Safekeeping (36 page)

Ziva pinched the boy's cheek. He wasn't her biological child, but he was hers the way all the children were. She loved how the children had no memory of any other world, and she took great pains to never speak in front of them about death camps or pogroms or anything that might give them a sense of victimhood. “If anyone is crying today, it's King George, right?”

The boy nodded, and Franz said, “I've never seen you this happy. You're so—”

He shook his head, went back to his tomatoes. Ziva, returning to her onions, wondered why he didn't finish his sentence. What was he going to say before he stopped himself? Franz's restraint over the last year had surprised her. She hadn't thought him capable of restraint, but he had kept the promise made in the half-finished schoolhouse, giving them room to build a friendship. They talked quite a bit, around the campfire or when they shared a work shift, Ziva often surprised by what he would tell her—about the casual sex he had before the war, how he knew the electric fence behind his barrack wasn't strong enough to kill, how he went back for his brooch. Sometimes she suspected his restraint was part of a plan, that he nurtured this friendship assuming she would eventually grow too fond of him. At other times she believed what he told her not long after the lipstick incident, that he would rather have her as a friend than not have her in his life.

A bang shot through the kitchen. Ziva spun around, holding up her knife.

“Sorry.” The former psychotherapist picked up the skillet he'd dropped.

Ziva exhaled and, heart still pounding, returned to her onions.

Franz leaned forward, spoke a little quieter. “Last night, I didn't sleep a wink. I was so worried about you.”

“Worried about me? You just said I've never looked happier.”

But she had known Franz would worry about her. While driving down the dark road toward the Syrian border, she pictured him lying in his barrack, worrying about the explosives taped to her legs. It was the same thrill she used to feel when their illegal Zionist meetings would run late, and she knew her mother was on the other side of Berlin pacing the kitchen. How Franz had come to know about the operation, he wouldn't say, but she
wasn't surprised someone had let him in on it. Everybody liked Franz and wanted to be liked by him. By the big day, he knew everything, including who was in charge of bringing the dynamite to the Yamruk Bridge, where others waited in the thicket along the Jordan River. She had been chosen because a British patrolman was less likely to body search a woman, to check under her skirt. In one night, the resistance movement managed to blow up seven bridges connecting the British Mandate to the surrounding countries. The British were going to have a hell of a time getting supplies and reinforcements into Palestine.

Franz laid down his knife and leaned on the table. “I know, but—”

Once again he stopped midsentence. Pretending not to have seen the hesitation on his face, she blinked back the tears and said, “The British need to be driven out of Palestine. I still can't believe they're forcing boats of refugees to sail back to Germany.”

Franz glanced at the boy and then proceeded to speak in German so he wouldn't understand. “Ziva, I know you're not going to like this, but I'm going to tell you anyway. When the radio reported that fifteen Jews had been killed on one of those bridges, I didn't care what happened to the rest of the operation or the British Empire or even the Jewish people. The only thing that mattered to me was that you weren't one of those fifteen.”

Ziva stared at Franz, trying to decide if he had just crossed a line. And what if he had?

The boy broke the silence. “I hate cutting vegetables! It's boring.”

“Quiet!” Ziva slapped the boy's shoulder. “All work is ennobling. It's complaining that demeans you. You've just demeaned yourself!”

The boy pouted and sullenly took another tomato while Ziva went back to work. She needed to think. Franz assumed she would find his worry despicable. Well, didn't she? Wasn't it low of him to care only about her well-being? She had recently learned how the guards at Buchenwald deterred escapees: Franz had to have known that ten people would be publicly shot or starved to death when he ran away. Instead of saving only himself, why hadn't he led an uprising? Of course, he never would have survived then. Never would have made it to Palestine to lie in a barrack worrying about her. Dov must have worried about her last night while he waited with the others in the shadowy brush by the bridge. But he would never have chosen her well-being over the success of the mission, over the well-being of the whole Jewish people. Nor would she want him to. Not
since her mother and father had somebody cared for Ziva the way Franz did—so exclusively. Selfishly.

Finished with the onions, Ziva wiped off her knife to help with the tomatoes. As she reached for a tomato, Franz did too. Their fingers grazed. His touch jolted her and quickened her heart. Trying to feign indifference, she picked up a tomato and placed it down in front of her.

Franz must have felt something too, because in a hushed German he said, “Ziva, I know I'm going back on my word, and I'm sorry. I really am. But after what I went through last night, thinking maybe I was never going to see you again, I just can't pretend anymore. I can't pretend that . . . I don't love you.”

Ziva looked behind her at the other table, where the psychotherapist had joined in plucking the chickens. Even if one of them understood German, the taller Polish woman blathered too loudly and incessantly for them to have heard anything. The boy obliviously hummed as he chopped.

She turned back to Franz, whose black eyes held a mix of apology and hope. She shouldn't feed that hope. She had to tell him not to talk that way, that it couldn't end well, but instead she said something equally true.

“I don't want you to pretend anymore.”

They both lowered their heads and returned to their work. What would happen next? Ziva didn't know. When the shift was over, after the dinner was cooked, eaten, cleaned up, would they remain in the kitchen while the other workers left? Where was this going?

When it came time to break for dinner, they brought their trays to different tables. Ziva joined Dov and some other pioneers while Franz sat with fellow survivors. All through dinner, her table discussed how the Brits were going to retaliate: they had already instated a curfew in Tel Aviv, and soon—maybe tonight—they would raid the kibbutzim. Between this urgent talk and what transpired between her and Franz, Ziva couldn't eat.

Dov rubbed her back as he told eager listeners: “We chose Ziva not because she could wear a skirt, but because we needed to know the dynamite would get there. No one would be more fail-safe.”

Ziva smiled, pushed away her uneaten plate. “My job was the least dangerous. I didn't lay down any explosives. I just waited in the car.”

Dov smiled. “The getaway car.”

Ziva remembered Dov's face, looking at her from the passenger seat as the car squealed away, a brilliant fire raging in the rearview mirror. His blue eyes beamed with pride and collusion. They were a team, she and Dov. A very special team. She shouldn't ruin that.

Those on dinner duty reconvened after the meal to clean up the kitchen. Ziva and Franz washed pots in the farmer's sink while the psychotherapist dried. Ziva feared Franz might reach for her hand under the sudsy water. Instead he barely looked at her. Had he too changed his mind? After walking to the edge, maybe he no longer wanted to step off. They skirted one another as they put away the pots and pans. Ziva felt more and more certain that Franz was going to be relieved to leave things alone. While she mopped the floor, Franz helped one of the Polish women return food to the fridge. The woman laughed, slapping his arm, and Ziva seethed, thinking for a moment that having won her over, he was bored and already onto someone new. By the time the other workers were removing their aprons and departing with cigarettes in their mouths, she was ready to tell him she had no intention of taking this any further. It was going to be hard for her to say, but not impossible.

When the door closed behind the last worker, she stopped pretending to clean the floor. Holding onto the mop, she said, “Franz, I've made it this far in my life without doing anything I regret.”

A hanging lightbulb buzzed between them. The dank smell of the wet cement floor mingled with the piney breeze billowing the curtains over the sink.

Franz stood with one hand on the prep table. “I don't want you to do anything you'll regret.”

Was that why he hadn't moved toward her? Maybe he was terrified of getting what he wanted? Maybe she was. She didn't see how their coming together could possibly live up to a year of yearning. It might be no better than it was with Dov.

She laid the mop against the counter. When she started walking toward him, Franz took his hand off the table, straightened. She stood as close to him as she could without touching. Her chest trembled. He gazed down, breathing heavily.

She closed her eyes as she raised her face. Her lips, her whole being, pulsed with anticipation. Their mouths met, and she felt a surge of life,
like she did when she saw the bridge explode. Franz clutched her arms and pulled her into him with a startling violence. He kissed her, hungrily, as if he couldn't quite get enough, but not in the way she had feared, not because she was disappointing, unsatisfying, but because the more he had of her, the more he seemed to want.

He lifted her onto the table, clasping her ass so hard it smarted. He unfastened her fly while she hurried to unbutton her shirt, hoping he would take her nipple in his mouth, something Dov had never done in all their years together. He did. As soon as her breasts were freed. She groaned as he sucked on one, then the other. Pushing her breasts together, he said, “So much whiter than the rest of you.”

When Franz pushed into her, Ziva's thoughts fuzzed while the kitchen—the world—crystallized, as if for a moment existence had dropped one of its pretenses. It was for this, all the fuss. The poetry, taboos, rabbinic obligations and condemnations, the hidden photographs, the promises. And the betrayals.

Afterward they held each other, Franz standing, Ziva sitting on the table, head resting against his chest. She wanted to tell him that she loved him as much as he loved her, but how could she? How could she feel this oneness with Franz when there was Dov?

“Dagmar.”

He toyed with her hair. “What's that?”

“My name was Dagmar.”

“Dagmar.” Franz said it slowly, as if conjuring a spell.

Fifteen years had passed since she or anyone had uttered her old name, and for Ziva it did conjure an apparition. She seemed to see the idealistic German schoolgirl standing behind Franz on the cement floor, dark hair in two unruly braids, hands folded in front of her navy tunic. Her girlish, close-set hazel eyes stared back at the thirty-one-year-old woman embracing a man under a naked lightbulb. Her younger eyes bore no judgment, just curiosity, as if after being shut out for so long, she only wanted to see what had become of her.

“But don't call me Dagmar when anyone else is around.”

Franz nodded. “I promise, Dagmar.”

“Ziva!”

Startled, Ziva gaped at Claudette running around the cutting table. Claudette reached for Ziva's bloody knife, but the old woman, bewildered,
trembling, jerked her hand free and went back to dicing the onions with the tip of her index finger missing.

“
Mon Dieu
! Your finger! Ziva! We need to wrap your finger!”

The cook rushed over, others too. They stood around the table as Ziva scooped the blood-splattered onions into a bowl. Blood smeared the plastic cutting board, the steel table, Ziva's chin.

“Ziva, we have to go to the hospital!” Claudette laid her hands on the old woman's bony shoulders and felt the skin broiling beneath the dry white shirt. “Now!”

“Nonsense.” Ziva pushed Claudette away with her bloody hand. “I'm working.”

Claudette shouted at the cook to call Eyal. The cook, already at the phone, hung up. “Mr. Margolin is on his way.”

“
Mister
Margolin!” spat Ziva. “Fuck
Mister
Margolin!”

In seconds, Eyal bounded into the kitchen and ran toward his mother. “Ima! We have to go to the hospital!”

Ziva leaned forward on the stepladder, pointing her knife at him. “Stay away from me.”

Eyal crept forward, palms raised. “Ima, please.”

Ziva swung the knife at the air between them. “You, you who give orders, you cannot order me! I want to keep working!”

The kitchen workers gawked while other bystanders gathered at the kitchen's back entrance and the doors onto the dining room. Eyal inched toward Ziva, trying to keep a calm face, but Claudette could see his distress.

“I called 1-0-0, Ima. They're going to be here in a few minutes.”

Ziva thrust the knife toward him. He stopped, waited, and took another step forward. She lunged with the knife again and toppled off the stepladder, landing on the cement floor hip first. The crack was audible. She howled in pain.

Eyal kicked the knife away from her and roared at the bystanders: “This isn't a show! Go away! Go away!”