Safekeeping (27 page)

“Oh, God!” Ulya leaned over the bed to stub her cigarette in an ashtray on the floor, giving Adam a close-up of her ass, the red short shorts hugging the roundness, riding up the crack. “You and your fucking grandfather again. Why do you want to give the brooch to somebody who didn't want it in the first place? This makes no sense.”

“Because I do. This woman is the only person my grandfather ever wanted to have it.”

Ulya shook her head. “No. There's something weird here.”

Claudette glanced at the brooch but hardly registered it. She turned back to the window, where the medics were returning down the path with an empty stretcher. She had decided to walk around the perimeter of the kibbutz for the injured boy. But how many times? The number of pills he stopped her from taking? That was impossible. It couldn't be done in a month. She might still be walking when he went into the operation.

Ulya brought her face closer to the brooch. Adam smelled her vanilla perfume and strawberry shampoo and a tangy trace of BO. He stared down at her bowed head, the light blonde roots in the red, and had a flash fantasy—his libido was definitely back—that she were giving him a blowjob. Jesus, not now, he thought, not while talking about the brooch.

“All these gems,” she said, “they can't be real.”

“Oh they're real. It's real.”

She had difficulty believing it. She could picture this kind of brooch in the treasury at the Kremlin. “If it's real, how much is it worth?”

“I don't know. A lot.”

She looked at him, her face so close to his. “How much is a lot? Five hundred dollars?”

Adam snorted, shook his head.

“More?”

“Yeah, a little.”

She sat back. “Five thousand?”

He made a sweeping motion upward with his hand.

Her eyebrows arched. “How much more?”

He turned his gaze to the brooch. “I don't know exactly. Probably worth more than my apartment. This brooch has been in my family for almost seven hundred years. Can you imagine that? Seven hundred years.”

Ulya turned back to the brooch. More valuable than an apartment in New York? Then it had to be worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Since stealing the magazine in the train station, she had stolen many, many things, but nothing so valuable as this. The most expensive was a dress with a price tag of four hundred shekels. Some would say, she supposed, that it was stealing from the State of Israel to pretend she was a Jew, but stealing from a state didn't count. Even stealing a dress from a store like Mango wasn't really stealing since it didn't hurt any one person. It wasn't like stealing from a neighbor or a friend. Or even a stranger. From actual people, she'd taken nothing, except maybe a lipstick here, a scarf there, some kopeks off a table. The magazine. But a family heirloom? If she needed it to survive, fine. But otherwise, she wasn't sure she wanted to do that.

“And where do you keep this thing all the time if it's worth so much?”

Adam patted the front pocket of his jeans and, seeming to have heard her thoughts, said, “Never leaves me. Ever. I even sleep with it. I take it into the bathroom when I shower. Someone would have to kill me to get this brooch.”

Ulya smiled. “And how do you know I won't kill you?”

“Don't get me wrong, Ulie, I think you're badass, but I don't think you have murder in you. Anyway, it shouldn't be long until I've gotten it to Dagmar. This Tuesday I'm going to Tel Aviv and—”

“Tel Aviv?” Her face lit up, and she jumped onto her knees, shaking the bed. “I'm coming!”

“I'm not sure I invited you,” he said, though he liked that she wanted to come.

“It's going to be so fun! Tel Aviv isn't Moscow or New York, but at least it isn't the kibbutz.”

The ambulance pulled away, and Claudette turned from the window. She would walk the perimeter of the kibbutz five times, because it had
been five in the morning when the boy shook her awake. She headed for the door. It was going to be a long, long night. If only she had ignored the music, taken the pills. She didn't think she could be in a hell worse than the one she had tried to escape. She still had the pills, hidden in the backpack under the bed, but she couldn't escape before the boy's operation.

Adam said, “Where you going, Claudette the Astonishing?”

“To walk around the kibbutz.”

When the door closed behind her, Ulya pointed at her head and made crazy circles.

Z
iva admired the final draft of her article, painstakingly rewritten onto the pages of a new legal pad. “Utopia on the Auction Block” had taken her far too long to write, but in the end she hadn't let any of it stop her—her deteriorating body, the specter of Franz's grandson, her wandering mind, the fatigue. She wielded the pen ruthlessly, erasing and reworking every sentence, every argument, until she was left with her most inspiring rhetoric yet.

She turned in her chair as if she would find Dov sitting on the couch, waiting to share in her triumph. After all these years, she still felt in these moments his pride in her. Her eyes wandered to his portrait, obscured by the glare on the glass, and then to the wall clock. It was almost three in the morning.

Too exhilarated to go to sleep, she would immediately walk the article over to the library, where that young woman—Mara? Maya?—edited and printed the newsletter. She would take the long way, posting the
SAVE THE KIBBUTZ
! flyers she had made over the last week. They weren't fancy, just blue marker on white paper, but sometimes simple hit hardest. And it was best to spread posters at night, so people woke up to them in the morning. That's how they did it when she was a student.

Stepping out her front door, she saw the light on in Eyal's office. What could he be doing in there at all hours? Brainstorming new ways to ruin the place? He hadn't had a girlfriend since that artsy-fartsy Orna woman, ten years ago already. Why hadn't he just gone and lived in Tel Aviv with her? Why did he refuse to leave the kibbutz if all he was going to do
was try to destroy it? It didn't make sense. Maybe he was subconsciously seeking revenge on his mother.

Such a muggy, quiet night. She would wait until she had passed the old people's building before hanging up a sign. No use wasting posters on people who, aside from her, didn't work anymore; they would never vote for salaries. It was the future she had to convince. Walking with her article, her stack of signs, and a roll of scotch tape, Ziva felt very much in her element. In the eighties, she drove around Galilee gumming up posters for the Labor Party. During the wars of the sixties and seventies, she hiked about the Jezreel Valley with heartening images of dancing children and homegrown watermelons. There were a few posters, she was proud to say, she had nailed up at great risk to herself. In 1936, she and another woman, dressed as British officers' wives, marched up to the British police station in Haifa and hammered a sign to its door with the warning:
GO HOME OR ELSE
! And three years before that, while still a girl in Berlin, she pinned to the school's bulletin board a drawing of a buck-toothed Hitler Youth under the dictum:
ONLY COWARDS JOIN THE HITLER YOUTH
! Dov and another freckled boy from their Maccabi Hatzair chapter, a
mischling,
as the Nazis would have called him, a half-breed, whose name she hadn't been able to recall for decades, stood guard on either end of the hallway. Wait! His name was David. And they called him Bloomie. Funny, for most of her life she couldn't remember, and now there it was, both his real name and nickname.

Ziva reached the smaller houses belonging to young couples without children and stopped to tape her first poster to a lamppost. While breaking off the tape, she heard a rustle behind her and quickly turned around. Just a rabbit darting out of a bush. She exhaled and went back to taping the poster. Instead of having to watch out for Nazis or British patrolmen or Arab raiders, she had to beware of busybodies who would ask her if she thought it was a good idea to be out at this hour. And where was her helper from Canada? they would say. It was sickening the way people treated someone like a child as soon as they reached a certain age. She wanted to shout into their concerned little faces that she was taking on the world before their parents had even fucked, but her bluntness, a point of pride her whole life, was now shrugged off as crotchety old-ladyhood. Fuming, Ziva scanned about for another good place for a poster and, lo and behold, there was her son's bungalow. She would stick one to his front door.

By the time Ziva reached the western edge of the kibbutz, she had posted all her signs and was out of breath. Her skin prickled from the heat, and her knees smarted with every step. She wheezed up the path to the library, which had a banner along its white wall, faint ink on continuous computer paper:
WELCOME BACK, OFIR
! She paused at the door to savor the moment before slipping the article into the metal slot.

With only the roll of scotch tape left, she hobbled over to a wooden picnic table to rest before starting the trek back. Nestled in a patch of pines, the table overlooked the bank leading down to the plastics factory. An ugly but practical factory. Corrugated steel, cement, a parking lot. That boy was right about one thing: the cotton fields had been magical. In September, before the harvesting, a sea of white fluff glowed in the sunlight. Ziva exhaled deeply, trying to expel the nostalgia. Nostalgia was an idle person's ailment.

She took a shorter route back to the old people's quarters, cutting across the parking lot and its flock of white Subarus—compacts, hatchbacks, minivans, some new and shiny, others beat up. Look how many cars the kibbutz had now. She paused to count the keys in the cabinet. Twenty-three. One missing. Why did people need their own cars when they had twenty-four sitting here waiting for them?

“Ziva?”

Two teenage boys and a girl stood beside her. The handsome boy with the thick dark eyebrows held the missing key. She didn't know any of their names—when had she stopped knowing everyone's name?—though she could guess who their parents were.

“Yes?”

“It's late,” said the girl, glittery purple stars hanging from her ears. “Is everything okay? Can we help you?”

“Can
you
help
me
? How dare you tell me it's late. If one of us should have a bedtime, it's you, don't you think?”

The teenagers exchanged looks. The handsome boy, smirking, reached past Ziva to return the key to its hook. Then they walked off, waiting until they were a couple of meters away before bursting into laughter. She heard the shorter, gingery boy call her a witch.

She arrived at her apartment in nearly unbearable pain. Her joints burned. The marrow in her bones throbbed. She leaned on her desk to read her article one last time, the hand copy she had made to later verify the
newsletter hadn't messed with her words. Was it indeed a tour de force? She found that it was.

Reassured that her pain was worth it, she changed into her nightie and limped to the bathroom to take her nightly muscle relaxer and opioid. Removing the cap from the opioids, she found only a couple of pills at the bottom of the bottle. Hadn't she picked up a two-month supply only a month ago? She was sure of it. Was she losing her mind? Fear fluttered in her chest. A deteriorating body she could handle, not a failing mind.

She climbed into bed. At least tomorrow was Shabbat, and she could rest. She rolled onto one side, and then the other. It was impossible to fall asleep before the pills carried away the pain. It wouldn't be too long. As much as she hated relying on so many pills, she was grateful for them. Without them, she might not have been able to keep working. Oh, yes, she could feel the sharp pain softening to a mild throb. Hmm, very good. Soon even the throbbing would disappear. When the hurt lifted, it always left her with a strange floaty feeling. Like lying on a stockpile of cotton.

That field of white. She remembered walking through it, the dusty path puffing under her boots. All around her, ripe white fluff, and the sky above a perfect blue, as if all the clouds had fallen to the ground. Her mind was at peace—it always was when she was heading into the fields. Her whole life she had watched people look for that peace—on psychologists' couches, at ashrams, in nightcaps—when all they had to do was give themselves over to honest labor.

“Hello, Ziva.”

Startled, she turned to Franz, who was short of breath from jogging to catch up. It crossed her mind to pretend not to remember his name. But why would she do that? Sometimes she had to wonder if she were the one making things needlessly awkward.

“Hello, Franz.”

“I'm also working in the cotton fields. It seems I've been deemed well enough to work outdoors.”

He did look healthier, the tendons in his face no longer visible, though the cheekbones were still too sharp. His black hair didn't grow in patches anymore; it was thick and combed back with pomade. Who wore pomade to work in the fields? He was as clean-shaven as if he'd stepped out of a barbershop. Most men on the kibbutz shaved only on Fridays, but come to think of it, she had never seen Franz with bristles. His ironed shirt glowed
as white as the cotton fluffs. And yet, for all the newfound health and careful grooming, the hue of someone recently sick lingered, an ashen cast.