Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  Joshua. That would be their childhood friend, the poor boy who had become a millionaire. Joshua. The repeated name soothed her, and she fell asleep at last when Yehuda, Rebecca’s husband, joined them. His voice was husky, and Lydia imagined him to be a tall, wide-shouldered man, possessed of great strength and great gentleness.

  *

  LYDIA awakened the next morning to a city shrouded in mist. Automatically, she switched on the radio. Once she had been indifferent to international news; now it possessed her. The BBC newscaster read with dispassionate clarity. In Budapest, Cardinal Mindszenty had been released from prison. Crowds had cheered him in the street. Men and women had wept and asked for his blessing. Lydia felt a surge of pride, a stir of longing. Like Rebecca Arnon, she wanted to be with her people, in her homeland, in this hour of crisis. But Rebecca had a home and she had none. Rebecca had a family and she was alone. Rebecca would return to Israel, but Lydia would never see Hungary again. She would never lay a small stone on Ferenc’s grave or on Paul’s. She had seen the Dohány Street Synagogue for the last time.

  She fought back an unfamiliar wave of self-pity, commanded herself to wash and dress. The announcer’s voice trailed her as she moved through the room. In the Middle East, the Israeli Seventh Armored Brigade was moving across the central axis of the Sinai. Scattered uprisings continued in Hungary. Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador, deplored random acts of violence. There had been no arrests for the murders of at least three Soviet soldiers. In the United States, on the eve of the presidential election, both Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower had issued cautious statements. Both the incumbent president and the challenger regretted the violence in the Middle East. Both men regretted the violence in Hungary. Both implored all Americans to go to the polls to demonstrate their commitment to democracy.

  “Who will win your election—Eisenhower or Stevenson?” she asked. She could not ask him if Budapest would go up in flames or if Israel would be destroyed.

  “Eisenhower, I think,” Aaron said. “But it will make no difference. Neither of them will do anything.”

  They left the hotel and walked through Kensington Gardens, pausing to watch a small boy, swaddled in layers of brightly colored sweaters, chase after a flock of pigeons. They sat on the top deck of a bright red London bus and rode to Hyde Park, where they listened to an intense, bespectacled young woman rant against the sale of liquor. They wandered to another soapbox, on which an elderly gentleman in an elegant velvet-collared topcoat called for an end to national welfare. Free speech was new to her, and she stared in wonder at the speakers and the clusters of listeners.

  Aaron took her to a department store off the Tottenham Court Road. Lydia had fled Budapest without even a change of clothing, and they had bought only a few essentials during their few days in Vienna. She wandered through the large, brightly lit emporium, marveling at the towering hillocks of merchandise; she stared down long aisles crowded with racks of dresses and suits, children’s clothing, and rainwear. The array of clothing was a miracle. In Budapest, shoppers stood in queues for hours only to confront bare shelves, sullen salespeople.

  She bought a black wool suit and two sweaters, one gray and the other black. She had selected the clothing of a mourner, Aaron thought, but he said nothing, although he remembered the satin blouse that matched her eyes which she had worn to the Hemmings’s party.

  “You’ll need a dress,” he said, and he took her to Fenwicks because he had seen one of turquoise silk in the window as they passed.

  He left her in the dress department and went to the lingerie boutique, where he bought her a simple white nightdress of fine batiste. He fingered the delicate fabric. He imagined it falling gracefully about her body, swirling at her slender ankles.

  “For your wife?” the saleswoman asked pleasantly as she wrapped it.

  The question startled and flustered him. He did not answer but busied himself with the bill, counting out the unfamiliar currency. Lydia was not his wife. Katie had been his wife and Katie was dead. Lydia was his snow-white princess, with hair as black as coal and skin as white as snow. Only the fairy tale had been reversed. It was she who had awakened him from the apathy he had felt since Katie’s death; she had rescued him from the long sleep of despair, the numbness of uncaring. And he, in turn, had rescued her from danger, slain her attacker, and carried her across the border into freedom. In the fairy tale, the knight always married the princess. But in the fairy tale, unvanquished ghosts did not haunt the enchanted lovers; a single kiss sealed their destiny and decreed the happiness of their “forever after.” He had kissed Lydia in the glow of a Budapest street lamp; he had held her close in shadowed forests and gently stroked her neck in a dimly lit café. But still, their own “forever after” remained shrouded in mist, draped in silence.

  They had dinner with Rebecca and Yehuda that night. Rebecca was more relaxed. The news was good. Nasser had ordered a complete withdrawal from the Sinai, and Israeli armor had captured Gaza.

  “The war will be over in a few days,” Yehuda said. He spoke with calm authority.

  Aaron stared at his brother-in-law. The battles in the Sinai held no mystery for Yehuda Arnon. The object of the war was not obscure for him. It had been carefully predetermined in smoke-filled Jerusalem conference rooms, in Guy Mollet’s safe house in Sevres, in Patrick Dean’s austere suite in Whitehall. He and Lydia Groszman had been tossed by the winds of history, but men like Yehuda Arnon built windmills to harness dangerous currents. Briefly, he envied his sister and her husband.

  “The war will be over but the killing will go on,” Rebecca added. Aaron was startled by the bitterness in his sister’s voice. It did not relate entirely to the desert war, he thought. Even as children, he and Rebecca had been acutely sensitive to each other’s moods. He discerned her sadness now and pondered its source. There was an odd tension between Rebecca and Yehuda, a strange, elusive uneasiness.

  Music played, and Yehuda politely asked Lydia to dance. Aaron and Rebecca watched them move across the polished dance floor. The dress Lydia had finally chosen was a navy-blue silk with a high collar that accentuated her pallor.

  “She’s very lovely,” Rebecca said. “I’m sorry about her son.”

  “He was her husband’s son,” Aaron interposed.

  “But she raised him. As we have raised Mindell. Mindell is my daughter.”

  “As your father raised me,” he said.

  “Our father,” she reminded him. David Goldfeder had loved them equally.

  “Yes.” He played with his silverware, pleated the linen napkin. “Are you happy, Rebecca?” The abruptness of his own question startled him.

  “Happy?” She repeated the word as though it were somehow foreign to her. “I don’t think about it anymore,” she said at last. “At Bennington I once wrote an essay. ‘On the Nature of Personal Happiness,’ it was called. I couldn’t write such an essay now. I suppose I’m happy. I have the children, my painting, the feeling that what we are doing in Israel is important.”

  “And Yehuda.”

  “And Yehuda. Whom I love. Who loves me. But he also loved his first wife, Miriam, and in some complicated way, her memory has become part of our lives, shadowing us. Sometimes I awaken in the night. Yehuda is beside me in the darkness, yet I feel so alone that I know he is with Miriam. If he were to speak, he would say her name. And I am jealous. Crazy, isn’t it—to be jealous of a dead woman?”

  “No,” Aaron said gently. “It’s not crazy.” Lydia had murmured her husband’s name that night in the Grand Hotel, and he, who was neither husband nor lover, had been jealous of the dead man.

  Yehuda and Lydia returned to the table, flushed and exhilarated. They were both unused to dancing, to gaiety, to normality.

  “What will you do now, Lydia?” Yehuda asked. He liked the beautiful Hungarian woman. Aaron would be a fool to let her go.

  “I will go to the United States. My brother and his family are living there. And it will be the best place for me t
o work. American scientists have a sophisticated approach to radar technology.”

  “We had hoped, when we first learned about you, that you might decide to come to Israel eventually,” Yehuda said.

  “There has always been a close exchange of information between Israeli radar experts and Americans,” Lydia said. “I know this from my participation at international conferences. I would like to visit Israel, of course, but now I will go to the United States.”

  She did not meet Yehuda’s eyes. She was ashamed to tell him that she trembled at the thought of living in a country that faced the constant threat of war. She had lived her life in fear and hiding. She had suffered too many losses, seen the flames of too many fires. The faces of the mourners in the Great Synagogue in Dohány Street haunted her dreams. Her parents had taken their own lives; her husband had died beleaguered and embittered. The soil of the cemetery where Paul Groszman had been buried only days ago still clung to her shoes.

  She wanted a new life, an end to fear. She wanted to hike along trailways that had never known the march of soldiers’ boots, the rumble of tanks’ thunderous treads. Others might choose renewed danger; her own courage was depleted. She was too tired, exhausted by the effort of her life. She felt Aaron’s eyes upon her. His sympathetic gaze caressed her face, and she turned away.

  “I must go upstairs,” she said.

  He rose, too, and they left Yehuda and Rebecca at the table. But as they left the dining room, they both looked back and saw Rebecca gently lift Yehuda’s hand and press it to her lips, against her cheek.

  He and Lydia looked away from each other, as though the observed intimacy had somehow wounded them. When they reached their own corridor, they slipped wordlessly into their separate bedrooms. Minutes later, he knocked at their connecting door.

  “I have something for you.” He handed her the large white box that the saleswoman in the Fenwicks lingerie department had so carefully wrapped with blue satin ribbon.

  “For me?” Her eyes were awash with liquid brilliance. Had she been crying? Why did her hands tremble as she took the package from him? A deep blush rose from her neck and blossomed in her cheeks. She touched his face. “Thank you.” The words were a whisper. She closed the door as he stood there, shutting him out.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, not bothering to light the lamp. A desperate fatigue overwhelmed him. He yearned for sleep, but he feared the dreams that sleep would bring. Weariness gritted his eyes, but he dared not close them. She had closed the door behind him and confirmed her loss and his aloneness. Before Paul’s death, perhaps, there might have been a chance for them. But now she was benumbed by grief, bound by ghosts.

  “Aaron.”

  Lost in his melancholy, he had not heard the door open, yet she stood beside him. Her blue-black hair caped her shoulders; it matched and surpassed the darkness. Her skin was tallow-white beneath the sheer cotton folds of the nightdress. The golden aureoles of her breasts were small and gentle flames. If he touched them they would surely burn his fingers. His arms moved toward her; his hands traced the curve of her arms, the slope of her back. Her lips were soft and gentle on his face. She kissed his eyes; her lashes brushed his cheeks, light as the wings of a butterfly.

  Gently, he eased her down onto the bed and pressed his hands across her body. Her skin ignited his, but he was not seared. They were aflame; their shared fires, so long subdued, mingled and burst in a mighty and mysterious conflagration. Their separate worlds, their separate sorrows, came together and were transformed into joy, blazing, fiery joy that convulsed their bodies and melted at last into exhausted contentment.

  “Aaron.” She celebrated his name. “Aaron, I could not let you go.”

  “And I would not have let you go.”

  He stroked her hair and studied the translucence of her skin. The turquoise mark on her neck shimmered in the darkness. She was very beautiful, his snow-white princess, his gentle love. He closed his eyes and fell easily into dreamless sleep.

  *

  THEY walked the patterned paths of Kensington Gardens the next morning, their fingers loosely linked. They had things to say to each other that could only be uttered in the clear, cold air of the November day. The sky was gray, yet streaked with lingering ribs of pale sunlight, uneasily balanced between fall and winter. Brittle leaves fell to the ground; in a few days’ time they might be covered with snow. They, too, hovered at season’s edge, aware of their entry into a new length of days. Aaron fed the crumbs he had brought from the breakfast table to a flock of greedy pigeons and told her at last about Katie.

  “I loved her,” he said simply, “even though I knew from the beginning that there was something wrong. She was not like other people. She fell into moods of such despair, of such darkness, that I could not reach her. Still, I married her. I was young and full of wonder at what I felt for her. When you are young, I suppose, you think you can do anything. I had survived a childhood of strange secrets, of mysterious loneliness. I had survived a war. I was strong. The world was mine, and I was sure I could help Katie and share it with her. But I couldn’t, of course. She shut me out, told me lies, and lied to herself. She became pregnant and did not tell me. Instead, she flew to Puerto Rico and had an abortion.”

  He fell silent. The aborted fetus had assumed a reality for him. He grieved for the child it had not become; he grieved for the loss he had unknowingly, unwillingly sustained. Only yesterday he had looked at a toddler in Regent Park, so brightly bundled in scarlet suiting against the encroaching cold; and wondered whether the small bit of detritus sucked from Katie’s womb had been male or female, a son or a daughter, blond like Katie or copper-curled as he himself had been as a boy.

  Lydia leaned against him as though the pressure of her weight might ease his sorrow. When she spoke of Ferenc her voice was soft.

  “For a while, after I was married, I did not think about having children,” Lydia said. “I suppose I thought of myself as a child still, because the war had stolen my childhood. I was the daughter-wife and Ferenc was my father-husband. And Ferenc was so weary, so frightened. He could not bear the thought of bringing another child into such an uncertain world. And, after all, we had Paul. It was Paul who made me think about myself as a mother—a woman who nurtured and protected a child.” Her voice broke, and Aaron held her close.

  “Who can protect their children?” he said softly. He thought of the Arnon children, huddling in a bomb shelter. He remembered that Sherry and Joshua Ellenberg’s daughter, Lisa, had miraculously escaped death when she fell beneath the wheels of a speeding car on a quiet Great Neck street. Children were hostages to danger and mischance, fortune’s playthings.

  “Once, I thought I was pregnant,” she continued. “It was such a sweet secret. I smiled when I thought about it, and Paul asked me why I smiled. Children always want to share a secret. I thought, I am smiling because you may have a brother or sister and we will be a family again, looking forward instead of remembering back. I decided that no matter what Ferenc said, I would have the baby. I thought of how I would tell him. I would wait for an evening when Paul had a late rehearsal. I would prepare a good dinner and later, while we drank plum wine and the candles burned low, I would tell him. When he saw my happiness he would abandon his sorrow. But in the end there was no need to tell him. One night I awakened and my body was twisted with cramps and my bed stained with blood. The pregnancy was over. The hope was gone.”

  “For then,” he said firmly. “Only for then.” They would have to draw boundaries carefully and define the then and the now of their lives. They would learn to distinguish between apparition and reality. In this quiet London park, they shared their sadness, lifted the shadows.

  “Katie died in a traffic accident,” he said. “She was hit by a taxi, but she had walked directly into its path. She died because she wanted to die, because she could not control her life. And I could not help her. Sometimes I awaken in the night, and I am confused and desperate because I cannot think of what I must
do to help her. And then I remember that she is dead and I cannot help her.”

  “I know.” Lydia’s voice was so soft, he bent close to hear her. “I watched Ferenc die. Week after week I sat by his bed and saw him grow thinner and thinner. The pain weakened him and the morphine brought him memories. He wept like a small child. There was nothing I could do. I held his hand and I wiped his tears, but I could not help him.”

  Her helplessness had matched his own. He had been powerless to help Katie and she could not help Ferenc. And together they had watched Paul Groszman’s lifeblood stain a Budapest plaza. Their sorrows were unevenly balanced, their memories weighted and exposed. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the pale autumn sun. She was thinking of Ferenc and Paul Groszman, he knew, but he felt no fear, no threat. They had laid their ghosts to rest.

  *

  THAT SUNDAY, they drove to Gatwick Air Terminal with Yehuda and Rebecca. Their flight to New York was scheduled to leave only a half hour after the Arnons’ plane to Lydda. It was a clear, crisp day, and they stared out the windows of their taxi at small family groups walking home from church. Young couples pushed gleaming prams and middle-aged men diligently washed their cars. Small boys in striped jerseys played rugby on the bald lawns of council flats while their mothers leisurely walked the high streets and peered into the dimly lit windows of clothing shops. Suburban England was enjoying its day of rest. The London Times was spread open on Yehuda’s lap. In the Middle East the Sinai Campaign was over. There was a front-page photograph of a troop of Israeli soldiers at Sharm el Sheikh. In Budapest, Soviet tanks rolled imperiously through the streets. Russian soldiers fought Hungarian high school students. An exclusive dispatch from Reuters described a fierce battle fought on Ulloi Avenue, close to the bypass where Aaron had killed the Russian soldier and blocks from the spot where Paul Groszman had so swiftly died. The bonfire would be extinguished by now, Aaron thought sadly. He wondered suddenly what Yuri Andropov had done with the small gold lapel pin.