Safekeeping (23 page)

“So I noticed something the other day when Claudette and I were in the avocado orchard,” said Ziva, leaning back with her tea. “There were more Arabs picking fruit than kibbutzniks.”

Eyal, cookie at his lips, paused. Years ago it had occurred to him that these chocolate-ginger cookies tasted like heartache to both him and his mother. “Don't start, Ima.”

“Cheap labor, that's what it is. Even in the worst of times, when a few extra hands would have stopped us from going to bed hungry, we didn't hire help. No employers or employees: that was the idea. Next thing, you will find Arabs too expensive and start importing workers from Africa.”

Claudette stood up. She shuffled between Ziva and the coffee table. “Excuse me. I'm just going to the washroom.”

“Palestinians need work, Ima, and we need help in the fields and factory. If I could pay them more I would—these are things you don't think about, these are things you didn't have to deal with when you were secretary—but we have to compete with China. China, which is practically giving away their fruit and plastic. And to be fair, these Palestinian workers bring home more money from the kibbutz than they otherwise would. A lot more.”

Claudette, relieved they were so absorbed in their argument, grabbed the bag from the floor and hurried into the bathroom. She locked the door and then leaned against it for a second to steady herself. Through the wood she heard Ziva shouting: “Do you even hear yourself, Eyal? Do you? They're better off? That's what all exploiters say and have said throughout history!”

Claudette opened the medicine cabinet's three mirrored doors and was greeted by a wall of medications—glass bottles of pills, pills in orange plastic containers, boxes with sheets of tablets. What should she do? She didn't want to endanger the old woman by leaving her without some important medication; and, anyway, wouldn't she be more likely to notice something was wrong if she found a bottle empty or missing? Not to mention, if all she did was grab a bottle or two, she might end up with vitamins, because everything was in Hebrew, and the few names in English she didn't recognize. The only thing to do was to skim a little of everything. Six of each. A good round number. She reached for the blue container in the top left corner, planning to work her way across. When she saw its orange sticker with the black skull and crossbones, she took eight.

“Goodnight, Ima.” Eyal pushed himself out of the armchair.

Ziva pulled on the armrest and shuffled after him. “My son, the feudal lord.”

Eyal opened the door and walked out the apartment.

Ziva called from her doorway. “Slave driver!”

He didn't look back, and she watched him walk to the administration building and disappear into its back door. After a minute, his office window on the second floor lit up.

Ziva closed her door. Was Claudette still in the bathroom? She knocked on it. “Claudette, are you okay?”

“Yes!” Claudette was on her hands and knees, scrambling to pick up all the tiny pink pills scattered about the tiled floor. Everything had been going smoothly until then. She had feared her OCD would keep making her reopen the same bottle or recount the same pills, but that never happened. The Bad Feeling was quiet. Eerily so. In her haste, though, she had forgotten to stuff back a wad of cotton and had to reopen a number of bottles to find the one missing it, and when she finally did find that container, she was shaking so badly she dropped it.

Claudette hurried to her feet, put the bottle of pink pills back, and grabbed the next in line. She had made it through two rows of bottles. She struggled to open the childproof cap—each one was secured differently—and eased six yellow pills into her palm. She dropped the pills into the plastic bag, replaced the bottle, and grabbed another.

“Claudette?” Ziva spoke through the door again. “I'm starting to worry about you.”

“No, no, I'm fine. I'm coming out now.”

That would have to do. The bag contained a rainbow of pills. She hoped this and her two-month supply of Prozac were enough. She stuffed the work shirt back inside and flushed the toilet. She ran the water while dabbing her sweaty face with the hand towel. She took a deep breath and emerged from the bathroom, holding the plastic bag behind her.

“Are you ill?”

“No.” Claudette felt the sweat returning to her face. “Well, a little.”

“The mint tea will help. Come, come sit down.”

Claudette couldn't bring herself to say no. She set the bag back down on the floor and took a seat again next to Ziva on the couch. It was getting late. If she took the pills tonight, her roommate might come home in time to save her. It would be safer to wait until tomorrow, right after Ulya left for the night. She sighed at having one more day.

Ziva tasted her cookie. “My son's still mad that I didn't give him his own birthday presents when he was a boy. On his sixth birthday, he threw a fit when I gave all the children in his year a sun hat. He wanted me to give only him a sun hat.”

Claudette forced down a sip of tea. “I can understand wanting your mother to give you your own birthday present.”

She could. Her whole childhood she had wanted a present bought just for her, a mother to love her especially. Over the years she had met
many women she had hoped would take a motherly liking to her: doctors, nurses, nuns.

Ziva put Eyal's uneaten cookie on the tray. “Of course you can understand it. People are naturally selfish. They don't want to share. It's an instinct that has to be fought.” She stood. “Well, I think I should go to bed now. I want to get up early tomorrow and finish my article.”

Claudette rose to her feet. Since she couldn't thank Ziva for the pills or for the kindness she had shown her over the last few days, she said with emphasis, “Thank you, Ziva, for the cookies. Thank you so much.”

“No need to make a fuss, Claudette. They're just cookies.” Though as soon as she said it, she knew that wasn't exactly true. “But I'm glad you enjoyed them.”

I
t was six o'clock in the morning, the kibbutz still asleep, when Adam headed out to mail the search form. He knew the mail didn't go out on Saturday, but he awoke at 5:45 a.m. as if the alarm had gone off. He had lost the ability to sleep in.

As he crossed the great lawn, dew wetting his sneakers, Golda in tow, he spotted Ziva on a bench in the square, writing. Half of him wanted to prod her again for information; the other half prayed she wouldn't notice him. Yesterday, while he was wiping dishes, she stood on the other side of the conveyer belt berating two teenage girls, pointing from their plates to the garbage, where they had been about to dump their uneaten sandwiches. The harangue continued until the girls, under her watch, stuffed the sandwiches into their mouths. To think he had once hoped this woman was Dagmar. His gentle grandfather never would've fallen for such an ogress.

“Golda! Come back here!” It was too late. The little dog bulleted across the square.

Ziva looked toward the shouting. She missed the little dog, low to the ground, only saw the young man and his familiar gait. Was he coming toward her? She had risen at the crack of dawn to concentrate on the article. And now here he was, like a revenant. What was he doing about at this hour?

“Oy!” The chihuahua pounced at her shins, surprising her. She moved her aching legs away, but the dog continued to paw at them. Leaning over her sore belly, she tried to shove it away.

“Sorry.” Adam nudged Golda aside with his sneaker. “Guess she just wanted to say hello.”

Ziva forced herself to look up. “I never understood the point of breeding them so small.”

He shrugged, gave her that closed-lip smile. “Small things are cuter. I don't know why. Just a law of nature. Say, did you happen to remember anything more about my grandfather, Franz Rosenberg? Or his girlfriend, Dagmar?”

She spoke with her lower jaw extended. “You must stop asking me about this.”

“I just thought something might have come to you.”

“You're a little pest. I told you I'm not going to suddenly remember something. My memory is fine.”

A little pest? Fuck her. “If your memory's so fine, why don't you remember anything?”

The old woman leaned forward. “Your grandfather . . . he obviously didn't teach you any manners.”

“Actually, he did. He had better manners than anyone.”

Franz, manners? Ziva had no great esteem for manners, but the boy didn't understand the difference between manners and charm. She shook her head. “Well, I'm afraid to say whatever graces your grandfather had didn't rub off on you.”

“Maybe they didn't. Maybe a lot of good shit didn't rub off on me.” Adam looked off to the side, pissed that he had proven her point by swearing. Why did this woman get under his skin so badly? He turned back to her. “You know, I get this weird feeling about you . . . like . . . like you're not telling me something.”

Ziva gripped her writing pad. “Why would you think such a thing?”

“Not sure. A look in your eye.”

“And what do you think I'm not telling you?”

She waited, heart pounding. She didn't want this. All she wanted was to be left alone. To work on her article. Save the kibbutz. His presence felt like a revenge.

“I don't know.”

She exhaled. “You see, you're being absurd.”

Perhaps it was absurd, but Adam wasn't going to say sorry to this woman. He held up his letter. “Well, I got to go mail this. The Jewish
Agency is going to check their files for Dagmar. You were right about one thing: she didn't live here.”

Ziva struggled to think of what the
Sochnut
could have on her. If she'd arrived with all the refugees after the war, they'd have papers for sure. But she came when the agency was what, one or two years old? And from the minute she stepped off the boat, she had been Ziva. If she had filled out a form back in 1932 in Berlin, and by some miracle it made it to a bureaucrat in Tel Aviv, could they really trace it to her?

“Young man, can I ask you a question? I don't know why you're looking for this Dagmar, and I don't want to know; it's none of my business. But have you thought about whether this Dagmar wants to be found?”

“What do you mean?” Adam tapped the letter against his palm.

“What do I mean? That's exactly my point. You're young, so you're thinking like a young person. Young people like to shake the snow globe. But old people, they've worked hard to put things exactly where they are, and maybe this Dagmar doesn't want you coming along and stirring things up. Maybe she doesn't want to hear what you have to tell her. You hadn't thought about that, had you?”

It was true. He hadn't given a second's thought to Dagmar and what all this would mean to her. He tried to picture it: If a woman died fifty years from now with his goodbye letter in her hand, would he want to know? Would it make him happy to learn such a thing, or unbearably sad? He shrugged. Because it didn't matter. There was no one else to give the brooch to.

“I hate to say it, but I guess I don't care. I'm going to find Dagmar, and that's all there is to it.”

Ziva shook her head. “There we go. It's the me-me-me generation from the me-me-me capitalist culture. You're very selfish.”

True. If he hadn't been a selfish fuck his whole life, he wouldn't have to find Dagmar. But this old bitch didn't know that. If she weren't a hundred years old and the secretary's mother, he would tell her to fuck off.

He turned for the mailbox. “Come on, Golda.”

C
laudette lay on her side, pretending to nap, while she waited for Ulya to leave for the night. Normally her roommate would have set out an hour ago, but she hadn't even begun getting dressed. Instead she also sat on her bed, smoking a cigarette and flipping through a fashion magazine. What if tonight were the one night she didn't go out?

The sun set. The room darkened. At last Ulya rose from her bed. This was it. She was leaving. Claudette's heart thumped. After flipping on the ceiling lamp, Ulya returned to her bed and magazine.

Claudette sat up. “Aren't you going out tonight?”

Ulya looked over. “Yes. Why?”

“I just wondered. Normally you would have left by now.”

Ulya sensed something strange. Why was Claudette anxious for her to go? What did the weirdo do at night while she was out? Masturbate? No, she had probably never masturbated in her life. She probably wanted the privacy to say a million Hail Marys or do one of those bizarre rituals of hers, tap her fingers together or open and close the closet door. Well, it was none of her business why she was leaving later tonight. She wouldn't have told her best friend, if she'd had one, that her Arab lover wouldn't bring her to his father's fiftieth birthday party, not unless she put on more clothes and could be presented as his fiancée. He claimed it wasn't worth the drama of introducing her otherwise—a Russian immigrant, a non-Muslim, an unbelieving Christian, a fake Jew, a woman with obscenely red hair. It was pathetic and unmanly to be so afraid of his parents, but what did she care? More proof that he wasn't a man to be taken seriously.
And besides, she wouldn't have gone to the party anyway. And so she had agreed to meet him afterward, as she preferred to meet him: in secret.