Safekeeping (51 page)

A choke rose in Ziva's throat. She reached out a trembling hand.

Eyal, confused, looked behind him to see what she could be reaching for. He searched for a glass of water, a remote control, but saw nothing she
might want. Had she slipped again into the past? The other day she had tried to tie a tent flap that was blowing in a long-gone wind.

Then he felt it—her hand on his. He froze, facing away from her. Did she think he was somebody else? He slowly turned around and found his mother beholding him as if for the first time. Her eyes were wet, and his welled up too. To ease the strain on her arm, he moved their clasped hands onto her bed. She squeezed his hand.

“You are Dov's son.”

Ziva felt as she did that night Dov had cholera, when she realized that she loved him, but thought it was too late. Except this time it really was too late.

“If you had been anyone else's son, you would have left the kibbutz a long time ago. You would have gone off with that woman, taken care of yourself. Not stuck around and tried your best to save it. All these years.”

Eyal's chest expanded so fast and wide it hurt. Maybe it was pathetic at his age, a half a century old, to be so happy that his mother took pride in him, but there it was.

“Thank you, Ima.”

Ziva wanted to tell her son that she loved him, but even though this could very well be the last time she would ever see him, she couldn't. She gathered the breath for the words, but she couldn't say
I love you
on the night he ended the kibbutz. The air left her mouth carrying only the sour taste of medicine and the mucus collecting in her throat.

Eyal squeezed his mother's hand again as the pleasant realization came over him that life never stopped doling out surprises. Yes, they came less often than in one's youth—longer and longer interludes of uneventful life came between the surprises—but then, when they did come, they were all the more staggering and bittersweet.

“But make no mistake, my son, you have all just evicted yourselves from the Garden of Eden.”

Eyal nodded, grateful for this last ember from his mother, the extinguishing firebrand. He continued to hold her hand, the way he had wanted to hold it when he was a little boy and she was the young woman on duty in the children's house. He held it until her grasp relaxed and her head fell to the side in sleep. Then he stood, picked up the folder of votes, and walked out, quietly closing the door behind him.

U
lya laid her hand on Adam's knee. They were sitting on his bed, Adam swilling the bottle of vodka she had brought him. This was the second night she'd come over with vodka. Adam had run out of money, and she knew it wouldn't help her if he were forced to sober up. Not to mention, he had stopped opening the door for her. This changed quickly when she started showing up with a bottle.

Adam eyed the hand traveling up his thigh. “What are you doing?”

She had no choice but to stoop to this. A week had passed since the rave, and she was lucky that Adam, who had called in sick for the second time in a row today, was still on the kibbutz. Eyal was probably too busy with the referendum to kick him off, but tomorrow the referendum would be over. Last night she had summoned the courage to try to take the brooch after Adam passed out. Terrified, she slowly, slowly inched her fingers into his pocket while he seemed dead to the world—dead until he suddenly smacked her arm away. It was so shocking and painful, she barely caught her scream in time. With a welt blooming on her arm, she had backed out of the room, unsure whether he had done this in his sleep or immediately fallen back to sleep and forgotten. Tonight, she had to get the pants off him before he passed out. And for that, she had to offer more than friendship.

“What do you think I'm doing?”

“Honestly, I don't know.”

He didn't. He couldn't understand why she was stroking his thigh, bringing him gifts, bottles of vodka. If she wasn't into him when he was
sober and a hell of a lot more fun to be around, why would she like him now? Was it the green card? In any case, she was wasting her time. When her hand reached his crotch, he closed his eyes to concentrate, but it was no use. She might as well have been rubbing someone else's dick.

He opened his eyes to take a swig and was confronted with Ulya's frustrated, even angry, expression. She was quick to replace it with an encouraging smile, but it was too late. He brushed her hand away. “It isn't you, Ulie. You know how much I wanted you. I'm just depressed.”

Golda, curled up on the other bed, looked depressed too. He wasn't playful with her anymore. Poor little thing, she had hitched herself to the wrong wagon.

Ulya sat back on her heels and started unbuttoning her work shirt. He shook his head. “Seriously, it's no use.”

She ignored him, working her way down her buttons. He watched. She dropped the shirt off her shoulders and hurried to hold it in front of her small belly. Adam ogled the swollen breasts, barely contained by the overstretched bra. A tiny white bow was recessed between two swells of nylon stretched to such sheerness it looked as if the pink nipples might poke through. Ulya had to laugh at his dumbstruck expression because even she found their current fullness titillating. She arched her back to undo the clasp.

Adam smiled, sadly, one corner of his lips turned down. “You wouldn't even kiss me. I tried to kiss you . . .”

“Forget before. I'm letting you kiss me now.”

She leaned forward, balancing on her arms, breasts hanging beneath her. Adam hardly seemed to be breathing, but the little air puffing out of him smelled so bad it brought her back to the filthy drunks who used to hang around the railway station, begging for
vobla
. She pushed through her nausea and planted her mouth on his. Cold. His lips were disturbingly cold. When she pulled back her face, Adam noticed for the first time a black freckle under one of her eyes.

She took his hand, the one not holding the bottle, and placed it on her breast. He appreciated the weight in his palm, the knob of nipple. Pressing his fingers into the flesh, he felt a stir in his groin. He let her take the bottle and set it on the bedside table. She kissed him again.

Ulya struggled to decide which would be less repulsive: his cock in her mouth or in her vagina. Both prospects sickened. Most tolerable would have been to lie on her stomach, bury her face in a pillow, and let him do
his thing while she daydreamed that she was already hurrying down the dark country road with the brooch. But Adam was never going to wake up and take the helm. He lay like a saggy pouch of yogurt. It was a lot harder to have unwanted sex when you were the one doing all the work.

She brought her face to his fly. Adam still didn't get why she was doing this, but every button she opened made him a little hornier and more forgetful. Nothing compared to the forgetfulness of arousal, better than booze even. It wasn't always available like booze, and it didn't last long, but while it did, the amnesia was more complete.

To Ulya's revulsion, Adam wore no underwear. She freed his warm, half-flaccid cock and put it in her mouth. She sucked, thankful that at least he didn't have Farid's massive thatch of hair with its smell of dank soil. Bobbing up and down, she imagined herself out on that country road, the kibbutz gate behind her.

Adam swelled in her mouth. He groaned and clutched the hair on the back of her head. She groaned too, pretending this was a turn-on, and gripped the sides of his jeans. She tugged them down to his hips. This was working. Repulsive, but working. She pulled the jeans down to his thighs. Almost there.

A knock at the door.

She tried to ignore it. Was it Eyal come to kick him off? Now? Please no. Please let this person go away. Adam seemed to be trying to disregard it too. To help him with that, she cupped his balls in her hand, sucked more enthusiastically.

The knocks got louder and longer, causing Golda to run and bark at the door.

Adam pushed Ulya's head away. As he hiked up his jeans, she wiped the saliva from her face with the bed sheet. Her heart pounded from the humiliation, the anger. She searched for her bra, couldn't find it, and hurried to button on her shirt while the knocking intensified.

Adam called out. “All right, all right! Coming!”

He chugged vodka and staggered for the door, remembering when Bones's messengers would come knocking, how he would step into the hallway so Zayde wouldn't hear. Like Ulya, Adam figured this was Eyal, or one of his messengers, here to walk him to the gate. And so what? He didn't need to stay on the kibbutz anymore. He was never going to find Dagmar. He opened the door.

“Claudette?” This was the person pounding like that? “What's the big panic? Is Jesus back?”

Golda ceased barking and stood beside Adam, still his faithful bodyguard. Ulya rose from the bed, ready to kill.

Catching her breath, Claudette said, “It's the old woman I work for! Ziva! She's Dagmar!”

Adam didn't understand. Couldn't. Maybe he was too drunk.

Claudette tried again. “She's the one your grandfather tried to give the brooch to.”

Adam shook his head. “No, it's not possible. I asked her. I sat in her apartment and asked her.”

“Was your grandfather's name Franz?”

Adam turned back to his room, eyes darting around, at first in shock, then increasingly as if looking for something, someone, to punch. He grabbed the bottle from the bedside table. All this time, she had been
right there
. Dagmar had sat in front of him on a bench, fucking inches from him, and asked how his search was going. What kind of psycho did that? He had known something was off about her. He fucking knew it. That fucking bitch—if she had told him the truth, he wouldn't be in this room right now chugging vodka. He would be at home, in the apartment, sober and several months into his new life. He wiped his mouth and threw the emptied bottle at the garbage, knocking the plastic bin over.

Claudette edged into the room. “You need to come see her. Now.”

“Now?” Adam laughed. “Fuck you, and fuck her.”

Dizzy, Adam leaned on the dresser. Ulya hurried over. She had to keep him from going to the old lady. If he left to give her the brooch now, she would never get it. She rubbed his back. “Yes, fuck her. If she needed to talk to you so bad, she wouldn't have lied to you.”

Claudette clasped her hands, crept toward Adam. “You said your grandfather never stopped loving her. She should hear that. But you have to go tell her now, because she's coherent tonight. She might not be coherent tomorrow. She might . . . she might not even be . . .”

“Be what?” Ulya bore her eyes into Claudette. “Alive? Please, the woman isn't dying
tonight
. You're crazy! We all know, everybody knows, that you're crazy, Claudette.”

Adam rubbed his forehead. He couldn't think. He needed to think. He didn't want to give the brooch to the lying bitch. But what else could he
do? Keep it? Put it back in the Florsheim shoebox like nothing happened? Donate it to a museum as Mr. Weisberg had wanted him to, so some strangers could give it a glance and forget about it? He had set out to give it to the only person Zayde had deemed worthy, and he could still do that.

“Fine, I'll go.” He had trouble moving his mouth around the words and could hear he was slurring. “Just give me a second to calm down.”

“All right.” Claudette sat on the unused bed. “I'll wait.”

“You don't need to fucking wait!” Adam stood over her. “I know exactly where she lives.”

After Claudette left, Adam stood waiting for the room to stop wheeling around him. Whenever the world spun like this, he thought of the Rotor ride on Coney Island. Once a summer Zayde would take him on the N train all the way out to the amusement park on the seashore, where he would claim to be too old for such nauseating rides and would wait, holding Adam's baseball cap, while Adam rushed up to the Rotor three or four times in a row. Round and round the rotor would go with the promise that any second the floor would drop.

He bent over, swiped his Converses off the ground.

“Wait!” Ulya grabbed the shoes from his hands.

Standing up too fast, Adam saw gray speckles, like TV static. He squeezed his eyes and opened them again. “What? What are you doing?”

She held his rancid sneakers behind her back. “It's stupid to give the old lady the brooch. You heard Claudette, she's going to die soon, maybe in a few days—and then what? Your family's brooch will go to the kibbutz. Or—oh my God—Eyal! You hate Eyal.”

He didn't hate Eyal, not after he gave him a second chance. That didn't mean he loved the idea of the brooch ending up in his fat fist, but that was beyond his control. What Dagmar did with the brooch was on her conscience. “I don't care. I have to get it to her.”

“Why?”

“Please . . .” Adam fumbled for his shoes. “Give those back.”

“Why? Tell me why you have to give this old bitch the brooch.”

“Because I promised myself, okay? After Zayde died, I fucking promised myself I would get the brooch into the right hands.”

Ulya's mouth dropped. “What? You mean, you didn't promise
him
? Your grandfather? You only promised
yourself
?”