by Ruth Gruber
Raquela felt blood rush to her head. What kind of world do we live in that women have to give birth in a prison? What crimes have these women committed? That they’re Jews? And they want to go home?
The mother woke up from the anesthesia. “How is my baby?”
Raquela stood at her side. “Your baby was stillborn. But you’re all right.”
The mother screamed, “Even this they deny me! They take away my land. My freedom. Now my baby. Let me die. I want to die.”
Raquela held the sobbing woman in her arms. Tears ran down her cheeks. “You’re young,” she told the mother, her own voice choking. “You’re healthy. You’ll have other babies in the Holy Land.”
“Let me die.”
The next morning, Raquela confronted Dr. Carr in his office. Her face was ashen.
“I will not do another delivery unless there is a doctor on the grounds all the time.”
He looked at her in amazement. “I’ve never seen you so upset.”
“I’ve lost two babies. Both of them might be alive, if you—if a doctor—were here.”
“You know why I go home at night, Miss Levy. My wife needs me. My baby needs me.”
“These women need you, too. Unless a gynecologist is on duty all the time for emergencies, I will not deliver another baby.”
“My dear young woman, you’re being unreasonable.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Carr. I’m going back to Hadassah today. You’ll have to find another midwife.”
“Not so hasty, young lady. I know I should have been here when you needed me. I’ll get Haifa and ask them to send me some clothes. I’ll move into a barracks in the hospital compound. Now, please, let’s not have any more difficulties.”
Raquela was not ready to agree. “What happens on your day off?”
“I’ll send a doctor from Haifa to cover.”
Raquela nodded. “I’ll stay.”
Four weeks passed.
The desk calendar lay untouched.
Six weeks. Seven weeks. She knew she could go to Haifa and telephone Dr. Yassky. You said it would be for three or four weeks. It’s nearly two months. Why don’t you send a replacement?
She never telephoned.
On a boiling-hot afternoon she lay on her cot for a quick nap. Little steps scampered overhead on the tin roof. She knew they were rats searching for food in the storage partition next to her room. Often they kept her awake at night. But this was afternoon.
Day or night, rats terrified her. With her head on the pillow, she shut her eyes.
Suddenly she screamed. A rat had found its way into her room and leaped, landing in her long hair. She shook her head free and raced in panic out of the barracks.
I’ve got to get out of here, she thought frantically. Out. Out. I can’t take anymore.
She was running down the Walkover, toward the entrance gate. Men and women crowded around, some touching her arm.
“My baby is sick…”
“Can you get me more milk?…”
“The sore you bandaged is healing…”
“How can I thank you?…”
“I felt some pains this morning. Do you want me to come to the delivery room this afternoon?…”
“You look so pale. Soon you’ll look the way we do. Please take care of yourself. We need you…”
She stopped running. She felt currents of love eddying toward her from the ragged people. What was a rat, compared to their agony and need? She turned around and reentered the hospital.
Late in the afternoon, Raquela put on a bathing suit beneath her white uniform and took a shortcut across the hill to the sea. Before her eyes stretched an expanse of bleached white sand and beyond it the blue Mediterranean. Two worlds separated by the hated hill: back of her, dirt, filth, barracks, barbed wire, the foul smell of imprisonment; before her, cool breezes, the sea breaking on the dazzling sand, freedom.
She kicked off her white oxfords, stepped out of her uniform, and ran into the water.
THIRTEEN
JUNE 1947
A car drove up to the barbed-wire gate. A tall man showed the sentries his credentials and made his way to the hospital.
“Shalom, Miss Levy,” he extended his hand.
“Shalom, Dr. Yassky.”
They looked at each other in silence. Finally, Dr. Yassky spoke.
“I’ll send a replacement for you at once,” he said.
“You’ve seen the camp.”
He nodded. “Take a holiday, Miss Levy. Go home to Jerusalem and rest for a few weeks. Then come and see me. If you decide not to come back, I’ll understand completely. Your job is always waiting for you at the hospital. Meanwhile I’ll send a temporary replacement.”
She nodded silently.
Two days later, her replacement arrived. She said good-bye to her patients, boarded the intercity bus to Jerusalem, and slept most of the way.
At home, she kissed Mama and Papa, then retired to her bedroom. She folded back the clean printed bedspread, lay down, and fell asleep. She slept around the clock. For three days she called no one. Not even Arik.
At last she phoned him. He hurried from Mount Scopus to Bet Hakerem, held her in his arms, then stood away to look at her.
“You look good,” he said. “Do you feel the way you look?”
“I’m all right.”
“How about going downtown? There’s a Philharmonic concert tonight. Let’s have dinner early and celebrate your homecoming.”
She nodded.
Soon they were on the bus, riding past Bet Hakerem’s peaceful gardens and myriad playgrounds. In Romema the bus picked up Arab passengers; the memory of the Arab attack on the bus before her Bat Mitzvah slipped dreamlike in and out of her mind. On the street, the men in robes and keffiyehs, smoking their water pipes, looked shadowy, like sepia figures in a painting.
Now they were in the old Jewish quarter; Zayda and Bubba seemed to be dancing a Hassidic dance midair, Chagall-like. She saw them through half-opened eyes. She had long decided that a trip in a Jerusalem bus was like an instant voyage through the Middle East and the shtetls of Eastern Europe. But now, she thought, talking to herself, the shtetls of Eastern Europe are exterminated, wiped out. Still, the people live on, here in Jerusalem. Survivors, too.
As the bus continued its route, she looked at the little stone houses and open kiosks, at the men in long black coats and curled earlocks, the women in long-sleeved dresses and cotton stockings, dressed in traditional Hassidic garb despite the summer heat. But she saw them all through a haze, like a patient coming out of ether.
“You’re so quiet, Raquela,” Arik said. “Still tired?”
“A little. Though I should be slept out.”
They were now in the bustling modern quarter of new Jerusalem. Women in attractive summer dresses, men in shorts or slacks and cool open shirts, walked briskly. The buildings looked new, the shops well stocked. “Look at those people.” Raquela shook her head in disbelief. “Look at them sitting in cafés, as if nothing has happened. Eating, talking, laughing. Look at them in front of that greengrocer, filling up string bags with fresh fruit. And over there—queuing up for a movie!”
“What’s wrong with that?” Arik interrupted.
“Don’t they know about Athlit? Does life just go on?”
“This is reality, too, Raquela. I’m worried about you.”
“I don’t think I can sit through dinner and a concert,” she said.
“What would you like to do?”
“Let’s go up to Mount Scopus.”
They changed for Bus 9, as Raquela had done for more than four years. She felt her spirits lift a little as the bus passed the hospital, the nursing school, and then dropped them in front of the university.
Together they strolled slowly on the mountain she loved. The sun, setting on the Old City, washed most of the domes and steeples in gold.
“I kept expecting you to go to Haifa, to call me on the telephone,” Arik said. “When you didn’t call, I figu
red you must be working night and day.”
“The truth is, I didn’t have time to miss you. I was so busy—and so angry.”
“Anger is good, Raquela. Remember the words of the Jewish sage: ‘b’kisso, b’kosso, b’kasso.’ ‘A man is known by three things: by his pocket, his cup, and his anger.’ Your anger, my darling, is righteous anger.”
A cool wind blew up from the desert behind them. Arik put his arm around her as they walked through the university garden. The flower-scented air, the peace and serenity on the mountain above the turbulent city, Arik’s nearness, were like balm. At last the words came, released in a torrent. She began to tell him about the babies she had lost, the rats, the lack of privacy, the boredom, the open love-making, her feelings of guilt when she sought refuge in the sea.
He took her hand and held it between both of his. “You had a right to push the camp away for a few hours whenever you could. People like us, doctors and nurses, live with tragedy and death every day. If we don’t escape occasionally, we can’t function. We can break under the pressure.”
Tears formed behind her eyes. “But Arik, I could run away from the camp; they couldn’t.”
Raquela strolled through new Jerusalem looking at shop windows. She entered a dress shop on Ben Yehuda Street and rummaged through the racks. She’d been gone only two and one-half months, and already the styles had changed. The skirts were longer now, and the shoulders of suits were padded, like a football players uniform.
The salesgirl approached her, holding up a voluminous brown taffeta dress. “It’s ‘the new look.’ Christian Dior designed it. Why don’t you try it on? With your height and figure, you’d look eisen beton.”
Raquela smiled. Eisen beton, literally “iron concrete,” meant “terrific,” “supercolossal.” It was part of the new “slanguage”—a mixture of colorful words from all over the world, with Hebrew syntax.
In the fitting room she tried on the dress. Imagine turning up in Athlit with the “Dior look.” Athlit! She pushed it swiftly out of her mind. She still had time to make the decision. She looked at herself in the mirror. The dress was brown, Señora Vavá’s favorite color. That was good. And it had another advantage: it made her look older than did the cotton skirts and blouses she usually wore. Would Arik notice?
“I love it,” she told the salesgirl. “I’ll take it.”
She walked down Ben Yehuda Street as if she were a stranger in Jerusalem, feasting her eyes on the window displays of leather pocketbooks, cosmetics, bathing suits, oriental rugs, shining brass coffeepots, and round hammered trays. Ben Yehuda Street was a narrow hilly avenue that descended like an arrow into new Jerusalem’s main thoroughfare, Jaffa Road, which came all the way from Jaffa up to Jerusalem, to the portal of the Jaffa Gate, entering the Old City.
Now, at her left, she saw coils of barbed wire sealing off the big government buildings in the vast “Russian compound” with its onion-domed church and its complex of old buildings. Here were the headquarters of the British police, the CID, and the Central Prison, a low ugly stone building that was said to have been a monk’s retreat when it was built, in 1860. Now its tiny dark cells were filled with “dissenters,” the men of the underground, who could look through their iron bars at the noose and the trap.
It seemed to Raquela that the rusted wire, the concrete “dragon’s teeth,” the soldiers with submachine guns—the whole complex—had become a war zone. With typical Galgenhumor—gallows humor—the Jews nicknamed it “Bevingrad.” The British, she thought ruefully, have become prisoners of their own security measures.
She continued walking down Jaffa Road as it curved around a small hill, became King David Street, and emerged the most elegant boulevard in Jerusalem, with the King David Hotel set back on its left and the YMCA rising majestically on its right.
This is the way America must look, she thought. The Y—the Young Men’s Christian Association—had been built by Americans, and the two small streets that flanked it were named for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
But now armored cars and personnel carriers were lined up on King David Street, and soldiers with submachine guns stood on the steps of the Y, pushing back a crowd of people who seemed to be waiting for a big event.
“What’s happening?” she asked a woman.
“The members of UNSCOP are opening their hearings. We want to see what they look like.”
She nodded. She had read about UNSCOP—the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine—composed of delegates from eleven small, neutral countries.
Two months ago, on April 28, the United Nations had held a “special Palestine session.” Bevin seemed to be giving up. He had thrown the Palestine problem into the lap of the UN. The fifty-five member nations, meeting in the special session, had voted to send another committee to investigate and make recommendations.
It was the nineteenth commission on Palestine. But this committee was different: for the first time Britain was not a member of the group investigating her own role in the Holy Land.
The people watched as a fleet of Studebaker limousines pulled up. The eleven members of the committee climbed the wide stone stairs to the tree-shaded veranda, and entered the conference chamber.
Raquela stood in the crowd, holding her package in her arms. Strangers talked to one another; everyone was involved.
“Do you really think this UNSCOP committee is any different from all the others?” a woman in a large straw hat asked her neighbor, a man, carrying a briefcase, who looked like a civil servant.
“And if it is different, and they do come up with a real solution”—he shrugged his shoulders—“do you think Bevin will accept it? Remember how he turned down the Anglo-American Committee report last year?”
Raquela questioned him. “Don’t you think, this time, Bevin’s had a stomachful? After all, he went to the UN and threw it in their lap.”
“Bevin will never give up Palestine. He’s pretending now that he is neutral. You heard his line, ‘The Jews want to go to the head of the queue.’ He’s incapable of neutrality. He loves Arabs and hates Jews.”
“Then why did he turn the problem over to the UN?” she asked.
“It’s his newest trap. He didn’t go to surrender the Mandate. He wants a new mandate—this time from the UN. He’s probably sure he can convince the countries of the world that Britain is the only one that can keep law and order here.”
A boy broke into the crowd, waving a newspaper. “The three Irgunists have been sentenced to hang!”
The crowd gasped. The three Irgunists captured after breaking into the prison at Acre on May 4, 1947, were being tried in the British Military Court nearby.
The man with the briefcase turned to Raquela. “That shows you who’s running this country. Imagine choosing today. The very first day the UN committee holds its meetings. Today they have the chutzpah to fling this death sentence in the committee’s faces.”
Raquela had seen the pictures of the three condemned prisoners on wall newspapers pasted up at night by the Irgun. They looked barely eighteen or nineteen. They had hardly lived; now they were sentenced to die at the end of a rope.
From the back of the crowd, Raquela heard the voice of a young woman: “The Irgun will fight back! The Irgun will avenge this terrible deed!”
Raquela spent the next days at home, with Mama and Papa. Jacob and Yair came with their wives, and Arik, welcomed affectionately, especially by Mama, came in the evenings.
All conversation stopped the moment Papa turned on the radio in the living room for the nightly broadcast of the UNSCOP hearings.
Raquela sat on the straight-backed sofa, beside Arik, trying to concentrate. But her mind kept wandering back to Athlit. Soon she would have to make the decision. Return to Athlit—or stay.
She looked around the room; all the people she loved were here, in the small, simply furnished cottage. It’s so good to be here, she thought, and Jerusalem is so beautiful, even with all the tension and the violence and the
soldiers. Listen, a voice beguiled her, you can sleep in your own clean bed. No tents, no dirt, no rats on your roof. Privacy.
But another voice spoke even more insistently: Go back to Athlit. They need you.
Vaguely she heard the radio announcer describe the eleven members of UNSCOP. Eleven strangers, she thought, trying to decide the fate of Palestine. The fate of the Jews, the Arabs, and the British. Eleven Solomons pondering what to do with the “baby.” Give it to one of the mothers? Give it to the foster mother—Britain? Or cut it in half?
“Listen to B-G,” Jacob said, breaking into her thoughts. Ben-Gurion was Jacob’s idol.
“What the Jews need,” Ben-Gurion told the committee, “is immigration and statehood; what the Arabs need is economic development and social progress.”
Immigration and statehood, she thought. That’s what my people in Athlit want. Her mind no longer wandered, as she heard Ben-Gurion say, “We feel we are entitled to Palestine as a whole, but we will be ready to consider the question of the Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine.”
Jacob blurted, “It’s the first time B-G has come out for partition. Until now the Jewish Agency Executive has held to the original promise of a Jewish homeland in all of Palestine.”
So they might cut the baby in half after all, Raquela thought.
A few nights later, Arik came to the house for dinner. After the meal, they were to go into town, to the Philharmonic. Raquela decided to wear the new brown dress.
Arik noticed it instantly. “Turn around, Raquela,” he said, examining the strange long hemline and the padded shoulders. “Fine. Gorgeous.”
Delighted, she asked, “And don’t you think it makes me look older?”
He laughed. “Positively ancient.” Then he frowned. “But it may bring you bad luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know I’m very superstitious? People will envy you, you look so beautiful. They’ll give you the ein hora—the evil eye.”
She chuckled. “Are you afraid of black cats, too?”
“And I won’t walk under a ladder. Do you have some red thread?”
“What do you want with red thread?”
