Safekeeping (6 page)

“So what were you doing on the floor, in the dark? Praying?”

The odd woman shook her head.

“What were you doing then?”

She looked off to the side, shook her head again.

He hadn't pushed when he asked her what she was looking for in the square or what the deal was with her “orphanage.” This time he would press a little more. “Come on, what were you doing?”

She dropped her head, whispered. “Counting the tiles.”

Golda jumped, clawing at the side of Ulya's mattress. Adam picked her up, and the dog stationed herself on his lap like the Sphinx. Stroking her back, he said, “Why were you counting the tiles?”

Claudette rubbed her knees a good ten seconds before responding. “To make sure there were . . . an even number . . . between our beds.”

“Why does there have to be an even number?”

The sun was setting quickly now, the room dimming. When Claudette didn't answer, he said, “I don't get it. Why does there need to be an even number of tiles between your beds?”

“To . . . to protect Ulya.”

“Protect Ulya? From what?”

Ulya emerged from the bathroom, eyes lined as vixenish as the other night, only in purple instead of black. She had changed from the work clothes into a pink crop top and jean miniskirt. Her shapely legs balanced on strappy green heels. She flipped on the ceiling light. “Ta-da! How do I look?”

Adam got to his feet. “Is this what you wanted to ask me?”

“Do I look like I could be going out in Manhattan?”

Adam didn't think so. Maybe Brighton Beach.

“Totally. You look like you're headed off to the Tunnel. Where are you going every night anyway?”

Fuck. He asked. He shouldn't have asked. He just had to hear “bar.”

Ulya's eyebrows came together. “Why do you say I go out every night?”

He sensed she was hiding something. When you're using, you end up in your fair share of strip clubs, and a lot of those girls were Russian. Was that true in Israel? Was this girl stripping in a nearby town? He glanced at Claudette.

Ulya caught the glance. “Her? She told you? I didn't even know she could talk.”

“She didn't tell me,” Adam hurried to say. “Maybe it was the same person who told you I was from Manhattan.”

Ulya's lips pursed. Then she shrugged, went to the mirror, and brushed her hair as if she couldn't care less who knew what, but she brushed too violently. “You can go now,” she said.

“Oh, can I? Thank you, Your Highness.” Adam headed for the door, Golda at his heels. “And don't worry. I don't give a shit where you go at night.”

Adam walked out of the room into the half-light. That meeting would be starting soon, the one that had Eyal all worried. If he went, maybe he could question one or two people about Dagmar. As he climbed the steppingstones onto the main road, the streetlamps lit up. Fat, frosted globes on short posts, the lamps looked like giant electric lollipops, making the kibbutz feel even more like an elf village. He paused in front of one of those strange doors, the number 4 stenciled onto the concrete slope behind it. They all had a different number. He pulled on the door, and to his surprise it opened. He peered down a dark concrete stairwell tunneling into the ground. At the bottom of the stairs loomed another steel door. Bomb shelters. He felt stupid for not realizing it sooner.

He crossed the kibbutz's only road for cars, already hearing the commotion in the dining hall. He walked up to the back entrance, where a tall boy in a striped sweatshirt smoked under the awning. He bypassed the puffing teenager and leaned in the doorway. All the tables were stacked on the sides, and everyone sat in rows facing a platform. Latecomers shouted to their friends. Chairs screeched against the terrazzo floor. The speakers boomed as a young man tapped the microphone.

“Excuse me,” Adam heard from behind.

He turned to see a very old woman: sun-worn face cracked like a dried riverbed, the sclera around her muddy green eyes a light yellow, her hair a wispy white tempest. Thin and hunched, everything about the old woman was shrunken, except her belly, which stuck out as if she were ten months pregnant. Adam's heart pounded. What if Eyal had been wrong? What if this was Dagmar?

“Young man! Are you going to get out of the way? I'm needed onstage.”

“Sorry.” He jumped to the side, and she glared at him as she passed through the doorway.

Adam watched as the audience turned in their chairs to behold the old woman. A wave of whispers followed her as she walked toward the stage. How different this old woman was from the geriatrics who sat blinking into space on the benches in Seward Park all day, like breadcrumbs on the table the morning after a big dinner party, just waiting to be swept up and thrown away. This was the kind of woman Adam could picture his grandfather falling for.

Adam turned to the teenage smoker to inquire about the old woman and realized it was the soldier from the gate. “Wow, I didn't recognize you without your uniform.”

The boy shrugged and sucked at his cigarette. The binder tucked under his arm brimmed with papers.

“I'm the guy from New York. You know, the guy you gave the third degree to.”

“I know. Adam. I had no choice. You were sweating like a nervous wreck.”

“Yeah, I had . . . jet lag. Sorry, I don't remember your name.”

“Never gave it to you. Ofir.”

“Ofir, tell me . . .” Adam pointed at the old woman stepping onto the stage. “Do you know who that is? That old lady?”

“Of course. That's Ziva.”

Adam's heart sank. It would have been so satisfying to give that woman the brooch. So easy.

“What about an old woman named Dagmar? Is there anyone named Dagmar on the kibbutz?”

Ofir shook his head.

“You sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. Everybody knows everybody on a kibbutz. And everything they do.”

“How many people live here?”

“Five hundred adults, and two or three hundred people under twenty-six.”

Adam couldn't imagine living in a town with seven hundred people, not to mention one where everyone ate all their meals together. What hell.

“Eyal said there's never been anyone named Dagmar on the kibbutz.”

“He would know.” Ofir exhaled the last of his cigarette. After smashing it into the standing ashtray, he lit another.

“Chain-smoke much?” said Adam.

Ofir half smiled and peered into the dining hall with restless gray eyes.

“This meeting, it seems to be making everyone real jumpy.”

“Yeah, this meeting's a big deal. But me . . .” Ofir aimed his cigarette at a standing piano to the left of the dais. “I'm just waiting to get on that piano. That poor excuse for a piano is the only one on the kibbutz, and I only get to use it when I'm on leave. Three days a month, that's all I get to play.”

The microphone squealed as Eyal adjusted it toward his mouth. Even from the back door, Adam could see the secretary's fear as he waited for the congregation to quiet down. His face was slick with sweat, and dark circles spread from the pits of his light blue T-shirt.

Also on the stage sat a middle-aged woman studying her notes through reading glasses. Her long curly hair draped over her loose purple frock. In the chair beside her sat Eyal's mother, Ziva, dressed in the same canvas work clothes Adam wore and Ulya couldn't wait to take off. Sitting erect, chin extended, eyes surveying the audience, Ziva gave the impression that whatever she had to say didn't need notes.

Eyal tapped the microphone and got a nod to proceed from the young guy working the amplifier.

“I know everyone is scared,” he began, his magnified voice reverberating in the hushed dining hall. “I'm scared too.”

M
other shit
pizdets
fucking
ebanniy
kibbutz, thought Ulya as her green stilettos kept lodging in the soil of the cabbage field. But what was she supposed to do? Meet her lover in work boots? A gust of wind blew a strand of red hair into her gluey lip gloss. As she tried to pick the hair off her lip, her shoe jammed again, and a bare foot with freshly painted fuchsia toenails slipped out and plunged into the mud.

She slipped her mucky foot back into her shoe and scanned the world around her: the rows and rows of cabbages, the modest white houses of the kibbutz on the plateau, the smattering of village lights along the black mountaintops. How long was she going to have to live in this dusty corner of the world surrounded by Jews and Arabs? Until fifty years ago, half the people in her hometown of Mazyr had been Jews, but it was difficult to imagine when the only evidence was the eighteenth-century cemetery overlooking the Pripyat River where cows and goats grazed among sunken stones. It was off one of these stones that she stole the name for her fake Jewish grandmother.

At last she reached the fragrant grove where the trees were swollen with ripe mandarins and the leaves appeared gray in the moonlight. The hard orchard dirt allowed for easier walking and a more optimistic train of thought. When the USSR announced they were letting Jews leave for Israel, she had jumped at the rare chance to get an exit visa, and what was the use of blubbering about it now? So what if by the time she got the visa the Union had crumbled? Life in Belarus still wasn't a bowl of raspberry jam. In her last letter, her mother wrote that she now wrapped her feet
in plastic bags before slipping on her shoes because the spring puddles seeped through her worn-out soles. Ulya was lucky to have found a way out, and soon she was going to be in New York City. Of this she had no doubt. She doubted almost everything—politicians, religions, isms in general, science, declarations of love, even her family—but one thing she knew she could depend on no matter what: Ulya. With her dyed scarlet hair, she likened herself to molten lava, a smoldering force that coursed through the world dissolving anything and anyone in her way. She shook her head, amused by her own melodrama.

A match flared in the trees up ahead, making her stomach turn. Why did she keep coming to see this man? She watched the orange cigarette tip rise and fall in the darkness. This was very un–molten lava of her. Stupid. He wouldn't help her get to New York. That new boy, Adam of Manhattan, perhaps he could help her. But how? She couldn't imagine falling in love with him: he was so skinny, with purplish bags under his eyes, and all he talked about was his grandfather. She might be able to pay him to marry her, to be her green-card husband—he smacked of someone who might go for that sort of thing—but how much would she have to pay? If it was anything more than nothing, she didn't have it. What if he fell in love with her? Maybe he would marry her for free, without her having to pretend she loved him, in the hopes of winning her over? This didn't seem likely though. He showed surprisingly little interest in her, even after seeing her naked. Was it because she was nothing compared to the women in New York?

Ulya's heart had been set on living in that city of cities for eight years now, ever since that day she was working beside her mother selling dried fish on the platform of the Mazyr train station, and a stunning woman stepped off the Minsk-Kiev express wrapped in a sable fur coat with the most lavish cape collar. November 1986, only a few months after the radioactive rains, and her twelve-year-old self couldn't take her eyes off the woman as she sashayed toward their small stand with her high sleek ponytail and ballerina posture.

The woman bestowed a smile on her, white teeth glistening between painted red lips, and turned to her mother and ordered fifty kopeks of
vobla
in a Moskva accent. As her mother selected the best fish from her offerings, the woman explained that she would never eat food from so close to Chernobyl, but it was good enough for her cat. The woman's
luminous skin and rosy cheeks made Ulya embarrassed by her mother's faint mustache and the large chin mole that echoed the black eyes of their dried perch.

A man in sunglasses and a shiny mink
ushanka
strode toward their stall with open arms. “Hey,
privyet
! Look who's here!” The woman put down her red leather bag, and they stood, clasping each other's arms, gushing over what a delight this chance encounter was and how splendid the other looked. Seeing her mother was too transfixed by the beautiful people to notice anything else in the station, Ulya dropped to her knees and crawled around the fish cart until her extended hand could snatch something, anything, out of the woman's bag. Before she had acknowledged what she was doing, she had done it and was back on the other side of the fish cart fumbling to hide a manila envelope in her coat. She had never stolen before, not even a fruit dumpling from her mother's kitchen.

Fortunately the train started at once, and the woman grabbed her red handbag and paper-wrapped fish and ran laughing with her male companion toward her car. Ulya's luck continued when, as soon as the dark green caboose chuffed out of the station, her mother mumbled that she was going to the toilet. Ulya knew she was also going to pay the station guard his bribe before he had the chance to mosey over and insinuate how much trouble he could get in for letting them sell their fish. Impatient to see what was in her secret envelope, Ulya watched her mother trudge across the railroad tracks and climb onto the opposite platform, her charcoal coat and brown headscarf matching the rusty tracks and cement station building. The giant red digital clock above the station's doors seemed the only color for miles. The second her mother disappeared through the doors, followed by the guard, eager for his ten kopeks, Ulya whisked the envelope out of her coat.