“What do you want, Petrovich?” she shouted, for she had recognized him at last, knowing him through his wild burst of laughter as a foreman of the timber lock which her father-in-law managed. He had laughed that way with Yaakov’s father one evening as he drank a glass of schnaps offered to celebrate Yaakov’s marriage. He was a tall man, redheaded like Yaakov, his arms and chest billowing with muscles raised through years of battling the woodlands with great strokes of the steel ax that hung from his belt. She caught sight of her own face in the shining metal, and the face that had pleased her in the attic mirror was now a mask of fear so that she closed her eyes, terrified at her own image.
“You know what I want, bride girl. Of course you know what I want.”
He flung her to the ground, still holding her arms and legs immobile and laughing as she spat into his face and bit the heavy features he thrust against her mouth.
“Yaakov!” she screamed wildly, “Papa! Oh God!”
He ripped her skirt in one sharp sure movement and thrust himself against her, forcing himself into the resistant narrowness of her body, thrusting upward against her while she writhed and screamed, fighting his weight and force. The last thing she remembered before sinking into a darkness of mind and numbness of feeling was biting fiercely at the hand he held over her mouth. When she drifted from that darkness into a shadowy wakefulness, a sliver of pink flesh clung to her teeth and she spat it out and covered it with her own vomit. The fire had died and the mound of charred wood and ashes rose from the earth like a gentle grave.
*
A month later Leah sat in her brother Moshe’s flat, slowly pulling a needle and thread through a gaping rip in a blue cambric shirt and absently listening to the rise and fall of the voices around her. She had mended that shirt almost a dozen times but each time something about her work had displeased her—the stitches were too small or uneven, the mended fabric bulged where it should have remained flat, the thread was of the wrong shade. The shirt had belonged to her husband Yaakov and had been peeled from his body by Moshe who had thought his brother-in-law might still be alive when he was found on an Odessa street, his head shattered and a farmer’s gleaning tool stuck in his chest. Moshe had ripped the shirt to probe for life in the heart that had stopped beating hours before, and Leah worked now to repair it as though the fabric made whole would mysteriously restore her husband to her.
She rethreaded the needle, but her eyes had grown tired in the dim light of the paraffin lamp and she put her work aside and looked about the room as though startled to find herself there, surprised that she was in fact alive and that the words of those about her had any meaning.
Moshe sat on the low cot which Henia had covered with a bright woven cloth. Next to him David Goldfeder, who had also come to Odessa from Partseva, slowly sorted a pile of papers, arranging them on a wooden plank that served as desk and table. Moshe and Henia had lived in the Odessa apartment for five years but they had never furnished their rooms, thinking their stay temporary. Their future lay to the south, in the ancient land of Palestine which they referred to only as Zion. They did not want to encumber themselves with possessions which they would not be able to take to the small settlement in the Huleh valley they hoped to make their home. They knew that there they would live in a tent mounted on planks against the encroaching dampness of the swamp and that all their energies would be needed to struggle with that swamp. Only that day Moshe had had a letter from a comrade in Palestine telling him of the death of yet another pioneer who had succumbed to malaria carried by the mosquitoes that infested the stagnant waters.
“It’s a terrible thing about Rackman,” Moshe said now. “He was so full of hope.”
“What else do we have to be full of?” David Goldfeder asked and Leah saw that his hands trembled slightly so that the papers he held fluttered like forlorn white flags.
David Goldfeder’s brother Aaron had been killed in the pogrom and also his fiancée, tiny Chana Rivka, who had written long manifestos on social justice in metered rhyme and traveled the countryside lecturing peasant women on concepts of hygiene and nutrition. She had died trying to save two small girls who were being taunted by a group of marauders who tossed the youngsters up into the air, passing the terrified children from one to the other as though they were balls, laughing as a child dropped and a small bone cracked. In the end they had killed Chana Rivka and the body of one of the children had been crushed beneath the wheels of a passing lorry. The surviving child, a thin dark-haired girl, hobbled about the streets of the town, using a crutch constructed of a red-painted table leg. The child did not speak but when an adult approached she would scream wildly and hover in the shadow of a doorway. When Leah, during one of her rare excursions from Moshe’s house, had passed the small girl the child had followed after her, hopping in the protection of Leah’s shadow, as a lame animal will often follow another maimed creature as though shared misery assured protection.
“We must be full of plans,” Henia said, answering David Goldfeder’s question. “Hope is a luxury. We must decide what to do. One thing is certain. We cannot stay here. Russia will be a graveyard for Jews.”
“Why only Russia?” Moshe interjected. “All of Europe will be a graveyard for Jews. They will need only a few years to recover from the Great War and then they will turn around and begin. Already in Germany they are saying that it was the Jews who made the Kaiser lose the war. No, Palestine, Zion, is the only answer, the only place for plans, the only place for hope.”
“And when do you leave?” David asked. “I hear that the Rothschild family has offered money to help at least one thousand more immigrants.”
“He doesn’t want the Russian Jews coming into France and Germany,” Moshe said, laughing, but his gaze was heavy. He and Henia looked at each other and then each darted a nervous glance across the room where Leah had resumed her sewing.
In the dimly lit room she seemed more like an old woman than the beautiful teen-aged girl who only a month before had danced naked before an attic window and watched leafy shadows move across her bare breasts. She sat erect, her long dark hair knotted into a severe bun, her large dark eyes staring from a face whose pale skin was stretched too tightly across the fine bones. She wore the same black dress she had worn to her husband’s funeral and her fingers moved now and again to touch the symbolic tear the rabbi had made in her mourning garment at the burial. She had worn that dress to all the other funerals held during that week when the streets of the Jewish quarter of Odessa rang with the moans of the dying and the wild grief of the mourners.
Leah had watched, dry-eyed, at Yaakov’s funeral, as the pine box slid into the shallow grave. The coffin had rattled lightly as the stones and earth within it slid about. Yaakov had been killed on a cobbled street, his head bludgeoned so that the cranium had crumbled and the spongy white mass of brains had littered the bloody stones. The members of the burial society had carefully scraped up that mass of decaying detritus that had been the mind and thoughts of the young Socialist and placed it in the coffin. They had even dislodged the cobblestones stained with his blood and the earth around that had been drenched with it. According to Jewish law it was essential that the corpse be laid to rest with every particle of the body that could be salvaged, and so the stones and earth had been placed in the coffin on which the widowed bride dropped a handful of graying earth that crumbled beneath her trembling fingers.
Leah had observed the seven days of mourning at her brother’s home, refusing to return to her in-laws’ house where they mourned Yaakov using the same mourning benches upon which they had sat shiva for his brother, killed only two years before in the Czar’s army.
The Czar was gone now but still Jews sat in mourning for their young men, Leah’s father-in-law observed as Yaakov’s Socialist friends came to comfort him.
“You should sit shiva with Yaakov’s family,” Leah’s father had urged, but the girl had cried out in wild protest and they were afraid to insist.
Moshe an
d Henia did not know what had happened to Leah during that first morning when the pogrom began. She had come running into their apartment, her legs scratched and scarred by her journey across the fields, her hair tangled and loose, and a small network of scratches etched across her cheek. She wore a dark winter dress and brambles and nettles clung to the sweat-stained wool.
“Leah, what happened? Are you hurt?” Henia had cried but Leah had not answered. She had instead remained at the window, hour after hour, moving her lips soundlessly, searching the street for a sign of Yaakov.
He was dead even as she stood at the window, but she did not relax her vigil until Moshe came home, carrying the blue cambric shirt, his face collapsed with grief and loss. She held the shirt against her cheek and when she fell asleep at last, she cradled it in her arms and the pale blue turned dark with the tears that would not stop falling even as she slept.
“I don’t know when we will go to Palestine, David,” Moshe said. “But it must be soon. Henia does not want to spend another winter in Odessa.”
“No, that’s not true,” Henia said. “The truth is I don’t want to spend another day in Odessa.”
They all laughed but their laughter was dry and cracked, a humor born not of joy but of bitterness. Even Leah smiled slightly, but almost at once her fingers found the tear in the mourning garment and the smile faded as she stroked the severed fabric.
“And what will you do, Leah?” David Goldfeder asked, assembling his papers in a cardboard portfolio. “Will you go to Palestine too?” He was a thin man who worked quickly, his pale-gray eyes fixed on the job at hand, his mouth set in a thin line of concentration. Because he was in mourning for his brother and Chana Rivka, he had neither shaved nor cut his hair for a month and Leah noticed for the first time how thick and dark his hair grew, making his thin face and light eyes seem even paler in contrast. She had known him in Partseva and knew that he was always the older boy who concerned himself with younger children, marshaling them for games, telling them stories, keeping pace with the smallest during hikes across the field. A hurt animal was always brought to David Goldfeder, and women came to him often and placed their worries before him. With gentle talk he sorted out their fear and grief, just as he had sorted the papers that he now gathered together in his worn folder.
Again Moshe and Henia glanced quickly at each other and then at Leah. Clearly, it was a question they had wanted to ask her but were unwilling to. There are defined borders to the territory of grief and they did not want to trespass.
“What are those papers you are working on, David?” Henia asked as Leah remained silent, staring straight ahead.
“Affidavits. Affidavits that our society has obtained from Jews in America. These papers will make it possible for some of our people to settle there. It’s a new world over there across the ocean. A new society. A new philosophy of life.”
“All worlds are the same,” Moshe said. “There was a new philosophy here in Russia. Ah, yes. The brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of communism. But it would seem that the brotherhood is an exclusive one and Jews are not invited into the fraternity. In your United States there is the brotherhood of democracy, but such noble sentiments will do nothing to prevent pogroms there. The only answer is Palestine, Zion. The only answer is to build our own state, establish our own society, protect ourselves.”
“And when the Arabs of Palestine attack your settlements, your state, your society, what will you call that?” David asked. “Ah, you will not call it a pogrom because pogroms belong to the old world, to the Diaspora. You will have another name for such attacks, but it will be the same thing. Jewish blood will be shed. Jewish children will die. Jewish lives will be in constant danger and the British will not care just as the Czar did not care and the Comintern did not care. Would I grieve less for my Chana Rivka or my brother Aaron if they had died at the hands of an Arab instead of at the hands of drunken Russians?”
“Stop!” Leah shouted and paused for a moment as though surprised at the harshness of her voice. “Please.” Her tone was soft now, falling almost into a whisper. “Stop all this talk of killing. Please. No more. No more.” She drew the needle fiercely through the blue cambric and cried out in pain as it pierced her finger and a tear-shaped drop of blood fell on the collar of Yaakov’s shirt. She threw the garment aside and ran from the house, slamming the door behind her.
The three remaining in the room stared at each other and at the door.
“Go talk to her, David,” Henia said. “You were so fond of each other as children. You always understood her.”
“Yes, I remember,” David said thoughtfully. “I will talk to her. But in a while. Let her be alone now. It will be all right. You’ll see. It will be all right.” He repeated the phrase with practiced ease, not thinking about its reality but offering it as comfort to himself and to those who waited for placebos of reassurance. “Believe me, it will be all right,” he said again flatly and turned to a few forgotten papers, absently fingering the thin documents of hope.
*
A light mist drifted up to the streets of the Jewish quarter from the harbor and Leah felt it settle coolly on her face and dampen her hair. The familiar salt smell was pleasant and she opened her dress slightly at the throat and let the moist air settle on her skin. Her pleasure at the evening cool surprised her. She had thought herself numb to all feeling, relieved of sensation. She was a newcomer to the landscape of grief and did not know how to sift through the sands of sorrow and grab small footholds of life, grains that could be fashioned into strength. The events of the past month had paralyzed Leah with the ferocity of their impact, their terrible finality, and she had burrowed deeper and deeper into a cavern of fear. She had retreated into the shelter of Moshe’s home, taking refuge there just like the small crippled girl who huddled in shadowy doorways. She could not stay there forever, she knew, and the time was coming when she would have to make a decision.
She was certain now, not with joy but with terror, that she was pregnant. There was no longer any need to count the weeks since her last menstrual flow or to touch her breasts, now grown full and tender. The child within her was growing and in a few more months it would stir with life. And soon too, her condition would become obvious and her secret would be common knowledge.
She knew there were those who might seize strands of hope from her pregnancy and the birth of her child. A life had been taken, they would say, but one had been given, blessed be the name of the Lord who fathered the fatherless. An infant had been named in the synagogue just after the pogrom had at last been squelched by government forces. The aged rabbi who during his years of service in Odessa had intoned the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for more Jewish souls than he could remember, had lifted the newborn baby high for the entire congregation to see. It was a girl and its mother’s cries of labor had mingled with the screaming of dying children and the moaning of bereaved men and women. The child had been born on a night when the town blazed with fire and shards of broken glass littered the cobbled streets so that the horses of the funeral carts kicked wildly and would not pass through. But the newborn was a healthy baby, weighing almost ten pounds, and the assembled congregation smiled as the infant stretched luxuriously and purred through dreamless sleep.
“The parents of the child name her Tikva—hope,” the rabbi told the worshipers. “Her birth and her name are a message for all of us. Where there is death there is also life. We dare not despair. We go on. We bring forth new children to take up our faith and we entrust them to God’s care because in His mercy He shall see that Israel will endure, that new generations will rise up.”
Leah, sitting in a rear pew, leaned forward with the other women, as they lifted the thick gauze curtain that separated them from the men so that they could see the child. They murmured softly, with satisfaction, as the strong baby kicked away its swaddling and they smiled when the young father, wrapped in his prayer shawl, carried his child down from the pulpit.
It would be
said of Leah’s child, also, that the new birth marked the continuity of the generations, that Yaakov’s child was an obscure compensation for Yaakov’s death, that it would provide comfort for her, grant her a gain against the magnitude of her loss. But what would happen to their emotional bookkeeping if she were to announce that it was possible that the child that clung so tenaciously to her womb was not of her dead husband’s seed, that it might have been conceived through struggle and hatred? She had thought she was pregnant in the innocence of that August morning but it had been too soon to know. In moments of calm she assured herself that the child was Yaakov’s, born of their tenderness, but the stormy moods of uncertainty tore into that calm, forcing her to recognize that she might have been impregnated by the redheaded woodsman whose laugh was tinged with fury and whose eyes had burned with hatred.
It had taken her weeks to organize her thoughts, to recognize the consequences of that anguished struggle. Even in the blind hours that followed Petrovich’s attack, when she had at last struggled to her feet, removed the ripped dress, remembering to shred the fabric even more and to consign it to the rag pile, she had thrust all thought from her mind. She had washed herself over and over, using a coarse sponge and rubbing the lower part of her body with such fierce strength that for weeks afterward it remained red and raw. She had put on a winter dress, thinking of the thick material as a shield, and run through field and thicket to Moshe’s home in the town. There, she had shrugged away all questions knowing the danger that lay in answering them.
Other women had been raped during the pogrom and each day Henia brought her a new tale of sexual violence and violation.
“Goldstein’s daughter. Only sixteen years old. They say she has not spoken since the attack. And Eisenberg’s wife. A pregnant woman with a suckling at her breast. God help them. God help the daughters of Israel.”
At such moments Henia forgot her Zionist zeal and became again the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. She swayed in silent prayer and her tear-filled eyes turned heavenward.
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