Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

How many children were there on that boat? Rebecca wondered, and thought of her Auschwitz infants. Would these other unknown children, waiting out there on dark water, ever play with Mindell and Katia and Shlomo? Would they ever walk through gentle evening mist singing softly like Yehuda’s small daughter Danielle? She thought of her brother Michael, reading while sprawled across the living room rug, his father reading in one chair, his mother in another, bent over her sketch pad. Wasn’t that the natural legacy of any child—to sit in a circle of light, surrounded by warmth and love? A violent wind shrieked above them and lifted loose branches, which fell in dull thuds against the compacted sand.

  Yaakov emerged from the truck, his hand raw with cold, twisting his fingers.

  “There’s no reply. Either their radio is out or they didn’t make it through the blockade. The British are using power boats now. I’m afraid if I keep trying the British will trace our signal. We’ll wait another hour and head back.”

  He mounted the promontory and looked across the inlet. Someone lit a cigarette and its tiny red glow pierced the thick darkness.

  “Put it out, damn it. The British might be patrolling this beach.”

  Like a tiny phosphorescent insect, the lit cigarette sailed through the air onto the sand. Rebecca searched the expanse of darkness across the rolling waves, thinking of the nights she had stared from her window and glimpsed the glowing embers of Yehuda’s cigarettes. Suddenly she saw an almost infinitesimal light across the cove, flickering on and off, staying lit for a long moment and then again extinguishing itself.

  “Yaakov, look to the left,” she called.

  He took out his binoculars and focused in the direction to which she pointed.

  “Yes. That’s them. It must be them. They’re using code. Let me read them.”

  Their hearts stood still as the light sparked on and off, growing weaker, then stronger, signaling the location of the ship, then repeating the message and waiting as Yaakov flashed an acknowledgment and a read-back, using the emergency safari light they carried in the truck.

  They moved quickly now, with practiced efficiency. Two by two, they unloaded the lifeboats, spread the blankets in readiness in the back of the truck, unlashed the lengths of rope.

  Rebecca was aboard the first lifeboat and she clutched the rubber side as it was shoved off into the crashing surf. Icy water settled in pools beneath her feet, traveling down over the tops of her boots. A sudden wind whipped her face and the spray was salty against her tongue. The light rubber raft moved easily now, soaring atop the waves, responding to the strong pull of the oarsmen.

  “There they are!”

  A lantern flickered and they saw another boat approaching them, launched from the immigrant ship. She tossed a rope to it and it was caught by a sailor. The boats were pulled alongside each other and one by one the children, small shivering bundles of fear, cloaked in layers of sweaters, were passed from boat to boat. The children did not make a sound but Rebecca whispered softly to each as her arms went about them, and passing them to the kibbutz member behind her, she saw the tears frozen in their eyes and how their small mouths twisted to subdue the screams of fear.

  The rubber boat listed dangerously. Swiftly, they distributed the weight of their human cargo and rowed back to shore, the lengths of rope in readiness to be cast out again when they approached the surf. There the waiting kibbutz members lurched forward, seized the hemp, and pulled the boat to shore. Again the children were passed hand over hand into the waiting truck, where warm blankets and thermoses of soup were waiting.

  “Two more trips, I think,” Yaakov whispered to her and she nodded and climbed back into the rubber raft to repeat the operation. In the darkness they passed the other yellow boat and heard the soft sobs of a very young child, muted cries, not of fear, but of agonized desolation.

  The next boatload was simpler to manage because the illegal immigrants were mostly adults and adolescents who maneuvered from boat to boat easily. But the wind had changed and they knew that they were lucky there would be only one more trip out.

  By the third journey Rebecca’s clothing was soaked and stiff with sea water and her fingers struggled numbly for life within her gloves. The tiny craft jostled its way over waves that veered skyward with sudden wild spurts, showering them with icy pellets of spray. At last they pulled alongside the longboat and she saw, with sinking heart, that this group of passengers consisted of very old men and women, and children so ill that they lay in immobile heaps. The rubber raft lurched dangerously, bobbing drunkenly between the waves. One by one, the immigrants were transferred. A bearded old man, the sea spray like glinting jeweled moisture against the whiteness of his long beard, murmured the Psalms in unfaltering sequence.

  “A song of degrees. Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications…”

  “Amen.” A woman’s frail voice threaded the darkness with ancient acquiescence.

  “Amen,” Rebecca heard herself say as she gently took a small boy swathed in blankets into her arms and settled him on a tarpaulin in the corner of the boat, which sagged suddenly.

  “That’s it. We can’t take any more.”

  “One more. One more small boy,” a voice called from the longboat.

  “We’re overloaded now.”

  “One more.”

  She looked toward shore. The other boat was being dragged up onto the beach and the truck’s lights were flashing on and off and on again. It was the danger signal. They would have to leave within minutes. There would be no other boat to pick up one more small boy.

  “All right.”

  She leaned forward and the sailor, holding a rope in one hand and a blanketed bundle of child life in the other, leaned across toward her. An enormous wave crested suddenly and dizzying hills of foam peaked between them in wildly mobile aqueous mountains. The impact of the wave sent the sailor reeling backward. The child was knocked out of his grasp and there was a sharp splash as the small body hit the turbulent waters.

  “Rebecca, no! You’ll never make it,” the oarsman called but she was already over the side of the boat, her arms reaching desperately for the child who bobbed lightly above the water like a piece of aimless jetsam. She gripped him and swam toward the boat, gasping for air, feeling the harshness of the salt water against the membranes of her lungs, strangling her breath. The yellow rubber wall of the boat seemed enormously high and the child’s weight dragged her down. She could not make it herself, much less hoist him up with her. The old man’s voice, still intoning the Psalms, floated above the rushing waters. A song of degrees, Lord, a song of degrees.

  “Hang on, Rebecca. Another minute. I’m behind you.”

  She recognized the voice and was fired with renewed energy. She strengthened her grip on the boy, clutched his limp body, and treaded water, breathing with anguished care. Yehuda flashed through the wilderness of crashing waves and took the child from her.

  “Okay. You scramble up there. Gideon is directly above you. Grab his arm and I’ll pass the boy up.”

  Blindly, she followed his directions, felt Gideon’s fingers pull at her wrists, then hold her body as she lowered herself painfully over the side and took the child from Yehuda, heaving him with a wild spurt of strength onto the rubber floor of the boat, which veered dangerously from side to side. Then they were moving through the crashing white waters, to be pulled at last to safety in the surf and then to the waiting trucks on shore, their motors already grumbling. A British patrol had been sighted and they sped from the cove without looking back to the beach where a child’s wool hat on a hillock of sand was the only sign that they had been there pulling life out of the sea.

  As they rumbled along the dark stretch of coastal road, the brandy seared her body and she listened again to the old man as he continued to chant the words of David. “I will give thanks in the great congregation. I will praise Thee among much people.”

  “Where is Yehuda?”
she asked Yaakov suddenly, as though waking from a sleep. She had thought him beside her, felt his breath against her neck, but had awakened from that half-coma of exhaustion to find it was her cousin who sat close by her, watching her anxiously.

  “He went back to the ship. He sails back to Bari with them. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  She watched the small lights of the houses that lined the pitch-dark road, feeling a strange vacuity, an odd elusive sense of betrayal. Later that night, after the excitement of their arrival had subsided, she stood alone in her room and looked at the slender cypress. She knew, with quiet certainty, that she must leave Beth HaCochav. She had been waiting too long for something that would not, could not, happen. In Jerusalem, they said, the noon light turned the ancient stones the color of gold-dusted cyclamens. She fell asleep, wondering how such a color could be created on her palette. Perhaps in Jerusalem she would learn.

  18

  AARON AWOKE EARLY that spring morning and remained motionless in the half-darkness, watching a vagrant slat of sunshine streak through the Venetian blind and onto Kate’s bare shoulder. The soft golden glow matched her hair, matted damply now about her head, one small ringlet nestled against her cheek. Sometime during the night he had heard the shower running and knew that Kate had crept out of bed and was standing beneath the steaming water, her eyes closed and her head tilted upward, allowing the droplets to slip slowly down her body. Once, wakened and finding her gone, Aaron had watched her briefly from the bathroom doorway but had gone back to bed before she saw him. Sweet, wet Katie, he had thought sleepily then and now he lightly touched her damp curl and reached over to the night table and switched on the small bedside radio.

  There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy,

  A little shy and sad of eye,

  But very wise was he…

  A man’s voice, pitched to an uneasy softness, crooned the lyric, and Kate stirred reluctantly into wakefulness.

  “Come on, Aaron. It’s too early for ‘Nature Boy.’ Let me sleep.”

  But she lifted her arms and the sunlight danced between her small, perfect breasts. He laughed and thrust his head against the gliding patch of golden light that danced across her skin. He felt it warm against his head, felt her long fingers lifting one strand of his hair, then another, hiding the sun and releasing it as though the liquid rays were casual playthings.

  “Now your hair is amber. No. Now it’s russet—the color of fall pears and leaves. Watch—when the sunlight jumps you’re going to turn copper, like the bottoms of your mother’s pots. Aaron, do you think our children will have your hair? Do you think we’ll have children? Do you think we could be Goldfeder and Goldfeder, Esq.? Oh, Aaron.”

  “Shut up,” he said and slid her down, leaving the vagrant light to waft across the empty pillow as his hands slid across her body, his lips burying themselves against the soft golden tufts of hair that peaked below the gentle mound of her stomach. His red hair nestled into the curve of her shoulders, his body rose and fell in steady urgent rhythm, and when the full light of morning pierced the slatted blind, his full love thrust forward within her and he lay back, sweetly spent, and fingered the curl on her cheek, damp now with his own sweat.

  The radio played on and they lay in each other’s arms, listening to the announcer’s insouciant voice tell them that President Truman had just returned to the White House after a weekend in Missouri, Senator Robert Taft had condemned the Marshall Plan for aid to Europe, milk prices were up, bread prices were down. Locally, Representative John F. Kennedy would speak that afternoon in Harvard Commons. On the international scene, in Tel Aviv, the interim Jewish government was preparing to issue the declaration of the independence that would declare it the State of Israel. Drifting back to sleep against Kate’s shoulder, Aaron dimly remembered now, that that was why he had awakened so early that morning. He had wanted to hear just that announcement. Rebecca would be coming home soon, then. Yaakov would insist that she leave before war broke out and he could not imagine his laughing impetuous sister, for whom life had been a series of enthusiastic triumphs, lingering in a land at war. Perhaps when Rebecca came, he and Kate might marry. He looked down at the small blonde girl who lay beside him. Her eyes were closed and her pale gold lashes were wet with secret tears. Sweet Katie, he thought and kissed her eyes, licking the mysterious salt on her cheek. Sweet Kate, who wept in the depths of love, who lived slightly apart from others, hovering on the edges of their lives, grasping at the tales of their childhoods. He understood that strange apartness of hers, remembering with tenacious clarity the days and nights of his boyhood when he had hovered in doorways and peered through darkened windows. Poor sweet Kate, he thought, and his heart was mysteriously heavy for the young woman beside him and the vanished boy he had been.

  *

  In New York City that same afternoon, Leah and David strode up Park Avenue from Grand Central Station on their way to Charles Ferguson’s new art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, where several of Leah’s paintings were included in an exhibition. As always, when he walked with Leah, David was conscious of the admiring glances of passersby, who looked back at his tall dark-haired wife, dressed in a navy-blue cape suit of her own design. A silk scarf with geometric patterns screened in shades of deep purple and pale blue fluttered at her neck. The design was taken from one of Leah’s large graphics, and Joshua Ellenberg’s company had manufactured scarves and blouses in that pattern and others of Leah’s creation.

  “Do you know what I’m thinking of doing?” Joshua had asked her the last time he had visited her studio, where his watchful eye scanned her recent work. “I’m thinking of taking your designs for a whole line of linens—tablecloths, sheets, draperies―why not?”

  He slapped the black leather fingers of his prosthetic hand against his thigh for emphasis and picked up a small painting in red and gold tempera.

  “Wouldn’t you want to sit down to a Thanksgiving table set with this kind of cloth? Listen—I’m telling you America is moving on. It’s had it with white sheets and cloths. Look to the future with J. Ellenberg. Hey, let me write that down for my ad man.”

  Leah had smiled up at the tall young man in the well-cut Italian suit, his bulging leather portfolio always at hand, seeing him again as the tiny gamin-faced merchant scurrying down crowded east side streets. Joshua was cultivating a moustache now, as sleek as his thick pomaded hair, and his name appeared frequently on the pages of Womens Wear Daily. “Enterprising Joshua Ellenberg, offshoot of internationally famous S. Hart Inc., keeps an attentive finger on fashion’s pulse” “Could the mysterious L. G. who signs Joshua Ellenberg’s fabulous new fabric collection be Leah Goldfeder, whose stunning, innovative designs put S. Hart Inc. on the fashion map?”

  Little Joshua, her children’s playmate, now father, husband, entrepreneur, en route to becoming a fashion tycoon, urging his shy petite wife from an attached house in Queens to a split level in Great Neck, moving farther and farther from the teeming streets of his boyhood. Leah had sold Joshua several of her designs, smiling to think that people would be stretching to sleep against the patterns she created in the redwood and glass studio behind their home.

  David, as always, moved too quickly for her down the crowded avenue, and she hurried now to keep up with him. It was as though the habit of rushing had been grafted onto his nature so that he seldom slowed his pace, fearful of losing precious minutes as he rushed from the hospital to his consulting room. The years spent dashing from his grueling factory job to his evening studies had established a life pattern which he could not break although he knew with precise, professional detachment that he must. Too often now, his breath came in short frenzied gasps and a sudden arrhythmic escalation of his heartbeat left him weak and worried. But still he walked too fast, climbed steps two at a time, and answered the telephone on its first demanding ring. He left Leah several paces behind him now and waited for her at the entry of Waldorf-Astoria, looking upward at the flag flying over the facade of
the great hotel.

  It was the custom of the Waldorf to fly the flag of the country of a visiting head of state. Only the week before David had attended a psychiatric conference at the hotel when de Gaulle was visiting, and had seen the French tricolor sway in the young springtime breeze. But the flag that fluttered easily and gracefully in the wind today was one the Waldorf had never flown before. A little breathless still, he waited for Leah to catch up to him and clasped her gloved hand.

  “Look,” he said, “we are watching history.”

  Above them the white satin banner, with the blue star of David stitched between two slashes of matching blue, fluttered in the sun-tinged air. Leah stared up at it, remembering the first time she had seen the banner of Jewish independence in the Zionist meeting room in Odessa. She thought of the whirling horas of her youth, of the passionate discussions of agricultural settlements, a philosophy of collectivism, of her brother Moshe astride a podium, Henia learning to use a rifle, of Yaakov lying dead in an Odessa street. She remembered the fierce wind that had blown the day Moshe and Henia sailed for Palestine almost two decades earlier and she thought of the young men of her village who had died of malaria in the swamps of the Huleh. It had all led to this day, to this reading of a document of independence in a Tel Aviv museum.

  “May fifteenth,” Leah said. “A Jewish state at last. And Weizmann is here in New York. A flag is flying for the head of a Jewish state. Oh, David, what does it mean? Will Rebecca be all right? And Moshe and Yaakov and the new baby? David, a Jewish state. Does it mean another war?” Gladness and grief mingled in her voice, and he gripped her arm in the familiar posture of comforter and protector to the woman who had become his wife because of shared grief and loss. His voice took on the soothing cadence he had discovered years ago in that Odessa park.

  “Rebecca will be all right. Probably she’s planning now to come home. And your brother’s family has survived so much that they will survive this too. Come, we must hurry. Charles will be waiting for you at the gallery.”