Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Neither of you knew that the other was in Egypt?” Avram Akavia asked in surprise.

  “My father mentioned in a letter that my cousin had joined the RAF but I thought he was in Canada.”

  “And I knew that Yaakov was serving with the British but I thought he would be defending Jewish settlements in Palestine,” Aaron said. “In fact, I thought that if we got any leave at all I would take the train to Jerusalem and visit my uncle’s kibbutz.”

  “Perhaps we will do it together. It would make my father so happy! But come, let us join the others. The service is about to begin.” Yaakov tossed an arm over his cousin’s shoulder and together they advanced to the rough bench set up in front of the platform.

  A tall young soldier, sun-bronzed, his bright golden hair covered with the red beret of the British Expeditionary Forces, stood on the small rough platform holding a Torah. Like the assembled soldiers who had draped silken prayer shawls over their rough khaki uniforms, the Torah too was girded for battle, garbed in a strong gray canvas cover. Akavia glanced toward the tent entry and saw the evening shadows obscure the last shreds of light. He nodded and the group opened their prayer books and listened to the startling deep tenor of the soldier-cantor ring through the quiet desert night.

  “Kol Nidre,” the strong resonant voice sounded—“All vows, bonds, promises, obligations, and oaths with which we have vowed, sworn, and bound ourselves from this Day of Atonement unto the next Day of Atonement, of all these we repent. Let them be absolved, released, nullified, made void and of no effect; they shall not be binding nor shall they have any power. Our vows shall not be vows, our bonds shall not be bonds, and our oaths shall not be oaths.”

  “Amen!” chorused the khaki-clad congregation, who fingered the fringes of their prayer shawls and repeated the chant in unison, banishing with fervent chorus the worry over the battles that would be fought and the blood that would be shed before the next Day of Atonement. Grimly they thought of the prayer they would recite the next day—“Who shall live and who shall die—who by fire and who by water—” and trembled with the certain knowledge that some of them would surely die, some by fire and some by water.

  Toward the end of the service a British major quietly slipped into the tent. He was a lean man, somewhat shorter than most of the tall soldiers around him. He wore a dark beard and moustache that reminded Aaron of David’s. His deep-set eyes strayed from the open prayer book, which he read without difficulty, to the soldiers, who bent and swayed at prayer. His head, oddly large on that compact muscular body, was covered with a pith helmet and his field uniform was almost threadbare.

  “That’s Orde Wingate,” Gregory whispered, and Aaron turned to look at the British officer who was said to hold the key to the North African campaign.

  The service continued. The soldier-cantor’s voice rose and fell, caressed the ancient melody and issued rhythmic warnings, chanted promises. The light in the tent flickered, then burned bright with new strength. Aaron looked at his cousin. They stood shoulder to shoulder, these tall young grandsons of Avremele, the stooped Talmudic scholar, whose sad eyes stared out of the twin framed photographs—one hanging in Yaakov’s small kibbutz room and the other perched on the marble mantelpiece of Aaron’s Scarsdale home.

  The two cousins talked late into the night. They each had some snapshots with them and Aaron showed his cousin photos of Rebecca in her tennis dress, smiling mischievously into the camera, of Michael building a model airplane, of Leah and David staring seriously out over the brick walls of the terrace. He looked at Yaakov’s pictures of Moshe and Henia and his brothers, Daniel and Ethan.

  “You look so much like my mother,” Aaron said. “You have her coloring, her eyes.”

  “But I am named for your father—your natural father—Yaakov Adler. And it is you who have his coloring. When my father speaks of him he calls him the Gingi—that is the Arabic word for redhead,” Yaakov said.

  “What has your father told you about him? My parents, of course, have seldom spoken about him and sometimes, you know, I’ve thought about what he must have been like. I’ve even wondered if he and my mother were really happy together. I know they were very young but still…” Aaron’s voice trailed off and Yaakov Abrahami thrust backward in memory, focused on childhood tales of the old country—the land of Czars and commissars, of suffering and pogroms—to retrieve the half-forgotten tales of his unknown aunt’s first marriage.

  “They were happy, my parents always said. It was a love affair, not an arranged marriage. They had not been married even a year when he was killed. I remember that my parents did not go up to Palestine with the rest of their group. They waited until your mother was able to cope, to organize her life. Perhaps until she married David Goldfeder. I don’t know. They didn’t know, even when they sailed for Palestine, that she was pregnant with you, Aaron. For some reason she kept that a secret. But yes, I think they were happy together. Why do you ask such a question, Aaron?”

  Aaron did not answer. He could not tell this cousin, so newly discovered, of his childhood fear that his mother had perhaps not loved him because she had not loved the dead father who had given him life. The mystery remained his own emotional conundrum, and when he closed his eyes that night he summoned up his mother’s face and saw again the doubt and agony in her eyes as she hovered over him while he feigned the heavy sleep of exhausted boyhood.

  *

  Immediately after Yom Kippur, intensive training began for a campaign, the ultimate aim of which was still kept secret from the contingents of soldiers who readied themselves for it. Rumors were rampant and Salim distributed whispered information with the cups of steaming Turkish coffee he slid across the tin-topped tables of the El Ibrahim café. He sprinkled a name here, garnishing it with a rumored date there, served it up with a vague speculation. Squadrons were disbanded, reshuffled, and formed anew. Yaakov, Aaron, and Gregory were assigned to the same unit, with Yaakov serving as a squadron leader.

  “If Wingate were smart,” Gregory said one afternoon, “he’d put Salim on his payroll.”

  “Oh, Wingate is smart and Salim is probably on his payroll,” Yaakov answered. “But Salim must be on a dozen other payrolls, which I am sure Wingate also knows. To you Salim whispers about Italian Somaliland. To someone else he says Abyssinia. We hear that transport has been requisitioned for the spring and that there is no transport. Salim says that by Christmas Haile Selassie will be back on his throne and that the Duke of Aosta is dying of cancer. But he told Nechemiah that the Duke is mustering an enormous army to take on a French force and he told the Reuters man that ten thousand men are attached to Gideon Force. The confusion that Salim spreads with his Turkish coffee is Wingate’s special creation.”

  “Psychological warfare,” Aaron said, looking up from a letter he had just received from home. “But one thing’s for sure. Wherever we’re going we’ll be doing a lot of compass marching. That’s the thing Wingate’s been concentrating on. And he’s got Yaakov in as advance man because Yaakov’s used to marching without roads or highways.”

  “Well, it’s true that the Negev and the Galilee don’t have too many modern highways, but I don’t think the kind of hiking I did for my botany classes could be classified as military marching.” Yaakov had been in his third year of botanical studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem when war broke out. He had had Haganah training and he joined the British army the same day Aaron had crossed the border into Montreal to become a British airman. The shadows of the Odessa pogrom, the specter of defenselessness, had reached across the years and spurred these cousins, the children of survivors, to do battle for their own survival.

  “You have had a letter from home?” Yaakov asked.

  “Yes. Finally. It takes mail so damn long to get here from New York. This letter’s dated the beginning of November and here it is almost Christmas. Not too much news.” Aaron scanned the thin sheets of tissue paper, reading scraps aloud. “My mother’s pretty involved in the lend-lease cont
racts and the factory’s so busy they’ve even got Aunt Mollie going in. My father’s practice is flooded with more and more refugees. They’re ‘totally and irrevocably traumatized,’ he says. He’s got a sort of textbook or clinical approach to letter writing. He talks that way too. To borrow from his own jargon, I’d say it was a defense mechanism. He’s such a damn sensitive man that he’s got to protect himself. Rebecca’s settling in pretty well at Bennington after her violent protests about the futility of going off to school at a time like this. Pretty dramatic, our Becca, but a lot of fun. She’s pretty much in the dark about what happened to Lisa Frawley—a girl I used to like. Went off to school in the West somewhere and was never heard from again. And there’s a postscript from Michael—he wants me to send him stamps. It doesn’t matter from what country—just send them to him. My old pal Joshua Ellenberg is probably teaching him how to sell them. The little devil—he thinks I joined the army just to set him up as a stamp collector. Everyone sends their love to you, Yaakov, and Gregory, my mother underlined three times a sentence telling you to write to your lonely mother—so write to your lonely mother, write to your lonely mother, write to your lonely mother.”

  “Oh shut up,” Gregory said. “I’m trying to listen to the bloody loudspeaker. An announcement’s coming through. Probably about a special Christmas dinner catered by Salim. Roast ass or sautéd ox buttocks. No—there are movement orders posted at HQ. Any volunteers to go over and see?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Yaakov predicted and nodded sagely as Nechemiah, the freckle-faced sharpshooter, burst into the tent.

  “We’re moving,” he said breathlessly. “All of Gideon Force. Our new posting is a place called Soba, near Khartoum, in the Sudan.”

  “The Sudan,” Yaakov said thoughtfully. “My friends, a veritable miracle. One of Salim’s rumors turns out to be the truth. We are off to Ethiopia to put Haile Selassie back on his throne.”

  *

  The camp at Soba more closely resembled a ransacked native village than a British operational center. But it was from this camp that the British hoped to launch their objective of achieving a revolt in Ethiopia from within the embattled country. Ethiopian volunteers had flocked to Soba when the news of the British initiative spread through the area with the help of Salim and men like him who peddled their gossip with skill and discretion. Some of the native volunteers had arrived with their families and Amharic-speaking women, in their long colorful skirts, baskets of laundry balanced on their heads, roamed the camp, issuing soft reprimands to the hordes of half-naked children who trailed after the arriving British soldiers.

  On their first evening in Soba, Aaron and Gregory, tossing a ball, had become aware of a small boy, his flesh limp on fragile bones, his eyes burning like dark coals in his thin black face. It occurred to Aaron that the child was Michael’s age and he reached into his pocket and offered the boy a half-melted Hershey bar.

  The boy’s name was Ato, he told them, and he had been hiding in the scrub bushes of Mount Belaiya since the Duke of Aosta’s Italian forces had crashed through the village, meeting the mild resistance of the unarmed population with savage assault. An Italian militiaman’s sword had slashed savagely through the air and severed Ato’s father’s head from his body in a single thrust, so swift and efficient that as the head toppled to the ground and rolled off into the bloodied dust, the decapitated body staggered for a few steps, the headless form motored by sheer nervous impulse, and then collapsed into a lifeless heap from which blood streamed relentlessly. Ato had gathered up his father’s head and carried it up the mountain where he talked tenderly to the frozen features, opened and closed the dark staring eyes until the eyelids froze in place, and combed the sticky dark hair with fragrant pinecones until at last a gentle older tribesman heard the boy’s frantic weeping and helped him to bury his father’s head beneath a thistle bush on which heavy purple blossoms grew.

  Ato had stayed on Mount Belaiya with a group of other refugees and traveled with them to Soba when he heard of the arrival of the Gideon Force. He followed Aaron everywhere now, attracted by the American soldier’s red hair. He had never seen hair of such a color before, and he insisted that its radiance meant that Aaron was descended from the sun itself.

  It was Yaakov who recognized Ato’s value. The boy knew the paths to Mount Belaiya and spoke both Amharic and English, which he had learned from a missionary to his village. He understood animals and nursed a passionate hatred for the Italians who had destroyed his village and murdered his father. When Yaakov told Avram Akavia about Ato, Wingate’s secretary insisted that the boy be part of the entourage that would escort Haile Selassie to the headquarters camp at the foot of Mount Belaiya. Because Ato would not leave Soba without Aaron, Aaron and Gregory were also assigned to the advance contingent. Again Aaron thought of how small incidents altered one’s life. Because he had offered a piece of chocolate to a small boy who reminded him of his brother Michael, he was now part of a historic mission that would escort the Ethiopian emperor back into his kingdom.

  When Aaron was a small boy Seymour Hart, on one of his Sunday “outings,” had taken him to a science fiction film where the expanses of the moon had been portrayed as desolate naked fields, scarred by yawning fissures and steaming lava pits. The children had been frightened by the film and for weeks afterward, as a child awakened screaming in the night, Mollie had berated Seymour for his lack of judgment. The chasmed area west of Belaiya, through which the small British unit passed with tortuous slowness, reminded Aaron of that film and he sometimes thought, as the men moved slowly forward, that it was the brutal enervating heat that had dredged up the remembered nightmare of his childhood and that even now he was caught up in a fading fantasy. But the hot wind that seared his face and sent the perspiration streaming down his thighs rooted him to reality. The stench of the dead animals that littered the road mingled with the odors of men’s vomit and feces and he knew that it was not a science fiction creation he was recalling but the terror of war that he was actually experiencing. Beside him Gregory marched, his face set in grim lines of despair. His body bent and straightened as he slowly pushed himself forward, riddled by the cramps of dysentery.

  As they pressed forward they hacked out a road of sorts with machete and ax. Small Ato darted in and out among them, weaving his way through gorges and small hillocks entangled with vines and scabrous brush. They passed the corpses of camels, their pale flesh already being consumed by the low-flying vultures which trailed knowingly after them, their widespread wings briefly shadowing the sun-drenched plateau. The birds hooted at each other and blood dribbled from their huge sharp golden beaks.

  “Damn fools to bring camels here. This isn’t their kind of country,” Yaakov said bitterly that night as they sat beside a low burning campfire.

  “Not much of a choice. The lousy Italians managed to grab every damn mule in East Africa,” Gregory said.

  He leaned back in exhaustion. The cramps had disappeared but he felt himself light with weariness, weighed down by a peculiar pressure about his head, and his body trembled with febrile intensity. A new cramp caught him unawares and he writhed in pain, pulling his legs up so that he lay curled in fetal position.

  Aaron looked at him anxiously.

  “You’ll feel better in the morning,” he said.

  Together, he and Yaakov piled every bit of clothing and covering they could find on their friend. Feebly, they tried to coax him to laughter when he could not sleep, to mine his resources of dry cynical humor, but Gregory lay back convulsed with fever and shivered even beneath the heavy covering, and when he spoke it was in the wild voice of delirium.

  “No medical officer. No quinine. Nothing but the stink of those lousy camels,” Yaakov grumbled.

  “Is it worth it?” Aaron asked wearily, wiping Gregory’s forehead with a damp cloth. Bitterly he remembered David’s warning that Hitler meant to destroy all civilization. Looking about him, at the desolate lunar landscape shrouded in shifting gra
y shadows, he wondered if all the world would look like this if Fascism succeeded.

  “Of course it’s worth it.” Yaakov’s voice was impatient. He confined his anger to the lack of water and quinine but never did he doubt the importance of the long-range goal that had set them down in this ravaged African wasteland. “You know what Wingate told us just before we came here? It was at a meeting of Jewish volunteers in Khartoum and he said: ‘Whoever is a friend of Abyssinia is a friend of the Jews. You are here for the sake of Zion.’ We must believe that, Aaron. It makes some sense of what is happening here. In the morning Gregory will be better.”

  But in the morning Gregory was dead, his body curled into a rigid arc, his hands reaching toward the vanished fire as though to seize the warmth of the lingering embers. They fashioned a litter for the body and Aaron covered his friend’s face with his own tunic.

  “For the sake of Zion,” he said softly, bitterly. “You are dead for the sake of Zion.”

  During the rest of the march he thought of the letter he would have to write to the widow Liebowitz, telling her that her only son had died of dysentery in Italian-held East Africa. But in his dream that night it was his own mother, Leah Goldfeder, who wept with wild abandon and hacked off her long dark hair with kitchen scissors, wildly calling his name: “Aaron—Aaron!” Her grief pierced his sleep and he rose to comfort her and saw the enormous stars frozen into the galactic sky and heard the gentle steady breathing of his cousin who lay beside him.

  The day after Gregory’s death, they finally reached the foot of Mount Belaiya. A cheer rose up from the exhausted soldiers as Haile Selassie, the proud Lion of Judah, his uniform impeccable and his jet beard trimmed despite the rigors of the march, drove into temporary headquarters in the truck that they had maneuvered through the agonizing terrain. Aaron remained grimly silent. In the late afternoon there was a brief burial service for Gregory and two other casualties of the devastating march.