Safekeeping (24 page)

“I'm going out a little later tonight, that's all.”

Claudette rested her hand on her roiling stomach. “How much later?”

Ulya regarded her suspiciously. “Nine o'clock.”

Claudette lay back down and did the calculation. Ulya never came home before two in the morning, leaving a window of five hours. It wasn't any more time than she would have had after leaving Ziva's last night. But it would have to do. What was she going to do with the next two hours though? The Bad Feeling hadn't said a word since she stole the pills—didn't accuse her of any wrongdoing, didn't demand any penance. It was silent for the first time in as long as she could remember. Claudette knew why: it couldn't accuse her of doing anything worse than what she was about to do. Even a murderer could later repent and be returned to God, but a self-murderer was lost forever. Claudette closed her eyes and listened to the strange quiet in her head. She heard Ulya flip a page of her magazine. Then the chitchat of people walking along the path behind their window. A bird. Another, higher-pitched bird. Her stomach calmed a bit.

At last Ulya tossed her magazine aside and padded off to the bathroom. Claudette rolled onto her back to wait out the final minutes while Ulya put on her makeup. The ceiling lamp stared down at her, its light dotted by a graveyard of flies. She hadn't noticed that before. Ulya stopped humming, let out a toot, and resumed humming. Could she not hum and toot at the same time? It was the silliest thought, and Claudette felt close to laughing. Laughing? Here, now, on the edge of perdition? She couldn't help it. She felt giddy. Free. Her mind was free. Why did she have to experience, just before she died, how easy and enjoyable life was without the Bad Feeling? How easy and enjoyable it was for other people?

Ulya came out of the bathroom and wiggled into a black minidress. She slipped on her high cork-wedge sandals and, taking a last look in the mirror, fluffed up her hair and gave her reflection an approving smile. She headed out the door, leaving behind a sweet, powdery scent of vanilla. “Ciao!”

Claudette sat up and listened to Ulya turning the key. She rose from the bed and turned off the ceiling lamp. The streetlamps provided enough illumination. It would be easier if she got this over quickly. She retrieved the bag of pills from the blue backpack she kept under the bed, the backpack
her brother-in-law had lent her for the trip. She emptied the pills onto the gray blanket and swept them into a colorful heap. She laid out the instruments: bottle of Prozac, rubber band, new plastic bag. It was all there. Except the water.

The water bottle was too big for the bathroom sink, so she held it up to the showerhead. She slowly turned the faucet until the water trickled. The showers here were so strange: no tub or curtains, only a showerhead and a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor. As the bottle filled, she took in the rusted shower basket laden with Ulya's shampoos, body scrubs, shaving creams. Ulya always complained about having no money, but every day she came home with new lotions and tank tops.

When Claudette turned off the shower, she heard music. Carrying the water back to the bed, she remembered Ulya asking her a few weeks ago if the piano wasn't driving her crazy. When she told her roommate she hadn't noticed it, Ulya gave her an incredulous look. But she hadn't heard it. She had been too busy trying to work out whether she'd been aroused that morning while milking the cow. Again and again she had forced herself to picture the cow's long rubbery teats in her hands.

Claudette perched on the edge of the bed, water bottle in hand, and listened to the piano. She wanted to hear, to feel, what other people did when they listened to music. She waited. The first thing she noticed was a change in the pale light pouring through the window, what it seemed to do to the room. Ulya's green high heels, lying haphazardly on the floor, appeared strangely poignant. The colorful pile of pills popped against the gray wool blanket. The air thickened with all the disappointments and dreams of the transients who had lived in this room. Including hers.

The notes ascended, and Claudette remembered an icicle. It appeared in her head. She saw it through the rusty bars on the window, hanging from a lintel, at once clear and opaque, full of fairy light, muted pinks and blues. She reached through the bars for it—she must have been four or five years old—and broke it off. When later she tried to show it to the beautiful and older Françoise, the prettiest girl in the orphanage, the icicle was gone. Françoise laughed at the puddle in her drawer: “Silly-head, you can't own an icicle!” That was years before Françoise lost her mind completely, before she harbored the most evil delusions about one of the younger priests, accused him of doing unspeakable things to her in the broom closet. After months in the pink-padded quiet room, Françoise disappeared, but by
then Claudette was too busy counting tiles to notice. She hadn't recalled trying to show Françoise the icicle in twenty years. She hadn't recalled anything.

Half an hour later, the piano still hadn't released her. She felt as if the music might lift her, as Christina the Astonishing had risen toward the rafters during her requiem. Was God reaching out to her, asking her to reconsider? Could that be? Why would He wait until the last second to show He cared?

Claudette put down the bottle of water. She had to make sure. She covered the pills with a shirt and went outside. The music came from somewhere behind the classroom. As she climbed the stones, the music grew louder and her heart beat faster. What was she going to find? What if it were a vision of Christina? Or the Son Himself? On the main road, she found the music emanating from the darkened dining hall. She scurried to its back door.

Ofir was exhausted, but he couldn't stop playing. For three weeks Dan and the others had given him hell for running into the kasbah, and tomorrow he would stand before army court and get sentenced to at least six weeks in jail, but he didn't regret it. The only thing he truly cared about was his music, and his composition was infinitely better thanks to those minutes with the Palestinian boy in the shadowy room of mirrors and the race back toward the sunlight of the square. The melody had turned out sadder than he had expected. The ache of gravity. It carried this fear that life could never quite slake your thirst for it. Strange considering he'd never felt more optimistic, but he didn't force it. He stayed honest to the piece, more honest than he'd ever managed before, and it made him feel like a true artist, not the sham he always feared himself to be.

Usually he played with reservation, careful not to get too loud. If his music carried too far, the next morning there would be teasing:
Ofir thinks he's Beethoven. Oh, here comes our little Mozart!
Growing up in a children's house, where he had to line up to take a shit at an assigned hour, had taught him it was best not to stand out, even in a good way. Tonight, though, he didn't care who heard him.

Had someone come to complain? Sensing a presence behind him, he glanced back—

His fingers froze. A ghost haunted the doorway, a wide-eyed ghost in a moonlit white dress.

“Oof.” He laughed. “You scared me.”

Claudette leaped sideways and stood with her back against the wall. She didn't know what to think. Could that Jewish teenager be a messenger of God? Pimples riddled his cheeks. A hideous gash crossed his chin. His T-shirt bore a cartoon mouse in a big yellow hat.

When the piano started up again, she held her breath to listen. It was as beautiful as before.

To Ofir's relief, he got right back into it. His fingers moved over the keys as if guided by instinct. He forgot about the girl in the doorway.

Claudette slid down the building until she was sitting on the cool cement. The music came through the wall, vibrating against her back. She must have cried before, when she was a little girl, but she couldn't remember it. It felt different, crying, than she had imagined. She clutched at the front of her dress, where her chest hurt, as if it might bust open. But it also felt good, the tears and mucus running down her face. A relief.

“Hey, hello. Hey, wake up.
Boker tov
. Good morning.”

Claudette felt herself being shaken. She opened her eyes.

“You better get up now. People are going to start coming for breakfast.”

The teenager who had been playing God's music looked down at her, the sky behind him a pale yellow. Had she taken the pills? The boy's gray eyes were bloodshot, the raised red scar on his chin flanked with black perforations. Would an angel have such an ugly scar? Was this Hell? In her grogginess, Claudette allowed Ofir to clutch her upper arms and help her up.

“Sorry about shaking you like that. But you wouldn't wake up. I've never seen anyone sleep that hard.”

Sleep? Claudette blinked. Through the night? Outside? Without medication?

He brought his hand up to cover his chin. “I got scared for a second. I thought I might have to call the nurse.” He couldn't decide how old this girl was. Most volunteers were in their twenties.

“It was like you were playing that music just for me. I thought God was playing through you. Yes, I think He was.”

Ofir stared at Claudette, joy burgeoning inside him. She stared back, face stern. It was the best thing anyone had ever said to him. All at once, she had dispelled the doubts that had arisen with the morning light. He must have captured something universal if it affected someone so different
from him, this girl from, he wasn't sure, France? His eyes stung with excitement and pride. He blinked back the tears. The girl didn't need to see that.

“Thank you.” He flipped open his pack of cigarettes. “How long are you going to be on the kibbutz? I would love to play for you again, but . . .”

He paused to light his cigarette, and the girl took off. It was so odd. He watched her run across the lawn in her white sundress and bare feet and hoped she would still be here when he got back from army jail.

O
fir waved at Gadi from his seat at the back of the bus. Gadi pushed through the people, mostly taller than him, standing in the aisle. When he got to where Ofir was saving him a seat, he said, “I don't know what you're smiling about. Your chin looks Frankensteinish, and you're on your way to jail.”

Ofir hadn't realized he was smiling. “Never mind my chin. I almost lost an eye saving this seat for you.”

He gazed out the window while Gadi stood on his toes to stuff his duffel in the overhead shelf. The Haifa bus station was coming to life, starting the workweek. The CD store blasted electronica out of giant black speakers. Vendors replenished their bins of candy and nuts. Couples kissed in front of bus doors, and parents hugged their adult children goodbye. Gadi barely sat down and secured his rifle between his knees before the bus backed out.

“Sorry I was so late. I didn't think I was going to make it. Every time I was halfway out the door, my mom remembered something else she wanted to give me: new underwear, potato chips.”

The bus descended through the hill city, winding its way to the seaside highway. They passed more CD stores, shoe stores, falafel stands. Soon they were past the city center, driving by residential buildings, three- and four-story white apartment houses yellowed by the sea air. Every car, telephone booth, scaffold was plastered with banners and bumper stickers. They'd proliferated over the last year:
PEACE NOW!; NO ARABS, NO BOMBS!; THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE HE, WE VOTE FOR YOU; NATIONAL SUICIDE IS
NOT A PEACE PROCESS; THE NEW GENERATION WANTS PEACE; RABIN IS A MURDERER
. Gaps between the white buildings provided glimpses of the Mediterranean. A year into his army service, Ofir still wasn't used to being off the kibbutz.

Before Gadi had a chance to start talking about yet another girl he had met this weekend and almost, just almost, fucked, Ofir said, “I had a good Shabbat.”

“You?” Gadi opened a bag of peanut-flavored puffs and held it out to Ofir. “I thought you'd be crying the whole time. That's what I would've been doing if I were headed to army jail. But it could have been worse, I guess. We could all be dead because of you. It's weird Dan let you go on leave first. He must have a crush on you.”

“You know that composition I've been working on all winter? I finished it. And, I feel kind of weird saying this, but I think it's good. I mean, really good. Like maybe I can use it to get into a top-notch music school.”

“It must be fucking good, 'cause this is the first time I've ever heard you say anything positive about your music. Usually you're like, ‘I wanna be good, I wanna be good, but I suck I suck I suck.' Does this song have a name? I'd love to hear you play it. Though, honestly, I don't see that happening anytime soon. My weekend leaves are turning into jail. If I just mention going out, my mom starts crying. If we don't leave the West Bank soon, I think she's going to go crazy.”

“And there was this girl, a French girl. She was really moved by my piece. I'm too embarrassed to even tell you what she said. She said—no, I can't. Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm calling it yet. Maybe—”

“A French girl?” Gadi raised his eyebrows, decidedly more interested.

“I think she's French. She was weird. She had this necklace with a big . . . I don't know, like a woman with a halo. A saint or something Christian.”

“Oh my God, this kid won't stop kicking my fucking seat.” Gadi turned and stilled the little boy's leg with a gentle hand on his knee. The child, his pudgy face smeared in chocolate, grinned, and the young mother whispered, “Sorry.”