Safekeeping (20 page)

Claudette finally raised her head, and Ziva was taken aback by the terror in her eyes. Terror was the only way to describe it.

“Oh, leave the girl be,” Ziva said. “Not everyone is as sex-crazed as you, Dana.”

Dana laughed. “I don't believe it! Some people just aren't in touch with what's going on in their mind and body. My mother once told me you used to listen to your body, Ziva. Hmm? She said you had quite a few lovers. Is that true? Come on, it's such a long time ago, you can admit it now. Did you?”

“The apple doesn't fall far, does it? Your mother was the kibbutz gossip, and now it's you. You know, I heard you the other day, Dana, spewing your
shtuyot
. And so did Eyal. You should be ashamed.”

“Eyal, poor man, I don't think he's had sex in ten years. Not since Orna left him.”

“Dana! What makes you think I want to hear this? And besides,
he
left her. She wanted him to leave the kibbutz, and he wouldn't go.”

“Well, doesn't it bother you that you're not going to have any grandchildren?”

“All the children on the kibbutz are my grandchildren, Dana. I don't care about passing on my bloodline. I care about passing on my ideals, my hard work. If the kibbutz dies—if you people kill it—then I'll have no lineage.”

Dana cocked her head, pursed her lips. “You still haven't answered my question, Ziva. Did you have a lot of lovers?”

“What I can't understand is what difference it makes to you.”

“Just curious. Did you?”

“No, Dana. I did not. There was my husband, Dov. And that's it. I know your generation must find that shocking. Now will you leave it alone?”

Dana smiled and shook her head. “One person your whole life! I don't know how you people did it. And the kids today aren't having much fun either, aside from Talia. Oh, the sixties, now that was a good time!”

The three women folded in silence. As Claudette worked through the jeans—a fat woman's elastic waist, a young man's faded Levi's, a little girl's pink pair—she thought: other people had boyfriends, husbands, mothers, friends, children. They snuggled under blankets, hugged in metro stations, kissed goodnight, walked hand in hand. That's what other people did while she disinfected the sink.

When Dana left for the bathroom, Ziva said, “Are you all right, Claudette?”

Claudette nodded.

“You looked scared before. You look a little scared right now.”

Claudette shook her head.

“Well, speak, Claudette! If you're okay, say so.”

“I'm okay. Thank you.”

“Dana is always bullying people to talk about their private lives. She's so stupid she can't help it.”

“I understand.”

“You know, if you're ever scared, you can tell me. I'm very good at toughening people up.”

Dana returned and fidgeted with the radio antennas, but all she got was static. She turned it off. “Fucking rain.”

Ziva folded, remembering how scared she had been that first night she and Dov were expected to sleep together. The group voted to give them a private tent every Shabbat, saying, “Make the kibbutz's first child!” Every other day, so as not to undermine the supremacy of the group, they would sleep with the others in one of the main tents. To this day, the smell of kerosene brought her back to that first Shabbat, lying in the darkness after Dov snuffed the lamp. Outside the others sang around a campfire
. No more tradition's chains shall bind us. Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall! The earth shall rise on new foundations. We have been naught, we shall be all.

Dov perched on the edge of her cot, carefully, as if he didn't want to wake her. The awkwardness was upsetting. Until now she had always felt as comfortable around Dov as she felt by herself. With a serious expression on his face, he gently laid a hand on her shoulder. She wanted to laugh, but was afraid that would ruin what was supposed to be a romantic moment. She'd never stifled a laugh around him before. As Dov's familiar face came toward her, she assured herself that this made sense. Who else was she supposed to make love to if not the person she loved the most?

Their lips met. She felt little. She kissed him back, feeling as if she were playing make-believe, pretending that she was married, pretending that she was being swept off her feet. Having never made love before, she didn't know if it always felt like pretending, if everybody pretended to feel what they read in books and saw in the moving pictures. Dov's hand moved up her thigh and inside the leg of her shorts. She braced, and yet it still surprised her, the jolt she felt when his fingertips grazed her there. Just a soft, quick touch and his hand retreated down her thigh.

Unease gave way to curiosity. When his hand once again crept up her thigh, she nearly moaned, but caught herself in time. How embarrassing, to moan like that in front of her friend. His hand did not venture any closer. It loitered, hesitant, inches away. Holding her breath, Ziva reached into her shorts and laid Dov's hand between her legs. His lips stilled on her mouth. His hand froze. Was he unsure what to do? Too self-conscious? Uninterested? Repulsed?

He withdrew his hand, leaving Ziva feeling like an idiot, unsure why she had gotten it into her head that her ugly vagina was something someone would want to touch.

He turned his back to her and unbuttoned his shirt. “I suppose we should undress.”

Ziva unbuttoned her shorts to boisterous singing.
We shall not cease, for still our strength is rising higher. For dauntless is our will, and our hearts are on fire!
She laid the shorts on the floor and started undoing her shirt. Last she peeled off her underwear. The summer night was warm but her skin still goosebumped.

She lay back on the cot and considered her body: pale breasts falling to the sides, brown nipples, smooth belly, mound of black hair, strong, tanned thighs, much tanner than her chest. Did she glow like her mother's favorite painting, the uniformly pale
Nude Maja
? She would know perhaps when Dov turned around.

“Ready?” he said.

“Ready.”

He tossed his work shirt and, without so much as a peek at her body, climbed on top. What she saw of his body did resemble the marble statues lining the main hallway of the Alte Nationalgalerie, but she found it off-putting that Dov had a body. She would have loved him without it. There was a poking at her vagina.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

As a schoolgirl, changing for gymnastics, she had heard another girl reading aloud from a novel to her enraptured friends. She vaguely remembered the novel saying it felt like a dam rupturing, sending a wave rolling over the woman, engulfing her, making her feel as if she needed to come up for air, making her gasp.

“I'm not hurting you, am I, Ziva?”

“No.”

He pushed in and out while Ziva thought: For this, all the fuss? The banned novels? The giggly whispers? The bawdy innuendos? The dirty photograph Danny the American kept under his mattress? The scandals? Betrayals? Rabbinic obligations and condemnations? The Song of Solomon?

It chafed. She closed her eyes.
Away with grief and pain, for hope does sorrow mend. Around and round again, for the hora has no end!
At last Dov's panting loudened, quickened. She hoped this meant it would soon be over.

He grunted, said, “I love you, Ziva.”

“I love you, too.”

He returned to his own cot, and she rolled to face the other side of the tent. What did she care if sex wasn't all that it was trumpeted to be? That only made it easier to concentrate on the important matters. The cotton and peanut fields needed water before this heat wave shriveled the fledgling plants. She had to practice her rifle shot if she was going to be of any use to the Haganah. According to yesterday's paper, Jews were being stripped of their German citizenship, meaning she had to try harder to convince her parents to come to Palestine; though how they could travel without a passport now she wasn't sure. And Dov, dear, dear Dov, was alive and deserved to be loved.

Ziva put down the jeans in her hands and rubbed her arthritic knees. She could no longer bear so much standing. Her ankles ached too. She could sit on a stool to fold the laundry, but she didn't want to sit all day. She would rather take anti-inflammatories. She limped over to her bag hanging on the wall and pulled out the plastic pill organizer. She might as well take the blood pressure capsules, too. Weren't those the ones that had to be taken between meals?

Dana looked up from her ironing. “That's a lot of pills, Ziva.”

Ziva's hand shook as she extracted a red tablet. “Yes, my bathroom looks like a pharmacy.”

Heart pounding, Claudette watched Ziva shamble over to the kitchenette, pour a glass of water, and swallow a handful of pills. A bathroom like a pharmacy. When that orphan boy had killed himself with stolen medication, she had condemned him. Twelve years old and she already spent most of her waking hours trying to appease the Bad Feeling—counting tiles, washing her hands—but she wasn't yet wondering the worst about herself, whether she wanted to have sex with Sister Marie Amable or burn down the orphanage. She had been horrified when she heard how the boy did it. After swallowing the pills, he pulled a plastic produce bag over his head and held a rubber band around his neck. As he lost consciousness, he let go of the band. That way, if he didn't take enough pills to die, only to pass out, he would still suffocate. For years she pictured him in the Hell of the Damned, eternally suffocating on a produce bag. Now she understood that the boy simply could not take it anymore.

The rain clattered against the windowsills while Ziva and Claudette spent the remainder of the afternoon folding towels. Claudette pressed
Christina the Astonishing, patron saint of the insane, against her chest, trying to push her into her heart, but even Christina couldn't prevent Claudette from trying to get to Ziva's bathroom. When the wall clock showed half past five, Ziva folded one last hand towel and headed for the door, eager to work on her article.

“You did all right today, Claudette.”

Claudette consulted the window. “Shouldn't we wait until the rain calms down?”

Ziva pushed open the screen door. “It's only water.”

Claudette paused in the doorway as Ziva hobbled into the downpour. If she wanted the pills, she would have to go after her.

Dana lit a cigarette. “Haven't you figured it out yet? The eleventh plague couldn't stop that old hag.”

Claudette ran into the rain and joined Ziva on her journey down the path, making sure to take two steps in each sidewalk square. In seconds, they were both soaked, Ziva's bra straps showing through her white shirt, Claudette's brown hair hanging in thick wet strands. This time when dizziness rushed up at Ziva, she slipped her arm through Claudette's. To give the impression this was merely a gesture of goodwill, not of necessity, Ziva kept her chin raised. Now Claudette felt dizzy: their skin touched. She didn't know the word for lusting after the elderly, but that didn't mean such a deviance didn't exist. She desperately wanted to retract her arm.

“I lied.”

Claudette looked over at Ziva. The rain had matted down the wild white hair, exposing its actual thinness and the mottled scalp beneath. “What?”

“I've told two lies recently, and I'm not a liar. I despise lying.”

Claudette nodded. “Lying is a sin.”

“I just couldn't bear that horrible woman asking me any more questions, but the truth is I've been with two men.” Ziva kept her head up, making no effort to avoid puddles. “I know it must be hard to imagine anyone wanting to sleep with me.”

Claudette was besieged by fear: fear of the old woman's freckled scalp, the warmth where their elbows met, by what she was going to do in her bathroom, by the thought of being with a man as the old woman had been, by the requirement that she respond to her confession. What could she say?

Claudette stammered, “I've never . . . been with anyone. Kissed, I mean.”

Ziva turned to Claudette, her sparse eyelashes in small wet clumps. “Once I would have said you weren't missing much, but now, I have to say, Claudette, you must try it.”

Claudette, having forgotten to watch the sidewalk, witnessed her foot landing on a line between the concrete blocks. More fear bloomed in her chest. No, she would never kiss anyone. She couldn't even walk down a sidewalk.

When they arrived at the old people's quarters, Claudette hesitated while Ziva opened her door. If she wanted the pills, she would have to ask to come in, but wouldn't it seem odd to ask to use the bathroom when hers was only a minute away?

Ziva turned in her doorway. “Claudette, why don't you come for tea this Shabbat? Friday night after dinner?”

Claudette nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

If God didn't want her to do this, why was He making it so easy?

“My son, Eyal, the big shot, will be here.”

As Claudette walked back to the volunteers' section, where she would spend the next few hours sanitizing the sink again, she dodged all the lines in the path, thinking, Friday Friday Friday Friday. Now that she wasn't going to have to do fifty more years of this, the three days until Friday seemed a long time.