Leah's Journey (27 page)
Now, as the train thundered on through Bessarabia, along the coast of the Black Sea where tiny fishing hamlets were still lit by wicks fitfully nourished with kerosene so that they danced nervously in the velvet darkness, she put the final touches on the sketches she had made in Rome. She would post them in Odessa, she thought, and go on to her parents’ village in the morning. Her hands trembled as she worked and once she lifted a corner of the drape and stole a fearful look at the lights of the city where her journey had begun.
“Almost there, almost there,” the whirling wheels of the train sang, and she shivered slightly and gathered her things together, barricading herself behind her suitcases and watching small groups of passengers assemble in the narrow train corridor. A young mother, her pale, almost colorless hair neatly tucked beneath a dark-blue kerchief, knelt to lift a sleeping child and Leah wondered if Michael, her small laughing boy, was sleeping too, in the cool of the distant mountain country in New York State.
Odessa had changed very little in the seventeen years since she had left, and as she wandered the cobblestone streets in search of a driver who would take her to her parents’ village, she chided herself for thinking that the city would be any different. The changes had occurred within herself and her own life. The streets she had known as a student and later as a young bride were immutable. Their names had changed—the Boulevard of the Czars was now People’s Square—but the streets themselves were the same. New lives filled the flats and cafés where she and her friends had sat and talked, planned and dreamed. There were, of course, small monuments to those plans. Here, on a familiar corner where Yaakov had once mounted a cobbler’s bench to argue for shared distribution of food, there was now a cooperative restaurant for workers. A small industrial district had grown up and over each small factory building the red flag of the Revolution fluttered. On her way to the post office, Leah passed groups of young women, each holding the hand of a small child and carrying a tin lunch box. They were, she supposed, on their way to one of the many government nurseries where the children stayed while the mothers worked in the factories.
The post office, where she mailed her letters home to the family and dispatched the last of the Italian sketches to Seymour, was not far from the square where she and David had sat on that autumn evening so many years ago. She walked over to it and saw that the café across the way, where mournful violins had played songs of hopeless love, had been torn down and replaced with a Komsomol meeting hall decorated with an enormous picture of Josef Stalin. The small park itself was deserted at midmorning on this summer day, but in a shaded corner, near a ragged hedge, two boys kicked a scarred black-and-white soccer ball at each other. No, they replied in answer to her strange question, posed in the scraps of Russian she had all but forgotten so that she had to rip the words into her consciousness, they knew of no old woman who frequented this park, though they often played here, even in the evening. They had never seen such a woman. But was it true that Leah came from the United States, and if so did she know Clark Gable? They had stood for hours in the line to see
Mutiny
on the Bounty and they hoped to see it again. Leah disappointed them when she admitted that she had never seen Clark Gable, even from a distance, and they were incredulous when she explained that the distance from New York to California was like the distance from Odessa to Paris. However, they were pleased when she found some American coins in her purse and argued over the one stamp she gave them until she found another.
The driver whom Leah finally located, however, knew of the woman she inquired about.
“Bryna Markevich—a name like that. I remember her. Sometimes when I was a small boy and played here she tried to give me coins or candies. She was always running to the train station. There was some story about her husband that my grandmother told me. I think it was that he deserted her and she could never believe it, and so she kept waiting for his train. Yes—I’m sure that was it.” He nodded with satisfaction.
The driver, who sported a glossy Stalin moustache, was very young, barely twenty. He must have been a toddler, wheeled in a stroller, when Leah left Russia. He was Jewish but spoke no Yiddish and he wore the bright-red scarf of the Komsomol. A child of the Revolution, born to the glories of the brave new world, he was unable and unwilling to believe in the terrors of the years gone by. He did not conceal his incredulity as Leah told him the true story of Bryna Markevich.
“She was not deserted. Her husband was killed in the terrible pogroms of 1903. He was on a train journey and she could never believe that he had been so brutally murdered and was not coming home.”
“Come now.” The young driver was scornful. “That is all reactionary propaganda. Russians did not murder wantonly like that. The Jews suffer from historic fantasy—we call it, at my dialectic seminar, a delusion of history. Do you know what xenophobia is, Madame? It is the Jewish disease which they have no desire to cure. Believe me, I know. I live in a family of such sufferers. My father—and he fought with Gregoriev, mind you—sees an anti-Semite behind every Gentile face. Surely an intelligent woman from the United States of America knows better.
“Three years ago, maybe four, we had a terrible winter here in Odessa. Blizzard followed blizzard and there was difficulty obtaining fuel. The public places, the parks and squares became mountains of snow and when at last the spring came and they were able to clear through the melting snow, they found the old woman, Bryna Markevich, frozen to death on a bench in the park. Like a statue she sat there, a Bible open on her lap, they say, and the snow-diggers were frightened and would not touch her. It was the police who carried her away, her hair bright with ice and her breath frozen about her open mouth. Some say they buried her sitting up because they could not force the body to recline.”
He laughed harshly but she heard the fear in his voice and asked no more questions. They drove the rest of the way in silence and when they reached the village of Partseva, he opened the car door for her, a small courtesy she had not expected.
The village square, with its cracked cobblestones and leaking pump, was exactly as it had been. The town hall, recalled through the years as an edifice of importance whose polished floors had the official odor of carbolic and where windows of real glass framed the gold-edged sunset of the vast Russian skies, was a modest two-story building. Through the doorway she saw a harassed clerk sip cold tea and nervously tap rimless spectacles against a splintering wooden counter.
Leah, in her navy-blue suit with a cape to match, of her own design and Seymour’s manufacture, stood nervously near her hired car. Her arrival had already spiked curiosity and small groups gathered to stare at her in front of the planked tables that served as open-air counters for the village vendors. There were very few men in the square, and the small, wide-eyed children stared at her, hiding behind their mothers’ skirts.
In this village they had not forgotten Yiddish and she heard the shrill whispers of the children.
“Look Mama, she does not wear a shetel.” The strange woman who had arrived in a motorcar wore no marriage wig, and Leah nervously passed her fingers through her cropped black hair and noticed that the women, who moved closer to her now, automatically adjusted the squares of cloth that covered their shorn heads. Their marriage wigs stood in brocaded cases in a corner of the closet, reserved for the Sabbath. That, too, she had forgotten and she felt a strange melancholy for all that had been lost to her—her father’s voice, her mother’s light laughter, the voices of her own children tumbling from infancy to childhood. Life happened too quickly—passages were too swift. Names deceived and places were lost.
“Leah—Leahle—is it you, after all these years?” The woman who rushed toward her was their neighbor, Shaindel Lichter, and Leah’s heart leapt up, remembering that it was Shaindel who had traveled to Odessa for Leah’s marriage to Yaakov, carrying with her an embroidered matzoh cloth which adorned the table in Brighton Beach on Passover. She fell into Shaindel’s outstretched, welcoming arms and breathed in the remembered smell of camphor and garlic, mingled with a fragrance of lilac talc—a powder which Shaindel ground herself from the purple blossoms that grew so profusely in her tiny courtyard. Amid all that she had forgotten, all the spidery memories that had drifted into nothingness, Leah remembered herself, a small girl with long black braids, importantly pounding away with mortar and pestle in Shaindel’s garden, her small being suffused with the scent of lilac which she could never forget.
“Ach, Leah. Such a journey. You must be hot. Come, have some water.”
The crowd of women and children parted respectfully as Shaindel led Leah to the communal water pump which stood in a corner of the square.
Leah drank thirstily from the tin cup which dangled from a rusty chain, tasting in the cold sweet water the remembered subtle metallic flavor of the waters of the town stream. She looked wonderingly about her, marveling at the scene that had changed so little since her childhood. Russia had endured a revolution but the village of Partseva remained as it had been. Leah watched as a young woman plodded toward the pump, a small child clutching her skirt and two buckets balanced across her shoulders on long poles. She filled the buckets at the pump, bending her body low with a dancer’s easy balance as though the arduousness of her life had trained her body to perform with skill. A few drops of water fell on the fair-haired child, who laughed suddenly and coaxed smiles from the tired faces of those around them.
“So tell me, Leah—how does it feel to be back in Russia? And how is your David? The children we know about it. Your parents, God bless them and keep them to a hundred and twenty, read us your letters and show us the pictures. Ach, I should have gone to America then too. Look at you. A noblewoman you look to be. And David is a doctor?”
“Well, I am not a noblewoman but David is a doctor,” Leah said, wiping a trickle of water from her chin. “But I must see my parents. Will you come with me, Shaindel?”
Suddenly she was afraid. Perhaps she would be a stranger to the man and woman who had given her life, perhaps they would be alien to her. Seventeen years had passed since she had seen her parents and although they had written and exchanged photographs, she could not summon up a mental image of her mother and father. It was a curious inability. She had not seen her brother Moshe and his wife Henia in as many years, yet she could close her eyes and see them—tall Moshe and his delicate wife whose fragility had not prevented her, when she surprised a group of Arab marauders near the kibbutz children’s house, from banishing them into the darkness with blasts from her rifle. But Leah’s parents remained shadowy figures to her—they drifted through her thoughts only as a silent bearded man and a sad-faced woman who had always been bewildered by their second daughter. She had crossed an ocean, and then a continent, to see them, but now she felt restrained by this strange hesitancy.
“Such a question. Of course I’ll come with you,” Shaindel said. She was thoroughly enjoying her importance as Leah’s guide and she straightened her blouse, rolled down her sleeves, and brushed her full dark skirt. “Come, I will find someone to mind my stall.”
Shaindel’s stall was a long planked table, tented by two frayed blue cotton blankets, on which small jars of medicinal herbs and sweet-smelling powders were arrayed. Now Leah recalled Shaindel’s reputation as a curer. There was no doctor in the village and the nearest Jewish physician, who also served as a dentist, lived in Odessa. There were few automobiles in the village and saddle horses and carts drawn by donkeys stood in front of the inn. With transport so limited, Shaindel’s business thrived. She distributed her homemade potions and drugs, applied massages, extracted teeth with a huge pair of pliers, and, on occasion, served as midwife and cupper.
“So you still are mistress here in town of the healing arts?” Leah asked.
“Yes, but much is changing. The state controls all medicine now and the law is that doctors must treat any citizen who comes to them. Of course, the fees then belong to the government and many are against this. But I say that as long as sick people get good care we should be happy and thank God. This is not the same Russia you left, Leah.”
“The same and not the same,” Leah said. “I’m not the same Leah.”
“That I can see,” Shaindel said and her ample body shook with laughter. “You were such a small, skinny girl. Now you’re a woman. But your hair, Leah. You had such beautiful hair. Why did you cut it?”
“It’s the style in America,” Leah said and remembered the afternoon she had cut her hair, hacking away at it with kitchen scissors as Eli Feinstein’s body was prepared for burial.
Walking slowly now, she followed Shaindel down the village streets, so much narrower than she had remembered them, across wooden walkways to the narrow path where she had grown up and where her parents still lived. Women, sweeping their wooden steps with straw brooms, paused to stare after her, and small children, playing games of jackstones in the dust, looked up curiously. To all of them Shaindel called proudly, “It’s Leah, daughter of Basha and Avremel, come from America.” The women nodded and their tired eyes took careful note of her tailored blue suit, the quality of her handbag, and her sheer silk stockings encased in the neat brown-and-white spectator pumps. Two small girls, barefoot, in homemade dresses fashioned from the same bolt of dull plaid cloth, trailed shyly after her, jumping into the shadow of a house when she turned to smile at them. She opened her bag, thinking to give each a coin, but at that movement they dashed away and disappeared into a doorway, like frightened little animals.
Word of her arrival had reached her parents and they stood leaning against the wooden porch rail of their frame house, staring down the narrow path. Grayer and smaller than she remembered them, not touching but gripping the railing, they stood together and watched the tall dark-haired young woman, in foreign dress, who was their daughter, walk slowly toward them. So they had stood when as a young girl she had left the narrow street and the tiny house for the world of Odessa, and in this same posture of anxious despair they had welcomed her home as a young widow of nineteen who would have to fashion a new life in a new world. So they stood, passive and submissive, schooled in the rhythms and patterns of their history. Things had always happened to Jews as they waited in the shadow of their porches for the sound of approaching footsteps or stood behind bolted doors in anticipation of a harsh compelling knock; it was the role of the Jew to allow them to happen, while they clutched the rituals and routines of their faith, clinging for support to fragile wooden railings.
