Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “I shall cable my husband tonight and tomorrow morning we shall go together to the American Embassy. I shall do anything I can to help you,” Leah said.

  She and Frederic Heinemann rose to leave and when the two men shook hands Leah saw Frederic Heinemann slip a folded bill into Herr Schreiber’s hand. Impulsively she pressed her lips to Frau Schreiber’s cheek. The German woman’s skin was paper-thin.

  “Have courage,” Leah said in Yiddish. “We will do what mothers have always done. We will hope.”

  Tears blazed brilliantly in the German woman’s pale eyes. She made no move to hide them but stood erect and said firmly, in a clear voice, “Of course, we will hope, Madame. Hope—Hatikva—you see how well we have chosen the title of our people’s anthem.”

  That night Leah wrote long letters to her brother Moshe in Palestine and to her family in New York. Her meeting with the Schreibers had convinced her that the situation in Europe was even worse than they suspected. She told both her brother and her husband of her increased determination to make the arduous journey to Russia as soon as her business at the Italian showings was completed.

  *

  The Bessarabian Express moved at a rapid pace during the daylight hours, but as night swept across southern Russia, with a stern, dark swiftness that banished daylight without the gentle benediction of sunset, the wheels turned more slowly and occasionally ground to a full stop as though the motorman himself had been narcotized by the thick folds of night. Leah Goldfeder had drawn the thick green-velvet curtains of her compartment even while the silvery-pale summer daylight still lit the forests where slender pines swayed gracefully and stretched skyward, interspersed by narrow birch groves that shimmered with ghostly luster.

  The Russian farmers had had a good summer and when they passed cultivated countryside, the feathery wheat was thick across seemingly endless acres. Field workers, stripped to their waists, vaulted upward on their tractor seats and waved to the passing train. At short station stops, crowds of children boarded the train and sold the passengers the first fruits of the summer harvest—thick green pears and strangely shaped cylindrical apples with a fruit of tender, sweet whiteness beneath the gleaming red peel. The children were barefoot but sunburned and cheerful, and the most enterprising group—on whom the lessons of the Communist collective had clearly been lost—carried with them garlands of braided wild flowers which they sold to the women passengers. Leah had bought such a necklace, remembering then how she and Malcha had braided similar strands on lazy afternoons, lying near the small creek and hiding from their mother who searched them out to help in the kneading of dough, the chopping of fish, or to assist in the small dusky stall she called her shop. Malcha had used the long-stemmed wild lilacs while Leah searched out the bright-red blossom they called “Blood of Russia,” which she threaded with delicate golden buttercups. She had made just such a braided floral crown for Yaakov during the brief lost days of that marriage which seemed to her a dream now except when she looked at Aaron’s flaming hair.

  As the train sped on through the fields Aaron’s father had known and loved, she recalled the lean toughness of Yaakov’s body and remembered how that garland of red and gold flowers had sat atop his coppery curls and fallen at last to the clean, newly cut wooden planks beside their marriage bed. In the morning it was wilted and the proud “Blood of Russia” was tattered, drying petals.

  As the train sped through fields aglow with the soft-petaled sunlight of the fragile buttercups, her eyes unexpectedly brimmed with tears. She wept then, for the first time in many years, for the brief months of her first marriage and for the terrible years of uncertainty that had marked the childhood of Yaakov’s son who had been denied his father’s name. She had advised Frau Schreiber to hope, but how often, in those lost years, she herself had turned from hope. It was then that she had drawn the drapes of her compartment and turned in sad resignation to the papers in her portfolio.

  The sketches she had made at the French and Italian shows had been mailed to Seymour. She and Frederic Heinemann had agreed to work together, comparing their drawings and pooling their ideas. They had arranged to correspond with each other and Frederic Heinemann had been pained when Leah suggested that her letters to him should be signed by Charles Ferguson and posted from Charles’s address.

  “If Aryan veterinarians are forbidden to treat Jewish dogs, I do not think the authorities will look kindly on your relationship with a Jewish firm in New York,” she said gently, trying to inject some weak semblance of humor into the situation that those who gathered in the Schreibers’ tiny rooms on the Rue des Rosiers regarded as ludicrous.

  But Frederic Heinemann had not laughed.

  “All this will pass. It must. If I did not believe that it would pass I would be fearful for myself and Heinz. Such a regime tolerates no irregularities, no friendships that are too involved and beyond the norm.” He sighed and clasped and unclasped his fine long fingers.

  But as her stay in Europe was prolonged, Leah was convinced that there was little cause for optimism. In Italy she watched Mussolini’s blackshirted young Fascisti march up and down dusty boulevards. They were much admired by citizens and tourists, who spoke admiringly of the wonder of trains that now ran on time and the new highways and bridges that were solving unemployment problems in Italy the way Hen Hitler, in his wisdom, had solved them in Germany. On the small steamer that carried her across the Adriatic Sea to meet her rail connections for Russia, she saw groups of Jewish passengers huddled together. Unable to obtain visas elsewhere, they were en route to the Asian countries, carrying their battered suitcases, their sacks of cooking utensils, and their carefully shrouded Torah scrolls to the mountains of Japan, the teeming streets of Hong Kong. She was relieved then that Seymour had been able to obtain visas for the Schreibers and had written offering Herr Schreiber employment with S. Hart.

  Now, as the train thundered on through Bessarabia, along the coast of the Black Sea where tiny fishing hamlets were still lit by wicks fitfully nourished with kerosene so that they danced nervously in the velvet darkness, she put the final touches on the sketches she had made in Rome. She would post them in Odessa, she thought, and go on to her parents’ village in the morning. Her hands trembled as she worked and once she lifted a corner of the drape and stole a fearful look at the lights of the city where her journey had begun.

  “Almost there, almost there,” the whirling wheels of the train sang, and she shivered slightly and gathered her things together, barricading herself behind her suitcases and watching small groups of passengers assemble in the narrow train corridor. A young mother, her pale, almost colorless hair neatly tucked beneath a dark-blue kerchief, knelt to lift a sleeping child and Leah wondered if Michael, her small laughing boy, was sleeping too, in the cool of the distant mountain country in New York State.

  Odessa had changed very little in the seventeen years since she had left, and as she wandered the cobblestone streets in search of a driver who would take her to her parents’ village, she chided herself for thinking that the city would be any different. The changes had occurred within herself and her own life. The streets she had known as a student and later as a young bride were immutable. Their names had changed—the Boulevard of the Czars was now People’s Square—but the streets themselves were the same. New lives filled the flats and cafés where she and her friends had sat and talked, planned and dreamed. There were, of course, small monuments to those plans. Here, on a familiar corner where Yaakov had once mounted a cobbler’s bench to argue for shared distribution of food, there was now a cooperative restaurant for workers. A small industrial district had grown up and over each small factory building the red flag of the Revolution fluttered. On her way to the post office, Leah passed groups of young women, each holding the hand of a small child and carrying a tin lunch box. They were, she supposed, on their way to one of the many government nurseries where the children stayed while the mothers worked in the factories.

  The post office, where she
mailed her letters home to the family and dispatched the last of the Italian sketches to Seymour, was not far from the square where she and David had sat on that autumn evening so many years ago. She walked over to it and saw that the café across the way, where mournful violins had played songs of hopeless love, had been torn down and replaced with a Komsomol meeting hall decorated with an enormous picture of Josef Stalin. The small park itself was deserted at midmorning on this summer day, but in a shaded corner, near a ragged hedge, two boys kicked a scarred black-and-white soccer ball at each other. No, they replied in answer to her strange question, posed in the scraps of Russian she had all but forgotten so that she had to rip the words into her consciousness, they knew of no old woman who frequented this park, though they often played here, even in the evening. They had never seen such a woman. But was it true that Leah came from the United States, and if so did she know Clark Gable? They had stood for hours in the line to see Mutiny on the Bounty and they hoped to see it again. Leah disappointed them when she admitted that she had never seen Clark Gable, even from a distance, and they were incredulous when she explained that the distance from New York to California was like the distance from Odessa to Paris. However, they were pleased when she found some American coins in her purse and argued over the one stamp she gave them until she found another.

  The driver whom Leah finally located, however, knew of the woman she inquired about.

  “Bryna Markevich—a name like that. I remember her. Sometimes when I was a small boy and played here she tried to give me coins or candies. She was always running to the train station. There was some story about her husband that my grandmother told me. I think it was that he deserted her and she could never believe it, and so she kept waiting for his train. Yes—I’m sure that was it.” He nodded with satisfaction.

  The driver, who sported a glossy Stalin moustache, was very young, barely twenty. He must have been a toddler, wheeled in a stroller, when Leah left Russia. He was Jewish but spoke no Yiddish and he wore the bright-red scarf of the Komsomol. A child of the Revolution, born to the glories of the brave new world, he was unable and unwilling to believe in the terrors of the years gone by. He did not conceal his incredulity as Leah told him the true story of Bryna Markevich.

  “She was not deserted. Her husband was killed in the terrible pogroms of 1903. He was on a train journey and she could never believe that he had been so brutally murdered and was not coming home.”

  “Come now.” The young driver was scornful. “That is all reactionary propaganda. Russians did not murder wantonly like that. The Jews suffer from historic fantasy—we call it, at my dialectic seminar, a delusion of history. Do you know what xenophobia is, Madame? It is the Jewish disease which they have no desire to cure. Believe me, I know. I live in a family of such sufferers. My father—and he fought with Gregoriev, mind you—sees an anti-Semite behind every Gentile face. Surely an intelligent woman from the United States of America knows better.

  “Three years ago, maybe four, we had a terrible winter here in Odessa. Blizzard followed blizzard and there was difficulty obtaining fuel. The public places, the parks and squares became mountains of snow and when at last the spring came and they were able to clear through the melting snow, they found the old woman, Bryna Markevich, frozen to death on a bench in the park. Like a statue she sat there, a Bible open on her lap, they say, and the snow-diggers were frightened and would not touch her. It was the police who carried her away, her hair bright with ice and her breath frozen about her open mouth. Some say they buried her sitting up because they could not force the body to recline.”

  He laughed harshly but she heard the fear in his voice and asked no more questions. They drove the rest of the way in silence and when they reached the village of Partseva, he opened the car door for her, a small courtesy she had not expected.

  The village square, with its cracked cobblestones and leaking pump, was exactly as it had been. The town hall, recalled through the years as an edifice of importance whose polished floors had the official odor of carbolic and where windows of real glass framed the gold-edged sunset of the vast Russian skies, was a modest two-story building. Through the doorway she saw a harassed clerk sip cold tea and nervously tap rimless spectacles against a splintering wooden counter.

  Leah, in her navy-blue suit with a cape to match, of her own design and Seymour’s manufacture, stood nervously near her hired car. Her arrival had already spiked curiosity and small groups gathered to stare at her in front of the planked tables that served as open-air counters for the village vendors. There were very few men in the square, and the small, wide-eyed children stared at her, hiding behind their mothers’ skirts.

  In this village they had not forgotten Yiddish and she heard the shrill whispers of the children.

  “Look Mama, she does not wear a shetel.” The strange woman who had arrived in a motorcar wore no marriage wig, and Leah nervously passed her fingers through her cropped black hair and noticed that the women, who moved closer to her now, automatically adjusted the squares of cloth that covered their shorn heads. Their marriage wigs stood in brocaded cases in a corner of the closet, reserved for the Sabbath. That, too, she had forgotten and she felt a strange melancholy for all that had been lost to her—her father’s voice, her mother’s light laughter, the voices of her own children tumbling from infancy to childhood. Life happened too quickly—passages were too swift. Names deceived and places were lost.

  “Leah—Leahle—is it you, after all these years?” The woman who rushed toward her was their neighbor, Shaindel Lichter, and Leah’s heart leapt up, remembering that it was Shaindel who had traveled to Odessa for Leah’s marriage to Yaakov, carrying with her an embroidered matzoh cloth which adorned the table in Brighton Beach on Passover. She fell into Shaindel’s outstretched, welcoming arms and breathed in the remembered smell of camphor and garlic, mingled with a fragrance of lilac talc—a powder which Shaindel ground herself from the purple blossoms that grew so profusely in her tiny courtyard. Amid all that she had forgotten, all the spidery memories that had drifted into nothingness, Leah remembered herself, a small girl with long black braids, importantly pounding away with mortar and pestle in Shaindel’s garden, her small being suffused with the scent of lilac which she could never forget.

  “Ach, Leah. Such a journey. You must be hot. Come, have some water.”

  The crowd of women and children parted respectfully as Shaindel led Leah to the communal water pump which stood in a corner of the square.

  Leah drank thirstily from the tin cup which dangled from a rusty chain, tasting in the cold sweet water the remembered subtle metallic flavor of the waters of the town stream. She looked wonderingly about her, marveling at the scene that had changed so little since her childhood. Russia had endured a revolution but the village of Partseva remained as it had been. Leah watched as a young woman plodded toward the pump, a small child clutching her skirt and two buckets balanced across her shoulders on long poles. She filled the buckets at the pump, bending her body low with a dancer’s easy balance as though the arduousness of her life had trained her body to perform with skill. A few drops of water fell on the fair-haired child, who laughed suddenly and coaxed smiles from the tired faces of those around them.

  “So tell me, Leah—how does it feel to be back in Russia? And how is your David? The children we know about it. Your parents, God bless them and keep them to a hundred and twenty, read us your letters and show us the pictures. Ach, I should have gone to America then too. Look at you. A noblewoman you look to be. And David is a doctor?”

  “Well, I am not a noblewoman but David is a doctor,” Leah said, wiping a trickle of water from her chin. “But I must see my parents. Will you come with me, Shaindel?”

  Suddenly she was afraid. Perhaps she would be a stranger to the man and woman who had given her life, perhaps they would be alien to her. Seventeen years had passed since she had seen her parents and although they had written and exchanged photographs, she could not summon up
a mental image of her mother and father. It was a curious inability. She had not seen her brother Moshe and his wife Henia in as many years, yet she could close her eyes and see them—tall Moshe and his delicate wife whose fragility had not prevented her, when she surprised a group of Arab marauders near the kibbutz children’s house, from banishing them into the darkness with blasts from her rifle. But Leah’s parents remained shadowy figures to her—they drifted through her thoughts only as a silent bearded man and a sad-faced woman who had always been bewildered by their second daughter. She had crossed an ocean, and then a continent, to see them, but now she felt restrained by this strange hesitancy.

  “Such a question. Of course I’ll come with you,” Shaindel said. She was thoroughly enjoying her importance as Leah’s guide and she straightened her blouse, rolled down her sleeves, and brushed her full dark skirt. “Come, I will find someone to mind my stall.”

  Shaindel’s stall was a long planked table, tented by two frayed blue cotton blankets, on which small jars of medicinal herbs and sweet-smelling powders were arrayed. Now Leah recalled Shaindel’s reputation as a curer. There was no doctor in the village and the nearest Jewish physician, who also served as a dentist, lived in Odessa. There were few automobiles in the village and saddle horses and carts drawn by donkeys stood in front of the inn. With transport so limited, Shaindel’s business thrived. She distributed her homemade potions and drugs, applied massages, extracted teeth with a huge pair of pliers, and, on occasion, served as midwife and cupper.