Safekeeping (33 page)

Adam tried to picture an old Ulya, not merely an Ulya with wrinkles around her eyes and fallen jowls, but an Ulya whose spirit had been eroded by time, a tired Ulya, an Ulya too exhausted to covet fuchsia pumps, New York City, anything as badly as she wanted them now. It seemed to Adam only the young claimed they were “going to die” if they didn't get the thing they wanted, and Adam couldn't picture Ulya without that kind of wanting.

“Can't do it,” he said. “I just can't picture someone like you ever being forty.”

She smiled, and they walked on. Ulya could tell Adam was starting to have feelings for her. Could she pretend to have feelings as well? For two whole years? Maybe that wouldn't be so horrible. People had boyfriends and girlfriends for that length of time, longer, that they said “I love you” to, when they weren't sure they did, when they knew they were going to leave them some day. Would it be so different from that?

They came upon a trendy beach bar. On a black wooden deck that extended into the sandy shore were low white wicker couches with bright red pillows and matching sun umbrellas.

“Is it time for our drink now?”

Adam scraped his Converse against the ground. “We just finished our ice cream.”

“So?”

He looked into the place: young people relaxed on the red cushions, smoking cigarettes, chilling out to the ambient house music. It'd be so nice to sit like that with Ulya.

“I'll sit with you, but I'm just going to have a Diet Coke.”

This was too close. He felt it the moment they entered the bar. He wasn't scared enough. He needed to be so scared of relapsing that he kept a safe distance. The danger didn't begin with the first sip, but when you stopped being scared that you might take a first sip. You're scared, he told himself. You're fucking scared.

They took a table at the far end of the deck. The sea waves roared under the electronic beats. Ulya crossed her shapely legs and fished lip balm out of her purse.

“Have you noticed Claudette wears this bright lipstick now?”

Adam laughed. “She's a weird one.”

Ulya rubbed the balm on her lips as the waiter set two menus on the table. A scared alcoholic would leave the menu alone, thought Adam, picking it up. He read the small selection from the English panel. Two local beers. Herzl would be proud: Hebrew menus, Jewish beer. A nation like any other now. If he wanted to taste Israeli beer, he could just swish it around in his mouth and spit it out. What? Stop. That was crazy thinking. Think scared.

“Shalom.” The waiter stood over them.

Ulya handed back her menu. “I'll have a screwdriver without the orange juice.”

Adam opened his mouth and now he was scared, scared of what was going to come out. “I'll have a Diet Coke.”

He exhaled as the waiter walked away. He did it.

Ulya lit a cigarette and raised her head to blow out smoke. “Diet Coke? That isn't fun.”

Adam lowered his eyes and fingered the wicker handrest. “I'm an alcoholic. And, I guess, a drug addict. But the cocaine, that was mostly so I could keep drinking.”

“Alcoholic? Doesn't that mean you
do
drink? A lot?”

“I'm a recovering alcoholic. It means I can never drink again.”

“Oh.” She turned to the beach. Was she embarrassed for him? Sorry? Did any interest she might have had in him dissipate? She pointed at a woman in a gold bikini and wide-brim straw hat. “I love that girl's bikini. She looks like a movie star.”

Adam didn't know what to make of her changing the subject. He supposed he should be glad for the nonchalance.

The waiter brought their drinks. Ulya sipped. “Blah!” She scrunched her face. “This vodka is disgusting. I'm not even sure it is vodka.”

Adam, wanting to show Ulya that he too could be nonchalant, said, “So where do you go every night? I promise it won't change my opinion of you. I'm just curious.”

He knew for sure now that she didn't want people knowing about her nightly excursions. He noticed that she didn't take the steppingstones up
to the main road but went in the opposite direction, as if she were taking some furtive exit off the kibbutz. She had to be working in one of the nearby towns, because she wasn't buying all those clothes and makeup with the kibbutz's monthly stipend.

Ulya drank the awful vodka, surprised by his words. Wouldn't change his opinion of her? Where did he think she was going?

“It's none of your business.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“Maybe later,” she lied.

When it was time to pay, Ulya pulled a twenty-shekel bill out of her purse.

“Hey,” Adam said. “I thought you didn't have any money.”

“I never said I didn't have money. I said I didn't have money for the bus.”

After strolling along the boardwalk some more and wandering into the nearby streets, it was time to head back to the office. As they came through the door, the receptionist shook her head.

Adam pushed on the desk. “What? How is that possible? I gave you her full name, and she most definitely lived on a kibbutz.”

The receptionist shrugged. “Dagmar Stahlmann, it's such a German name. Maybe she changed it. At that time, after the war, a lot of people changed their names to something more Jewish.”

“What? Are you saying she might not be called Dagmar anymore?”

“Or Stahlmann. Stahlmann isn't a Jewish name. All these names people think of as Jewish are just German. At some point Jews were forced to take on German names. A lot of people when they got to Israel changed their names back to something Hebrew. Shimon Peres used to be Szymon Perski.”

Adam's head was spinning. “Okay. There must be somewhere I can go, some records office where they keep track of name changes. I mean, you can't just change your name. It's like a legal thing, right?”

The woman shook her head. “What office? Israel didn't even exist in 1947. People just started going by something else, and that was that.”

Adam staggered out of the office building and onto the sidewalk.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” He paced back and forth while Ulya leaned on the cement building. “This is a fucking joke. Who ever heard of people changing their names to something
more
Jewish? That's fucking hilarious. Why is this so hard? There's like twelve people in this country, twelve
people who all fucking know each other, and I can't find this one woman. Fuck! I don't even have a name now.”

Adam's pacing and cursing slowed until he stood, silent, head bowed.

“Are you done?” said Ulya.

Adam turned to her. “What?”

“Are you done with your little boy tantrum? Good. Now you think of some other way to find her.”

“Little boy tantrum? Fuck you, you Russian bitch. Oh, excuse me, Belarusian bitch. Are you fucking hearing me? I don't even have a fucking name!”

“Don't shout at me! Think, you American bitch! We're in Tel Aviv, and tonight we have to go back to the kibbutz. Stop crying, and make the most of that. Maybe Tel Aviv has an office—”

“Fuck offices!” Adam paced again. “I've had enough of fucking offices and their fucking forms. I mean, I could go up there and murder . . .”

His eyes fell on a man, seated on a bench, legs crossed, reading a newspaper.

He spun to face Ulya. “Hold on . . . What does everybody do in this news-obsessed country? Read the fucking paper! All the newspaper offices are probably here in Tel Aviv. Make the most of Tel Aviv, you said. I'm sorry for calling you a Russian bitch, Ulie. Come on, let's go ask that guy what's the most popular paper in Israel.”

The man looked over his paper at them, seemingly amused by the foreigners and their question. “Well, it's not this one,
Haaretz
. I would say
Yedioth Ahronoth
.”

“Which paper would a kibbutznik read? I want to use the classifieds to find a woman who lives on a kibbutz.”

“Well, a kibbutznik might read
Haaretz
. It's the most left-wing of the papers. But I would go with
Yedioth Ahronoth
. It's everywhere. That way even if she doesn't see the ad, someone she knows will.”

“Do you know where their offices are?”

“How should I know? Call 144. There's a pay phone over there.”

Luckily their offices weren't far. It took them fifteen minutes with Adam checking and rechecking the map to make sure they were heading in the right direction. The newspaper's red logo was emblazoned across a a building of pristine Jerusalem limestone. Inside a security guard checked Ulya's purse and pointed toward the ad office.

Adam approached the counter, panting. “How much is a classified? Or maybe it's a personal. Are personals only for lonely hearts? What if you're looking for an old lady? Not for sex, I mean. Like you're trying to find a specific old lady.”

The clerk put on her reading glasses. “What day do you want to run the ad?”

“What day do you get the most readers?”

“Friday.”

“Friday then. Actually, how much would it cost to have it run a whole week?”

“Depends on the number of characters. Write it here.”

“Can I write it in English and you translate it?”

“I'll do my best.”

Adam wrote: LOOKING FOR DAGMAR STAHLMANN, APPROX AGE 80. I AM ADAM SOCCORSO, GRANDSON OF FRANZ ROSENBERG, A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR WHO LIVED AT KIBBUTZ SADOT HADAR. PLEASE CALL—

Adam asked Ulya to fill in the number for the foreigner's pay phone. If this ran for a whole week, it was bound to get to Dagmar. It gave him honest-to-God goosebumps to picture the old woman confronted with her original name alongside the name of her old lover.

The clerk reached for her calculator. “A hundred and thirty-two characters is . . . a hundred and sixty-two shekels for the Friday paper. It won't appear in this Friday's, but the following one. And to run all week would be . . . three hundred and ninety shekels.”

A hundred dollars. Adam opened his wallet. He'd have only five bucks left. He would have to rely on the kibbutz stipend from here on out.

Out on the city sidewalk once more, Adam thanked Ulya for her help. “I don't know what I would have done without you.”

“Maybe now you'll marry me and take me to America?”

Adam definitely felt tempted in a way he hadn't before.

He smirked. “Do you have my thirty-five thousand dollars?”

“No, but I would get it. If you say you'll do it, I will get it.”

He believed her. She had mettle. And Ulya believed by the way he looked at her that she had won him over. She hooked her arm in his.

After she bought them each a falafel, Ulya was out of money too. They had barely enough left to pay for their bus tickets back to the kibbutz,
and yet they still wandered around until well after dark. The stores lit up, and the sidewalk cafés filled with people. They ambled up a ramp onto an elevated pedestrian plaza that had at its center a large, cylindrical sculpture striped in a rainbow of faded colors. A concrete basin under the wheel revealed it was meant to be a fountain. Beside the broken fountain, Hare Krishnas sang and tapped on drums. Adam and Ulya continued down a busy sidewalk, where a street violinist drew a small crowd and bouncers guarded unmarked dance clubs. The buses stopped running at midnight, and they caught the last one returning to Haifa.

“I hate to go back to the kibbutz,” Ulya said, staring out the window, though she was excited for one thing. When she had told Farid not to wait for her tonight because she was going to Tel Aviv with the American boy, his eyes clouded with jealousy. She smiled at this, and Adam gently poked her in the arm, as if he had something to do with her smile.

The bus sped down the highway, desolate at that hour, the Mediterranean and farmlands a swath of darkness. Adam had heard that one of the highways in Israel could double as a landing strip during a war and wondered if this was the one. The light bobbing on a distant buoy gave him the strange, irrational feeling that it was the light of home, so far away. Talk radio mumbled at the front of the bus.

Ulya had fallen asleep, her head back, mouth hanging open. How vulnerable she looked, and kind of ugly. If he'd had a camera he'd have taken a picture to tease her with, though he wouldn't even have the money to develop the film. Her bare thighs splayed on the seat, her knees having parted in her sleep. He pictured his hand slowly grazing up and up until he felt her warm pussy.

Beyond the big windshield, the headlights illuminated the highway and the occasional road sign:
CAESAREA
, 5
KM
. He had never loved a girl he hadn't ended up hurting, beginning with Monica of the pink velour track pants. After an agonizing year of waiting to lose their virginity together and much masturbating, two weeks before their anniversary, he wound up drunk on the couch with someone's older sister. He didn't even remember it, how they got from the couch to the girl's bedroom, the feeling of slipping into a vagina for the first time. When he confessed to Monica, around the back of their school, her big brown eyes filled with tears. “We had only two weeks to go, Adam.”