Adam saluted Claudette as she rose from the linoleum floor, brushing off her knees. “Hey, Claudette the Astonishing.”
Ulya opened the blinds, and the low, golden sun streamed in. She smiled at Adam. “I promise to close them again when I change.”
“Very funny,” he said. “What did you want to show me?”
She pulled from under her bed a powder-blue leatherette suitcase, similar to the one Zayde stored on the top shelf of his tidy closet. He had an awful flash of his burned and shaky hands rifling as fast as possible through the junk on the shelf beneath the suitcase, shoving aside the ancient Life magazines, the jam jars filled with buttons, the old Polaroid camera, to get to the hidden shoebox.
“My grandfather had a suitcase just like that one.”
Ulya pinched the rusty steel snaps. “It’s an old, ugly thing.”
As she lifted its top, hope shot through him—hope that she was about to disclose something illicit, drugs or a flask of some strange Eastern European absinthe-like drink. He rubbed his hand over his mouth. No, no, no. He didn’t want that.
The only thing resting in the faded lilac lining was a magazine, an old Vogue with Kelly LeBrock on the cover, giant plastic pink hoops hanging from her ears and over-the-top eighties makeup. Ulya picked up the well-thumbed magazine, and it fell open to the right page. Cradling the magazine on her arm, she showed Adam a two-page spread of Manhattan at night.
An aerial shot, it was taken somewhere in the East Seventies, looking south down Park Avenue toward Grand Central and the Pan Am Building. Didn’t they just change that building to something else? Even though this wasn’t exactly his New York City, the picture still filled him with longing: the exciting red streaks left by the taillights, the many windows hinting at the many lives, the majestic green and gilded cap of the Helmsley Building against the gray practical lines of the Pan Am. In the top right corner, a woman stood on a rooftop, the chiffony train of her yellow dress and her long red hair blowing in the wind like bright water reeds.
Ulya looked up at him. “Does it really look like this?”
“How old’s this magazine?”
“1986.”
“Eighty-six? Why do you have an eight-year-old fashion magazine?”
“It doesn’t look like this anymore?”
“I guess if you’re in a helicopter or something. Or maybe if you can afford to live in a penthouse. But I think it looks a lot better from below, anyway, you know, like when you’re in the thick of it.”
“The thick of it? What is the thick of it?”
“Like when you’re in it. When you’re a part of it.”
Ulya turned back to the picture. “I’m going to be a part of it. One day I’m going to be that woman on the roof. Far, far away from this shit kibbutz.”
As she laid the magazine down on the lilac lining, Adam said, “If you hate the kibbutz so much, why’d you volunteer?”
“Volunteer?” She snorted and pushed the suitcase back under her bed. “Ha! I wish I was just a volunteer, like you.”
“You’re not?”
“Are you crazy? None of the Russians are volunteers. We’re olim chadashim. New immigrants. The government puts us in places where we can live for cheap, learn Hebrew. I got put on a kibbutz, of course. Not a merkaz klita in Tel Aviv. I am never lucky. I don’t even want to be in this country, but I’m here because this was the only way to get out of the Soviet Union, to be a Jew moving to Israel. But the truth is I’m hardly a Jew. My grandmother, she was . . . a Jew.”
Adam leaned against the wall. “You know why Israel gives automatic citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent, right?”
“Actually,” Ulya said, pulling a hot pink T-shirt out of her closet, “my grandmother was only half Jewish, so I am only one-eighth. But I stay in this shit country, because it is easier to go from here to the U.S.A. To the real Manhattan.”
“Because one Jewish grandparent was all you needed to be sent to a concentration camp. That’s what my grandfather told me.”
Ulya turned from her closet. “My grandfather had this suitcase. My grandfather told me. My grandfather, my grandfather. It’s like you’re twelve years old.”
Adam gripped the back of his neck. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was talking about him so much. He died last month.”
Ulya stomped for the bathroom with a bundle of clothes in her hands. “This is no tragedy, Adam of Manhattan. Everybody has a dead grandfather. I cannot wait to take off this ugly uniform. Wait here! I will be out in two minutes.”
Adam pushed off the wall. “You showed me what you had to show me, and now I got to go.”
“No! Stay one minute, Adam of Manhattan! I have another thing to ask you.”
She shut the bathroom door, and Adam pushed aside the newer magazines Ulya had on her bed to sit down. He sat face-to-face with Claudette, who was perched on the edge of her bed. He had almost forgotten she was there.
“So what were you doing on the floor, in the dark? Praying?”
The odd woman shook her head.
“What were you doing then?”
She looked off to the side, shook her head again.
He hadn’t pushed when he asked her what she was looking for in the square or what the deal was with her “orphanage.” This time he would press a little more. “Come on, what were you doing?”
She dropped her head, whispered. “Counting the tiles.”
Golda jumped, clawing at the side of Ulya’s mattress. Adam picked her up, and the dog stationed herself on his lap like the Sphinx. Stroking her back, he said, “Why were you counting the tiles?”
Claudette rubbed her knees a good ten seconds before responding. “To make sure there were . . . an even number . . . between our beds.”
“Why does there have to be an even number?”
The sun was setting quickly now, the room dimming. When Claudette didn’t answer, he said, “I don’t get it. Why does there need to be an even number of tiles between your beds?”
“To . . . to protect Ulya.”
“Protect Ulya? From what?”
Ulya emerged from the bathroom, eyes lined as vixenish as the other night, only in purple instead of black. She had changed from the work clothes into a pink crop top and jean miniskirt. Her shapely legs balanced on strappy green heels. She flipped on the ceiling light. “Ta-da! How do I look?”
Adam got to his feet. “Is this what you wanted to ask me?”
“Do I look like I could be going out in Manhattan?”
Adam
