Safekeeping (5 page)

“Pervert.”

Adam raised his head. The girl towered over him, wearing the same navy work shirt and beige work pants as him, and plenty of eyeliner, though not as much as that night. The late afternoon sunlight inflamed her absurdly red hair.

He brought his hands together. “I'm so so so sorry about that. I swear it wasn't what it looked like. You know, you really should shut your blinds when you're getting dressed.”

“And you really should not be having your eyes in people's windows.” Her flinty Russian accent made it hard to tell if she was angry or simply giving an idiot some advice.

“Listen, I was walking around the back of the building for totally other reasons and . . . well, there you were. But I swear on my life I wasn't getting my rocks off. Honest to God. Did you report me?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

Adam blew through his lips. “Okay. That's good. Thank you.”

“I do not report people.”

She shot him a pitying look before leaving to join the other Russians playing cards around the picnic table.

Adam went back to the directory. He was nearing the end without any luck. If only he had a last name. Many of the listings were simply the “Horesh Family” or “Kaplan Family.” He reached the last page. No Dagmar. A red petal fell on the list of names. The tree was shedding its flowers, dappling the lawn. Adam lay back on the grass and gazed into its branches. Golden sunbursts came through the leaves and flowers. One
more day, and he could talk to Eyal's mother. He had seen her name in the directory.

He closed his eyes. The exotic smell of the freshly mowed lawn put him on edge, but the sound of the Russians bantering around the picnic table was homey. Adam had been lullabied to sleep on many a summer night by people chitchatting in a foreign tongue, ever since that first sweltering July night he moved in with his grandfather, almost twenty years ago. Several old people, seeking relief from their lonely, muggy apartments, had dragged kitchen chairs onto the sidewalk, and for hours they sat beneath his second-floor window, kibitzing in German and Yiddish. He lay listening to them for a long time after Zayde explained what had happened to his mom.

When his mother first failed to pick him up that afternoon, nobody had been surprised. Certainly not Mrs. Wadhwa, the Indian woman who babysat several kids in their apartment building in Gowanus. It was normal for Adam to still be sitting in front of the TV long after the other children had been picked up, while Mrs. Wadhwa collected the toys off her floor, mumbling, “I should charge your mother more, I really should.” Things only started to seem different when he was still on the couch as Mr. Wadhwa came through the door in his bus driver's uniform. After saying hello to Adam, Mr. Wadhwa pulled his wife into the kitchen, where Adam could hear them whispering between muffled phone calls.

Hours passed. Night fell. A knock came at the door, and Adam went running at the sight of his tall grandfather standing with his straw fedora in his hands. “Zayde!” He threw his arms around his legs. His grandfather, cradling his head against his waist, said, “You're coming home with me.” Didn't it seem strange to the old man that he took his hand and followed him down four flights of stairs and across the foyer's black-and-white checkered floor and out the building and down the street without ever asking, “Where's my mom?”

They took a cab to Manhattan, not the train—another sign this was not a regular day. Adam had never traversed the bridge in a car and was hypnotized by the ever-changing rhombuses made by the Brooklyn Bridge's crisscrossing silvery cables. The city lay in wait for him, an enormous Lite-Brite, the two new towers soaring into the sky. When they got to the apartment on Essex, Zayde ordered pepperoni pizza, which they ate at the small wooden table pushed against the kitchen wall. Actually, only Adam
ate; Zayde sawed off a bite with his knife and fork, but never brought it to his mouth. When Adam had eaten as many slices as he could, Zayde said, “Adam . . .” Adam fell quiet, braced for the bad news about his mother, whatever it was this time. But then Zayde stacked the unused napkins. “Let's clean up first.”

They did the dishes right away instead of leaving them on the table, as Adam was used to. Zayde washed, Adam dried: they were a team. While Adam brushed his teeth, Zayde sat on the toilet. “Always brush for a count of a hundred,” he said. “Your teeth will sparkle.” Adam hoped Zayde would never get to whatever it was he had to tell him. Why couldn't they just do this? Just carry on? Adam was led to his mother's old bedroom. His very own room. No sleeping on the couch. Zayde tucked him in so tight he couldn't move. Then the old man sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand.

Other grandfathers might have lied, made up a more comforting story, planning to tell the truth some day, but Zayde simply told him his mom had fallen on the subway tracks and the train just couldn't stop in time. “It didn't hurt her. It happened so fast, Adam, your mom couldn't have felt any pain.”

Fallen? The wondering would come years later. Drunkenly? Jumped? Sober?

The Russians around the table burst into laughter. Adam opened his eyes. Beyond the tree and its raining red petals was a cloudless sky. The Russian girl's face appeared before the perfect blue.

“You're awake.”

“I wasn't asleep.”

“What's your name?”

Adam sat up. “Why? Have you changed your mind about reporting me?”

She shook her head.

“Adam.”

She withdrew a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket, the nails on her pale fingers painted pylon orange. “Someone just told me you are from Manhattan. Is that true?”

“Is that what they actually said? Manhattan?” He eyed the people around the picnic table. He'd never spoken to any of them. “That's surprisingly specific.”

“They know I am obsessed with Manhattan. So they are probably just teasing me. But are you?”

“I am, in fact.”

She paused before lighting her cigarette. “The one in New York?”

“Is there another?”

She dropped the lighter in her pocket and, exhaling smoke, looked at him as if she were trying to decide whether to believe him. “Yes. There are fake Manhattans all over America. There is Manhattan, Kansas. Manhattan, Montana. Manhattan, Indiana. I know everything about Manhattan. If you were from the real Manhattan, you would be more stylish.”

Adam patted his overgrown hair. “Yeah, I don't look my best. Thanks for pointing that out.”

Golda climbed into the pocket of Adam's crossed legs and peered up at the girl as if making clear whose side she was on.

“Oh, thank you for asking about me,” said the girl, resting a hand on one hip. “I am Ulyana from Belarus, but I will let you call me Ulya. You know where this is, Belarus? No, of course not.”

“I know where Belarus is,” he lied.

“Can I show you something, Adam of Manhattan?”

“I'm busy.” He held up the directory he wanted to go through one more time, just in case. “Maybe later.”

“This is a kibbutz. Nobody is busy on a kibbutz.”

“I am.”

She cocked her head, smirked. “Maybe you have to be nice to me, or I will report you.”

Adam cocked his head too. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Of course I am kidding!” She grabbed his hand and pulled. “But you have to come! Please. Come to thank me for not reporting you.”

Adam sighed and allowed her to help him up. He tapped his jean pocket, checking for the brooch, and followed the girl to her room. As they approached her door, his eyes fell to her butt. She must have requested workpants a size too small. As she walked, a crease switched from beneath one round cheek to the other, but the sight didn't rouse him. Even when he remembered seeing the white swells inside the pants, he felt nothing. And that was a good thing. He didn't need that kind of distraction.

Ulya unlocked the door, and Claudette, on her hands and knees in the dark, looked up with wide eyes.

“Oh, you.” Ulya dropped her keys on her dresser and walked toward the back window. “I keep forgetting I have a roommate now.”

Adam saluted Claudette as she rose from the linoleum floor, brushing off her knees. “Hey, Claudette the Astonishing.”

Ulya opened the blinds, and the low, golden sun streamed in. She smiled at Adam. “I promise to close them again when I change.”

“Very funny,” he said. “What did you want to show me?”

She pulled from under her bed a powder-blue leatherette suitcase, similar to the one Zayde stored on the top shelf of his tidy closet. He had an awful flash of his burned and shaky hands rifling as fast as possible through the junk on the shelf beneath the suitcase, shoving aside the ancient
Life
magazines, the jam jars filled with buttons, the old Polaroid camera, to get to the hidden shoebox.

“My grandfather had a suitcase just like that one.”

Ulya pinched the rusty steel snaps. “It's an old, ugly thing.”

As she lifted its top, hope shot through him—hope that she was about to disclose something illicit, drugs or a flask of some strange Eastern European absinthe-like drink. He rubbed his hand over his mouth. No, no, no. He didn't want that.

The only thing resting in the faded lilac lining was a magazine, an old
Vogue
with Kelly LeBrock on the cover, giant plastic pink hoops hanging from her ears and over-the-top eighties makeup. Ulya picked up the well-thumbed magazine, and it fell open to the right page. Cradling the magazine on her arm, she showed Adam a two-page spread of Manhattan at night.

An aerial shot, it was taken somewhere in the East Seventies, looking south down Park Avenue toward Grand Central and the Pan Am Building. Didn't they just change that building to something else? Even though this wasn't exactly his New York City, the picture still filled him with longing: the exciting red streaks left by the taillights, the many windows hinting at the many lives, the majestic green and gilded cap of the Helmsley Building against the gray practical lines of the Pan Am. In the top right corner, a woman stood on a rooftop, the chiffony train of her yellow dress and her long red hair blowing in the wind like bright water reeds.

Ulya looked up at him. “Does it really look like this?”

“How old's this magazine?”

“1986.”

“Eighty-six? Why do you have an eight-year-old fashion magazine?”

“It doesn't look like this anymore?”

“I guess if you're in a helicopter or something. Or maybe if you can afford to live in a penthouse. But I think it looks a lot better from below, anyway, you know, like when you're in the thick of it.”

“The thick of it? What is the thick of it?”

“Like when you're in it. When you're a part of it.”

Ulya turned back to the picture. “I'm going to be a part of it. One day I'm going to be that woman on the roof. Far, far away from this shit kibbutz.”

As she laid the magazine down on the lilac lining, Adam said, “If you hate the kibbutz so much, why'd you volunteer?”

“Volunteer?” She snorted and pushed the suitcase back under her bed. “Ha! I wish I was just a volunteer, like you.”

“You're not?”

“Are you crazy? None of the Russians are volunteers. We're
olim chadashim
. New immigrants. The government puts us in places where we can live for cheap, learn Hebrew. I got put on a kibbutz, of course. Not a
merkaz klita
in Tel Aviv. I am never lucky. I don't even want to be in this country, but I'm here because this was the only way to get out of the Soviet Union, to be a Jew moving to Israel. But the truth is I'm hardly a Jew. My grandmother, she was . . . a Jew.”

Adam leaned against the wall. “You know why Israel gives automatic citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent, right?”

“Actually,” Ulya said, pulling a hot pink T-shirt out of her closet, “my grandmother was only half Jewish, so I am only one-eighth. But I stay in this shit country, because it is easier to go from here to the U.S.A. To the real Manhattan.”

“Because one Jewish grandparent was all you needed to be sent to a concentration camp. That's what my grandfather told me.”

Ulya turned from her closet. “My grandfather had this suitcase. My grandfather told me. My grandfather, my grandfather. It's like you're twelve years old.”

Adam gripped the back of his neck. “Sorry. I didn't realize I was talking about him so much. He died last month.”

Ulya stomped for the bathroom with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “This is no tragedy, Adam of Manhattan. Everybody has a dead
grandfather. I cannot wait to take off this ugly uniform. Wait here! I will be out in two minutes.”

Adam pushed off the wall. “You showed me what you had to show me, and now I got to go.”

“No! Stay one minute, Adam of Manhattan! I have another thing to ask you.”

She shut the bathroom door, and Adam pushed aside the newer magazines Ulya had on her bed to sit down. He sat face-to-face with Claudette, who was perched on the edge of her bed. He had almost forgotten she was there.