Safekeeping (44 page)

“Fuck you!” Adam grabbed another plate and was about to hurl it too when Yossi seized his wrist. In seconds, Adam's arm was twisted behind
his back, and his chest and cheek were pressed against the hot dishwasher. He struggled to free himself, but the smallest move brought sharp pain.

“Okay.” Adam squeezed his eyes to keep back the tears. “Okay. Enough with the fucking Krav Maga. I'll go.”

Yossi released him, then stood, arms hanging by his sides, looking very sorry about it all. “I liked you, Adam. I really did.”

Adam grabbed his water bottle and stormed out of the dining hall. He walked toward the volunteers' section, finishing it off. When he got to his room, he flung the door open so hard it smacked the wall and sent Golda fleeing into a corner.

He marched over to his chest of drawers and tried to heave them over. They were heavier than he thought. Steadying the bottom with his foot, he tried again, pulling with all his might. At last, the chest toppled over, drawers falling out and hitting the ground first, his yellow Discman snapping upon impact, the Soul Asylum CD skidding across the floor.

He slumped down next to the dresser and rested his head on its dusty back. What had he done? All he had to do was wash some dishes and he could have stayed here as long as he liked, looking for Dagmar. But he couldn't manage it. Why? His grandfather managed to keep going; so what was his problem? What did he know about suffering? His alky mom died when he was a kid. Okay. He never got to meet his dad. All right. He had a hard time resisting booze and cocaine. On a scale from one to ten—where Buchenwald was a ten and, say, being bound to a wheelchair a five—where was his lot? One? One and a half?

Adam lifted his head off the dresser. It wasn't over. He didn't have to give up. He still had the brooch. As long as he had it, he could still get it to Dagmar. And he hadn't been kicked off the kibbutz—not yet. He could go to Eyal before Yossi did and beg for one last chance.

He spotted the little dog trembling in the corner and rushed over. “Golda!”

Collecting the shaking bundle in his arms, he said, “Did I scare you? It's just a bunch of drawers!” Golda calmed, lapped his hand, and Adam pressed his face against her fur. “Don't worry, I would never hurt you.”

A
fter forty-five minutes of plodding under the beating sun, Ulya descended the potholed road into Kfar Al-Musa, the Arab village nestled in the foothills of Mount Carmel. She checked that the rosary she grabbed off her roommate's nightstand hung over her loose tank top. Walking into this ramshackle village was unpleasant enough without being mistaken for a Jew. She had heard stories of Jews in Arab souks getting knifed in the back.

A piebald mutt abandoned the trash scattered alongside the road to run up and bark at her, an earsplitting bark, but Ulya knew to never let an animal see your fear, be it a dog or human. Fear fed the thirst to attack; she never could have shoplifted for so long if she had let the dread of getting caught show on her face. She kept walking, chin up, eyes ahead, until the mongrel lost interest and trotted off.

What a lazy people, thought Ulya, as she entered the outskirts of the town. Half the houses were unfinished, their top floors roofless, just concrete pillars sprouting rusted rebar, and yet there wasn't a construction worker in sight. She was thirsty, but the cave-like shops were uninviting, their Coke bottles probably warm and covered in dust. She passed a bare-bones café but saw only men inside puffing on hookahs and drinking coffee, not a single woman. If these people had been living in this village for seven generations, as Farid so often pointed out, why did it look like such a shit pit? The Jews irritated people with their striving, but as far as she was concerned, it was the only good thing about them. After only fifty
years, they had red Spanish roofs, satellite dishes, green lawns with yellow rosebushes. Maybe the question shouldn't be who got here first, but who was going to make the most of it.

As she approached the center of the town, the houses got older and more bunched together. One thing was certain: seeing this third-world village further convinced her, as if she weren't convinced enough, that she was right to seek an abortion. The only reason she was coming to tell him about it was to hurt him. She wanted to punish him for not fighting over her, for not running after her when she stomped off into the orchard, for being too big of a coward over the last few weeks to try to get her back.

The village's main plaza amounted to a triangle of cracked cement with two benches and an old man selling pitas from a wooden pushcart. A whiny Arab pop song wafted out of a store, its door propped open by a garbage bin holding plastic brooms. Could she and Farid have grown up in more disparate places? Mazyr's Lenin Square was an expanse of gray cobblestones surrounded by magnificent buildings: the rose-colored theater with its centuries-old chandeliers glimmering in its windows; the yellow church topped by three golden cupolas, though its doors had been boarded all her life; and the giant gray technical college gridded by hundreds of small square windows. In the middle of the plaza, a statue of Lenin raised a black fist at the overcast sky. It was under this statue that she had smoked her first cigarette. How disorienting to think her mother still crossed that square every single morning with her basket of dried perch. If her mother could see her now, pregnant and walking through this Arab town, she would die.

Ulya double-checked the rosary and walked up to the old pita peddler. “Do you know where Farid lives?”

“Farid who?”

He ogled her breasts, now too big for her bras, and she imagined him thinking, look at this promiscuous white woman about to give it to this Farid.

“I don't know his last name.”

“You don't know his family name?”

The old Arab's Hebrew was worse than hers. They were both speaking a language they didn't like.

“I already told you no.”

“What does he look like? How old?”

“He's tall. Twenty-five years old. Has gold eyes.” As she described Farid, her skin prickled, and she blamed the harsh sun. She'd forgotten to put on sunblock, and her arms were pink. “He works at Kibbutz Sadot Hadar.”

“Sahouri. Farid Sahouri.” The old man pointed up a sloping street. “Gold eyes, yes. Lives with his parents. Not married. One, two, three . . . the sixth house.”

Ulya slogged up the inclined road.
Sahouri
. Imagine having a child with such a name. Even worse: she would be Ulya Sahouri. Horrible!

Four girls were coming down the hill wearing jeans, long-sleeved T-shirts, and colored headscarves. All their eyes were on Ulya, making her second-guess her short jean skirt and low-cut tank top. Who were these girls to make her feel cheap? Did they enjoy being subservient to their brothers? Did they like covering every inch of their bodies? It was a hundred fucking degrees! As the girls passed her, she gave them the finger, happy she had painted her nails hot pink that morning. The girls' mouths opened as they looked from her to each other. Ulya laughed and carried on, but she was angry and remained angry as she counted five houses and walked up the cement path to the sixth one's door.

The house wasn't as miserable as she had expected. A stained-glass fanlight decorated the wooden door, and crocheted curtains shaded the window. She rang the bell. She didn't have to come and tell him. As it turned out, it was easy to get an abortion in Israel. All she needed was authorization from a “termination committee,” and they always gave approval for conception out of wedlock. The doctor estimated she was eighteen weeks along, meaning she would have to do it soon or risk having a rarer, more gruesome kind of abortion where they suctioned out its brain so the head would pass more easily out her vagina. The physical risks for that kind of abortion were as low as any other, the doctor said, but some women suffered emotionally when the fetus was more developed. She wouldn't have that problem, but there was no reason to put things off.

A little boy opened the door.

“Hello,” she said, smiling at him.

A stout older woman waddled up behind the boy, wiping her hands on a dishcloth.

“Yes?” she said in Hebrew.

“Shalom. I mean, salaam. Is Farid here?”

The white headscarf framed a doughier, saggier version of Farid's face. It was from his mother that he got the eyes. She ushered Ulya into the cool shade of the house and looked back curiously—accusingly?—before starting up the stairs to fetch Farid.

Alone with the little boy and the smell of fried onions, Ulya considered the inside of the home. An orange ceramic vase sat on a glass console table, and marble thresholds divided the rather spacious rooms. She had to admit it beat the cramped two-room apartment she had shared with her parents, brother, and grandmother. When they were placed in the “disposable building,” it was supposed to be for a short time, just until communism alleviated the housing shortage, but fifteen years later, they were still living between its uninsulated walls, going to bed in their winter coats.

Ulya heard footfalls upstairs and fluffed her hair. Had her eyeliner melted down her face? She should have consulted her compact before ringing the bell. Aside from a few distant glimpses in the dining hall, it had been almost a month since she and Farid had seen each other. She hooked her fingers into her belt loops and straightened her back.

Farid came down the stairs behind his mother. He looked taller, but maybe that was due to the weight loss. He must have shed ten pounds.

“Ulya.”

“Farid, we need to talk.”

He beckoned her up the stairs, and she climbed behind him, eyes on the back of his jeans, feeling how odd it was for them not to kiss or hug hello, to be so close without touching. He led her down a hallway and into his parents' bedroom, where a busy comforter covered a double bed and a collection of unbranded perfumes sat on a dresser. He closed the door and guided her onto the balcony. With the sun coming from behind the house, the shaded balcony was like a box seat to the dazzling white village below. A slender minaret rose from the white, its crescent black against the cloudless sky. Limestone and grayish olive trees dotted the surrounding hills, brown and dry from the long summer. In the distance stood the kibbutz's water tower. In a dusty patch below the balcony, kids ran around, hosing a donkey.

Farid leaned on the iron railing. “I thought maybe I was exaggerating your eyes in my head. But no, they are so blue. Bluer than peacock feathers.”

Ulya smirked at his attempt at poetry. She didn't confess her astonishment at finding his eyes as gold as she remembered, as gold as Adam's brooch.

“For twenty nights, I went to our place and waited for you.”

“I'm pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” He parroted it back with no emotion.

She nodded and watched his face, waiting for the shock to turn to joy, fear, but it remained frozen. He said nothing.

“Hello? Are you having trouble understanding, Farid?”

Farid breathed deeply through his nose and then seemed to hold his breath.

“It's yours, if that's what you're wondering. I haven't slept with anyone else in a year.”

“But I . . . I thought you said . . . Chair. . . Chairee. . .”

Ulya squeezed the railing. Why was she supposed to be on top of the whole Arab-Jew mess, but he couldn't get this one name right?

“Chernobyl. Yes, that's what I was told. I was told I was infertile. But now I'm over four months pregnant.”

Farid regarded her belly, though nothing could be detected under the loose tank top. She had expected him to be unable to hide his happiness and then to be crushed when she told him about the impending abortion. Either the information was still sinking in or he was going to prove a coward again, too chicken to ask if she was going to keep it.

“Of course, I'm going to abort it.”

Farid turned from her, squinted out at his village. “Can you? Is that legal?”

Ulya turned to the village too. “Yes, the baby is as good as gone.”

She waited. Now would he beg her not to do it? Plead with her to keep their child? No. He dropped his head. What a fucking milksop. The kids below ran circles around the donkey, imitating its bray. Imagine if one of those boys were hers, all dirty and spraying a donkey. She gave Farid a few more seconds to reply. He didn't lift his head.

She turned away. “I guess there's nothing more to talk about.”

She left the balcony and walked across the bedroom, listening for him to call out to her as she had listened in the orchard. Now, she thought, bringing her hand to her belly. He's going to cry:
Stop, Ulya!
All she heard, though, was the donkey's neigh.

She laid her hand on the door handle. Still nothing. When she turned to look at him one last time, he still stood on the balcony, back against the railing, facing her. He was just going to watch her go.

“You know why this baby is going to die, Farid? Because its father is a fucking coward.”

Farid opened his hands on either side of him, as if to say
What do you want from me?
and stepped into his parents' bedroom.

“Tell me, Farid, do you want me to have your baby? Yes or no?”