Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  Still, the pills were real and remembered and she gulped down several of them, not remembering Dr. Hernandez’s instructions. They would calm her, he said, not meeting her eyes. She was to take them if she felt upset. They had both been in a hurry and anxious to leave each other. He was going to Mass and she was catching a plane. He had not said how many to take. One more or less could not make a difference, she thought, and swallowed yet another. Nembutal. What a nice name. She felt better already.

  She dressed carefully, putting on a blue silk shirtwaist that Aaron especially liked. Her hair was dry and she brushed it into a cloud of gold that circled her small face. With trembling fingers she pressed pale powder on the circlets of violet beneath her eyes and outlined her lips in creamy pink. She would go to the office and see Aaron. Neither of them had a court appearance that day. She would tell him that she had thought about it and wanted the vacation in Israel. And then she would see David and her father-in-law would give her the name of a psychiatrist who would help her. She had no secrets from Aaron’s father, she knew. His wise, sad eyes had long ago fixed on her with knowledge, pierced the soft membrane of charm, and searched out the darkness of her true self. What he did not know for certain, he had guessed. He did not like her but for Aaron’s sake he would help her. She would begin treatment as soon as they returned from Israel. She saw everything with startling clarity now. Aaron was right. Other lawyers could handle their cases. The only important thing was that no more doors be slammed between them.

  The pills were taking effect and she regretted now not using them before. A new calm propelled her, organized her thoughts, motivated her movements. How simple everything seemed, how organized and orderly. The unmade bed briefly troubled her and she smoothed the covers, puffed up the pillow. A stranger had slept there in fitful sleep, an unknown ghostly Katie who would soon be vanquished. Tonight the real Katie would sleep there with Aaron; she would thread her fingers through his copper-colored hair, move to the rhythm of his love, sob not with grief but with gladness as her body arched beneath his, and they would begin again. Yet again.

  Swiftly she left the apartment and in the lobby she was startled to see that the rain still streaked steadily down.

  “A cab, Mrs. Goldfeder?” the doorman asked.

  She wore no raincoat, carried no umbrella, but she shook her head. The rain was so clean, so soothing. She and Aaron had loved to walk in the rain through the Harvard Yard and return to towel each other dry in their small apartment where a wood fire glowed radiantly against their naked bodies.

  “I’ll walk,” she said happily. Aaron’s hair had matched the firelight. She remembered that.

  She did not hear the doorman’s protest, the neighbor who called after her. How light and cleansed she felt as the rain drifted about her. Years dropped away, unnamed burdens drifted off. The chimerical pills floated about in her bloodstream, magically cushioning harsh nerve endings. She carried neither purse nor attaché case, only Rebecca’s letter like a lucky talisman pinched between her fingers. She floated down the street, a small golden-haired woman in a blue silk dress that soon shimmered wetly and clung to her body, exactly matching the bright blueness of her eyes.

  She did not notice the passersby who stared after her nor the traffic light on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street that went from red to green with startling speed. The rain whispered to her and she followed its rhythmic voice, its steady stroke, and walked calmly into the street. She never saw the speeding taxi, its windshield blinded by the rapid swirls of water, that streaked toward her, swerved but could not avoid her. With silent impact the tons of metal met her flesh, struck her small bright figure, tossed it briefly skyward and then onto the sleek black asphalt where it lay in startled death. Its bright-blue eyes were open in astonishment and one blue-sleeved arm neatly, gracefully spread across a soft breast sadly spattered with mud and blood. A woman wept and the cab driver vomited. A very young policeman found the green air letter from Israel and went to search for a telephone.

  Sheets of rain, harsh unremitting savage floods of autumnal grief, fell the next day as once again the family gathered at the cemetery, to bury Katie. It was a small funeral and the mourners stood beneath black umbrellas, their faces pale with shock. Again Aaron Goldfeder stood alone in black suit and hat, a clear plastic cape draped over his shoulders. On its surface, the rain tapped out a message of grief and loss, waste and yearning, time past, time lost. He stepped forward when the rabbi motioned to him and in a quiet voice he intoned the prayer for the dead. Unlike his uncle Seymour, he stood erect and held his body still.

  The earth that he picked up to drop into the open grave congealed into mud within his hand and fell too swiftly onto the rain-dampened wood.

  “Poor Katie, sweet Katie, wet Katie,” he thought, the words weeping their way through his mind.

  He saw his golden-haired wife emerge from the shower, her body still red with the pressure of his own. He saw her slender form slide through the waters of Pontchartrain and remembered the small fire that glowed orange and gold in their Cambridge apartment and how he had so often rubbed her dry after a laughing dash through the rain, delighting in her soft white skin that glowed golden in the firelight.

  Around him, at the open grave site, others moved forward to deposit their offerings of earth—her parents who had never understood Katie in life and did not comprehend her in death, her sisters, dazed and bewildered, smelling of the lemon-scented soap which Katie too had used, whose fragrance had wafted toward him, battling the odor of disinfectant and formaldehyde, when he bent to identify her poor broken body as it lay on a slab in the morgue.

  Her family left the cemetery swiftly, the rain whipping their backs as the wind shifted. The stale odor of repeated grief filled the hired car from the funeral home which he shared with his parents. Katie’s family, grief and accusation in their eyes, rode behind him. They would return to New Orleans for the week of mourning.

  “They blame me,” he said and was relieved when his father did not argue with him.

  “Only because they do not know whom to blame,” David replied gently. He was an expert on grief, a skilled practitioner in the mystic fields of guilt and anger. His very skill sickened him now. He wanted only to take Aaron’s head and hold it gently in his own hands, to pass his fingers across the young man’s wounded eyes.

  “They’re right to blame me. All she wanted was a child. And I couldn’t give it to her. I couldn’t give it to her.”

  David stared ahead. It was the moment to tell Aaron about Katie’s trip to Puerto Rico, to relieve his guilt but compound his sorrow. An accident, a taxi speeding down a rain-dark street—that could be absorbed, accepted. But this other death, for which an appointment had been made, a check written, a skillful web of deceit woven—with such a death Aaron could never become reconciled. Still, he had to be told.

  “Aaron.” Leah’s voice was firm and her husband and son bent to catch her words. “Surely you could have given her a child.” Quietly as the car sped northward, she told her son about the infant born to Lisa Frawley as he fought in North Africa, the boy child conceived in the sheltering shadows of trees and strangled at birth in the cord of sustenance.

  Aaron leaned back. The knowledge shocked and subdued him. Vagrant griefs tossed about in his thoughts, became entangled and hammered at his heart. Tears came at last and he wept as the car moved out of the city, and Leah and David, their eyes meeting in sadness and sympathy, sat in patient painful vigil and watched their son’s broad shoulders shake, his body break with sobs, as he submitted at last to his love and to his sorrow.

  Home

  1956

  23

  THE BLONDE GIRL, her thick hair caught in a single braid, nestled the tiny goat within her arms, lifted a bottle, and pressed the pink rubber nipple into the quivering creature’s mouth. The young kid closed its eyes and sucked the blue-white liquid with surprising strength. When the bottle was empty, its small rough tongue darted out to lick up
the few drops that dribbled about its mouth and it moaned softly, pressing its body against the girl’s small breast.

  “Ah, you’re still thirsty, Mushi, and I don’t want to go back for more water. Can you wait? They’ll be here any minute.”

  She stood and peered down the narrow black ribbon of asphalt highway that wove its way through the oceans of drifting golden sand. There had been no highway six years ago when they arrived at the site chosen for their new kibbutz, Shaarei HaNegev—Gateway to the Southland.

  “You see,” Yehuda had said, when the new highway opened, “Moses performed a miracle when he parted the Red Sea, but we perform a modern miracle: We have parted the desert.”

  Mindell looked across at the desert which was both their adversary and their comfort. She loved the endless expanse, broken only by the stunted growth of tamarisk and pink-flowered cactus; she loved the hot gem-like glitter of the sands in the bright sunlight of high noon. It banished the years of darkness in the tunnel beneath a barracks, the closeness of other small bodies pressed against her own, the wail of a siren and the echoing bark of harsh voices in the language of hate.

  “Still waiting, Mindell?”

  Her sister Danielle came toward her and Mindell saw with relief that Danielle carried a canteen. Mushi would have another drink after all.

  “They should be here any minute if they left Beersheva right after breakfast. What’s Ima doing?” she asked.

  “Still nursing the baby. What an appetite. I think he’s greedier than Mushi. And he’s only a week old.”

  Danielle carefully unscrewed her canteen and poured the water into the bottle, flinching when a drop fell to the earth and was swallowed by the sand. The sisters shared the desert dweller’s reverence for water and both of them had lived through months of drought when the kibbutz posted stern notices, rationing the flushing of toilets, the usage of showers. They remembered the time, only a year before, when the fedayeen had sabotaged the pipeline and the flow of water had ceased entirely. They had had to use the emergency cistern then, measuring out liters in pale blue plastic jugs, saving as much water as they could for their own livestock and that of the bedouins, who carried their smallest goats and lambs and led young camels, delicately balanced on stock-thin legs, to the drinking troughs which the kibbutz set up.

  “But the bedouins are Arabs too. Why would the fedayeen want to hurt their own people?” Mindell had asked then, and Yehuda had pressed his hand against the small white scar on his forehead.

  “You ask a reasonable question, Mindell, but you know that hate is an enemy of reason. It is another one of your good questions that I cannot answer.”

  She loved Yehuda for that honesty, for not answering, for acknowledging his own bewilderment in the face of hers. She asked too many questions, she knew. Again and again, she asked why her parents—her real parents, the slender fair-haired woman whom she remembered only for a bright pink dress and a picture hat to match and the man with the small moustache who wore a gold watch on a long chain about his waist—had had to die in the low, windowless dark red brick building that stood in a grassy corner of the town of terror they called Oswiecim and the Germans called Auschwitz. Yehuda offered no answers and Rebecca—the second mother of her life—spoke softly of grief and loss, of love and acceptance. She did not understand Rebecca’s words but took comfort from the soft voice, the light touch of her hands. Mindell offered the same words to Danielle who was, after all, a year younger than she was, who had never been out of Israel, who did not understand terror and darkness, the screams of sirens and the staccato message of handguns. Danielle, too, asked such questions because she too lived with the ghostly memory of a mother who had gone away and never returned. But the new baby, the infant born to Rebecca and Yehuda, the small bundle of cooing flesh they had named Yaakov, would never ask such questions. His mother would never stand beneath a spigot that spewed forth gaseous death or be shot in a forest clearing created for lovers’ trysts. This new baby, their brother, had natural parents, and today grandparents—real grandparents—were coming all the way from America.

  Grandparents and a new uncle, she remembered belatedly and hoped their uncle Aaron would be as much fun as their uncle Michael was. Michael had spent several weeks on the kibbutz and he was hiking up north now but he too would return tomorrow for Yaakov’s circumcision ceremony. Of course, they had been warned that Uncle Aaron might be a little sad because his wife had died recently, had been run over by a taxicab on a rainy New York street. It seemed to Mindell a mild, almost normal, way to die and she hoped her mother’s brother would not drag his sadness behind him in a cloud that shadowed their joy. Oh well, if he did she would make him laugh, would thrust Mushi’s face into his ear. No one would remain sad when Mushi’s warm tongue tickled them.

  Mindell was good at making people laugh. She had had enough of darkness and sorrow, of silent weeping and anguished keening. She laughed to block out the sounds of fear, the small gasps of misery, the sudden shriek of terror. Sometimes when she laughed too loudly, she saw Yehuda and Rebecca look swiftly at each other, pain and helplessness locked in their gaze. The new baby, little Yaakov, would have the gift of quiet laughter, of small soft sounds of merriment. Lucky Yaakov, she thought, and hoped that Rebecca would let her hold him that afternoon and show him off to their American family.

  “Mindell, does it hurt the baby?” Danielle asked.

  “Does what hurt the baby?”

  “You know. The cutting. The circumcision.”

  “Just a little, I think. A very little.” But she herself was not reassured and she caressed Mushi and told herself that she would not watch the rabbi, she would turn her eyes out toward the desert, toward the bright clouds of dancing sands.

  “When do you think they’ll get here?” Danielle asked.

  “Soon. They said before lunch and it’s after lunch already.”

  “Maybe they knew we were having that horrid leftover stew and wanted to miss it. Chana thinks she’s cooking food for cold German winters. Someone should tell her that we live in the Negev.”

  “What do you think they’ll be like, Danielle?”

  “Oh, nice. Ima says her mother, Grandma Leah, is beautiful. Tall and black-haired. Like a queen, she said. She’s an artist too.”

  “It’s strange to have a grandfather and grandmother you’ve never seen,” Danielle said.

  “It’s stranger to have parents you don’t remember,” Mindell replied and was surprised at the quiet sadness in her own voice. It had been a long time since she thought of the woman in the bright pink dress and the man whose golden watch chain had sometimes scratched her cheek when he lifted her high above his head.

  “Here they come. There’s the car. Hurry, let’s tell them!”

  They ran off, their cheeks flushed with excitement, sandals fluttering, clouds of sand rising behind them, too shy suddenly to remain at the side of the road and greet the parents and brother of the young woman they loved so fiercely, whom they called Ima because she had become a mother to them and now, at last, had given them a brother.

  *

  Leah leaned forward, wiped the sand from the window of the huge old American taxi that had carried them southward from Beersheba, and watched the retreating figures of the two girls. The only other sign of life they had seen in the past hour had been a slender gazelle that leapt swiftly from behind a hillock of sand, glanced about, its liquid dark eyes wary with wisdom, and flashed across the rose-red desert floor into an outgrowth of smoke-colored rocks. Their driver, a jovial, moustachioed man named Danni who alternately sang, told jokes, and filled them with ecological and archeological information about the passing landscape, stopped the taxi until the animal vanished.

  “A Bible beast,” he said. “They don’t like the sounds of cars and motors. Frightens them to death. And in the Negev life is precious, we’ve got to protect it.”

  They understood Danni’s concern about protecting life because they had noticed, when he rolled up his slee
ves at the kiosk in Mitzpeh Rimon, the small row of blue numbers etched into his arm. Anyone who had hovered so close to death understood the preciousness of life.

  On the seat beside them Aaron slept, and Leah and David spoke softly, knowing how little sleep he had had during their ocean voyage and the few days in the country. On shipboard, David, awakening at night with sudden tightness constricting his chest, pain flashing through his arm, would stealthily take a pill and go up on deck into the quiet darkness and allow the movement of the sea to cradle him into calm. It was then that he would see Aaron leaning against the rail, watching the waves, and the terrible sorrow he read in his son’s hunched shoulders moved him to a pity he could not reveal to Aaron. He was grateful then that it had not been necessary for him to tell Aaron about the abortion and he remained concealed in the shadows, nursing his secret pain as Aaron nursed his.

  Leah, too, would waken in the silvery light of dawn and hear Aaron pacing in his stateroom next door. She heard him speak aloud one night, when the light washed through their porthole and the air sparkled with dancing argentous motes. At the sound of Aaron’s voice she turned her head to the wall, unwilling to eavesdrop on her son’s misery. He would recover from Katie’s death, she knew, and remembered with muted sadness the days and nights of her own grief, of her own yearnings for death. Her grief had passed as his would, and she searched for words to offer him but knew that, after all, there was nothing she could say.

  “Are we almost there, Danni?” she asked softly.

  “We are there, Geveret,” Danni replied. “Those two girls who ran away like my frightened gazelles were probably young members of the kibbutz. We turn in now to Shaarei HaNegev.”