Safekeeping (26 page)

Come on! He almost had the damn thing. If he got it now, he could still join the Zionists on that train for Vienna. Then the boat down the Danube to Odessa. And from there, a smaller boat across the Black Sea, followed by an illegal ship traversing the Mediterranean. His chances of making it to a kibbutz were laughable; but at least if he were seized at sea, he could toss the brooch overboard. Better an eternity at the bottom of the sea than pinned on a Nazi's breast.

He felt the knife catch.

When Franz would daydream about this moment—and he had daydreamed about it countless times, it was the only dream he had left—he'd been careful to warn himself that if, by some miracle, he did get to come back for the brooch, it might do nothing for him. It might turn out to be so ludicrously inadequate that it would only kill whatever little scrap of hope he had left.

He pulled out the brooch. He didn't have the time to look at it now. He stuffed it in his breast pocket between the fake papers and his heart. If his luck held up, in a couple of hours he would be able to take a long look at it in a bathroom on a train headed north, but as he headed for the front door he already knew that it had been worth coming back for. He felt less alone with it in his pocket. He took one last glance around his old home before limping into the street, not bothering to close the door behind him.

Part Two

A
dam sweated in front of the messenger boxes, squinting at the names in the letter:
Dagmar Stahlmann, Dagmar Gopstein, Dagmar Aisenthal
. The last day in June, a strong sun still beamed in the sky at five o'clock in the evening, blinding him as he scanned the white paper. He had waited a month to hear back from the Jewish Agency, and it was worth it.

           
Dear Mr. Soccorso,

                 
We have three Dagmars in our files and the forwarding addresses for two of them. Their information is below. Be advised, however, that the address for Mrs. Dagmar Gopstein hasn't been updated since 1969. We hope this proves helpful. We wish you the best of luck with your search.

Sincerely, Lymore Mendelsohn Associate Archivist

The Aisenthal one from the UK, he could forget. Born in 1971. But the other two were perfect—both around eighty, originally from Germany, and living in Israel in 1947. He was down to two people with last names. And one had a phone number and an address where he could knock on the door and place the brooch in her hand.

When he got to the volunteers' phone, ready with the letter and the tokens, another foreigner was chatting on it. He waited, leaning on a pillar.
Although the girl was gabbing in Russian, he could tell by her gossipy tone and mindless toying with the cord that the conversation was trivial. Come on, get off, get off, he thought, eyes darting from the girl to the quad and back to the girl. The solitary tree's hard fruits, which were an orangey-red for a few weeks, were light green again, and rounder, larger, the size of baseballs now. At last the sun was softening, bringing a slow close to the third day in a row topping ninety degrees.

The girl was in the middle of one of those long drawn-out goodbyes—“
Okay, okay, da, da, pokah, da, ya tozhe, chao, okay . . .
”—while another Russian approached the phone. Adam readied to pounce. If he'd learned one thing over the last few weeks, it was that Israelis and Russians didn't give a shit about lines. As soon as the girl moved to put down the receiver, he grabbed it from her hand.

She screwed her face. “Excuse me.”

To Adam's relief, the other guy waved his hand as if the phone weren't worth the wait and walked off with the girl.

The letter shook in his hand as he punched in the number. Hopefully this one with the contact information was his Dagmar. The phone played back the melody of numbers, hummed, and clicked into a connection.

One ring. How should he introduce himself? Two rings. Should he tell her everything on the phone, or just ask to meet her? Three rings. He really should have decided that beforehand. Four.

Twelve rings and no one had picked up, not even an answering machine. He wondered if he should hang up and try again later, or if he should stay on the phone, letting it ring and ring until someone answered, even if that was five hours from now. Then came the crackle of someone lifting the receiver, followed by more crackling.

“Hello?” Adam said. “Hello?”

The rustling continued until an old man offered a slow, shaky: “Shalom?”

“Shalom, may I please speak with Mrs. Gopstein?”

“Dagmar? You want to speak with Dagmar?” His German accent was sluggish, heavily aspirated.

“Yes, that's right. Thank you.”

“I'm sorry. Dagmar died three years ago.”

“Oh.” Adam revisited the letter, praying now that his Dagmar was the other one. “Can you tell me, did Mrs. Gopstein live on a kibbutz?”

He leaned on the phone, squeezed his eyes, waited for the answer.

“Dagmar?” The old man chuckled. “On a kibbutz? Ho, that's funny. My wife was a real city girl. Barely made do with the theater scene in Tel Aviv. She would have been Europe's greatest theater critic if things had gone differently in the world. Every Saturday she went to the theater and . . .”

Adam couldn't bring himself to interrupt. He fed tokens into the phone while the old man, happy for the chance to talk about his Dagmar, droned on about how his wife always picked up on things in plays or movies that he missed—so why would he go to a show now alone? There would be no pleasure in it, none at all. But back in Berlin, when they were young, and Dagmar dreamed of writing reviews for the
Berliner Tageblatt
. . .

After Adam inserted his last token, he explained they were going to get cut off soon, and the old man said, all right, he would let him go, and then hung up without ever asking why the young American had been inquiring about his wife.

Adam walked toward his room, taking heart in having at least a full name now: Dagmar Stahlmann. It had to be her. But now what? He could write to the United Kibbutz Movement again with the updated information, but he couldn't bear sitting around for another letter, and that office never even wrote him back the first time. Next Tuesday, his day off, he would go to Tel Aviv. He would show up at their office with her full name.
Dagmar Stahlmann
. The more he said it, the more sense it made. It just sounded right.

“Adam, Adam!”

Ulya stood outside her door, beckoning him, her messy hair matching her red terry short shorts. Walking toward her, he had to admit she was a cute girl. It wasn't the first time he'd had to admit this over the last few days.

“Come, hurry.” She drew him into her room. “The boy is back.”

He followed Ulya to her back window, the window that framed her nakedness that first night. Claudette already stood there, craning to see the medics pulling a stretcher out of an ambulance. Adam remembered his first glimpse of the young soldier poring over his music sheets in the guardhouse.

The medics rolled the stretcher along the path behind their building, toward the teenagers' section. The boy was wheeled right past their window,
his body covered by a white sheet, his head swathed in bandages. An obese woman jogged alongside the stretcher, struggling to keep up, her T-shirt soaked through with sweat. She talked nonstop at the medics.

Ulya shook her head while Claudette remained stock-still, unblinking. For five weeks she had waited to find out the boy's fate. At first she couldn't understand why God would have allowed this to happen to the boy who had played His music; but then she surmised, of course, it was her fault. The boy had been fine until her. She had allowed him to help her onto her feet, to clutch her arms—she, who had been planning to kill herself—and just a few hours later, he boarded that bus. She had infected him with her death wish. She knew it made no sense, but the feeling of guilt was undeniable.

Adam turned from the window. “Doesn't look good, head bandaged up like that. I wonder what's wrong with him.”

“I know what's wrong,” said Ulya. “His mom comes to the dairy every day. She's good friends with my boss.”

Adam sat on Ulya's bed, shuffling until his back was against the wall. “So, is he going to walk again?”

Claudette didn't breathe as she waited for the answer. Every day she had wanted to ask Ziva about the boy, but the question lodged in her throat, held back by the fear that if
she
asked about him, spoke his name aloud, it might bring him bad luck and change the answer for the worse.

“His body was covered with—I can't remember what it is called—the little pieces of the bomb that get stuck in your skin . . .”

“Shrapnel?”

“Maybe, yes. And his face and chest were burned, but this will be okay. He will walk and talk. One eye is ruined. But the thing everyone in the dairy is talking about is his ears. The blast burst the eardrums. And the boy loved music. He was the one who was always playing the piano.”

Claudette turned back to the window and gripped the sill.

“So he's deaf?” said Adam.

Ulya lit a cigarette, shook the match. “I think he can hear, but not well. They tried to make new drums from the skin on his arms or neck or somewhere, but it didn't work. They are going to try one more time.”

Claudette dropped her forehead against the pane and rolled her head back and forth. She had to ensure the boy's next operation worked. But how?

Adam pulled his gaze away from Claudette's strange rocking. “You know, I never paid attention to the wounded. Whenever we hear about these suicide attacks, we always ask how many people died, and then we judge how bad the attack was by that number. Three dead, that's sad; twenty dead, that's fucking horrible. I've never read ‘seventy wounded' or whatever and thought, holy shit, that's seventy people who were now going to have to live without a leg or their hearing.”

“Wounded, killed, war, terrorism, I'm so fucking tired of it.” Ulya sat on the bed with Adam. “Are you sure you don't want to take me to the States?”

“No, my little babushka. I'm only going to marry for love.”

Ulya blew smoke rings that dissipated against the languid sweep of the standing fan. She pictured Farid, how he lay in the heat the night before, talking about his big fancy restaurant in his sad little underwear. She smiled to herself.

“Is there something funny about me getting married for love?”

“What? No.” She turned to Adam and noticed his hand fussing in his pocket again. “Why do you always have your hand in your pocket?”

Adam's eyes went down to his pocket. He hadn't realized he was grasping the brooch. “I don't.”

“Yes. You're always playing down there, and it looks like you're playing with your dick.”

Ulya pulled her feet onto the bed and sat facing him, cross-legged. Adam glanced, instinctively, at her soft inner thighs and the band of red terry just wide enough to cover her crotch. He felt himself getting hard. His first spontaneous boner in months. He crossed his legs.

“It's not my dick, okay. It's nothing. I mean, it's not nothing, but . . .”

“But what? What do you have in your pocket?”

He arched his back, felt his hard-on press against his pants. Then, more for himself than Ulya, wanting to be reminded of why he was here, he pulled out the brooch.

“This.” He held it against his palm, the first time he was showing it to anyone since the jeweler. He immediately went soft.

Ulya had expected something different. She didn't know what, maybe some kind of good-luck charm a man might carry around, a rabbit's foot or skeleton key, not a piece of old-lady jewelry.

“And why do you carry this thing around?”

“It's complicated.”

The way Adam regarded the piece of costume jewelry piqued Ulya's curiosity. “People always say that. Just tell me.”

He couldn't tell her the whole story—the old Florsheim shoebox, Bones and his hoods, the heart attack, the yellowed goodbye letter, the jeweler's blood. But without those details, how would the story make sense?

“You know my grandfather lived on this kibbutz fifty years ago, right? Well, when he was here he tried to give a woman this brooch. She turned it down, turned him down, and it broke his heart. He never got over it. Now I want to find this woman and give her the brooch.”