Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  Aaron stood over the gaping hole that would serve as a temporary grave site for the puckish-faced boy who had shared his MacDougal Street apartment. He remembered Gregory his fellow student arguing an obscure point of Hegelian dialectics; he thought of Gregory his co-worker in that network of impossible dreams they had naively called the Movement; he pictured Gregory his friend laughingly flirting with Becca, squeezing laughter out of the ordinary, planning an ice cube consortium in Cairo; he wept for Gregory who hated cruelty and injustice. Aaron remained there as soldiers in fatigues, caked with the dry red floor of the Ethiopian forest, covered the grave, and he stood there still as the scarlet sun disappeared around the other side of the mountain. It was small Ato who finally plucked at his tunic and led him to the campfire where they sat together in the gathering darkness.

  Gregory’s death had somehow steeled Aaron, girded him with the emotional armor he needed for the days that followed. Gideon Force was in full operation. The Italians were mystified as to the size of the British army and scattered before the approaching troops. They did not believe that only a few hundred British soldiers had been able to mobilize the enormous Ethiopian guerrilla force. Salim and his confederates had done their work well.

  The Ethiopians and British marched on, taking over Fort Burye and Musaad, heading toward the goal of Addis Ababa. The British contingent was imbued with new confidence and although the heat was relentless and they still marched through wild country, cutting their own path and taking their bearings from compass readings, there was a vital new excitement. The heavy heat-soaked air rang with song. The Palestinian Jewish soldiers taught Aaron their songs and sometimes, even as he lagged behind, he found himself singing the ancient Hebrew choruses by himself. “Who will build the Galilee… We will build the Galilee… Let us sing before Him a new song, a song of victory, a song of triumph…” The Hebrew words came with surprising ease and now, when he heard Yaakov speaking Hebrew with Asaph and Nechemiah, he found himself following the conversation.

  “Perhaps when all this is over you will come with us to Palestine,” Yaakov said the night after the successful assault on the fort at Jigga. They stood on a low hill, their blankets wrapped around them, watching a herd of gazelles leap with electric speed across the plain below. Behind them Ato brewed coffee over the glowing embers of a mess fire.

  “When this is over, I never want to see killing again,” Aaron said. “Not anywhere in the world.”

  Yaakov remembered always the heavy sadness that permeated those words and he was glad, afterward, that he had suddenly taken his cousin’s hand in his own and felt Aaron’s fingers unclench and respond to his touch.

  It was the next day that they marched on the fort at Dambacha, their confidence still high. But outside the fort they were met with a fierce Italian assault. The Ethiopians and British had no sentinels, no defense positions, and their first warning of danger came from small Ato, who had ridden ahead astride a mule. Desperately the boy’s shrill voice rose in a shout that pleaded caution; again and again the child shouted and then his voice gurgled as an Italian bullet pierced his throat and sent the blood soaring into his strained larynx. But Ato’s shouts, mangled and anguished, continued until he slid from the mule, frothy pink blood streaming from his mouth. Aaron cursed, cocked his Bren, and thrust himself forward.

  “Stay back, you damn fool,” Yaakov shouted. “Stay back!”

  He watched as Aaron’s helmet tumbled inexplicably from his head—later they learned that the Italians, short of ammunition, had catapulted stones toward the approaching British and Ethiopian troops, and Yaakov supposed that it was such a stone that hit the helmet. He saw Aaron’s bright hair aflame in the searing sunlight and saw his cousin pivot forward, into the heart of the battle where the small boy had fallen from his mule. That was his last glimpse of his American cousin, so newly found.

  He did not see him again during that battle, nor was Aaron in the group of survivors that regrouped along the bloodied escarpment in Burye. Neither was he among the corpses who carpeted the forest floor, the stench of their swiftly decaying bodies mingling with the foul vegetal odor of damp dead overgrowth.

  When Akavia took the roll call that night, he wrote beside the name of Aaron Goldfeder: “Missing in action. Presumed dead.”

  And that night too, Yaakov Abrahami began the letter that took him two days to complete:

  Dear Aunt Leah and Uncle David,

  It is with a heart full of sorrow that I write to tell you that my cousin Aaron, your beloved son, was lost in a battle near Dambacha. There is some hope that he was taken prisoner by the Italians. It was a miracle that Aaron and I met in Cairo and a gift from God that I came to know and love my gentle cousin. Please believe…

  The letter went on to describe Yaakov’s last conversation with Aaron and it was David who noticed how the ink had run because Yaakov’s tears had fallen across the paper as he wrote. But it was Leah who kept the letter in her night table drawer to be read and reread in the darkest hours of the night. Her son was lost to her. She had forfeited the chance of explaining to him the mystery that had haunted his childhood and forged so wide a gulf between them that neither tears nor laughter could bridge it. This, at last, was her punishment for the years of silence, for the love withheld and the dark shadows of doubt she had cast across her son’s bright youth.

  “Aaron,” she said quietly, “please, Aaron, come back to us.”

  But the night remained dark and silent. A weak, aimless wind tossed the dry leaves of the maple tree and they scraped thinly across the flagstone garden path.

  13

  REBECCA GOLDFEDER’S DESK in her Bennington dormitory room was a reflection of Rebecca herself. It was littered with projects begun in a storm of enthusiasm and abandoned abruptly in a lull of indifference. A pile of index cards chronicling the history of French Renaissance poetry toppled over notes on the life of Chaim Soutine, which in turn were littered with a collection of transparencies for a research paper on pre-Columbian art, a ripped nylon stocking, a half-knit argyle sock, and a pile of letters, most of them from Joshua Ellenberg and the last one still unopened because all Joshua’s letters managed to read alike. He was working like a devil because the factory was now open on a twenty-four-hour basis. They had undertaken uniform contracts in addition to the lend-lease orders. He hoped she was eating properly, not working too hard, and not worrying too much about Aaron. Joshua himself was certain that Aaron was safe, a Prisoner of War. Rebecca glanced at the picture of her family which somehow managed to dominate the clutter on her desk. It had been taken on that long ago Labor Day weekend—it was odd how two years could seem an aeon when events that had occurred during her childhood in Brooklyn seemed vivid and recent. In the photo she and Michael were grimacing at each other, her mother and father were staring with great seriousness into the camera, and Aaron stood behind her mother, also grave, with his hand poised just above Leah’s shoulder. Studying his face now, she thought of how rarely he had laughed, of how he had always seemed to live on the periphery of the family.

  Joshua had been more central to their lives than Aaron, who had moved farther and farther away from them, loosening up only with Michael. Yet, despite this distance, Rebecca had always felt a near twinship with her older brother. They had shared the loneliness and poverty of the years on Eldridge Street and the emotional tundra that had seemed to separate her parents during those early years—an iciness that had melted miraculously with Michael’s birth, or perhaps before that. She and Aaron had never talked about their parents’ relationship, but it had united them, and for all the differences in their personalities they had been much closer than she had realized. How close she had realized only when the news that Aaron was missing in action had arrived in Scarsdale, delivered by a somber British consul who drove up to the house in a black Ford Anglia, wearing a morning suit and a homburg hat as armor against their grief. It had happened in the Ethiopian campaign, the man had said in that impeccable accent that appeared to
defy hysteria, and when David had brought the atlas, he had carefully marked the area where Aaron had disappeared and told them hesitantly that there was a chance, just a mere chance, that Aaron had been taken prisoner.

  It was to that chance that they all clung.

  “In Jewish law,” David had said, “two witnesses must see a body before a person can be assumed dead. In Jewish law, our son lives.”

  As though to affirm his faith in that law he had suddenly began attending synagogue again on Saturday mornings, often with Michael and Leah at his side.

  “Poor Daddy,” Rebecca thought now and completed the letter she had begun earlier.

  October 4, 1941

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  Well, it’s taken me a while but now I realize that you were right to insist that I return to Bennington. I have begun to get involved in my courses again although it does seem absurd to be studying twentieth-century literature when no one knows whether there will be a twenty-first century. These pessimistic thoughts are not encouraged up here where most people think that the tide of the war will change. Hitler’s luck cannot last forever.

  The best thing about my courses this year is that I am taking sculpture with a really terrific new young professor, Joseph Stevenson. Actually, I call him Joe because you know that one of the great things about Bennington is the terrific informality between faculty and students. Joe and I have had some terrific talks and he is very optimistic about the outcome of the war.

  It took me two years but I finally did look up your old friend Eleanor Greenstein. She has a really neat little factory near Bennington and a couple of design majors in the work-study program are apprenticed to her. We had a good visit and she told me how you worked together at Rosenblatts when you were just starting out. It’s funny, Mom—I can never think of you as just starting out—I always see you as a prize-winning designer who knew just what to say and when to say it. Anyway, Mrs. Greenstein invited Joe and myself to a sort of party this afternoon so I had better hurry and get dressed. Did I tell you that one of Joe’s sculptures won a prize at the Museum of Modern Art? He’s really terrific.

  Please try not to worry too much about Aaron. Somehow, I have the feeling that he is all right and that I would know if he wasn’t. You probably have a fancy clinical term for that, Dad, but I know he’s all right.

  Tell Michael to stay out of my room and I love him—and all of you.

  Your

  Becca

  Rebecca reread the letter, frowned at her notoriously illegible handwriting, and added several quick drawings to the corners. One showed a ponytailed girl in an oversized man’s shirt studying at a desk; another depicted the same ponytailed girl in a loose sweater and plaid skirt, working at a potter’s wheel; the third drawing was of a serious-faced young man wearing enormous horn-rimmed glasses. Rebecca pointed an arrow at him across which she wrote “Professor Joseph Stevenson.” She smiled, quickly folded the letter, and put it in an envelope, dislodging a pile of letters from Joshua. Poor Joshua. She would definitely write to him tomorrow.

  Rebecca dressed quickly now, selecting a soft blue wool of her mother’s classically simple design, admittedly patterned on Madame Chanel. Still, it had been her mother’s idea to add the stole which Rebecca draped dramatically around her shoulders. Leah had been right, after all, to insist that Rebecca take at least a few “good” dresses, prevailing over Rebecca’s objections that all the girls at Bennington wore were skirts and sweaters or rolled-up dungarees with their fathers’ cast-off shirts. And of course most of the girls did dress like that except for a few who wore artsy-craftsy Bohemian clothes, tramping across campus in loose homespun dresses that created a curious tentlike impression, and another small group of girls who seemed to have arrived at Bennington through error and dressed in the style of the Midwestern campuses—loose mohair sweaters with plaid skirts and spotless white dickies, high white bobby sox and polished loafers with shiny pennies sparkling against the leather.

  Rebecca, who had grown up in a home where styles and fashion had been a natural part of the atmosphere, was amused by the variety of uniforms on display at Bennington. If Lisa Frawley had come to Bennington with her as they had planned, how they would have laughed together at the pretensions of the tall blonde girl whose face was powdered to a snowy whiteness and who dressed always in a black leotard with various overlong faded cotton skirts, although she was not even a dance major. But Rebecca had not even heard from Lisa since her friend had abruptly left Scarsdale High School in the middle of their senior year, just about the time Aaron had been sent from England to Egypt. Rebecca had heard that Lisa was going to boarding school somewhere in the Midwest, but when she phoned the Frawley home to ask for her address, Lisa’s mother was cool and evasive—almost hostile, Rebecca thought, but then Rebecca knew herself to be oversensitive. Lisa was terribly busy, her mother said. She knew Rebecca’s address and if she were interested she would write. At school there were the usual foolish rumors and speculations and Rebecca slammed indignantly out of the locker room when one of the girls announced that Lisa had left school because she was pregnant. That was sheer nonsense, Rebecca protested angrily to Joshua Ellenberg. After all, she and Joshua knew that the only boy Lisa was at all interested in was Aaron. Joshua nodded and suggested that Rebecca would be wise not to write Aaron about those foolish rumors. Rebecca agreed and after a while Aaron’s letters no longer mentioned Lisa. Rebecca had called the Frawley house again when they learned that Aaron was missing in action.

  “I thought Lisa would want to know,” she told Mrs. Frawley.

  “I’m very sorry, of course, but I doubt that Lisa is very concerned about your brother anymore,” Mrs. Frawley said and she hung up without saying good-bye.

  Rebecca seldom thought about Lisa now but she did miss her at times like this when she was dressing for Eleanor Greenstein’s party. And she would have liked to talk to Lisa about Joe Stevenson, something she could not do with her Bennington friends because Joe, after all, was a member of the faculty.

  It was through a curious accident that Rebecca had, from the first, ignored Joe’s formal academic title. She had registered for the introductory course in sculpture at the suggestion of Charles Ferguson, who admired some of the small figures she had done in a summer workshop. She arrived early for the first class and found herself alone in the sunlit studio. A hunk of moist clay was on the worktable and idly she picked it up and tried to mold it. It was too hard and she sliced it on the wire and flung it on the hard wood table.

  “Uh, uh. Not so hard.”

  A sandy-haired young man in an open-necked blue cambric work shirt and faded jeans had come quietly in and stood beside her. He took the clay from her, worked it into an oval shape, and flung it down with a swift practiced motion. He picked it up, touched it, sliced it, and threw the two separate parts and then blended them. Again he tested its texture and she noticed that his dexterous fingers were scarred with traces of pale red clay and a small plaster scar ran along the rim of one lens of his enormous horn-rimmed glasses.

  “There, now you can work it,” he said. “The trick is not to throw the clay too much—just enough to make it malleable.”

  “Thanks,” she said gratefully. “I’ve just had this one sculpture workshop and I don’t know anything about it. I would have been pretty embarrassed at not even knowing how to work the clay. By the way, my name is Rebecca Goldfeder.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he assured her, “most of the girls in the class are beginners. My name’s Joe.”

  She assumed then that he was one of the male graduate students at Bennington and they talked easily, working together at the table, playing with the clay. She told him about her other classes and explained that she had chosen Bennington because of its unstructured atmosphere and its creative arts department.

  “You want to be an artist, then?” he asked seriously.

  Rebecca was startled. At home she was still treated as a small child whose whims had to be indulged. Her e
nrollment at Bennington was simply another offering in a constant buffet of pleasure and amusement. But no one had ever seemed to have serious expectations of laughing, enthusiastic Rebecca Goldfeder. She was cuddled and indulged, her whims satisfied, her brief passions assuaged. More than ever, since Aaron had been reported missing, her parents had relied on her for a flippant gaiety that would relax the tensions in the house. Now this serious-eyed young man was looking at her, asking her if she wanted to be an artist, assuming that she had a serious goal in life, and she found herself oddly pleased and flattered.

  “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I think I have some talent and I’ve done some work. My mother is a designer and although I’m not interested in that field I’ve always liked to draw and paint. I’d like to sort of experiment this year and see how good I am and what I’d really like to do. You see, at home no one seems to expect me to do any serious work—everyone’s pleased if I’m just happy. Sometimes I felt that that was my job. But being away from the family, I think I’ll be able to concentrate on real work and maybe get an idea of what I want to do. Because I know I want to do something—to make my life count.”

  Joe Stevenson nodded.

  “It’s easy enough to imagine why parents feel that way—why they want their kids to have everything fun and easy. It happens most with people who have been through some hard times themselves. Then they think that joy and ease is a kind of heritage they can give their children. They don’t realize that their kids want—and need—something more.”

  “That’s true. That’s the way it is with my parents,” Rebecca said and in a rush of words she told him about Leah and David’s early days in America, the east side apartment, the Brighton Beach house, and finally the Scarsdale home and then the war. She talked so swiftly and with such ease that she was startled when the bell rang and students trailed into the studio and took their places at the worktables. She was even more startled when one of the girls nodded to her and then turned to Joe and asked, “Did you have a nice summer, Professor Stevenson?”