Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  Ziva closed her door. Was Claudette still in the bathroom? She knocked on it. “Claudette, are you okay?”

  “Yes!” Claudette was on her hands and knees, scrambling to pick up all the tiny pink pills scattered about the tiled floor. Everything had been going smoothly until then. She had feared her OCD would keep making her reopen the same bottle or recount the same pills, but that never happened. The Bad Feeling was quiet. Eerily so. In her haste, though, she had forgotten to stuff back a wad of cotton and had to reopen a number of bottles to find the one missing it, and when she finally did find that container, she was shaking so badly she dropped it.

  Claudette hurried to her feet, put the bottle of pink pills back, and grabbed the next in line. She had made it through two rows of bottles. She struggled to open the childproof cap—each one was secured differently—and eased six yellow pills into her palm. She dropped the pills into the plastic bag, replaced the bottle, and grabbed another.

  “Claudette?” Ziva spoke through the door again. “I’m starting to worry about you.”

  “No, no, I’m fine. I’m coming out now.”

  That would have to do. The bag contained a rainbow of pills. She hoped this and her two-month supply of Prozac were enough. She stuffed the work shirt back inside and flushed the toilet. She ran the water while dabbing her sweaty face with the hand towel. She took a deep breath and emerged from the bathroom, holding the plastic bag behind her.

  “Are you ill?”

  “No.” Claudette felt the sweat returning to her face. “Well, a little.”

  “The mint tea will help. Come, come sit down.”

  Claudette couldn’t bring herself to say no. She set the bag back down on the floor and took a seat again next to Ziva on the couch. It was getting late. If she took the pills tonight, her roommate might come home in time to save her. It would be safer to wait until tomorrow, right after Ulya left for the night. She sighed at having one more day.

  Ziva tasted her cookie. “My son’s still mad that I didn’t give him his own birthday presents when he was a boy. On his sixth birthday, he threw a fit when I gave all the children in his year a sun hat. He wanted me to give only him a sun hat.”

  Claudette forced down a sip of tea. “I can understand wanting your mother to give you your own birthday present.”

  She could. Her whole childhood she had wanted a present bought just for her, a mother to love her especially. Over the years she had met many women she had hoped would take a motherly liking to her: doctors, nurses, nuns.

  Ziva put Eyal’s uneaten cookie on the tray. “Of course you can understand it. People are naturally selfish. They don’t want to share. It’s an instinct that has to be fought.” She stood. “Well, I think I should go to bed now. I want to get up early tomorrow and finish my article.”

  Claudette rose to her feet. Since she couldn’t thank Ziva for the pills or for the kindness she had shown her over the last few days, she said with emphasis, “Thank you, Ziva, for the cookies. Thank you so much.”

  “No need to make a fuss, Claudette. They’re just cookies.” Though as soon as she said it, she knew that wasn’t exactly true. “But I’m glad you enjoyed them.”

  It was six o’clock in the morning, the kibbutz still asleep, when Adam headed out to mail the search form. He knew the mail didn’t go out on Saturday, but he awoke at 5:45 a.m. as if the alarm had gone off. He had lost the ability to sleep in.

  As he crossed the great lawn, dew wetting his sneakers, Golda in tow, he spotted Ziva on a bench in the square, writing. Half of him wanted to prod her again for information; the other half prayed she wouldn’t notice him. Yesterday, while he was wiping dishes, she stood on the other side of the conveyer belt berating two teenage girls, pointing from their plates to the garbage, where they had been about to dump their uneaten sandwiches. The harangue continued until the girls, under her watch, stuffed the sandwiches into their mouths. To think he had once hoped this woman was Dagmar. His gentle grandfather never would’ve fallen for such an ogress.

  “Golda! Come back here!” It was too late. The little dog bulleted across the square.

  Ziva looked toward the shouting. She missed the little dog, low to the ground, only saw the young man and his familiar gait. Was he coming toward her? She had risen at the crack of dawn to concentrate on the article. And now here he was, like a revenant. What was he doing about at this hour?

  “Oy!” The chihuahua pounced at her shins, surprising her. She moved her aching legs away, but the dog continued to paw at them. Leaning over her sore belly, she tried to shove it away.

  “Sorry.” Adam nudged Golda aside with his sneaker. “Guess she just wanted to say hello.”

  Ziva forced herself to look up. “I never understood the point of breeding them so small.”

  He shrugged, gave her that closed-lip smile. “Small things are cuter. I don’t know why. Just a law of nature. Say, did you happen to remember anything more about my grandfather, Franz Rosenberg? Or his girlfriend, Dagmar?”

  She spoke with her lower jaw extended. “You must stop asking me about this.”

  “I just thought something might have come to you.”

  “You’re a little pest. I told you I’m not going to suddenly remember something. My memory is fine.”

  A little pest? Fuck her. “If your memory’s so fine, why don’t you remember anything?”

  The old woman leaned forward. “Your grandfather . . . he obviously didn’t teach you any manners.”

  “Actually, he did. He had better manners than anyone.”

  Franz, manners? Ziva had no great esteem for manners, but the boy didn’t understand the difference between manners and charm. She shook her head. “Well, I’m afraid to say whatever graces your grandfather had didn’t rub off on you.”

  “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe a lot of good shit didn’t rub off on me.” Adam looked off to the side, pissed that he had proven her point by swearing. Why did this woman get under his skin so badly? He turned back to her. “You know, I get this weird feeling about you . . . like . . . like you’re not telling me something.”

  Ziva gripped her writing pad. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Not sure. A look in your eye.”

  “And what do you think I’m not telling you?”

  She waited, heart pounding. She didn’t want this. All she wanted was to be left alone. To work on her article. Save the kibbutz. His presence felt like a revenge.

  “I don’t know.”

  She exhaled. “You see, you’re being absurd.”

  Perhaps it was absurd, but Adam wasn’t going to say sorry to this woman. He held up his letter. “Well, I got to go mail this. The Jewish Agency is going to check their files for Dagmar. You were right about one thing: she didn’t live here.”

  Ziva struggled to think of what the Sochnut could have on her. If she’d arrived with all the refugees after the war, they’d have papers for sure. But she came when the agency was what, one or two years old? And from the minute she stepped off the boat, she had been Ziva. If she had filled out a form back in 1932 in Berlin, and by some miracle it made it to a bureaucrat in Tel Aviv, could they really trace it to her?

  “Young man, can I ask you a question? I don’t know why you’re looking for this Dagmar, and I don’t want to know; it’s none of my business. But have you thought about whether this Dagmar wants to be found?”

  “What do you mean?” Adam tapped the letter against his palm.

  “What do I mean? That’s exactly my point. You’re young, so you’re thinking like a young person. Young people like to shake the snow globe. But old people, they’ve worked hard to put things exactly where they are, and maybe this Dagmar doesn’t want you coming along and stirring things up. Maybe she doesn’t want to hear what you have to tell her. You hadn’t thought about that, had you?”

  It was true. He hadn’t given a second’s thought to Dagmar and what all this would mean to her. He tried to picture it: If a woman died fifty years from
now with his goodbye letter in her hand, would he want to know? Would it make him happy to learn such a thing, or unbearably sad? He shrugged. Because it didn’t matter. There was no one else to give the brooch to.

  “I hate to say it, but I guess I don’t care. I’m going to find Dagmar, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Ziva shook her head. “There we go. It’s the me-me-me generation from the me-me-me capitalist culture. You’re very selfish.”

  True. If he hadn’t been a selfish fuck his whole life, he wouldn’t have to find Dagmar. But this old bitch didn’t know that. If she weren’t a hundred years old and the secretary’s mother, he would tell her to fuck off.

  He turned for the mailbox. “Come on, Golda.”

  Claudette lay on her side, pretending to nap, while she waited for Ulya to leave for the night. Normally her roommate would have set out an hour ago, but she hadn’t even begun getting dressed. Instead she also sat on her bed, smoking a cigarette and flipping through a fashion magazine. What if tonight were the one night she didn’t go out?

  The sun set. The room darkened. At last Ulya rose from her bed. This was it. She was leaving. Claudette’s heart thumped. After flipping on the ceiling lamp, Ulya returned to her bed and magazine.

  Claudette sat up. “Aren’t you going out tonight?”

  Ulya looked over. “Yes. Why?”

  “I just wondered. Normally you would have left by now.”

  Ulya sensed something strange. Why was Claudette anxious for her to go? What did the weirdo do at night while she was out? Masturbate? No, she had probably never masturbated in her life. She probably wanted the privacy to say a million Hail Marys or do one of those bizarre rituals of hers, tap her fingers together or open and close the closet door. Well, it was none of her business why she was leaving later tonight. She wouldn’t have told her best friend, if she’d had one, that her Arab lover wouldn’t bring her to his father’s fiftieth birthday party, not unless she put on more clothes and could be presented as his fiancée. He claimed it wasn’t worth the drama of introducing her otherwise—a Russian immigrant, a non-Muslim, an unbelieving Christian, a fake Jew, a woman with obscenely red hair. It was pathetic and unmanly to be so afraid of his parents, but what did she care? More proof that he wasn’t a man to be taken seriously. And besides, she wouldn’t have gone to the party anyway. And so she had agreed to meet him afterward, as she preferred to meet him: in secret.

  “I’m going out a little later tonight, that’s all.”

  Claudette rested her hand on her roiling stomach. “How much later?”

  Ulya regarded her suspiciously. “Nine o’clock.”

  Claudette lay back down and did the calculation. Ulya never came home before two in the morning, leaving a window of five hours. It wasn’t any more time than she would have had after leaving Ziva’s last night. But it would have to do. What was she going to do with the next two hours though? The Bad Feeling hadn’t said a word since she stole the pills—didn’t accuse her of any wrongdoing, didn’t demand any penance. It was silent for the first time in as long as she could remember. Claudette knew why: it couldn’t accuse her of doing anything worse than what she was about to do. Even a murderer could later repent and be returned to God, but a self-murderer was lost forever. Claudette closed her eyes and listened to the strange quiet in her head. She heard Ulya flip a page of her magazine. Then the chitchat of people walking along the path behind their window. A bird. Another, higher-pitched bird. Her stomach calmed a bit.

  At last Ulya tossed her magazine aside and padded off to the bathroom. Claudette rolled onto her back to wait out the final minutes while Ulya put on her makeup. The ceiling lamp stared down at her, its light dotted by a graveyard of flies. She hadn’t noticed that before. Ulya stopped humming, let out a toot, and resumed humming. Could she not hum and toot at the same time? It was the silliest thought, and Claudette felt close to laughing. Laughing? Here, now, on the edge of perdition? She couldn’t help it. She felt giddy. Free. Her mind was free. Why did she have to experience, just before she died, how easy and enjoyable life was without the Bad Feeling? How easy and enjoyable it was for other people?

  Ulya came out of the bathroom and wiggled into a black minidress. She slipped on her high cork-wedge sandals and, taking a last look in the mirror, fluffed up her hair and gave her reflection an approving smile. She headed out the door, leaving behind a sweet, powdery scent of vanilla. “Ciao!”

  Claudette sat up and listened to Ulya turning the key. She rose from the bed and turned off the ceiling lamp. The streetlamps provided enough illumination. It would be easier if she got this over quickly. She retrieved the bag of pills from the blue backpack she kept under the bed, the backpack her brother-in-law had lent her for the trip. She emptied the pills onto the gray blanket and swept them into a colorful heap. She laid out the instruments: bottle of Prozac, rubber band, new plastic bag. It was all there. Except the water.

  The water bottle was too big for the bathroom sink, so she held it up to the showerhead. She slowly turned the faucet until the water trickled. The showers here were so strange: no tub or curtains, only a showerhead and a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor. As the bottle filled, she took in the rusted shower basket laden with Ulya’s shampoos, body scrubs, shaving creams. Ulya always complained about having no money, but every day she came home with new lotions and tank tops.

  When Claudette turned off the shower, she heard music. Carrying the water back to the bed, she remembered Ulya asking her a few weeks ago if the piano wasn’t driving her crazy. When she told her roommate she hadn’t noticed it, Ulya gave her an incredulous look. But she hadn’t heard it. She had been too busy trying to work out whether she’d been aroused that morning while milking the cow. Again and again she had forced herself to picture the cow’s long rubbery teats in her hands.

  Claudette perched on the edge of the bed, water bottle in hand, and listened to the piano. She wanted to hear, to feel, what other people did when they listened to music. She waited. The first thing she noticed was a change in the pale light pouring through the window, what it seemed to do to the room. Ulya’s green high heels, lying haphazardly on the floor, appeared strangely poignant. The colorful pile of pills popped against the gray wool blanket. The air thickened with all the disappointments and dreams of the transients who had lived in this room. Including hers.

  The notes ascended, and Claudette remembered an icicle. It appeared in her head. She saw it through the rusty bars on the window, hanging from a lintel, at once clear and opaque, full of fairy light, muted pinks and blues. She reached through the bars for it—she must have been four or five years old—and broke it off. When later she tried to show it to the beautiful and older Françoise, the prettiest girl in the orphanage, the icicle was gone. Françoise laughed at the puddle in her drawer: “Silly-head, you can’t own an icicle!” That was years before Françoise lost her mind completely, before she harbored the most evil delusions about one of the younger priests, accused him of doing unspeakable things to her in the broom closet. After months in the pink-padded quiet room, Françoise disappeared, but by then Claudette was too busy counting tiles to notice. She hadn’t recalled trying to show Françoise the icicle in twenty years. She hadn’t recalled anything.

  Half an hour later, the piano still hadn’t released her. She felt as if the music might lift her, as Christina the Astonishing had risen toward the rafters during her requiem. Was God reaching out to her, asking her to reconsider? Could that be? Why would He wait until the last second to show He cared?

  Claudette put down the bottle of water. She had to make sure. She covered the pills with a shirt and went outside. The music came from somewhere behind the classroom. As she climbed the stones, the music grew louder and her heart beat faster. What was she going to find? What if it were a vision of Christina? Or the Son Himself? On the main road, she found the music emanating from the darkened dining hall. She scurried to its back door.

  Ofir was exhausted, but he coul
dn’t stop playing. For three weeks Dan and the others had given him hell for running into the kasbah, and tomorrow he would stand before army court and get sentenced to at least six weeks in jail, but he didn’t regret it. The only thing he truly cared about was his music, and his composition was infinitely better thanks to those minutes with the Palestinian boy in the shadowy room of mirrors and the race back toward the sunlight of the square. The melody had turned out sadder than he had expected. The ache of gravity. It carried this fear that life could never quite slake your thirst for it. Strange considering he’d never felt more optimistic, but he didn’t force it. He stayed honest to the piece, more honest than he’d ever managed before, and it made him feel like a true artist, not the sham he always feared himself to be.

  Usually he played with reservation, careful not to get too loud. If his music carried too far, the next morning there would be teasing: Ofir thinks he’s Beethoven. Oh, here comes our little Mozart! Growing up in a children’s house, where he had to line up to take a shit at an assigned hour, had taught him it was best not to stand out, even in a good way. Tonight, though, he didn’t care who heard him.

  Had someone come to complain? Sensing a presence behind him, he glanced back—

  His fingers froze. A ghost haunted the doorway, a wide-eyed ghost in a moonlit white dress.

  “Oof.” He laughed. “You scared me.”

  Claudette leaped sideways and stood with her back against the wall. She didn’t know what to think. Could that Jewish teenager be a messenger of God? Pimples riddled his cheeks. A hideous gash crossed his chin. His T-shirt bore a cartoon mouse in a big yellow hat.

  When the piano started up again, she held her breath to listen. It was as beautiful as before.

  To Ofir’s relief, he got right back into it. His fingers moved over the keys as if guided by instinct. He forgot about the girl in the doorway.

  Claudette slid down the building until she was sitting on the cool cement. The music came through the wall, vibrating against her back. She must have cried before, when she was a little girl, but she couldn’t remember it. It felt different, crying, than she had imagined. She clutched at the front of her dress, where her chest hurt, as if it might bust open. But it also felt good, the tears and mucus running down her face. A relief.