Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope Page B

have been twenty years younger than Ziva was today. Excited, nervous, she and Dov had held hands throughout that train ride to the port in Venice—fat, smooth, childish hands that didn’t even appear to have veins in them.
    Her mother had been painting a blue bird the night she came home with the ocean liner tickets. Their parlor, once reserved for special occasions, had been transformed into her mother’s makeshift studio: bedsheets covering the Persian rug, the settee, and piano. Her mother’s back faced the foyer, the studio lamp highlighting the grays in her brown hair and the hand applying feathery, blue brushstrokes to a bird’s extravagant wing.
    â€œDagmar.” Her mother didn’t turn from the canvas. “Why so late?”
    Dagmar hung up the wool coat, tickets tucked inside the inner pocket. “We had trouble drafting this month’s newsletter, Mutti.”
    It was true the Maccabi Hatzair meeting went longer than usual, but it was also true that she and her best friend, Dov, had taken the long way home so they could plot, as they had for years, their departure to the Land of Israel, only this time they had the tickets, bought that afternoon, for a ship leaving in three weeks. They were seventeen years old: if Hitler hadn’t come to power, their parents never would have approved of them setting off on their own for the dusty edge of Arabia, but now she and Dov believed they would let them go without too much of a fight.
    Dagmar hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a chocolate-ginger cookie from the counter, and sat at the breakfast table with a marked-up copy of the newsletter. The chocolate-ginger cookies were the only thing her mother baked that she could still swallow. Ever since her mother had been barred from the art school, she filled the hours she would have spent teaching with baking. Since the family of three could only eat so many pastries, Dagmar and her mother had walked plate after tinfoiled plate over to the neighbors, until they stopped answering their doors. Dagmar read through the statement, circling the Hebrew words she didn’t know. Having the best Modern Hebrew in the chapter, she had been voted translator, and even if she had to work through the night, she would have the translation perfected for tomorrow’s printing.
    â€œDagmar, sweetie, come paint with me,” called her mother.
    â€œI’m busy!”
    Her mother came and leaned in the kitchen doorway. She wore lipstick and a wool skirt even though she hadn’t left the house that day. Dagmar admired the strength her mother showed in keeping up appearances, but lipstick was degrading, and the woman who put it on while fellow Jews were having their beards cut in the streets ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous.
    Her mother said, “I don’t like these meetings. They’re dangerous.”
    Dangerous! In other words: courageous, admirable. Imagine her reaction when she finds out about the tickets for the Kampala . Without looking up from her notes, Dagmar answered, “It’s better to die on your feet, Mutti, than live on your knees.”
    Her mother walked over and kissed her on the head. “Oh, my Dagmar. My little Dagmar and her big plans.”
    Ziva tossed a bruised lychee at the rotten basket, wondering if she could have painted with her mother that night and still have completed her translation. She picked another lychee from her lap. It too was bruised. Tossing it, she realized she was moving as slowly as her empty-headed young charge.
    Enough. She sat up straighter. She had to focus. Keep working, fighting. She might have lost an important battle at last night’s meeting, but she hadn’t lost the war. Articles needed to be written for the kibbutz newsletter, question-and-answer sessions had to be organized, posters needed to be printed and tacked everywhere. There was no time for woolgathering. The answer was no. No, she could not have painted with her mother