Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how we drifted. I try to look back, to chart the hour that we first stopped talking. Did I withdraw from her, or did she close me off? How was it that once we shared everything and then suddenly we shared nothing?”

  “It happens. I know.”

  And then she told him about her own marriage, about Yehuda and the joys and adventures of their early years together and the mysterious rifts that now scarred the carapace of their marriage.

  “I used to think that it began with Noam’s death, but I realize now that the strain between us had been building for many years. Our lives before we met were so very different. Always his first marriage was a shadow between us. And then, of course, his work meant so many absences, so many silences. He could not tell me where he had been, what he was doing. I understood, of course, but it created barriers. Sometimes I needed him because a child was ill and I didn’t even know where he was. And then, with Noam’s death, we felt the cumulation of all those years. At first we were both stunned with grief. We sank beneath it and surfaced separately, differently. We had lost the habit of sharing. I could not tell Yehuda that Noam’s death made me fear for Yaakov and Amnon. I thought that perhaps he would see that fear as a betrayal.

  “He threw himself into his work. Always, there was a trip, a meeting. He would do what he could to prevent other deaths. He would keep himself so busy that there would not be time to remember that his son was dead—his son had been killed.” Her voice trembled with sadness. She pitied herself and she pitied Yehuda and she pitied the youth who had died on a Galilean hillside.

  “With Ellen, during those last months, I didn’t know what I wanted. Do you know, Rebecca?” Benjamin asked, and she understood that he offered her the secret of his marriage as clue to the mystery of her own.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Sometimes I think that I’m just not strong enough for him. Perhaps I’m not strong enough for life in Israel.” Her own words startled her. She had, after all, been strong enough for life in Israel for two decades.

  “But he loves you?” Benjamin Nadler asked.

  “Perhaps.” She did not tell him that Yehuda sometimes whispered his first wife’s name in his sleep. Mia. The name was a verbal caress that pierced her with sadness, filled her with shame. She was jealous of a woman long dead, a woman whom she had never known.

  They had dinner together in a small Italian restaurant. They spoke with the intimacy of old friends and were not surprised to discover that they liked the same artists, the same music. A reproduction of Soutine’s Woman in Blue hung over his desk. She had framed that same reproduction for her kibbutz studio. They talked about Joe and Inga Stevenson and the beauty of Nantucket Island, and they conjectured about the young couple who sat in a corner of the restaurant and did not exchange a word throughout the meal.

  “Perhaps they’re mutes,” Rebecca said wickedly.

  “No. They’ve been married too long and can no longer discuss the wedding and the presents.”

  They looked hard at each other then, acknowledging the aching sadness of marital silence.

  He walked her to Grand Central. The snow had stopped, but huge drifts lined the sidewalks and an overlay of ice glistened brilliantly. He took her arm to steady her and did not release it even when they reached the interior of the cavernous terminal. The train to Scarsdale was delayed, and they stood at the gate, joining the weary commuters and the discontented women shoppers who had stayed in the city too long and too late. Gently, he touched her face. His fingers traveled to her eyes, followed the lines of her cheeks, the curve of her lips. And then her own hand reached up and she traced the soft, dark slashes of brow that crowned his amber-colored eyes.

  When she boarded the train at last, she was suffused with the languorous warmth that often overtook her in the afterglow of love. She sat quite still, her eyes closed, until the Scarsdale station was called.

  Benjamin Nadler phoned the next morning. He was scheduled to give a series of lectures at Bennington College. He would be speaking on Modigliani, Utrillo, and Soutine—artists for whom she had a special affinity. Could she join him?

  Rebecca took the call in the breakfast room, and as she spoke -she watched her mother and Boris, who lingered over second cups of coffee. Leah’s face was radiant against the pale wintry light. Her marriage to Boris had infused her with new strength, renewed energy. She and Boris seized each day with concentrated enthusiasm. Against all odds, they had each been granted another chance, and they raced against time. They traveled. They chaired committees. They had made the cause of Russian Jews their own. Boris addressed crowds of students on college campuses, stood vigil in front of the gates of the Russian consulate in New York, the Soviet embassy in Washington. He bore witness. His life was testimony. Leah’s poster—letters of flame rising from snow-covered hillocks: “Let My People Go”—had won an international graphics competition.

  “I almost decided against doing it,” Leah had confided to Rebecca, “but I suppose I’ve learned that the only thing one regrets are the opportunities missed—the chances that were not taken.”

  Rebecca remembered her mother’s words now. She held the phone tightly and experienced an unfamiliar eagerness, as though she, too, were racing against time.

  “I’d like to come,” she said. “You know, I was a student at Bennington, a lifetime ago.” She was eager suddenly to travel back in time. Rebecca Arnon, the woman, would visit the landscapes that had been so dear and familiar to Becca Goldfeder, the girl.

  The campus was little changed. She walked with Benjamin Nadler down the tree-lined paths she had followed during her college days and showed him the building where she had studied French literature, the auditorium where Martha Graham and Hanya Holm had danced, the wide-windowed studio where she had studied with Joe Stevenson.

  The girls who hurried past them on the campus reminded her of her own classmates. They, too, wore long batik skirts and heavy homespun sweaters, and their small waists were circled by wide leather belts. They circulated petitions to end the war in Vietnam, jangled canisters on behalf of the children of Biafra, sold buttons for CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. All causes for the good were their own, and they believed fervently, with the enchanted optimism of the young, that the signatures on their petitions and the quarters dropped in their canisters made a difference.

  Rebecca smiled at them. Her own classmates had collected money for the refugee children of Europe, for the victims of Hiroshima. Their petitions had called for the creation of an international organization, a United Nations. The Bennington chorus had sung the United Nations Hymn with sweet strength. Rebecca had recalled the words to the song that morning, with rare bitterness, as U Thant’s visage drifted across the television screen and he acknowledged, to an unsmiling Arthur Goldberg, that an Arab guerrilla attack on an Israeli civilian intercity bus was “deplorable.” The chorus of Bennington girls had sung of a different United Nations, but that song was twenty years old now, and hardly anyone remembered the words.

  In the lecture hall where, as a freshman, she had heard white-haired Robert Frost read his own poetry, she listened to Benjamin Nadler relate the tragedy of Modigliani’s life to his paintings. In the dining room of the Bennington Inn, she argued with him about the essence of an artist’s solitude. And later, in the wood-paneled bedroom where a great fire leaped and blazed in the half darkness, mocking the whirling wind and the leafless branches that scratched the windows, she lay still as Benjamin Nadler’s hands traced the contours of her body, his lips searched out the secret sources of her tenderness. Gentleness restrained his passion and ignited her own. She surged toward him, and they came together at last, weeping and laughing, each whispering the other’s name. In that firelit room, they subdued their sorrow and banished their loneliness.

  They stayed in Bennington for three days, and when they returned to New York she sent a cable to Yehuda telling him that she had decided to do the Zalenko book.
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  “Are you sure it’s wise to stay away that long?” Leah asked.

  Rebecca spun around.

  “Didn’t you go to the fashion shows in Europe when I was a girl? And from there to Russia? And that was before air travel was so common. I can be in Israel within hours if there is an emergency—you couldn’t have done that.”

  “You know that I had special reasons for going,” Leah replied. She had traveled to Europe in 1937 to try to persuade her parents to leave Russia. She had not succeeded, and now she lit a memorial candle for her parents on the eve of each Day of Atonement because she had never been able to determine either the dates of their deaths or the concentration camps where they had been killed.

  Sadness dimmed Leah’s eyes; anguish veiled her face. Rebecca turned away. She had been unfair, she knew, to counter her mother’s concern with accusations, to create a false scale on which past experiences were weighed with present demands. She knew, with instinctive certainty, that she was right to stay, even as her mother had been right to go to Europe so many years ago.

  Still, her decision was tempered with tension, unease. She had dreamed about her sons again. Yaakov and Amnon had stood with Yehuda at the edge of a yawning chasm, and she had called to them from the opposite side. Amnon had tried to bridge the distance. He had lifted his arms and hovered dangerously close to the precipice. She heard his shriek of terror and answered it with her own monitory scream. She had awakened, her body soaked with sweat, her face dampened with tears, her throat aching. Had Leah, too, known such dreams? she wondered.

  “I’m sorry.” Rebecca put her hand on Leah’s shoulders. “You went to Europe then because you had to. And I, too, think that I am doing what I must do. It is not easy.”

  “I know,” Leah said. Rebecca stood at a crossroads, and no one could help her choose direction.

  Boris listened to them without comment. He had learned to be the silent observer, the listener, in the battles of love Leah fought with her passionate children. He turned back to the letter he was writing to a congressman asking for more direct intervention on behalf of Russian Jews. His head ached and his eyes burned, but he continued to write. He had been lucky. He had found Leah and thus a new life. He could not abandon those who did not share his good fortune.

  *

  BENJAMIN NADLER came to the Scarsdale house for dinner. He studied Leah’s paintings, discussed the glories of the Hermitage collection with Boris. He had visited Moscow twice and planned to go again. Leah and Boris liked him, Rebecca knew, and perversely, she resented that liking. It would have been simpler to counter their open disapproval.

  “He’s a very fine man, your Benjamin Nadler,” Leah said, when he left.

  “He’s not my Benjamin Nadler,” she retorted sharply and turned away from the worry in her mother’s eyes.

  She read the Zalenko poems carefully, etching them into her thoughts and feelings, and made her first tentative sketches. Increasingly she worked at Benjamin Nadler’s apartment, and his book-lined study became her studio. Rebecca’s easel was placed where Ellen Nadler’s desk had stood. Ellen’s books were packed into cartons to make room for Rebecca’s supplies and for the books of photographs and reproductions she was studying. One afternoon she brought a framed photograph of her sons and placed it on a shelf above the window seat. She remembered then that Benjamin had told her how he had often found Ellen seated at the window watching the children play in the courtyard below. She removed the picture and took it home with her. She began to leave clothes at the apartment and called Scarsdale often to tell her mother that she had decided to stay in the city.

  “All right,” Leah said wearily. She never asked Rebecca where she was staying. Her daughter was a grown woman now, a mother herself. But still my child, Leah thought worriedly. Still my wandering child.

  *

  REBECCA ARNON, who had grown up in New York City and Benjamin Nadler, who had lived there for years, explored the city as though they were tourists. They visited Madison Avenue galleries where subtly placed track lighting illuminated paintings and sculptures; they climbed narrow staircases to lofts where canvases were piled against peeling walls and young painters watched them nervously as they looked at oils and etchings, lithographs and sketches. They went to the Beekman Towers and watched the city speed by below them. Cars jumped lights, pedestrians hurried—only they were suspended in time.

  One twilit evening, they walked the length of the city to the Eldridge Street apartment, where they shared a Chinese dinner with Michael and Mindell. Mindell, in her last trimester of pregnancy, was radiant, optimistic. The nursery was fully decorated now. Rebecca had painted a smiling sun beaming down on a sheltering tree, just above the small white crib. Benjamin Nadler averted his eyes when he saw it and Rebecca knew that he was thinking of another nursery and of his infant daughter Felice, who had not been protected by whimsical beauty.

  Mindell discussed possible names. It was foolish, she knew, but she did not want to name her children for her parents, who had died in Auschwitz. Their lives had been so vulnerable, their deaths so tragic. She wanted a different life for her child—she wanted her child to be protected, shielded.

  “Children in this country are safe, cared for,” Rebecca said, and she was surprised at the bitterness in her voice. Her son’s lives were not protected. They would wear uniforms and go to war. She felt, suddenly, a visceral longing for them. She wanted to hold Amnon in her arms, to tousle Yaakov’s thick hair. She had been away for only two months, yet in the snapshot that they had included in their last letter, Amnon looked taller, more vulnerable, and Yaakov’s mouth was set in a firmer, more mature line. Yehuda’s letters assured her that they were fine, that they missed her but were pleased that she was doing work that was meaningful, important. “As I am,” he had added. He was on the kibbutz now, but he did not know how long he would stay. He could not tell her where he might be going. He did write that he had seen a wide-winged Bonelli’s eagle soar across the sand crater. Once, Rebecca and Yehuda had looked up during a twilight walk and watched the rarely seen bird shadow the ocher sands. They had held hands very tightly then, awed by the primeval beauty they had witnessed. She understood that Yehuda was reminding her of that moment, of all that they had shared.

  “I’m afraid you are both wrong, Rebecca, Mindell,” Michael said, turning from his sister to his wife. “There is simply no way a parent can shield and protect a child—anywhere.”

  The civil rights workers he had known in the South had come from sheltering homes and had swarmed to danger and even to death. His Hutchinson students left their peaceful, protected campus and flocked to the cities, to demonstrations and rallies. They sang of peace and were stalked by death. Only last week a pretty blond sophomore had been beaten at a rally in Union Square. It was only a question of time before a student protester was killed by a nervous police officer, a frightened National Guardsman. He had seen Lisa Ellenberg that afternoon. Her eyes were circled with fatigue; her hands trembled as she spoke to him. Her father had built an industrial empire; an elaborate alarm system protected his Great Neck mansion, but he could not protect his daughter from the impact of her own times. Poor Lisa. Poor Joshua. Michael decided that he would set up an appointment with Lisa. He fumbled to phrase the warnings he would offer her. Lisa, you are too intense. You care too much and work too hard. Useless words, he knew. He could neither mitigate nor dilute her intensity, her caring.

  “Still, there is more of a chance for a safe life here,” Benjamin interposed.

  He had read a story in that morning’s Times about mine throwers used in an attack from Lebanon against Israeli settlements. He had clipped the item to show to Rebecca, but in the end he had decided against it. It would be an unfair tactic, he knew, to use against his unknown and absent adversary. He acknowledged that he was in a struggle against Yehuda Arnon, against her life on Kibbutz Sha’arei ha-Negev. He knew that she feared for her sons and felt an aching distance from her husband. He knew, too, that she stru
ggled against her feeling for him, yet she wept in joyful submission when his strength conquered and subdued her. There was hope for them. He loved Rebecca Arnon—vibrant, talented Rebecca, who had drawn him away from the precipice of his grief and thrust him back into caring and sharing. He wanted her to stay with him always.

  They made love that night with swift desperation, as though they were caught up in a race and had no time to spare. They fell asleep with their arms knotted, their bodies close upon each other, as though the smallest space between them might admit doubt and memory, threaten the fragile balance of their togetherness.

  “What shall we do?” she asked. Her voice was loud and clear in the night silence, but when he looked down at her he saw that she had spoken in her sleep, and his answer died on his lips. They would go away, he decided. They needed distance and time alone together.

  *

  THE AIR on Nantucket Island smelled of salt and snow. A thin sheet of frost was stretched across the undulating beach, and as Rebecca and Benjamin walked, they heard it crackle. The winter clothing they had brought from New York was not adequate against the cold. Rebecca wore Inga’s down-filled red parka and pulled the hood tight so that it covered her cheeks. Benjamin went into town and bought a blue woolen cap and a long bright green muffler, which he wrapped and rewrapped about his neck. The Stevensons had warned them about the cold when they offered them the use of the house. They themselves were off to Mexico.

  “Like any sensible artist,” Joe had said. “Nantucket in the winter is hardly a haven.”

  Still, Rebecca was glad they had come. She loved the wintry solitude of the island, the blanched majesty of the snow-crowned dunes, the glittering, icy expanse of the beach, and the gray reefs spackled with mica that glinted in the pale sunlight. The rhythm of the waves breaking against the shore soothed her as she sketched. Her easel was mounted on the beachhead, and when she heard the wild shrieks of the gulls, she lifted her eyes and watched the winged convoy soar in graceful formation.