Safekeeping (25 page)

Gadi, settling back, dug into his bag of peanut puffs. “So the French girl?
Nu
? Did you—”

A loud crack split open the world.

A wall of hot air rushed at Ofir, slamming him hard, sending him flying, flying back as if the seats and windows of the bus had disappeared.

What was the sound of fear?

The air sparkled with glass as the gray asphalt rushed up on either side. He landed on his back, the smack driving the air out of his chest. Blackness.

He wheezed for breath. Was it seconds later? An hour? He tried opening his eyes. The left eye—no, fuck, pain. Glass, something, in his eyeball.

He opened his right eye. Red strobe lights revolved, but the only siren he heard was in his head. That's all he heard: a high-pitched whistle. EMTs and civilians waved and soundlessly called to one another in front of the charred shell of the bus. The cool May morning blew on Ofir's legs and chest like when his mother would blow on his fingers after he burned them on the toaster. He smelled burning—hair, flesh, gasoline.

A medic kneeled beside him, her eyes darting over his body. Her lips moved, but he couldn't hear her above the whistle. It was the whistle that pained him the most. More than anything, he wanted a stop to that incessant high-pitched C. The medic's lips moved as she wiped his face with a cool cloth. He knew, having been trained to treat shock, that she was talking at him for the sake of talking at him, saying calming things like, “Everything's all right. You're all right. Everything's all right.”

He lifted his head. Thank God, he wasn't paralyzed. He squinted down at his body. His khaki shirt had blown open and blood streaked his torso, but it didn't seem to be his blood. He had all his limbs. He moved his fingers. Oh, they were fine.

Gadi. Peanut-flavored puffs. Annoyed at the chocolate-faced boy kicking his seat. As the medics lifted Ofir onto a stretcher, he covered his painful eye and searched for his friend.

He had been right beside him. A red mess pooling out of his side. It was probably his blood on him. His brown eyes were open but unseeing. His friend would never almost fuck a girl again.

Dresden, 1945

F
ranz, limping past darkened townhouses, breath clouding in the cold March night, checked with trembling fingers again that his false papers were still in the top-left pocket of the beige suit. In one hour, he had to be at the train station. They would be waiting for him, these crazy Zionists who had returned to Europe, risking their own lives to help other Jews get out. They had secured him this suit, the fake papers, a railway ticket, and it was wrong of him to chance missing that train for a brooch.

The bombs that had shattered most of Dresden had missed Kaitzer Street. It was ghostly the way the residential boulevard and the surrounding blocks stood amid a sea of rubble. The streetlamps were unlit, and the dome of the Church of Our Lady no longer rose in the distance, but otherwise the street looked as peaceful and lovely as it did when Franz would practice his swing outs on the way home from a night at the Manhattan Mayhem. Now, four years later, he had trouble walking, knees buckling under his meager weight.

Franz stopped before townhouse 5. Aside from the missing mezuzah, it too looked the same: red brick, the two dormer windows in the roof that belonged to his room. The new inhabitants must have liked his mother's stained-glass hummingbird, for it still hung in front of the white curtains in the bay window.

Franz glanced in either direction, pulled open his pocketknife, and limped up the steps. He could do it. He could be in and out in five minutes. How many times had he arrived home after a night at the Mayhem
and found he'd forgotten or lost his keys? He always got the door open without waking his parents. Even if the lock had been changed, the latch was loose.

Franz held his breath as he slipped the blade between the doorjamb and the frame. The latch might be the same, but his hands were not. They were nothing like the hands that used to do little more than lead a girl into an underarm pass and later that night, if he was lucky, unbutton her blouse. These raw, bony hands shook uncontrollably, making the knife rattle inside the doorjamb like a Purim grogger.

He paused, scoped the street. Look at him—a burglar breaking into his own home. A window lit up two houses down. Frau Gaertner's house. Did she still live there with her three cats? He turned back to the door. To hell with his shaking. He had come this far, and he wasn't leaving empty-handed. He would either leave with the brooch or be killed in his home. He reinserted the knife and pressed down, ignoring the rattle, putting all his weight in his arms. They burned with fatigue, but he had learned to live with pain.

The latch gave, and Franz nearly fell over. The door opened halfway with barely a creak, as if the house were on his side. He tiptoed into the foyer, it too almost unchanged: the brass chandelier, the red oriental runner ascending the stairs, the worn-down depression in the middle of the landing. Franz half expected Bennie Goodman to come running out and do panting circles around him. Thankfully whoever lived here now didn't have a dog. There was no barking, no sound of someone getting out of bed upstairs. It was quiet except for the tick of the pendulum clock, the clock his father had brought home the day his firm made him a partner. Franz clenched his jaw.

He crept, bringing down his feet as lightly as he could. When he spotted an oak chest, he paused. He had been sure he remembered the house perfectly—he would walk through it hundreds of times, room to room, while lying in the barrack—but he had forgotten this chest with the inlaid vines along its edges. It scared him, made him wonder what else he had forgotten.

Above the chest, he saw a man in the mirror. He jumped.

The man in the beige suit jumped too.

That pale scrag with shadows for eyes was him. He had seen his reflection a couple of times since escaping, but it was different to see it here, in the
mirror where he had watched himself grow up. The last time he straightened his tie in this mirror, he had been a handsome twenty-six-year-old with thick black hair and broad shoulders, a man all the girls wanted to dance with because he lifted them so high their skirts flew.

When he reached the kitchen at the back of the house, the smell of home walloped him. He stopped, inhaled it. This he hadn't been able to relive hundreds of times; one can picture a place, but not its smell. What was it exactly that had steeped into the walls? His mother's Friday-night brisket? His father's turpentine shoe polish? Every morning his father used to shine his shoes at the kitchen table over yesterday's newspaper. Franz headed for the sink, thinking, please be here.

He counted nine tiles to the left of the faucet. Please, please. He jammed the knife in the groove between the tile and the grout. Please. Long before the Nazis, Franz would watch his mother unpin the brooch from her dress and carefully store it behind this tile in the wall. As a teenager he used to laugh at how easy it was, despite his mother's velvet theater dresses and rouged cheeks, to see the shtetl in her when she was hiding the brooch in its special place like a peasant hiding a groschen under the bed. He would tease her—“Why are you so paranoid?”—and then not listen when she launched into the history of the brooch. His mother claimed she could recount the provenance of the brooch all the way to before the Black Plague. Franz wished he'd listened. He always figured he would pay attention next time. When his mother used to stow the brooch, the tile came out more easily, but his father had filled in the grout when it became clear things were going to get worse before they got better.

Franz chipped away at the mortar, heart pounding in his ears. Sweat ran into his eyes even though a wintery wind whistled through the window over the sink. Please, let this be the grout my father filled, he thought. Look, Mother, I've come back for your brooch. The tile loosened. Easy, easy, he tried to coax it out with the knife, but his hands were even shakier now, and he lost control. The tile fell. Clanged onto the counter.

Worried about the noise, Franz ducked, scanned for a place to hide. He crawled across the checkered floor and huddled under a rolling server, against the icebox. He gripped the open pocketknife. He felt like a scared animal backed into the corner of a cage, the shining knife his claw. He listened to footfalls upstairs. Then the stairs groaned. Somebody was coming.

A blonde woman in a satiny black nightdress crossed the kitchen, her pale bare feet padding against the checkered tiles, toenails painted glossy red. Franz hunched up, breathed as quietly as possible while her lilac perfume displaced the smell of his past. It was hard to believe the world still contained women who wore perfume and nail polish. She filled a glass at the sink and drank it, her back to him, staring out the window. How thirsty he had been for four years while this woman drank from his sink. Her nightie scooped low in the back, a glow tracing the satin over her buttocks. The fear Franz had that she might turn around and see him was replaced by the fear that he would kill her. Oh, to see the fear on her face.

The woman picked up the fallen tile, turned it over in her hands. Franz stiffened, gripped the knife. She leaned forward to inspect the hole. Franz could hear her thinking: What's this? One of those exciting stashes? Everyone knew the Jews had hidden their watches, wedding rings, kiddush cups under floorboards and in the walls of their houses, planning to come back for them one day.

The woman turned in the direction of the foyer, offering a view of her wary face. She tiptoed toward the front of the house, disappearing from Franz's view. Her voice echoed in the darkness, a tentative “Hello? . . . Hello?” A silence followed, and Franz held his breath. The wooden floor creaked as she walked around, looking into the parlor, the dining room.

When she reentered the kitchen, her gait was relaxed again. She returned to the hole. As she slid her white hand and red nails inside, Franz readied to spring if she pulled out the brooch. The woman felt around, her blonde head turned to the side. Her shoulders fell. She pulled her hand out and balanced the tile against the wall as if planning to deal with it in the morning. Franz held his breath again as the woman and her lilac scent turned and left the kitchen.

Why hadn't she found the brooch? He remained huddled, listening to the woman climbing the stairs. He waited for it to go quiet, eyes on the black hole. It looked like the missing piece in a puzzle. He had tried so hard over the last few years to remember what his mother had told him about the brooch. His grandmother, her mother, had given it to her on her eighteenth birthday. He was almost sure of that. Though maybe it was her wedding. The rest of the brooch's past was even hazier. He could call up only snippets from the centuries: a consumptive deathbed, Cossacks on horses, an elopement, a knife peddler wandering across the Pale. There
was the dramatic story of how their family came to possess the brooch in the first place, an incredible story—something to do with a housemaid and a magical army of yellow butterflies. This was the story Franz tried the hardest to remember, hoping it had been stored somewhere in his subconscious, but after being passed down for six hundred years, it was gone. All that remained was a strange image of a sky filled with yellow butterflies.

The only thing Franz recalled with certainty about the brooch was his mother's response to his youthful questions, not about its past, but its future.
What if I don't get married, Mutti? What if you don't like my choice of wife? What if she's a horrible, unworthy woman, but outrageously beautiful? Can I still give her the brooch?
His mother never laughed at these questions. She would say in a grave voice: “I wouldn't give this brooch to just anyone, Franz. She'd better be special.”

With the house hushed again, he rushed at the hole and reached inside. Nothing. He patted around. The hole curved to the left. He didn't remember that. Had his mother, shortly before the family was ripped from their beds, chipped and chipped into the wall, trying to make the hiding place more secure? Franz leaned over the counter, stretched his arm as far as he could. If only he could cry out, maybe he could stretch his arm some more. His fingertips brushed something hard, cold, pushing it away. He went back in with the knife and tried to edge it out. Please be the brooch, please be the brooch. Beyond the kitchen window, the sky paled over the rooftops. Morning. He was lucky to see morning. Ten people were shot or starved in a barrack for every one that escaped. But they were going to die anyway, right? They should have made a break for it too. Run like hell through the evergreens. He wasn't the only one who'd seen their bunkmate throw himself at the electric fence and not die. They had all seen him hanging onto the wires until a guard had to come and shoot him in the head. Still: What would those ten men think of him jeopardizing his life now for an object?