a fedora, a straw one in summer, felt in the winter. I guess I can’t say for sure that he wore one here, but in New York, always. Oh, and he worked in the cotton field. Said I wouldn’t believe the way cotton grew on bushes, looking just like it did in the bags at the pharmacy. That always sounded very, I don’t know, magical to me, cotton balls growing on a bush.”
“He told you about the cotton fields?” Wearing a sad smile, the old woman’s eyes gazed over his head, as if at the long-gone field.
“Yeah, a few times. Eyal said the field’s gone, that there’s a plastics factory there now.”
“Your grandfather, does he like it in New York City? I’m only asking because . . . New York City, cotton fields, they’re very different.”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“Died a month ago. I guess he liked New York. I mean, I can’t picture him living anywhere else. It suited him.”
“I’m so sorry . . .” She did look sorry, the corners of her lips pulling down. Sorrier than he would have expected for someone she didn’t remember. Was it just depressing to have everyone your age dying around you? He hoped Dagmar wasn’t dead.
“So, Dagmar. That name really doesn’t ring a bell?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No. We’ve never had anyone named Dagmar on this kibbutz.”
Adam wanted to ask how she could be so sure when she couldn’t remember his grandfather, and he had definitely been here. “Well, if you remember her, please let me know. I work in the dishwash—”
“I won’t suddenly remember her. There’s nothing wrong with my memory. I have a perfect memory.”
Adam insisted as gently as he could. “I don’t mean to say there’s anything wrong with your memory, but . . . there was a woman named Dagmar on this kibbutz. And she wasn’t here temporarily as a Holocaust refugee. She was a kibbutznik. I know this for a fact.”
The old woman bared her lower teeth. “Do you know how rude you’re being, young man? And how ridiculous? Flying in here from New York City and telling me who was on my kibbutz thirty years before you were even born?”
He had hurt the old woman, and he was sorry, but the joke of her calling him rude!
“Thanks for your time.” He stood. “And now, as promised, I’ll go away.”
He headed for the door, thinking there were still the archives. He’d call that Barry guy right now. He probably wasn’t back from reserve duty, but he’d leave a message so that when he did come home, no time would be wasted.
The old woman hobbled beside him. “I am sorry, though, to hear about your grandfather. I hope he wasn’t in too much pain in the end?”
Oh, he was in pain.
“No, he wasn’t. He had a heart attack. Happened”—Adam snapped—“just like that.”
Adam opened the door and found night had fallen, the lollipop lamps glowing. He walked away from the old woman’s apartment with that pain in his breastbone again. How did disappointment, dread, regret, sadness, feelings that had no physical existence, press against the back of the breastbone like that, as if they were as real as tumors? He took a deep breath, but the air felt low on oxygen.
An eerie green light shone out of the bomb shelter. He slinked up to the open door and peeked down. At the bottom, above the second steel door, the safety lights had green bulbs, making the concrete stairwell glow.
The door opened and out came a young woman, as well as a thumping techno base and a walloping smell, the smell of trouble and intoxication and sweet numbing relief. The smell of the only thing in the world that could—in seconds—get those feelings to back off of his breastbone. The girl waved at Adam and stood on her toes to hook the door open to the wall.
Adam stepped back and raised his head to the sign above the bomb-shelter door. Three black letters on a blond piece of wood. He summoned what little he could remember from his bar mitzvah to sound them out: pei, aleph, bet. Pe . . . ah . . . bbb.
P-U-B.
Two guys in their twenties passed him on their way down the green-glowing hatch. They could. It was no big deal for them. This was probably where Ulya went every night. A bomb shelter—could there be a more perfect place to get wasted? Underground. Windowless. Shielded from the world. But he couldn’t go down there, not even just to see the place. Tomorrow he’d have six days clean. Almost a week. How many chips for one week “Clean & Serene” were in his desk drawer back home? Fifteen? More.
The first time he got drunk was Passover 1980, a few months before his bar mitzvah. They didn’t normally have a Seder, but Mrs. Silver moaned about being alone again for the holiday, and Zayde invited her to do it with them. Mrs. Silver was one of the few who hadn’t fled the city for New Jersey over the last couple of years, who had stayed in the building and, like Zayde, bought her apartment for a song.
“Why couldn’t you go to California for the holiday?” Adam had asked as they took their seats at the kitchen table. They almost never had someone in the third chair. Living up to her name, the old woman had silver disks pinned to her ears and silvery roots that betrayed her dyed black bob.
“I don’t fly. My son knows that.”
Zayde read from the English side of the Haggadah in his German accent: “Blessed are you, Eternal One our God, who gave us life, and kept us strong, and brought us to this time.”
Adam sat with his elbows on the table, head propped in his hands. Other kids shared a Seder table with not only a grandfather and some old lady from their building, but a mother and father and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins. Why had they no family? And what was going to happen in a few years? The old man wasn’t going to live forever.
Zayde lifted his glass. “The first cup.”
Adam raised his eyebrows at Zayde, making sure he was really supposed to drink.
“You don’t need to drink it all. Drink a quarter.”
Bringing the glass to his face, Adam got a waft of his mother, in bed, at night, making him feel guilty, because he never remembered her without also remembering how little he had mourned her. What eight-year-old didn’t care that his mother had died? Before he’d even finished the quarter of a glass, a wonderful warmth was blooming in his stomach. It was that immediate.
The Seder continued—breaking the matzah, parsley dipped in metaphorical tears, talk of slavery, freedom. By the time Zayde invited them to drink the fourth glass, Adam couldn’t understand why he had been so unhappy with this Seder. He brimmed with love for Zayde, a love he always harbored for him, but was usually buried under the sad promise of him dying some day. He had him now—that’s what mattered. He even felt love for shiny Mrs. Silver, and why not? Didn’t she always give him her leftover candy the day after Halloween? He loved this small kitchen, the old building, the lively street outside. He’d no idea how much dread he carried in his chest until, for the first time, it was dispersed.
The bomb-shelter bar switched from electronica to Bob Marley. A young couple skipped down the green stairs, the girl smoking, the guy with a finger hooked on her jeans.
