Safekeeping (34 page)

Ulya lifted her head and asked for the time. Adam held up his wristwatch. 1:08 a.m.

“You looked cute, sleeping.” He imitated her, dropping his head back and opening his mouth.

Ulya hit him. “Oh no! My mom sleeps like that. Actually, I dreamed I was in Mazyr. I've been in Israel for a year, but my dreams never take place here. Sometimes the people in the dream are from here, but we're always in Mazyr.”

“Have I ever been in one of your dreams?”

“Not telling.”

Ulya's face was pale in the dim bus. His gaze darted from her eyes to her lips as he debated kissing her.

She realized what he was thinking, and he saw her realize it. Her lips parted slightly. She didn't look away, and he took that as a yes. He leaned in, slowly, while her eyelids dropped halfway. His body hummed as, drawing closer, he smelled the coconut sunblock on her neck, the tobacco on her breath. Just before contact, she turned her head, his lips skidding against her cheek.

“Sorry,” she said.

She didn't know what happened. She had braced to kiss him. While he debated whether to kiss her, she debated too and decided that until she had made up her mind about faking it, she should fake it. But at the last second, she saw Farid and couldn't do it. She laid her head on Adam's shoulder. “Maybe we can try again later.”

Adam's heart and groin ached from the refusal. They didn't talk much the rest of the way home. In Haifa they caught a van running the bus routes after hours. It was two in the morning when they walked through the kibbutz gate.

At the bottom of the steppingstones, Golda darted for Adam. He lifted the dog to his chest and carried her.

As they passed the tree, he said, “Do you know what kind of tree this is?”

Ulya, turning for her room, shook her head. She looked back at him over her shoulder. “I'll see you tomorrow, Adam. Okay?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

C
laudette was crossing the main lawn when she heard the piano. A few weeks ago, when she began these nightly walks, finding it easier to still her mind while her body was moving, she wouldn't have heard the faint plinking. She would see and hear little as she roved, repeating
It isn't true, it isn't true
. Then one night, as she was walking past the pine trees beside the library, she noticed she wasn't repeating the mantra, that her mind had strayed. She didn't know where her mind had gone, only that the pines smelled wonderful. She hadn't known that was possible, not to monitor your thoughts, but every night more and more of her walk was spent simply taking in the kibbutz while wondering about Ziva or the orphanage or the boy. Tonight she had been wondering what the boy did all day in his room when she heard the piano. She hastened toward the dining hall and crept up to the doorway, the same one she had stood in seven weeks ago.

Ofir twisted the volume on his hearing aids with the hopes that turning them all the way up would enable him to hear the softer notes over the ringing in his head. Nothing could be done about the loss of silence. He knew rests were important to music, but he had never appreciated just how much sound was in that quiet. He stretched his fingers and, sweat trickling down his face, started once again. Now the low notes, meant to be solemn certainties, thundered like a volatile storm. Was that the hearing aids? Was he coming down too hard on the keys? Had the notes always been wrong?

He bit his lips and played on. Maybe it was only a matter of loosening up after being away from the keys for two months. He had never been
away that long. Even during basic training. If he kept playing, by the end, the music might flow out of him as it had that last time, as if the melody had its own need to be heard.

That didn't happen. He got worse. Fast. The notes grew increasingly angry, loud, incoherent—the stammering sounds a person makes when he's desperately trying to explain himself, but keeps failing.

Claudette watched Ofir slam two fists down on the keys. The dissonance spread through the dining hall, humming in the plates and glasses, while Ofir sat dead still. When the last shred of sound left the piano, he dropped his head on its shelf. Though Claudette couldn't hear him sobbing, she saw his back rising and falling. She had her answer: the boy would live, but not with music. She could turn around and go now. Or—the thought turned her cold—she could try to help him.

How? What if she said the wrong thing? What if he touched her again? She could already hear the Bad Feeling preparing to accuse her of violating a young boy. But she couldn't let the Bad Feeling be the only reason for not going to him.
It isn't true. It isn't true.

She stepped into the unlit dining hall and tiptoed down the alley between the long cafeteria tables. Nearing the piano, she heard the boy's sniffles, gasps for air. She edged closer. He continued sobbing, having no idea she was there. Maybe she had been too quiet? She stood next to him, paralyzed, afraid to startle him.

Turning his head to rest on the other cheek, Ofir saw a white blur through the tears. He raised his head, and there was a face. Annoyed, he sat up, wiped his eyes. He didn't want to see anyone. He had waited until two in the morning, played as quietly as possible, so nobody would hear him and offer their fake praise and bullshit encouragement.

When he recognized the girl he had been daydreaming about when the bus blew apart, he felt sick, like he might throw up. She wore the same white sundress. It was disorienting, things being just as they were, as if nothing had happened—his room, the dining hall, the trees outside his window, the same leafy green as last summer. If anything, the girl looked prettier, her lips painted a bright coral.

“Did you feel as if I were playing just for you again?” he said sarcastically, though part of him hoped that maybe, just maybe, he hadn't been hearing himself properly. “Like God was playing through me?”

Claudette shook her head.

He turned to the keys. Her answer hurt, but at last someone had been honest with him. Not cruel. The downward curve of her bright lips when she shook her head revealed how sorry she was. Ofir closed his eyes, making Claudette wonder why she had thought for even a second that she could help anyone.

She said, “I'm sorry. I'll go now.”

“No.” He opened his eyes. “Don't go. I like that you told me the truth.”

Claudette fidgeted with the waist of her dress as Ofir wondered what to say next. Maybe nothing. What right did he have to ask the girl to stay with him? She had been drawn to his music. Now the music was gone, and he was just a charity case.

“I mean, of course you can go. I couldn't tell how loudly I was playing. Sorry if I woke you up.”

“I was awake.”

“At two a.m.?”

“I take long walks at night.”

Ofir lowered his head, contemplated the black-and-white keys. Should he keep playing? Or, rather, keep failing to play?

“If you don't want me to, all you have to do is say so, but if it's okay, can I walk with you a bit? This is the first time I've left my room in twenty days.”

Claudette felt the Bad Feeling awakening, stretching its arms, but she couldn't say no because of it.

Outside the dining hall, Ofir glanced left and right to make sure the coast was clear, then beckoned Claudette around the side of the building, hemming close to the wall. “If I'm seen out late with a foreign volunteer, there'll be talk. When you live somewhere this small, you learn the less people know, the better.”

Claudette, having also grown up in a closed community, understood this, but recoiled at the idea of there being anything to “know” about her and the boy. They were doing nothing wrong.
Nothing wrong.

“Have you been to the spearmint field?”

“I only wander among the houses.”

Claudette tried to stay calm as they walked past the feathery cedars looming against the night sky and down the dirt path to the fields. The rusted rod gate that opened onto the fields was draped in pink and purple bougainvillea. The lush mint plot, just up ahead, beckoned with its heady, sweet fragrance.

When they reached the mint, Ofir waded into the dense green foliage. “You won't believe the smell when you're standing in the middle of it.”

Claudette followed him through the plants, their leaves and branches brushing up to her waist. She remembered seeing this dark green square of field from the cemetery, when she had asked Ziva how she wanted to die, and she had said working.

Ofir grabbed her hand and pulled her along. Claudette panicked. She had to assure herself that
he
took
her
hand. What could she do? Yank her hand from a sick boy? It was no different than when Ziva slipped her arm through hers.
No different.

When they reached the heart of the field, Ofir turned to her. “I keep telling myself: I don't need music to make life worth it. This smell should be enough.”

Claudette tried to ignore Ofir's warm hand still gripping hers.

“The thing is . . .” His face twisted. “. . . I can't quite convince myself. I just don't know what to do with the smell of things now. How to enjoy it.”

Claudette shook her head. “Me neither.”

Ofir regarded her with interest, and she noticed now that his right pupil wasn't round. Both his pupils had been round when he shook her awake that morning, his bloodshot gray eyes the first things she saw, informing her she was still alive. Now the right pupil was shaped like a teardrop, giving his eyes a sad beauty. No, not beauty, she thought, afraid. But beauty didn't have to be sexual.
There was nothing wrong with beauty
.
Nothing wrong
.

Ofir had the same sensation he did the first time he spoke to her, the rare sensation of not being alone, of being understood. “Let's take as big a sniff of the mint as we can and see if we can enjoy it, okay?”

Claudette agreed, and at the count of three, they both inhaled deeply, smiling at how silly they looked, nostrils flaring, straining to smell together. Claudette's gaze fell from the boy's mismatched eyes to his mouth, where the moonlight glowed on his lower lip. The world reduced itself to the flare of moonlight on the boy's bottom lip.

Ofir looked down at Claudette's lips, the color of the ripe pitangos he used to hunt for in the bushes near the schoolhouse, popping them in his mouth while they were still warm from the sun. He leaned forward.

Claudette saw his face coming toward her but didn't believe it, couldn't believe it.

When his lips touched hers, she screamed—a scream amplified tenfold for Ofir by his hearing aids. She pushed him with surprising force. His balance no longer what it was, he stumbled and fell back into the bushes of spearmint.

Claudette pressed her hands against the sides of her skull as if that could control the insurrection forming inside.

Ofir scrambled to his feet, hurried to apologize. “I . . . I guess I misread you.”

She crushed her head as hard as she could. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“I'm sorry!” He stepped toward her, then stopped himself. “I'm so sorry.”

“It's vile. I'm vile. I'm thirty-one. You're too young. Too, too young. I can't. I can't.”

Ofir figured she was older than him, but thirty-one? That was old. Two months ago he might have balked. But this wasn't two months ago.

“I don't care if you're a hundred and one.”

“I want to go back. Now.”

“I'm not twelve, you know. I'm almost eighteen. I patrolled the West Bank for six months. I've been through a hell of a lot. I think I can be considered an adult.”

Claudette hugged herself and rocked. “I've never kissed anyone. Never. And I never will. I'm sick. Please, leave me alone. I'm sick. Very, very sick.”

Ofir gaped at her. Did she have AIDS? Or some other STD? Is that why she couldn't kiss anyone?

“What do you mean? Sick?”

She kept rocking, bowed her head. “Mentally.”

He didn't know what to say, but he wasn't going to do what others did to him, downplay her pain.

“That must be terrible.”

“Sometimes I think . . .” She brought her clasped hands up to her mouth and looked up at him. “I think it was because of me . . . that you were in the bombing. That I'm a conveyor for evil.”

Ofir looked at her sideways, wearing a small smile. “That makes sense. It's because of you, and not the jihadi with the bomb strapped to his chest.”

Claudette's mouth twitched a little. She was shocked to find that she did see the humor in it. The idea still hurt, but it was also a little funny.

They stood in silence.

Ofir imagined that far beyond the mint field right now, on the other side of the world, yesterday's sunlight still shone on his American alter ego as he practiced the piano. He had to try to let that guy go. They weren't in competition anymore.

He said, “I really don't want to go back to my room yet. I can only go out at night because my skin and this eye still can't take the sun. If I promise not to try to kiss you again, can we keep walking?”