In order to change the subject—or maybe, Ulya thought, because he had wanted to ask all evening—he said, “So who was that person you were eating lunch with today?”
Enjoying his jealousy, Ulya pretended not to remember. She rolled on her side to face him. “Today? Lunch? Who was it?”
“He didn’t look familiar. Didn’t look Russian. Probably a Jew. Tanned skin. Black hair.”
“Oh, him! Adam. Yes, he’s a Jew . . . from Manhattan.”
“Manhattan?” Farid raised his eyebrows.
Ulya smiled at his worry. She was glad he hadn’t seen Adam until today. If he had seen her with him when he first arrived, a week or so ago, he never would’ve been jealous. He would have known that she couldn’t possibly be interested in that bum with the shaggy hair. But Adam didn’t look quite as sickly and unkempt now. From the distance Farid had probably seen him, he may have looked quite good.
“Yes, Manhattan. The real one, in New York. I don’t know why he’s on the kibbutz. His grandfather was here after the war.”
“My grandfather was here before the war.”
“Oh, God!” Ulya rolled her eyes. “Not this again. I can’t hear this anymore. Everything was different before the war. Then Belarus had the Jews. Who knows? Maybe if there’d been no war, if the Germans hadn’t destroyed every city in my country, and then the Russians, maybe I wouldn’t be running away today.”
Farid rested his hand on the dip of her waist. “And did this Jew try to convince you to go to Manhattan with him?”
Ulya wasn’t going to tell him that even though Adam had seen her naked, he couldn’t be less interested in her, that he talked to her as if she weren’t the least bit attractive.
“I don’t want to talk about Adam anymore.”
“Me neither.”
Farid pressed his lips against hers and pulled back his head to take in her face. Ulya met his stare with her blue eyes, which she knew Farid found as beautiful and exotic as she found his gold ones. He brushed a strand of hair from her face.
He said, “Chez Farid is going to be a very special restaurant. I can see the sign, very fancy. It’s going to have the best hummus. Everybody—Jews, Arabs, even Russians—are going to come from all over for it.”
Ulya stuck out her tongue. “I hate hummus. It tastes like whipped sawdust.”
“And, of course, what I’m really hoping, Ulya, what I want more than anything is for you to be with me behind the counter. For it to be our restaurant.”
Ulya managed to keep a cool face even though his words punched her in the gut and sent her soul, the soul he claimed to sense so well, reeling backward. How had she come to a place in life where such a proposal was possible from such a person? She couldn’t imagine a worse fate than the one she’d just been offered. For a second she missed Mazyr and the smokestacks.
“That’s sweet,” she said, as if he couldn’t possibly be serious.
But he either didn’t hear the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. “I can’t help it, Ulya. You’re as important to the dream as the fancy sign and the hummus. I’m not even sure if I would want the restaurant without you.”
As important as the hummus? If she weren’t so horrified, she would laugh. And did he think it was cute that he wouldn’t want the restaurant if it weren’t for her? That’s why he was never going to have one. He didn’t want it enough. Farid didn’t want anything enough. She couldn’t even be sure he wanted her badly enough. Maybe she had come to him too easily. She rolled onto her back. A stone pressed into her shoulder blade, and she writhed to the side, away from Farid.
“I’m going to New York, Farid. Manhattan. I’ve told you that a hundred times. It’s like you’re deaf.”
Farid shifted over to be near her again. “Do you know how many times you’ve said you never want to see me again, but then, the very next night, come crawling through that barbed wire?”
Ulya’s face burned. The stars twinkled down at her, mockingly. She debated telling him, once and for all, that she never wanted to see him again. She rolled so that she was facing away from him. She really should get up. Go. Go talk to the American. Make herself see something in him, make him see something in her. Anything but keep wasting time here.
Farid laid his hand on her waist, tentatively this time. “Okay. I believe you. You’re going to New York. But don’t you think you’re going to miss me? At least a little?”
Ulya’s eyes roamed over the collapsed cattle wire fence and the fallen mandarins rotting on the ground and marveled that Farid could think for even a second that she would miss him amid the dazzling store windows and honking yellow taxis and elevators to the sixtieth floor and cocktails the color of gemstones and handsome young businessmen in Italian suits with platinum tie clips. Did he really think she was going to miss his farmer’s hands with those flat fingernails packed with dirt when one of those suited men had his hands on her waist? She may have come to him easily while she was trapped on the kibbutz, but when she’s in Manhattan she’ll never think about this barbaric place and its lovelorn Arab. She probably won’t even remember his name.
She sat up and reached for the second bottle of metallic cabernet. As she twisted out the cork, she noticed him watching her, head propped on his elbow, his glossy eyes like gold coins lost at the bottom of a lake.
She laid a hand against his cheek and covered his face in light kisses. Farid closed his eyes, and she kissed each lid. Why rub in how little she was going to miss him?
Adam walked down the hallway, looking for the archives office. Eyal’s office door was open, revealing the secretary hunched over his desk, but everyone else had gone home early, as was the custom on Fridays, which sounded like a great custom to Adam until he found out Israel had a six-day workweek with only Saturdays off. Luckily, Barry, who had returned from reserve duty the evening before, wasn’t making him wait until after Shabbat to go through the archives. He agreed to meet him the following day, as soon as Adam was finished with his dishwashing.
Adam knocked on the open door, and a stout man rose from behind a desk, extending his hand. “Shabbat shalom! You must be Adam.”
Adam had expected a guy in his thirties, old enough to be in charge of the archives, young enough to be a soldier. How could this graying man with reading glasses tucked into the collar of his work shirt just have returned from reserve duty? They shook hands.
“Sorry about leaving you so many messages,” said Adam.
Everything about Barry’s face sloped down, his nose, the outer corners of his eyes, and yet he had a cheerful aura, a sense of humor under his clipped accent. “That’s quite all right. It was nice to come home and have so many messages not from my mother. Last time, she forgot I was doing miluim and kept calling long-distance from Jo’burg asking why I wasn’t calling her back.”
“How often do you do reserve duty?”
“Every three years or so. This was probably my last. Funny, for years I hated going, and now . . .” He smiled, shrugged. “Well, I suppose we all get too old for something. So you’re looking for a woman named Dagmar, eh? Who lived here in, what was it? Forty-seven? Dagmar, sounds Swedish. Or maybe German?”
Disappointed that yet another person didn’t remember Dagmar, Adam said, “Not sure,” before recalling the liebster Liebling and all the German in the goodbye note. “Sorry. Definitely German. Don’t have a last name though.”
“Not a problem. The kibbutz was tiny back then. We’ll go through the papers of everyone who became a member in the forties.”
Barry’s sport sandals squeaked on the linoleum as he walked to the front of the room and ran a finger down a dusty cabinet. Tall metal filing cabinets lined every wall, most topped by cardboard filing boxes. Barry pulled out the bottommost drawer and returned with a stack of files. “Do you read Hebrew?”
“I can sound out the letters.”
He jotted four letters on a scrap of paper. “That’s ‘Dagmar.’ Look for it here, on the top line of each form.”
Barr
y set half the stack down in front of Adam and took a seat with the other half. Adam dropped into a chair and eagerly searched the papers. Every time the passport-sized black-and-white photo stapled to the forms revealed a young woman, Adam compared the name to Barry’s jotting twice, three times if she was pretty.
When Adam reached the last form without success, he looked to Barry, who shook his head. “No luck here either. We can check the files from the thirties, but those people, the pioneers who founded the kibbutz, are legendary. I would have heard of Dagmar if she were among them.”
As Barry carried the file back to the cabinet, Adam contemplated Dagmar’s name written on the scrap of paper. The four letters, though somewhat familiar from Hebrew school, were foreign enough for it to seem strange that these squiggles——could represent a human being. Please, please, he thought, let these squiggles be in this next batch of files.
Barry settled behind his desk with a manila file too thin to need two people to leaf through. Adam, hands clasped on top of the desk, leaned forward while Barry’s eyes skimmed the papers. A moment later, he removed his reading glasses and shook his head again.
Adam sat back. “This makes no sense. She was my grandfather’s girlfriend when he was here. She was a kibbutznik. I have a letter from her, addressed from the kibbutz.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I made aliyah in sixty-seven, after the Six-Day War, so I can personally say there hasn’t been a Dagmar since then. And she just isn’t in the records from before that.”
Adam dropped his head. He had accepted that Dagmar no longer lived here, that it had been naïve of him to think that she did just because she had written she would be here “for the rest of her life.” How many people lived the lives they planned for themselves when they were young? Now he had to swallow that she had never lived here. He would have to start looking for her elsewhere. But where?
Barry tapped the desk. “I have an idea. If you’re sure she was a kibbutznik, you could write the United Kibbutz Movement. One letter, and you could find out if she’s living on any of the three hundred kibbutzim in the country. Unless you think she might be religious. Religious kibbutzim are under a different umbrella.”
In the note she had scoffed at the world to come, and he couldn’t imagine his grandfather with an orthodox woman. He used to get a chuckle out of the wigged women fitwalking over the Williamsburg Bridge in their long skirts and opaque nylons. “No, she wasn’t religious . . . Can we first look up my zayde’s file? Franz Rosenberg?”
“Certainly. The DPs must be somewhere.”
While Barry walked around the room, inspecting the file drawers, Adam closed his eyes and tried to stay calm.
“That him?”
Adam opened his eyes. Stapled to the form Barry held out to him was the oldest photo he’d ever seen of Zayde. By far. Any picture from before the war had been lost. The oldest pictures he’d seen were the faded Polaroids from the late sixties, showing a man younger than the one Adam would come to love, but well into old age, his thick hair a gunmetal gray, his tall, thin body decked in fashions—high-waisted pants, fat ties—so out of step with his teenage daughter’s mod minidress. But it wasn’t only the youth that made this photo unique. He’d never seen Zayde so frail, even in old age. The hollows in his cheeks could hold water, as could the sockets housing his shiny black eyes. His hair grew in patches. Though Adam had long known his grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, he’d somehow never pictured what he must have looked like in the aftermath of those years. It occurred to him—he felt like an asshole making the comparison, but there it was—that he and Zayde had both arrived at this kibbutz frail, alone, with nothing but the brooch and a resolve to start over.
Barry pulled up a chair and began to translate. “It says he arrived February 17, 1945, and left . . . that’s interesting. He never officially checked out. It says he—ne’elam. Disappeared. That he was last seen on the morning of November 30, 1947.”
The date from the goodbye letter. So Dagmar knew he was leaving, but not the kibbutz.
“I wonder why he didn’t check out.”
Barry looked from the photo to Adam. “You know, you’re the spitting image of him.”
Barry left to xerox the picture for him and grab the address for the United Kibbutz Movement. After seeing that picture of his young, feeble grandfather, Adam felt closer to the old man, something he hadn’t thought possible. So even though he was frustrated Dagmar wasn’t in the archives, he also felt a tinge of excitement—he was on their trail: not only Dagmar’s, but his grandfather’s. He was getting a story about him after all. Why had he disappeared? And on the same day as Dagmar’s note? In the note, she apologized for the night before. What could she have done?
Barry handed Adam some papers. “I also got you the address for the Sochnut, the Jewish Agency. They have immigration files on everyone who’s made aliyah since 1930 or so. Between the Sochnut and the United Kibbutz Movement, you should get a good lead.”
Adam headed for the general store to buy stationery and stamps, the papers folded in his back pocket. Outside, spring was putting on a show, the May sunlight compelling the square’s bricks to sparkle, the same twinkling found on Manhattan’s sidewalks on bright days. The leaves rustling in the trees flashed white, and the flowers in the cement planters bloomed a popping pink. The air smelled of fresh soil. Had it been this kind of ridiculously pretty day on the kibbutz when his grandfather first fell in love?
It was because of the brooch that Adam knew his grandfather had never loved his grandmother. One day when Zayde was cleaning it at the kitchen table—the second and only other time he witnessed his grandfather with the brooch—Adam leaned on a chair back and asked whether Bobbe had worn the brooch a lot. He wanted to sit down at the table with Zayde, but couldn’t. Almost seventeen and home after his second stint at Lodmoor and third school suspension, he was trying hard to act normal, get things back to the way they were, but the old man wasn’t softening as quickly this time. Without looking at him, Zayde dipped a Q-tip into a jar of jewelry cleaner and said he never gave the brooch to Bobbe, he had hoped that one day he would want to, but it didn’t work out that way.
Adam gripped the back of the chair. He hadn’t listened to the last story about the brooch, and this time he was going to fucking listen. “What do you mean it didn’t work out that way?”
Still not looking at him, Zayde dabbed the brooch’s tiny gold flowers. “Love isn’t what brought me and your bobbe together. We were schoolmates as little children. Not friends. We had some classes together. When I got to New York, she married me so I could stay here.”
“You never loved Bobbe?”
“I loved her, the way you can’t help but love someone in your family, the way you might love a sister you don’t get along with . . . Your grandmother wasn’t a bad person, Adam, but as the years wore on, we grew apart, not closer. She didn’t like when I played my records. She never wanted to take walks, go to the movies. I had a hard time with her sleeping all day. All day, she slept. Never cleaned, never cooked. After a long day at Leo’s, I had to come home and make dinner. She was a depressed woman, your bobbe. She had more than enough reason, but it was very hard for me the way . . . she slept.”
Adam found it extremely romantic that after losing Dagmar, his grandfather had never fallen in love again. Adam had already been in love more times than he knew: Clara, the toothy registrar at Baruch, who’d sneaked him into the system after he failed to register on time; Suzie, the sullen Korean girl at the corner bodega, forced to work after school by her family; Stephanie, from that second time in juvie rehab, LOVE razored onto her arm, the embossed scar so poignant; and, of course, Monica Rivera of the pink velour track pants, the first girl he ever loved and hurt. Did having loved so many girls make each of these experiences something less than love? When he was with them, nobody else existed; and when it was over, usually after the girl tired of his bullshit, he was always shattered, convinced that he would never get over her
. But then he would meet someone new. He didn’t see how it was possible not to fall in love again. If you were paying attention to people. People were so heartbreaking, beautiful. Other people, anyway.
Bells tinkled as Adam entered the kolbo. Kibbutzniks filed in and out, hurrying to make purchases before the store closed for Shabbat. One-tenth the size of Duane Reade and not half as brightly lit, the store’s shelves were sparsely packed with shampoos, cleaning products, and school supplies. Adam approached the cashier, a pudgy-faced woman with ratty, dyed blonde hair, and asked where he could find envelopes and stamps.
“How many do you need?”
“Two, I guess.”
She laid two blue airmail letters on the counter. “They don’t need stamps.”
Adam pulled out his monopoly money, and she waved. “We give volunteers airmail for free. Just remember to tell your family how nice we are.”
“I will.” People always assumed you had a family. “I keep telling my mom not to worry about me.”
“Worry—that’s what moms do.”
As Adam turned from the counter, he met eyes with Ziva, who stood before a wall of over-the-counter medicines. She quickly turned.
“Hey.” He walked over. “I’ve got a picture of my grandfather, from back in the day. Maybe it’ll jog your memory.”
The old woman had taken down a bottle of calcium and was absorbed in its packaging. Adam pulled the papers out of his back pocket.
“Will you look at it?”
“Right now?”
“I wish it were clearer.” He held it out. “It’s a xerox of the photo in the archives.”
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