Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  Bonnie Cosgrove and her children were there but Peter Cosgrove had been buried in the American cemetery at Ardennes, one of the first casualties of that bloody battle. On a gold chain around her neck Bonnie wore the Purple Heart he had been awarded posthumously and her small son played with his dead father’s medal.

  Mollie and Seymour dominated the far end of the table flanked by pretty Annie, who was proudly pregnant now and awaiting the return of her husband who had been assigned to the occupying troops in Japan. Now that he was to become a grandfather and suffered from high-blood pressure and an incipient ulcer, fleshy, florid Seymour had at last abandoned the blonde models who had shared his bed for so many years. There were no more urgent out-of-town trips, no imperative overnight conferences in the city. He and Mollie served on their temple board, went to B’nai B’rith brunches, and held cocktail parties for the Joint Distribution Committee. Now he motioned everyone to silence as Annie told them of a letter she had received from her husband, describing a flight over Hiroshima. Again and again he had written of the waste, the charred desolation.

  “It was very terrible,” David said sadly, “but there was no other way.”

  That was what Jeffrey Coleman had told him during a brief visit some weeks after that day in early August when a great mushroom cloud of destruction rose over a devastated Japanese metropolis. Jeffrey’s work at Los Alamos had been related to the development of the atomic bomb and it occurred to David that if, years before, his therapeutic effort with the talented young science student had been unsuccessful, Jeffrey would not be the brilliant physicist whose work had contributed to the development of the bomb that ended the war. They were all inexorably linked together in this endless chain of history, he thought, and gently smoothed the hair of Bonnie’s youngest child, golden-blonde like her father’s. Sorrowfully he thought of his friend Peter Cosgrove, his academic mentor, cut down by war in the fields of France which he had hiked so joyously in his student days.

  David’s eyes were watchful as Leah’s head inclined toward Aaron and she spoke softly to him. The young man nodded and he and Leah rose from the table, murmured excuses, and left the room. Minutes later, as the family lingered over dessert and coffee, they heard the rear door softly close and through the diamond-paned French windows that lined the dining room, they saw mother and son disappear into the garden, heading for the small stone gazebo whose marble floor trapped a silver pool of wintry sunlight. Leah wore her dark-blue woolen cape, the hood pulled up. Within the heavy cowl her face was strangely pale but her gaze, turned on Aaron, was firm and her eyes glittered with determination. Aaron wore an old tan cardigan, a remnant of his high school days, two buttons still missing, lost on a day when he had rescued Lisa Frawley from a bramble bush along a north county path. But he had grown so thin that the sleeves of the sweater fluttered like loose woolen wings in the gentle wind and he shivered against the crisp autumnal chill.

  “Are you cold?” Leah asked.

  “I think I’m cold all the time now,” he said. “Dad says it’s slight anemia. He’s pretty sure it’ll pass once I gain back the weight and get generally recharged. Probably iron pills will help. I’m going to see Dad’s friend Dr. Adler next week for a general checkup.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “This is a new beginning.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “Aaron, I want us to have a new beginning too.”

  “Yes.”

  He fixed his eye on a vagrant prism of sunlight that flashed across a fallen maple leaf, the band of liquid gold balanced on the brittle scarlet surface. He waited for her to go on, his heart tight, thinking that he had waited a long time for this moment, for the words that would tell him at last what he had always longed to know.

  They sat on the stone bench and Leah scattered some crumbs she had brought with her. Two hesitant sparrows, who had lingered too long in the north, flew in, hastily plucked up the minuscule morsels, and soared back onto the apple tree. They perched among the barren branches, fragile-winged sentinels balanced on a low-hung bough.

  “I always loved that tree,” Aaron said. “It’s funny. I never had much feeling for this house. Maybe I was too old when we finally moved here. But in the prison camp when I thought of home I sometimes visualized the apartment on Eldridge Street, sometimes our house in Brighton Beach. If I thought of Scarsdale—of this house—at all, I thought only of that apple tree. I remembered the curve of its trunk and the way the heavy blossoms weighed down those new young branches. I would think of the way you and Becca used to sketch out here and of the long shadow of the tree in the first days of fall.”

  “Yes. Trees become a part of you as nothing else does. When I think of Russia, I too think of a particular tree—a Lombardy tree that stood in your grandparents’ garden. Its smallest leaves were shaped like stars. Their small veins were yellow, as though the sun had left drops of golden light within them. Your father Yaakov—and I, we often sat beneath that tree and talked—and sang—and laughed. I loved that tree until—” Leah’s voice faltered and she bent to pluck up a late-blooming wild rose, flowering on the bush that had somehow threaded its way through the stone lacework of the gazebo’s wall. Her hood flew off and Aaron saw the small wings of silver that crested her black hair.

  “Until―”

  His voice prodded her on, gentle but insistent. She had come out here today to grant him a legacy long denied. He would have it; he must have it.

  “Until—” he said again.

  Her fingers smoothed the silver strands and his heart turned with a prescient grief.

  “Until the very last day I lived in that house. Your father and grandparents were away. I was alone, up in the attic. Suddenly there were flames. The house next door was on fire—children were crying.”

  She spoke softly, as though her voice might disturb the rhythm of the remembered weeping, the staccato crackling of burning wood, the stertorous sputtering of flame against stone, the odors of singed fabric and molten metal.

  “I ran out—hurrying toward the children. But I got only as far as the tree, the Lombardy tree. A man came across the fields. I saw his red hair and thought that it was your father. I ran to him. God help me—I ran to him!”

  She buried her face in her hands and on their leafless bough the sparrows chirped mournfully. Aaron touched her shoulder, knowing now what she would tell him, wanting her to stop and knowing that she would not, that she could not.

  “I fought him. Ran from him. Around and around the Lombardy tree. But I could not escape him. I knew it and he knew it. He caught me at last. That night I managed to reach Odessa—my brother Moshe’s house. There I learned that your father had been killed. And a few weeks later I knew that I was pregnant.”

  “And you were never sure of who my father was,” he said with a strange calm, understanding at last those moments when he had caught her studying his face, hovering over his boyhood bed.

  “I was never sure. And how wrong I was to have let it matter. I should have loved you no matter who your father was. You were my son. And I did love you, Aaron—in some ways more than I loved your brother and sister. But that day stood between us. We lived together, you and I, in the shadow of that Lombardy tree, in the reflection of those terrible flames, of that terrible afternoon. Until the day of your bar mitzvah.”

  “My bar mitzvah?”

  He remembered anew the smell of the salt sea in the small synagogue, David’s eyes bright with pride, a baby Michael resting on Leah’s shoulder, and his own voice trembling through the prophetic reading and then cracking with embarrassing suddenness—breaking into the timbre of manhood.

  “Your voice,” she said. “It became your father’s voice, Yaakov’s own tenor. There was no doubt. I was free of the wondering, of the uncertainty. But by then it was too late. We had lost so much.”

  “It’s not too late.”

  Aaron’s voice broke. He knelt beside Leah, his head on her lap, and she passed her fingers through the thick copper cluster
s of his hair that shimmered beneath the wetness of her own tears, which fell freely now. She raised his head and saw that he wept too, openly, as a strong man weeps. Long unshed tears coursed down his lean cheeks and she pressed her mouth to his face and tasted the bitter salinity of his sorrow.

  “Can you ever forgive me, Aaron?” she asked.

  He did not answer and she did not question his silence.

  They rose then and he held her in a gentle embrace. Slowly, arms entwined, they walked across the long dark-velvet shadow of the apple tree and back to the house where lamps glowed in golden brightness against the drifting shadows of the gathering dusk.

  *

  “And what about you, Becca? What are you going to do now?” Aaron asked his sister as they walked down the Bronx River Parkway together later that week. It was a time of decisions, of new beginnings, of soft luminous hope after the dark frightening years of the war. Aaron was beginning law school. Joshua Ellenberg, with Seymour’s investment and blessing, was beginning his own business. Leah would work only part-time at S. Hart now. She had begun to do serious painting, and a studio was under construction at the back of the house. Only Rebecca remained in limbo, caught between a vanished love and a wistful yearning for a future that would link adventure with meaning.

  “I don’t know. I don’t seem to have an urgent calling,” she said, kicking at a pile of maple leaves, remembering a distant day when Joe had threaded them lazily through her hair as they lay naked in an isolated Vermont meadow, shivering deliciously as the fall wind caressed their intertwined bare bodies. Briefly then she hated Joe for leaving her and loved him for having loved her.

  “Do you know what I’d do if I were you? I’d take a trip to Palestine. I’d do it now myself but I feel that I’ve wasted so much time—that I’m years behind. Finally, I feel that I’m really ready to study, to work toward what I want to be. But over in North Africa, I listened to our cousin Yaakov and the other Palestinians talk about the country. If I hadn’t focused on the law, if I weren’t sure of what I wanted to do, of what I should do, I’d hop a boat for Palestine tomorrow. Maybe I will do it in a couple of years. But right now, I know where I’ve been and I know where I’m going.”

  Rebecca envied him that peaceful certainty. “Palestine?” she said and thought of Joe’s letter, of his description of the Belsen children bound for that sun-parched strip of territory where an elusive freedom waited. Palestine. Why not? She would meet her mother’s brother, the legendary Moshe, and her cousins. She had seen photographs of the stark hills of Galilee and had thought then of sketching trips through that forbidding landscape. And of course she could stop in Italy en route and visit the museums. Yes, of course, she would go to Palestine.

  And so she had traveled through a war-ravaged Italy and come at last to the dreamy port of Bari to await a ship for Haifa. She hurried now, along the winding ancient streets, to the hilltop post office. These might be the last letters she would mail from Italy. A ship for Haifa was due in port within a few days, and a new excitement at the thought of the journey dispersed the loneliness she had felt in this town where the aroma of rising dough mingled with the fragrance of a thousand flowers.

  She posted her letters quickly and dashed off a picture postcard to Joshua and Sherry Ellenberg.

  “Perhaps, Signorina Goldfeder, I can offer you a stamp for your postcard,” a man’s soft voice said. She looked up in irritation, prepared to ignore the clumsy attempt to pick her up. But then she remembered that the man had used her name and she hesitated.

  “How do you know that I am Signorina Goldfeder?” she asked and studied him with her frank artist’s gaze.

  He was a tall man in his middle twenties and his thick hair was almost the same shade as his deeply bronzed skin—skin which had a leathery texture, as though sun and wind had burned their way onto and through his body. From that lean bronzed face glinted gray eyes, sleek as silk, and a thin slit of mouth betrayed startling white teeth. He wore khaki slacks and a blue nylon shirt open at the neck, the standard uniform that year for student tourists and seamen at liberty.

  “I bring you greetings from your Uncle Moshe and cousin Yaakov on Kibbutz Beth HaCochav. Your cousin knew that you would be here. My name is Yehuda Arnon.”

  “And my aunt—does she too send her regards?” Rebecca asked warily.

  “Your aunt—the good Henia—yes, she too sends regards. Have I passed the test?” He smiled at her in amusement. “May we go now to the square and have a cold coffee? I am very thirsty.” He pasted a stamp on her postcard, his eyes sliding over the name.

  “Ellenberg. There is an Ellenberg family on our kibbutz.”

  “A cousin of my friend’s. His family and mine came from the same town in Russia.” Joshua. Her friend and nearly-brother. Her protector and almost-husband. How lucky they had all been that Joshua had met and married Sherry. She dismissed the thought too quickly, not wanting to remember how she had almost surrendered her life.

  “All right then. Let us go to a café. But I hope you don’t mind if I have a gelato instead of coffee. If there’s anything I hate worse than ersatz coffee, it’s cold ersatz coffee.”

  He laughed.

  “In Palestine the coffee of the Bari cafés would be considered manna from heaven,” he said. “But of course you may have whatever you wish.” He paused then and searched her face. “And I would not be very surprised if that is not what you have always had—whatever you wished.”

  She did not answer, reading an odd contempt in his tone, and they walked down the hill in silence and remained silent even after he had given their order to the waiter. It was the siesta hour and they sat alone in the deserted café and watched the high afternoon sun sweep in a golden arc across the deep-blue waters of the Adriatic Sea.

  “Your uncle Moshe thought that perhaps you might help us with a small endeavor here in Bari,” he said, when at last the waiter, annoyed at being disturbed during the siesta hour, had slammed down the coffee and gelato and disappeared into the shadows of the café.

  “Us? Who would that be?” she asked. She heard the hostility in her voice and wondered what it was about this tall, self-assured stranger that provoked her annoyance.

  “Us. Ah yes, who are we? Simply Jews concerned about other Jews. Specifically today, here in this port, about Jewish children. Survivors of the death camp at Oswiecim in Poland. Auschwitz, as the Germans called it. They are here in Bari, these orphaned survivors, and we want to get them to Palestine. Ah yes, I used that mysterious we yet again. That we includes your family, myself, and practically every Jew in Palestine. We work here in Europe through an organization which we call Bericha—the Hebrew word for flight. And the Jews of Europe are in flight, my dear Miss Goldfeder. They are in flight from memories of death and near-death, from the countries of their birth which now reject them, from the camps for displaced persons that remind them of the camps which consumed their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters. They flee their own fears, their nighttime terror and their daytime memory. And in all the wide world there is only one place which can give them refuge—Palestine.”

  He took a long sip of the coffee and looked out toward the harbor, marking the progress of a V-formation of gulls gliding toward a parapet of rocks. She saw how the color rose high beneath the deep bronze of his skin and how his eyes glistened with that dangerous brightness she had seen long ago in Gregory Liebowitz’s eyes when he spoke fervently of a new society, of a world reborn. Her father had remarked dryly then, “Idealism has a strange effect on the adrenal glands.” Poor Gregory, dead of dysentery in Ethiopia, never to know either the brave new world of which he had dreamed or the weary recovery of the old world he had so disparaged.

  “But Jews are being admitted into Palestine,” she said.

  Only that morning the Paris Tribune had carried a front-page picture of a group of Jews disembarking from a British naval vessel at Haifa port in which a smiling British sailor carried a Jewish child ashore.

 
“Yes. The British make good propaganda. I too read this morning’s paper. But surely you know that the British have a very strict quota system—a White Paper, which allows only a few Jews into Palestine. They are more concerned about placating their sources of oil than with Jewish lives. They run a blockade against immigrant ships and if the ships are caught, the passengers are sent back to the Europe of their nightmares or to detention camps on Cyprus. Our organization helps to get the Jews to ports on the Mediterranean and then we try to smuggle them into Palestine. Illegal immigration, the British call it, and we call it Aliyah Beth. But you must know something of this—your family has been involved in it for many years.”

  He looked searchingly at her and she turned away, not wanting his eyes to capture and thus command her own.

  She knew, of course, about her Uncle Moshe’s work but she had thought about it, when she thought about it at all, as a part of the war. Her own life had absorbed her and the problems of the Jews of Europe were pitiable but remote. She was not visiting Palestine out of any deep ideological conviction but because her relatives were there, because it had seemed a logical place to go, because in a way she too was in flight. Flight. Bericha. She did, after all, have something in common with the man who sat across the table from her, his smooth gray eyes staring openly, contemptuously at her American clothing, her oversized new leather bag, the smooth skin of her bare, sunburned arms.

  “But why have you come to me? What can I do?” She asked the question reluctantly. She did not, in fact, want to do anything. She wanted to board her ship, select a deck chair, and lie in the sun, not thinking, not remembering.

  “Whatever I tell you is in strictest confidence. Whether or not you decide to help us, you must never speak of what I say to you today. Is that agreed? Please, I am not being dramatic but it is necessary that we understand this.” He leaned closer to her and suddenly put his arm around her, bent his head laughingly toward her, kissed her on the lips, and spooned some gelato from her dish into his mouth.