Adam stepped back and raised his head to the sign above the bomb-shelter door. Three black letters on a blond piece of wood. He summoned what little he could remember from his bar mitzvah to sound them out: pei, aleph, bet. Pe . . . ah . . . bbb.
P-U-B.
Two guys in their twenties passed him on their way down the green-glowing hatch. They could. It was no big deal for them. This was probably where Ulya went every night. A bomb shelter—could there be a more perfect place to get wasted? Underground. Windowless. Shielded from the world. But he couldn’t go down there, not even just to see the place. Tomorrow he’d have six days clean. Almost a week. How many chips for one week “Clean & Serene” were in his desk drawer back home? Fifteen? More.
The first time he got drunk was Passover 1980, a few months before his bar mitzvah. They didn’t normally have a Seder, but Mrs. Silver moaned about being alone again for the holiday, and Zayde invited her to do it with them. Mrs. Silver was one of the few who hadn’t fled the city for New Jersey over the last couple of years, who had stayed in the building and, like Zayde, bought her apartment for a song.
“Why couldn’t you go to California for the holiday?” Adam had asked as they took their seats at the kitchen table. They almost never had someone in the third chair. Living up to her name, the old woman had silver disks pinned to her ears and silvery roots that betrayed her dyed black bob.
“I don’t fly. My son knows that.”
Zayde read from the English side of the Haggadah in his German accent: “Blessed are you, Eternal One our God, who gave us life, and kept us strong, and brought us to this time.”
Adam sat with his elbows on the table, head propped in his hands. Other kids shared a Seder table with not only a grandfather and some old lady from their building, but a mother and father and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins. Why had they no family? And what was going to happen in a few years? The old man wasn’t going to live forever.
Zayde lifted his glass. “The first cup.”
Adam raised his eyebrows at Zayde, making sure he was really supposed to drink.
“You don’t need to drink it all. Drink a quarter.”
Bringing the glass to his face, Adam got a waft of his mother, in bed, at night, making him feel guilty, because he never remembered her without also remembering how little he had mourned her. What eight-year-old didn’t care that his mother had died? Before he’d even finished the quarter of a glass, a wonderful warmth was blooming in his stomach. It was that immediate.
The Seder continued—breaking the matzah, parsley dipped in metaphorical tears, talk of slavery, freedom. By the time Zayde invited them to drink the fourth glass, Adam couldn’t understand why he had been so unhappy with this Seder. He brimmed with love for Zayde, a love he always harbored for him, but was usually buried under the sad promise of him dying some day. He had him now—that’s what mattered. He even felt love for shiny Mrs. Silver, and why not? Didn’t she always give him her leftover candy the day after Halloween? He loved this small kitchen, the old building, the lively street outside. He’d no idea how much dread he carried in his chest until, for the first time, it was dispersed.
The bomb-shelter bar switched from electronica to Bob Marley. A young couple skipped down the green stairs, the girl smoking, the guy with a finger hooked on her jeans. Adam delved his hand into his pocket, clutched the brooch, and turned away.
There, he thought, crossing the square. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Though to be safe, he would avoid the main square at night, when the bar was open.
When he reached the bottom of the steppingstones, Golda charged at him and ran circles around his legs while he marched for his room to grab the phone tokens and directory. He ducked around the tree, all its flowers gone. Instead it bore greenish-brown balls, the size and shape of small lightbulbs.
The blue pay phone, shared by all the volunteers, hung on the wall outside the classroom where the Russians studied Hebrew. The phone token, a silver coin with a hole in the middle, reminded him of the subway tokens from his childhood with the Y of NYC punched out in the middle. He dropped the asimon in the phone and dialed Barry’s number. Dagmar had to be in those archives.
An answering machine picked up. After a Hebrew message came an English one in a British-y accent. Maybe New Zealand?
“Lucky you! You’ve reached Barry Sloman. I don’t need to tell you what to do after the beep, do I?”
Ulya and Farid lay on a maroon blanket in their usual spot on the hillside, just past the mandarin grove, on the other side of the cattle-wire fence that surrounded the back of the kibbutz. The spring wildflowers covering the hill, which were a splendid blur of blue and yellow during the day, lost their color at night, but were twice as fragrant.
Farid turned onto his side and looked down at her. “Maybe your cousin can lend me the money?”
Ulya, head resting on her purple vinyl purse, blew out smoke. “For what? Your little restaurant dream?” She tossed the cigarette, even though it still had a few hauls left. She refused to suck at butt ends. “Wake up. You’re going to work on the kibbutz for the rest of your life.”
“Why do you say that? Because I’m Arab?”
Ulya found Palestinians or Israeli Arabs or Palestinian Israelis or whatever the hell she was supposed to call them a lazy bunch, it was true, but that wasn’t why she thought Farid was going nowhere. He just didn’t have it—that hunger, that urgency, that willingness to do whatever it took.
“Yes, because you’re a lazy Aravi.” She said “Arab” in Hebrew to give it extra bite.
When she and Farid first started spending time together, he would get mopey when she teased him, but then he came up with his wishful theory that she was behaving like a love-struck schoolgirl, teasing a boy because she was frightened by her feelings for him. Ha! The truth was she couldn’t care less if Farid ever got his restaurant. If he remained a fieldhand for the rest of his life, what did it matter to her? For selfish reasons, she even liked how easygoing he was. When she was with him, it made her feel almost easygoing. For the few hours, when she lay with him on the hillside, the future felt just a little less urgent. So the very reason why she liked being with Farid was exactly why she could never fall in love with him.
Farid picked a twig off the blanket and rolled it between his callused fingers. “Arabs are responsible for some of the world’s greatest inventions, you know. We invented the concept of zero.”
“Oh, I believe that!” Ulya tried to grab the twig from him. “If there’s anything the Arabs could invent, it’s nothing.”
Farid climbed on top of her and poked her cheek with the twig. She wriggled her head and laughed under the delight of his weight.
“Say you’re sorry.”
“No.”
“Say you’re sorry!”
“Get off me!” she hooted.
“Have you ever said sorry in your life?”
Ulya gazed past Farid’s shoulder at the stars. Just as she had to admit that Farid had striking eyes, she had to admit this sorry little country had a magnificent night sky. Every time she lay out here, she spied a falling star. In Mazyr, the gray smoke billowing from the orange and white stacks blanketed the sky, tucking its citizenry into the city the way her mother used to tuck her and her brother under the charcoal blanket they would spend the rest of the night fighting over.
She shrugged. “I’ve never had to.”
“I’ll make you sorry.” Farid nuzzled his face into her neck and growled like a bear, tickling her, making her cringe and laugh. Then he rolled off and lay on his side again, resting his hand on her stomach, his fingertips under the hem of her cropped tank top. “I know why you can’t ask your cousin for the