“Oh, Rivka, I wish you hadn’t cut your hair. It was so pretty.”
Rebecca touched the sleek cap of dark hair which encircled her head and smiled.
“No. I am not going to the party because I must work tonight. And I’m glad I cut my hair even if you’re not. After all, it wasn’t you who had to get up at five in the morning and wash it in ice-cold water.”
She hugged Mindell and remembered the day Henia had cut her hair and the sense of lightness and freedom she had felt as the silken black sheaves slid to the ground beside her.
Rebecca Goldfeder, the Scarsdale schoolgirl, her parents’ doll, her lover’s playmate, cavorting across tennis courts, rushing through Vermont woods, had had time to brush and dress her hair, to luxuriate in its smooth fall down her naked back after a long leisurely bath, to twist it into coronet and topknot. But Rivka, Yaakov’s cousin, transitory kibbutz worker and itinerant agent in illegal immigration, could not spare the time for such luxurious frivolity. Besides, her long black hair had made her too easily recognizable and remembered. Walking down the streets of Haifa one day, not long after her arrival with the Auschwitz children, she had been stopped by a British agent.
“You got away with it once, Miss Goldfeder,” he said, his lips pursed in a thin ugly line of anger. “But next time we’ll recognize you, we’ll be ready for you.”
But he had not recognized her a week later because a kibbutz hat covered her shorn hair and when she stopped him and asked him for a match, he lit her cigarette and walked on without pausing. It was that daring of Rebecca’s, that instinct for innovation, which impressed the leaders of Bericha, who assigned her to operations of special risk.
Yehuda had glanced at the new haircut through hooded lids.
“Ah—a new haircut and thus a new Miss Goldfeder, I dare say,” he said, his silken gray eyes roving insolently over her. She was suddenly conscious of the fact that Baila’s blue shirt was too small for her, pulling tightly across her breasts, and realized, too, that it was stained dark with sweat beneath her armpits. She had worked in the banana fields that morning, shrouding the young fruit in lengths of blue plastic against an early frost.
“Perhaps you too ought to get a haircut, Yehuda,” she replied curtly. “Perhaps the new Yehuda Arnon will be a pleasanter Yehuda Arnon.”
She walked quickly away, her heels kicking up small clouds of red dust.
“Rebecca!” he called after her, but she did not turn and he did not follow her.
That night at dinner Yaakov told her Yehuda had sailed for another Bericha mission in Europe and she wondered if he had called after her to say good-bye. Beneath the grape arbor that night, she wept softly and wondered why it was that she and Yehuda seemed always to be moving in opposite directions. They lay in wait for each other endlessly and then drifted stealthily away, as though fearful of encounter. She felt his eyes upon her as she walked into the communal dining room, but when she had laden her tray and searched for a place to eat, his seat was empty. Often, late at night, she glimpsed him standing beneath the umbrella of the cypress tree opposite her door, but when she emerged into the night he was gone, leaving only a small mound of cigarette butts behind him. Late in the afternoon, she waited for him as he came back from the fields but always dashed away moments before he passed her. It was as though they were playing an elaborate game of hide and seek, interchanging the roles of pursuer and quarry.
He was in Europe still, this New Year’s Eve, when the cold Galilee wind whipped the kibbutz and small kerosene fires burned in every room. It would be bitter cold in the Mediterranean ports and on the clumsy, ancient ships which carried the illegals. Sighing, she bundled Mindell into a heavy sweater and sent her off to the party.
“But if you’re back early enough, you’ll come to the party, won’t you?” the child asked.
“Of course,” Rebecca assured her and watched Mindell run through the cold to the brightly lit dining room.
She marveled again at the swiftness with which Mindell, Katia, Shlomo, and the other children had adjusted to their new lives, had reclaimed their shattered childhoods and learned to dance and play, to shout out loud, to laugh with joy and scream with anger. Within months they were unrecognizable from the other children of the kibbutz, except for isolated moments when one or another of them drifted suddenly into a mysterious tenebrous silence, filled with grim memories of those subterranean years when they hid from death but could not escape the screams and entreaties of the dying. Shadowy figures of vanished parents, half-remembered siblings, would glide through their dreams, and the child who had gone to sleep smiling and happy wakened in the night terrified by desperate grief. Still, the children grew better and Rebecca hoped she would come back early enough tonight to see “her” children at the first New Year they would usher in in freedom and joy.
“Rebecca—Rivkala—are you there? Henia sent over an extra sweater for you. It will be bitter cold at the sea tonight. I’ve given Yaakov one as well. He’s manning the radio.”
Baila strode into the room and tossed Rebecca a heavy hooded blue sweater.
“Yes, I know. I’ve been listening to the weather reports. The cold doesn’t bother me particularly but the wind velocity does. If the winds are as strong as they say, the longboats will have a terrible time rowing inland. Some of the illegals may have to swim for shore.”
She shivered, remembering the night only three weeks before when one of the longboats had taken water and the entire boatload of immigrants had been forced to take to the sea. One old man among them had carried a small Torah which he refused to release, and he held it aloft in one hand as he was pulled ashore through the raging surf. It had been his dead, already stiffening body that they loaded into the waiting truck, but the Torah, encased in its worn red velvet coverlet, was barely damp. Moshe Abrahami, who had cradled the old man’s body in his arms, built an ark for it, polishing and sanding the wood until it gleamed with a golden smoothness.
“That old man—for a moment—a split second—I thought that he was my father, your grandfather,” he told Rebecca. He rubbed fiercely at the wood and a cloud of golden dust floated above his fingers.
There had been no news of Rebecca’s grandparents since the opening of the Russian front; the letters sent from the United States and Palestine were returned to Moshe, Leah, and Mollie marked “Addressee Unknown.” The village of their birth had vanished and they saw their lost mother and father in the faces of weary bearded man, in the frightened eyes of careworn women.
“Perhaps the wind will let up,” Baila said, looking through the window where the cypress tree bent and swayed in vectorial arcs. “There are many children on this ship—the most important cargo of all.” She smiled and touched her abdomen, proudly tumid now. Baila’s first child would be born at winter’s end.
“How do you know?” Rebecca asked.
“Bericha had a communication from Yehuda.”
“Is he on the ship?” She kept her tone casual but felt her blood pulse more quickly and the electric tingling of her palms.
“I wouldn’t think so. He was to act as liaison for arranging another ship in a month’s time. We’ve got to get as many people in before the British pull out, because after that we’ll be too busy fighting the Arabs to launch any immigration operation.”
“I know,” Rebecca replied.
It was impossible to live in Palestine and not know. From the moment the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine, only a month before, illegal immigration operations had been intensified. The British would leave the country in the spring and there was little doubt that the Arabs would launch an invasion then. The immigrants smuggled in now were to be fighters for Israel in six months’ time. They were en route from one war to another, these grim survivors of death who even now held no guarantee of life.
“You don’t like Yehuda, do you?” Baila asked, leaning back on Rebecca’s bed and watching her husband’s American cousin pack a waterproof kit bag of first-aid supplies.
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“I don’t know. And I don’t know how Yehuda feels about me. Ever since that first day in Italy I’ve had the feeling that he saw me as a spoiled American kid who always had her own way. Now I think he sees me as someone grabbing an adventure. I don’t think it occurs to him that I can be as serious, as involved in all this as he is.”
Rebecca slapped a small flask of brandy into her bag. She did not drink brandy, but on their last rescue operation Yehuda had had to swim to shore carrying a small child, and when he sat beside her on the truck heading back to the kibbutz, his body was riveted with violent shivers. She had passed him the flask then and watched as his limbs slowly quieted under the liquor’s warmth.
“You are wrong, Rivka. You would have to be blind to watch you with the children and not know how deeply you feel for them. Yehuda sees that,” Baila said.
“Do you know that when I sailed with the children, it was the first time in my life that I had done anything for anyone else. It was the first time anyone had ever expected me to do anything for anyone but myself. Yehuda kept waiting for me to say no. And then he kept waiting for me to fail. Now, I don’t know how he feels about me. But I do know that I’m tired of proving myself to him.” Her voice rang with an anger she had not known she harbored and her hand trembled imperceptibly as she pulled on an extra pair of socks.
“Be gentler. He’s had a hard time, our Yehuda.”
“Baila—what happened to his wife?”
The question Rebecca had wanted to ask for months floated on the waves of that new sudden anger, an anger that she now recognized had gathered through the lonely months, the strange silences and stranger avoidances. The kibbutz was like a small town where gossip flourished and privacy was virtually nonexistent. Since her arrival in the summer, Rebecca had learned about divorces and affairs, distant scandals and current flirtations.
She knew that Margalit, married now to Noah, had lived for years in the same room as tall Reuven who managed the carp pond. She knew that the small blond Yardeni twins were the children of a Tel Aviv restaurateur who had lived briefly with a kibbutz girl. There was a former kibbutz member in New York who had absconded years before with funds earmarked for agricultural equipment. She knew of two couples who casually and cheerfully switched partners. But she knew nothing of Yehuda Arnon’s wife, the woman who was the mother of the small boy and girl who walked with him each evening. The net of silence, the strange secrecy, was puzzling in Beth HaCochav where knowledge as well as property was communally shared. Knowledge of everyone, with the strange exception of Yehuda Arnon.
She had asked her question but Baila remained silent, her fingers toying with the edges of the blanket. “I myself am new to the kibbutz,” she said evasively.
“Yes. But you know.”
“I know what I’ve heard.”
“And what have you heard?”
Baila sighed and looked through the window. A group of children walked through the gentle twilight, hand in hand, on their way to the party. As they walked, they sang a song popular that year, when their country hovered at the edge of history, balanced precariously between war and peace.
The days drift past,
The year ends,
But the melody, the melody always remains…
“I have heard that Danielle looks very much like her mother—Yehuda’s wife, Miriam—except that Miriam had blonde hair. She was very beautiful, they say, so beautiful that when she walked down the streets in Haifa, the men stopped their work to look at her.”
Rebecca’s heart twisted in an unfamiliar pang which she recognized, with annoyed surprise, to be jealousy. She was jealous of a woman she had never known.
“Miriam came with her parents in the early thirties from Czechoslovakia and grew up here on Beth HaCochav. Yehuda was born here. They grew up together, working and studying, and were married here. Danielle was born in the first year of the war in Europe and Noam three years later. Yehuda was already working in the Mosad, going back and forth to Europe, helping to smuggle Jews out. In those days he worked against both the Germans and the British. Mosad desperately needed an agent in Czechoslovakia who could pass as a Gentile, who knew the language. Miriam seemed the natural choice. Yehuda was against it but she fought for the assignment. The kibbutz could take care of the children and they say she could no longer bear to be without Yehuda. Those who knew them say that when they walked together it was as though only one person moved. They spoke little because they read each other’s thoughts. They had grown up, you see, like brother and sister and had become lovers. They were each an extension of the other.”
“Like you and Yaakov,” Rebecca said.
“No. Between Yaakov and me there is a great love but he is a child of Palestine and there are things that happened to me in Hungary and in Belsen which he will never know about—which he must never know about. But there was nothing in their lives which Miriam and Yehuda did not share.”
“I see,” Rebecca said, remembering back to the childhood she had shared with Joshua and the special, dangerous closeness it had created. Joshua, so newly a father. Twins. Of course, twins. Two for the price of one. Clever Joshua. She smiled and turned back, to Baila who continued talking, her eyes fixed on the windblown cypress tree.
“Miriam won out in the end, of course. A British plane dropped her behind the lines in Czechoslovakia. Ah, the brave British. Even while they were impounding illegal ships and sending Jewish immigrants back to Europe, they had no objection to using Jewish agents. Well, Miriam operated out of Prague for months. She was a successful agent. Her looks and the language made it easy for her to pass. But in the end it was her own beauty that betrayed her. She was on her way to a country rendezvous with Yehuda, and a German officer who had been flirting with her trailed her to the spot. Yehuda was hiding in the brush but he saw the officer run toward her and watched her struggle. He rushed out and the German pulled his gun. Miriam ran between the bullet and her husband. It pierced her forehead and she died instantly. Yehuda strangled the German officer with his bare hands and hid both the bodies. Miriam’s he concealed in a cave covered over by a thicket of blackberries where they had often met. Her body, we think, was never found. But Yehuda blamed himself then, and does still, I think, for Miriam’s death. And there are those who also blame him, who feel he was not “professional.” Miriam’s parents, the old couple who sit always alone, blame him still, I know. That is why she is never spoken of, here on Beth HaCochav. And that is why the Mosad will not let husbands and wives or lovers work together. They are a danger to each other. If Miriam had not been Yehuda’s wife, she might be alive today.”
Baila, who seldom smoked, lit a cigarette and offered one to Rebecca. They sat in silence and thought of the beautiful young mother lying dead in a land no longer her own, a victim of her own love, her own courage. Rebecca felt a heavy grief for the lovely Miriam and a strange solidarity with her. She began to understand, now, Yehuda’s brooding silences, his silent vigils beneath the cypress tree, his long waits and sudden disappearances. There was a necessity for the distance he had established between them, and she wondered if that distance could ever be bridged. Her father, the specialist in emotional pain, whose sad eyes so often reflected the anguish he had absorbed through long hours of listening, had told her once that there were hurts which could not be healed. Survival did not mean recovery. She longed suddenly, to lean on her father’s shoulder, to hear his gentle voice. Perhaps, after all, she should go home. Impatiently, she snuffed her cigarette out.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said to Baila and kissed her cousin’s wife who sat now with her hands across her stomach, as though to protect that unborn life within her from the dangers which haunted her dreams and memories. Outside the truck, painted black, its headlights blinded, honked impatiently. Rebecca seized her kit bag, covered her hair with a wool cap, and hurried out. In the clear silent night, the bells of a nearby Galilean mission church tolled their last count of the year. Soon, in distant cities, women in
soft gowns and men in evening dress would lift their glasses and toast the new year of 1948. Rebecca Goldfeder, too, thought of the months ahead as she huddled in the corner of the pitch-dark truck between two swollen yellow life rafts, and rolled down an unpaved coastal road to an ancient Crusader port where a battered Greek freighter flying a Panamanian flag listed from side to side in the cold darkness.
The truck trundled to a stop in a small cove and Rebecca sniffed the fresh sea air, heard the waves crash wildly against the sloping promontory which shielded them from sight. She and the others pulled on their high boots and rain gear, working in silence, preserving their concentration for the task that awaited them.
“It’s a cold night for an operation,” one man said, climbing down from the truck.
“Yes. But a good one. No stars. No moon. And the British getting drunker by the minute, celebrating their last New Year’s Eve in Palestine.”
They stood outside the truck ready to move, shifting their booted feet across the sand congealed by the cold into a gritty hardness. They peered across the water, searching for a flicker of light, but sheer darkness confronted them. From the interior of the truck they heard Yaakov speaking softly, insistently, into the microphone, but they knew from his repeated questions that there was no answer.
“Perhaps they didn’t get through the blockade,” someone said softly.
No one replied, but the air was heavy with their fear.
Two gulls, soaring in concentric circles across a cliff, hooted wildly at each other and from across the water came the mournful call of a third gull. The wind blew in keening sobs through the tall dune grass and a small jackal scurried out from beneath a brush pine and streaked off into the darkness.
“Hello. Shalom. Answer me. Are you there? Hello. Shalom. Answer. Signal.” A note of desperation had crept into Yaakov’s firm tone.
Leah's Journey Page 38
