Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  She herself hardly slept; and when she did lose consciousness for a few hours, she woke in a freezing sweat.

  Thirty-nine. A widow. Trying to fill her sons’ needs. Trying to be both mother and father. Careful not to demand too much of the boys. Wary lest Amnon—thoughtful, caring, like Arik—try to become man of the house overnight. Forfeit his childhood. And Rafi—who followed her around the house, openly adoring—she worried that Rafi was clinging to her too much.

  For the anxiety, the fears, the sleeplessness, work was the answer. This morning, after another endless night, she had looked at herself in the mirror and decided what she must do.

  Now she was discussing it with Dr. Prywes. “Moshe, I want to continue Arik’s project. It’s his memorial. It’s too important. I don’t want it to—just to die.”

  She concentrated on his face as she leaned across the desk.

  He and Arik had come from the same background. Both were born in Poland, though Moshe was three years younger than Arik. Both had gone to medical school in Paris. Both had the authoritative air of doctors, of medical men accustomed to facing crises. Raquela knew the way these doctors functioned; she could almost see the wheels turning in Moshe’s head.

  He tilted back in his desk chair. She was concentrating now on his mouth—his well-formed, sensual, aristocratic lips—which would tell her whether what she wanted was realistic and feasible or some wild fantasy.

  At last he spoke. “I don’t know whether we can do this, Raquela.”

  “Why not?” She suppressed the instant despair.

  “Look here—you’re a very skilled nurse. And a gifted midwife. But America would never let a nurse head up a major research project like this.”

  “Even though nobody worked closer with Arik than—?”

  Moshe’s heavy black eyebrows raised above his brown penetrating eyes. “Facts of life, my dear Raquela. Governments give grants to academicians, doctors, epidemiologists—”

  She interrupted. “Moshe, couldn’t you find someone? I could work with him, the way I worked with Arik.”

  Prywes stood up. His lithe, sinewy body seemed always in motion. She watched him looking out at the Municipal Garden toward the City Hall.

  Surely he would find a solution. Brilliant. Urbane. A world traveler. Member of the World Health Organization. French Legion of Honor. Medical adviser to countries as far apart as Guatemala, Singapore, Argentina. Arik, his best friend, had called him the most creative medical educator in Israel.

  It was that friendship that Raquela was relying upon now. For twelve years, their two families had been close; they had spent vacations and summer weekends together at the little beach house Arik and Raquela had built at Bet Yannai, north of Netanya.

  Watching him searching for a way to help her, Raquela thought of the evenings on the beach when Moshe had regaled them with stories of the war. Somehow he had always managed, with incredible ingenuity, to land on his feet.

  He had been one of the very few Jewish doctors working in the university hospital in Warsaw when World War II began. The hospital was evacuated eastward; Warsaw was burning. The doctors were mobilized; Moshe became a captain.

  A few days later the Nazi-Soviet Pact partitioned Poland; the Polish army commander gave the doctors in uniform a choice: “You can go west and join the Nazis, or you can go east and become a Soviet prisoner of war.”

  As a youngster, Moshe had been a member of Betar, a Zionist youth movement; the leader of his group had been a young man named Menachem Begin. Moshe, well-known as a Zionist, knew the Nazis would kill him as a Jew; the Russians would imprison him as a Zionist. He chose the lesser of the evils. He went east.

  The Russians rounded up all the officers—Poles and Jews. Many were taken to Katyn near Smolensk, where ten thousand were massacred. Moshe was saved by a Communist whom he had once treated as a patient: “For the Russians, better to be a simple soldier—not an officer. Russians distrust all officers except their own.”

  Before the roundup, he ripped off his captain’s bars and buttons. Then he folded his medical diploma into a tiny square and hid it inside the heel of his leather boot. Finally he burned all the papers that might identify him as a member of the famous and wealthy Prywes family of Warsaw.*

  Now an obscure private, he was sentenced to fifteen years as a “socially dangerous enemy” and exiled to an Arctic slave-labor camp along the Pechora River, near the Ural Mountains.

  Every morning, awakened at four o’clock, he was marched, with political prisoners, criminals, and prostitutes, four or five hours into the forests. All day, in temperatures that fell to sixty below zero, he chopped trees. Then, exhausted and frozen, the prisoners were marched another four or five hours back to the barracks.

  Moshe had spent a year and a half in the prison camp when the Nazis attacked Russia in a blitz on June 21,1941. A few days later, all Russian doctors and nurses in the country, including all the medical staffs in the NKVD secret-police prison camps, were mobilized into the Red Army.

  The twenty-eight thousand prisoners in Moshe’s camp were now without a single doctor, without any kind of professional help. The camp officials began to search among the prisoners.

  “Does anyone have any skills in medicine?”

  Moshe decided to reveal who he was. By now he weighed less than one hundred pounds. He was dirty, emaciated, weak from malnutrition and diarrhea; he felt he had nothing to lose; he was one step away from death.

  He entered the room of the NKVD commandant, a long hall with a huge T-shaped table at the end of which was a desk, and behind the desk, sitting like God, was Colonel Prokuratoff, in the khaki green uniform and red and gold pips of the NKVD.

  Colonel Prokuratoff glanced up. Moshe was trembling as he walked through the long cold room; he stopped midway, afraid to approach closer.

  “What do you want?” The NKVD commandant stared at the bedraggled figure.

  “You are asking for medical people,” Moshe said humbly, his voice little more than a whisper. “I—I am a doctor.”

  Colonel Prokuratoff’s stainless-steel teeth glistened as he roared with laughter. “You—a doctor!”

  “Yes. I am.”

  He pulled off his once-elegant leather boot, cut open the heel, and drew out the carefully folded diploma.

  The commandant examined the document.

  “Bozhe moy! My God. I’m going to put you in charge of medicine for all the prison camps along the Pechora River.”

  Moshe was given a house, a horse, and a white coat. He traveled about the heavily forested region, country-doctor-style, for five years, operating on prisoners, delivering babies, treating all the illnesses—cancer, typhus, dysentery, malnutrition, madness, and concentration camp depression.

  With prison labor he built a three-hundred-fifty-bed hospital to treat prisoners.

  He survived the war and returned to bombed-out Warsaw. His wife, Isabella, a dentist, had also miraculously survived. She had worked as a nurse in a prison-camp hospital. But of the six hundred members of the Prywes family, only twenty remained alive. He and Isa left Poland; Moshe worked for the American Joint Distribution Committee in Paris until he was invited in 1951 to become Organizing Dean of the Medical School in Jerusalem. A week later, Arik invited him to Amnon’s Brith Milah—his circumcision ceremony—and the two families became friends.

  “I want to help you, Raquela,” Moshe said, returning to his desk. “I’m going to call Dr. Michael Davies. He’s head of the department of medical ecology at the medical school.”

  She listened closely as he spoke into the phone. Her heart pounded.

  “Fine, Michael. I’ll write the NIH in Washington immediately and ask them to transfer the project and funds to you.”

  He smiled at her as he continued. “I’ll assure them that in my judgment you are the most qualified person in Israel to continue the work. But I have one condition—that Raquela Brzezinski work with you.

  Raquela leaned forward hopefully.

  �
�Then you admire her, too…Yes, with all her other talents, she is also a fantastic organizer. Efficient. Highly responsible. Agreed, then, Michael?”

  He hung up.

  Approval arrived from Washington. Apprehensive, determined, Raquela honed herself to succeed.

  The study involved the life and death of babies. On the basis of the material, doctors could provide better preventive-health services and keep more mothers and babies alive.

  Raquela began working in the department of medical ecology of the medical school; her office was in the Bible House, one floor above Moshe’s. She felt new energy unleash in her body; she threw herself into every aspect of the project.

  Fascinated, she rediscovered the neighborhoods of Jerusalem as the researchers programmed the computer to produce statistical tables so they could correlate the origin of the mother’s birth, the neighborhood she lived in, and her age with the rate of infant mortality, eclampsia, stillbirths, and congenital malformation.

  Through the project, nurses were coming into their own. The survey teams were all nurses. And every Jewish, Christian, and Moslem pregnant woman in Jerusalem, and in the Arab and Jewish settlements in the Jerusalem corridor, was interviewed.

  Mornings, Raquela jumped into her car and drove about the city, visiting each hospital and clinic and the vast network of mother and child care centers that Hadassah had started long ago and named Tipat Halav—drop of milk. (In the early days, milk for the Jewish and Arab babies in the centers had been delivered by donkey express.) From her office, Raquela could drive home in twenty minutes to be with Amnon and Rafi. And when she was not home, Mama fed them, baked their favorite cookies, kept a bag of chocolates especially for Rafi, and, whenever they liked, let them sleep in the cottage in Raquela’s old bedroom. Papa, tall, scholarly, adoring grandfather, became their surrogate father.

  Meanwhile, Raquela was pulling herself together, finding nourishment in her work and in raising her sons.

  Her old friend Judith Steiner, who had become director of the nursing school, dropped in one afternoon for tea. She sat in the sunken living room, eating Raquela’s homebaked fruit pie. Amnon and Rafi were at Mama’s.

  “We go back a long way,” Judith said. “Will you forgive me if I try to give you some advice?”

  “What kind of advice?” Raquela straightened her skirt. She dressed now like an executive, in handsome wool suits and silk blouses.

  “You should start going out more.” Judith bit into the pie, waiting for a reaction.

  There was none.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Raquela. I don’t think you realize that a lot of eligible men would like to marry you.”

  Raquela put down her teacup. “I’m not ready, Judith. I can’t do this to my boys. I can’t bring a stranger into the house, into their lives. The boat’s steady now. I don’t want to rock it.”

  “The boys will grow up, and you’ll be alone.”

  “I’m not afraid of loneliness. Someday, maybe when the boys are older, through their adolescence, I might consider marrying again. But not now. Now Amnon and Rafi need me.”

  She stood up and walked to the French doors. Papa’s trees and plants were a tropical jungle outside, framing the doorway.

  “I need time to mourn,” she said.

  Her best friends were Moshe and Isabella Prywes. They phoned often, constantly inviting her and the boys to dinner with their two daughters in their apartment at 19 Balfour Street, near Wingate Circle.

  For Raquela, Isa was a role model, an extraordinary woman with extraordinary courage. Warm, highly intelligent, quintessential wife and mother, Isa sought to heal Raquela’s wounds. But it was Isa who needed healing.

  Isa was dying of cancer. She was forty-nine.

  Moshe had kept her alive for eleven years. Whatever was new he tried. Every new drug. Every new treatment. He learned that in Chicago, Dr. Charles Huggins, who later became a Nobel laureate, was having some success reducing prostate cancer in men by injecting them with female hormones.

  Moshe flew to Chicago. He brought Dr. Huggins slides of Isa’s metastasized body. Would his treatment work for a woman? Could he help Isa?

  Dr. Huggins had been to Jerusalem years before: he had met Isa, and admired her. He prepared concentrates of female hormones, and every few weeks drove to the airport in Chicago and sent them to Moshe “air express and with a prayer.”

  The hormones worked for a whole year. Isa had a miraculous remission.

  But no longer. Even the massive doses of drugs could not halt the wildly reproducing cancer cells.

  Moshe took Isa to the Hadassah hospital at Ein Karem. His office was now in the medical school on the main floor of the huge semicircular medical center.

  Every hour he raced up the stairs to see her. Still fighting, she ate only when he came to feed her. Even her breakfast waited until his arrival; each morning he stopped off at a bakery to bring her freshly baked rolls and bread.

  Jenny, their eighteen-year-old daughter, was serving with the army; her noncom gave her time off to visit her mother. Vivian, fourteen, came every day after school. Raquela visited briefly each day, hoping to bring even a few minutes of distraction. She tried not to weep, marveling how Isa, racked with unbearable pain, continued to fight.

  She died in November 1965.

  Jenny was transferred to Jerusalem to be closer to home, and each evening she and Vivian tried to comfort their grief-stricken father. Jenny read chapters of the Bible aloud. One evening, she read from Exodus. Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses (Moshe), was addressing him in the desert: “Why sittest thou thyself alone?”

  Jenny put down the book. She looked up at her father. “Daddy, you too are alone—like Moshe in the Bible. Alone too much. Someday soon I will marry. Vivi will marry. You’re a young man, Daddy. Only fifty-one. You should get married.”

  It was the last day of December 1965.

  Friends telephoned Moshe. “We’re giving a New Year’s Eve Party. Please come.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m really not good company.”

  They insisted. “It will do you good. Just come to toast the New Year.”

  Raquela, too, was invited.

  The party swirled around her; she tried to make small talk, but the evening dragged. She wondered why she had come.

  Moshe, finding the gay atmosphere intolerable, took two doctors into a small room and soon involved them in a heated discussion of the medical school.

  Midnight. The lights went out. Husbands and wives kissed each other.

  Raquela was alone.

  The lights went on. Moshe approached her. “Let’s get out of here, Raquela. This is no place for either you or me tonight.”

  “Sure.”

  In the street, Moshe said, “Let me drive you home.”

  “I brought my car. What will I do with it?”

  “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”

  He opened the door of his car and helped her in.

  He drove toward Herzl Boulevard, entered Bet Hakerem. She saw him pass her house and without a word continue along the highway around the Hills of Judea toward Ein Karem.

  They drove in silence. Raquela could see the lights in the windows of the hospital rising up from the dark mountains.

  “Let’s turn around and go home,” she said after a while.

  “Why?” he asked, disappointed.

  “It’s very late.”

  He shifted gears and without another word turned the car around and brought her home.

  The next morning Raquela found her car standing in front of the house. Why had Moshe not even rung her bell? Probably busy—the busiest man in the medical school.

  Three days later he telephoned. “Raquela, I’m building a house in Ashkelon. The contractor is coming tomorrow. You’ve just built a house. You know so much more about this sort of thing than I do. Would you come along with me and talk to the contractor?”

  “Why not?”

  She sat beside him in the car, drinking in
the Jerusalem air as they began the descent down the Hills of Judea. The once-barren stubbled hills with huge white boulders were now green, terraced with trees. Little settlements of Jews from Yemen, Cochin India, Afghanistan, from Europe and from Arab lands, peopled the biblical hills and valley.

  Just before Latrun, the Arab-held salient that blocked the highway, they turned south.

  Raquela looked around. How often she had driven this road with Arik on their way to Beersheba. She relaxed. At last she could think of Arik without a stab of pain.

  They were in the northern Negev, approaching the land around biblical Gat. The poignant words of David, lamenting the death of Saul and Jonathan, sang in her head: “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon…lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice…”

  The terrain, fertile and green, became bony with barebacked mountains. The Arab frontier closed in upon them everywhere. East of them, the Hebron Hills, in Jordan’s hands, were a hotbed for the renewed Arab infiltration. Gaza, in Egypt’s hands, lay south and west. The road itself was called the “Security Road,” though it was far from secure and there were constant military forays upon it from both Jordan and Egypt.

  Moshe stopped for gas in Kiryat Gat, the administrative center for the whole Lachish area. Lachish was the focal point of the largest and most dramatic regional scheme in the country, a kind of human TVA project that stretched from the Gaza Strip to the Hebron Hills, two hundred thousand acres of desert inside the explosive borders between Egypt and Jordan.

  “I wish we had time to drive around this village,” Moshe said, stretching his arm out of the car window. Kiryat Gat rose—starkly simple buildings filling up the sand dunes, as in a Dali landscape, against a gray endless hinterland of sand.

  “This is where the people from the surrounding villages get together. They’ve got everything here—schools, factories, cotton gins, community centers. It’s a fascinating experiment. Our sociologists and psychologists have worked out a new technique of absorption. We’ve discovered that the old pressure-cooker technique we used when the state was born—mixing all the newcomers, putting Poles and Iraqis, Romanians and Moroccans, in one village—didn’t work. We’ve learned that even Moroccans from the big cities like Casablanca and Rabat don’t mix well with Moroccans who’ve lived in the caves of the Atlas Mountains.”