Safekeeping (15 page)

“He was here for three whole years.”

She went back to the bottle, turned it in her hands. “Three years might seem like a long time at your age . . .”

Ziva stopped talking when another shopper squeezed by them. Adam had noticed kibbutzniks acted like everyone was a potential eavesdropper and every conversation fodder for gossip. He pushed the photocopy at her. “I'd love to hear anything you can remember about him. Even if it's just something small, silly.”

The old woman considered the small, fuzzy, black-and-white square—his hollow-cheeked grandfather.

“The hat. You were right about the hat. A brown fedora.”

Excited, Adam pressed, “And what about a girlfriend? Do you remember him having a girlfriend?”

“No.” She replaced the bottle on the shelf, turned from the vitamins. “All I remember is the hat.”

“That's it—a hat?”

“I'm not even sure I remember that. You mentioned it first.”

Ziva headed deeper down the aisle, away from Adam. He trailed her. “He disappeared on November 30, 1947. He didn't check out. Do you have any idea why he'd run away like that?”

The old woman stopped, turned her head to the side, giving Adam her profile. “How would I know?”

Adam returned the photo to his back pocket and headed for the door with the weird sensation that the old woman knew more than she was letting on. Maybe it was in his head.

He heard: “November 30, 1947 . . .”

He turned around. The old woman stood, clasping a shampoo bottle with both hands.

“. . . is the day after the UN voted to partition Palestine.”

“What? The UN?”

“Yes. Don't you know any history? It's the day after they voted to divide the land into two states—one Jewish, one Arab.”

“Oh. And you think that could have something to do with my grandfather's disappearance?”

“I just thought you should know the date. That was a very important day.”

Adam nodded, not knowing what to make of this information, and left the store. Why would a UN vote make his grandfather flee? Zayde was the least political person he knew. He didn't even vote for mayor.

And then, as if the spring day weren't already too much, as Adam was crossing the square, he spotted a rainbow in the middle of the green lawn, glowing in the sprinklers. A fat rainbow with a spectrum so bold and full, each color boasted three distinct bands. Adam felt a powerful urge to elbow someone and say,
Hey, look at that!
What if he never again had someone to elbow and say
Hey, look at that!
to? Maybe there were Tibetan monks out there who could enjoy a rainbow alone, but for him, if he had no one to say
Hey, look at that!
to, or
How delicious is this?
or
Aren't we having fun?
then it was all unbearable. He'd rather not notice the rainbow.

He lowered his head and hurried to his room to write the letters.

C
laudette heard fumbling at the door and drew the wool blanket over her head so she wouldn't have to face her roommate. Ulya stumbled into the room and flipped on the light. Had she forgotten about her again? Claudette watched through the blanket's gray weave as Ulya drunkenly kicked off her high heels and tossed her purse at her bed. It missed and landed on the floor, coins jangling across the room. Swaying toward the purse, she stopped when she noticed the lump Claudette made under the woolen blanket. “Oops, sorry!” she snorted, returning to switch off the light.

Ulya made use of the bathroom without bothering to close the door. After a long urination, she blew a fart, laughed, and said again, “Oops, sorry.” When she didn't come out after flushing, Claudette knew she would be in there a while, studying her reflection in the mirror. Claudette hoped that before Ulya came back into the room she would have figured out what she had been trying to figure out all night: Did she or didn't she molest a little girl today in the cafeteria at lunch?

Claudette closed her eyes, tried yet again to revisit the incident second by second. First she took a green tray from the steel trolley. Then a fork, a knife. A napkin from the dispenser. Had she already seen the girl with the wavy brown hair at this point? Maybe out of the corner of her eye? Maybe subconsciously? Did she hurry into the hot food line to make sure she would be behind the girl? She didn't remember walking faster than normal, but she couldn't be sure.

The skinny girl wore a heather gray muscle shirt and white shorts, even though it wasn't that warm. She looked eleven, maybe twelve. Buds for breasts. She was scooping mashed potatoes onto her plate when Claudette reached for the brussels sprouts ladle, and their arms brushed. Having left her brown cardigan on her chair at her table, Claudette wore only a T-shirt, so their skin touched, the soft skin of the girl's upper arm grazing the soft skin of her upper arm. Had she done that on purpose? And if she had, could the girl have sensed it? And if the girl sensed it, could this have traumatized her? Defiled her? In some unforeseeable way, ruined her life?

Claudette squeezed her eyes and rewound to just before she reached for the brussels sprouts. Did she have to reach for them right then? Could she have waited until there was no chance of touching the girl? Why didn't she go for the boiled carrots first? They were closer. What was going through her head? If only she could obtain a recording of what was going through her head! Then she could know for sure if she was a lesbian. A pedophile.

Ulya emerged from the bathroom and slumped on her bed, arms hanging between her thighs. Claudette observed her from under the blanket. Through the gray wool, which made it look like the crimson-headed girl were sitting in a fog, Claudette could smell the wine on Ulya's breath. The smell of Holy Communion.

Ulya leaned forward. “Hey? Are you asleep?”

Claudette stayed as still as possible. Why was she talking to her now? She never had before.

Ulya burrowed her fingers into her hair, massaged her head. “I can't even remember your name. Clara? Klavidya?” Did she know she was awake, or was she too drunk to care? Maybe she wouldn't have cared even if she were sober. “Chlamydia?” Ulya cracked up. “No? Cllll. . .audia?”

Claudette stuck her head out of the blanket. “Claudette.”

“Right! Claudette!” Ulya, still dressed, lay down on her side. “Did I wake you?”

She shook her head.

“I used to have trouble sleeping.” Ulya tucked her hands under her head. “After Chernobyl, I had nightmares. Terrible ones. Ah, but you probably don't even know what Chernobyl is. I was talking to Adam yesterday, Adam of Manhattan, and he didn't know. Said it sounded familiar.”

Claudette didn't remember much about Chernobyl, only Sister Marie Amable, one of the oldest nuns at the orphanage, holding up
La Presse,
the large photo on its front page displaying an abandoned teddy bear on the asphalt in front of an empty Ferris wheel. Peering at Claudette and the other girls through her tortoiseshell glasses, the hoary sister said, too deaf to hear how loudly,
This is what happens to godless nations.

Claudette pulled the blanket up to her chin. “I remember a picture of an abandoned amusement park.”

Ulya rolled onto her back and gazed up at the ceiling, hands clasped over her stomach. “But don't pity Ulya. No, now I sleep like a dog in the sun. And for the rest of my life, free birth control. My uterus got dried up, like a potato in the microwave. But I don't care. I didn't want to have crying babies anyway.”

Claudette didn't pity Ulya. She wished she could, but she never had space left in her head to feel pity. Now, having thought of Sister Marie Amable, all she could hear was the nun's booming voice. It echoed in her skull as it did in that office the morning Claudette finally mustered the courage to ask about her mother.
Recalcitrant girl.
The nun read too loudly from a brown folder.
Impossible to reform. Weak in the face of vice.
It wasn't what Claudette, thirteen at the time, had hoped to hear about her mother, though she shouldn't have expected much from a
fille-mère
. And then, pulling Claudette's folder closer to her eyes and lifting her steel-framed glasses, she said, “Oh. Oh no.” What she read next, Claudette would not let herself hear again. She shook her head—in that office, and thousands of times since, including now on her pillow in the room on the kibbutz. Claudette did such a good job not hearing this part, it was almost as if she didn't know, except the feeling of knowing remained. She felt like a vile creation.

Ulya fluffed up the pillow under her head. “I guess I can't be angry with Adam. If I were American, I wouldn't care about Chernobyl either.” She yawned. “It's not like I care about what's happening in Rwanda right now, the Hutus mass murdering the Tutus. Or maybe it's the other way around . . .”

Claudette whispered, “I don't know anything about Rwanda either.”

Her confession landed on deaf ears. Ulya's eyes were shut, mouth slack. How could a person fall asleep that fast? One moment the girl was talking
about nuclear fallout and genocide, the next she was sleeping. How would the sisters have explained that? They claimed only the clean of conscience fell asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillows.

Claudette reached for her rosary. Since she brushed the little girl's arm at noon, she would say twelve Rosaries. The clock showed 3:21 a.m. She wouldn't be going to sleep tonight. Working through the decades, she was bound to brush her finger against the blanket or touch a bead in a different way, necessitating an additional twelve Rosaries while brushing the blanket with her finger and another twelve touching the bead in that different way. Before long, in order to be sure she wasn't cheating, she would have to do twelve times twelve Rosaries.

Claudette made the sign of the cross.
Au nom du Père et du Fils et du Saint-Esprit. Amen.

She didn't want to be doing this. It wouldn't bring her peace. As soon as she penanced this Bad Feeling about the girl's arm, another Bad Feeling would arise and need to be purged. Trying to rid the Bad Feeling was like walking toward the horizon; no matter how far or fast she walked, the horizon remained the same distance away.

Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

The “obsessive thoughts” and “compulsive rituals,” as Dr. Gadeau called them, began before Claudette could remember. At first, satisfying the Bad Feeling, the name she gave it as a child, was easy. At five years old all she had to do was eat her peanuts in even numbers or not step on the lines in the convent's speckled-tile floor. But as the years wore on, it took more and more to appease the Bad Feeling, and by her teens, it took every waking minute, and still it wasn't enough. Claudette suffered through the days, one after another. She had planned on suffering through them until God called her from this life, but then Sister Marie Angélique came halfway down the stairs and said someone was waiting for her in the foyer.

Mid-November, the Monday after the thirty-third Sunday, well into winter, Claudette worked alone in the basement's laundry, folding undershirts. “Are you sure they're here to see me?”

“Yes.” Sister Marie Angélique smiled over the banister. The sixty-something nun smiled no matter what she was saying or to whom. Her cheeks possessed such perfect pink circles it was whispered the sister wore blush.

“Is it Dr. Gadeau?”

“
Non.
It's a young woman.
De l'extérieur
.”

The outside? Other than the Chinese who dropped off washing at the back service door, she never spoke to anyone from the outside. Claudette followed Sister Marie Angélique up the stairs, pausing when the sister did to catch her breath. All the nuns were old. When she was a child, the nuns came in all ages, but over the decades the old ones died, the middle-aged ones became old, and no young women came to replace them. The youngest sister in the convent was fifty-nine.

Sister Marie Angélique bid Claudette good luck, leaving her to walk down the long corridor to the foyer alone. Portraits of the mother superiors dating back to the order's founding in 1824 lined the wall, oil paintings giving way to black-and-white photos. Only the current mother superior stared out from a colored photograph, which still failed to capture the blueness of her eyes.

In the foyer, deaf Sister Marie Amable stood with a woman in an orange beret, a striking orange only someone
de l'extérieur
would wear. Claudette drew nearer, trying to look natural while making sure not to step on the lines between the tiles. Sister Marie Amable watched through her black bifocals, hands folded in front of her cardigan. The mysterious woman gave a big smile, and Claudette halted. She knew that smile. It was the one she used to see when she was a little girl playing with her reflection in the mirror. Claudette looked to Sister Marie Amable and back at the woman in the orange beret. Was this her mother?

The stranger in the parka opened her hands at her sides in a gesture that conveyed uncertainty about how exactly to do this. “I'm Louise!” she said. “Your sister!”

Of course, this woman was far too young to be her mother. Younger than herself by quite a few years.

“Don't act like you don't know how to speak, Claudette,” said Sister Marie Amable. “Come closer.
Dis bonjour
.”