Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “They are our hope, you see,” a young black-haired woman who had somehow organized a small school within this compound of devastation, told him. “If the children do not survive, if they do not become the next generation of our people, then all those who died here lived for nothing and died for nothing.”

  He looked across the yard where a group of boys had organized a game of ball. They ran awkwardly, their legs matchstick thin, their small hands flailing the air, jumping for the ball which the Palestinian Jewish soldier had fashioned out of a neutralized hand grenade, artfully wrapped round with khaki socks. One small dark-haired boy, who leapt with surprising agility, reminded Joe of Rebecca’s brother Michael. When Joe looked more closely he saw that the child was the brother of the little girl to whom he had given his pocket comb. She watched the game and he saw that she, like his own Rebecca, had dark hair and a warm wide-lipped smile. With a sudden shock, he realized that only years and geography separated Rebecca and her brother Michael from the orphans of Belsen, the frail large-eyed children who were the last hope of those who had died and those who had survived.

  Palestinian Jews taught the children circle dances. They sang as they danced and a Palestinian soldier sang lustily, the rich Hebrew resounding against the soft wind that cooled the hot spring afternoon.

  “What does the song mean?” Joe asked.

  The soldier finished the refrain, then replied, “It means that we dance because our heart is one heart from one generation to the next and because the chain of those hearts remains unbroken.” He sang softly in the Hebrew, “Ki libenu lev echad, Minay oz v’oz edad, Ki od nimshechet hashalshelet.”

  “Because the chain remains unbroken,” Joe thought. That chain which linked Jews one to the other: newborn infants born to the thousands of murdered men and women buried in mass graves below their birthing place, a fragile old rabbi to a strong young Palestinian soldier; which linked Rebecca and Michael Goldfeder to the small girl who combed her younger brother’s hair with a fallen twig. It was a chain which he knew now, on this day when the air rang with song and was sweet with the breath of a new season, that he must not break. He could not stand beneath a wedding canopy with Rebecca nor could he dance with her in such a circle of joy and continuity. Again he thought of his lovely love as the silver moonlight slid across the gentle curve of her cheek and his eyes filled with tears.

  He wrote Rebecca a long letter, filling page after page with all he had seen during the eternity of weeks he had spent at Belsen. He enclosed some drawings he had done, feeling somehow that they explained much that he could not articulate. In a few months, he told Rebecca, he would be separated from the army but he would not return to America. He would go to France and work in a studio in Paris. It was time that he faced himself and that was something he had to do alone. Alone. He stared at the word and went to the window.

  Small campfires were lit every night at Belsen now and young people sat and sang beside them. He watched and listened as they sang, their arms intertwined, their bodies swaying. “Ki od nimshechet hashalshelet… Because the chain remains unbroken.” He sealed his letter and mailed it that night. There was a full moon and as he walked back to his tent from the post box, he followed the trail of its silvery light across a field of new young grass.

  *

  Joe Stevenson’s letter arrived in Bennington on a very hot summer morning and Rebecca Goldfeder held it loosely in her hand when she went to answer her phone. It was just noon, she remembered, and the letter had arrived early that morning. She had read it over several times, and studied the drawings Joe had enclosed. She understood and yet did not understand but knew with certainty that her heart was twisted with grief and she moaned softly with the pain of it. The phone rang several times before she answered it, and when she heard her mother’s voice she knew that she would cry.

  “Becca!” Leah was shouting. “They’ve found Aaron. He’s alive. He’s just been released from a Prisoner of War camp. Aaron’s alive and well!”

  Rebecca did cry then and she did not know, then or later, whether the tears that streamed down her cheeks that morning were for her newly found brother or her newly lost love.

  16

  THE CITY OF BARI, a sleepy port on the Adriatic coast of Italy, had emerged from the anguish of the war with its curious timelessness intact. Polished black landau carriages, pulled by limpid-eyed horses festooned with fragrant garlands, continued to circle the cobblestoned piazza overlooking the gentle rolling sea. University students hurried to classes in ancient red brick buildings, grabbing hot sausage rolls to eat en route from the vendors who followed each other up the narrow curving streets. There were, of course, fewer young men in town than there had been a decade earlier. The war had made the young men of Bari impatient and many had departed for Venice and Rome, some embarking for the United States and South America. But their departures did not disturb their sedentary elders. They were young men—they would see the world and return. Meanwhile, those who sat in the cafés which rimmed the harbor dipped oversized spoons into bowls of rainbow-colored gelato and looked out to the harbor, marking the arrival and departure of familiar boats and strange ones.

  The women wore the eternal mourning costume of Italy. Their shapeless black dresses showed rust in spots and their black cotton stockings wrinkled about legs that occasionally were surprisingly well shaped. They stopped to chat with each other, balancing their battered aluminum trays of newly baked dough on their heads with indifferent ease. They went twice a day to the communal baker’s oven for the rising of their pasta dough and then worked together in the gardens near the square. There they sliced the mounds of spongy yellow dough into thin spaghetti strips or helped each other operate the small iron machines that fashioned it into macaroni elbows, petaled shells, or tiny snow-flakes of tubettini. They talked as they worked, looking up to shout reprimands at the small boys in short pants who hurtled through the streets, teasing groups of girls in flowered skirts who walked together, arms intertwined, singing the newest songs from Radio Roma. They looked up, too, when the American signorina who had lodged for the past week in the small pension near the university passed. She was, they agreed, molto bella, very beautiful, and they had been surprised to learn that she did not speak Italian. They had thought, at first, because of her long black hair and dark eyes, that she would know their language but it was of no importance. She would leave Bari soon. They had lived all their lives in a port city and the vagaries of travelers were no mystery to them.

  Rebecca Goldfeder moved quickly down the narrow streets although she had neither an appointment nor a destination. In the large red leather purse which had been her first purchase in the straw and leather market of Florence, she carried a packet of neatly addressed envelopes for posting. These were dutiful letters to her parents and brothers, to Eleanor Greenstein and her other friends in Vermont. They were worried about her, she knew, and so each letter was designed to reassure them and she laced her sentences with cheerful asides and drew small pictures along the margins. From Milan she wrote them descriptions of the opera house where elegant women in frayed, prewar clothing threaded diamonds through their chignons and adorned worn velvet capes with clusters of pearls, garnets, rubies. She wandered the museums and galleries of Rome, avoiding the blank areas on the walls where precious paintings had disappeared. They had been mysteriously “borrowed” by the Germans or loaned by Mussolini to his friend Hitler and were now victims of the postwar maelstrom of displaced persons, displaced paintings, razed towns, and vanished villages.

  She wrote to Eleanor of the wonders of Florence and sent Aaron a tan portfolio of tooled Florentine leather for his new notebooks and papers. “See,” all this told those at home, “I’m all right. I’m traveling and doing things, shopping and going to the theater. It’s fun. I’m having fun.”

  She wondered if she fooled them and suspected sadly that she did not. Still, they all had their own busy lives, particularly with Aaron safely home. She reflected again on how wonder
ful it had been that the news of Aaron’s safety coincided with that long wrenching letter from Joe Stevenson, the letter that she carried still in her leather bag, worn and frayed from reading and rereading. The news about Aaron had offset that crippling emptiness, filled the strange vacancy left by the loss of the knowledge that she loved and was loved.

  That letter, those tissue sheets which Joe had filled in the darkness of a Belsen night, left her with an unjustified sense of betrayal—all the more bitter because she knew such betrayal to be unjust, irrational. Still, whatever Joe’s reasons—and they were good reasons, she acknowledged finally, in the exhaustion of examined grief—he was gone and would not be back. She was alone for the first time in her life. She wandered the Bennington apartment where his presence hovered in the unfinished paperback mystery with his place still marked, the outline of a tube of oil paint on the cherry wood table they had refinished together, the odd items of clothing he had neglected to ship back to California—and why had he shipped anything to California, she wondered for the first time. He must have known even then, in a secret part of him, that their time had not come, would not come. She wanted to flee their apartment; she no longer wanted to live in Vermont and walk alone the paths they had walked together.

  Eleanor Greenstein had been understanding and regretful when Rebecca told her of her decision to leave.

  “But you have made some plans, I hope,” the older woman said. “I know how it is, Rebecca, to begin again. Have some sort of a blueprint for the future in mind.” And she hugged Leah’s daughter, who had in these brief years filled the place of her own lost child whose young impatient life had been seared into death by the flames she still saw in her dreams.

  Rebecca had had a blueprint for her future. In the darkness of a long night when she had wept with such passion that tears had failed her, she had envisioned her future with luminous clarity and made her decision. With it, a strange deadly calm had settled over her and subdued her passionate misery. It was, after all, quite simple. She would go home and marry Joshua Ellenberg. When she formulated the idea, it seemed to her logical, as inevitable as the last piece of a complicated jigsaw puzzle sliding effortlessly into place.

  She thought then of the way Joshua had protected her as a child, guided her through her adolescence, comforted her through the years of Aaron’s disappearance, and shielded her even as she rejected him on that wintry day when they stood together beneath a snowy bower. He would shield and comfort her again. He would take care of her. He would make a great deal of money and she would live within the shelter of his love and his protection. They would have children and a large home. Somewhere in that house there would be a small studio where she could toy with her painting and drawing. All this she foresaw clearly, even to the skylight in the studio and the russet carpeting on a phantom staircase.

  She fell asleep then, cradled in the sweet calm she had known as a child when Joshua led her out of the Eldridge Street living room, crowded with boarders and visitors, to her small trundle bed, where he told her stories and fashioned toys for her from the mountain of rags he called his “merchandise.” That was what she wanted now, in this season of loss, to once again be Joshua’s Becca, his baby, his love.

  She knew a good deal about Joshua’s war. That first cheerful, irreverent letter had been followed by others which she had answered in a similar vein, writing with sisterly fondness. Joshua had fought along the Rhine and during the last days of that fierce assault a grenade had exploded in his hand, shattering every bone and pulverizing the flesh of his palm into shreds of blackened blood-laced meat.

  “Nothing the docs could do with such ruined merchandise except get rid of it,” Joshua had written. She knew then that his right hand had been amputated. In an English hospital he had been fitted with a prosthetic hand and although he insisted he was as good as new it was clear that his war was over. Leah had written Rebecca that Joshua would soon be demobilized and sent home. Rebecca had decided to be in New York for his arrival. Her life in Vermont was over and her life with Joshua would begin.

  She stood beside his parents at the west side dock waiting for the troopship to disgorge its cargo of returning soldiers. Near her, a young blonde woman lifted a hefty two-year-old who waved a small American flag and screamed “Daddy! Daddy!”

  The woman wanly returned Rebecca’s smile at the staccato shrill shouts.

  “He’s never met his dad. I was pregnant when Frank was shipped out and Frank Jr. here arrived when his daddy was fighting in Sicily.”

  Older children clung to their parents and grandparents and searched the crowd of disembarking soldiers with gazes both hopeful and apprehensive. An American Legion band played “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” “Over There,” and “The Caisons Go Rolling Along” in rapid succession. Then as the first soldiers walked down the gangplank they broke into a rousing rendition of “God Bless America.” Someone began singing and soon hundreds of voices filled the air. The small boy who had never seen his father waved his flag wildly and sang “Daddy, daddy, daddy,” in tune to the music.

  His song of summons was answered by a tall, smiling sergeant who loped toward them, expertly balancing himself on crutches.

  “Frank, oh Frank!” the blonde woman called, tears streaking her face, her voice melting with gladness. Her arms went around the soldier who embraced her and the child together while his empty trouser leg flapped in the wind.

  Rebecca turned away, her heart sinking, and searched the wave of khaki-clad men who surged toward the waiting crowds.

  “There he is,” she called to Sarah Ellenberg. “There’s our Josh!”

  And there he was, taller and leaner than she remembered, his crew-cut, sand-colored hair bleached to a new brightness by the oceanic sun. She tried not to look at his hand but was impelled to and when she hugged him her lips, in penance for the hurt he had suffered on her behalf, touched the hard black leather fingers that gripped her shoulder.

  “Mom! Dad! Becca! Hey, this is great. I never expected you to be here, Becca baby.”

  “And I expected you to be the first GI down the gangplank, you operator. What slowed you down?”

  “Blame her—my precious baggage slowed me down.”

  The young woman in the trim gray uniform of the British Nursing Corps was so tiny that Rebecca had not noticed her as she stood patiently at Joshua’s side. Her military cap sat pertly on a crop of auburn hair and her small face was dotted with freckles.

  “She outranks me, so be careful,” Joshua said. “Mom, Dad, Becca, say hello to the biggest Ellenberg coup yet—my cockney bride, Sherry Goldstein Ellenberg, formerly of Bournemouth. She had the great good fortune of being in the right place at the right time—she was right there when they fitted me with this little beauty.” He shook his prosthetic hand and hugged his wife, who blushed and hid her face in his uniform.

  “Oh, my darling girl, my darling boy, my children. Kinderlach.” Sarah Ellenberg engulfed the girl in a tearful embrace and Rebecca’s own eyes were filled with tears as she bent forward and gave Joshua’s wife a welcoming kiss.

  “Sure I’m still an operator, Becca. Didn’t I arrange to get my wife assigned to my own troopship? Do you know anyone else who had a trans-Atlantic honeymoon on the taxpayers’ expense in this war?”

  “Joshua can do anything,” Sherry said and looked up at him, her amber eyes alight with love.

  “We know that,” Sam Ellenberg said proudly. He took his son’s artificial hand in his own and put an arm around his new daughter-in-law.

  Rebecca trailed along behind them, Sherry’s kit bag over her shoulder. In her bedroom that night, she confronted both her regret and her relief at Joshua’s marriage. She stared into the darkness and wondered now what she would do with the days and years of her life.

  It was Aaron, months later, who provided her with an answer. His arrival home had been quieter than Joshua’s and his attitude more subdued. He told them briefly, without detail, of his experiences in a Prisoner
of War camp near Trieste. His status had confused his captors. He was an American Jew in British uniform fighting with a Palestinian brigade. Perhaps they had seized on such irregularities to claim an exemption from the stipulations of the Geneva convention and had not listed his name on standard Prisoner of War rosters. Still, they had not treated him badly. He was very thin because there had been very little food and there was still a scarcity of food in Europe. Men who are at war have no time for farming. But, oddly, there had been an excellent library in the prison camp, established by the Red Cross, and Aaron had spent the term of his imprisonment reading. It was then that he had decided to study law.

  “This world isn’t going to be changed by wars or revolutions,” he told his family as they sat down together to their first Thanksgiving dinner of the new peace. “There’s work to be done and I want to be part of it.”

  “I’m going to be a lawyer too,” Michael echoed and they all laughed. Clearly, if Aaron decided to become a deep-sea diver, Michael would follow his brother into the aquatic depths.

  Leah looked around that table with quiet joy. They were all there—her sons and daughter, Joshua and his petite wife who listened attentively to every word he uttered and smiled adoringly up at him, Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber, grown old and frail but finally possessed of a sad, accepting serenity. Their son was long dead and they knew now that their old friend Frederic Heinemann, the brave German who had introduced them to the Goldfeders, had perished in the concentration camp at Matthausen. But Hitler had been defeated, a heavy justice had been won, and they had been in their small way instrumental in its achievement. Their work was done. Fragile Mrs. Schreiber cut Michael an extra-large slice of the apfelkuchen she had baked for dessert. He was a growing boy. He needed sweets and nourishment. How like her son he looked. She coaxed the boy, who had become the grandson she would never have, to eat yet another piece.