Claudette’s eyes, burning from exhaustion, stared into the first light starbursting through a broken slat in the blinds. This might as well be Hell. It was a profane thought—the mortal sin of Despair—but she couldn’t imagine how Hell could be much worse. This past night she had been a lesbian and a pedophile; the night before, she wanted to have sex with a dog; the night before that, she lay awake scared that she hadn’t washed her hands between going to the toilet and cutting vegetables in the kitchen with Ziva, and many people on the kibbutz were going to get sick and die because of her. What would it be tonight?
Yes, she was sure of it: better a lake of fire.
Adam followed the country road with Golda running ahead to sniff the trees and willow herbs. This was his first time leaving the kibbutz since walking up this road three weeks earlier. While waiting to hear back from those organizations, he figured he could use his day off to check if Dagmar lived on one of the two other kibbutzim on the hill. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made: maybe Dagmar and his grandfather, being in love, had visited each other’s kibbutz every day. That would explain why she could refer to herself as a kibbutznik even though she wasn’t a member of Sadot Hadar, and how she might still be reminded of her old lover wherever she turned.
The first kibbutz Adam called upon, halfway down the hill, sent him to their main office, where an old lady, hair yellowed from decades of smoking, rasped, “No, we’ve never had a Dagmar here.” After she double-checked their files, she offered him a taste of chocolate made in their factory. Adam hoped he’d get a different answer at the second kibbutz, nestled at the bottom of the hill, not far from the bus stop at the road’s end, where he recalled disembarking at a concrete shelter on the edge of a flaxen field.
The thirty-something woman in the guardhouse put down the phone when Adam approached her window. Hair tucked inside a light blue snood, she peered through what seemed to be a permanent squint.
“I’m looking for someone named Dagmar who might live on this kibbutz. Or used to live here.”
She shook her head, lips curved down. “But you can check with Avi at the main office.”
Adam glanced into the kibbutz: two men with yarmulkes stood talking, white strings dangling over their beige cargos, not over black pants like with the jeweler, but still, he didn’t want to be around tzitzis. It was a religious kibbutz, and he really didn’t want to go in there. And it probably wasn’t necessary; he’d already decided Dagmar couldn’t be religious. But he had to go in. It would be stupid not to. Maybe fateful.
“Can my dog come?” he asked, worried orthodox people had something weird against dogs. Had he ever seen a black hat walking a dog?
“Of course,” the woman said, and directed him and Golda to the main office.
The peacefulness inside was similar to Sadot Hadar; old trees towered over small white bungalows. He passed a basketball court, the kolbo, and then something they didn’t have on Sadot Hadar. It was an unimpressive synagogue, a boxy building covered in discolored stucco and topped by a large rusty steel menorah. Out of its open doors floated the sound of several men half singing, half mumbling an afternoon prayer.
Adam left Golda outside and stepped into the main office building, where it was cool and quiet. He poked his head in the first open door. “I’m looking for Avi.”
“You’ve found him.” A youngish guy with a scraggly black beard and silver-framed glasses put down his pen. Adam explained what he was looking for and Avi replied, “No, no one with that name lives here now, but if you follow me, we can check the older archives. Now I’m curious.”
Avi touched the mezuzah as he passed through the door, but he didn’t kiss his fingers afterward the way Mr. Weisberg had when he passed into the office in the back of the jewelry store. Adam accompanied Avi, who looked religious from the neck up—blue crochet yarmulke, beard—and totally kibbutznik from the shoulders down: threadbare T-shirt, khaki work pants, leather utility sandals. Mr. Weisberg would never have worn sandals. Would never wear them. He wasn’t dead.
Avi ushered Adam into a room of filing cabinets and pointed at a beige computer monitor, orange Hebrew type glowing on its black screen. “We’re slowly transferring the important files onto that computer, but it’s taking forever. At the rate we’re going we’ll be in a perpetual state of data entry.” He picked up a floppy disk. “It took six months to put six months of data onto this thing. What year were you looking for again?”
“Forty-seven.” Adam didn’t feel well. The windows in the room were shallow and high on the wall. He couldn’t breathe in this drab office. Why did this guy also have to wear silver-framed glasses? Most of the time, when the jeweler popped into his head, he could push him out, but trapped in here it was impossible.
“Hey, do you mind if I sit outside while you do this? I can trust you to check, right? It’s really important that I find her.”
“Yeah. No problem. Do you mind if I ask you’re relation to this woman?”
He’ll look harder, Adam reasoned, if she’s family. “She’s my aunt. I mean, my great-aunt. She lost touch with the family during the war. And now, well, she’s my only living relative.”
“Oh. So you know her last name?”
“Um, actually, no. I know that sounds weird, but my grandfather’s name was changed when he came to America, and I’m not totally sure what it was before. Oh, and I guess that doesn’t even matter because she’s an aunt on my grandmother’s side, and I don’t know what my grandmother’s maiden name was. I don’t think most people know their grandmother’s maiden name, do they?”
Lies always snowballed into stupidity. Why hadn’t he just told him that he’d rather not say why he was looking for Dagmar as he had with everyone else?
“Okay,” Avi said, sounding suspicious.
Adam sat on a bench in the hallway, where at the far end, Golda peered through the glass doors for him. Was she afraid he wasn’t coming back? He closed his eyes. He had never wanted to hurt anyone, physically or mentally, and yet that’s all he had done with his life so far. The plan had been to get the brooch back peacefully. He’d figured it all out the same night the medics carried Zayde away. He had sat down at the kitchen table and done the calculations: if the jeweler agreed to keep the brooch until he could buy it back, for, say, fifty percent more than he had paid for it, then he could have the money—thirty thousand dollars—in a year. He still had four grand left from selling the brooch; and he could get the rest if he kept his monthly expenses on food and the apartment under five hundred a month and got a job as a bike messenger, mover, anything that paid a hundred bucks a day, six days a week. It would be hard, but not impossible. The only potential hitch in the plan was the jeweler. Would he agree to hold it for him? A fifty-percent profit sounded high to Adam, but would the jeweler think so?
That next morning, he was waiting outside Weisberg’s Gold and Diamonds when Mr. Weisberg arrived to open the shop. The jeweler bent over to unlock the rolling metal grate, his breath white in the cold morning air as he told Adam to wait a minute. Adam was too warm with drink to feel the cold. He knew he’d have to sober up to hold a job and save all that cash, not to mention the very idea of him drinking after what had happened was horrifying, but how else would he have gotten through that first night? Surrounded by Zayde’s records and potted plants and the kitchen table where only that morning the old man had sat in his pajama set spreading marmalade on toast while the brooch was still safe in the shoebox? Adam, watching the jeweler unlock the door, couldn’t believe that was only yesterday. Only yesterday that he had followed the sign in the store window: WE BUY GOLD, DIAMONDS, WATCHES, & ESTATE JEWELRY. Mr. Weisberg unlocked the door, hung his matching black wool coat and fedora, and steadied his yarmulke.
“All right, Ben,” he said once he was behind the counter. He peered at him over his silver-framed bifocals. “What can I do for you?” When Adam explained that the brooch had belonged to his great-grandmother who died in Buchenwald and that he’d reall
y like the chance to buy it back, the jeweler said his whole extended family had been wiped out in the Shoah, and that if Adam was serious about buying back his family’s heirloom, he would hold it for him and sell it at the exact price he paid for it, twenty thousand, no interest. In the meantime, he would like to show the brooch to a jewelry historian because in his fifty-some years in the business, he had never seen anything like it. So, yes, the jeweler agreed to keep it for him, at no profit to boot, something Adam hadn’t even thought to ask for. Adam left his shop, saying, “Thank you, Mr. Weisberg. Thank you, thank you.”
Avi stood before Adam, shaking his head. “Sorry. I even found a map from 1946 showing who lived in what tent and house, and no Dagmar.”
Adam got to his feet. “Thanks.”
“Did you want to stay for lunch? You’re welcome to have a bite in the dining hall.”
“No, no. I have to go.”
Adam rushed to get off the religious kibbutz, holding Golda in his arms so she wouldn’t slow them down with her incessant sniffing.
“Bye,” he said to the woman in the guardhouse, just as he had said “Bye, Mrs. Weisberg!” as he left the jewelry store that third time, that last time, as if nothing had happened.
Adam put Golda down and plodded back up the hill toward Sadot Hadar. Again the little dog ran ahead with her tail up. When he had followed this road from the bus stop, it had been twilight. Now the sun was high, the shadows short, the tall grass where the horses fed washed out by the bright light, like an old photograph. In the distance Mount Carmel loomed behind a haze.
This was the problem: a month after the jeweler agreed to keep the brooch for him, he was still drinking. He just couldn’t stand being in the apartment without being drunk, and sometimes even then he couldn’t bear it. He blew a lot of money on hotels and often followed people he met in bars back to their places. A couple of times he even slept in Penn Station like a bona fide bum. If it had been warm enough, he would have camped on park benches. The morning he went back to the jeweler for the last time, he had awoken on a mattress on a floor in Inwood.
The dump belonged to some kids he’d met the night before at the Aztec, the dive bar one block down on Essex. How he got to talking with them or how they got from the Lower East Side all the way uptown, he didn’t know; all he knew was that the kids came from Wisconsin or some state like that to live out one of those dreams that drew people to his city—stand-up comedy or stockbroking—and that one of the guys had a pistol his dad gave him for his twenty-first birthday. While they were tweaking, the kid had been naïve enough to show the vintage gun to him, a total stranger.
Adam sat up on the mattress and looked at the black pistol still sitting on the coffee table, then at the two noobs sleeping, one on the couch, the other on a second mattress, both too wasted to be disturbed by the sun streaming through the curtainless bay window. Last night he’d squandered a hundred and fifty bucks on beer and his share of the eight ball. Not only hadn’t he saved a dime since he spoke with the jeweler, he’d spent half of the four grand. It was a vicious circle: he was never going to save the money for the brooch unless he got his act together, and he was never going to get his act together until he’d done something right with the brooch. And any minute, the chance to get the brooch back might be gone forever. He’d been as naïve as the blond Midwesterner, believing for even a second that the jeweler would keep the brooch for him. For no profit? The guy was in the business of buying and selling estate jewelry. That’s what he did. For all he knew, Mr. Weisberg might have sold the brooch already.
Within ten minutes, Adam was straphanging on the A train, crammed among the morning rush-hour passengers, the pistol under his leather jacket, stuffed into the back of his Levi’s.
“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” said Mr. Weisberg when Adam came through the store’s chiming door. “I’ve got a lot to tell you. Just let me finish up with these nice people, and we’ll talk.”
Adam was caught off guard by the young couple browsing wedding bands. He figured at this hour the jeweler would have been alone. He scanned for a camera. There didn’t seem to be one, but just in case he backed into a corner. What in the hell could the jeweler have to tell him? That he’d already sold it? If the brooch was gone, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He leaned on the mirrored wall and watched the jeweler tell the prospective groom, “That looks perfect on you.”
“I don’t know.” The man considered his hand. “I was looking for something flatter.”
“What do you mean? It’s flat! You want flatter than that? Let me get a calculator. I’ll make you a good deal. And if you both get a ring, I can make you an even better deal. You know . . .” Mr. Weisberg smiled and pointed at the young woman. “She’s going to need one too.”
Adam grimaced while the yarmulked jeweler punched numbers into a small calculator. No wonder people thought we were money hungry. Who wanted “a deal” on their wedding band? The jeweler didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. He was a two-bit salesman, and he had been right not to trust him. He better still have that brooch.
Mr. Weisberg turned the calculator around to show the couple the discounted price. When the woman said they were going to continue looking elsewhere, the jeweler shrugged and replied okay in a way that suggested they were wasting their time.
When the door closed behind the couple, the jeweler turned to Adam. “The brooch is in my office. We’ll talk in back.”
Adam exhaled. He still had it. He was both relieved and nervous. The jeweler never would’ve taken him into the back room if he weren’t a Jewish kid whose great-grandmother died in Buchenwald. The jeweler called for someone to watch the front, and an elderly woman, presumably Mrs. Weisberg, shuffled out of the back in a wig too thick and black for her pale shriveled face. She touched the mezuzah, kissed her fingers. Adam smiled at her, and she returned a look that left no room for misunderstanding how unimpressed she was. Adam realized that he hadn’t showered or changed his clothes in days.
“Come, come.” The jeweler squeezed past his wife, the space behind the counter too narrow and the jeweler’s belly too big for them to pass each other comfortably.
Mr. Weisberg also touched the mezuzah as he passed into the back office, which reminded Adam of Barney Miller, one of the shows his mother used to watch from her bed: drab green walls, papers piled on a metal desk, a word processor collecting dust on a filing cabinet. The room’s only splash of color was a stylized, almost cartoonish painting of Jerusalem in a brass frame.
“Sit down. Sit.” The jeweler gestured at the visitor’s chair.
Adam took the seat in front of the desk and checked that the back of his leather jacket concealed the gun.
“So, you’re here to buy back the brooch?” Mr. Weisberg turned the knob on one of the three safes stacked in the corner.
“Yes.” Adam barely got the word out.
“Good, good. I have so much to tell you, Benjamin. It’s as I suspected. This isn’t any vintage brooch. No, it’s even more valuable than I could have imagined. Infinitely.”
“Oh, yeah?” Adam shifted in his seat. Heart pounding in his head, he moved his hand back, readying to grab the pistol. “It’s worth more than the twenty grand?”
The jeweler carried the faded blue felt bag, the one that had been in Zayde’s shoebox, to his desk. He pulled out his chair, sat down. “Don’t worry, I’ll sell it back to you for the twenty, like I promised. I’m a man of my word. But before I do, Benjamin, I’m hoping to convince you of something. I have some very important things to tell you about this brooch.”
Adam’s hand remained tense, trembling, by his hip.
The jeweler pushed up his glasses. “Listen, Benjamin. I’ll tell you up front what I’m hoping. I’m hoping after I tell you everything I know about this brooch, why it’s so special, you and your family will be convinced that the right thing to do would be to loan it to a museum, preferably the Jewish Museum, but maybe the Met. That’s what I was going
to do if you never came back for it. To be frank, I doubted you would. Tell me, Benjamin, do you have any idea how your family came to have this brooch?”
The sea of rubble. A city turned to rubble? A house?
“No.” Adam shook his head. Realizing he wasn’t going to make a move until he’d heard about the brooch, he relaxed his hand, brought it back in front of him. “Why? What’s the big deal?”
“What’s the big deal?” Mr. Weisberg emptied the felt bag onto a black velvet display box and picked up the brooch. Head tilted back, a small appreciative smile on his face, he peered at it through the bottom half of his lenses. “This brooch was made in the thirteen hundreds, that’s the big deal. It’s almost seven hundred years old!”
Adam couldn’t wrap his mind around that much time. Their apartment building was a hundred and twenty years old, and the city had been poised to designate it a historical landmark before the Mexican restaurant downstairs knocked out the old storefront to put up a flat glass window.
“How do you know it’s that old?”
“How do I know? Well, I had my suspicions straightaway. I’ve been in the jewelry business since I was thirteen years old, Benjamin, and my family, the Weisbergs, have been jewelers, maybe not as long as some, but since at least 1656, when the Jews were kicked out of Lithuania, so I know a little bit about jewelry. As soon as you brought this in I knew we were dealing with something from the Middle Ages. But just to be sure I took it to the jewelry historian at the Cloisters, and oh, you should have seen his face! I thought he wasn’t going to give it back! I’m sure you know, Benjamin, that during the Middle Ages, Jews couldn’t own property, that we were banned from all the professions except moneylending and gem cutting, but either way, we dealt with jewels, right? I’m sure you know all that. But what you probably don’t know is that although the Jews made jewelry, we couldn’t wear it. Sumptuary laws forbade us from wearing nice clothes. We couldn’t look better than the goyim, right? But this brooch, this magnificent brooch, was made for a Jew. This wasn’t the main thing that impressed the historian at the Cloisters, but I . . . I was moved by that. That someone would make something so magnificent that could never be worn in public.”
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