Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “You’re playing with fire, Matt,” he said quietly, a new authority in his voice. “Don’t you know what the real danger is? The real danger is that we’ll be set up against each other—Jews against black—and the white elite will sit back and enjoy it. Is that really what you want?”

  The West Indian did not answer. Michael, Mindell, Yehuda, and Aaron left the room. Briefly, they stood outside the schoolhouse, looked up at the star-spattered sky, and sniffed the cool evening air, fragrant with the scent of Cherokee roses and cinnamon fern. In the distance a mockingbird sang plaintively into the lonely darkness, but there was no answer to its sweet song.

  *

  THE WEEKS after the arrest and trial passed swiftly. On his last day in Troy, Michael looked with satisfaction at the neatly arranged bookshelves and lettered a small placard: THE TROY FREEDOM LIBRARY. Rodney Mason nailed it into place. Mindell had reserved a shelf for the books and pamphlets she had collected on nutrition and child care, medical home advice, and first aid. The collection seemed meager to her, and she looked at it sadly.

  “Is this all we’re leaving?” she asked.

  “No,” Michael replied. “We’re leaving much more than that.”

  Mrs. Mason wept when they left. She stood beside them in the dim light of dawn and enfolded each of them in strong embrace.

  “You come back. You hear? You come back.” Her love-born command was fierce, intense.

  The Mason children pressed close to them. Dora Lee wept, and Rodney hugged both Michael and Mindell. Michael remembered how they had been too shy to talk to him when he first arrived three years ago. But now the barriers of color had broken down. They were at last sharing, caring friends.

  The family waved as they drove away, and Mindell turned toward them until they disappeared into the distance. By midafternoon they had crossed the Mississippi border, and they stopped to rest and eat on the banks of Pickwick Lake in Tennessee. Michael stretched out beneath a wide-branched persimmon tree and watched two painted buntings skitter playfully from branch to branch. The birds cooed flirtatiously to each other, and their rainbow-colored wings flashed as they chased each other through the thick, dark foliage. Mindell sat beside him and plaited a wreath of wildflowers, a skill she had been taught by Leah on a distant afternoon in a distant land. Deftly, she interwove black-eyed susans with trillium and columbine.

  “No Cherokee roses,” he said.

  “No Cherokee roses.”

  “What will you do now, Mindell?”

  “Go back to the hospital. Finish my research project. And then…I don’t know. And you, Michael?”

  “My contract at Hutchinson extends for another year. After that, I don’t know. Teaching, of course. Research, perhaps. But how and where, I don’t know.” Oddly, this indecision no longer troubled him. He knew who he was and of what he was capable.

  “What about Mississippi?”

  “That’s over,” he said sadly. “Oh, I’ll go on with my work for civil rights. It’s part of me, part of my life. But I can’t go back to Mississippi.”

  She did not ask why. Kemala was in Mississippi. A letter from Kemala had been delivered to the Mason home, and Mindell had brought it to Michael at the schoolhouse. She had seen him stare at the envelope and slowly rip it into shreds without opening it. Days later, she had met Kemala on the street in Neshoba.

  “You’re angry with me, but I did what I had to do,” Kemala had said fiercely. “Matt explained it to me. What we’re fighting for is more important than anything else. And he was right. The coverage of Michael’s trial focused attention on what’s happening in Mississippi. Matt knows these things. He knows how to do things, accomplish things. He doesn’t get lost in philosophy, false codes of morality.” He was not like her father, who had read On Liberty, believed in the goodness and reasonableness of his fellow man, and died of gunshot wounds in a North Carolina woodland. “You understand, don’t you, Mindell?”

  Kemala clutched her wrist, and Mindell saw how thin her arm was, the veins of her neck strained bluely against her dusky skin. She felt a new sympathy for the tormented young woman whom Michael had cared for so deeply.

  “I understand in a way,” she said.

  “I knew you would.”

  Unexpectedly Kemala kissed her on the cheek and hurried away. Mindell looked after her. They shared a bond, she and Kemala. Suffering and persecution united them. They had both lived in fear, had recoiled from the hatred and contempt in the eyes of uniformed men. But a strange thing had happened to Mindell that day on the bayou road when their car had been surrounded by officers. She had lost her fear of uniformed men and their cruel and terrible authority. She had been struck and had sustained pain, but the pain had neither threatened nor subdued her. Inexplicably, she had been cut free of terror. Now, in her dreams, she walked a sunlit lane through a dark and threatening forest. Mississippi had liberated her from Auschwitz.

  Beside her now, Michael turned, moving closer into a ribbon of shade.

  “You’ll be working with Jeremy?” he asked.

  He offered her his friend’s name tentatively, although he anticipated her revelation. Les had prepared him for it.

  “We’ll have to look for someone else to share the apartment,” Les had said. “Jeremy’s in love. He wants to get married. He’s only waiting for her to get back.”

  Her. Mindell, of course. They had been close during Jeremy’s visit to Israel. It had been Jeremy who had arranged for her fellowship to the United States and Jeremy who had met her on arrival, guided her through her first weeks in the country. Mindell’s conversation was peppered with quotes from Jeremy. “Jeremy thinks… Jeremy says…” As once he had searched for any excuse to mention Kemala’s name. Kemala. The thought of her saddened him now but caused him no pain. They had separated from each other, he realized now, long before that night in the Troy schoolhouse. He had known, he thought, since the night of the Makeba concert and perhaps even before then, that they would never be together. And perhaps, too, he acknowledged now as he watched Mindell’s fingers weave the flowers into a colorful pattern, he had stopped caring but had been unwilling to relinquish the dream. How lovely Mindell’s hands were, how gentle. How graceful were her arms. She wore a lemon-yellow sundress that matched her hair, and he noticed, for the first time, the small dimples that blossomed at her golden shoulders. Lucky Jeremy, damn him. An anomalous sadness stole over him.

  “Jeremy wants to go to Israel for a while. He’s interested in the Hadassah family-care clinic concept.”

  “That will make it very easy for you, then,” he said. A heaviness settled on his heart, and his sadness was no longer nameless. He had lost her. Without knowing that he had wanted her, blind and stupid, he had lost her.

  “For me?” She looked at him quizzically, plucked up a sprig of larkspur, and wove it in with the trillium. “What has it to do with me? It’s between Jeremy and Melanie.”

  “Jeremy and Melanie?”

  “Yes. Didn’t Les tell you? They’re going to be married.”

  “I didn’t know.” His heart soared. The painted buntings flew skyward in tandem, rainbow-winged arrows aimed straight for the sun. “I thought…all summer I thought it was you and Jeremy.”

  “No, Michael,” she said gently. “All summer, for me, it was you and me. But there was Kemala.”

  “Yes. There was Kemala. I’m sorry.” He looked at her. “You and me. Michael and Mindell.”

  “Michael and Mindell,” she repeated.

  “For forever after?”

  “For forever after.” Her answer came in a whisper. The floral crown, completed, rested on her palms.

  He took the wreath of flowers from her and placed it on her inclined head in gentle coronation.

  “My noonday princess,” he said. “My forever-after love.”

  His lips touched the dimples on her golden shoulders, traced the veins of sunlight on her arms, the dappled shadows of her face, and settled, at last, against the full, sweet softness of her
mouth.

  They drove north through the late afternoon, into the lingering haze of twilight. Mindell’s head rested lightly on Michael’s shoulder. She was asleep. He touched her hair and drove slowly, moved and soothed by the long, mysterious shadows of evening that carpeted the narrow highway.

  KIBBUTZ SHA’AREI HA-NEGEV

  1966

  THE SETTLERS’ HOMES on Kibbutz Sha’arei ha-Negev stood at the base of a martello-shaped sand crater that glowed rose-gold in the harsh light of the desert morning, turned topaz in the late afternoon, and was, at last, rilled by gliding shadows as the sun slowly surrendered into evening darkness. The children of the kibbutz called the crater malchat ha-midbar, the desert queen, and told stories of a mysterious romantic regent garrisoned in the fortress of sand. The small white bungalows were built in a straight line, equidistant from one other and from the natural bastion that dominated them. Rebecca, during the planning period of the kibbutz, had worried over the landscaping and argued for scattering the houses. One could be built in the shade of the acacia tree, others near the grove of date palms, and still others in the small natural circle formed where a terebinth stole the sunlight from the crouching Sodom apple tree.

  It would be more interesting, more aesthetic, she had insisted, and the other members had patiently agreed with her and even more patiently explained that there was the problem of security compounded by the kibbutz philosophy of egalitarianism. They explained very carefully, because she was an American and an artist, and they understood that their ways were new to her. Houses built in a line were more easily defended, and if all the houses were alike and similarly situated, there could be no lingering feelings of resentment and inequality.

  “Equal doesn’t have to mean the same,” Rebecca had murmured to Yehuda, but she had been new to the group then and unwilling to threaten its harmony by persisting in her argument. In those early days she had been compliant, acquiescent. Nothing in the world had been as important to her as her love for Yehuda.

  Now, almost two decades later, she conceded that the others had, after all, been right. She walked toward her bungalow, after a long afternoon at her studio, and was pleased at the way the small homes, newly whitewashed, gleamed in the receding light; their symmetry in the desert wilderness had a reassuring geometric beauty. A dwarf palm had been planted in front of each house, and a luxuriant garden bloomed on the common lawn. Rebecca’s life on the kibbutz was marked by the garden’s plantings. The beds of lavender marked the birth of her son Yaakov, and on the day of Amnon’s circumcision, she and Yehuda had embedded iris bulbs deep into the unyielding earth. Always, the flowers bloomed with seasonal certainty in time for her younger son’s birthday. When Yehuda returned from the Sinai Campaign, he carried with him cuttings of Egyptian savignia, and now the tiny lilac flowers were deeply rooted and marked the weeks of danger, the hour of return.

  All the houses shared a view of the twin Christ’s-thorn trees; their beadlike orange fruit glittered among the cruel, serrated leaves. A family of warblers nestled in the branches, and their sweet and tender songs pierced morning silence, evening quiet. Always, Rebecca looked forward to that quiet at day’s end when she could listen to the birds and watch the leaves of the thorn tree cast their wild shadows across the patterned sand. But today there would be no quiet hour, she remembered suddenly, with a mingling of annoyance and regret. Amnon waited for her at the bungalow in imperious stance, his short legs apart, his hands plunged into the pockets of his shorts. He stared at her with the aggrieved indignation of a child whose urgent pleasure has been irrationally thwarted by adult indifference.

  Rebecca smiled at him. Newly showered, with drops of water still clinging to his extraordinarily long eyelashes, he glowed with health and cleanliness; his fresh white shirt and shorts sharply contrasted with his sun-burnished skin. Both her sons, Amnon and Yaakov, had inherited her topaz complexion and dark hair (fretted with silver now) and Yehuda’s lucent gray eyes. But now Amnon’s eyes were smoky with wrath (as Yehuda’s were so often these days, she thought with sinking heart), and he tapped his sandaled foot impatiently.

  Ima, aren’t you ready? You are coming to the wedding, aren’t you?”

  “I’m very tired, Amnon. I worked so late this afternoon that I just managed to pick up the mail before Sara closed the office. The wedding procession will pass by the bungalow. I’ll watch it from the window.” She fingered the letters in her pocket, impatient suddenly to read them. The crisp white envelope was from Charles Ferguson, embossed with the imprint of his art gallery, and the air letter was from Mindell. Sweet Mindell, who had been daughter and friend to her and was now her brother’s wife.

  “But I want to go,” Amnon said petulantly. “I want to be in the wedding with the others.”

  “Of course you do, and of course you’ll go,” Rebecca said, struggling against the irritation in her voice. It occurred to her, disloyally, that her brother Aaron’s children did not seem to be as nagging and insistent as Amnon. It would be a sociological irony if her kibbutz-bred son turned out to be more spoiled than his Scarsdale cousins. “You’ll go with your brother and sister.” She pointed to Danielle and Yaakov, who crossed the lawn and walked toward them, moving very slowly because Yair Ben Dor accompanied them. Yair, still in uniform, propelled himself awkwardly forward on the prosthetic leg that had been recently fitted for him at the Tel ha-Shomer hospital.

  Danielle looked especially beautiful, in a yellow cotton dress that matched her flowing hair and hugged her narrow waist. She spent so much time with Yair now, Rebecca thought uneasily, and wondered if that was because Yair had been with Noam on the day of his death. Odd, how they always spoke of Noam’s death, yet never said that he had died. The noun, death, was somehow more passive, more acceptable than the harsh verb, died. When Rebecca thought of strong, young Noam, she visualized him streaking across the fields of the kibbutz. He had worked on the irrigation system, and his days had been spent monitoring the veinwork of pipe and spigots that guaranteed the survival of their desert crops; he had checked for breakages and pressure, his long body hugging the earth he nurtured so carefully, so jealously. She saw him, too, in memory, tossing a ball to Yaakov and Amnon or galloping up to their bungalow on the black stallion, the legacy of a group of marauding fedayeen who had been routed before they could mount their steeds. Their kibbutz neighbors had been annoyed by that; the horses’ hooves had mangled the pampas grass that the new immigrants from Argentina had planted so laboriously. It had always amused Rebecca that the kibbutz members were as house-proud as the Westchester homeowners of her childhood. She had apologized and promised that it would not happen again. And it had not, because a week later Noam was dead. She had been sketching the horse in charcoal on the day of his death. She had finished the drawing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and then she had crushed the stick of charcoal between her palms.

  “When did death come to him?” Yehuda had asked the army officer who was too young to be assigned his sad task. He wiped Rebecca’s hands with his handkerchief as he waited for the answer. A father had the right to know when death had come to his son. The old died, as was natural, but death came to the young in pursuit, swooped down upon them and captured them in the vulnerability of their youth. Death had come to Noam Arnon, it was reported, as afternoon melded into evening, and often, as daylight faded, thoughts of him crowded their minds.

  “Aren’t you coming to the wedding?” Danielle asked.

  “You take Amnon. Perhaps I’ll come later, when your father comes home.” She took the two envelopes from her pocket. “I have letters I haven’t had time to read yet.”

  “But I want you to come,” Amnon protested peevishly.

  “Later,” Rebecca said firmly, fighting the wave of fury that swept over her. Damn it, she was so tired of doing what other people wanted her to do, of going to meetings when she wanted to be in her studio, of taking her turn in the kitchen when she needed every scrap of energy for the large landscape, of playing dominoes w
ith Yaakov and Amnon when she wanted to read a book or write a letter. Now, shamed by the inexplicable irrationality of her mood, she smiled with a penitence she did not feel.

  “Save us seats at the meal and have a good time,” she said.

  Danielle lingered as the others walked on.

  “Are you all right, Rivka?” she asked gently, and Rebecca remembered when Yehuda’s daughter had stopped calling her Ima. Danielle, wearing the same yellow dress, her hair brushed loose, had returned from a party in Eilat and Yehuda had stared at her in astonishment, seeing her for the first time perhaps, as a young woman. “You look exactly like your mother,” he had said, his voice muted by pain and memory, “exactly like Miriam. Mia.”

  Resentment had stabbed Rebecca then. She had spent the two decades of her marriage striving against the ghost of her husband’s first wife. She had mothered her children and competed with the myth and memory of the courageous golden-haired woman, the loving companion of Yehuda’s youth, who had died in a forest in Czechoslovakia, blocking a bullet that had been meant for her husband. Brave, beautiful Miriam. Rebecca could never vanquish that memory. She had told Aaron as much, years ago in a London restaurant.

  She was “Rivka” to Danielle now. The ghost of Miriam had triumphed.

  “I’m fine, Danielle,” she said firmly. “I just need a little time alone.”

  “I know.” Danielle touched Rebecca’s cheek lightly with her fingers, a private gesture of comfort, and hurried to catch up to the others.

  What did she know? Rebecca wondered wearily. Had Danielle sensed the constraint and uneasiness between Rebecca and Yehuda? She had noticed surely that her father was moody and irritable, obsessed by worries that he could not share with his family. He answered Rebecca’s questions with monosyllabic replies, and his lovemaking was too swift and oddly violent. He was en route from Jerusalem now—the third time that month that he had been summoned to the capital for urgent meetings. Always, he returned fatigued and dispirited, swaddled in anger and silence.