Читать книгу Safekeeping - Jessamyn Hope - Страница 11

Adam shifted in his chair while Eyal, the kibbutz secretary, struggled to read his chicken-scratched application. He’d still had the shakes, couldn’t steady his hand, while rushing to fill in all those upsetting questions: What year did you graduate from college? Somehow he had to make it through this interview. It was almost midnight in New York, and he barely slept last night. He was eye-burning tired and, though he had no appetite, his body was revolting against not being fed in three days. His gut seethed, threatening to send him bolting for the toilet. He ran a hand along his bristly jawline, wishing he’d at least been able to shave. Being interviewed was easier when you were good-looking, but he only ever seemed to be in front of someone’s desk—social worker, principal, cop—when he was low.

The balding secretary rubbed his bloodshot eyes with his thick fingers and flipped the page. Weren’t kibbutzim supposed to be tranquil oases? The secretary’s desk, covered with coffee-stained spreadsheets, invoices, and unopened mail, appeared as overwhelmed as its middle-aged owner. Adam glanced over at the other applicant seated beside him. The rosary woman. She sat straight-backed, legs pressed together, staring into space, as if she were riding the subway and Adam and the secretary were merely other passengers in the car. Stranger still was the way she held her hands above her lap and tapped her spread fingers together, like a cymbal-banging-monkey toy. Thankfully she either didn’t know or care about him being at her window last night.

“You’re on the kibbutz at a very tense time.” Eyal laid their applications in front of him. “This is why, Claudette, I apologize, I didn’t get to you for a couple of days. Let me start by telling you both what we expect from our volunteers and what you can expect from us.”

Between chugs of coffee the secretary explained that over the years the kibbutz had hosted over three hundred young people from over thirty countries who wanted to experience living on a commune. Volunteers were treated like members, meaning they were expected to live by the kibbutz motto, to give according to their ability and take according to their need. The volunteers worked like members, and in return they ate in the dining hall, received a room with a bed, and were welcome to use all the facilities—the pool, laundry services, medical center. In the sixties and seventies, they had more North American volunteers, but now most of the foreigners on the kibbutz were from the former Soviet Union.

“You have to take your job seriously, show up on time, work hard. Some volunteers come here to party.” The secretary’s eyes rested on Adam. “We like young people to have fun. But why should you be allowed to come here and live for free? We have Americans and Europeans who get angry when we insist that they do their jobs, as if they would let me, a stranger from Israel, come and do nothing but party in their house for the summer.”

Adam gritted his teeth, nodded. He had to play nice, get the green light to stay here. The application required a two-month commitment, but really he’d be gone in two or three days. It was one of a slew of lies he’d put down. If he’d had more than two hundred dollars to his name, he’d have checked into a nearby hotel.

Eyal promised to do his best to find them both satisfying jobs and turned his attention to Claudette. After gulping down the last of his coffee, he asked her if she knew anything about computers. Claudette stopped tapping her fingers and shook her head.

“That’s too bad. We got two new IBM compatibles and I can’t figure them out. Would you like to work with children? In the school?”

She shook her head again. “No.”

“Why not? That’s the most coveted job among the volunteers.”

“I don’t . . . read or write very well.”

Her candid admission surprised Adam. He couldn’t place her accent. Where was she from? Her round freckled face was makeup-free, eyes the same burnt umber as her wavy mop, which looked as if someone had taken scissors to it with the sole aim of making every strand three inches long. Against her creased white button-down rested a cheap-looking saint pendant that reminded him of a military dog tag.

Eyal turned a pen over his hands. “I meant English, Claudette, not Hebrew.”

“I don’t read English.” She bowed her head. “In French I read a little.”

Frowning, Eyal revisited her papers. “But you’re from Canada . . .”

“I didn’t go to school,” she said, quietly. “I grew up in an orphanage.”

That’s it: she had the accent of the French Canadian fir tree sellers who set up on street corners in the weeks before Christmas. For some reason his grandfather couldn’t stand the piney smell of the trees and used to cross the street to avoid them.

“The orphanage didn’t school you? What did you do all day?”

Her eyes seemed to be focused not on Eyal’s face, but a few inches above. “Kept care of the younger or sicker orphans. Cleaned. For the last fifteen years, I did laundry. I was told I could do laundry here.”

“You were born July 30th, 1962, so that makes you, let me see, almost thirty-two, correct? That’s quite a few years older than most volunteers. We could benefit from your experience. So why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to since the orphanage and I can try to make use of your skills. Does that sound good?”

“I only left the orphanage seven months ago.”

Adam widened his eyes while Eyal, visibly flummoxed by this information, ran a hand over his balding pate. How could a thirty-year-old still be in an orphanage? Was she also lying on her application? Why would anyone make up such an absurd lie? And she didn’t strike him as a liar. She had to have the wrong word. She meant some other kind of home.

Eyal set her application to the side as if it were no use. “Claudette, if you don’t mind me asking, what brings you to the kibbutz?”

Claudette described how she ended up on the kibbutz in a hushed voice, free from emotion, except perhaps discomfort. For the last seven months she had lived with her half sister Louise while continuing to work in the orphanage’s laundry. When Louise got married last week, her brother-in-law, who had once volunteered on a kibbutz, insisted she should do it. He promised she could do laundry here in exchange for room and board. Just like in the orphanage. Adam imagined the starry-eyed newlyweds who didn’t want this weirdo hanging around their honeymoon nest. They must have been giddy with relief when they realized they could pawn her off on the kibbutz for a while. Claudette finished: “And I supposed it couldn’t hurt to be where Jesus had His ministry.”

Eyal said he was very sorry, but they didn’t need anyone full-time in the laundry, that they would have to think of something else for her to do, and picked up Adam’s application. Adam straightened, clasped his hands.

“Honestly, I can’t read a word of this. I can’t even make out your name. Alan?”

“Sorry. My penmanship needs work. My name’s Adam.”

“Adam. It looks like you went to college for . . . what was it?”

“History. I majored in New York City history at Baruch College, which is one of the best schools in the City University. That high school I went to, Stuyvesant, it’s the best public high school in the city, maybe the country. Three Nobel Prize winners went there.”

These weren’t entirely lies. He had gone to Stuy, but they wouldn’t readmit him after he got back from rehab. As for Baruch, he was about to declare himself a history major when he was suspended that last time. He did love those history classes, and actually got an A- in “NYC: The People Who Shaped the City.” The only reason he hadn’t yet declared his major—how stupid it seemed now—was because he had worried that it was kind of pathetic to be a historian, that people who wanted to be great became great, and people who couldn’t become great became historians and studied great people.

“Not much I can do with history. What about jobs?”

He’d been fired from many shitty jobs—painting apartments, moving furniture, scooping ice cream—usually within a month.

“Well, I’ve had a lot of internships and other jobs, but—” What had his grandfather done on the kibbutz? He thought hard. “Cotton! What about picking cotton? My grandfather was on this kibbutz for a couple of years after the war, and that’s something he did.”

“Your grandfather was on Sadot Hadar?” Eyal raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Sadly the cotton fields are long gone. Even with the machines we couldn’t compete with India, where people pick for seventy cents a day. Seventy cents a day—wrap your head around that. There’s a plastics factory now where the cotton used to be, which means we now have to compete with China.”

Eyal massaged his forehead. Behind him a moth fluttered along the wall, past an oversized calendar scrawled with notes and scratched-out notes. Not a single day blank. Again, not the kind of calendar Adam would have expected on a kibbutz.

“I have an idea.” Eyal waved his pen at Claudette. “You worked with sick people, yes? We have an old woman on the kibbutz who’s very sick, but she won’t stop working. The problem is—and it breaks my heart to say this—wherever she goes, she’s more a nuisance than help. I try to send her somewhere different every day, spread the burden. Your job will be to accompany her, to help her get around. And to do some of the work she isn’t.”

Adam buried his hand in his pocket, clutched the brooch. Could this be the old woman he was looking for?

Claudette shook her head. “I would be better in the laundry.”

“But we don’t need anyone in the laundry.” Eyal picked up the phone. “Trust me, this is better. You’ll experience the whole kibbutz working with Ziva—picking mandarins, working in the dining hall. But whatever we do, we can’t let on that it’s you looking after her.” He raised his finger to suggest everything would be clear in a moment.

Adam released the brooch. He wasn’t looking for a Ziva.

“Hello, Ima,” Eyal said into the receiver. “We have a young Canadian woman for you to take charge of. She will follow you to your assignments, and you will make sure she understands the tasks and gets them done. Beseder?”

A squawk burst out of the handset, and Eyal jerked it away from his ear. He switched to Hebrew, but Adam understood by the jut of the secretary’s jaw that he was frustrated. He banged down the phone and lifted his hands in a what-can-you-do.

“I should warn you, Claudette, Ziva can be very . . . what’s a nice word for it? Forthright? Even Israelis find her rude. Don’t take anything she says personally. Believe me, I should know. She’s my mother.” He turned to Adam. “And you we can put in the plastics factory or the dishwashing room. It’s your choice.”

Neither sounded very Fields of Splendor, but Adam was relieved he could stay. “Dishwashing, thanks.”

Eyal pulled Monopoly money out of a drawer, two wads of colored copy paper stamped with numbers. “You can use these at the general store, the kolbo, to buy toiletries or other things you might need. In addition, we’ll give you a small stipend, a hundred and twenty shekels a month. You can pick up your work clothes and boots at the laundry.” Eyal stood, and Adam and Claudette followed suit. “Enjoy your time here at Sadot Hadar.”

Claudette departed without saying goodbye, while Adam hung back. He steadied himself on the back of his chair. “Hey, Eyal, one more thing. Can you tell me where I can find Dagmar?”

“Who?” Eyal carried his JNF mug to the kitchenette and scooped in a heap of Nescafé.

“I’m looking for an older woman named Dagmar. She lives on the kibbutz.”

“Not this kibbutz.” Eyal poured steaming water from an electric kettle. “There’s no one named Dagmar here. Never has been.”

Adam took a second to absorb the news that Dagmar might not live here anymore. Why hadn’t he prepared for that? He had assumed she’d either be here or dead. She wrote his grandfather that she would be on the kibbutz “for the rest of her life.”

The secretary carried the brimming mug back to his desk and settled into his chair behind the mounds of papers. He gazed up at Adam, clearly itching for him to leave.

Adam said, “Maybe she doesn’t live here right now, but I know she did in 1947.”

“Forty-seven?” Eyal shook his head. “Maybe in the DP section. Temporarily. But she couldn’t have been a kibbutznik.”

“She was a kibbutznik. I’m sure of it.”

Eyal spread his fingers out on his desk. “Listen, Adam. I was born here in forty-eight and have lived here my whole life. My mother is a founding member of the kibbutz, the only founder still alive. I’m the longest-running secretary we’ve ever had, and I know the name of every single person who’s ever been a member. I’ve been through their papers so many times I could draw their family trees. There was never any Dagmar on this kibbutz.”

Adam shrugged. “You’re wrong. My grandfather was here in forty-seven, and he knew her.”

“I’m not wrong.”

“Was your mom here then?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll ask her.”

“Fine, ask her. But she’s not going to give you a different answer. And please, please, leave her alone until after tomorrow night. We’re having a meeting, and . . . actually, leave her alone the next day too. This meeting—” He briefly closed his eyes. “It’s just not a good time.”

Adam didn’t want to wait two days, but what could he do? He promised not to bother this woman before Wednesday and turned to leave. As he was passing through the door, Eyal called him back.

“I want you to know, Adam, for your sake and ours, that we don’t give second chances.”

Adam leaned in the doorway. “What? I didn’t know it was a crime to ask about an old lady.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve had this job a long time, and I’ve met a lot of volunteers. All I’m saying is do your job, keep out of trouble, and everything will be fine.”

Adam descended the stairs of the small office building, shaking his head. Why did some people think they knew everything? Outside, the kibbutz’s poky main square was deserted except for Claudette, who stood in its center, head down, slowly rotating as if scanning the beige bricks for a lost earring.

Which way was the volunteers’ section? It wasn’t far, but he’d been such a wreck walking over here, nothing looked familiar. Across the square was the dining hall, a single-story concrete building with glass doors. On the left was presumably the general store, its corrugated steel awning shading an ice-cream freezer and fruit stands. A few yards over from the store stood a door. Just a door. Nothing on either side or above it but a hem of concrete, making it look as if the door led to an invisible world. To the right of the square was the main lawn. Too embarrassed to ask for directions, he’d see if Claudette were heading back soon.

He sidled up to her. “What did you lose?”

She turned with a start. “Nothing.”

Glancing down at the plaza’s interlocking bricks, he had no idea what she could be doing. “You heading back to the volunteers’ section?”

Claudette circled one more time, eyeing the bricks, before nodding.

Together they walked across the square, Adam’s hands in his jean pockets, one clasping the brooch, Claudette’s arms folded, fingers clutching the flesh over her elbows. A row of unchained bicycles waited outside the dining hall, handlebars gleaming with sunlight. Adam waited for Claudette to start a conversation, but she didn’t, and he was grateful to avoid chitchat. They followed a path around the side of the dining hall and walked along its wall of windows, upon which their mirror images followed them, surrounded by the blurry green reflection of the main lawn. No wonder Eyal had given him a hard time. He was the image of a junkie: twiggy arms coming out of a black T-shirt and disappearing into the pockets of jeans so big they barely hung on.

This must have been how he looked that last time Zayde walked him from Lodmoor to the train station. If he’d kept the promise he made on that walk, he wouldn’t have had to lie on the application. When he came down to the foyer that morning, where Zayde waited for him, the receptionist had asked if she should call them a cab, but Zayde said, No, no, they would walk to the train station. Adam’s backpack was heavy, but he wasn’t about to complain; this was the third time they were doing this trip.

At first they had walked in silence through the Queens neighborhood, past the houses covered in pastel aluminum siding, the small yards closed in by chain-link fences; hardly the picket-fence suburbs seen in sitcoms, but it always surprised Adam that New York City had houses at all. Zayde’s eyes, shaded by the brim of his straw fedora, squinted at a house with a plastic kiddie pool on its mowed lawn and a red BMX chained to its porch.

“Maybe I should have moved us out here, where you could have had a nice bicycle.”

Adam shook his head. “No. No way. I love where I grew up. Zayde, this . . . this has nothing to do with you.”

Zayde sucked in his lips, lowered his gaze to his brown oxfords. “Just when I was supposed to start university, they stopped letting in Jews. To this day I have no idea what I would’ve studied, what I would have become. A musicologist? Maybe a dance critic. Probably not a furniture salesman.”

Adam tasted blood. He’d been chewing on his cheek. His grandfather almost never spoke about those times. Should he say something? What?

“Finish college, Adam. I worked hard to save that money so you could go. I don’t want to make you feel bad, but it’s true.”

Adam forced himself to look at his grandfather, to make a promise he wasn’t entirely sure he could keep. “I promise, Zayde, I’m done. Seriously. You’ll see. I’m going to be somebody you can be proud of.”

His grandfather looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t want it for me, Adam.”

Adam was shaken out of his thoughts when Claudette about-faced and started marching back. He turned. “Hey, where you going?”

After three or four steps, she pivoted again and came back. They continued walking.

“What just happened?” asked Adam.

Eyes fixed on the path in front of her feet, she said, “Sorry. I . . . had to do that.”

“Why?”

“Because I did.”

Adam noticed now that Claudette’s eyes never left the ground. And once in a while she did that thing with her hands, clapping like the Musical Jolly Chimp. He was getting a better idea of what kind of institution she might have been in.

“Claudette, can I ask you a question? Did you really live in an orphanage until a few months ago?”

She nodded.

“But orphanages are homes for children. Are you sure you don’t mean some other kind of, you know, institution? It’s safe to tell me. I’m a four-time, not-so-proud resident of Lodmoor Rehab.”

She made no response, only pulled her crossed arms into her chest, and Adam let it go.

They passed another one of those strange doors, which he now saw had a slope of concrete behind it, and made a turn before the jasmine bushes. He trailed Claudette down the steppingstones, which she took like a bride going down the aisle, bringing her feet together on each stone. When they reached the bottom, a sandy-haired chihuahua rose from the grass around the flowering tree and trotted alongside them, surprising Adam. He associated chihuahuas with uptown wives who lunched after Bergdorf’s, not the Middle East. As they neared the room where Adam had seen the naked girl, Claudette pulled a key out of her pocket.

He said, “I thought nobody used keys around here.”

“My roommate wants the door locked at all times. Every night she goes out and locks me in the room.”

The partying roommate, putting on all that eyeliner. Where could she be going on a kibbutz? What nightlife could they possibly have? Did kibbutzim have bars? Forget it. He shouldn’t even wonder. He took a gander at the picnic table: the bottle was gone.

To ask anything other than whether the kibbutz had a bar, he pointed to Claudette’s pendant. “So who is that anyway? Guessing it’s a saint.”

She pressed the medallion against her chest, seeming at once proud and shy to talk about it. “Yes, it’s Sainte Christine de Liège. In English, she is called Christina the Astonishing.”

The chihuahua reared onto its hind legs and pawed at Adam’s calf, forcing him to scratch its tiny head. The dog closed its eyes to bask in the affection.

“Yeah? What was so astonishing about her?”

“So much.”

“Such as?”

“At Christine’s funeral—she was only twenty-two when she died—she floated out of her coffin, and God spoke to her. He gave her a choice: she could either go to Heaven or she could come back to life and save people in Purgatory by suffering on their behalf. Every time she suffered, a soul would be released. She chose to come back, and for the next fifty years, she tortured herself. Jumped into fires. Swam in frozen rivers. She starved herself, never ate any food, except the milk from her breasts. She had milk even though she was a virgin.”

Adam struggled not to smile. “That is pretty astonishing.” After a second’s thought, he added, “I guess it would be nice to believe someone was out there, atoning on my behalf. Poof! I’m sin free.”

Claudette wrapped her hand around the saint. “All you have to do to believe is believe.”

“Right.”

Adam continued to his room. He didn’t want to lie down, but he had no choice. His eyes were closing against his will. And he needed to keep close to the toilet. The cramps were only warming up, and he didn’t want to risk a repeat of what happened last time he was detoxing: while standing on line at Duane Reade, trying to ignore the cramps, before he understood what was happening, he felt a warm liquid flowing down his leg. He lowered his eyes, thinking, God no, but there it was, diarrhea oozing out of his jean leg and pooling around his Converse.

“Hey, buddy,” he said to the chihuahua trotting next to his ankles. “Where do you think you’re going?”

The chihuahua whipped its tail. Adam stopped, looked around for its owner. Claudette still stood at her door, wiping its knob with her shirttail.

“Yo, Claudette. Do you know who this little guy belongs to?”

Claudette clutched the shirttail in front of her. “It lives in the volunteers’ section. People leave food and water for it by the tree.”

“It got a name?”

“Golda, I think.”

The tiny dog gaped up at him, its big black eyes wide, giant ears on end. A dog had always been something other people had, normal people.

When he started walking and the dog followed again, he asked, “Are you going to insist on coming with me?”

The chihuahua’s tail wagged faster, and Adam felt his eyes closing on him again.

“All right. Let’s nap.”