They had hovered at the edge of a dangerous precipice, each claimed by a separate past, trapped by disparate fears and memories. They struggled with oddly matched bits of grief and yearning. In the heat of the desert night they lay rigid beside each other, haunted by thoughts of what might have been. She thought of autumn walks through a Vermont forest, and he remembered a clearing in Czechoslovakian woodland. More than once he saw her study Leah’s painting of the maple tree that stood sentinel in the garden of her girlhood.
There had been no alternative to her leaving. He had gambled and so had she. He prayed now that the war would not come before their cards were called, their dice revealed.
The newly married couple emerged from their bungalow and smiled at him with the benign kindness that lovers bestow on those who are alone. The young bride’s fair hair was damp and her skin was bright, polished by touch and caress. Her husband licked at his smile, struggled to subdue his joy. He did not want to offend Yehuda Arnon, whose wife had been in America these many months. He would never let his own wife travel so far for so long. Yehuda hurried away before they could invite him to join them for coffee.
He turned and walked to the sand crater, slatted now by the shadows of dusk. Once, he and Rebecca had slept beneath the natural fortress and watched the light of dawn turn its ocher crest the color of fading firelight. Once they had climbed to its summit and surveyed the small kingdom of their settlement. The twin Christ’s-thorn trees had seemed joined from such a height, their branches ensnared and entangled. They had imagined the trees as clinging lovers who would not be parted, and they, in turn, had clung close to each other on their sandy parapet.
He stood in the protection of the crater’s shade now and watched as two egrets in search of a nesting place circled its crown. Briefly they rested and then soared northward toward the Dead Sea, their white wings flashing in twinned sweep through the vinous sky. He watched them and thought it wondrous that they should move as one. He remembered the days when he had moved as one with his young American bride.
“Rebecca. Rivka,” he said softly, and his heart turned with longing.
“Rebecca. Rivka,” he repeated in a stronger voice that resounded in the silent twilight. He trembled with loneliness. He stood alone now, on a desert plain, yet once, in this same springtime season, he had walked with her through the fields of the Galilee and anemones had blazed in scarlet fires at their feet.
“Rivka.” He whispered again because her name comforted him.
“Yehuda.”
He did not turn. Surely, he had imagined her answering call, the tremulous softness of her voice. He had heard that solitude and loneliness played such cruel tricks.
“Yehuda.” His name again, and then the sound of footsteps running lightly across the desert floor. Fearfully, yet not without hope, he turned, saw her moving toward him, and knew that he was not deceived. How beautiful she was, her silver-streaked black hair falling to her shoulders, her deeply inset green eyes like jewels against her topaz skin. Her arms were outstretched, and he rushed into them and encircled her in the strength of his embrace, in the fullness of his love.
“You’re home,” he said. “You’ve come home.”
“Home,” she repeated, and her tears seared his shoulder.
A Kfir plane, flying very low, streaked through the sky, but they did not look up. They stood as one in the shadow of the sand crater until the first stars of evening, like vagrant silver shards, lit the desert sky.
JOURNEY’S END
Sha’arei ha-Negev, 1978
SUMMER ends slowly, languorously, in Israel. Gradually, the feral heat diminishes, and often, in late afternoon, the sky darkens and a sudden rain cools the air, pelting it with rapidly falling lucent droplets. Children skip through the downpour with the fierce gaiety born of the knowledge that the season of carefree days, of hot golden hours and warm starlit evenings, will soon be over. Adults lift their faces to the falling rain and do not brush away the drops that moisten their cheeks, jewel their lashes. The old stand at their windows and watch the lovers who hover in doorways or sprint laughingly through the glittering showers.
In the countryside the grain is stacked in shining sheaves, and baled blocks of hay border the fields that lie fallow, resting and waiting. The cattle nibble at the stubbled gleanings, and flocks of terns and egrets wing their way southward to their nesting places along the Red Sea. They perch briefly on trees long since stripped of their bright fruit and sing the mournful melodies of their flight. It is the Hebrew month of Elul, when the Book of Life is inscribed, when atonement is made and accounts are closed. It is the season of solemn ending and hopeful beginning.
The tall silver-haired woman paused in her walk across the desert hillside to pull her bright blue shawl tighter about her shoulders and to shift the basket of golden dates she carried from one hand to the other.
“Are you tired, Grandma?” the dark-haired girl who walked beside her asked.
“A little.” Leah smiled down at her granddaughter Shlomit. “But then an old woman has the right to get tired.”
“You’re not old!” Shlomit was indignant. She knew about old people. She often accompanied her mother when Mindell attended the clinic. Shlomit had seen the elderly as they sat quietly in the Golden Age room at the Ellenberg Center, unread magazines on their laps, their voices low, their faded eyes filling suddenly and inexplicably with tears. Her grandmother Leah was not like them. She was always busy, completing one project and formulating plans for another, although Shlomit had noticed that often, as now, she paused abruptly, as though to gather new strength. But still her eyes were bright, her hands quick and skillful, her laughter strong.
Old people were submissive, Shlomit knew. They moved their magazines aside and followed the aides to the lunchroom. They obediently produced color snapshots of their children and their grandchildren. Leah carried no snapshots. She needed no celluloid reminders of her children; their lives were part of her own. Shlomit’s family and her aunt Lydia and uncle Aaron and their children gathered each Friday evening at Leah’s Scarsdale home. She had refused to move when Grandfather Boris died. (Shlomit mourned him still. She had loved him for his wonderful stories and his sad eyes, and she had been glad that his death had been gentle. He had gone to sleep one night and had not awakened again. “I want to die like that,” Shlomit had told her mother, and she had been angry when Mindell held her too tightly and would not let her go.)
“Of course I will not move,” Leah had said angrily when Uncle Aaron suggested she move in with him.
And it was Leah who made the arrangements for the journey the family made together each year to Sha’arei ha-Negev. Her voice was vigorous as she arranged for tickets, assigned tasks. She was not like the old people who touched Shlomit with quivering fingers as she passed them.
“All right. So I’m not old,” Leah said agreeably, and she smiled at Michael’s daughter. It was not right, she knew, to have a favorite granddaughter, and yet there was something special about Shlomit. The child’s eyes sparkled with warmth and she ran with a litheness and grace that reminded Leah of her sister Mollie as a young girl. Shlomit’s laughter was swift and bell-like, yet often she would sit quietly, lost in a world of fantasy. Always, she had sung softly to herself—a sweet-voiced, black-haired child named for peace, a dreamer, shy and fragile.
Leah looked up. A single, smoke-colored cloud drifted across the azure sky and shadowed the sand crater. The rain, when it came, lasted only minutes, long enough to dislodge a porcupine from its sunbaked rock. The indignant animal scurried between them and they laughed. Leah’s mirth lit her lined face, and Shlomit’s laughter rang with startled joy.
Leah’s children and grandchildren sat on the covered patio and watched them, and she, in turn, lifted her eyes as she approached Rebecca’s cottage. She saw Yehuda touch Rebecca’s cheek, heard Lydia laugh softly. Aaron stood between Mindell and Michael, his hands resting lightly on their shoulders. The grandchildren were clustered a
bout the Monopoly board, Shlomit’s young brothers perched on the laps of their older cousins. The sun that had so swiftly followed the rapid shower wrapped them in a circlet of light.
Leah smiled. Her children were friends to one another, and their children, in turn, laughed and played together. David would have been pleased. David. They would go together to his grave that evening—she and her children and grandchildren. But now she felt the familiar sweet fatigue that overcame her, with increasing frequency, each afternoon.
“Are you tired, Mother?” Rebecca went to meet her, frowning slightly.
“A little,” Leah acknowledged. “I think I will go to the bungalow and lie down.”
“You look tired also, Shlomit,” Mindell said worriedly. Shlomit was recently recovered from the late summer cold that attacked her each year at the onset of school.
“Come, Shlomit. Keep your grandmother company,” Leah said cajolingly as the child drifted over to the Monopoly board.
“We’ll start a new game with you later,” Seth promised his cousin. He shook his flame-colored curls and winked conspiratorially.
Shlomit smiled. She loved her cousin Seth. She wondered if Uncle Aaron had looked like him when he was younger. She wondered if it was all right for first cousins to marry each other.
“All right,” she said.
She was tired, and it would be cool in the small room across the hall from her grandmother. The desert air conditioning moistened the air, and her mother always closed the shutters.
She took her grandmother’s hand, and together they walked across the compound to the guest bungalow.
“Have a good rest, Shlomit,” Leah said, and the child smiled sleepily.
Minutes later, when Leah entered the room, Shlomit lay asleep on the bed, one sandal on and one sandal off. Gently she removed the sand-caked shoe. She left the door open and returned to her own room. Afternoon naps, she thought gratefully. The luxury of the very young and the very old.
She glanced at the luminous green dial of her bedside clock and closed her eyes in sweet surrender to the kaleidoscopic dreams that teased the light sleep of daylight. She was a young girl again, dancing in the tall grass of the Russian woodlands, her dark hair garlanded with the crimson flower they had called the Blood of Russia. Yet suddenly she wept and hurried toward the shelter of a lombardy tree. The tree’s trunk opened and became a ship. Sea spray kissed her face, its saline moisture matching the tears that filled her eyes. “Leah.” David called her name in a voice so gentle it broke her heart. “Mama.” The baby Aaron clutched her skirt. Children’s laughter. Rebecca the girl, Michael the child, hurtling toward her across a sun-dappled lawn. “My Leah.” A man’s voice, tense with anguish, with desire. Eli. Her long-ago lover lost in flames. How they had licked toward her that long ago Friday, a city day of desert heat.
She writhed in her sleep.
She remembered those flames, those fiery golden tongues, the smoke that darkened and poisoned the air, searing her throat, weighting her limbs. She screamed but no sound came—a dream-bound cry that thrust her into wakefulness.
She struggled to open her eyes—why did they burn and smart so?—to look at the bright green numerals of her clock. She jerked forward. She could not see them. They were obscured by the spiraling smoke that filled her small room.
“Grandma!” Shlomit’s voice, trembling with terror, pierced the wall. “Help me, Grandma.”
“I’m coming.” Her voice rasping, unfamiliar.
She struggled through the smoke and flung open the door. Flames danced in the narrow corridor that separated the two rooms. Rivulets of fire flowed into a great incandescent wave. She plunged through it, felt the fire singe her hair, smelled her own charred flesh. Still she rushed to the child’s bed, wrapped her in the blanket.
“It’s all right, Shlomit. I’m here.”
The small girl was heavy in her arms, her sweet-singing grandchild named for peace. Again she passed through that rush of flame, staggering beneath the child’s weight, her head down, her eyes closed lest the bright scarlet and golden wavelets blind her. The door to the guesthouse was open; she glimpsed the clear air outside and labored toward it. Her breath and strength ebbed. The child sobbed; her hot tears seared Leah’s cheeks. There were inches to go, but she saw them as miles; each small step exhausted her. Somewhere an alarm sounded and screams pierced the air.
“Mama!” Rebecca’s voice strident with terror.
“Shlomit!” Michael calling with desperation to his daughter.
Once before she had been imprisoned by gates of flame. Memory surged forth, memory mined from dream.
“Jump, Leah!” Eli had shouted at her. “Jump!” He had kissed her on the lips and thrust her forward. Now, as if in a trance, she kissed Shlomit on the lips and thrust her toward that open door, toward that clear air.
“I have her!”
Michael lurched forward and Leah saw with joy that he held his daughter. Shlomit was safe.
Painfully now, she edged forward, fighting the great heaviness that had settled on her. Pain and fatigue slowed her steps and each breath was a labored effort. It would be so easy, she thought, to lean back. Perhaps the columns of flame would support her. Their phosphorescent light teased and beckoned. Still, she resisted and struggled on. One more step. Two. She gained the doorway and paused. She wondered why it was that Rebecca clung to Yehuda—why Aaron and Lydia wept as they rushed toward her.
“It’s all right,” she said. Aaron. Rebecca. Michael. Soundlessly her lips formed their names. “It’s all right.”
Slowly then, she stepped out of the embrasure of flames, swayed and fell onto the soft and fragrant grass. They knelt beside her—Rebecca’s cheek upon her own, Michael’s face against her hair, Aaron’s hand upon her wrist.
“Mama.” Aaron’s voice caressed the word; but a last, gentle smile played upon her lips and her children knew that she would not answer them again. She had, at last, reached journey’s end.
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