Safekeeping (29 page)

His mother heaved herself out of the chair. She never stayed long. She did a terrible job hiding how hard it was for her to be around him.

“We'll ask for a TV,” she said.

“What?” He caught himself too late again.

“We'll—get—you—a—television!”

“You know I don't watch TV.”

“Maybe you will now.
Seinfeld
is funny.”

His mother pressed the lids back on the Tupperwares of untouched food and waddled over to his minifridge. Her rolls bulged against her T-shirt as she bent over to find room for the containers. He could always tell how his mother was doing by her weight, and he'd never seen her fatter.

His stepfather patted the bed. “Keep your chin up, Ofiri.”

His mother stood by the door. “Whatever you do, don't go in the sun: the burns need to heal. Don't open the blinds during the day. Don't get up, except to go to the bathroom. Don't touch the bandages. And don't stay up all night. Get some sleep. And you're going to need to start eating.”

His parents pushed through the screen door, leaving him alone for the remainder of the night, alone in the room where everything looked exactly
as it did that morning he set out for army jail, exhilarated from the best night he'd ever had at the piano. The kasbah mirror hung where he'd nailed it. The information packets from the best conservatories in the world still sat on his desk: the navy folder from Yale, Juilliard's red glossy booklet, the catalog of classes from the Royal College of Music in London. The Speedy Gonzales T-shirt he'd taken off to put on his army uniform was still draped over the back of his chair.

How many visitors did he have today? Twelve. Nine if he counted his mom's four visits as one visitor. Nine visitors and zero connections. Every day it became more obvious that no one could hear the whistle in his head but him. That no one else would ever hear it.

I
t was nine in the morning and already sweltering, even under the eucalyptuses that shaded the modest graveyard. Ziva and Claudette began the cleanup by tackling the weeds growing around the recumbent tombstones.

“I'm the only one who wants to work here.” Ziva tugged on the yellow star thistle sprouting around the only English gravestone:
Daniel Birnbaum, 1924–1989, Born in Cincinnati, Ohio
. “But there are more people here I want to be around than in the dining hall.”

Claudette, attempting to pull out each weed with an even number of tugs, couldn't have imagined a cemetery more different from the one covering the slope of Mount Royal, where Louise had taken her to visit their mother's snowcapped headstone. At the bottom of that sprawling cemetery hummed the gray city. When Claudette returned in the spring, the stone angels and crosses basked among green grass and giant leafy oaks. This cemetery had no snow, no grass, no sprawling city, no angels. Its few dozen graves rested among parched cacti, dusty earth, and white gravel paths. The limestone tombs lay flat like white stone beds.

“Come see this grave, Claudette.”

Claudette joined Ziva in front of a slab of weathered white stone, its recessed Hebrew letters packed with dirt. Ziva had explained that Jews left a rock on the grave when they visited, but this one had none.

“That's Ziva Peled's grave.”

“Your mother's?”

“No. My mother died in Theresienstadt . . . I think. And Jews don't name their children after themselves. There's no such thing as Shmulik Goldberg the third. Look at the date of death, Claudette.”

There wasn't one. It read
1915–

“This grave has been waiting for me for forty-six years. People say it's morbid, that it's against Jewish tradition, blah, blah. I think they're being ridiculous: there's a bit of land waiting for everyone, whether your name's on it or not. And it brings me great comfort to know that I will lie next to my best friend.” Hand on her back, she grabbed a stone from the ground and added it to the pile on the grave beside hers. “My dear Dov.”

Claudette recalled the face from the black-and-white photo, the clear eyes, the serious mouth under the thin blond mustache. The dates on the grave—
1915–1948
—revealed that he had died not so long after that picture was taken. She had assumed Ziva had lost her husband only a few years ago, when they were both old.

“How did Dov die?”

“In the War of Independence. After working so hard to create the Jewish state, he only lived in it for two weeks.”

Claudette was confused: Hadn't this always been a Jewish place? What about Jesus? She lowered her eyes. “I'm sorry.”

Ziva shook her head. “Don't be. Dov died fighting. Israel declared independence, and the next day we were attacked by five Arab armies. Can you imagine that, Claudette? The country wasn't a day old and we were fighting Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt. Two weeks into the war, the Syrians made it to Sadot Hadar, and all we had were Molotov cocktails, a few grenades, and one, just one, antitank gun. Dov was shot over there, where the mandarin grove is now.” She pointed at a shallow hill covered by lush green trees. “I got to him within seconds, but he was already dead. The bullet went right through his head.” She continued to gaze in the direction of the grove. “But no, don't be sorry. There are worse ways for a Jew to die than fighting. People won't like me saying this, but in a shower, for instance.”

While they weeded, Claudette asked herself: Was there a more shameful way to die than with a plastic bag over your head and veins surging with medicine stolen from a sick old woman? These days the Bad Feeling was more demanding than ever, telling her to do this and that and if she didn't the boy's operation wouldn't work. Tolerating the Bad Feeling was even harder after experiencing what it felt like to live without it, if only briefly.

Ziva tugged the thistle from Dov's tombstone. “When we buried Dov, it was very simple, very dignified. After lowering him into the ground, we all stood around in silence for a minute or two, each of us left with our own thoughts, and then we started shoveling the dirt on him. No prayers. No
Blessed art Thou, O Lord
claptrap. Now everyone says the Kaddish. We tried so hard to keep religion out of the kibbutz, and for the most part, we did, except when it came to death. Even the most rational people can't seem to bury their loved ones without some hocus-pocus. I know you're religious, Claudette, and probably don't like me calling it all hocus-pocus, but I can't pretend to respect something I don't.”

Claudette was too distracted to be offended. She had pulled out a weed on the seventh tug—an uneven number. Now, to even things out, she had to make sure it took seven tugs to pull out the next weed, or the boy's operation wouldn't work.

With the weeding finished, Ziva and Claudette watered the cacti and the eucalyptuses. The day had grown even hotter, and the tin watering cans were too scalding to handle without wetting their hands first. Claudette had to give each plant eight spills of water, no matter if it was a tall tree or a wee flower. To give a plant the right amount of water, she had to adjust the lengths of the spills. If she made a mistake and splashed a plant a ninth time, she had to give it an additional seven teeny pours. All the while the idea of a dignified death hung around her like the heat. Even if she never swallowed the pills, was it possible to have a dignified death after an undignified life? Look at her, pouring seven extra drops on a cactus as if it mattered.

She rested the watering can. “Ziva, how do you want to die? If you could choose?”

Ziva laid a hand against a eucalyptus. What a question. Most people refused to talk about such things, but not this girl. She had to give her that. Leaning on the tree, she surveyed the fields unfolding from the shaded cemetery, the dark green mint, the purple rows of cabbages, the yellow lines of the flowering peanut plants.

“Working,” she said. “I would like to die working, preferably in the fields.”

Claudette noticed the old woman appeared very yellow against the tree. Not olive, but unquestionably yellow—her face the ochre of old scotch tape, blue veins bulging on mustardy calves.

“I don't want to die in bed. I've never been lazy, and I don't deserve to die with my head on a pillow. It wouldn't be fair, Dov in battle and me in bed.”

After lunch, sandwiches eaten in the shade of the largest eucalyptus, the women wiped down the dusty gravestones. The midday sun bore through the trees, leaving dazzling flecks of light on the limestone and white gravel paths. Every now and then, while the women dunked their rags in buckets of bath-warm water, a breeze blew through the trees, bringing momentary relief and making the flecks of light dance. Somewhere in the sky, military planes broke the sound barrier.

“That's a sad one.” Ziva pointed at the grave Claudette was wiping down. “You know that boy who was in the bus bombing? Ofir? That's his father's grave.”

Claudette froze, her rag over the inscription.

“That boy's poor mother. First her parents starve in the Łódź ghetto while she's hiding in a convent in England. Then her first husband's killed in the Yom Kippur War, while she's pregnant with the boy—which, by the way, I can relate to, because I was pregnant with Eyal when Dov died. And after all that, the boy, her only child, gets blown up on a bus.”

“The boy . . . do you know how he's doing? Is he going to be all right?”

Ziva shrugged. “Depends on how you define all right. If I were him, I'd be all right. He has his legs, his hands, his brain. Personally, I think hearing is the least important of all the senses. But the boy really lived for music.”

“But the operation . . . I heard they were going to do the operation again. Did they?”

“They did. It failed. They tried to graft him new eardrums three times. The skin doesn't stay. And now they think that maybe the little bones deeper in his ears are too damaged anyway.”

“So he'll no longer be able to play music?”

“I don't know.”

Claudette traced the foreign letters on the father's grave with her finger. She would trace the father's name a hundred times—no, two hundred. She would trace the father's inscription two hundred times to make sure the boy could still play his piano.

She finished a third tracing. The prospect of doing this a hundred and ninety-seven more times—assuming she traced them all perfectly—was
unbearable, but if she refused, wouldn't it seem like she didn't care about the boy's plight? What if her lack of caring was taken into account by God and this affected the boy's chances of being able to play music? She saw Ziva carrying her bucket to a new grave.

She had lost count. Or rather, she hadn't lost count, but worried that she had anyway. Just in case, she would have to start over. Even though she didn't want to. Even though she didn't truly believe it would make any difference. If these rituals made a difference, why after six weeks of saying Hail Marys for the boy and counting the leaves in the trees and chewing her food in even numbers did the operation not work?

Before she fully understood what she was doing, she was standing up and backing away from the grave. She walked backward with the heavy pail of water, eyeing the white grave as if she were afraid to wake it up. Her fists were clutched so tight, the nails dug into the skin of her palms, as she whispered,
Ce n'est pas vrai.

It isn't true.
She whispered it again and again as she knelt before a different grave with the rag.
It isn't true.
Her heart beat in sharp painful bursts. Was she really going to refuse to do a ritual? Disobey the Bad Feeling? She would keep repeating the phrase until she left the cemetery.
Ce n'est pas vrai
. She had to fight so hard not to return to the father's grave that she shivered in the heat, felt close to throwing up.

Ziva noticed Claudette looking ill and supposed the Canadian wasn't used to the high temperature. “Claudette, have you been drinking enough water?”

“I think so.”

“Your pee should be clear.”

Ziva felt a little queasy herself. She hoped she wasn't suffering from mild sunstroke. She used to handle the heat with ease. Maybe it was the drugs that made her more sensitive? Some warned of photosensitivity, whatever that was exactly. Her sweaty cotton shirt stuck to her back and bulging belly, which got a painful squeeze every time she bent over. It had only been three weeks since she'd had the fluid pumped. It used to take four months before she noticed any discomfort. Ziva arched her back, and the blood rushed from her head. Her vision darkened. She leaned on a grave and lowered herself to the ground. And she had just been worrying about the girl. She would sit down for just a minute. Just until everything
stopped spinning. She closed her eyes, but still the graves circled her. All those graves, all her old comrades.

“Ziva! Ziva! Your hands!” Dov shouted as he danced past her. She was dancing in the inner circle and had once again failed to clap her hands. She was wretched at the hora. Dov, face illuminated by the campfire, shook his head at her in mock disappointment as the dancing pulled him away.

Round and round—it was dizzying—and when she next had to clap hands, this time with a Hungarian refugee, she failed once more. A strange sound floating over their singing had distracted her. She broke from the hora and stood between the two circles listening for the source of that sound. What was it? Jazz music? Others stopped to listen too, and the hora circles slowed to a halt.