Safekeeping (8 page)

He noticed his mother kept looking toward the back of the dining hall. He followed her eyes and spotted the new volunteer, the troubled kid from
New York, lolling in the side entrance. His mother shifted her weight yet again and brushed the front of her shirt. He knew it wasn't only her distended belly and aching back behind her restlessness. She was eager to take the microphone. The truth was his mother could win tonight regardless of what he wished or what was good in the long run for everybody. She had always been the kibbutz's best orator. She had been rallying people for sixty years. When she was only seventeen years old, she had inspired other adolescents, including his father, Dov, to abandon their families and the parlor rooms and universities of Europe for the desert and swamps of the Promised Land. Soon after, she roused men and women to meet Syrian and Lebanese and Transjordanian armies with nineteenth-century rifles stolen from a museum in Haifa. Alone she had ventured into nearby Arab villages to persuade their elders to share the river with the new Jewish settlement. And now, she had told him this morning, she had to be as persuasive as ever, because here at the end of her life was the most important fight of all, the most important because if she failed tonight, she might as well have failed all along.

Eyal heard clapping. The speaker had finished, and he hadn't registered a word. He rose, shook the visitor's hand, and approached the microphone again.

“At last, we will hear from Ziva, who will present the arguments for sticking to our socialist principles.” He had saved his mother for the finale. Why? Because whether she deserved it or not, he loved her. He also loved her socialist principles; it wasn't his fault they didn't work. Besides, his speech wouldn't have sounded as good following hers.

His mother stood, smiling as if she had already won. She had ignored him when he asked if her speech was ready because she knew he was well aware that it was beyond ready. She had been perfecting it for two months and had committed it to memory over the last few days, practicing until she could say it with a driving rhythm that soared in all the right places.

Strangely, his mother didn't move for the microphone. She stood in place, staring at the crowd. Was this an oratory trick, a way to commandeer the audience's attention before she started? He thought he knew all her techniques. Ziva groped behind her, but her deformed hands couldn't seem to find what she wanted. The back of her chair? Her eyelids fluttered.

Eyal took a step toward her. “Ima?”

She lurched, the crowd gasped, and Eyal dropped his notes and ran. He grabbed his mother by the upper arms; so frail, all he could feel in his hands were the canvas sleeves and bones. The fat on his own arms shook as he held her up while her legs buckled beneath her. Ziva's head dropped back, offering her yellow face to the ceiling lights. Had she stood too quickly? Had her heart been pounding too violently while she waited for her turn to speak? Her hazel eyes blinked at the overhead lights.

“Ima, can you hear me?”

She let out a groan.

“Ima?”

She stopped blinking. The consciousness rushed back into her eyes. She closed her mouth. Lifting her head, she tried to jerk out of Eyal's grip, but he wouldn't let go, not until she was securely on her feet. Then he hovered while she brushed her sleeves.

Ziva cleared her throat, turned to the audience. The whole dining hall had risen. Eyal knew this wasn't the standing ovation his mother had imagined for tonight. Her eyes darted as if she were searching the back of her mind.

“Ima,” he whispered. “Do you want me to help you to the microphone?”

She didn't respond. Wordlessly, she sat back down in the plastic chair.

Eyal didn't want to believe it. His mother wasn't going to give her speech. Couldn't.

He walked back to the microphone and spoke over the crowd that was already gathering its stuff and heading for the doors.

“At the end of September, we will vote on whether to institute different wages. This gives you the whole summer to consider it. No one will be able to say they weren't given enough time to think about this very carefully. If anyone wants to come by my office and ask questions, please do. And—”

He gestured toward his mother, sitting straighter than ever, but looking terribly small. Reduced. She glared into the emptiness above the crowd. He raised his voice.

“And, please, please, if anyone would like to hear the arguments of the opposing side, I encourage you to go to Ziva. I know she would be happy to speak to you. Please, please do not hesitate to talk to her.”

A
dam checked his wristwatch again. 2:17 a.m. Was that soldier ever going to stop playing the piano? In four hours he had to get up and wash seven hundred people's dishes. The kid would never be allowed to play all night if the only people within earshot of the dining hall weren't the foreign volunteers and senior citizens. Before going to bed, Adam had scoped out Ziva's apartment in the old people's building, her window the only one still filled with light.

When Adam first climbed into bed, he had been grateful for the piano. As he drifted in and out of a light sleep, he heard Ofir trying a bar one way, then another, tripping up and trying again, and it was much better than the inescapable quiet of the last two nights. But now the soldier had hit his stride. Every time Adam closed his eyes, the wistful melody sent him up the stairs of their five-story walkup, two steps at a time, carrying grocery bags filled with Oreos, Pop-Tarts, Mountain Dew, and a large container of kasha varnishkes, that tasteless mix of buckwheat groats and bow-tie pasta his grandfather loved so much. Every time he reached their door—2C—he managed to pop open his eyes.

Golda slept beside him, her chest pressing into his thigh with every inhale. Why did this little creature attach herself to him? He rested his hand on her warm furry body and immediately removed it. He couldn't bear the fragility of her tiny ribs under his palm.

2C. Would he ever be able to stomach being in that apartment again? Just two bedrooms, a family room, a bathroom, and a kitchen, all of them just big enough. Anyone else would find the place nothing special, no
different than a billion other small apartments in the city, in the world, but that's where he had spent a happy childhood and had planned on living out the rest of his life—loving a wife, maybe raising a child, and at the end of it all being just like Zayde, an old man setting the potted plants out on the fire escape in the spring, then bringing them back in before the first snowfall. If a person wanted to have a real home, he couldn't keep moving around; he had to stay put.

He closed his eyes and there he was going up the stairs again, carrying the bags of goodies. When he arrived at their door, he allowed himself to unlock it, turn the knob. Inside, he found the apartment unusually quiet. He wiped his Converses on the coir doormat and hung his parka. He supposed the old man was napping; otherwise he'd be in the family room, reading a mystery novel or listening to a favorite swing tune. Mostly he listened to the old records sitting on the couch with a faraway look, but once in a while he danced with an imaginary partner, especially to Bing Crosby's “After You've Gone.” Swaying, eyes half closed, an invisible woman in his arms, he'd mouth,
You'll feel blue, you'll feel sad, you'll miss the bestest pal you've ever had.

Adam dumped the kasha varnishkes into a bowl and popped it in the microwave. While the timer counted down, he assured himself that objects were just objects. Even that brooch, when all was said and done, was just an object. And he had no choice. When Bones's thugs trailed him home from the East Broadway station, smashed his head into a mailbox in broad daylight, and warned him that next time they would kill him and force the money out of his old man, he knew he had to come up with the fifteen thousand dollars fast. And the brooch—eventually it was going to be his anyway, right? Since he was the only person around to inherit it. Zayde had only Adam and Adam only Zayde; so maybe his grandfather wouldn't have done it with pleasure, but he would have let him sell the brooch to save his life. This way the old man got to make that sacrifice without the hurt of knowing it.

“Zayde!” Adam headed for his grandfather's bedroom. “Wake up! I got your favorite, kasha varnishkes from Moishe's.”

He carried the warm bowl through the family room, where snow dusted the fire escape beyond the window. A cold March. Usually at this hour in the afternoon, a golden square of dusty sunlight glowed on the wooden floor in front of the television, but today the wintry light was pale and diffused. The radiators rattled. The apartment, barely renovated since Zayde and Bobbe moved into it in 1950, was anchored with anachronisms: a
wooden breadbox sat next to the microwave; a midcentury credenza housed the VCR; an old-world cuckoo clock hung beside the wireless phone. All the furniture came from Leo's! on Delancey, where Zayde had worked the floor for forty-six years before his retirement two months earlier.

“Zayde?” Adam stood outside his door. “Don't you want some kasha varnishkes? I warmed them up for you.”

Not a rustle. If the old man were sleeping, where was his snore? Maybe he wasn't home? Where could he have gone? He'd already taken his daily walk to Duane Reade. Adam slowly turned the knob. “Zayde?”

The old man's bedroom hadn't changed since the days when Adam would crawl into his bed after a nightmare: the framed drawing of a gaslit street in Dresden, the blue acrylic blanket, the window onto the brick air-shaft that echoed with cooing pigeons. As Adam turned to leave, he spied the slippered foot sticking out from behind the bed.

He dropped the bowl of kasha and ran to where his grandfather lay on the hardwood floor, body facing one way, head the other, the old Florsheim shoebox open beside him, the shoebox that earlier that morning, while his grandfather was on his walk to Duane Reade, Adam had pulled from the shelf in the closet, pulled out from behind all that junk, the magazines and jars of spare buttons and pens. He'd been careful to replace it all just so, was certain nobody could have detected anything.

He took the old man's face in his hands, the cheeks smooth, cold. He searched the eyes, the black eyes like his own. Their light was out—that loving, amused, nostalgic shine gone. He brought his face to the slack mouth, checked for breath. Nothing. Only the familiar, safe smell of his grandfather, a warm human smell, slightly peppery, overlaid by a rum-based aftershave, laundry starch, scotch mints. Brylcreem.

It was the Brylcreem Zayde had gone to buy at Duane Reade when Adam hunted for the brooch and found it in a blue felt bag in the shoebox.

Adam sat back, hands pressed against his mouth. If only he too would stop breathing. In his grandfather's fist was the yellowed note, the one that had been in the felt bag with the brooch, the one he had been in too big a hurry to read.

Adam opened his eyes, back again in the kibbutz dorm room. The music had only grown more haunting, more insistent. He got out of bed, padded over to his bureau, and retrieved the old note from inside his passport. He unfolded the brittle paper, revealing the slanted black cursive.

It had taken three people to translate the note for Adam—Mrs. Silver in 4C did the German, Moishe of Moishe's deli the Yiddish, and the Israeli punk from the head shop on Avenue A explained the Hebrew—but since then Adam had read the note so many times with the translations in his head that as his eyes skimmed over the words, the languages felt familiar. As if he were his grandfather. And now he was reading it where his grandfather had read it that first time all those years ago.

           
November 30, 1947

           
Kibbutz Sadot Hadar

           
Mein liebster Liebling
Franz,

                 
It's so painful for me to write this letter that I'm having trouble moving the pen. Please forgive me for returning your brooch like this. What I did last night, what I'm doing right now, I hate myself for it, but please don't hate me. You must know how much I've loved you these last two years. If only I believed in something beyond the here and now, I could take comfort in the idea that we might be together again one day in the
olam ha-ba
. But, of course, I don't believe in such things. This is our one life, and we will not spend it together. We will probably never see each other again. It's unbearable to think. Or at least it seems so now, but the truth is we are still quite young with a fair amount of time ahead of us. A day will come when it won't seem so unbearable. Your mother said the brooch should only go to someone special. I hope you find her, I really do (though, selfishly, the thought also kills me. Isn't that horrible?). I'm afraid your heart will heal faster than mine. I'm sure of it. Wherever I go on the kibbutz, for the rest of my life, I will be greeted with memories of you, whereas you are sure to forget this plain little kibbutznik amid the glamour of your
goldene medina
.

                 
I hope the second half of your life will be much, much easier than the first.

Love always,

Dagmar

Adam looked up from the note. In twenty years, he'd only seen his grandfather with the brooch twice. How was he supposed to know that he
went into that shoebox so often? If he'd known that within a day the old man would've noticed it missing, he might have done things differently. Might have. It was hard to say when a person was using. He still might have been too fucked up, too desperate, too selfish to care. This is what he'd hoped: that his grandfather would only notice the brooch missing after a few years, after he had been a good grandson, a good person, so long his grandfather would be forced to forgive him. He also figured chances were good the old man might die without ever finding out. But it had never occurred to him that finding the brooch missing would give the old man a full-on heart attack. That it would kill him.