anymore. Why hadn’t he prepared for that? He had assumed she’d either be here or dead. She wrote his grandfather that she would be on the kibbutz “for the rest of her life.”
The secretary carried the brimming mug back to his desk and settled into his chair behind the mounds of papers. He gazed up at Adam, clearly itching for him to leave.
Adam said, “Maybe she doesn’t live here right now, but I know she did in 1947.”
“Forty-seven?” Eyal shook his head. “Maybe in the DP section. Temporarily. But she couldn’t have been a kibbutznik.”
“She was a kibbutznik. I’m sure of it.”
Eyal spread his fingers out on his desk. “Listen, Adam. I was born here in forty-eight and have lived here my whole life. My mother is a founding member of the kibbutz, the only founder still alive. I’m the longest-running secretary we’ve ever had, and I know the name of every single person who’s ever been a member. I’ve been through their papers so many times I could draw their family trees. There was never any Dagmar on this kibbutz.”
Adam shrugged. “You’re wrong. My grandfather was here in forty-seven, and he knew her.”
“I’m not wrong.”
“Was your mom here then?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll ask her.”
“Fine, ask her. But she’s not going to give you a different answer. And please, please, leave her alone until after tomorrow night. We’re having a meeting, and . . . actually, leave her alone the next day too. This meeting—” He briefly closed his eyes. “It’s just not a good time.”
Adam didn’t want to wait two days, but what could he do? He promised not to bother this woman before Wednesday and turned to leave. As he was passing through the door, Eyal called him back.
“I want you to know, Adam, for your sake and ours, that we don’t give second chances.”
Adam leaned in the doorway. “What? I didn’t know it was a crime to ask about an old lady.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve had this job a long time, and I’ve met a lot of volunteers. All I’m saying is do your job, keep out of trouble, and everything will be fine.”
Adam descended the stairs of the small office building, shaking his head. Why did some people think they knew everything? Outside, the kibbutz’s poky main square was deserted except for Claudette, who stood in its center, head down, slowly rotating as if scanning the beige bricks for a lost earring.
Which way was the volunteers’ section? It wasn’t far, but he’d been such a wreck walking over here, nothing looked familiar. Across the square was the dining hall, a single-story concrete building with glass doors. On the left was presumably the general store, its corrugated steel awning shading an ice-cream freezer and fruit stands. A few yards over from the store stood a door. Just a door. Nothing on either side or above it but a hem of concrete, making it look as if the door led to an invisible world. To the right of the square was the main lawn. Too embarrassed to ask for directions, he’d see if Claudette were heading back soon.
He sidled up to her. “What did you lose?”
She turned with a start. “Nothing.”
Glancing down at the plaza’s interlocking bricks, he had no idea what she could be doing. “You heading back to the volunteers’ section?”
Claudette circled one more time, eyeing the bricks, before nodding.
Together they walked across the square, Adam’s hands in his jean pockets, one clasping the brooch, Claudette’s arms folded, fingers clutching the flesh over her elbows. A row of unchained bicycles waited outside the dining hall, handlebars gleaming with sunlight. Adam waited for Claudette to start a conversation, but she didn’t, and he was grateful to avoid chitchat. They followed a path around the side of the dining hall and walked along its wall of windows, upon which their mirror images followed them, surrounded by the blurry green reflection of the main lawn. No wonder Eyal had given him a hard time. He was the image of a junkie: twiggy arms coming out of a black T-shirt and disappearing into the pockets of jeans so big they barely hung on.
This must have been how he looked that last time Zayde walked him from Lodmoor to the train station. If he’d kept the promise he made on that walk, he wouldn’t have had to lie on the application. When he came down to the foyer that morning, where Zayde waited for him, the receptionist had asked if she should call them a cab, but Zayde said, No, no, they would walk to the train station. Adam’s backpack was heavy, but he wasn’t about to complain; this was the third time they were doing this trip.
At first they had walked in silence through the Queens neighborhood, past the houses covered in pastel aluminum siding, the small yards closed in by chain-link fences; hardly the picket-fence suburbs seen in sitcoms, but it always surprised Adam that New York City had houses at all. Zayde’s eyes, shaded by the brim of his straw fedora, squinted at a house with a plastic kiddie pool on its mowed lawn and a red BMX chained to its porch.
“Maybe I should have moved us out here, where you could have had a nice bicycle.”
Adam shook his head. “No. No way. I love where I grew up. Zayde, this . . . this has nothing to do with you.”
Zayde sucked in his lips, lowered his gaze to his brown oxfords. “Just when I was supposed to start university, they stopped letting in Jews. To this day I have no idea what I would’ve studied, what I would have become. A musicologist? Maybe a dance critic. Probably not a furniture salesman.”
Adam tasted blood. He’d been chewing on his cheek. His grandfather almost never spoke about those times. Should he say something? What?
“Finish college, Adam. I worked hard to save that money so you could go. I don’t want to make you feel bad, but it’s true.”
Adam forced himself to look at his grandfather, to make a promise he wasn’t entirely sure he could keep. “I promise, Zayde, I’m done. Seriously. You’ll see. I’m going to be somebody you can be proud of.”
His grandfather looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t want it for me, Adam.”
Adam was shaken out of his thoughts when Claudette about-faced and started marching back. He turned. “Hey, where you going?”
After three or four steps, she pivoted again and came back. They continued walking.
“What just happened?” asked Adam.
Eyes fixed on the path in front of her feet, she said, “Sorry. I . . . had to do that.”
“Why?”
“Because I did.”
Adam noticed now that Claudette’s eyes never left the ground. And once in a while she did that thing with her hands, clapping like the Musical Jolly Chimp. He was getting a better idea of what kind of institution she might have been in.
“Claudette, can I ask you a question? Did you really live in an orphanage until a few months ago?”
She nodded.
“But
