Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  Moshe, the first out of the lorry, hugged her now and then Michael whirled her around in a small dance of welcome. Yaakov and Baila and their children—three small boys dressed only in royal-blue bloomers and bright red kibbutz hats—poured out, and Henia, always calm and controlled, her face wreathed in lines of contentment, followed her grandchildren.

  The family, arms wrapped about each other as though to fend off new partings, new separations, joined the other members of the kibbutz to witness the third and last wedding to be performed that day. The groom was a grave-eyed boy who stood beside his bride in khaki shorts and an open shirt, his sandaled feet shifting nervously. The bride had made her dress out of the gauzy white fabric which the bedouins use for their kaffiyehs. The bright sun shone through the sheer fabric and the girl’s skin glinted golden beneath it. Her fingers lightly touched her shy groom’s hand and when she turned, Leah saw that her face had the sweet innocent quality of a young child. She lifted it to her new husband as a young bud rises to the warmth of the sunlight, and Leah’s heart turned.

  Her brother walked up to her.

  “Come, Leah. Walk with me a bit. The circumcision ceremony will not be for another half-hour and I want to see the avocado fields,” he said.

  An accordionist struck up a gay hora and as they walked the music trailed behind them, one tune leading to another.

  “Do you remember that one?” Moshe asked. “We used to dance to it in the Zionist clubhouse in Odessa.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  She looked at her brother who had been a slender boy with their father’s narrow build and delicate features. He was a muscular man, his skin stained a golden brown. His thick hair was gray and he walked with the purposeful stride of a man who has little patience for leisure but moves swiftly from one task to another.

  “It was an age ago. So many things have happened,” he said.

  “Yes. Do you remember those days in Odessa—right after Yaakov’s death? You asked me then to come to Palestine with you.”

  “Yes. But you don’t regret going to America, do you? You did such wonderful things there. The designing. The painting. And your life with David and the children has been good.”

  Moshe studied his sister’s face. The daring of the young girl he had known had evolved into the strength of the woman. His sister stood tall and straight, her dark eyes large and quiet. She wore her dark hair today in a coronet of braids, just as she had worn it when she had been a bride, as young as the golden-skinned girl who had stood that day beneath the marriage canopy. Bands of silver ran through its dark thickness and he had noticed, too, the network of fine lines about her wide-set eyes.

  The brother and sister stood now at the edge of a field where young plants grew in hopeful, fragile rows of green, shivering beneath the rhythmic silvery caress of the streams of water splayed forth by a revolving sprinkler. Prisms of color danced in the crystal spray and tiny rivulets ran through the hoed fields, turning the loose sands into fertile, sustaining earth.

  “I should like to paint this field. This field and the stretch of desert beyond,” Leah said. A canvas stirred to life in her mind and she wondered if she could buy brushes and paints in Beersheba.

  Her brother did not reply. A patient man, he waited for an answer to his question.

  “No,” she said at last. “We each had our separate journeys to make, Moshe. And we traveled forth to life—to new and different lives. What I regret is that we left so many behind to death. But that we could not help. No one can tell anyone else which roads to travel. Even our children we cannot tell. They must find their own ways, make their own journeys.”

  She stooped and plucked up a clump of hard-packed earth in which loose grains of sand were trapped. She passed it to her brother, and as he took it the loose sand drifted to the ground and was lifted and carried away by a gentle desert breeze. They smiled and walked quickly back to join the others.

  *

  An ancient acacia tree grew just beyond the bungalow where Rebecca and Yehuda lived, and its mushroom-shaped crest, brown-leaved and thorn-entwined, cast a circle of shade onto the pebbled ground below. Here a long table had been set up and covered with a thick white cloth of heavy linen. A small pillow covered with an embroidered pillow slip had been placed on it and just above it a small blue amulet dangled from one branch of the acacia tree and a bright red ribbon had been tied to another. A polished silver wine goblet stood on the table, and Leah was startled when she recognized it as her father’s. Moshe followed her gaze.

  “Yes. He gave it to me the morning that we sailed. And now we use it at the circumcision of his great-grandson,” Moshe said, and put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. All journeys have their landmarks and she confronted this one with a commingling of joy and anguish.

  They heard the infant’s lusty cry and Rebecca and Yehuda moved toward the table just behind the rabbi. Baila held the baby, smiled, and handed him to Aaron, who took the infant and walked toward the chair, following the rabbi’s mimed directions. The white pillow was placed on Aaron’s lap and he put the infant on it, his large freckled hands handling the small bundle of writhing flesh with surprising ease, with a natural gentleness. The rabbi lifted a scalpel that glinted in the sunlight and the infant blinked at the sudden silvery brightness. The prayer was intoned and the guests took up the words of the rabbi in fluent unison.

  “Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, king of the universe, who had made us holy through His commandments and commanded us about circumcision.”

  The scalpel flashed and the blue amulet danced in a shifting breeze. A scarlet drop of blood fell on the snowy whiteness of the pillow slip as the foreskin was severed from the tiny penis.

  The baby wailed piteously and a sponge of cotton soaked with red wine was pressed against his lips. Hungrily he sucked and smiled, the pain forgotten, the wine sweet and anesthesizing, and he lay quietly as the bandage was applied.

  In the circlet of shade, Rebecca and Yehuda held hands and softly repeated another blessing after the rabbi.

  “Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who has sustained us in life unto this day,” they said.

  Leah looked at Aaron, her own firstborn, who held the child still, grateful that he had served as godfather to the infant who bore his father’s name. A cycle had been completed and new generations would begin new journeys. She moved to stand beside David and placed her hand within his.

  *

  A small pain awakened David later, deep into the night, after the long afternoon and evening of feasting and dancing, of song and talk, was at last over. In the darkness he spoke to it as though it were an old adversary for whom he had formed a reluctant fondness.

  “You’re back again, are you?” he said. “Coming less and less often, though. Well, I’ll soon take care of you.”

  Moving slowly, glad of the moon-streaked darkness, he found his pills and the glass of water he had learned to keep at his bedside. Well, he had invited this attack, he knew, by the wild dancing of the evening, but still he did not regret it. The music whirled through his head again and he thought of how his body had moved easily, the steps of the dances easily remembered, as he danced to the happy tunes of his youth.

  He smiled as he remembered the feel of the firmness of Leah’s flesh beneath his hands as he whirled her around the coarse wood floor of the kibbutz social hall. She slept heavily beside him now, her mouth slowly open, curved into a smile as though she too remembered the dancing and the joy. Her bare arm was flung across the pillow and gently he eased it down, kissed the soft white flesh of her forearm, and covered it with a blanket.

  The pill, as always, had stimulated him to a wakefulness which he knew he would not overcome, but the pain, blessedly, was gone. He thought of reading but was afraid the light would waken Leah. He would take a walk instead, he decided, and dressed quickly and quietly, putting on his warmest sweater and jacket against the chill of the desert night.

  Outside the air was brisk and stars filled th
e sky, a myriad of silver flowers which clustered here and ranged there against the soft blackness. He looked up at the argentous overgrowth and found the familiar constellations, the Orion family outlined against the velvety sky, trembling so close to him that he felt his face must be bathed in the metallic light that shimmered through the night.

  He walked on and passed the small bungalow of the couple wed that afternoon. A lamp glowed softly in their window and as he passed he saw the naked form of the young bridegroom, carefully holding a glass of water, his fingers cupped about it as though it were a precious offering. Rebecca’s small house was dark and David wondered how many brothers and sisters would join the infant Yaakov in the years to come, how many grandchildren he would welcome. Still, it did not matter. He had this day held his first infant grandson close. He walked on, shivering beneath a new and harsher chill. The slight breeze that wafted over him was ice-edged, reminding him of the cold night air of the Russian forest of his boyhood. He trembled suddenly, overcome by cold and by memory. He would go back to the room where Leah slept, to seek out the familiar contours of her warmth and feel her breath sweet against his neck. Now pain had gone and a sweet fatigue replaced it.

  He quickened his steps, but as he passed the pink stucco children’s house, a slender figure slipped out of the shadows. He paused, thinking it was the watchman, and as he stood there the man touched a window, struggled with it briefly and when it did not yield, stole over to another. Now David clearly saw the moving figure’s white headdress, the flash of polished blue metal in his hand.

  “Stop!” David called and hurried over to the building.

  The stranger wheeled about and David saw the milk white fear in the Arab’s eyes, the tight terrified set of his lips. He saw the hand move upward and the blue metal flash in the silvery starlight. A shot shattered the silence of the night and David’s body exploded with heat and pain but he moved forward and shouted again, “Stop! Stop, I say!” He did not recognize his own voice but cursed it for its softness.

  Lights flashed on, doors opened, and men with rifles and guns dashed across the compound, shouting orders with fierce staccato efficiency. David fell then, his face sinking into the softness of the blanket of desert grass. The pain washed over him and then with blessed swiftness, vanished. Briefly, his fingers opened and closed and opened again.

  He was dead when she reached him, when she bent over his body and covered it with hot, unbelieving tears. She took his hand, the palm outstretched as though searching for her absent touch, and pressed it to her mouth, biting at the flesh, scraping her face with her husband’s lifeless fingers.

  “No, David,” she protested wildly. “No. No. No!”

  He was not dead. He could not be dead. They had traveled too far together to be separated like this.

  It was Mindell and Danielle who moved forward at last, shivering in their long white nightdresses, their soft eyes bright with new grief. Gently, each took one of Leah’s hands and led her away from David’s lifeless body to the bungalow where dim lights burned against the danger and the darkness of the night.

  Russia

  1956

  Epilogue

  FALL ARRIVES EARLY in Russia. Its warning chill begins even before the last crops of summer are harvested and the leaves turn gold and russet while the flowers of late summer bloom with a desperate brightness. The workers in the communal fields wear heavy jackets in the cold light of dawn, shed them as the sun slowly rises, and put them on again only hours later when the sun’s brief life wanes and its harsh gold pales against the sky that turns so swiftly from blue to gray.

  The tall woman who sat in the rear seat of the Intourist car, which traveled slowly north along the road that parallels the Sea of Azov, wore a hooded cape of thick blue wool. The driver, swiveling slightly in his seat, had noticed that her shoes and bag were of the soft American leather his own wife yearned for. But when she spoke to him, to advise him of a runoff where the sea road cut into a forest clearing lined with dwarf pines, she spoke in a clear but oddly accented Russian. She carried an American passport, he knew, having checked it routinely at the Odessa hotel when he picked her up. Leah Goldfeder. It was not a Russian name but he had gone to school with a boy whose name was similar—Goldenkrantz or Goldenberg. A Jewish boy, he knew, having once seen his identity card where the line which calls for nationality had been marked “Jew.” Perhaps this woman too was Jewish. He had heard that once many Jews had lived in this part of Russia where the sea air penetrated the green thickness of forest lands. It was, after all, beautiful country.

  He drove slowly, enjoying the ride, enjoying the luxury of having only one passenger with whom he could talk in his own language when usually his touring car was full of foreigners and he struggled to explain his country in languages painfully learned and painfully used.

  As the day grew warmer the woman removed her hood. Her long hair was pulled softly back from her face and nestled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Waves of white rippled through her hair and when he caught sight of her face in his rear-view mirror he saw that she was older than he had thought, close to sixty perhaps, and very beautiful. She had a rare face, the sort of strong face which was denied prettiness in girlhood but became proud with beauty in age. He saw that a small half-dimple lurked at one corner of her mouth which was just a bit too wide.

  She leaned forward in her seat, her eyes raking the road. Once she asked him to stop and he waited as she knelt in a meadow, thick with long wild grass and varicolored flowers. She gathered up long-stemmed yellow buttercups and bright-red flowers from whose dark hearts wiry black tendrils sprang.

  “Just north of Osipenko,” she said, “there is a small village. I am looking for a farm just outside of it.”

  “Osipenko.” The name stirred no memory and he pulled over and reached for his map. It was marked but a note recorded that the town had been razed some years back because a new road had been built through it.

  “The town is no longer there,” he said, and she sighed.

  She had not really expected the town to be there. The week before she had visited the site of the village of her birth and that village too had not been there. Fields of silver-green alfalfa grew where once small wooden houses had stood, behind rough planks spread to create a road through encroaching mud. Only one very old man remembered that once there had been a village there, a tiny town of Zhids—Jews. What had happened to them? He did not know. He did not remember. He smoked a long curving pipe of the sort her father had smoked, its bowl carved of ivory. Wistful blue strands of smoke wept about his mouth and he watched them rise in the sunlight as though they might contain the answers to the urgent questions this strange woman asked. The Zhids had gone during the war, during the days of shooting and the nights of fire. She had turned away then, and the old man was briefly bitter because she did not thank him, but later a woman had told him that the American lady had been crying.

  Leah leaned back against the seat of the car, her fingers deftly moving among the flowers. Perhaps, after all, she should have allowed Aaron or Michael to travel with her from Israel. They had wanted to come, had argued and insisted. But she had remained firm and Moshe had advised them to let her do as she wished. She had wanted to return to this land where her journey had begun, to the fields bright with wild flowers and the city by the sea from which she and David had gone forth to their new lives.

  It was a journey which David would have wanted her to make, she knew, a journey which they had vaguely planned to make together. Instead he lay buried in the first grave to be dug in the small cemetery the young kibbutz had reserved for its dead. Small children, his own grandchildren and others, would come to his grave each year and place tiny pebbles of tribute on the headstone, knowing that the man buried there had died protecting the lives of sleeping children. Already the American doctor, the visiting grandfather, had become a kibbutz myth. And Leah too would come, with Aaron and Michael and the families that would be born to them in turn. Through t
he years they would journey again and again to visit their dead, to see how Rebecca’s children grew, how the sand turned to earth and how the newly planted date palms gently brushed the sky.

  But to Russia she had journeyed alone, yet she was not alone. Gentle ghosts traveled at her side, memories both harsh and sweet whispered to her through long silences.

  “Now, Madame,” the driver said. “We are just north of Osipenko and there are no farms here.”

  “Ah, but once there were,” she said, too softly for him to hear. She raised her voice. “But this is the road I want. Drive very slowly now.”

  She opened the window and leaned out, her eyes marking a passing bramble bush, looking hard at a hedge where chinaberries would sparkle in a month’s time, her hands still busy with the flowers on her lap.

  “Here. Stop here,” she said at last.

  She got out of the car and walked toward a tree, a Lombardy tree, bent so low with age that the leaves on its lowest branches trailed across the twig-littered ground. The tree had a wide trunk and she knelt before it, touching its bark, rising to move about it in a slow circle. It was midday now and the sun, at its strongest, broke forth among the leaves. She leaned against the tree, her fine white skin dappled by sunlight and leafy shadow.

  The driver followed her eyes as she gazed northward. Yes, once a house had stood there. He saw the single broken gray cinder block that must have been a foundation stone. But she, the tall woman in the dark blue cape, seemed to see the house itself. As he watched, she slowly loosened her hair, shook it free of the confining pins, and allowed it to flow about her shoulders—a cascade of thick black hair through which white waves dipped in gentle strokes. Briefly, she seemed to dance, moving slowly in the steps of a mysterious secret rhythm as young girls sometimes do when they are alone and unseen. He turned away and went to smoke a cigarette on the other side of the car.