Читать книгу Safekeeping - Jessamyn Hope - Страница 15

Adam checked his wristwatch again. 2:17 a.m. Was that soldier ever going to stop playing the piano? In four hours he had to get up and wash seven hundred people’s dishes. The kid would never be allowed to play all night if the only people within earshot of the dining hall weren’t the foreign volunteers and senior citizens. Before going to bed, Adam had scoped out Ziva’s apartment in the old people’s building, her window the only one still filled with light.

When Adam first climbed into bed, he had been grateful for the piano. As he drifted in and out of a light sleep, he heard Ofir trying a bar one way, then another, tripping up and trying again, and it was much better than the inescapable quiet of the last two nights. But now the soldier had hit his stride. Every time Adam closed his eyes, the wistful melody sent him up the stairs of their five-story walkup, two steps at a time, carrying grocery bags filled with Oreos, Pop-Tarts, Mountain Dew, and a large container of kasha varnishkes, that tasteless mix of buckwheat groats and bow-tie pasta his grandfather loved so much. Every time he reached their door—2C—he managed to pop open his eyes.

Golda slept beside him, her chest pressing into his thigh with every inhale. Why did this little creature attach herself to him? He rested his hand on her warm furry body and immediately removed it. He couldn’t bear the fragility of her tiny ribs under his palm.

2C. Would he ever be able to stomach being in that apartment again? Just two bedrooms, a family room, a bathroom, and a kitchen, all of them just big enough. Anyone else would find the place nothing special, no different than a billion other small apartments in the city, in the world, but that’s where he had spent a happy childhood and had planned on living out the rest of his life—loving a wife, maybe raising a child, and at the end of it all being just like Zayde, an old man setting the potted plants out on the fire escape in the spring, then bringing them back in before the first snowfall. If a person wanted to have a real home, he couldn’t keep moving around; he had to stay put.

He closed his eyes and there he was going up the stairs again, carrying the bags of goodies. When he arrived at their door, he allowed himself to unlock it, turn the knob. Inside, he found the apartment unusually quiet. He wiped his Converses on the coir doormat and hung his parka. He supposed the old man was napping; otherwise he’d be in the family room, reading a mystery novel or listening to a favorite swing tune. Mostly he listened to the old records sitting on the couch with a faraway look, but once in a while he danced with an imaginary partner, especially to Bing Crosby’s “After You’ve Gone.” Swaying, eyes half closed, an invisible woman in his arms, he’d mouth, You’ll feel blue, you’ll feel sad, you’ll miss the bestest pal you’ve ever had.

Adam dumped the kasha varnishkes into a bowl and popped it in the microwave. While the timer counted down, he assured himself that objects were just objects. Even that brooch, when all was said and done, was just an object. And he had no choice. When Bones’s thugs trailed him home from the East Broadway station, smashed his head into a mailbox in broad daylight, and warned him that next time they would kill him and force the money out of his old man, he knew he had to come up with the fifteen thousand dollars fast. And the brooch—eventually it was going to be his anyway, right? Since he was the only person around to inherit it. Zayde had only Adam and Adam only Zayde; so maybe his grandfather wouldn’t have done it with pleasure, but he would have let him sell the brooch to save his life. This way the old man got to make that sacrifice without the hurt of knowing it.

“Zayde!” Adam headed for his grandfather’s bedroom. “Wake up! I got your favorite, kasha varnishkes from Moishe’s.”

He carried the warm bowl through the family room, where snow dusted the fire escape beyond the window. A cold March. Usually at this hour in the afternoon, a golden square of dusty sunlight glowed on the wooden floor in front of the television, but today the wintry light was pale and diffused. The radiators rattled. The apartment, barely renovated since Zayde and Bobbe moved into it in 1950, was anchored with anachronisms: a wooden breadbox sat next to the microwave; a midcentury credenza housed the VCR; an old-world cuckoo clock hung beside the wireless phone. All the furniture came from Leo’s! on Delancey, where Zayde had worked the floor for forty-six years before his retirement two months earlier.

“Zayde?” Adam stood outside his door. “Don’t you want some kasha varnishkes? I warmed them up for you.”

Not a rustle. If the old man were sleeping, where was his snore? Maybe he wasn’t home? Where could he have gone? He’d already taken his daily walk to Duane Reade. Adam slowly turned the knob. “Zayde?”

The old man’s bedroom hadn’t changed since the days when Adam would crawl into his bed after a nightmare: the framed drawing of a gaslit street in Dresden, the blue acrylic blanket, the window onto the brick air-shaft that echoed with cooing pigeons. As Adam turned to leave, he spied the slippered foot sticking out from behind the bed.

He dropped the bowl of kasha and ran to where his grandfather lay on the hardwood floor, body facing one way, head the other, the old Florsheim shoebox open beside him, the shoebox that earlier that morning, while his grandfather was on his walk to Duane Reade, Adam had pulled from the shelf in the closet, pulled out from behind all that junk, the magazines and jars of spare buttons and pens. He’d been careful to replace it all just so, was certain nobody could have detected anything.

He took the old man’s face in his hands, the cheeks smooth, cold. He searched the eyes, the black eyes like his own. Their light was out—that loving, amused, nostalgic shine gone. He brought his face to the slack mouth, checked for breath. Nothing. Only the familiar, safe smell of his grandfather, a warm human smell, slightly peppery, overlaid by a rum-based aftershave, laundry starch, scotch mints. Brylcreem.

It was the Brylcreem Zayde had gone to buy at Duane Reade when Adam hunted for the brooch and found it in a blue felt bag in the shoebox.

Adam sat back, hands pressed against his mouth. If only he too would stop breathing. In his grandfather’s fist was the yellowed note, the one that had been in the felt bag with the brooch, the one he had been in too big a hurry to read.

Adam opened his eyes, back again in the kibbutz dorm room. The music had only grown more haunting, more insistent. He got out of bed, padded over to his bureau, and retrieved the old note from inside his passport. He unfolded the brittle paper, revealing the slanted black cursive.

It had taken three people to translate the note for Adam—Mrs. Silver in 4C did the German, Moishe of Moishe’s deli the Yiddish, and the Israeli punk from the head shop on Avenue A explained the Hebrew—but since then Adam had read the note so many times with the translations in his head that as his eyes skimmed over the words, the languages felt familiar. As if he were his grandfather. And now he was reading it where his grandfather had read it that first time all those years ago.

November 30, 1947

Kibbutz Sadot Hadar

Mein liebster Liebling Franz,

It’s so painful for me to write this letter that I’m having trouble moving the pen. Please forgive me for returning your brooch like this. What I did last night, what I’m doing right now, I hate myself for it, but please don’t hate me. You must know how much I’ve loved you these last two years. If only I believed in something beyond the here and now, I could take comfort in the idea that we might be together again one day in the olam ha-ba. But, of course, I don’t believe in such things. This is our one life, and we will not spend it together. We will probably never see each other again. It’s unbearable to think. Or at least it seems so now, but the truth is we are still quite young with a fair amount of time ahead of us. A day will come when it won’t seem so unbearable. Your mother said the brooch should only go to someone special. I hope you find her, I really do (though, selfishly, the thought also kills me. Isn’t that horrible?). I’m afraid your heart will heal faster than mine. I’m sure of it. Wherever I go on the kibbutz, for the rest of my life, I will be greeted with memories of you, whereas you are sure to forget this plain little kibbutznik amid the glamour of your goldene medina.

I hope the second half of your life will be much, much easier than the first.

Love always,

Dagmar

Adam looked up from the note. In twenty years, he’d only seen his grandfather with the brooch twice. How was he supposed to know that he went into that shoebox so often? If he’d known that within a day the old man would’ve noticed it missing, he might have done things differently. Might have. It was hard to say when a person was using. He still might have been too fucked up, too desperate, too selfish to care. This is what he’d hoped: that his grandfather would only notice the brooch missing after a few years, after he had been a good grandson, a good person, so long his grandfather would be forced to forgive him. He also figured chances were good the old man might die without ever finding out. But it had never occurred to him that finding the brooch missing would give the old man a full-on heart attack. That it would kill him.

The music stopped. Adam waited with the note in his hand for the boy to start up again, but he didn’t. 3:32 now. The music may have sent him up the stairs, but at least it had sympathy. How did people live with such coldhearted silence? He refolded the note along its worn creases and returned it with his passport to the top drawer. He couldn’t get in the bed though, not yet, not with his heart racing like this. He paced with Golda watching him.

Someone special. The wrong hands. Only after the ambulance—no strobes necessary—carried Zayde away, and he was left standing alone in the middle of their family room, did he remember his grandfather telling him about “the wrong hands.” Remembered wasn’t the honest word, more like couldn’t forget. He did remember before stealing the brooch, but he could forget, could push it out of his mind. Now it was all he could think about: his grandfather sitting on a bench in Seward Park, repeating with cross-eyed intensity that the brooch couldn’t end up in “the wrong hands.”

What else could he remember from that story? Almost nothing. Fourteen, finally old enough to hear about the brooch, and what did he do while his grandfather was talking? Daydream about his new girlfriend Monica, who told him on the phone that afternoon that she wanted to wait until they’d been together a year before losing their virginity. He kept imagining pulling off her pink velour pants while his grandfather told him a story that may have involved Buchenwald. Had it? God, he hoped not. Sometimes when he tried to remember the story, he got a flash of rubble. Rubble as far as the eye could see—but that could just be a weird connection his mind was making because maybe there had been construction that day in Seward Park. He never got up the nerve to ask his grandfather to tell the story again. The only thing he could remember for certain was the part about “the wrong hands,” how he had to make sure the brooch didn’t end up in them, and he only remembered that part because the old man said it four or five times.

Adam climbed into the bed, where Golda hurried to burrow under the blanket and snuggle against him. What Dagmar had begrudgingly wished for his grandfather, that he would find another special person for the brooch, never happened. For the rest of his life, decade after decade, it remained in the felt bag with that goodbye letter. What did Bobbe, his wife of twenty-some years, think of him never giving her the brooch? Did she even know about it? As for their daughter, Adam’s mother, it was no mystery why it never went to her: she would have sold it before Adam had the chance to. Adam’s hands had turned out to be the wrong hands.

The only way to make sure the brooch ended up in the right hands was to leave it with the one person his grandfather had ever wanted to have it, the one person he had ever found worthy. It wouldn’t undo the past, Adam understood that, but it was both the least and the most he could do. There was only Dagmar. He had to find her.