Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  He didn’t move.

  Now she had to get out of here. Fast. Silently. She tiptoed for the door, leaving her sandals by his bed. The little dog slept on the other bed, its eyes two black slits. She softly pressed down on the door handle and slipped outside.

  She bolted across the quad for her room. The Russian guys around the picnic table watched her curiously, the same guys she used to dread teasing her about Farid. Farid—she did love him, but in twenty years, when she was a middle-aged woman still living in Israel, would she regret it? The idea of never seeing him again broke her heart, but this didn’t tell her what she should do. She knew she would miss her mother, but she still left Mazyr.

  She flung open her door and charged for her dresser. No time to make a decision now. She had to get out of here. Hurling T-shirts out of the drawer, she fished out her Israeli passport and stuffed it with the brooch in her purse. She slipped on her work boots—she needed to be able to run—and hurried to tie the laces while glancing at the door, frightened that any second Adam would break through it.

  She couldn’t leave, however, without her most prized possession. She yanked the old suitcase from under the bed and rushed to unsnap it. There it was, not a golden family heirloom, but still.

  As Ulya left the room, clutching her magazine, she didn’t know which way she would walk when she reached the junction at the bottom of the hill. She would only know for sure when she got there.

  Adam woke up to Golda licking his cheek. It was early in the morning, the light soft. He lay on his back, brain thumping against his skull, stiff from sleeping with his legs hanging off the bed. He sat up, a feeling of alarm coming over him before the reason why. He felt an absence against his thigh. He jumped to his feet, dug his hand into his pocket. No. Why were Ulya’s sandals on the floor? No, no. He tore the blanket from the bed, shook the sheets. Ulya’s bra fell out.

  He ran in his stockinged feet for her room, thinking, she better be there, she better be there. The door wasn’t locked, not a good sign. He threw it open and found her dresser drawers hanging ajar, shirts flung all over the floor. The ratty blue suitcase lay open, empty. His heart pounded behind his eyes. He buckled over, leaning on his knees. The vomit came out in staggered spurts like water from a rusty pipe. The clear puke puddled on the ground, specked with dark beans of blood.

  Claudette, returning from Ofir’s, found Adam lying on the floor next to the vomit. She crouched beside him. “Adam? Adam, are you all right?”

  He hugged his legs into his chest and buried his face into his knees as if trying to curl himself into nonexistence.

  “What’s wrong? Should I get a doctor?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “What’s gone?”

  When he didn’t answer, Claudette laid her hand on his shoulder, something she never would have been able to do a few months ago. “What’s gone, Adam?”

  “I can’t give it to Dagmar now. The cunt stole it.”

  Claudette took in the chaos of the room, and the understanding sank in that her roommate had taken the brooch in the same way she had stashed that bottle of shampoo into her work shirt. How could she do it? To Adam? To a dying woman? Only the brooch didn’t matter to Ziva, did it? She didn’t even like it.

  “You don’t need the brooch to go to Dagmar. She only needs to hear that your grandfather didn’t hate her.”

  Adam pushed Claudette’s hand off him. All for a drunk fuck. No, wait. Did he even fuck her? He remembered her breath in his ear, the whispered “I love you.” It was so pathetic. He had traded the brooch his family had safeguarded for seven hundred years to pretend for a minute that someone loved him.

  “I can’t.”

  “Please, Adam. Go now. It can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow—the idea of it made him want to throw up again. Another night followed by another morning and another night and another morning. “Leave me alone! Please!”

  “I think it will—”

  Claudette stopped midsentence when Adam started convulsing as if he were caught in an electrical current. The spasms intensified. He rolled onto his back and shuddered, hands opening and closing, head shaking. His eyes bulged. He sucked air through his nose in loud snores, and white spittle foamed at his mouth.

  “Adam! What should I do?” Claudette wanted to run for a doctor but was afraid to leave him. “What should I do?”

  Adam coughed, and the shaking calmed. He hacked, trying to clear his chest. Then he sat up. Breathing heavily, shiny with sweat, he looked around in confusion.

  Claudette kneeled in front of him. “You had a fit.”

  “What?” His voice was small, childlike.

  “You had a fit.”

  He squeezed his eyes, wiped his mouth. “Now?”

  “Yes. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Get me something to drink.”

  “Water?”

  “No. Alcohol. Please. It’ll make it stop.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know. But please. If you get me something, I’ll go to Ziva.”

  Waiting for Claudette to return, Adam sat on the floor, back against the bed, eyes on the faded lilac lining of Ulya’s old suitcase. How many people had owned this suitcase before her? Had it been packed for a long-ago honeymoon? An out-of-town funeral? Zayde dancing with his imaginary partner: that’s what the lining looked like to him. How much time and place and loss and regret could be packed into one life? He was too weak for it. He didn’t care how low he was on the suffering scale. Life came with so much fucking pain, even the bare minimum—level one and a half—was asking too much.

  Claudette rushed in with a bottle of vodka. “I got this from Eugene.”

  Adam took the bottle—only a quarter full but better than nothing—twisted off the top, and chugged. The warmth hit his stomach, soothed his trembling. When the numbness reached his head, he used the bed to push onto his feet. “Let’s go.”

  They stopped by his room for his shoes, and he grabbed the goodbye letter. Golda tagged along as they climbed the steppingstones. They walked alongside the dining hall’s wall of windows in silence, just like they did that first morning after the interview in Eyal’s office. Adam kept his head turned so he wouldn’t have to see his reflection.

  Claudette opened Ziva’s front door and blocked Golda with her foot. She led Adam through the quiet of the apartment. Adam’s hand came up to pat his hair, but then, realizing what he was doing, he stopped. Styling his hair, that was hilarious.

  When they entered the bedroom, the old women didn’t turn from the window to greet them. The air was stuffy with death and the talcy smell of old age. As they approached her bed, Adam waited to see the old woman’s expression when she laid eyes on him. Would she still feign ignorance? He would have thought he’d feel more hate in the presence of the old liar. Last night he would’ve, but this morning, all his hate was consumed on himself. There wasn’t much left even for Ulya.

  They reached the edge of her bed without Ziva registering them. Claudette was shocked to see how much she had deteriorated overnight, more in one night than in all the weeks she’d been bedridden. Was it because of the results of the referendum? She looked dead already, staring vacantly out the window, yellowed cheeks collapsing into her half-opened mouth. Her breath rasped in her throat.

  Claudette gently laid a hand on her wrist. “Ziva.”

  Ziva turned and glared at Claudette as if she were stranger, one who had no business laying a hand on her. Her eyes then drifted, confusedly, fearfully, until they alighted on Adam. Her face lit up.

  “Franz?”

  Claudette’s heart sank. This wasn’t a coherent day. With the way Ziva looked, she feared there would never be another one.

  Adam could almost laugh. After months of denying she knew his grandfather, now she thought he was him? “I’m Adam, his grandson. Remember me? The guy you’ve been lying to?”

  Ziva furrowed her brow and looked to Claudette for an explanation. Claudette leane
d forward and enunciated each word as if that made a difference. “This is Franz’s grandson. From New York.”

  A perplexed expression remained on Ziva’s face, and Claudette turned to Adam. “I’ll wait outside. Hopefully her memory will come back for a second.”

  As Adam listened to Claudette leave, he avoided the old woman’s eyes. He wasn’t sure why he had agreed to come. To confess how his grandfather had died? To explain how he lost the brooch last night? The front door closed with a thud. He wiped his brow, the sweat smelling of alcohol.

  “I came here, all the way from New York . . .”

  “New York.” Ziva nodded with a small smile. “That’s where I always pictured you. While working in the fields, I would often wonder what you were doing at that exact moment on the other side of the world, and I always pictured New York City.”

  “I’m not Franz. I’m his grandson,” said Adam, causing Ziva to eye him as if he might be playing a trick on her. Unsure how to tell his story, he started again. “I know you know how much my grandfather’s brooch meant to him. He kept it . . .”

  She interrupted once more, this time as if suddenly realizing where she was. “You’re Franz’s grandson. The one with the little dog.”

  “Yes, Dagmar. Why have you been lying to me?”

  Ziva closed her eyes and let the “Yes, Dagmar” echo in her head. No one had called her Dagmar in fifty years. She saw Franz in his brown fedora, the way he would wear it on Saturdays when they would walk in the hills, the iridescent green feather stuck in the black band. She wouldn’t let them rest until they had reached a peak with a view of the valley, and he would tease her, saying, “Yes, Dagmar. Of course, Dagmar. Dagmar won’t rest until she gets to the peak.”

  Ziva chuckled and opened her eyes. “Remember that time we came back too late for dinner, and you snuck into the kitchen and ate all the cherry jam? The whole jar, meant for the children! I was furious. And an hour later, while you were rolling around with a stomachache, you had the chutzpah to say that I didn’t understand, because I didn’t love cherries like you did. I didn’t appreciate the wonder of cherries. Who do you think planted those cherry trees?”

  Adam nodded, sadly. At last here was a memory about his grandfather. “Yes, he did love jam. Especially marmalade. Ate it every morning. Not me, my grandfather.”

  Ziva scowled at him. “I know that! I meant your grandfather.”

  Adam dug his hand into his pockets, felt the emptiness. “I wanted to give you the brooch. That’s why I was trying to find you.”

  Ziva looked down. “Why would you give me the brooch?”

  “It’s a long story, which I’ll tell you if you want, but, in short, it would’ve made me feel better.”

  She shook her head. “I never understood that. Why it would make you feel better. Your mother doesn’t know you went back for it. She can’t know. And the brooch doesn’t care who pins it on. It can’t tell if it’s in the wrong hands, as you say. It’s just an object.”

  “Just an object?”

  “Yes. And not even a useful one.”

  This, from the woman he had desperately tried to give it to. The woman whose goodbye letter sat in a felt bag with the brooch for half a century. Not only was she rejecting it a second time, but she was professing that it should have no importance to anybody.

  “You’re wrong, Dagmar. And I’m not Franz.”

  Ziva hated the way the boy kept correcting her. “I know who you are, young man!”

  “I wanted to give you the brooch because, whether you deserved it or not, you were the only person Zayde—Franz—ever wanted to have it. He died with this in his hand.”

  Ziva regarded the paper Adam held out to her with wariness before shakily reaching for it. She unfolded the delicate note, hands shuddering so much Adam feared she would rip it. Lean, slanted cursive. Her old handwriting—so familiar and shocking. She felt the same disorientation she did when confronted with old photographs. On the kibbutz’s fiftieth anniversary, Eyal had posted pictures in the dining hall of the early years, pictures of bright-eyed, plump-faced people she had grown accustomed to seeing with deflated cheeks and sunken eyes. She held the note at arm’s length.

  Mein liebster Liebling Franz.

  She drew a sharp breath. Adam, seeing her pain, lowered his eyes.

  Her cowardly note. She had been right to fear what the boy had in store for her. My dearest darling Franz. She remembered writing those words, feeling like they weren’t her kind of words, that they were too trite for the occasion, and yet she couldn’t come up with better ones. It seemed impossible to her not to sound hackneyed when it came to love since love was something everybody did, even the laziest and most ordinary of people, probably especially them. She had loathed how conventional love was, but now, faced with the liebster Liebling she had penned so long ago, she knew her nostalgia was just as conventional, as commonplace as old age itself, and she didn’t care. It was powerful.

  Adam said, “I don’t know how you can say an object’s just an object when that’s clearly not true. I don’t know if something—an energy or whatever—sticks to a thing, if it soaks up meaning every time something happens to it, or what. But it’s impossible to say that that brooch was just a brooch.”

  Ziva tried to clear her throat, but she couldn’t swallow. The mucus clogging her chest made her breathing sound like a low roar. She knew what she was hearing: her own death rattle. She didn’t want to die under this ceiling, palish gray like a cloudy morning sky. Would she ever be under the sky again? It was quiet in the room, just the uneasy presence of the young man and the breeze blowing through the window and that low roar—waves coming in and out, lapping against the shore. Seagulls circled in the cloudy sky. What had the news reported the other day about seagulls? They found a fossil that was thirty-three million years old. For thirty-three million years gulls have circled the sky. It made Jerusalem seem young. It made her feel young.

  She shook her head. “Objects, personal possessions. Please, Franz, I can’t have this argument again. Not now.”

  Adam’s shoulders dropped at her calling him Franz again. She had let go of the note, and it had tumbled onto the floor. He moved to retrieve it, but then didn’t bother. What for? Who would be left to care about it? And what good would it do to correct the old woman again? He could tell her for the umpteenth time that he wasn’t Franz but his grandson, or he could just say, Okay, let’s not argue.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s not argue.”

  Ziva turned to him and looked into his eyes. Adam felt uneasy but held her gaze. He stood by a deathbed in the musty building for old people, while Ziva stood on the wooden platform of the Haifa seaport as it might have been on the morning of November 30, 1947. The Mediterranean was as gray as the sky, except where the two met in a pale yellow ribbon on the horizon. Though overcast, it wasn’t cold or likely to rain. An Arab peddler pushed a barrow of lychees past British soldiers in pith helmets. The waiting ship’s striped exhauster resembled a giant barber pole.

  “I made it just in time,” she said. “I was afraid we wouldn’t get to say a proper goodbye.”

  Adam didn’t know how to respond. The old woman wasn’t here with him, clearly, but where was she? Was she saying goodbye to his grandfather?

  He mumbled, “I’m glad you made it.”

  Time: Ziva smelled it in the salty air. She heard loss in the roar of the waves, the squawking gulls. The wind blew through her hair with the heartache of choice. It was all so keen because she was thirty-three years old, an excruciating age, when the opposite ends of life tugged equally hard, tearing a person down the middle. She was young enough to still have choices, but old enough to feel their weight. Old enough to know loss, and young enough to still have so much left to lose. Old enough for goodbyes, but not so old that they didn’t matter: decades were left to miss a person. The future stretched out like the sea.

  “If you don’t write to me, I’ll understand it’s because you don’t want to interfere
with my work here.”

  Adam nodded, still feeling awkward about pretending to be his grandfather. He hoped Claudette didn’t walk in now. “Okay.”

  The steamship honked, and Adam’s headache tapped on his temples and took hold of his teeth. He would need to drink something soon.

  Ziva gripped the blanket. “You know that I loved you, don’t you, Franz? That I didn’t take us lightly?”

  Adam tried to think: What would his grandfather want him to say? The woman had broken the man’s heart, but he did die half a century later clutching her note.

  “I loved you, too, Dagmar. All these years, I never forgot you.”

  Her thin lips quivered. “Goodbye, Franz.”

  Adam leaned forward and planted a kiss on the old woman’s forehead. “Goodbye, Dagmar.”

  As he walked out the room, he felt her eyes on his back, on his young grandfather’s back.

  Outside, once again in the bright morning sunlight, he stormed past Claudette. He didn’t know what he was going to do if the kolbo wasn’t open yet. Golda scampered after him. Claudette followed him too—“Adam!”—but then, to his relief, she stopped.

  He crossed the square, not knowing what to think about his encounter with Dagmar. He didn’t get to give her the brooch, but maybe Claudette was right. Maybe he gave her something more valuable: one last chance to be with his grandfather. He never got to say goodbye to Zayde. Or his mom. He would do anything for that, wouldn’t he? And the brooch . . . it was just an object. Adam, hearing his thoughts, felt sick. What was he doing? Rationalizing again. After everything—Zayde, Mr. Weisberg.

  He glanced down at Golda, who was working her tiny legs double time to keep up with him.

  “Why are you still following me?”

  Golda trotted on, tail curled over her back.

  Adam stopped, repeated: “Why the fuck are you following me?”

  The little dog stopped too. Sitting back, she looked up at Adam with her big round eyes. He could see his towering reflection in them.

  “You’re following me because you don’t know me. You love me because you don’t know me. Now go! Get out of here!”