Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope Page A

eyes.
    Ziva tossed a cracked lychee into the reject pile. “Claudette, I hope you don’t think you’re above sorting fruit.”
    Claudette shook her head. “No. Of course not.”
    â€œWorking the land is good for you. Build the land, and it will build you. ”
    Claudette held a lychee closer to her eyes. “It is important to keep busy. The devil finds work for idle hands.”
    Ziva squinted at the girl. Was she being sarcastic? The girl wouldn’t be the first in her generation to mock Ziva’s idealism. Ziva sorted the fruit in her lap as quickly as she could with her misshapen fingers and tossed an emptied crate to the side. She would lead by example. The young foreigner would be forced to pick up her pace when she saw an old lady with hideous hands was on a third crate while she was only halfway through her first.
    Instead the younger woman withdrew more and more into her own world. By the time Ziva had finished a fourth crate, the girl was staring into her crate of lychees, motionless. What was the feckless foreigner daydreaming about? The latest fashion? Some boy?
    â€œYou know you can’t sort fruit telepathically, Claudette!”
    Startled, the young woman looked up at Ziva and nodded, but Ziva could tell she was nodding at her without seeing her. She wasn’t present. Claudette reached for a lychee.
    â€œGrab a handful, Claudette! Enough with this one lychee at a time.”
    Ziva dragged a fifth crate toward her. She wasn’t going to let this young woman or what happened at last night’s meeting slow her down. What had happened? She had felt fine walking over. Angry, yes, horrified, but not sick, not weak. Well, of course, she’d felt a little sick: she was old, had cirrhosis. She always felt a little sick. But she felt capable. Prepared. She approached the dining hall, said “Excuse me” to the boy blocking the doorway, and then when the boy turned . . .
    She didn’t know him. She was sure she had never seen him before, and yet his face felt familiar. Terribly. The familiarity was so disorienting that for a second she thought: here he is, the Angel of Death, come for me. That’s how much this boy’s face threw her off her bearings. She proceeded into the dining hall, climbed onto the stage, but the confusion followed her.
    The whole time her son blathered about freedom and that other idiot prattled on about privatized communes, the boy leaned in the doorway, like a ghost, like . . . Of course. He resembled him so much: Franz. After he had been on the kibbutz for a couple of months, put on some weight, but wasn’t entirely healthy yet. She had told herself that it was absurd to be so unnerved about it; at her age everyone looked like someone else, someone from the past. So maybe it was the stress of the meeting, or all that medication, or the cirrhosis itself, but when she stood up—
    â€œShould we take these?” A young man pointed at the good crates. It was Yossi’s son, not a bad boy, but how did Yossi have a grown-up son? She still thought of Yossi as a boy. Did this young man see her faint last night? He wouldn’t remember when she was the secretary and ran the show. Probably wasn’t even alive yet.
    â€œYes, yes. These are done. No thanks to this young woman. Two hours and she hasn’t sorted a single crate.”
    â€œI’m sorry.” Claudette hastened to get another lychee. “I told the secretary I would be better in the—”
    â€œWhat good is sorry?”
    The young man carried the crates away, and Ziva went back to sorting the fruit. Had she ever seen gnarlier hands? Bony, dry, spotted, yellow. Shehad never seen her mother or grandmother with such old hands. The last time she laid eyes on them, when their families had come to the Lehrte train station to see her and Dov off, her mother had been only thirty-nine years old, and her grandmother—how strange to think it—must