Safekeeping (9 page)

The music stopped. Adam waited with the note in his hand for the boy to start up again, but he didn't. 3:32 now. The music may have sent him up the stairs, but at least it had sympathy. How did people live with such coldhearted silence? He refolded the note along its worn creases and returned it with his passport to the top drawer. He couldn't get in the bed though, not yet, not with his heart racing like this. He paced with Golda watching him.

Someone special. The wrong hands. Only after the ambulance—no strobes necessary—carried Zayde away, and he was left standing alone in the middle of their family room, did he remember his grandfather telling him about “the wrong hands.”
Remembered
wasn't the honest word, more like
couldn't forget.
He did remember before stealing the brooch, but he could forget, could push it out of his mind. Now it was all he could think about: his grandfather sitting on a bench in Seward Park, repeating with cross-eyed intensity that the brooch couldn't end up in “the wrong hands.”

What else could he remember from that story? Almost nothing. Fourteen, finally old enough to hear about the brooch, and what did he do while his grandfather was talking? Daydream about his new girlfriend Monica, who told him on the phone that afternoon that she wanted to wait until they'd been together a year before losing their virginity. He kept imagining pulling off her pink velour pants while his grandfather told him a story that may have involved Buchenwald. Had it? God, he hoped not. Sometimes when he tried to remember the story, he got a flash of rubble. Rubble as far as the eye could see—but that could just be a weird connection his mind was making because maybe there had been construction that day in Seward Park. He never got up the nerve to ask his grandfather to tell the story again. The only thing he could remember for certain was the
part about “the wrong hands,” how he had to make sure the brooch didn't end up in them, and he only remembered that part because the old man said it four or five times.

Adam climbed into the bed, where Golda hurried to burrow under the blanket and snuggle against him. What Dagmar had begrudgingly wished for his grandfather, that he would find another special person for the brooch, never happened. For the rest of his life, decade after decade, it remained in the felt bag with that goodbye letter. What did Bobbe, his wife of twenty-some years, think of him never giving her the brooch? Did she even know about it? As for their daughter, Adam's mother, it was no mystery why it never went to her: she would have sold it before Adam had the chance to. Adam's hands had turned out to be the wrong hands.

The only way to make sure the brooch ended up in the right hands was to leave it with the one person his grandfather had ever wanted to have it, the one person he had ever found worthy. It wouldn't undo the past, Adam understood that, but it was both the least and the most he could do. There was only Dagmar. He had to find her.

Z
iva watched her new charge roll a lychee around in her palm. The two women were sorting the little red fruits, seated on upturned plastic crates on the edge of the orchard. Ziva found the girl beyond irritating. Not only did she inspect every lychee for a full minute before tossing it into either the good crate or the bad crate; more often than not, she would retrieve the lychee and reexamine it. The same little drupe! One time she caught her inspecting the same lychee three times. And always with a distracted look in her eyes.

Ziva tossed a cracked lychee into the reject pile. “Claudette, I hope you don't think you're above sorting fruit.”

Claudette shook her head. “No. Of course not.”

“Working the land is good for you.
Build the land, and it will build you.
”

Claudette held a lychee closer to her eyes. “It is important to keep busy. The devil finds work for idle hands.”

Ziva squinted at the girl. Was she being sarcastic? The girl wouldn't be the first in her generation to mock Ziva's idealism. Ziva sorted the fruit in her lap as quickly as she could with her misshapen fingers and tossed an emptied crate to the side. She would lead by example. The young foreigner would be forced to pick up her pace when she saw an old lady with hideous hands was on a third crate while she was only halfway through her first.

Instead the younger woman withdrew more and more into her own world. By the time Ziva had finished a fourth crate, the girl was staring into her crate of lychees, motionless. What was the feckless foreigner daydreaming about? The latest fashion? Some boy?

“You know you can't sort fruit telepathically, Claudette!”

Startled, the young woman looked up at Ziva and nodded, but Ziva could tell she was nodding at her without seeing her. She wasn't present. Claudette reached for a lychee.

“Grab a handful, Claudette! Enough with this one lychee at a time.”

Ziva dragged a fifth crate toward her. She wasn't going to let this young woman or what happened at last night's meeting slow her down. What had happened? She had felt fine walking over. Angry, yes, horrified, but not sick, not weak. Well, of course, she'd felt a little sick: she was old, had cirrhosis. She always felt a little sick. But she felt capable. Prepared. She approached the dining hall, said “Excuse me” to the boy blocking the doorway, and then when the boy turned . . .

She didn't know him. She was sure she had never seen him before, and yet his face felt familiar. Terribly. The familiarity was so disorienting that for a second she thought: here he is, the Angel of Death, come for me. That's how much this boy's face threw her off her bearings. She proceeded into the dining hall, climbed onto the stage, but the confusion followed her.

The whole time her son blathered about freedom and that other idiot prattled on about privatized communes, the boy leaned in the doorway, like a ghost, like . . . Of course. He resembled him so much: Franz. After he had been on the kibbutz for a couple of months, put on some weight, but wasn't entirely healthy yet. She had told herself that it was absurd to be so unnerved about it; at her age everyone looked like someone else, someone from the past. So maybe it was the stress of the meeting, or all that medication, or the cirrhosis itself, but when she stood up—

“Should we take these?” A young man pointed at the good crates. It was Yossi's son, not a bad boy, but how did Yossi have a grown-up son? She still thought of Yossi as a boy. Did this young man see her faint last night? He wouldn't remember when she was the secretary and ran the show. Probably wasn't even alive yet.

“Yes, yes. These are done. No thanks to this young woman. Two hours and she hasn't sorted a single crate.”

“I'm sorry.” Claudette hastened to get another lychee. “I told the secretary I would be better in the—”

“What good is sorry?”

The young man carried the crates away, and Ziva went back to sorting the fruit. Had she ever seen gnarlier hands? Bony, dry, spotted, yellow. She
had never seen her mother or grandmother with such old hands. The last time she laid eyes on them, when their families had come to the Lehrte train station to see her and Dov off, her mother had been only thirty-nine years old, and her grandmother—how strange to think it—must have been twenty years younger than Ziva was today. Excited, nervous, she and Dov had held hands throughout that train ride to the port in Venice—fat, smooth, childish hands that didn't even appear to have veins in them.

Her mother had been painting a blue bird the night she came home with the ocean liner tickets. Their parlor, once reserved for special occasions, had been transformed into her mother's makeshift studio: bedsheets covering the Persian rug, the settee, and piano. Her mother's back faced the foyer, the studio lamp highlighting the grays in her brown hair and the hand applying feathery, blue brushstrokes to a bird's extravagant wing.

“Dagmar.” Her mother didn't turn from the canvas. “Why so late?”

Dagmar hung up the wool coat, tickets tucked inside the inner pocket. “We had trouble drafting this month's newsletter, Mutti.”

It was true the Maccabi Hatzair meeting went longer than usual, but it was also true that she and her best friend, Dov, had taken the long way home so they could plot, as they had for years, their departure to the Land of Israel, only this time they had the tickets, bought that afternoon, for a ship leaving in three weeks. They were seventeen years old: if Hitler hadn't come to power, their parents never would have approved of them setting off on their own for the dusty edge of Arabia, but now she and Dov believed they would let them go without too much of a fight.

Dagmar hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a chocolate-ginger cookie from the counter, and sat at the breakfast table with a marked-up copy of the newsletter. The chocolate-ginger cookies were the only thing her mother baked that she could still swallow. Ever since her mother had been barred from the art school, she filled the hours she would have spent teaching with baking. Since the family of three could only eat so many pastries, Dagmar and her mother had walked plate after tinfoiled plate over to the neighbors, until they stopped answering their doors. Dagmar read through the statement, circling the Hebrew words she didn't know. Having the best Modern Hebrew in the chapter, she had been voted translator, and even if she had to work through the night, she would have the translation perfected for tomorrow's printing.

“Dagmar, sweetie, come paint with me,” called her mother.

“I'm busy!”

Her mother came and leaned in the kitchen doorway. She wore lipstick and a wool skirt even though she hadn't left the house that day. Dagmar admired the strength her mother showed in keeping up appearances, but lipstick was degrading, and the woman who put it on while fellow Jews were having their beards cut in the streets ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous.

Her mother said, “I don't like these meetings. They're dangerous.”

Dangerous! In other words: courageous, admirable. Imagine her reaction when she finds out about the tickets for the
Kampala
. Without looking up from her notes, Dagmar answered, “It's better to die on your feet, Mutti, than live on your knees.”

Her mother walked over and kissed her on the head. “Oh, my Dagmar. My little Dagmar and her big plans.”

Ziva tossed a bruised lychee at the rotten basket, wondering if she could have painted with her mother that night and still have completed her translation. She picked another lychee from her lap. It too was bruised. Tossing it, she realized she was moving as slowly as her empty-headed young charge.

Enough. She sat up straighter. She had to focus. Keep working, fighting. She might have lost an important battle at last night's meeting, but she hadn't lost the war. Articles needed to be written for the kibbutz newsletter, question-and-answer sessions had to be organized, posters needed to be printed and tacked everywhere. There was no time for woolgathering. The answer was no. No, she could not have painted with her mother that night. It was as true then as it was now: the only way to accomplish something extraordinary was with extraordinary commitment.

“We're not leaving until we sort through every one of these crates,” Ziva told Claudette. “Don't sit back every time you pick up a lychee. It's a small waste of time, and small wastes of time add up to a big waste of time. You don't want to be a big waste of time, do you?”

Claudette shook her head, hunched forward.

“Oh!” Ziva gasped. She'd forgotten to take her arthritis pill.

She reached over her distended belly for her bag. How could she be expected to remember to take all these pills at their various prescribed times? With food, without food, before bedtime, in the morning, these together, these at least four hours apart? She opened the pill organizer, a big, ugly plastic thing with as many pockets of color as her mother's palette,
and struggled to identify the steroids. The green capsules curbed nausea, the white tablets numbed her throbbing bones, the yellow ones prevented dizziness, the red and blue gelcaps supposedly stemmed the accumulation of fluid in her abdomen, the tiny orange pills thinned her blood so it didn't pool in painful blue bulges around her ankles, and the pink antihistamines soothed the incessant itchiness caused by all this medication.

As she picked out two chalky tablets, she noticed the younger woman gawking at her and her stockpile of pills. “What are you looking at?”

“Sorry.” Claudette averted her eyes.

“Sorry again.”

Ziva washed down the pills with a chug from her tin canteen. In the distance, beyond the peanut fields and cabbage fields, tall eucalyptuses marked the kibbutz graveyard. Under the shade of those trees lay Dov and the other pioneers and a slab of earth waiting for her. Tonight she would remind Eyal that the cemetery hadn't been tended to since last autumn.

When the truck came at the end of the day to fetch the women, Ziva insisted they sit in the back on the metal benches with the other field workers, mostly Arab men. Once again she had to tell the driver that she didn't see why she should sit in the front on cushy seats. Because she was a woman? A Jew? An employer? She left out “old.” As the truck bumped over the dirt path, the setting sun made a golden wonder of the wheat fields. Ziva breathed in the early evening air, so cool and loamy, sweetened by the overripe lemon trees. In the distance, the lights of the villages twinkled on the darkening hilltops, little man-made constellations.