Safekeeping (10 page)

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.

O
fir sweltered in the back of an army truck zigzagging down a hill. Only hours ago he had been at the piano. In American movies, GIs took ocean liners and stopped at foreign cities on the way to the front, but he had only an hour on a public bus and a short hitchhike between kissing his mom goodbye and heading down to stifle a West Bank riot.

Everyone in the truck was mum. Postings were supposed to last four months in the territories, but their unit had been in Nablus half a year already. Ofir leaned over to see what his friend Gadi viewed through a hole in the truck's dark green canvas. Mostly half-finished houses with flat roofs and burs of black antennas. A young woman stood in front of a gate, blocking the sunlight from her eyes, her blue skirt whipping in the wind. Gadi joked: “I did her.”

Ofir sat back again and reached for his cigarettes. He held the pack out to the others, and the truck filled with smoke. Taking a drag, Ofir considered his composition. He was so damn close. But something, some quality, was missing, like a word on the tip of the tongue. The melody was about taking flight; no, it was about the feeling of taking flight, but . . . If only he were at home right now, figuring it out. Why did he have to be in this fucking truck?

He noticed Gadi's leg shaking, and glanced sideways at his diminutive face. Poor Gadi. Never mind the Palestinian girl, he'd never done any girl. After every weekend leave, he came back with some story about a beach
bonfire or a desert trance party where he almost, always
almost
, did it with some hot girl. Ofir never gave him a hard time because Gadi was the only one who didn't tease him about the cassette in his Walkman—Bach instead of Paul van Dyk. Gadi, drawing on his cigarette, gave Ofir a shrug that said,
This sucks, but what can you do?

“All right, listen up.” Their commander, Dan, looked at them from the front passenger seat. “No escalation. Just containment. No shouting, no threatening, no rubber bullets. Just keep things contained.
Beseder
?”

The soldier across from Ofir, Shai, rolled his eyes and clucked his tongue. Last night at dinner Shai had demanded, as he demanded every dinner, why didn't we just bomb the place until all the terrorists were dead? Why did we have to risk our lives? It wasn't our fault the assholes built their bombs right in the middle of their towns, surrounded by women and children. Hell, he said, their women loved them for it. Cheered them on. What would Paris do if bombs were going off in her subways? Just deal? For the first time in thousands of years, Jews didn't have to be victims; we could fight back, so why the hell weren't we fighting back with everything we've got? Because of world opinion? Fuck the world. The last thing a Jew should take into consideration is the world's opinion. The world would sit back and watch us all die. Again.

Dan pointed at Shai. “I mean it. Keep cool. I'm going to watch you.”

Dan was only four years older than the rest of them, and Ofir often amused himself with the idea that this whole show was being carried out by kids barely old enough for
The Real World
. Ofir regularly compared his life to an alternative version of himself living in the United States, a doppelgänger based partly on TV and movies, but mostly on the photos in the booklets he ordered from Julliard and the Yale School of Music. Ofir nagged his mother until she signed the forms allowing him to start his army service a year early. Her tears left wrinkled spots on the papers. But he didn't want to be so much older than his doppelgänger when he started music school. Still, it was hard to do it to his mom. When he was still a lump in her belly, his father was shot and killed on a hill in the Golan.

As the truck neared the town square, the dissonance of the riot grew louder, like an orchestra warming up. Remaining cigarettes were crushed in the sand-bucket ashtray. It's okay, Ofir told himself as he rolled up his sleeves. Today his American alter ego was at the piano while he was at a
riot, but he could still end up being the better artist, for whatever he lost in technical proficiency during these long days and nights when his fingers busied with binoculars and firearms instead of ivory and ebony keys, he gained in poetic urgency. That was the salvation of being an artist. The worst experiences could be transformed into meaning and beauty.

The truck stopped. The soldiers scrambled out the back. Smoldering tires poisoned the air. Chanting supporters brandished portraits of the suicide bomber who blew up a bus last week in Jerusalem. Glass crashed. Car alarms whined. Men swarmed, shouted, climbed on top of cars and shook their fists. Dan led his unit along the chain of soldiers bordering the square until he found a weak link. “Here!”

Ofir took his place, legs shoulder-width apart, M-16 in front of his abdomen, ready to swing it into position, even though it was only loaded with rubber bullets that he wasn't allowed to shoot. There were a hundred Palestinians to every soldier. More. What if, despite their guns, they all charged at once? It wasn't clear who was more afraid of whom. What was the sound of fear? Its pitch? Did it have breaks, like a pounding heart, or was it more like the whistle of an approaching Katyusha rocket, getting louder and higher and louder and higher? No, that was too easy. He had to think of something else.

A boy ran up to the soldiers and shouted, “Jewish whores take it up the ass.” Shai snorted: “I wish.” That was the extent of their Hebrew, one-liners about the promiscuity of Israeli sisters or mothers and slurs about the ugliness or evilness of Jews. Sometimes just the word
Jew
was yelled, as if something so vile required no adjective. Ofir's Arabic was also made of one-liners:
hurry
;
show me your ID
;
go
;
halt
;
hands in the air
.

“I don't get it.” Yaron, the soldier next to Ofir, a skinny kid of Iraqi Jewish descent, pointed his chin at the ground strewn with stones. “They must be dismantling their own homes to round up all these rocks.”

Soon, Ofir thought. Soon this would all be over. A few months ago Arafat and Rabin shook hands in front of the White House, shook hands in front of the world, in front of his mother, who collapsed on the sofa in front of the television with her hand over her chest, while his stepfather, eyes shining, whispered, “Would you look at that? That's what three thousand years of fighting coming to an end looks like.” Soon the army might be pulling out of Gaza City and Jericho. Maybe he wouldn't have to serve a whole three years?

Over the clamor of the square floated the
adhan.
The hallowed call to prayer fanned the riot's fire. More plastic bottles and cardboard boxes were thrown into the flames, and the noxious fumes thickened. Young men began pitching stones at the soldiers. Maybe that's what was missing from his composition: the sound of fear. Could that be it? It wasn't only about taking flight, but taking flight from something . . . Ofir rolled his head to release the tension in his neck. If it was the sound of fear, he had a lot more work to do. But he would do it. He wasn't aiming for good enough. Now every muscle ached to be at the piano. While he scanned the square, he hummed the melody, listening for where he could balance the—

Smack!
Stone, just below the groin. Inner thigh. Ofir struggled to withhold a cry. God damn it. Fuck. He clenched his teeth. His whole body clenched, muscles gripping the bones. Tears escaped. He couldn't help it. Also, a little urine.

When his breath returned, and the world reemerged from behind a sheet of tears, his eyes picked out a Palestinian boy about his age, sixteen or seventeen, not thirty yards away. The boy stood still and looked right at him. His China-made fake American T-shirt read:
I
'
M A HOT DOG, MAN
! At the end of one of his long skinny arms was another stone. The boy smiled at Ofir, a smile that out of context might have seemed good-natured. Ofir, pretending not to notice, scanned the square without letting the boy slip from his vision.