sport sandals squeaked on the linoleum as he walked to the front of the room and ran a finger down a dusty cabinet. Tall metal filing cabinets lined every wall, most topped by cardboard filing boxes. Barry pulled out the bottommost drawer and returned with a stack of files. “Do you read Hebrew?”
“I can sound out the letters.”
He jotted four letters on a scrap of paper. “That’s ‘Dagmar.’ Look for it here, on the top line of each form.”
Barry set half the stack down in front of Adam and took a seat with the other half. Adam dropped into a chair and eagerly searched the papers. Every time the passport-sized black-and-white photo stapled to the forms revealed a young woman, Adam compared the name to Barry’s jotting twice, three times if she was pretty.
When Adam reached the last form without success, he looked to Barry, who shook his head. “No luck here either. We can check the files from the thirties, but those people, the pioneers who founded the kibbutz, are legendary. I would have heard of Dagmar if she were among them.”
As Barry carried the file back to the cabinet, Adam contemplated Dagmar’s name written on the scrap of paper. The four letters, though somewhat familiar from Hebrew school, were foreign enough for it to seem strange that these squiggles—
Barry settled behind his desk with a manila file too thin to need two people to leaf through. Adam, hands clasped on top of the desk, leaned forward while Barry’s eyes skimmed the papers. A moment later, he removed his reading glasses and shook his head again.
Adam sat back. “This makes no sense. She was my grandfather’s girlfriend when he was here. She was a kibbutznik. I have a letter from her, addressed from the kibbutz.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I made aliyah in sixty-seven, after the Six-Day War, so I can personally say there hasn’t been a Dagmar since then. And she just isn’t in the records from before that.”
Adam dropped his head. He had accepted that Dagmar no longer lived here, that it had been naïve of him to think that she did just because she had written she would be here “for the rest of her life.” How many people lived the lives they planned for themselves when they were young? Now he had to swallow that she had never lived here. He would have to start looking for her elsewhere. But where?
Barry tapped the desk. “I have an idea. If you’re sure she was a kibbutznik, you could write the United Kibbutz Movement. One letter, and you could find out if she’s living on any of the three hundred kibbutzim in the country. Unless you think she might be religious. Religious kibbutzim are under a different umbrella.”
In the note she had scoffed at the world to come, and he couldn’t imagine his grandfather with an orthodox woman. He used to get a chuckle out of the wigged women fitwalking over the Williamsburg Bridge in their long skirts and opaque nylons. “No, she wasn’t religious . . . Can we first look up my zayde’s file? Franz Rosenberg?”
“Certainly. The DPs must be somewhere.”
While Barry walked around the room, inspecting the file drawers, Adam closed his eyes and tried to stay calm.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
