Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  He wrote her a polite note of congratulation and remembered, as he sealed the envelope, how lovely she had looked in her green silk dress, how light her head had been upon his chest as she slept.

  Lydia and Aaron gave a dinner party to celebrate Leah and Boris’s first wedding anniversary. Michael attended alone and remembered how Elaine had stood beside him at his mother’s wedding. It occurred to him that the year had whirled by with astounding speed and that at its end he was still alone, watching for letters from Mississippi, answering too quickly when the phone rang. He was marking time while the lives of others surged forward. In a few months’ time he would return to Mississippi, but this summer would be different, he decided. He and Kemala would confront the future. The thought filled him with a blend of fear and hope. He drank deeply when Aaron called for a toast to Boris and Leah.

  “L’chaim,” Aaron said loudly. “To life.”

  “L’chaim,” Michael murmured softly and felt his mother’s hand cover his own.

  *

  MINDELL KRASNOW glanced uncertainly about the Neshoba bus station and loosened the straps of her knapsack. If Michael was going to be much later, she supposed she should take it off. It was very heavy, and the fierce heat of the Mississippi afternoon adhered to the nylon fabric and seared her skin. It was her own fault, she acknowledged ruefully. She had grown up on the desert and certainly knew enough to use a canvas knapsack. She had, in fact, taken her army knapsack with her to America, but Joshua Ellenberg, who had recently begun manufacturing camping equipment, had pressed this one on her as a gift.

  He had presented it with her initials carefully worked into the shiny royal-blue fabric and proudly showed her the intricate compartments for storing bedroll, toilet articles, cooking gear, and clothing.

  “Wonderful for your camping trip around America,” he had said enthusiastically.

  Mindell could not resist his gift. She had a passion for the new, for the touch and feel of pristine items, for sweaters and blouses still nestled in tissue-paper wrappings, for dresses with tags still swinging from uncrushed sleeves. Since leaving the kibbutz, she had taken special joy in the purchases she made for her student room, for her sparse but carefully chosen wardrobe. Often she kept a new garment in its original box, as though to assure herself of its newness. An outgrowth of her childhood years, she supposed, when she had been kept hidden in the concealed tunnel of a concentration camp barrack and had worn whatever clothing the women prisoners who were her protectors and providers could scavenge to cover her nakedness. Once they had fashioned a garment for her from a uniform torn from the body of a newly dead prisoner. The scent of death and despair, of the dead woman’s mingled sweat and vomit, had clung to the worn striped cloth, which they had sewn into double lengths to fit Mindell’s tiny, emaciated body.

  She had loved the crisp touch of Joshua’s gift, the scent of its newness, and she had been touched by Joshua’s kindness in traveling from Great Neck to Leah’s house just to give it to her. But then Rebecca’s family and friends had all been so kind. She wondered why it was she still thought of them as “Rebecca’s family” when she had been assured and reassured, through the years, that they were her family as well.

  “We think of you as our daughter,” Rebecca had said more than once. “We want you to have our name, to share our lives.”

  Yehuda’s arm, gentle about Mindell’s shoulders, had affirmed Rebecca’s words. Mindell was saddened now as she thought of Yehuda Arnon. A full year had passed since Noam’s death, but Yehuda seldom spoke the name of his firstborn son, although he often visited his grave. He slept poorly and he walked alone, in the desert darkness, the ember of his cigarette glowing, his steps slowed by the weight of his memories. He traveled more than ever, and when he was on the kibbutz he seemed withdrawn, insulated and isolated by his sadness. Once Mindell had heard Rebecca protest his frequent absences. He had turned to her, his features contorted, his voice harsh.

  “Do you think I want to be away? But I must go where I am sent. Maybe what I am doing will make life safer for other children.”

  She had not replied. More and more often silence ended their discussions, and more and more often they averted their eyes from each other as they spoke.

  Mindell was troubled. She loved Rebecca and Yehuda Arnon and had thought of them as surrogate parents since she had journeyed with them to Haifa harbor. But for reasons that she could neither articulate nor understand, she had kept her parents’ name, which matched that of the small village of her birth. She was human testimony to the fact that once Krasnoye had existed, that once ten thousand Jews had lived peacefully in a quiet Polish village bordered by cherry trees. And the name, too, was all that remained of the gray-faced man and woman, the village apothecary and his wife, who had been her parents. She remembered only their colorlessness, the sour breath of their fear against her face—which meant, perhaps, that they had carried her very close to their bodies, concealed her against their skin, until the very last minute when her mother had been selected for death and had thrust her into the arms of a strange woman. Her life had been saved because a guard had turned away for a split second, because a strange woman had been both brave and kind. Always, Mindell thought, her life had depended on the tenuous solicitude of strangers—the women in the camp; Signora Sarfadi, who had hidden her in the basement of her Bari home; Rebecca and Yehuda Arnon, who had guided her to freedom and taken her to share their lives. Even now, in this hot and fly-infested bus station, she quiescently awaited the kindness of a near-stranger. She did not really know Michael Goldfeder. It had been years since his visit to Israel—that terrible summer when Rebecca’s father had died and Yaakov had been born—life and death entwined, a man buried and a child named.

  She and Michael had belonged to separate worlds then. She was a young adolescent, but she ran and played with the children, tenaciously clinging to a childhood that had been denied her. She had perceived Michael as an adult. He was a university graduate who talked soberly with the men of the kibbutz about the irrigation system, discussed politics with Yehuda and Rebecca, and asked invasive questions of the kibbutz members. Did they find fulfillment at Sha’arei ha-Negev? What were their personal goals? Did they feel that communal living in a rural setting was more satisfying than conventional urban life? His questions had become more intense, more urgent, after his father’s death, and Mindell had been glad that Michael did not know how the kibbutz members laughed and mocked his questions.

  “Like all the Americans,” one of them had said scornfully, “he thinks he’s in a laboratory and we are the guinea pigs.”

  No, he’s not like that, Mindell had wanted to say. He’s searching for something—can’t you see? But she had, of course, said nothing. What had she known of Michael, after all, except that he was Rebecca’s brother and thus a kind of surrogate uncle to her? She had been surprised to realize some years later that Michael was only six or seven years her senior—not her age but of her generation.

  Jeremy Cohen, his friend and roommate, had spoken a great deal of Michael during his visit to Israel. It had been Jeremy who encouraged Mindell to apply for a fellowship at the New York hospital where he was on the pediatric staff.

  “The medical training you’ve gotten in Israel is terrific, but we have important new techniques, and besides, a girl like you should see the world—and the world should certainly see you.”

  Mindell had laughed, but weeks after Jeremy’s return to America he sent her an application for the fellowship, and she had filled it out. He had been with Leah at the airport when she arrived.

  “Jeremy is standing in for Michael,” Leah had explained. “Michael spends the summers at a small school in Mississippi, and he is there already.”

  It was Jeremy, then, who guided her through bureaucratic intricacies at the hospital and introduced her to New York. Her fellowship would not formally begin until the fall, and it was Jeremy who suggested the detour to Mississippi when she told him that she had decided to tour
the States.

  “You haven’t seen America until you’ve seen Dixieland,” he had said. “And you’d better see it now because it’s disappearing fast.”

  “The sooner the better,” Les Anderson added.

  Jeremy had written to Michael, and arrangements had been made for Michael to meet her bus in Neshoba. But where was he? She was hot and tired now and vaguely annoyed that she had decided not to join a group of Israeli students who were traveling together to California.

  Glumly, she walked over to a bench, undid the straps of her knapsack, and allowed it to slide down and rest against the wall. It was good to be free of the oppressive weight, and she breathed deeply with relief and glanced around the room, aware suddenly that everyone was staring at her—not with curiosity but with open, unmasked hostility. Across the room two women in faded flowered cotton housedresses glared at her. Their lips were tightly set, their pale eyes hard. Small flecks of angry color mottled their skin. A man who sat beside them in faded dungarees and a dirty blue workshirt spat a wad of tobacco toward Mindell and smiled evilly, displaying yellow teeth interspersed with gaps.

  “Don’t pay her no mind,” he said, and Mindell realized, with surprise, that he was pointing to her. “I expect she likes dark meat.”

  The neatly dressed black couple sitting next to Mindell looked at each other, rose, and left the building.

  “I expect she’s just some rich college-kid Communist freedom rider,” one of the women said and diligently rubbed at a stain on her white plastic purse.

  “Come to smoke marijuana and make trouble,” her companion replied, her eyes fixed angrily on Mindell.

  Mindell took Michael’s letter out of her pocket and reread it. He would meet her bus, he promised, but in an emergency, she could call a phone number in Neshoba and ask for Kemala Jackson. Kemala—Michael’s special friend whose name had produced a sudden, tense silence in Leah Goldfeder’s home.

  “Leah does not like Kemala?” Mindell had asked Aaron’s wife, Lydia.

  “She doesn’t know Kemala very well. But she doesn’t think she can make Michael happy,” Lydia replied carefully. She watched her own children at play in the sunny family room. The baby chortled in the crib that Aaron had painted fire-engine red; black-haired Paulette built a block house with small redheaded David, whose efforts sent the uneasy structure tumbling down. David laughed, Paulette frowned, and Lydia smiled, amused at her own involvement in their game. Her desk was littered with urgent messages from her laboratory, yet she continued to watch her children.

  Mindell admired the way Lydia balanced her life. She had spent an afternoon on the campus of the state university with Lydia and watched her at work in her laboratory, teaching her seminar. Mindell had been fascinated by Lydia’s discussion of a sonogram designed to trace the movement of a fetus within a pregnant woman’s womb.

  “How long before we can have such an apparatus in Israel?” Mindell asked excitedly.

  “It will be a long time before it’s perfected,” Lydia replied. “In any case my Israeli colleagues are much more interested in the work we are doing on radar evasion techniques.”

  “I know,” Mindell said regretfully. Israel’s next war would be fought in the skies of the Middle East; only a sophisticated radar system would ensure Israel’s survival.

  Lydia frowned and studied a computer printout on her desk. Absorbed in her work, she almost forgot Mindell’s presence.

  But at home Lydia’s attention was riveted to her family. Her children’s lives, their happiness absorbed her. She watched as they played, as though she were the audience at a rare and wonderful performance. She was at once amused and concerned, and always vigilant. Paulette threw a block at David, and the small boy cried. Lydia scolded her daughter, gathered her son up into her arms; she soothed him, speaking softly, cradling him gently. The child was calmed and bounded off to rejoin the game.

  “Play nicely,” Lydia cautioned.

  It was, after all, simple to comfort a small child, to issue gentle admonitions. But Leah could not comfort Michael with gentle words, reassuring caresses. She could not call warnings after her son who was a grown man. “Be careful. Love wisely.” Mothers did not say such things aloud. Lydia pitied Leah for her impotence, Michael for his vulnerability. She turned back to Mindell, who had not forgotten her question.

  “Why not?” Mindell had persisted.

  “Their backgrounds are very different.”

  “Like you and Aaron.”

  “Kemala is not Jewish. And she is black. And she is very bitter, very angry.” Lydia thought back to the few evenings she and Aaron had shared with Michael and Kemala. Always, they had ended in barbed argument, in uneasy, stilted rhetoric. I, too, have suffered, Lydia wanted to scream at Kemala. Losses littered her life. The dead drifted through her dreams. Kemala Jackson had not cornered the market on injustice, on human misery. But she said nothing, of course. Their connection to Michael had to be protected.

  “If I were a black in this country, I would be bitter and angry also,” Mindell had said. She had traveled through Harlem and seen the decaying tenements. She had worked on the pediatric ward that week. A small black girl had been admitted. An emergency case. Lead poisoning.

  “They eat the paint from the walls,” Jeremy had explained.

  A boy had been admitted, suffering from malnutrition. His distended stomach protruded like an inflated basketball.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yes. But not in Israel.”

  Her own small stomach had been similarly bloated when she had at last been liberated from the camp. But starvation had been the norm in Auschwitz. This was America.

  “Things are changing.” Lydia’s answer had been quiet, restrained. “I used to think that the whole world could change overnight, Mindell. Now I know that everything takes time, a lot of time.” Lydia had hummed a melody then which Mindell recognized—it was a song sung by the Hungarian immigrants who had come to Sha’arei ha-Negev after the revolution.

  “I know that,” Mindell had replied. “But I want to do my share in that changing.”

  She had asked no more questions about Kemala Jackson, but she remained curious about her. All right. If Michael did not arrive within the next hour, she would call Kemala. She checked her watch. He was a half hour late. Meanwhile, she smiled pleasantly at the two fat women, who turned hastily away. Finally the door to the bus station was thrust open and Michael burst into the room.

  “Mindell! I’m really sorry. The damn car overheated again and I had to wait for a hitch to get some water. My God—I can hardly recognize you. Stand up.”

  He pulled her to her feet, and she blushed as he studied her approvingly.

  She knew she was pretty. Her blond hair was thick and curly, and she wore it gathered in bunches about her ears. Her creamy skin turned rose gold in the summer, and her amber eyes were long-lashed and starkly angular. In Israel tourists had often asked if they might photograph her.

  “A real Sabra,” they would say admiringly. “You see what it is to be born in a land of sunlight and milk and honey.” She never told them that she had been born in Poland and that she had spent such a long time hidden in darkness, eating scraps and drinking dregs, that her first glimpse of the sun had frightened and blinded her and her first taste of whole milk had produced a violent vomiting attack.

  “You’re certainly not a little girl anymore,” Michael said. “Jeremy wrote me about you, but I thought he was exaggerating.” (Mindell is a dream to look at, Jeremy had written, but he had said little more about her, although he had worked hard at arranging the fellowship for her.)

  “You also look different than I remember,” she said shyly.

  He was thinner than she remembered. His faded jeans and paint-spattered T-shirt hung loosely on his slender frame. His thick dark hair was too long and unevenly cut.

  “I suppose I am different,” he said. “A great deal has happened to me.” Kemala had happened to
him. And Mississippi. He had been in search of meaning, and he had found it. Or thought he had found it. Strange how the clarity he had perceived that night in Golden Gate Park, that afternoon when his students had so exuberantly read the word “Freedom,” was now shadowed, obscured. What am I doing here? he had wondered one afternoon that summer when only two students had shown up for his afternoon tutorial. But then Kemala had come the next day, and again his doubts had abated, but not his memory of them.

  “Do you like it here in Mississippi?” Mindell asked as they walked out into the glaring sunlight.

  “‘Like’ is not a word that I’d couple with Mississippi,” he said. “But yes. There is a lot about it I like.” The pink glow of the rows of cotton plants at twilight, the sweet singing of the mockingbirds, the intense concentration on Rodney Mason’s upturned face as he grasped a new concept, the scent of Mrs. Mason’s corn bread drifting through the half-light of dawn. Kemala.

  “Why were those people in the waiting room staring so angrily at me?”

  “You sat down on a bench that’s reserved for the blacks. This is Mississippi. Whites and blacks don’t sit on the same benches, drink from the same water fountain, go to the same schools. It’s called segregation. You’ve heard about it.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard about it. But I never saw it. There were no blacks on the bus coming south.”

  “You came at an hour when working people don’t travel, and most blacks are working people.”

  “I see.” Her voice was very quiet, her amber eyes shadowed.

  “It’s strange to you.”

  “No.” She got into the car, a battered convertible, its New York license plates caked with mud. In Israel they were wary of mud-caked license plates. Such vehicles were often driven by terrorists who hoped to avoid identification. She looked at Michael curiously. “It’s all too familiar to me. Almost a déjà vu. The Nuremberg Laws were also laws of segregation. Jews weren’t allowed to go to the same schools as Gentiles, to work together—later they couldn’t even ride the same buses. Of course, the Germans called it the ‘Laws of Racial Purity,’ but it was segregation. My parents were its victims. For whites only. For Aryans only. It amounts to the same thing.”