayde's file? Franz Rosenberg?”

“Certainly. The DPs must be somewhere.”

While Barry walked around the room, inspecting the file drawers, Adam closed his eyes and tried to stay calm.

“That him?”

Adam opened his eyes. Stapled to the form Barry held out to him was the oldest photo he'd ever seen of Zayde. By far. Any picture from before the war had been lost. The oldest pictures he'd seen were the faded Polaroids from the late sixties, showing a man younger than the one Adam would come to love, but well into old age, his thick hair a gunmetal gray, his tall, thin body decked in fashions—high-waisted pants, fat ties—so out of step with his teenage daughter's mod minidress. But it wasn't only the youth that made this photo unique. He'd never seen Zayde so frail, even in old age. The hollows in his cheeks could hold water, as could the sockets
housing his shiny black eyes. His hair grew in patches. Though Adam had long known his grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, he'd somehow never pictured what he must have looked like in the aftermath of those years. It occurred to him—he felt like an asshole making the comparison, but there it was—that he and Zayde had both arrived at this kibbutz frail, alone, with nothing but the brooch and a resolve to start over.

Barry pulled up a chair and began to translate. “It says he arrived February 17, 1945, and left . . . that's interesting. He never officially checked out. It says he—
ne'elam
. Disappeared. That he was last seen on the morning of November 30, 1947.”

The date from the goodbye letter. So Dagmar knew he was leaving, but not the kibbutz.

“I wonder why he didn't check out.”

Barry looked from the photo to Adam. “You know, you're the spitting image of him.”

Barry left to xerox the picture for him and grab the address for the United Kibbutz Movement. After seeing that picture of his young, feeble grandfather, Adam felt closer to the old man, something he hadn't thought possible. So even though he was frustrated Dagmar wasn't in the archives, he also felt a tinge of excitement—he was on their trail: not only Dagmar's, but his grandfather's. He was getting a story about him after all. Why had he disappeared? And on the same day as Dagmar's note? In the note, she apologized for the night before. What could she have done?

Barry handed Adam some papers. “I also got you the address for the
Sochnut
, the Jewish Agency. They have immigration files on everyone who's made aliyah since 1930 or so. Between the
Sochnut
and the United Kibbutz Movement, you should get a good lead.”

Adam headed for the general store to buy stationery and stamps, the papers folded in his back pocket. Outside, spring was putting on a show, the May sunlight compelling the square's bricks to sparkle, the same twinkling found on Manhattan's sidewalks on bright days. The leaves rustling in the trees flashed white, and the flowers in the cement planters bloomed a popping pink. The air smelled of fresh soil. Had it been this kind of ridiculously pretty day on the kibbutz when his grandfather first fell in love?

It was because of the brooch that Adam knew his grandfather had never loved his grandmother. One day when Zayde was cleaning it at the kitchen table—the second and only other time he witnessed his grandfather with
the brooch—Adam leaned on a chair back and asked whether Bobbe had worn the brooch a lot. He wanted to sit down at the table with Zayde, but couldn't. Almost seventeen and home after his second stint at Lodmoor and third school suspension, he was trying hard to act normal, get things back to the way they were, but the old man wasn't softening as quickly this time. Without looking at him, Zayde dipped a Q-tip into a jar of jewelry cleaner and said he never gave the brooch to Bobbe, he had hoped that one day he would want to, but it didn't work out that way.

Adam gripped the back of the chair. He hadn't listened to the last story about the brooch, and this time he was going to fucking listen. “What do you mean it didn't work out that way?”

Still not looking at him, Zayde dabbed the brooch's tiny gold flowers. “Love isn't what brought me and your bobbe together. We were schoolmates as little children. Not friends. We had some classes together. When I got to New York, she married me so I could stay here.”

“You never loved Bobbe?”

“I loved her, the way you can't help but love someone in your family, the way you might love a sister you don't get along with . . . Your grandmother wasn't a bad person, Adam, but as the years wore on, we grew apart, not closer. She didn't like when I played my records. She never wanted to take walks, go to the movies. I had a hard time with her sleeping all day. All day, she slept. Never cleaned, never cooked. After a long day at Leo's, I had to come home and make dinner. She was a depressed woman, your bobbe. She had more than enough reason, but it was very hard for me the way . . . she slept.”

Adam found it extremely romantic that after losing Dagmar, his grandfather had never fallen in love again. Adam had already been in love more times than he knew: Clara, the toothy registrar at Baruch, who'd sneaked him into the system after he failed to register on time; Suzie, the sullen Korean girl at the corner bodega, forced to work after school by her family; Stephanie, from that second time in juvie rehab,
LOVE
razored onto her arm, the embossed scar so poignant; and, of course, Monica Rivera of the pink velour track pants, the first girl he ever loved and hurt. Did having loved so many girls make each of these experiences something less than love? When he was with them, nobody else existed; and when it was over, usually after the girl tired of his bullshit, he was always shattered, convinced that he would never get over her. But then he would meet someone new. He didn't
see how it was possible not to fall in love again. If you were paying attention to people. People were so heartbreaking, beautiful. Other people, anyway.

Bells tinkled as Adam entered the
kolbo
. Kibbutzniks filed in and out, hurrying to make purchases before the store closed for Shabbat. One-tenth the size of Duane Reade and not half as brightly lit, the store's shelves were sparsely packed with shampoos, cleaning products, and school supplies. Adam approached the cashier, a pudgy-faced woman with ratty, dyed blonde hair, and asked where he could find envelopes and stamps.

“How many do you need?”

“Two, I guess.”

She laid two blue airmail letters on the counter. “They don't need stamps.”

Adam pulled out his monopoly money, and she waved. “We give volunteers airmail for free. Just remember to tell your family how nice we are.”

“I will.” People always assumed you had a family. “I keep telling my mom not to worry about me.”

“Worry—that's what moms do.”

As Adam turned from the counter, he met eyes with Ziva, who stood before a wall of over-the-counter medicines. She quickly turned.

“Hey.” He walked over. “I've got a picture of my grandfather, from back in the day. Maybe it'll jog your memory.”

The old woman had taken down a bottle of calcium and was absorbed in its packaging. Adam pulled the papers out of his back pocket.

“Will you look at it?”

“Right now?”

“I wish it were clearer.” He held it out. “It's a xerox of the photo in the archives.”

The old woman pulled her eyes from the bottle and, barely turning her head, peered down at the picture. Adam, watching her face, thought he saw a spark of recognition in her eyes, but she offered nothing.

“Does he look familiar?”

“Hm . . . a little, perhaps, but . . . most of the survivors weren't here for very long.”