Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  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 u
niform. 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.

  “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 i
mpression 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.”

  Mother 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.