Safekeeping (38 page)

Trying not to sound too relieved, Adam said, “A real man you have there.”

Ulya shot Farid a black look and charged at Adam. She pushed against his chest with all her might again and again. Adam stumbled backward as she shoved and shouted: “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!”

The Arab's head was down; he wasn't even watching. They were both losers now, but that didn't make Adam feel any better. He turned. “Okay, I'm going.”

Once he began his retreat, he couldn't retreat fast enough. He headed for the orchard as fast as he could without breaking into a run. He climbed over the cattle wire and weaved his way down the darkness of the mandarin orchard and out onto the flat, open cabbage field again, where the moon beamed down on him like a spotlight. He'd been so focused on Ulya, he hadn't noticed how enormous the moon was tonight. This must have been what she had stopped to look up at.

Back among the white bungalows, he couldn't stand the laughter and chitchat floating out of the cozy-lit windows. Everybody having a nice Friday night with everybody else. Coffee, cake, small talk, arguments about the peace process, thighs secretly squeezed under the table, please pass the sugar. He couldn't be more alone. It was his fault: he killed his grandfather, hurt every girl who ever loved him, betrayed every friend. But that only made the loneliness harder.

Descending the stone steps into the volunteers' section, he nearly collided with Claudette. He looked up, and her painted lips formed a smile,
the first smile he'd ever seen on her. She apologized and hurried past him. Even Claudette had plans.

He dreaded the long night ahead, cooped up in his depressing dorm room. If only he could take a benzo and be out until morning. When he opened the door, Golda spun in circles and pawed at his legs, but he ignored her. He flipped on the light, but this only made the room appear more jail-like. Fuck it. He couldn't do it: sit here all night with himself. Wished he could—it was the fate he deserved—but he couldn't.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he said, waving Golda out the door.

He crossed the quad with the little dog hurrying to keep pace. He marched up the steppingstones and past the jasmine hedges and across the main lawn. He headed toward the bomb shelter, its door wide-open, insides glowing like a traffic light. Go.

Adam hesitated in the doorway. The steel door at the bottom of the stairwell held back a pounding bass. He could still turn around. Turn around and go where? He needed distraction. That's all. Not alcohol. The distraction. He'd order a Diet Coke. He did it in Tel Aviv.

Inside, he was enveloped by a thumping techno beat and a haze of cigarette smoke streaked with green and blue lights. And yet the vibe in the concrete bunker was mellow. On a shabby couch, two army-aged guys bobbed their shaved heads to the repetitive beats. Some teenagers sat around a table, leaning precariously back in their chairs, cracking jokes. At another table four Russians played poker while a fifth stood over them like a referee. Did people hide in here from Iraqi scud missiles?

He climbed onto a barstool and lifted Golda onto his lap. A skinny girl in low-slung jeans came for his order. An inked peace sign adorned her bony hip. Adam asked for her name.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Talia. What do you want to drink?”

Israelis really got on his nerves sometimes. He wanted to tell her to calm down, she wasn't that hot. And that all he wanted was a Diet Coke.

The girl crossed her arms when he failed to order. “
Nu
? Goldstar's half price tonight.”

He lowered his head and scratched the wooden bar as if it were a lottery ticket.

“
Nu
?” she repeated.

“
Nu
,
nu
,
nu
. Just go fucking get it already.”

“Go fuck yourself.” The bartender walked off on her pin legs.

Did that mean she wasn't going to bring him a beer? That would make things easy. But no, she grabbed a bottle from the minifridge. That's fine. He was still okay. No harm in ordering it. Only drinking it. He'd leave it sitting in front of him so he looked like a normal dude at a bar. What did he care if after he left the bartender found it full? Maybe he could empty it in the bathroom. Bomb shelters had to have bathrooms, right? People couldn't be confined in here without a toilet.

The girl popped off the cap and placed the bottle before him. Beads of condensation trickled down its brown glass and red and gold label. She leaned on the bar. “I'm going to kick you out if you keep being an asshole.”

Adam nodded. “You're totally right. I'm sorry.”

The girl left to take someone else's order and he eyed the bottle without touching it. Until he'd taken a sip, he hadn't taken a sip. He'd just sit here with the bottle and his aching breastbone. Ten seconds. He still hadn't taken a sip.

Why don't Jews drink?
went the old joke.

Because it interferes with their suffering.

His heart pounded wildly as he clasped the bottle. So cold in his hand. So familiar, he could practically taste it by just holding it. His mouth dried.

Was he doing this? He lifted the bottle, brought it to his mouth. Even with the cool glass rim against his lips, he wasn't sure. Or maybe that was bullshit. Maybe the only thing he wasn't sure about was whether he was truly unsure.

Was he?

Yes. Because he could still put down the bottle.

He tilted back his head and the cold, fizzy lager poured into his mouth. He held it in there, tongue absorbing the taste, not swallowing. He still hadn't swallowed, he still hadn't swallowed, he—

So fucking swallow and get it over with, you fucking loser.

Done.

Unsure of his unsureness? What a fucking joke he was. He knew he was going to drink from the minute he left Ulya and her Arab on the hillside. No, before that. He knew when he didn't go get a pen for the Holocaust survivor. Bloomie. Jesus, was there anything more depressing than an old pet name?

Yes.

He chugged the rest of the bottle and called, “Another one!”

He was going to get plastered tonight. Only tonight. Tomorrow, he'd stop. Tomorrow, he would be sober again, ready to push on. To think of a new way to find Dagmar. He just needed help getting through this one night.

C
laudette sat on her bed, the fax in her hands. The room had darkened in the two hours it had taken her to read it. She was supposed to have met Ofir at the car lot five minutes ago, but she couldn't help but reread her sister's note again.

           
Salut ma chère Claudette
,

                 
You must read this article from
La Tribune
! Didn't I tell you it made no sense that you were certified insane at one year old? Call me collect as soon as you read this!

XOXO,

Louise

Before the man from the office had knocked on her door with the fax, saying it must be important because her sister had called long distance to make sure it was hand delivered to her, Claudette had been brushing her hair, thinking she never could have imagined herself this content. It had been a month since she last wiped a doorknob or wondered if she'd molested a farm animal. Instead, her days were spent by Ziva's bedside, drinking mint tea and listening to her memories of surviving cholera and blowing up bridges. At night, she explored the fields and the surrounding hills with Ofir. She had been especially excited for tonight. He had planned on driving her to the Sea of Galilee to ring in her birthday. No one had ever planned something special for her birthday before.

She turned again to the newspaper article, the sea of small print that had taken her so long to understand. Each letter had to be sounded out and threaded into a word; the word strung into a sentence; the sentences looped together into something that made sense. But nothing did.

“DUPLESSIS ORPHANS” VICTIMS OF CHURCH-GOVERNMENT SCAM

BY JEAN CLOUTIER

Before Paiement Bottling Company would employ Michel Brossard, a paranoid schizophrenic, they required that his doctor provide a written statement that he was fit to work. Imagine Mr. Brossard's surprise when Dr. Pierre Maisonneuve, the psychiatrist who diagnosed him with schizophrenia thirty-three years earlier and had been treating him ever since, informed him that he didn't have the brain disorder and never did.

Mr. Brossard is one of several thousand victims of a long-term scam by the government of Quebec and the Roman Catholic Church to steal money from the government of Canada. Since provincial governments were financially responsible for orphanages and the federal government for insane asylums, Quebec had up to 20,000 orphans falsely certified as insane. In order to secure the cooperation of the Church, which ran most of the province's orphanages, Quebec offered the church nearly three times as much to care for psychiatric patients than orphans, $2.75 versus $1.00 a day.

Overnight, orphanages were converted into insane asylums, and many healthy children were shipped to existing mental hospitals. The orphans were slapped with diagnoses ranging from antisocial disorder to mental retardation, including infants far too young to be diagnosed. Most of these fraudulent diagnoses, beginning in 1949 and continuing until 1967, were never corrected. Thousands of orphans spent decades confined to institutions or were released in early adulthood poorly equipped for regular life.

Now the Duplessis Orphans, named after Premier Maurice Duplessis, who reigned from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959, are demanding an apology and compensation for the alleged mental, physical, and sexual abuse they experienced at the hands of psychiatrists, priests, nuns, and lay workers. The allegations include unwarranted electric shock
treatments, days in isolation cells, lobotomies, beatings, and rape. Some of the orphans claim they were used for drug tests and are calling for an excavation of an abandoned cemetery in the east end of Montreal to autopsy the remains of children who purportedly died from these trials. Their lawyer, Robert Néron, points out that the Church and government made still more money by denying the children an education and using them as forced labor.

Mr. Néron is seeking permission to file a series of class-action suits against the Quebec government, the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Providence, the Brothers of Notre-Dame-de-la-Miséricorde, the Little Franciscans of Mary, and the Brothers of Charity. In addition, Mr. Néron is preparing a suit against the College of Physicians of Quebec for their cooperation in falsifying medical records.

“We were easy targets,” says Geneviève Tremblay, who grew up at Mont Providence orphanage in Montreal. “They could do whatever they wanted. We were children, had no families to stand up for us. But now we can stand up for ourselves.”

Technically, most of the Duplessis Orphans, including Mr. Brossard and Ms. Tremblay, were not orphans. They were born to unwed mothers sent by their families to the Catholic cloisters so they could carry and deliver their babies in secret. Afterward, the babies remained in the Church's care. Few orphans were ever reunited with their biological parents, and a number of the orphans maintain the nuns viewed them as “living sins.”

Mr. Brossard says, “They punished us as if we had been the sinners.”

The current Quebec government of Robert Bourassa said it would be inappropriate for them to comment while the investigation is under way. The Roman Catholic Church promises to do their own internal investigation but for now insists it has “nothing to apologize for.” The College of Physicians of Quebec said they were prepared to hand over their patients' files for inspection of forgery, but all files over twenty years old have been discarded.

When Dr. Maisonneuve was asked why he finally told Mr. Brossard the truth after thirty-three years, he said, “I'm an old man now. I have lung cancer. I didn't want to die with the lie. I had to confess if I wanted God to forgive me.”