“It happened like a slow-motion film. I moved through it as though it were happening to someone else. I didn’t shoot. Someone else shot. My ears didn’t hear the screaming of the wounded. That someone else, that slow-motion ghost who had taken over my body, heard it. Even Gregory, poor dead Gregory, he was ‘someone else’s’ friend.”
Standing in the makeshift hospital, her eyes riveted to a pool of blood, her ears filled with screams and the muffled sounds of shamed weeping, she understood what Aaron had meant. Grimly, she commanded the “someone else” who inhabited her body to move down the corridor, to rip sheets into bandages, to apply a compress to the bloodied forehead of the fourteen-year-old boy who still tightly grasped the grenade he had not had time to throw before a bullet shattered his kneecap.
She learned that morning not to look at faces but to concentrate on wounds. She had made the mistake of looking up into the familiar deep-blue eyes of a young man delirious with pain, blood running from his right hand. He had held his other hand out to her and in the dirt-encrusted palm were three mangled fingers belonging to the bloodied right hand. A grenade had severed them by the muscle from his palm but he had plucked up the scraps of tendon, flesh, and bone and hurried with them to the clinic. His hands were his life, Rebecca knew, because he was Amnon Harel, the artist whose easel stood next to hers in the Bezalel studio and whose subtle use of line and color reminded her of Joe Stevenson’s work. She took the proffered fingers—the flesh soft and spongy against her own, one sharp knucklebone shimmering like milk-white ivory where the flesh had been scorched from it—found a glass of water and some salt, and plunged them into it. She had heard her father talk once about preserving severed flesh in a saline solution and she prayed that there was hope for saving Amnon’s fingers, the fingers whose magic gift captured the Judean hills in pastel tones as soft and delicate as the morning breath of a sleeping child.
At another bedside she held a block of ice in place against the groin of a tall, red-bearded man whose Number 6 bus she had often ridden to the German colony. A volley of submachine gun bullets had pierced his trunk and although the blood was staunched he moaned and writhed on the narrow cot. She did not look at him until he was quiet, and she thought then that the ice must have anesthesized his pain so that he slept at last. She moved to adjust his blanket and saw his hand dangling, blue and motionless. She pressed her ear against his mouth but she had known from the moment that she saw the hand that he was dead. Almost angrily she pulled the blanket over his face and seized the block of ice, taking it to where a mother sat with her seventeen-year-old son, waiting for Dr. Joseph to amputate the boy’s left leg, mangled into shreds of broken cartilage where an Arab half-track had ridden over it once and then shifted into reverse and ridden back across it to compound the crippling.
As the civilian volunteers and Haganah soldiers carried in the wounded, depositing them in every available inch of space, they brought the news of the battles raging throughout the city. Avram Uzielli’s troops had captured the Allenby Barracks, securing the Greek Colony, the German Colony, and Bakka. Fighting was fierce in the Old City and casualties were high among both the Jews and the Arabs. The Palmach, the key commando unit of the Jewish army, had taken Latrun in a surprise victory.
The Palmach, Rebecca thought with a sudden surge of fear which did not interfere with her calm cutting away of the bloodied blouse of a young woman Haganah fighter, who had passed out with the pain but would not die of the wound. Both her cousin Yaakov and Yehuda were in the Palmach. Were they in Latrun? No, of course not. She dismissed the thought. Yehuda was still in Europe. He had been traveling back and forth on Bericha vessels since New Year’s Eve. In a daring new plan, it was rumored that Bericha was now landing some vessels off the coast of the Lebanese port of Tyre, and the illegals were crossing into Israel by foot across the northern border. Yehuda, of course, would be the logical choice to run such an operation. She had not heard from him since the night they had swum through the icy waters of the inlet to the rubber raft together, and she accepted that silence as decision.
Sirens wailed ceaselessly in the streets outside and Nurse Dalia emptied a bowl of water which she had just used to cleanse the gaping neck wound of an Irgun fighter and poured it onto the floor, using it to mop up the mess of blood and vomit the wounded man had left. Nurse Rachel was in the chapel and Dalia told Rebecca that Dr. Joseph was operating now on her fiancé, who had been wounded in street combat.
“That was amazing presence of mind—preserving that boy’s fingers in saline solution. Dr. Joseph was able to stitch them right on and he’s fairly sure they’ll be manipulable. Have you studied nursing?” Rachel asked.
“No. But my father is a doctor.” Rebecca continued to rip up Nimra Halby’s linen, some of it still bearing the faded markings of a well-known Amman department store. Nimra Halby, who had stayed up all night worrying about Danni, would not mind the use to which her dowry was being put.
“Where did you learn to keep your head in such a situation?” the nurse said admiringly and dashed off, a clean sponge in one hand, a bottle of iodine in the other, to swab the cheek of a child who had been carried into the clinic by an old rabbi. He was a small Arab boy, one of the army of young shoeshine entrepreneurs who lined Suleiman Road. He had been caught in crossfire and the white-bearded rabbi, his white Sabbath caftan red now with the boy’s blood, had found him and carried him across the fiery half-mile to the convent clinic.
Where had the rabbi, the man of prayer and study, found the strength? Rebecca wondered, and thought of the day when Eleanor Greenstein had told her about Leah’s actions during the Rosenblatt fire. Rebecca had not been able to conceive of her mother wrapping the burning bodies of young girls in bolts of cloth and hurling them through windows to safety. But now she began to understand these secret veins of strength. Her children too, in all probability, would find it difficult to believe that she, Rebecca, could dress wounds in a makeshift Jerusalem clinic, its floors slimy with blood, its air thick with the odors of putrefaction, the screams of the wounded and the dying. But what children was she thinking of? She chided herself bitterly for the thought. The children she would not have with Joe Stevenson or with Joshua Ellenberg or with Yehuda Arnon? She reproached herself for even now being absorbed in her own problems. Gently, she pressed a damp compress down against the dark curls of the little shoeshine boy and listened to the muted murmur of the old man’s voice as he intoned the Psalms, shuffling from cot to cot, his pale old eyes awash with tears.
A new series of sirens rent the air, their shrill wail rising above the sputtering bullets, the explosive discharge of the Davidka cannon, the screaming of the wounded and the dying on both sides of the city.
“What the hell was that?”
Dr. Joseph emerged from the chapel, his mask askew, sweat pouring down his forehead. His apron was covered with blood so thick it formed wedges into which small white worms of entrails and striped scraps of muscles had embedded themselves. The internationally famous surgeon had flown home from a medical conference in South America in time for the battle of Jerusalem, and had been operating for almost six hours without a break, using the chapel benches as surgical tables, utilizing the light of flashlights held by nurses because the electricity at Saint Joseph’s had failed. Nurse Rachel, the slender Yemenite girl who had assisted him for much of the day, stood against the door, her hands hanging loosely at her sides. It was the first time in many hours that the tiny nurse was not moving frantically about, wheeling postoperative patients out of the chapel, preparing others for surgery, monitoring the meager supplies of morphine, bandages, and plasma. But now she stood absolutely still as though a great weight had settled upon her and held her immobile against the supporting doorframe.
A strangely familiar vacuity filled her eyes, and Rebecca knew it for the look of dazed incredulity that veils the eyes of those who have sustained an enormous loss. Her mother’s eyes had held that look when the news came that Aaron was missing in actio
n and again when she learned that the Russian village of her parents had been razed and its inhabitants taken to a remote wood called Babi Yar. And once, too, in the distant days of Rebecca’s childhood, Leah’s eyes had held that terrible wounded stare—during the days after the fire, Rebecca remembered suddenly—the summer when she and her cousin Annie had worn blue cartwheel hats whose trailing ribbons they had often sucked on. She understood then, with sad certainty, that Rachel’s fiancé had died behind the closed door of the chapel, and she moved toward the nurse and led her to an empty bench, holding the girl’s cold fingers in her own while outside the horns of death and danger continued their wailing threnody.
Dr. Joseph peered through the window.
“There’s an ambulance outside. Damn it, that’s what it is. A Magen David Adorn ambulance. Probably it was on its way over here. I can see the driver’s head against the wheel. Poor bastard got hit before he could draw up here. God only knows what wounded and how many are in the van. We’ve got to get out there and pull them in.”
“There’s crossfire from the Swedish School ricocheting down there. We’re sure targets for Abou Gharbieh’s men if we step out that door. We can’t afford to lose you, Doctor, and we don’t even know if there are any wounded in that van.” Danni Friedman had come in from the field only minutes before. A bullet had grazed his forehead en route and his argument carried with it the grim authority of the battles he had fought that day.
“But we can’t take the risk of leaving men out there, suffering, in danger.” The man whose life was dedicated to healing pleaded with the young soldier who would one day take his place in the operating theater.
“It’s too great a risk.” Danni’s voice was weary and firm.
He too looked out at the beleaguered ambulance and watched as a hand appeared in the rear window of the van and, like a ghostly disembodied appendage, scraped at the blood-spattered glass, then fell.
“You can spare me.” Rachel stepped forth, her eyes still frozen but her voice firm. “I don’t care about the danger.”
She did not care about anything at that moment, they knew, but the sight of that weak, pleading hand haunted them and they did not argue with her.
“I’ll go with you,” Rebecca said, acting with the swift impetuosity that had always governed her life.
“All right then. Go. I’ll cover you with my Bren. Dash for the back door of the ambulance, see what you’ve got, and get back in here with them if you can as quickly as possible,” Danni said briskly.
“Better than that,” Rebecca said. “I can make it to the driver’s seat and back it up to the convent entrance.” Before Danni could protest she jerked open the door and dashed across the road, sprinting to avoid the bullets that skittered off the cobblestones about her. Within seconds she had jumped into the battered ambulance and left the door swinging open. She shoved the body of the driver across the seat, gunned the motor, and heard with relief the engine’s noisy response. She shifted into reverse and bent low over the wheel to avoid a new streak of snipers’ bullets that pierced the windshield and settled with a dull thud in the cracked upholstery of the seat behind her, understanding how the driver had been killed. Without looking behind her, she moved the ambulance backward to the porticoed entry of the convent where Danni, Rachel, and Dr. Joseph stood in readiness. Then she scrambled into the rear of the vehicle, jerked open the door, and summoned all her strength to help Danni and the others move the half-dozen wounded men who lay there into the convent. The last man was unconscious and could not help to ease himself out as the others could. He lay face down, and she inched him forward patiently until Danni was able to grasp his shoulders and carry him, like an exhausted child, to safety in his arms.
She stumbled behind them, feeling her own tiredness settle across her whole being, but still she knelt for a moment beside the unconscious man. A cap shielded his face and she moved it so that he might breathe more easily. Her fingers trembled and then reached out with wondering tenderness to touch Yehuda Arnon’s earth-colored hair, matted now with sweat and blood.
She was still by his side hours later when he awoke. It was quiet in the convent now. Dr. Joseph slept sitting up in the large chair where the Mother Superior held court. The old rabbi repeated the Psalms and the two nurses moved up and down through the corridors, their eyes watchful. Grief had at last banished shock from Rachel’s eyes and Rebecca saw with relief that the little Yemenite nurse had released that grief into tears.
“It is very hard for her because they were childhood sweethearts, she and her fiancé, poor Gideon,” Dalia whispered. “They grew up together in Yemen and their families are neighbors in Rosh HaAyin. Gideon was studying medicine and it was their dream to work together in a clinic in the Negev. He and Rachel were lovers and still they were like brother and sister.”
“I know yet another story of lovers who were like brother and sister to each other,” Rebecca said.
She looked across to Yehuda who had watched his wife, the woman who had been both his sister and his mistress, gunned down in a forest of Czechoslovakia. He stirred in his sleep and she wiped the film of sweat that had formed in the stubble of his unshaven chin. His wound was not serious. A bullet had grazed his head and Dr. Joseph had cleaned and dressed it without even using a drop of his precious morphine.
Yehuda opened his eyes now and her heart melted at the sight of their silken gray sheen.
“Rebecca. Is it really you? What are you doing here? Where am I? What’s happened?”
“You’re at the Magen David Adom station in Saint Joseph’s Convent in Jerusalem. An ambulance brought you down from Latrun.”
“But the ambulance was ambushed. I remember now—the driver was hit.”
“No ambush. It was sniper fire just outside our door, but we got everyone in.”
“Ah, good. You are always expert at getting everyone in, Rivka. What’s the news?”
“Musrara is entirely in Jewish hands. We have no more news from Latrun. Was it very bad there, Yehuda? Was Yaakov there?”
“No, Yaakov is in the north. Yes, it was bad but it is bad everywhere. Still, here we are fighting with guns, not being gassed in showers or shot down in fields—or forests. Such a forest it was, too. Wild with vines and bushes. Sweet blackberries grew there. The brambles—they are sharp against our arms. Go carefully, Miriam. Don’t let the thorns tear your stockings. Ah, look, your arm is scratched. Here, let me lick the blood. How I love your soft arms. Miriam, please, don’t go into the clearing, there’s a shadow there. I see him coming closer and closer, Miriam, no. Stay back!” His voice rose in a delirium of grief and confusion. He sat up, his face flushed with fever, his arms flailing wildly, his shoulders shaking with remembered misery.
Gently, like a mother soothing a child grappling with nightmares, Rebecca eased Yehuda down, tucked the thin blanket firmly about his trembling body, and patted his shaking shoulders until his hand came up and grasped her fingers in his own. She sat beside him then and even when his fingers relaxed their grip, she did not remove her hand. She did not remember falling asleep as she sat by his side, but hours later, when she awoke to the shimmering rose-gold light of a new Jerusalem morning, her hand was still in his. With a gentleness that matched her own, he pressed it to his lips and smiled up at her, his silken gray eyes caressing her face. The fever was gone. Yehuda seemed tranquil. Gone, too, was the terrible tension that had hovered between them. He looked up at her.
“Good morning, Rivka,” he said. “Darling Rivka.”
She wept then and did not care that he saw her tears. That night, a fresh white bandage on his forehead, he left to find his unit and some days later she began the journey back to Beth HaCochav.
*
One month later she stood between Mindell and Danielle in a field where blood-red anemones covered the coarse green meadow grass. The children pelted her with the crimson blossoms and she watched the linear shadows the tall grass carved in their slender sun-streaked limbs. The United Nations t
ruce had been in effect for only two days and this was the first afternoon they had ventured any distance from the underground air-raid shelters. The two girls spotted a cluster of golden daffodils and dashed toward them, leaving Rebecca with the overflowing basket of anemones. She sank to her knees and braided the flowers the way her mother and her aunt Mollie had taught her, her fingers threading the stems together until she had fashioned a graceful wreath. “For me?”
His footsteps had been cushioned by the thick grasses and she had not heard him approach. She stood and held the flowers out toward him. He took them and placed them on her head, then cupped her chin in his hand and bent to kiss her lips. Where the bullet had grazed his forehead the broken skin took on a milky sheen, and she stood on her toes and touched the small scar with her lips. They stood quietly then, hand in hand, beneath the warm shower of golden sunlight and watched the children run toward them, their arms overflowing with the bright flowers of the field.
19
WEDDINGS. Leah had dreamed of them through the night before Aaron’s wedding. Clutching at the strands of memories, she lay quietly in bed and felt the damp, sultry breeze of New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain waft across her naked body. Just outside her door was the murmuring of patois French as two chambermaids argued about whether Madame and Monsieur le professeur would want café in their room. They settled at last on setting the tray just outside the door and Leah gratefully leaned back. She pulled the sheet up over her, careful not to disturb David who slept heavily beside her, his warm rhythmic breath caressing and moistening her neck. She turned toward him and, with light fingers, touched his thick short beard so intricately threaded with silver; when he did not awaken she moved the sheet up, curving it to the contours of his body like a solicitous mother.
Weddings. In the luxury of matutinal silence, in this strange hotel room in a strange city, she thought of all the different weddings of her lifetime at which she had danced and wept. She remembered her own first marriage when she had been a girl bride, dressed in a peasant costume of her own design. Her long dark hair had been threaded with flowers and the blossoms drifted to the floor as she and Yaakov whirled joyously to the tunes of what had seemed like a hundred horas. And then only a year later she had been a widow and then a bride once more. A pregnant bride in a shapeless dress, she had stood joylessly beneath the wedding canopy, beside the man whose body she covered now with such care, her quiet David who had nurtured her love and his own with a magical patience, nourishing it from a seedling into the full fragrance that had belonged to them now for three decades.
Leah's Journey Page 41
