“That’s better,” Yehuda said. “That is the way. My daughter also likes to be snuggled this way.”
His daughter, He was married then. What was the wife of such an arrogant, contemptuous man like? She wondered too how old his daughter was, and if he had other children. She fell into a light sleep then and when she awoke he was gone. Yet she knew he had watched over her as she slept because of the small hill of cigarette ash where he had stood, leaning against the rail.
There was foul weather the next two days, as the ocean became a glasslike expanse of white water, shattered into angry dark-blue fissures by a violent westbound wind. The children wept and she was relieved to see them at last surrender into childish misery, almost glad when Katia clung to her for comfort and Mindell, her secret favorite, perched on her lap to play with her purse. She did not go on deck that night or the next and she wondered if Yehuda had waited for her. She imagined him leaning against the rail, sending small sad wisps of cigarette smoke out across the waves.
Early on the fourth morning they docked at Haifa and she felt a rush of excitement as she stood on board and stared out at the busy port. There were signs everywhere, screaming their dock-side messages in Hebrew, English, and Arabic. Dark-skinned dock workers shifted cargo and British soldiers in khaki shorts and shirts patrolled the port. Trucks with Hebrew lettering on them were lined up and sunburned young men in shorts and sweat-stained undershirts heaved enormous sacks of produce, here and there sending onions or tomatoes skittling into the dirt. She looked northward, where the city of shops and villas climbed the graceful slopes of Mount Carmel. This then was Palestine.
Behind her the children, her Auschwitz infants, dressed in their uniforms, their hair combed and faces very clean, stood quietly. For them, this was only another test to be endured, another border to be crossed. They knew the rules and stood so still, so quiet, that she feared their unchildlike quiescence itself would betray them. Just ahead of them, moving swiftly toward passport control, she saw the British agent. He stopped at the desk, showed his identity card to the official, and bent forward, speaking rapidly, gesturing toward them. Rebecca’s palms grew damp and her heart ricocheted in urgent irregular beat. They would not, after all, be admitted. She could not brazen it through. She looked at the children and saw that mute anguished plea in their eyes, the plea that had pierced her heart in Signora Sarfadi’s basement. She could not fail them. On deck Yehuda looked down at them. He lifted his hand slightly, an almost imperceptible gesture, a sign of trust. A new strength came to her and she turned confidently to the children.
Smiling, she began to sing.
Jesus loves me, this I know,
Because the Bible tells me so.
Katia’s clear sweet voice picked up the song and then, with awkward accent but brave tremulous tone, all the children sang as they reached the desk of the passport control officer.
She held out her passport and the children’s papers to him and they continued singing as he looked carefully through the papers.
“Can you hurry please?” she said imperiously. “The children are very tired and I should like to get them to the mission in Nazareth as soon as possible. We have been traveling for a very long time.”
“These children are all en route to the mission?” he asked.
“As you read and as you see.” She might have been her mother, responding with annoyance to a delinquent supplier, or Eleanor Greenstein, impatiently answering the questions of a novice buyer. She had had good teachers and learned her lessons well.
The British immigration officer that day was a young man with a soft blond moustache named Guy Wilkes who attended early services each Sunday and was the father of two blonde, rosy-cheeked little girls whom he missed terribly. He smiled at the group of singing children because the hymn was a favorite of his and had been mastered by his eldest daughter just before he left for this “rotten Mideast posting.” Mindell, who at nine was mistress of a portfolio of survival secrets, smiled shyly back at him, closed her eyes demurely, and softly sang another chorus. Guy Wilkes turned reluctantly to the task at hand.
“You are Rebecca Goldfeder and you are chaperoning these children who are en route to the Mission of Saint Paul in Nazareth?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You are a convert then, I take it.”
“Saint Paul himself was a convert,” she replied with just a hint of admonishment. “I’d be very grateful if you could expedite the processing of these papers.” She leaned forward as though to take him into her confidence. “The children are exhausted.”
He glanced up and saw Mindell, leaning wearily against the wall. He leafed through the set of papers and sighed.
“It does create a difficulty when there are no legitimate papers.”
“But these are emergency documents issued by the Church. They are legitimate. The children must not be penalized because they were orphaned in the war and their papers lost.”
“Of course not.” He thought of his two little daughters, peacefully playing now in an apple orchard in Surrey. They were duly registered in his own slender navy-blue passport. He looked at the blonde child who so resembled his own Phoebe and then at the scowling intelligence agent who stood watching him. The trouble with the Investigative Division was that they saw an illegal immigrant in every new arrival. They took themselves too bloody seriously, those blokes. Also, their salaries and travel allowances far exceeded his. Mindell gave him another shy smile and he reached for his entry stamp. One by one he called off the children’s names, stamped their documents, and waved them on through the gate. He stamped Rebecca’s passport and handed it back to her, flushed with his own beneficent diligence.
“Take good care of the little ones, Madame. Good luck in the Lord’s land.”
“Thank you.” She smiled graciously at him, wanting in fact to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him, to thank him for this gift he would never know he had given.
And then they were on the dock where a yellow bus marked “Mission of Saint Paul” was waiting. A tall priest held out his hand to her and they helped the children onto the bus while two men in monk’s garb went to collect their baggage. Finally they were moving, rolling away from the dockside area, then out of the busy city streets clogged with oversized American cars and huge blue-and-yellow buses, and through the low, gentle hills of the lower Galilee. The tall priest suddenly burst into song—Hebrew song.
“Haveinu shalom aleichem,” he and the two monks sang, and when they turned to the children their faces, stained to the color of sun and earth, radiated warmth and welcome, victory and relief.
“Haveinu shalom aleichem—we bring peace and welcome unto you…” Their voices rose joyously and she too sang and was surprised to feel a single tear trace its way slowly down her cheek. Then the children’s voices took up the song, stumbling over the words in the language that would one day be their own, but was as yet unlearned. Katia held Shlomo on her lap and clapped his hands together.
“We’re in Aretz,” she told the child. “Look. See. We’re home.”
They looked out the windows at the roads lined with great cypresses and the fields through which tender green shoots of corn and oats kissed their way, emerging from the rick dark earth. In the meadows blood-red anemones tangled with vines of pale-pink cyclamens. Their fragrance enveloped the children who had lived for so long beneath the earth, smelling only the stink of death and the sickly scent of danger. Crying, laughing, singing, they breathed deep as the bus, unfollowed, they saw with relief, rumbled through the gates of Kibbutz Beth HaCochav, where the priest ripped off his cassock to reveal his work shirt and trousers and the monks discarded their robes and cowls and stood before them in kibbutz shorts. Jubilantly, they lifted the children out of the bus and into the arms of the waiting men and women. Again, the song of welcome arose, sung now by the children of the kibbutz who surrounded the new arrivals and hung garlands of flowers about their necks.
Rebecca was the last to desc
end and she stood on the steps of the bus uncertainly.
Shlomo and another child grew frightened at the wild explosion of joy and began to cry. A tall, motherly looking woman bent to comfort them. She wiped their tears and gave each a large sugar cookie, taken from the pocket of the apron that covered her overalls. Within that same pocket, Rebecca knew, there would also be a length of string for an impromptu game of cat’s cradle, one or two crayons, and perhaps a small scissors. Like Sarah Ellenberg, she belonged to the army of women who carry with them, always, small weapons against a child’s tears.
She looked up at Rebecca and her face lit up.
“Rivkale—you must be Leah’s Rivka,” she cried and embraced the girl. “I’m your aunt Henia. Ah—I would have known you anywhere with that hair and those eyes. You are your mother’s daughter. Moshe—Moshe! Come and meet your niece.”
They surrounded Rebecca—the tall, soft-eyed man who was her mother’s brother and shared her father’s gentle calm, her cousin Yaakov and his bride Baila, her other cousins and the men and women who had known both Leah and David in Russia. There were questions and kisses, tentative embraces and great bearlike hugs of delight. They welcomed her and were proud of her. The story of how the children had sung their way into the country traveled from person to person and they shook their heads admiringly and said with pride, “What a bluff, what chutzpah!”
They had lunch in the huge communal dining hall, and then Henia and Moshe led her to a quiet room where Henia turned down the bed and drew the shutters against the bright afternoon sunlight.
“You must get some rest,” her aunt said and kissed Rebecca on the forehead. “You are a very brave girl. Now sleep. Later we will talk again.”
Alone in that simple room, Rebecca went to the window and looked out at a slender cypress that sent a pyramid of shade across the sun-dappled lawn. In the distance she saw a man walking slowly, a small girl astride his shoulders, a boy, naked except for his bright blue bloomers and a sun hat, clutching his hand. It was Yehuda, his face relaxed into a softness she had not seen before.
He had two children then, a boy and girl, and both of them had inherited his earth-colored hair. She wondered which of the kibbutz women she had seen in that flurry of welcoming excitement was his wife. The little girl laughed loudly and Yehuda swung her high above his head. Rebecca watched them for a moment, then closed the shutter tightly, washed her face, and stretched out across the bed, tumbling swiftly into a heavy sleep.
When she awoke the room was pitch-dark and she looked at her watch and saw that she had slept away her first afternoon in Palestine. She went to the window and opened the shutter. Beneath the cypress, Yehuda stood, dressed now in a light-colored shirt, the ember of his cigarette glowing like a fiery jewel suspended against the velvet darkness. A sense of puzzlement, teasing and sensuous, suffused her. She had known, somehow, that he would be there, just as she knew he would be gone when she emerged from the room.
She dressed quickly and went out. He was not there. She stood briefly on the steps and breathed in the sweet heavy scent of newly green oranges, mingling with the bitter-sweet aroma of ripening citrons. How cool the nights in Palestine were, how sweet the air, how large the stars. Across the path she saw the brightly lit communal dining room and heard the singing. “Haveinu shalom aleichem—we bring you peace and welcome.” She too sang as she hurried across the wet grass toward the warmth and light.
17
ON THE LAST DAY of 1947, tiny Sherry Ellenberg, after a long and lusty labor during which Joshua, in a nervous frenzy, bought and sold shares in a new future called television, gave birth to twins. The boy and girl were named Scott and Lisa and their bright tomorrows were toasted in the Goldfeders’ living room in champagne passed by a uniformed maid.
“I remember when Rebecca was born we drank shnaps from jelly jars,” Sarah Ellenberg recalled with wistful regret.
The years of poverty, the crowded rooms, so cold in the winter and so stifling in the summer, the bare floors and sagging secondhand couches and beds, the tureens of watered-down chicken soup which she and Leah and Mollie had fed their armies of boarders, were remembered with wry fondness now. They were safe at last. They had emerged from the shadows of want and worry into the full sunlight of earned ease and prosperity. It was pleasant now, to stroke the delicate stems of Leah’s fine Baccarat champagne glasses, to sip the cold smooth wine and think of the coarse thick jars and the harsh strong liquor of distant threatening days. Those early years in America had been filtered through frayed screens of memory, achieving in retrospect a sweet softness that diluted their stern reality.
Recently, their former boarder Masha had visited them, her skin darkened by the California sun and thickened by age, her body draped in soft satin and furs, jewels sparkling and heavy on the taut neck that had once bent hour after hour over needlework. She passed Seymour color photos of her children and he in turn offered a snapshot of his infant grandson.
“How I miss those old days, when we were all one family,” she said and the wistfulness had been real.
Leah smiled, wondering if among Masha’s memories of togetherness, she included fragments of those nights before Mollie’s arrival when she and Seymour had danced together in the crowded parlor or disappeared behind the closed doors of a bedroom. Now, portly grandfather and prosperous matron, they passed their color photos, sweet testimony of their survival and their success.
Masha showed them pictures of her terraced California villa and her shimmering swimming pool, and they admired them as they mourned together the lost days of Eldridge Street where the hallways had smelled of urine and the front-room air had been thick with the scent of too many bodies and noisy with the sounds of too many voices.
Lisa and Scott Ellenberg were toasted also in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Aaron Goldfeder and Kate Reznikoff, a slight blonde girl from New Orleans who sat next to him in Torts at the Harvard Law School, were celebrating the New Year by painting Kate’s Brattle Street apartment.
“Is Joshua a close friend?” Kate asked. Aaron’s network of family and friends fascinated her. Her own family had lived in the South since the Revolution, regarding their move to New Orleans from Atlanta, after the Civil War, as “recent.” Her father served as a surrogate court judge, occupying the seat that his father and grandfather had held before him. Each year, during the Mardi Gras season, Kate’s family took a Caribbean cruise, quietly absenting themselves from the city which did not allow Jews to participate in its most famous festival. They never discussed the exclusion and were, instead, very pleased to point out the stained-glass windows in the synagogue which had been donated by Christian members of the bar in memory of Kate’s grandparents. Aaron was the first traveler from the world of immigrant American Jews whom Kate had met and she prodded him again and again to tell her tales of his father’s evening studies, of his mother’s early days in the sweatshop, of his own tenement life. She absorbed them with odd fascination, an almost bittersweet jealousy, and basked in their telling and retelling, as visitors from a cold clime cling to the sun of warmer worlds.
Aaron obliged her, glad to have something to share with the fragile blonde girl whose soft drawling voice belied her keen legal mind, her ability to pierce each question at its heart and pluck from it a nugget of knowledge. Kate was the first girl since Lisa Frawley, of whom he still sometimes dreamed, to send his blood rushing faster and fill his body with the pleasant ache of tender desire.
“Joshua’s almost like a brother. His family boarded with us when we lived on the east side and they came from the same town in Russia as my parents. I used to think that he was in love with my sister, Rebecca, and that probably they would marry.”
“Your sister who’s in Palestine now?” Kate asked, although she knew the answer.
Her own married sisters lived in Charleston and Atlanta and it seemed somehow appropriate to her that Aaron’s sister was living on a kibbutz while her own soft-voiced siblings met their friends for bridge, ins
tructed their staffs, and combed their young children’s shining hair.
“Do you think your sister is happy in Palestine, Aaron?” she asked.
“I think so. Come on, let’s be happy here.” His arms went around her and his tongue, insistent and knowing, sweetly licked her lips until they parted and her body weakened beneath his touch, and trembled in submission.
*
News of the babies’ arrival was cabled to Rebecca in Palestine and reached her on Beth HaCochav where she had remained after arriving there with the children. She lingered there from week to week, uncertain of her plans, unwilling to leave. Sporadically, she took sketching trips through the Galilee, worked in the irrigation ditches, and, when she was called upon, participated in the landing operations of illegal immigrants that took place in the dead of night. The weeks and months drifted by and she stayed on, vaguely aware that she was waiting for something to happen but not knowing what it was she anticipated. Often in the evening, she walked through a gentle incline where the rich dark grapes that were sold to the vintners of Rishon LeZion grew on vines that twined themselves through a fragile network of arbors. The early darkness fused its way through the drapery of leaf and fruit and she relished the strange melancholy that engulfed her when the last thread of light was swallowed and she stood alone in the blackness that smelled of humous earth and sweet grape.
She read the cable, smiled at the thought of Joshua as a father of not one, but two screaming infants, and placed it in a drawer. Still smiling, she turned back to plaiting Mindell’s thick blond braids.
“There. Now you’re ready for the party,” she said at last. “Aren’t you coming to the party?” Mindell asked. “You’ll have to change.”
She looked critically at Rebecca’s soiled work pants, the heavy black knit sweater which had once belonged to Yaakov, and the high boots, still caked with crusts of mud from the irrigation ditches.
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