Safekeeping (35 page)

Claudette nodded.

“Have you been to the old olive trees? They're two hundred and fifty years old.”

Claudette shook her head.

“Do you want to see them?”

She nodded again.

H
alfway into his shift Adam decided that as soon as he'd wiped off the last dish he would walk over to the dairy house and ask Ulya on a proper date. Ever since their day in Tel Aviv, he could feel her toying with the idea of being with him. At dinner, she watched him from across the table as if waiting for him to do that one thing that would help her make up her mind. Last night she had a good laugh at the only joke he knew about Russians.
How did Russians light their houses before they started using candles? Electricity.
He hoped they could go out tomorrow night. The next morning the ad would appear in the paper, and after that, he was going to want to stay near the phone.

He pulled down his yellow rubber glove to check his watch: 2:40 p.m. Exactly twenty minutes to go. After two and a half months of standing in the dishwasher's foul steam sponging off egg yolk and baba ghanoush, twenty more minutes felt like forever. How the hell did people do it? Wash dishes, or fold clothes at the mall, or cross off to-dos in a cubicle, or endlessly snap pieces of plastic together on an assembly line? All day, nearly every day, for fifty years. It was fine for the few who had interesting jobs. Civil-rights lawyers, Martin Scorsese. But most people weren't Martin Scorsese.

Zayde used to wake up three hours before his shift at Leo's! so he could drink his coffee and eat his marmalade toast with an unhurried grace. Then he'd take his time to shave properly, comb his thick, silvery hair, polish his shoes, slip horn stiffeners into his collar. All that prep to earn chump change selling twenty-somethings futons and laminate bookshelves. And
yet Zayde did this job with grace, always walking his customers up and down the floor with a smile and friendly conversation. At night he'd come home and tell Adam what he'd noticed about the young people that day: “How come you don't have an earring, Adam? All the other boys do.”

Why was Zayde able to do it but not his mother? She used to hit the snooze button twenty times before finally staggering out of her bedroom toward the kitchenette. There, leaning against the counter as if she didn't have the strength to stand, she would drink a cup of microwaved coffee through a scowl. One time, while Adam was waiting by the door to go to school while his mother leaned on the counter drinking her coffee, hours after they should've left the apartment, the phone rang. She didn't pick up. It rang and rang, stopped for a few seconds, and started again:
brrring, brrrring.
She grabbed the handset. “I can't. I just can't, Mike.” A pause while she chewed her lip. “I don't give a fuck! Tell the bitch to clean her own fucking toilets!” After hanging up, his mother slunk down to the floor, repeating, “I just can't do it anymore.”

At last it was time to take off the rubber gloves. Adam walked around the washing machine, asking Yossi if he had a restaurant he could recommend.

A smile spread on Yossi's sweaty face. “This for a date? Who's the lucky girl?”

“Yeah, it's a date. I need a nice place. White tablecloths, candles.”

“Around here?” He heaved a stack of plates onto a steel trolley. “I'll have to think about it.”

Adam freshened up at the hand-washing station, splashed his face, tweaked his hair. On his way to the dairy, he passed the laundry house, the medical center, the swimming pool with its rumpus of children on summer vacation, running and cannonballing into the water. When he arrived at the whitewashed dairy house, he was grateful for its lack of windows. Ulya couldn't see him pausing to take a fortifying breath. You're just asking someone on a date, he told himself. Straightening his shoulders, he pulled open the door.

Inside four women wearing latex gloves sat at four separate tables pouring yogurt onto cheesecloths. More people wasting their lives on drudgery. Three of them looked up to see who'd come through the door and then rotated in their seats to watch him walking down the center of the room. Only Ulya, at the far right table, took no notice. She worked, lost in some daydream, only noticing him when he stood over her table.

“What are you doing here?”

The other girls didn't turn back around. It creeped Adam out the way people openly watched each other on a kibbutz. People watched each other in New York, but people they didn't know—the crazy guy taking a shit between parked cars, the couple engaged in a shouting match on the subway platform—and then forgot about them as soon as they looked away. Here everyone had front-row seats to a never-ending soap opera starring their neighbors. Adam gestured with his head toward the door. “Can I talk to you outside for a second? In private?”

Peeling off her gloves, Ulya smirked at the other girls and then strutted out the door, Adam tailing. Outside, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “So? What do you want?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “What exactly are you doing in there? Making cheese?”

“Labneh. I have to boil the milk, cool it, mix it with old yogurt, make these disgusting pouches.”

Ulya wasn't wearing makeup for once, her skin clean and fair in the sunlight. Without mascara, the lashes framing her cobalt eyes were blond.

Adam mindlessly kicked the dairy house. “My job sucks too. Wiping off all that soggy half-eaten food. Sometimes it actually triggers my gag reflexes. But these shitty jobs, they're just for now. We're not going to be doing them forever.”

Ulya eyed Adam as she took a drag—studying him again. She blew smoke, lips pursed off to the side. “Not me anyway.”

“What? You think I'm going to wash dishes for the rest of my life? As soon as I'm done here, I'm going back to school, finishing my degree—”

“Adam, I can't leave the yogurt out. What do you want?”

He dug his hand into his back pockets, stretched his chest. “Well, I'm here to ask you something.”

Ulya's shoulders fell slightly, her head too, as if she anticipated what he was here to ask and didn't want it. Hoping he was misreading her, he plowed ahead. “I'm here to ask you on a date. A real date. To a nice restaurant.”

Ulya observed her cigarette smoldering between her chipped red nails. She should do it. Fake interest. Later fake love. It could be nice to go on a real date, to a restaurant, instead of lying on a hill with rocks digging into her back.

“How are you going to take me to a restaurant? In Tel Aviv, you didn't have money for a bottle of water.”

“We got our stipends. I'm willing to blow all of mine on you.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow night.”

Thursday nights she got to spend a little more time with Farid. Fridays being half days, she could catch up on sleep in the afternoon. Sometimes she stayed out until four in the morning.

She shook her head. “Not Thursday. Maybe Tuesday?”

“Why, 'cause you have that secret thing you do at night?” He worried about missing that phone call. Then again, by Tuesday night the ad would have run for five days already. Surely she would have called by then. Or he'd be going crazy. “Okay. Tuesday. On the later side.”

Ulya looked down at the dusty ground. As soon as they settled on a plan, she knew it was no use. She could lie to her mother, steal clothes, fake being a Jew, but she couldn't pretend to like someone she didn't. Maybe for a night, but three years? She'd never make it. She'd get to New York, but not like this.

She raised her head. “Actually, no.” She threw down her cigarette and squashed it under her boot. “I can't go on a date with you.”

“What? You just said you would.” He felt whiplashed. “Why
can't
you? Do you have a boyfriend or something?”

“No,” she sneered as if nobody around here were good enough.

“Then what's the problem? Think of it this way: you get a free meal, a night on the town, and I get a chance to change your mind about me. Nothing more. If you never want to do it again, fine.”

Ulya shook her head, unable to stop herself from smiling. She felt lighter, freer now that she had made up her mind.

“Why? We eat dinner in the dining hall together every day. What's the difference?”

She never understood this: why guys pressured a girl who didn't want to go on a date with them to go on a date with them. So stupid.

“Because it's a waste of time, Adam. I will never ever ever ever be your girlfriend.”

Shocked by the certainty, the callousness, Adam couldn't find his voice.

“Sorry,” she said, turning for the door. She smiled widely before disappearing inside.

Adam stood in front of the closed door, taking a different kind of fortifying breath. What was with that smile? Did she get off on hurting people? Why did she say she would never ever ever ever be his girlfriend as if she were talking about eating a cockroach? Was it now obvious to anyone who looked at him that he was a cockroach?

He left the dairy house, gripping the brooch. Never mind. He had to suck it up. Maybe he deserved this. It would have been wrong, starting up with Ulya, moving on with his life, before he'd taken care of the brooch. If all went well, in two or three days, the brooch would be safe with Dagmar and he would be on a plane back home, never to see Ulya again.

Z
iva, seated on a stepladder, chopped her umpteenth onion. Through the tears in her eyes, her hands appeared the same color as the onion skins. The steam belching off the industrial pots compounded the sweltering August forenoon, and yet her short-sleeve shirt remained bone dry. She had forgotten to tell the doctor about the lack of perspiration. She turned her attention to the ponytailed cook, a Jew of Yemenite parentage, rolling dough at the other end of the steel table. “Who told you we wanted to eat egg cylinders?”

Claudette, peeling carrots across from Ziva, was relieved to hear the old woman's voice. Ziva hadn't said a word all morning, not since they first arrived and Claudette offered to fetch her a stool. Claudette had expected the old woman to say no, as she always did, claiming she liked standing up, that it was more efficient to work on one's feet, but instead she had muttered “All right” and then remained silent for the next three hours.

“Firstly,” the cook said, pushing his wooden roller, “they're called egg rolls. Secondly, I make whatever Mr. Margolin orders.”

“
Mister
Margolin?” Ziva smacked her hand on the steel table, rattling her tin bowl and cutting board. “What
Mister
Margolin
orders
? Don't call my son
mister
.”

Ziva wiped away the onion tear streaming down her cheek. She knew it was unfair to berate the cook, just as it made no sense to scowl at the hired fieldhands. They couldn't be blamed for accepting jobs. But the anger got the better of her. Where was the difference between this man hired to
cook for the kibbutz and the housekeeper who used to prepare her family's dinners back in Berlin? A servant was a servant.

The cook muttered “Fine, fine,” and everyone went back to working in quiet. Claudette peeled her carrots, exhausted from walking with Ofir until three in the morning, but this languor was different from the kind of exhaustion that followed a night of counting bathroom tiles. Over the last week, she and Ofir had walked together every night, around the fields and along the stream, each time saying goodbye just a little later. The Bad Feeling still accused her of lusting after a child, but just as she had been fighting the Bad Feeling before their walks, so the fight continued. As Claudette placed the last peeled carrot into the steel tub, she remembered the first time she worked in this kitchen, how she had to wash the vegetables over and over again, afraid she missed a bug or a spot of manure, or that the very hands she used to wash the carrots were poisoning them.

“No
mister
, no
sir
! We do not use honorifics here!” Ziva spoke as if an hour of silence hadn't gone by. She halved an onion with her knife. “Why? Because the fieldhand who digs up the onion, and the kitchen worker who cuts the onion, and the cook who boils it, and the person who eats it and uses its energy to invent better ways of growing onions are all equally important.”

The cook raised an eyebrow at Claudette, who turned back to Ziva. Ziva lifted the hand with the knife and wiped her tears on her forearm. Claudette asked if she needed a tissue, and Ziva shook her head. “No, no. The more I wipe them, the more they tear.”

Claudette carried the carrots to the cook, thinking she should probably tell Eyal that Ziva wasn't well today.

Ziva squeezed her eyes as she scraped the diced onions into a bowl. It was impossible to cut onions gracefully. She remembered Franz's joke: “That's something I never thought I'd see—Ziva crying.” He had been dicing tomatoes on the other side of the table, where Claudette cut the carrots, except the table had been wood and the kitchen half the size. She had smiled at him. With the adrenaline from the night before still surging through her, she couldn't quite stifle her excitement at finding Franz also on dinner duty.

“Ziva doesn't cry. She's a national hero!” piped the eleven-year-old boy helping Franz cut tomatoes. Also in the kitchen were two women from Poland, plucking chickens at another table, and a former psychotherapist
from Belorussia, one of the few Jews to survive the Minsk ghetto, scouring pans at the sink.