Читать книгу Safekeeping - Jessamyn Hope - Страница 16

Ziva watched her new charge roll a lychee around in her palm. The two women were sorting the little red fruits, seated on upturned plastic crates on the edge of the orchard. Ziva found the girl beyond irritating. Not only did she inspect every lychee for a full minute before tossing it into either the good crate or the bad crate; more often than not, she would retrieve the lychee and reexamine it. The same little drupe! One time she caught her inspecting the same lychee three times. And always with a distracted look in her eyes.

Ziva tossed a cracked lychee into the reject pile. “Claudette, I hope you don’t think you’re above sorting fruit.”

Claudette shook her head. “No. Of course not.”

“Working the land is good for you. Build the land, and it will build you.”

Claudette held a lychee closer to her eyes. “It is important to keep busy. The devil finds work for idle hands.”

Ziva squinted at the girl. Was she being sarcastic? The girl wouldn’t be the first in her generation to mock Ziva’s idealism. Ziva sorted the fruit in her lap as quickly as she could with her misshapen fingers and tossed an emptied crate to the side. She would lead by example. The young foreigner would be forced to pick up her pace when she saw an old lady with hideous hands was on a third crate while she was only halfway through her first.

Instead the younger woman withdrew more and more into her own world. By the time Ziva had finished a fourth crate, the girl was staring into her crate of lychees, motionless. What was the feckless foreigner daydreaming about? The latest fashion? Some boy?

“You know you can’t sort fruit telepathically, Claudette!”

Startled, the young woman looked up at Ziva and nodded, but Ziva could tell she was nodding at her without seeing her. She wasn’t present. Claudette reached for a lychee.

“Grab a handful, Claudette! Enough with this one lychee at a time.”

Ziva dragged a fifth crate toward her. She wasn’t going to let this young woman or what happened at last night’s meeting slow her down. What had happened? She had felt fine walking over. Angry, yes, horrified, but not sick, not weak. Well, of course, she’d felt a little sick: she was old, had cirrhosis. She always felt a little sick. But she felt capable. Prepared. She approached the dining hall, said “Excuse me” to the boy blocking the doorway, and then when the boy turned . . .

She didn’t know him. She was sure she had never seen him before, and yet his face felt familiar. Terribly. The familiarity was so disorienting that for a second she thought: here he is, the Angel of Death, come for me. That’s how much this boy’s face threw her off her bearings. She proceeded into the dining hall, climbed onto the stage, but the confusion followed her.

The whole time her son blathered about freedom and that other idiot prattled on about privatized communes, the boy leaned in the doorway, like a ghost, like . . . Of course. He resembled him so much: Franz. After he had been on the kibbutz for a couple of months, put on some weight, but wasn’t entirely healthy yet. She had told herself that it was absurd to be so unnerved about it; at her age everyone looked like someone else, someone from the past. So maybe it was the stress of the meeting, or all that medication, or the cirrhosis itself, but when she stood up—

“Should we take these?” A young man pointed at the good crates. It was Yossi’s son, not a bad boy, but how did Yossi have a grown-up son? She still thought of Yossi as a boy. Did this young man see her faint last night? He wouldn’t remember when she was the secretary and ran the show. Probably wasn’t even alive yet.

“Yes, yes. These are done. No thanks to this young woman. Two hours and she hasn’t sorted a single crate.”

“I’m sorry.” Claudette hastened to get another lychee. “I told the secretary I would be better in the—”

“What good is sorry?”

The young man carried the crates away, and Ziva went back to sorting the fruit. Had she ever seen gnarlier hands? Bony, dry, spotted, yellow. She had never seen her mother or grandmother with such old hands. The last time she laid eyes on them, when their families had come to the Lehrte train station to see her and Dov off, her mother had been only thirty-nine years old, and her grandmother—how strange to think it—must have been twenty years younger than Ziva was today. Excited, nervous, she and Dov had held hands throughout that train ride to the port in Venice—fat, smooth, childish hands that didn’t even appear to have veins in them.

Her mother had been painting a blue bird the night she came home with the ocean liner tickets. Their parlor, once reserved for special occasions, had been transformed into her mother’s makeshift studio: bedsheets covering the Persian rug, the settee, and piano. Her mother’s back faced the foyer, the studio lamp highlighting the grays in her brown hair and the hand applying feathery, blue brushstrokes to a bird’s extravagant wing.

“Dagmar.” Her mother didn’t turn from the canvas. “Why so late?”

Dagmar hung up the wool coat, tickets tucked inside the inner pocket. “We had trouble drafting this month’s newsletter, Mutti.”

It was true the Maccabi Hatzair meeting went longer than usual, but it was also true that she and her best friend, Dov, had taken the long way home so they could plot, as they had for years, their departure to the Land of Israel, only this time they had the tickets, bought that afternoon, for a ship leaving in three weeks. They were seventeen years old: if Hitler hadn’t come to power, their parents never would have approved of them setting off on their own for the dusty edge of Arabia, but now she and Dov believed they would let them go without too much of a fight.

Dagmar hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a chocolate-ginger cookie from the counter, and sat at the breakfast table with a marked-up copy of the newsletter. The chocolate-ginger cookies were the only thing her mother baked that she could still swallow. Ever since her mother had been barred from the art school, she filled the hours she would have spent teaching with baking. Since the family of three could only eat so many pastries, Dagmar and her mother had walked plate after tinfoiled plate over to the neighbors, until they stopped answering their doors. Dagmar read through the statement, circling the Hebrew words she didn’t know. Having the best Modern Hebrew in the chapter, she had been voted translator, and even if she had to work through the night, she would have the translation perfected for tomorrow’s printing.

“Dagmar, sweetie, come paint with me,” called her mother.

“I’m busy!”

Her mother came and leaned in the kitchen doorway. She wore lipstick and a wool skirt even though she hadn’t left the house that day. Dagmar admired the strength her mother showed in keeping up appearances, but lipstick was degrading, and the woman who put it on while fellow Jews were having their beards cut in the streets ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous.

Her mother said, “I don’t like these meetings. They’re dangerous.”

Dangerous! In other words: courageous, admirable. Imagine her reaction when she finds out about the tickets for the Kampala. Without looking up from her notes, Dagmar answered, “It’s better to die on your feet, Mutti, than live on your knees.”

Her mother walked over and kissed her on the head. “Oh, my Dagmar. My little Dagmar and her big plans.”

Ziva tossed a bruised lychee at the rotten basket, wondering if she could have painted with her mother that night and still have completed her translation. She picked another lychee from her lap. It too was bruised. Tossing it, she realized she was moving as slowly as her empty-headed young charge.

Enough. She sat up straighter. She had to focus. Keep working, fighting. She might have lost an important battle at last night’s meeting, but she hadn’t lost the war. Articles needed to be written for the kibbutz newsletter, question-and-answer sessions had to be organized, posters needed to be printed and tacked everywhere. There was no time for woolgathering. The answer was no. No, she could not have painted with her mother that night. It was as true then as it was now: the only way to accomplish something extraordinary was with extraordinary commitment.

“We’re not leaving until we sort through every one of these crates,” Ziva told Claudette. “Don’t sit back every time you pick up a lychee. It’s a small waste of time, and small wastes of time add up to a big waste of time. You don’t want to be a big waste of time, do you?”

Claudette shook her head, hunched forward.

“Oh!” Ziva gasped. She’d forgotten to take her arthritis pill.

She reached over her distended belly for her bag. How could she be expected to remember to take all these pills at their various prescribed times? With food, without food, before bedtime, in the morning, these together, these at least four hours apart? She opened the pill organizer, a big, ugly plastic thing with as many pockets of color as her mother’s palette, and struggled to identify the steroids. The green capsules curbed nausea, the white tablets numbed her throbbing bones, the yellow ones prevented dizziness, the red and blue gelcaps supposedly stemmed the accumulation of fluid in her abdomen, the tiny orange pills thinned her blood so it didn’t pool in painful blue bulges around her ankles, and the pink antihistamines soothed the incessant itchiness caused by all this medication.

As she picked out two chalky tablets, she noticed the younger woman gawking at her and her stockpile of pills. “What are you looking at?”

“Sorry.” Claudette averted her eyes.

“Sorry again.”

Ziva washed down the pills with a chug from her tin canteen. In the distance, beyond the peanut fields and cabbage fields, tall eucalyptuses marked the kibbutz graveyard. Under the shade of those trees lay Dov and the other pioneers and a slab of earth waiting for her. Tonight she would remind Eyal that the cemetery hadn’t been tended to since last autumn.

When the truck came at the end of the day to fetch the women, Ziva insisted they sit in the back on the metal benches with the other field workers, mostly Arab men. Once again she had to tell the driver that she didn’t see why she should sit in the front on cushy seats. Because she was a woman? A Jew? An employer? She left out “old.” As the truck bumped over the dirt path, the setting sun made a golden wonder of the wheat fields. Ziva breathed in the early evening air, so cool and loamy, sweetened by the overripe lemon trees. In the distance, the lights of the villages twinkled on the darkening hilltops, little man-made constellations.

The truck parked behind the dairy house, and the tired workers clambered out. A young Arab with the most striking eyes—irises as gold as honey and long black lashes—held out his hand to help her down, but she waved him off, saying, “Go away!” Everyone tried to help her now. You reach a given age, and people think you can’t do the simplest things on your own. Shaking his head, the fieldhand ran to catch up with the other men heading back to the nearby Arab village of Kfar Al-Musa. Sitting on the floor of the truck, Ziva eased herself over its edge. When her feet were secure on the asphalt, she stood and brushed off her backside.

“Your Eyal’s a busy man, eh?”

Ziva turned to find Hanoch, still bitter over her insistence, back in 1978, that the television his brother had sent him from America should be installed in the clubhouse. His decrepit gray mutt sat beside him.

“And how’s Noam?” said Ziva, knowing his grandson was rumored to be a drug dealer in Miami. “Busy, too, I hear.”

Hanoch would not be deterred. He smiled and clapped his hands as if someone had finished a grand joke. “Remember when we replaced the benches in the dining hall with chairs? And oy, what a hullabaloo you made! Individual chairs, you claimed, would undermine our sense of comradeship. Ha! And now look at what we’re talking about and who’s the mastermind behind it. The son of the great Ziva Peled.”

Watching Hanoch and his tired dog tottering away, Ziva found it hard to accept that the bitter old man was ten years her junior. Turning for the seniors’ quarters, she said, “Hopefully you’ll do a better job tomorrow, Claudette.”

Claudette followed. “Eyal wants me to see you home.”

Ziva gave her a sidelong scowl. “I don’t need anyone to walk me home.”

Claudette walked alongside her anyway, gaze fixed on the pavement.

Ziva clenched her fists and looked ahead. “I’ll let you walk me home—for your sake, not mine.”

In silence the women passed the water tower, the tallest structure on the kibbutz by far, and a row of houses belonging to younger families, their porches strewn with soccer balls, scooters, small shoes. How long had it been since they closed the children’s house? Allowed children to live with their parents? It wasn’t that long ago, was it? 1989. Only five years ago. Five years! And look what people dared talk about now. Unequal pay. How could things unravel so quickly?

Dizziness, like a squall of wind, rushed up the white path at Ziva, threatening to knock her over. She forced one foot in front of the other as if the ground weren’t seesawing. She’d rather fall and break a hip than lean on the self-absorbed foreigner who never lifted her eyes from the sidewalk.

“There.” Sweating, Ziva leaned on her door handle, struggling to hide her shortness of breath. “You’ve walked me home, Claudette. Now you can be under the ridiculous illusion that you’ve done something useful today.”

Ziva waited for the young woman to say something, apologize or defend herself, but the girl merely turned and started back down the path, staring at her feet.

Alone at last in her apartment, Ziva wiped her forehead on her shirtsleeve and let her shoulders drop. She stumbled over to her faded green sofa and only realized after she had collapsed into it how viciously thirsty she was. After fourteen years, this apartment still felt new to her. Aside from the wider doorways and the red emergency buttons embedded into the walls, it didn’t look like an old age home, but the smell of decay and disinfectant was a giveaway. She smelled it every time she opened the door. Was it her or did the odor seep through the walls from other people’s apartments? At least on a kibbutz senior citizens weren’t packed up and sent to live in sad isolation. The old age home was still home, situated smack-dab in the middle of the commune, right off the main square. Why couldn’t these stupid ingrates see how special that was? Did they think they weren’t going to grow old? Her eyes ran over the black-and-white portraits propped on the sideboard—young her, young Dov—and up to the yellowing WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! banner nailed to the wall.

It had been one of the worst moments of her life, last night, when it all rushed back—her balance, her whereabouts, her fat middle-aged son, the reason for the crowded dining hall, the boy leaning in the doorway—it all rushed back, except the speech. It hid from her. Gazing out at the audience, she had ransacked her mind for it, but couldn’t find a single word.

She closed her eyes on her lonely apartment and imagined being back on that stage. How easy it would be to deliver the speech now.

“Time and time again, my friends, people have tried to establish ethical societies. Classless societies. The ancient Sun State of Spartacus, the medieval Hutterites, the Soviet Union, the hippy communes of Nevada. People have tried, and people have failed. Greed, egotism, corruption have always won out in the end, always, except here. The kibbutz. The kibbutz is the only long-lasting, completely voluntary, socialist utopia in the world. If you want to own a private home or an SUV or climb a corporate ladder—fine, by all means, go ahead. Move to Tel Aviv. Or New York. London, Tokyo, Bombay. Anywhere in the world. But, please, leave this one small corner of the map alone.”

Just please don’t make her whole life a pointless endeavor.

She would have to turn the speech into an article for the monthly newsletter. Despite her exhaustion, her sore back, her throbbing hands, she grabbed the pencil and notepad from the coffee table. She had to think of a grand title. Something that couldn’t be ignored.

Something that would ignite that noble fire, that will to rise above the measly self.