Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Lisa. Lisa.”

  Joshua wept and Aaron embraced him as he asked, yet again, “Why did it happen? How could it happen?”

  Aaron had flown to Israel when Noam Arnon was killed, and he had stood beside Yehuda during the nocturnal vigil when Jews guard the bodies of their dead before committing them for burial. Yehuda, the veteran soldier, the agent who had crossed dangerous borders and fought in too many wars, had asked the same question during that long night of watching.

  “Why did it happen? How did it happen?”

  He pitied Joshua now, as he had pitied Yehuda then, as he pitied himself and all other parents—for their helplessness, their impuissance. They were powerless to shield their children from grief and disappointment; they could not vouchsafe their happiness or even, in the end, guarantee their survival.

  Rebecca slept fitfully the night before the funeral. Again and again, fragmented dreams jerked her into melancholy wakefulness. Yaakov and Amnon ran barefoot through thickly falling snow, plunging into pristine drifts. She chased them, clutching winter garments, calling their names, but they ignored her pleas. Joshua held Lisa close, but she writhed away from his embrace and floated away, waving a spectral arm. Rebecca sat upright in bed and shivered, although the room was warm. She could not protect her sons from hazard, just as Joshua had been unable to protect his daughter.

  She slept again, and now Yehuda spoke to her from a distance, and she moved closer yet could not bridge the space between them. Benjamin Nadler glided toward her through mistbound shadow. She could not discern Yehuda’s words, and Benjamin vanished before he reached her. She awakened alone, her arms outstretched, embracing emptiness.

  She drove to the cemetery with Leah and Boris. Leah sat tall, her eyes dry but her face pale. She had loved Lisa as she loved her own grandchildren, but she could not, would not, succumb to grief. On a day such as this, the old, experienced in death and grief, loss and finality, gave strength to the young. In the car Rebecca wept, suddenly and violently.

  “It is so terrible,” she said, as though her tears required explanation, “when parents bury their children.” She knew. She lived in a country where parents, too often, buried their soldier sons. She had stood beside Yehuda at Noam’s grave. She wept now for Lisa and for Joshua, for Noam and for Yehuda, and for herself. At last her tears ceased, and she understood exactly what she had to do.

  Leah touched her daughter’s hand—a light monitory touch of recognition, understanding.

  “It is terrible,” Boris agreed. “But one recovers even from such a sorrow.” His children had died, but he had learned to live again. He had not forgotten their tears and suffering, but he had relearned the secret of laughter, reclaimed his wonder at the beauty of a soaring bird, an infant’s tiny hand. Eventually all griefs were absorbed. They ached but they did not fester.

  “I know,” Rebecca said softly. She thought of Sara Meiri, her closest friend on the kibbutz. Sara had been inconsolable after the death of her son in the Sinai Campaign. She was a flautist, but she had abandoned her music. Yet each week her husband polished her silver flute, and finally, one quiet afternoon, Sara had lifted it to her lips and played a gentle lullaby. The kibbutz members had bowed their heads as they listened. Two older women, bonded because each had lost a son in the War for Independence, looked at each other and nodded. They had known that although Sara could never vanquish her sorrow, her long period of mourning was over.

  Rebecca realized now, with sudden clarity, that Yehuda, too, would cease his mourning, abandon his anger, just as she now surrendered her fear. Noam was dead and would not be forgotten, but the laughter of Amnon and Yaakov rang clear; Danielle would soon be a bride, and Mindell had become a mother. Life, after all, outbalanced and outweighed death. Yehuda might call the name of his first wife in the darkness, but he slept beside Rebecca, and she recognized, as she stood beside the newly dug grave, that she would not have had him forget the bride whom he had married in his youth.

  Sherry Ellenberg emitted a desperate, denying moan. Joshua, gray-faced, his own hands trembling, steadied her, whispered softly into her ear. Their Great Neck home was shrouded in mourning now, Rebecca knew. She and Leah had draped sheets over the mirrors and arranged for the low stools of sorrow to be placed on the carpeted floor. But Sherry and Joshua would slowly recover. They would give parties again, and their house would be filled with laughter and music. Lovers would dance into each other’s arms and walk together through a garden lit by fairy lights. Summer would come to Nantucket’s snowbound beach. All losses were finally assimilated, all griefs arbitrated, and life progressed.

  Benjamin Nadler came to the funeral with Charles Ferguson. He did not move toward Rebecca, although his eyes never left her face.

  A light rain began to fall, and the mourners lifted their faces to the gentle spray as the rabbi spoke. He was a tall, white-haired man who had known Lisa from childhood. He had stood beside her at her bat mitzvah, and her death had shattered him. His grief and confusion comforted and soothed those to whom he spoke. He offered no explanation, no rationalization. There were those things which were inexplicable, which defied reason. It would help, he said, speaking so softly that they strained to hear him, if they who had loved Lisa could think of her brief life as a gift, a sweet loan too swiftly terminated. It was true that they had lost Lisa, but they would not rescind the memory of her golden days, her light laughter, and her youthful idealism.

  “Always in our memories she will be young and full of hope and convinced that her life can make a difference.”

  Those who had loved her nodded and clutched at the fragile strand of comfort he offered them. Lisa would never know the inequities of age, the dimming of hope, the sadness of disillusionment. The mourners touched one another’s hands, moved closer together. Sue Li sobbed, and Joshua moved toward her, drew her into the circle of the family. Joanna took her hand. Lydia’s head rested on Aaron’s shoulder. Mindell’s fingers pressed hard against Michael’s palm. Rebecca looked at Benjamin Nadler and saw that tears coursed down his craggy cheeks. He had not cried for Ellen, his wife, he had told her, but he wept now. He had been warmed and stirred to life. His thick hair was rain-spackled. She went to stand beside him.

  The plain pine coffin was lowered into the newly dug grave. Joshua and Sherry moved forward. They each dropped a clump of moist spring earth onto the pale, rough wood. Their lips moved soundlessly (as Yehuda’s lips had moved at Noam’s funeral, Rebecca remembered now). The soil streaked Sherry’s hand, and Joshua wiped it with his tear-dampened white handkerchief. Scott wept openly as he dropped a smooth stone onto his twin’s coffin. He held Stevie’s hand and spoke gently to his younger brother until Stevie at last released the patch of turf he had dug up in their garden that morning. Tendrils of green threaded the soft earth, and Rebecca thought of how the tender grass would yellow in the darkness of the grave. Joanna scattered violet crocus petals onto the wood because Lisa had loved the first flower of spring. The men took up the shovels, and the women stooped to gather up stones and soil. Together, they blanketed the coffin with a dark, moist coverlet of earth. And then Joshua intoned the mourner’s Kaddish; the others repeated the final response in unison.

  “May God, Who establishes peace in the heavens, grant peace unto us and unto all Israel….”

  Rebecca’s voice was vibrant. It was Lisa’s own prayer. She had dreamed of peace and worked for it. They would not abandon her dream, her prayer.

  “Amen.” Benjamin Nadler’s voice was sonorous, and when she looked up at him she saw that again his eyes were moist with tears.

  *

  CHARLES FERGUSON waited until the Ellenbergs’ week of mourning was over before issuing invitations to a private exhibit of Rebecca’s illustrations for the Pelican Press edition of Alan Zalenko’s poems. Again, Rebecca walked the deeply carpeted corridors and watched strangers study her work. Again, she stood before her drawings, and Benjamin Nadler stood at her side. She watched his pen fly across the pages of his
pad, making swift, cryptic notes, although he knew these pictures well, had watched them come into being.

  The managing director of the Pelican Press hurried up to her. The drawings were wonderful. The book would be a great success, a classic. Would she be available to undertake other projects?

  “Mrs. Arnon’s future plans are uncertain,” Benjamin Nadler said politely.

  Rebecca held her vellum-bound copy of the book tightly. It was a beautiful volume, and she would have always been haunted by regret if she had not undertaken the drawings. Yehuda had been right to encourage her to stay.

  Benjamin made no notes as they stood before the double-folio pen-and-ink sketch of the lonely beach after a snowfall. Rebecca had captured the ambience of loneliness as drifting snow whirled about misshapen dunes and long fingers of glittering ice trembled on the barren branches of beach-plum bushes. Low horizontal clouds streaked the sky and cast ominous shadows across the beachhead, yet a pale crescent of sun would not be obscured. It formed a coronet of hope above the wintry desolation.

  “You did that on the day after the storm.” He remembered.

  She nodded and thought of how he had held her close on the widow’s walk and wrapped his bright green muffler about her neck.

  They left the gallery and, once outside, blinked against the sudden brightness of the spring sunlight. Young women in light-colored linen suits hurried down the street, and men set down their attaché cases, loosened their ties, and purchased bunches of flowers from the vendors who stood on every corner.

  “How far away Nantucket seems,” Benjamin said.

  “Our winter island.” Rebecca’s voice was wistful but not regretful.

  Like invalids, they had withdrawn to that seabound, snow-glazed landscape that so exactly matched their own winter of despair. There, isolated and alone, they had ministered to each other’s loneliness. They had defied storm and cold and wakened each other to warmth and caring. They had confronted encroaching darkness and risen to canescent dawns. They had gathered strength and reassured each other, and now, standing in a patch of sunlight in front of a gleaming plate-glass window that mirrored their upturned faces, they acknowledged their separate recoveries.

  “You’re going back to Israel—back to Yehuda?” He had known since Lisa’s funeral that she would leave him.

  She nodded.

  “I must. I want to.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll have a good life in California.”

  “I hope so,” he said cautiously, and she smiled. They were too wise for certainty.

  Again, he walked her to Grand Central station, and in the familiar dimness of the terminal, he kissed her gently. She took his hand and held it, and then, briefly, pressed his fingers to her lips.

  “Goodbye.”

  “God bless.”

  The roaring train muted their farewells.

  *

  WHENEVER Yehuda Amon remained at Kibbutz Sha’arei ha-Negev for any length of time, he asked to be assigned to the avocado grove. He loved to work among the tall trees, checking them for dead or withered branches, allowing the pale green leaves to brush his face. Even after all the years he had lived on kibbutz, he retained a fascination for the mystery of growing things, and he watched with wonder as the small flower, devoid of petals, evolved into the ripe, slender-necked, pear-shaped fruit. The work in the grove was difficult. In addition to the pruning, he checked the irrigation and the fertilizer and studied the tender bark for insect pests and fungus diseases. He was usually weary by the end of the working day, but it was the pleasant fatigue that comes with a physical task competently accomplished. He preferred it to the terrible weariness that swept over him at day’s end in hotel rooms in foreign capitals or in the conference rooms of the Defense Ministry in Jerusalem.

  He had worked late that May afternoon, trying to pinpoint a leak in one of the underground feeder pipes, and he was exhausted when he returned to his bungalow. He showered and listened to the news, his face darkening. He switched the radio off and went to the window. The peaceful scene gave lie to the newscaster’s ominous report. Surely, he was not looking at a community poised on the brink of war.

  Small children laughed and chattered as they played on the lawn. Two older men played chess beneath an acacia tree, intently observed by a group of boys. A girl hung a bright yellow blouse out to dry on the rail of her porch. The desert heat would dry it within the hour, Yehuda knew, and he thought of how Rebecca loved to wear such a garment, newly dried and smelling of sunlight. He leaned forward and listened as women called to one another from their windows.

  “Aliza, please bring me grapes from the dining hall when you go.”

  “Chava, can I borrow a cup of milk?”

  The tiny two-burner gas stoves hissed and kettles and pots clattered as the women busied themselves importantly with the light pre-dinner snack. Rebecca had never been able to understand the Eastern European custom of having a hot drink at this hour, in the desert heat. Always, she had kept a pitcher of iced tea in their small fridge, with sprigs of fresh mint floating in the amber liquid. There was nothing in the fridge now except a bottle of Maccabee beer and the tins of fruit juice he kept on hand for Yaakov and Amnon, who were off to the Galilee on their school trip. The curriculum planners had not waited for the traditional outing at the end of the semester. They read the headlines carefully. Examinations were coordinated with Egyptian troop movements; class excursions to the north depended on Syrian maneuvers.

  A group of young people sat beneath a dwarf palm tree and sang softly as a bearded volunteer from Germany strummed his guitar. They sang the words from Ecclesiastes in Hebrew, in German, in English.

  “To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose…”

  Their voices, fluid with sadness and hope, mingled with the sweet, clear mellifluence of Sara Meiri’s flute.

  A newly married couple lived in the bungalow adjacent to his own, and Yehuda could discern their lovers’ laughter, their murmurs and sighs of pleasure. An almost corporeal loneliness suffused him. Always, at this hour, he missed Rebecca most keenly. The small sitting room was permeated with her presence. Her paintings hung on the whitewashed walls, the woven fabrics of her own design covered the cushions on the narrow beige sofa. Her art books were ranged on the low coffee table. He glanced at their titles. Gombrich’s Social History of Art, a biography of Modigliani, A Study of Modern Landscape Art by Benjamin Nadler. He turned away from the portrait of the author on the jacket and went outside.

  Two men kicked a soccer ball to their young sons. Sweat darkened their fresh white T-shirts, and they moved with long-legged, easy grace, laughing as the chubby youngsters lurched after the black-and-white ball. One of the men waved to Yehuda.

  “Anything on the news?” he asked.

  Yehuda shrugged.

  “The same. Hussein is off to visit Nasser in Cairo. The mobilization continues. Eban’s done with de Gaulle and Wilson and is on his way to Washington. He’ll have as much luck there as he had in Paris and London.” Everything was in abeyance while diplomats and heads of state flew from capital to capital, their diplomatic smiles frozen into grimaces, their hearts pounding. He was relieved that he had not been asked to accompany Eban on this trip. Younger men would feed him the intelligence he needed. Rebecca was right. It was time for him to step back, to work in the avocado grove and play with his growing sons.

  The men nodded and returned to their game. Their uniforms were clean and ready, their kit bags packed. They listened at the appointed hours for their reserve call-up. But while Hussein was in Cairo and Eban was in Washington, there would be no fighting. Not yet. Impatiently they shouted at their sons to keep their eyes on the ball, to straighten their knees. Their voices were too intense. Each game might be their last; the hours of peace and play were numbered.

  Yehuda recalled how he had assured Rebecca that it was safe for her to leave the country, that there would be no war that year. His predictions had been honest,
but they had been wrong. The war clouds had darkened and lengthened during the months of her absence. The idle speculations had become fierce and certain storm warnings. They no longer spoke of “if war came—now they talked of “when.” They had not abandoned their efforts for peace, but preparation was being made for war. They were calling in all their chips, mobilizing all their resources. Yehuda had sighed with relief when he had received a cryptic letter from Lydia Goldfeder.

  “The project we discussed on Rhodes is now completed,” she had written.

  Soundlessly he thanked Aaron’s wife and reflected that his mission to Budapest was, at last, accomplished.

  “It has been good to have Rebecca with us,” Lydia had added. “Now, after all these years, we have come to know each other and we are friends.”

  He had been right, he knew then, to insist that Rebecca journey back to the States, that she reestablish contact with her family and with herself. It had been a calculated risk, but he and Rebecca had never shied away from dangerous odds.

  They had needed the time apart. He had sensed her restlessness, the wistful regret in her voice when she spoke of family and friends, of the New York art world. It was only right that she know what it was to live the life she had once abandoned. He traced her mood in part to his own desperate weariness. He had been numbed by mourning and fatigue. He had reacted to Noam’s death by undertaking too many assignments, keeping himself so busy that he would not have time to sink into the bitter depression that threatened him. He had withdrawn from Rebecca then, he knew, because he had felt himself unable to reassure her and sustain her.