Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  She laughed now, a rich throaty sound that made his blood tingle.

  “I’ll have to remember to tell that to Joe. I’ll bet I’m the only girl at Bennington who ever helped sell shmattes.”

  “Oh yeah. Joe. Joe Stevenson.” Joshua pulled up the collar of his coat. He had forgotten Rebecca’s sculptor friend, or perhaps, he acknowledged reluctantly, he had not wanted to remember him. The uneasiness he had felt the previous evening washed over him and he took Rebecca’s gloved hand, pressed it tightly within his own, and put both hands in his pocket.

  They had left the campus now and were walking across a field where a copse of slender birch trees formed a natural windbreak. As they passed beneath the trees, a cushion of snow trembled on a low-hanging branch and fell, grazing Rebecca’s cheek. He took out his handkerchief and gently wiped the powdery crystals from her skin, then passed his finger across her face. Her skin was soft as velvet beneath his touch and she waited patiently, submissively, for him to minister to her, as he always had.

  “Joshua,” she asked softly now, as they stood beneath the snow-laden trees, listening to the wind whistle in mournful threnody through the branches, “what was the news that made you come here?”

  For answer, he reached into his pocket and took out the letter from the draft board. She held the crisp official paper and read it carefully.

  “You too, then. First Aaron and now you. You have to report in a week. That’s not much time, Joshua.” Her voice was heavy and all laughter had fled from her eyes.

  “Time enough. Time for us to get things squared away. Becca, baby, I wanted to wait until you finished college—I wanted you to have your fun, but like you said, now there’s not much time. So I want you to wear this now.”

  His hand trembled slightly as he reached into his pocket for the blue velvet box. He passed it to her and she held it hesitantly, then fumbled with the catch, her fingers made clumsy by her thick red wool gloves. She opened it at last and stared down at the ring, holding it a distance from her body, like a child handling a bewildering and unpredictable toy.

  “Do you like it?” he asked shyly.

  She had never heard Joshua’s voice so soft and uncertain before. She took her glove off and lifted the ring from its blue velvet bed, holding it so that the sunlight sparkled on the glinting ice of the perfectly cut stone.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “But Joshua—it’s an engagement ring.”

  “Of course it’s an engagement ring. Becca, baby, you must have known that’s what I always wanted, always worked for. I love you Becca. I’ve always taken care of you. I always want to take care of you.”

  As she struggled for an answer, three fighter planes from a nearby air force training field flew in formation overhead, winging in low and then soaring upward in swift and graceful corps, their noise drowning out her words.

  “What did you say?” He shouted to make himself heard above the noise of the planes, but they had disappeared so suddenly that now his loud voice ripped through the strange heavy silence they left in their wake.

  “I said ‘I love you, Joshua,’” she replied slowly, shyly.

  A large smile spread across his face. Doubt, uncertainty, vanished. Of course she loved him. Of course. She was his Becca, his baby.

  “Sure you do. So put the ring on already.”

  There was so much to do. Maybe Rebecca would come back to New York with him today. They had to tell her parents, his parents. Maybe they could even get married when his basic training was over. A small wedding, like Annie Hart’s but indoors. And then perhaps a brief honeymoon. He knew an inn in Connecticut. His body pulsed and strengthened, shivered with anticipatory delight.

  “I can’t put the ring on. I love you, but not that way. I love you the way I love Aaron. Like a friend, like a brother. Oh Joshua, Joshua, why did you have to spoil it?” Her voice broke and she was crying now, the tears spilling down her cheeks, one of them splashing across the blue box and staining the bright velvet.

  He stared at her in pained disbelief. His heart sank and his limbs grew light with sudden weakness. Her hand was outstretched and he took the ring box from her, snapped it shut, and put it back in his pocket. On the tree nearest them, a fragile, snow-laden branch snapped and soft mounds of snow slid silently to the frozen earth. She continued to cry, her face contorted into that familiar knot of misery which tears had brought her to since babyhood. Her full lower lip jutted out and her nose grew red. With the habit of years, he took out his handkerchief, still damp with snow, and wiped her tears. He took off her red beret and smoothed her long dark hair. When she still sobbed, he pulled her to him and holding her gently, he rocked her into a slow calm. He soothed her with weary patience, warding away her sorrow at the terrible hurt she had inflicted upon him. A harsh wind rose and whistled wildly through the copse, breathing coldly upon their upturned faces, but still they stood there swaying, clinging to each other for comfort, her red beret tightly grasped between his fingers, ungloved and raw with cold.

  *

  Six months later Joe Stevenson brought the mail up to the apartment he and Rebecca had shared for almost a year. Among the circulars was a tissue-thin V-letter covered with Joshua’s broad uneven handwriting. He was “somewhere in Europe.” Things were pretty hectic. His unit was a terrific bunch of guys. His best buddy was a Choctaw Indian who had taught Joshua some great curse words. They were really giving those Fascist bastards a run for their money. He hoped things were going all right at home. “Good night Becca baby. Take care.” That was all.

  It was the first letter she had had from him since they had stood on the crusty hillside sheltered by a fragile wall of birch trees. She read it over and her face crumbled. Quickly she went into the small bathroom and locked the door so that Joe Stevenson, who was embarrassed by tears, would not see her cry.

  15

  THE NIGHT BEFORE he left Vermont to report to the New Jersey army base for basic training, Joe Stevenson awoke in the unquiet dark, felt the familiar, comforting pressure of Rebecca’s head upon his arm, and saw the silver moonlight splash briefly and wondrously across her face. That was the way he would remember her always—lying there across love-rumpled bedclothes, her face lost in sleep as a slender shaft of argentous light drifted across her cheek and rested briefly on the thick dark hair that fanned out across the pillow.

  He carried a picture of Rebecca in his wallet, one taken in the Vermont hills they loved so well. In the snapshot she stood against a tree wearing a light-colored turtleneck sweater and dark slacks. Her head was tossed back and a stray maple leaf clung to her dark hair. She had been laughing; a half-smile was frozen on her full lips and laugh lines creased the corners of her large eyes. The picture wore thin as the war progressed. He stared at it lying across a three-decker bunk in a Texas training camp and held it in his hand as he leaned across the rail of the troopship which carried him into the European Theater of Operations. The Europe he had known as an exchange scholar had vanished and now, like other soldiers, he talked of the ETO, the Second Front, the French line.

  On leave in London, he huddled in a shelter as bombs sounded dully on the concrete shield of pavement above him. He took the picture out then too, and showed it to a young mother who clutched a fair-haired baby. The white-haired child laughed wildly, improbably, at the sound of the muffled rocket blast.

  “Are you married then, Yank?” the woman asked, passing the picture back to him. “She’s a pretty gel.”

  “No. I’m not married,” he said and wondered again why it was that he and Rebecca had not married.

  They had, of course, talked about it often, and it was acknowledged between them that sometime, in a vague, mysteriously deferred future, there would be a formal ceremony that would put the stamp of legal commitment on their lives and their love. Before he left for the army—his draft notice, too, arriving after years of deferments he had not sought—Rebecca had insisted that they marry. But then such a marriage had seemed to him unfair, selfish, an
d he had refused, gently and firmly. One did not take a wife and go to war. It had been one of the few times he found himself able to say no to his gay dark-haired girl, who had received so few denials.

  But had he been right, after all? he wondered, as the London shelter tumbled into a sudden darkness. He took the child from the trembling young mother and held it gently, his fingers smoothing its fine white hair. Women screamed and children cried in the subterranean darkness—then with that swift British assertion of determined control, there was sudden order, sensed though not seen, and a girl’s sweet clear voice began to sing, “There’ll be blue birds over, The white cliffs of Dover…” Around him other voices, old and young, strong and faltering, took up the song and when they had sung the last chorus, their voices surging upward with hope at “Tomorrow, just you wait and see,” the lights flickered weakly on again.

  He too sang and, because he could not look at Rebecca’s picture in the darkness, he thought of the shaft of moonlight gliding across her black hair. No. It would not have been right to have married then, a feeling shared, he knew, by Leah and David Goldfeder. He thought then of David’s troubled gaze and Leah’s large sad eyes.

  Rebecca’s parents had never openly objected to him nor to the unorthodox pattern of the life he and Rebecca shared in Vermont. Even at Bennington, it was unusual for an unmarried couple to live openly together. But he had been welcome at the Goldfeders’ Westchester home although he and Rebecca made it a point never to stay overnight there together. Only once, in his hearing, had David spoken of their relationship, and even then, the reference to their different faiths had been oblique.

  A letter had arrived from Palestine, from Rebecca’s uncle Moshe, her mother’s brother whom she had never met. Because it was written in Yiddish, David translated it for them as they sat over coffee. It had arrived during the bad days of the war, when the harsh voices of weary newscasters brought them bloody accounts of the invasion of Sicily and Michael moved the tacks on the war maps in David’s study, in uneasy circles, until at last it became clear that Allied troops would win the Italian peninsula in the end.

  Moshe’s son Yaakov was fighting with the Jewish Brigade of the British army in Italy, and Moshe himself was involved in the illegal operation of smuggling refugee Jewish children from Europe into a Palestine sealed to those children by a quota system. He wrote cautiously about this clandestine operation in familial code.

  “I am sure you remember Uncle Beryl,” he wrote his sister. “I find myself using some of the business tricks I learned from him.”

  Their Uncle Beryl had been a genius at sneaking Jews past border guards. Once, David told them, he had put three young Jews in enormous kegs of beer and when the Russian guards had stopped them, he had offered them drinks, his ladle scraping the heads of the emigrants. “The guards complained that there was hair in their beer but they drank it anyway and asked for more,” David recalled, laughing.

  Moshe’s letter concluded on a pessimistic note. He told Leah that he had all but given up hope for the safety of their parents in Europe. The soldiers of the Jewish Brigade had intelligence reports on the European camps for Jews. Their reports made him pray for his parents’ deaths rather than hope for their lives. In Palestine the Jewish community looked to the future and prayed that the skills of men like Uncle Beryl would benefit them all.

  “It’s ironic,” David had said then. “My brother-in-law and his family risk their lives for Jewish survival and we here in America treat it so lightly.”

  “What do you mean, Daddy?” Rebecca asked.

  “I mean you, Rebecca,” David said heavily and left the room too quickly, allowing the heavy oak dining room door to slam.

  “You mustn’t think he really minds that you’re not Jewish,” Rebecca reassured Joe later. “I mean, I suppose he does mind in a way but he would never make an issue of it.”

  Joe had not answered her then but he knew that while David and Leah would not have objected to their marriage, they were relieved when they did not, after all, marry.

  But why hadn’t they married? The question that had teased him in the London shelter recurred weeks later, as he shivered in the hills north of Saint-Vith, waiting with his unit to launch the assault which the freezing infantrymen, in their khaki wool face masks and double thickness of leather mittens, did not even know was called the Battle of the Bulge.

  He thought about it as his platoon trekked doggedly through the winding roads of frozen mud, coated with snow and ice, and followed a mysterious network of paths. They ascended evergreen crested hills that overlooked narrow rivers bordered by steep banks that meandered through the dense hill country. Men sang softly or cursed bitterly as the snow and ice invaded their combat boots and icy rain crept into their helmets. They were approaching Christmas of 1944, a Christmas they hoped to celebrate by controlling the foam-locked waters of the Roer River.

  “I’m hoping for a white Christmas,” the lanky soldier marching behind him sang. “Hey, Stevenson, who you dreaming about? Your girl?”

  “I’ve got my mind on Betty Grable. You think I’m un-American?”

  Joe shifted his backpack and held his rifle high as they forded one of the small brooks that riddled the Schnee Eifel hills they were now passing through. Here they heard the sounds of long guns, the thunder of an onslaught of artillery. They checked their rifles and forgot about the water freezing into ice within their boots. A strong wind, heavy with the breath of unfallen snow, battered their faces raw, and their lips bled where they had bitten through the frozen skin.

  Rampant rumor flew through the columns, as swiftly as the snow that broke into brief fitful flurries around them. The Germans, it was said, were launching twenty-two divisions against them. The entire Sixth SS Panzer Division had been deployed for a confrontation. Now it was confirmed that there were Germans dressed in American uniforms, speaking English and manning captured American tanks and trucks. Intelligence officers moved through snowdrifts, issuing instructions.

  “Don’t trust anyone. Ask questions they’d have to be from stateside to answer. Who won this year’s World Series? What does ‘hold the mayo’ mean? Where is Yankee Stadium? What does ‘mairzy doats’ mean? Who was Nick Carter?”

  Joe Stevenson, sculptor-in-residence at Bennington College, began to sweat within the heavy folds of his uniform.

  “Who the hell won the World Series?” he asked. He did not even know which teams had played.

  It occurred to him then that it was highly probable that he would be killed, and at a rest stop he wrote a long letter to Rebecca and immediately tore it into pieces, thrusting the pale-blue scraps of tissue-paper V-mail into the trunk of a tree strung with ribbons of ice. He might die and he had never confronted his life. He had feared his gift, doubted his talent, and so he was not a sculptor but a teacher of sculpture. Just as he had feared to commit himself artistically, so he had feared to commit himself personally. Many things had prevented him from marrying Rebecca, he realized now, the teasing conundrum routed at last. He could not have married her before he knew himself as an artist, as a man. Nor, he recognized, with startling clarity, could he have expected Rebecca to marry him until she too had faced herself. It had been too easy for her to slip from her parents’ home into their cocoon of easy, uncommitted love.

  Rebecca, too, had played with her talent, struggled very briefly with it, and then allowed the war to excuse her from meeting its demand. She worked now in Eleanor Greenstein’s factory. Like her mother, Rebecca had a sharp eye for detail, a natural talent for piercing design and production problems. Eleanor, struggling with a harried schedule of government contracts, needed her help. The job became Rebecca’s war effort. It was a natural niche and Rebecca had slid into it as easily and enthusiastically as she had slid into all the other situations in her life.

  These thoughts came to Joe on Christmas Eve, on the day he killed his first German soldier, a very young man, almost a boy, whose pale-gray eyes Joe picked out with the sights of his rifl
e. The young soldier’s steel helmet fell from his head when he toppled over, and Joe saw that his hair was milk-white in color, the same shade as the curls of the child he had held in the London shelter. After that he did not seek out the eyes and faces of the men he aimed to kill. In that same battle he somehow lost Rebecca’s picture and then had only the memory of the moonlight sliding across her sleeping face. Months after that same battle, he woke in a sweat. The eyes of the soldier he had killed rolled about loosely in his dream and somehow collided with the brooding stare of David Goldfeder. It was a dream of drifting orbs and wooded paths, but he had no time to puzzle out its meaning.

  It was winter’s end now and the rumors that rushed through the columns of those who had survived the march from Saint-Vith were fleshed with tales of the concentration camps deep within German-occupied territory. It was to these camps that Jews and gypsies, communists and dissidents had been taken. It was said that such camps—they were as large as small villages and towns, in fact—were surrounded by electrified wire and from within their confines was heard the barking of dogs and the soft desperate weeping of children.

  Joe remembered, then, that long-ago day in Scarsdale (was it only a year and a half ago?) when David Goldfeder had read the letter from Palestine in which a son had wished his parents dead rather than exposed to the mysteries of those camps.

  “But nothing could be that bad,” he thought uneasily and wrapped himself in his sleeping bag, knowing that he had seen things that were beyond imagination, rational assimilation. He had seen the throat of the good-natured lanky Texan who marched behind him pierced by a bullet and the man choked by his own blood foaming up through the perforated flesh. He had marched past a burned-out Panzer tank to which the body of a corpse clung, the skin clinging blackly to the exposed bones of the skeleton from which flesh and uniform had been scorched. The man lay with his feet pointed upward, still encased in their tightly laced combat boots, tied with an impeccable military knot.