Safekeeping (16 page)

Claudette slunk forward, more careful than ever not to step on a line.

The young woman spoke uneasily. “I would have contacted you sooner. Much sooner. I actually found your record seven years ago, but it said . . . it said . . . I'm sorry, I'm being awkward. It said that you were certified insane in 1963, so
bien sûr
I thought it couldn't be you. You were only one year old in sixty-three. How could a one-year-old baby be certified insane? But
when I had no success anywhere else, I went back to the file. And, well, here we are.”

“Better now than not at all,
n'est-ce pas
?” said Sister Marie Amable.

Louise turned to the nun. “It doesn't make sense, though, does it? Certifying a one-year-old baby?”

The old nun lowered her eyes and said, for once not too loudly, “I am not a doctor.”

After Louise assured Sister Marie Amable that she would bring Claudette back in time for dinner, they left the convent to find a café. The bitter wind prevented them from speaking as they scurried down avenue de la Miséricorde, holding their scarves in front of their faces. Louise stopped in front of a café Claudette had never visited despite having lived down the block her whole life. “This place looks nice enough.”

Inside was all wood and warmth, much warmer than the orphanage, especially the basement laundry when the dryers were off. Louise peeled off her beret and ruffled her brown pixie hair. The girl behind the counter asked what she could get them, and Claudette, who had no money, averted her eyes. Louise ordered two cafés au lait and two mille-feuilles.

Seated at a booth by the window, Louise emptied a packet of sugar into her coffee and stirred in silence. Then she laughed as if someone had told a joke, apologized for being awkward again, and explained that their mother had died seven years ago of breast cancer, and on her deathbed she had spoken for the first time of the baby she had been forced to give up when she was fourteen.

Forced. Claudette latched onto the word.

“I'm sorry you never met her. She was a fun woman. Always singing songs she made up as she went along. She could rhyme any word in a heartbeat. Until she spoke about you I'd never heard of these orphanages where unwed mothers delivered their babies in secret. The church claims they were doing these women a favor, so nobody would know about their ‘sin.' Otherwise, they say, these women's lives—our mother's life—would have been ruined. I don't know, maybe that's true.” Louise clutched her scarf in front of her neck. “But you can imagine my surprise to find you still living in the orphanage.”

Claudette needed to stroke the handle on her coffee cup twenty more times before taking a sip. “I'm not the only one. Children born to unwed mothers . . . aren't well.”

“Yes, I saw in the records: you all have some kind of . . . mental illness. It's like all the children who grew up in this place developed problems.”

“We didn't grow up to have them.” Claudette looked from her sister back to the coffee mug. “Bastards are born sick.”

Louise leaned back, mouth agape. Claudette considered her mille-feuille, so pretty with its hard sheet of black-and-white icing and the layers of yellow custard, but she couldn't eat. Louise hadn't touched hers either.

Louise sat forward again, leaned on the table. “We don't have the same father, Claudette. I tried to get my mother to tell me who your father was, but she wouldn't.”

Claudette turned in shame from her half sister's eyes. Beyond the window, across the street, people walked down a snowy allée. The sky shared the same pale glare as the snow-packed sidewalks, and against all that white, the black branches of the trees looked like cracks in a pane of glass.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

6:10 a.m., and she was six Rosaries short of a hundred and twenty. In forty minutes the alarm clock would sound. How was she going to function on so little sleep? Even when she was well rested, Ziva yelled at her for being moony and inefficient. Ulya still lay on her back with her hands clasped on her stomach. She hadn't budged all night.

A month after meeting Louise, Claudette told Dr. Gadeau she was thinking of moving in with her sister. He didn't think that was a good idea. She'd only been on Prozac for a month. Prozac was an exciting new drug, but he didn't want her to have unrealistic expectations: OCD couldn't be cured, especially extreme cases like hers. The best they could hope to do was alleviate some of her symptoms. He even gave a number: forty percent. When Claudette said she didn't want to be ungrateful, but that left sixty percent of her symptoms, and she might live another fifty years, and she didn't see how she could cope with fifty more years of this, he assured her that clinical depression was a normal secondary diagnosis for people with OCD. She shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad.

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.

A
dam 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 really 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.”