Safekeeping (50 page)

Claudette removed her hand from her mouth. “It was a brooch?”

“What? Oh, yes. A brooch.”

“With a big blue stone in the middle?”

Ziva didn't remember describing the brooch to her. Had she? It was impossible to deny that once in a while, like now, she did feel a little confused. Was it possible she had heard about the brooch from Adam? Did she know the boy was Franz's grandson? Ziva spoke carefully, waiting to see what Claudette knew.

“Yes, a sapphire. It had many jewels, but the sapphire was the largest. To be honest, I thought the brooch was hideous, absolutely hideous, with all its showy gems and gold busyness. It was difficult to stomach how much time and devotion went into—what? A useless object. A glorified safety pin. Didn't even work as well as a safety pin. I would have tried to convince Franz to give it to the kibbutz, so we could sell it and do something meaningful, but it would have been a waste of time. He was enamored with the thing. Absurdly sentimental about it.”

To Ziva's relief, Claudette asked no more questions. She didn't know Claudette was waiting for her to fall asleep so she could run and tell Adam that she had found his Dagmar. It had occurred to Claudette to tell Ziva that Franz's grandson was on the kibbutz, but it seemed more romantic to let him tell her. She would have to get to him soon, though, while Ziva was coherent. Who knew what she would be like tomorrow?

Claudette went to the kitchen to fill a pitcher with water, leaving Ziva alone with her thoughts. The boy likely had the answer to that question she'd been carrying all these years. Judging by the bitter way he asked for Dagmar's whereabouts, it was probably the answer she didn't want to hear, that Franz had hated her. But why would the boy need to tell her that? And was that truly the answer she had feared most? No. What she had feared most was Franz forgetting her; and his grandson's search meant at least that hadn't happened. Though wouldn't that have been the best thing for Franz? You see, love did make one selfish. It had probably been selfish of her not to give the boy his say.

Ziva didn't fall asleep after lunch as she normally did. She remained alert, staring out the window. As more and more people came to vote, the pain of the present edged out the pain of the past. She squinted against the sunlight to see who was entering the dining hall. Claudette listened to her worry aloud.

“Why would they vote to end the kibbutz? They wouldn't, would they? I've probably been nervous all these months for nothing.”

It was only after the sun had gone down and Ziva had swallowed her evening painkiller that she dozed off, allowing Claudette to rise from the visitor's chair and tiptoe out of the bedroom. As soon as Claudette was out of the apartment, she broke into a run. She darted through the voters gathered in the square and across the dark lawn and down the steppingstones toward Adam's glowing window.

Z
iva sat with the back of her bed raised high, watching the late-night news in the dark. The annoying red ticker at the bottom of the screen showed 11:21 p.m. She had awoken from sleep just as the ballot box was closing, over an hour and a half ago now. Eyal had promised he would bring her the verdict as soon as he completed the tally. He understood the rest of the kibbutz could wait until morning, but not her. So where was he?

After a segment on the fat-free fad sweeping America, the handsome anchorman announced breaking news: the Nobel Peace Prize this year would be going to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat. Ziva hurriedly increased the volume.
Nobel committee member Kaare Kristiansen quit rather than be a part of giving a peace prize to Arafat, whom he called the “world's most prominent terrorist,” but many Israelis welcome the news.

The broadcast cut to a young crowd waving peace now flags in Tel Aviv. A reporter interrupted revelers for their thoughts. A girl with a hoop in her nose talked excitedly under the blanching camera lights. “Who do you think you make peace with? Your friends? No, you make peace with your enemy.”

Ziva switched off the TV and sat in the dark. What to think? Had the Arabs really, finally, accepted the existence of Israel? Did they no longer want to get rid of the Jewish state? It was hard to believe, but she would never know. She wouldn't be here to find out. The next century, whatever it held, didn't hold it for her. She closed her eyes. She liked having her whole life contained in one century. The divisions between centuries just fell where they fell, it probably didn't mean much, but still, she liked it.
Born in 1915, during the first winter of the Great War, and dying now in the autumn of 1994, she was the twentieth century. Some people, like her mother or Claudette, straddled centuries, like immigrants, starting in one and ending in another, never fully belonging to either. The twentieth century, it seemed to her, had been the darkest and brightest in human history. Did everyone feel that way about their era? Or had hers been particularly dramatic?

“Ima.”

She opened her eyes.

“How long have you been standing there?”

He held an accordion file in his thick fingers. The muted lamplight coming through the window glowed on his bald head and left the bags under his eyes in shadow. She didn't know what to make of his hangdog expression—had he won or lost? She could never tell with her son: he never made a decision and then got on with it. He always wasted energy second-guessing and grieving over what had to be compromised.

“Well?” she said. “Spare me and spit it out already.”

“It was close.” Eyal considered one last time lying to his mother. She was dying. He could tell everyone to keep the truth from her, and she would leave this world believing her life had been a triumph.

Ziva smacked her hand down on the bed. “
Nu
? Do you enjoy torturing me?”

It had crossed her mind that Eyal might lie, but the fear hadn't lasted a second. Her son might be a lot of things—maybe even a capitalist—but he wasn't a liar. How many times could he have saved himself in the middle of one of their long and loud arguments by fibbing to her? He never did. In almost fifty years, she never, not once, had to stop and wonder if he was being truthful. She hadn't realized this until a few days ago, and so she hadn't valued it all these years. She wished she had.

Eyal held the files against his chest, like a shield. “Differential incomes.”

Differential incomes.
Ziva shriveled at the antiseptic sound of it. It had all the passion found in the teeny print no one bothered to read at the foot of a legal form. She would've preferred if her victors had marched through her bedroom, brandishing signs, blowing horns in her face. To be told she had failed in such a lifeless way made the defeat all the more defeating, as if what she had fought for her whole life hadn't been worthy of a passionate enemy.

“So we're not a kibbutz anymore?”

Eyal shook his head. “Not really.”

She turned away. “It was all for nothing?”

She hadn't been asking him, but Eyal said, “No, Ima! You know the kibbutzim were crucial. You know that. Communism failed, but Israel wouldn't be here if it weren't for you and the other pioneers.”

Ziva gazed through the window at the empty square. “All for nothing.”

Eyal sat down in the visitor's chair without turning on a light. He watched his mother's head drop. She said nothing more. It was the first time he had seen her defeated. His whole life he had wanted to make her proud of him, and now, on her deathbed, he managed to disappoint her more than he would have thought possible. Her silence was as loud as any death knell. He had prepared for hours of accusations, questions about the future, vows to keep on fighting, for a barrage of her favorite socialist zingers. Had he and his mother already had their last quarrel? He struggled to think of what it was. Oh yes, two days ago, they had been debating charging people to use the pool, which badly needed repairs.
Unthinkable
, she had said, pounding her bed with a jaundiced fist.
We can't have some children able to swim and others not.
Eyal couldn't believe their arguments were done. The chance for them to make their relationship right was over.

He picked up the pomegranate on her nightstand and turned it in his hands. What was there to say to his mother now? “Who brought you this, Ima?”

Ziva glanced at the fruit. “Claudette.”

He fingered its thorny crown. “I couldn't deal with this today, but she will have to leave the kibbutz. Apparently she's been sleeping with Ofir, and his mother's going out of her mind. She wants to press charges, but he's seventeen, over the age of legal consent.”

Ziva recalled that walk in the rain, when Claudette confessed to never having kissed anyone, and she had told her she must try it. So she had, and more. Over the last few months the girl had gained all the life force she had lost. She was happy for her friend. Her first friend, she thought, since Dov.

She shook her head. “People busy themselves with the stupidest things. He's seventeen. When I was his age . . . ach, forget it.”

Eyal had long ago decided that he would never ask. But maybe because they had nothing else left to speak about, or perhaps because he knew he
would never have another chance to ask it, he did. “Ima, I know people busy themselves with the stupidest things, talk nonsense, but over the years, with so much, you know, talk, I couldn't help but . . . but wonder if there wasn't some truth to the story about Dov not being my father.”

His mother regarded him with an unreadable expression. Since he hadn't planned on asking tonight, he hadn't imagined her reaction. When he had imagined it years ago as a teenager, he had pictured her exclaiming, “What
shtuyot
!” but tonight, she looked confused, undecided.

He wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans. “Ima, I don't care. I won't be mad. After all, I never knew Dov or any dad. I'm just curious, I guess. Was he? Or was it somebody else?”

It had been so many years since Ziva had given it any real thought. When the boy was born, she figured the father's identity would become obvious as he grew to look like one or the other, but with his round face, strong nose, close-set hazel eyes, and, before the balding, thick, curly, brown hair, he looked like her. As the years passed, she came to like the uncertainty. Not knowing made either scenario equally true: Dov had a child born in the fledgling Jewish state, and there was a human being who was a mixture of her and Franz.

“Never mind.” Eyal retreated from her silence. “It's not important.”

Ziva closed her eyes, and Eyal assumed she was trying to escape him, but he was wrong. She was considering whether it were even possible for him to be Dov's son. Twelve years she had slept with Dov every Shabbat and never gotten pregnant, and then Franz came along, and after two years, despite being careful about timing their encounters, she was carrying a child. Often, Dov didn't even climax. He would try, because he was a trier, but eventually he would roll off, exhausted, and, with a hand on her shoulder, kiss her on the cheek, as if to say it didn't matter, that he enjoyed loving her anyway. Many many many years later, when such things were talked about, when Rock Hudson died of that new disease and the front page of the newspaper showed a picture of two men walking with their hands in each other's back pocket, she had wondered and dismissed and wondered again and decided no: it was just that they were best friends, not lovers; or maybe Dov simply wasn't a sexual person; or perhaps it was the culture of the kibbutz at fault, its belief that sex was a necessary but lowly distraction. Only then, she would catch herself wondering again and dealing with the devastating idea that all those years they'd been together,
Dov had been suffering inside, suffering alone, that she hadn't been there for her best friend. But how could she have possibly guessed? They were running away from the old, effeminate Jew; they were the strong New Jews. The outside world, Berlin, Tel Aviv, New York, had deviance, but sociologists would actually come to the kibbutz to study their impressive lack of criminals and drug addicts and homosexuals. It would have been so unthinkable that Dov, the kibbutz's strongest, bravest pioneer, was a homosexual that maybe it had been unthinkable even to him.

Ziva opened her eyes, and Eyal shifted forward in his seat.

“I guess I'll go now, Ima. I have to go to Tel Aviv tomorrow morning to meet with the banks.”

“Wait. I'll answer your question.”

Eyal sat back again while Ziva told herself she didn't need to think about the past, the answer sat right in front of her. She studied her son more closely than she ever had before. It was strange looking for the young father in the middle-aged son, Eyal being at least fifteen years older than either Dov or Franz the last time she saw them. She considered his eyes, bloodshot from going over the kibbutz's budget night after night; often she would get up in the wee hours to go to the bathroom and see the light still on in his office. She contemplated his creased forehead and the groove between his eyebrows, lines etched over the seventeen years he had overseen the kibbutz, a job he compared to running around desperately plugging leaks in a giant roof about to collapse on hundreds of people. Those lips, pressed together, patiently awaiting the answer, she knew that stubborn little mouth well; ever since he was a boy, she had watched it argue, argue the most vexatious things, but passionately, inexhaustibly, caring deeply. Her gaze traveled down to the uneven shoulders, thanks to a collarbone break during the Six-Day War, when his jeep came under fire and rolled down a hill outside Jerusalem. Then there were the thick hands nervously gripping his thighs, the hands that had leafed through all the votes tonight. Nobody, despite Eyal's role in the referendum, had demanded a second person double-check his tally. He had counted alone. That was how much everyone, including her, trusted him.