Safekeeping (31 page)

“The most fearless person I know is Dov Margolin. If it weren't for his bravery, you wouldn't be standing here today. Trying to seduce his wife.”

Franz half nodded. “Dov's part of the reason I'm still alive, it's true. But not all of it. And you don't love him the way I want you to love me.”

“You obviously don't know how much I love Dov.” She managed to keep her eyes on him. And why would she look away? What she had to say was true. “I couldn't love anyone more than I love him. Now it's your turn to fulfill your promise. Please go.”

Franz hesitated, and Ziva wondered if he was going to try to kiss her, if he was going to rush forward and take her in his arms like the fiery couples in the moving pictures. And she wanted him to, because if he attempted to kiss her now, she could push him away. She hadn't been so sure a few minutes earlier, but now she could easily turn him down. Deridingly. Come on, she thought, try to kiss me.

“That's something else we share.” He picked up his lantern. “I keep my word.”

He navigated between the wood panels and bags of cement toward the doorless doorway. He stopped before it and took one last look at her before going through. Ziva continued staring at the empty doorway, the dusty ground and night sky it framed, confounded that such a man could affect her so. She didn't admire him. He wasn't a serious thinker or man of action. He had no honorable ambitions, wasn't a part of any important movement. He seemed immune to the sweep of history. Whatever was happening in the world, he would have given her this lipstick, which she found was still in her hand. Franz would have been Franz no matter when or where or to whom he had been born.

Ziva grabbed a knife from the worktable and sawed the corner off a burlap bag. She rubbed the scratchy cloth on her lips and checked the mirror. A red stain persisted. She rubbed at them again, but it was no use. No matter: it wasn't enough color to make anyone think the unthinkable, that she had been wearing bright red lipstick. It was only enough color to make her look perhaps a little, inexplicably, prettier. She left the half-built schoolhouse, tube of lipstick and smeared scrap of burlap in her pocket, chin raised. She had nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone had uninvited thoughts and feelings; the only thing that mattered was whether one acted on them.

The dancing had ended. Franz was folding down the phonograph while stragglers sat around the dwindling fire smoking cigarettes and passing a flask. Ziva walked up to Dov and held out her hand. He took it, and she helped pull him to his feet. Together they ambled up the dirt path to their bungalow. Seven years had passed since the days of the communal tents, when she and Dov would only have privacy on Shabbat. Everyone had assumed theirs would be the first child born on the kibbutz, to grow up never knowing what it was to be a persecuted minority, a wandering Jew; but people had long ago stopped teasing them about babies. Although no one had said it to her face, she had the feeling most blamed her for their sterility, that she was the barren prig.

She hooked her arm in Dov's. “Did you tell him to get rid of it?”

“Not exactly. Wait before you get upset, Ziva. I said he couldn't play the phonograph as long as he was on the kibbutz, but that he could keep it under his bed and take it with him when he leaves.”

“Leaves? Did he say he was leaving?”

“No, but he's not exactly the type to live the rest of his life on a kibbutz, is he, Ziva?”

Ziva stopped walking and turned to Dov. She wanted him to look at her, while her lips still bore a hint of red. She wanted to see if his crystalline eyes would have even a fleck of the desire that had burned in Franz's black eyes as he contemplated her lips in the unfinished schoolhouse.

Dov looked confused. She smiled, sadly. He said, “What is it, Ziva?”

It was shortsighted of Franz to not want the love she felt for Dov. It didn't make her dizzy, but it made her steady, made her feel like herself in a way that nobody else did. Franz wanted a carnal love, but that dizziness couldn't last forever, and what she had with Dov would.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Dov pinched her cheek. “Don't worry, Zivale. Everything will be back to normal in the morning.”

Ziva opened her eyes and saw Claudette wiping down a grave at the far end of the cemetery. How long had she been sitting here with her eyes shut? She held out her wristwatch far enough to make out the hands. Three o'clock? Could she have been daydreaming for nearly an hour? Wouldn't the girl have noticed? Claudette seemed to be in her own world again, wiping down the grave and—was she talking to herself? Ziva got
to her feet. She would just have to work twice as hard to make up for the lost time.

When they finished cleaning the cemetery, Ziva and Claudette returned the tin buckets, watering cans, and rags to the garden shed, where shovels awaited a more gruesome chore. Walking away from the graves, Claudette couldn't believe she still hadn't given in. As they walked through the fields, her body itched to run back and finish tracing the father's grave. She kept repeating in her head
It isn't true
,
it isn't true
while putting one foot in front of the other, letting the foot land where it landed, even if, once they were back on the cement paths between the houses, it landed on a line.

As they were passing the
kolbo
, Ziva stopped Claudette with a hand on her arm. Claudette assumed the old woman needed a rest. It wasn't hard to see the walks home were getting harder for her. Last week, Ziva had been given an electric golf cart, which was how members ten years younger than her buzzed about the kibbutz, but she refused to use it. The cart sat in front of her apartment, only brought to life once a week when Eyal came around to make sure the battery was charged.

“I would like to buy you something, Claudette.”

“Buy me something?”

In front of the store, a spotted dog panted in the shade under a tomato stand, and children leaned on a crate of oranges, licking yellow popsicles.

“Yes, Claudette. A little gift.”

Claudette followed Ziva through the chiming door and into the air-conditioned store. The plump, ruddy-faced cashier acknowledged Ziva with a nod. When Claudette was a child, she used to wish someone would give her a gift. At Christmastime, she rummaged through the bins of donated dolls, sweaters, and kaleidoscopes, imagining the girls who'd been given these things when they were new. Over the last half a year, Louise had bought Claudette a bra, a toothbrush, and the costly airplane ticket to Israel. She didn't mean to be ungrateful, but none of these things gave her the silly delight she had imagined those girls felt ripping away the festive wrapping paper. Louise gave what her poor half sister needed. It wasn't Louise's fault—she meant well—but if anything, these handouts made Claudette feel like a burden.

“Where are the lipsticks?”

“Lipsticks?” The cashier gave Ziva a bemused smirk. “For you?”

“Just tell me where they are.”

The cashier pointed down the middle aisle, and Claudette followed Ziva to a small shelf space reserved for makeup. Eye pencils stuck out of a tin canister, and a repurposed shoebox held a disarray of blushes, lipsticks, and mascaras.

Ziva rooted through the shoebox, disappointed by the plastic cases of these mass-produced lipsticks. No silvery elegance. At least back then capitalists had some concern for workmanship. She held up a green-tubed CoverGirl between her misshapen fingers. “Do you like this one?”

Claudette took the tube and turned it around in her hands. Ziva told her to pull off the cap and turn it. Claudette did, and Ziva crumpled her face.

“Blech. Pink is such an insipid color.”

While Ziva fished again in the shoebox, Claudette spied Ulya standing in front of a shelf of shampoos. Ulya's eyes were on the cashier as she slipped a purple bottle into her work shirt. So that was how her roommate brought home so many new beauty products.

“How about this one?” Ziva inspected under the tube. “Oh, but look at its stupid name!
Rosy the Riveting
! Isn't that offensive? Sickening?” Ziva tossed the lipstick back in the box. “You know, I really don't know what we're doing here. Let's forget it.”

“Okay.” Claudette tried not to sound disappointed. “I don't deserve lip . . . I mean, I don't wear it.”

Ziva could see the girl was crestfallen. How had she gotten herself into such a predicament? “Well, maybe we can find one without such an offensive name.”

She picked up a white plastic tube.
Tropical Sunset
. She twisted out a stick the hue of ripe papaya and held it out. “What do you think?”

Claudette nodded. “Yes, that's very nice.”

On their way to the mirror at the back of the store, they passed Ulya, coming in the opposite direction, arms crossed over her work shirt. Ulya gave a curt “Hi” as she went by.

At the mirror, the old woman stood in back while the younger one painted her lips. Ziva found the effect to be as immediate as it had been with her, so long ago, in the dimly lit schoolhouse. The bold coral brightened the girl's complexion, brought out the russet in her eyes and hair.
Standing next to the healthy young woman, it was impossible for Ziva to miss how much she'd yellowed, like an old newspaper. Claudette blinked at her image. Ziva smiled.

“I never thought I would ever write ‘lipstick' next to your name,” said the cashier, jotting down the purchase in the logbook. “I just read ‘Utopia on the Auction Block.'”

“What? I didn't know it was going to be in today's newsletter. I was told next week.”

The cashier put down the pen. “It was well written. But that kind of thing, you know, is out of style.”

“What kind of thing? You mean, social responsibility?”

“Well, yes. Today people want to know—have the right to know—what's in it for them. All this talk about the common good, it's up in the air. It's like . . .” The cashier rubbed her fingers together as if feeling for something that wasn't quite there. “It's like fluff.”

Ziva left the store, having trouble breathing. Claudette hurried after her. Fluff? She leaned on Claudette's shoulder.

“Do you want to sit down, Ziva?”

She shook her head.

Claudette regarded the lipstick in her hands. “I'm very happy with my present.”

Ziva nodded, unable to care about the lipstick now. She turned and walked in the direction of the old people's quarter, leaving Claudette in front of the store with the small white tube. Claudette patted her lips together to feel the softness. And—

The boy.

The guilt winded her. She had forgotten about him as soon as Ziva said the word
gift
. She had walked into the store feeling sorry for whom? Herself. Because nobody had ever given her a present. While the boy suffered in bed with burns and blindness and deafness, she reveled over lipstick.

You could go back to the cemetery
. The Bad Feeling was right. She could still go back and trace the inscription on the father's grave two hundred times. Three hundred times to make up for not doing it right away. Unable to read Hebrew, how could she be certain which was the right grave? She would have to trace the markings three hundred times on all the graves in its general vicinity.

Claudette brought a hand up to her throat. “It isn't true.”

Two women seated on a bench watched her warily.

“It isn't true,” she repeated aloud as she walked away from the store, not toward the cemetery, but in the direction of the volunteers' section. “It isn't true.”

When she reached her room, she closed the door and backed into a corner. Everything in the room accused her: the chests of drawers, Ulya's orange dress crumpled on the floor, the white walls. She hunched down and, wrapping her hand around her waist, clawed at her side as if she were trying to rip herself out of herself.
It isn't true. It isn't true. It isn't true.

The rosary beckoned from her bedside table. She rushed at it, thinking she would say three hundred Hail Marys instead of tracing the grave. How could saying Hail Marys be wrong? She balanced the lipstick on the bedside table and picked up the rosary. She held it in her hand, the sacrificed Son dangling. If she wanted to say Hail Marys, that would be all right. But she couldn't say them for the Bad Feeling anymore. She shuddered as she lay the rosary back down.

“It isn't true.” She paced. “It isn't true.”

Night fell. Ulya came home, and Claudette intoned
It isn't true
in her head while they crawled into their respective beds. All night she spoke over the Bad Feeling's protests.
It isn't true, it isn't true
. The fan whirred back and forth, fluttering the pages of Ulya's magazines, the corners of their bedsheets. They had failed to close the blinds, and the white lipstick tube on her bedside table glowed in the pale light. Ulya got up to go to the bathroom once.

At last the birds were cheeping. The rising sun, coming through the open blinds, striped the room in a smoldering coral, like her lipstick. Feeling feverish, Claudette trembled under the wool blanket. She never even closed her eyes, but she had done it. She hadn't returned to the cemetery or reached again for the rosary.