Leah's Journey (32 page)

“Of course we’re against what he says about the Jews being warmongers but Daddy is sure the stories we hear are exaggerations,” she had told Aaron.

“They’re not,” was his answer, but that was all he had said, not wanting to argue with Lisa, to surrender the pure simplicity of his relationship with her. There were so few times in his life that he felt this simple, clear ease and joy and he protected its brightness, refusing to cloud it with arguments and polemics and knowing that this sweet golden child was no match for any arguments he would offer.

“Come on, Aaron,” she asked again now, the shyness gone from her voice and replaced with the bullying insistence of the spoiled girl. “Tell me. Do you? Do you really like me?”

In reply, he leaned over her, his face full upon hers, and lifted her from the ground to kiss her once, and then again.

“Now what do you think?” he asked softly. “Isn’t that a dumb question? Do you think I get up at five in the morning to cycle with a girl I don’t like?”

“Oh, Aaron.”

She sighed and slid back into the tall sweet grass, but later that night, after the hectic events of the late afternoon and evening, as she lay in bed in her pretty pink bedroom where the starched white organdy curtains rustled at the windows, she remembered that he had not, after all, answered her. His final reply had been the strong mysterious pulsing of his body, lost within her. She remembered too, then, looking back as they left that wooded bower and seeing, with shock, the soft grass matted with a dark red clot of her girlhood blood.

Lisa and Aaron returned to the house at midmorning and found the family again assembled on the terrace, grouped around the radio.

“Good morning, this third of September, 1939,” a breezy announcer said and Lisa thought that she would always remember the third of September as she did the date of her birthday. The day I became a woman—my woman day, she thought, and went to sit near Aaron’s father.

David Goldfeder was stretched out on a lounge chair, an atlas of Europe open next to him, and as he clasped and unclasped his hands, Lisa noticed his graceful narrow fingers and the strange pink scar that rose to an angry welt on his wrist. She wondered if Aaron would resemble his father when he was older and then reminded herself that David Goldfeder was not Aaron’s natural father.

Leah was writing a letter and her eyes were red, as though she had been crying; Lisa was startled. She had never seen her own mother cry, not even when her grandmother had died. The sun rested harshly on Leah’s face, revealing the worry lines that circled her eyes and trembled in the corner of her mouth.

“I am writing to your grandparents,” she told Aaron, without looking up. “Now, there is no question about it. They must leave. At once.”

“Leah.” David’s voice was tired but his tone remained weighted with patience. “Your letter will be useless. They cannot leave now. The only possible way would be to travel east—to Palestine or the Asian countries—China, Japan. No Jew can go through those parts of Europe which Hitler controls.”

“But they can’t go to Palestine. You know what Moshe has written about the difficulties in getting even children in. The British refuse to relax the quota. As for China, Japan—can you see Papa and Mama going to China and Japan?” She laughed harshly and then began to weep, so softly that Lisa was gripped with fear.

“All right. Write. I’ll be in touch with HIAS, the Joint Distribution Committee. Maybe there are channels, ways…” But David stared straight ahead as he spoke, his gaze acknowledging that there were no channels, no ways.

“Look, something may happen,” Aaron said. “Hitler may back down. England may be able to work out a compromise of some sort. You know the French cabinet still thinks it can get Mussolini to mediate. Hitler marched into Poland on Friday and this is Sunday and nothing has happened yet. Perhaps there is some hope that France and England will stay out, will negotiate a peaceful settlement.” Aaron advanced his arguments with a sudden burst of desperate optimism. Lying on the grassy incline that morning, with Lisa Frawley nestled beside him, the sun high in the sky and cyclists cruising down the parkway, it had suddenly occurred to him that it was a sweet miracle that he was so young, the sun so strong, and that his life stretched before him as the sun-dappled highways stretched before the holiday cyclists.

“Ah, you haven’t heard the news, Aaron.” Joshua Ellenberg stood in the doorway, Rebecca just behind him. “Britain declared war on Germany this morning. France will come in anytime now.”

“My God.” Aaron held Lisa’s hand tightly and looked about the terrace as though he were seeing it for the first time, noting the strange crook in the branch of the elm tree and the way the purple morning glories wound their way around the bright green trellis.

“Aaron—you’re back! Aaron, play catch with me!” Michael, in short blue pants and a snowy white shirt, hurtled across the terrace clutching his pink Spaulding ball which he tossed so wildly that it fell onto David’s lap and rolled across the atlas.

They all laughed, glad to leave the war for the moment. Michael scurried after his ball and pulled Aaron after him onto the lawn. Rebecca and Lisa followed Leah into the kitchen and helped prepare the brunch. David, rising abruptly, asked Joshua if he would help him paint a picket fence in the backyard and surprisingly, Joshua agreed. The fragrance of a baking pie floated over from the neighboring house. It was as though a sudden addiction to domestic normality might dispel the terror that now engulfed the world they knew.

Aaron received a phone call that afternoon from Gregory Liebowitz, his apartment mate. He had to return to New York at once. Something had come up. It was only later that Leah realized that Aaron had come without a suitcase, but when David drove him to the station he had a large valise with him.

Aaron stood beside her when he said good-bye, grown to such a height that she, tall as she was, came barely to his shoulder. The sun set his hair ablaze and when he kissed her he held her tight and she felt his body taut and supple within her arms. A gratitude stirred within her then because Aaron seldom kissed her and had not embraced her since the day she sailed for Europe, three years earlier.

He kissed his sister too, then walked briefly in the garden with Lisa Frawley, who did not return to the house but rode her bicycle slowly home, her eyes so bright with tears that she had to swerve wildly to avoid being hit by a passing motorist.

Aaron tossed a gleeful Michael high into the air and shook hands with Joshua.

“You were right, you know, about the whole Communist business. It was a lot of crap,” he said.

“We all make mistakes. Take care, Aaron.” Joshua’s eyes held Aaron and he covered Aaron’s hand with his own. Later, Rebecca, remembering that handclasp, that exchange of glances, realized that Joshua had known what Aaron meant to do. Shrewd Joshua who always anticipated everything.

Two days later, as Leah sat at her drawing board and listened to the radio playing a recording of King George’s address to his people—“For the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war”—the phone rang. The thin ready voice of a long-distance operator asked her if she would accept a collect call from Aaron Goldfeder in Montreal. Then Aaron’s voice was on the line, bristling with strength, excitement.

“Ma—listen, don’t get upset. Gregory Liebowitz and I took the bus up here and enlisted in the RAF. You understand, don’t you, Ma? We had to.”

Her heart sank and the room dimmed. She struggled to a chair, grasped the phone, and said in a strong voice, “Yes, Aaron, I understand. I’m proud of you.” Tears streamed down her face but her voice remained calm. They talked for a few more minutes. The boys were leaving for England for special training. He would send his address as soon as he knew it. There were a lot of interesting guys in their unit—a whole American Zionist group from Chicago had enlisted.

“This isn’t an ordinary war,” Aaron said. “This is a war against evil.”

“Yes,” she agreed. Her palms were moist and a headache pounded distantly, obscurely, behind her temples. “You’ll write.”

“Of course.”

“Aaron—take care. Please.”

“You too, Ma. You too. Is Dad there?”

“No.”

“Tell him… no, don’t tell him anything. He’ll understand.”

Her voice was calm when she said good-bye and she remembered back over the years how she had watched for her small son’s fiery curls at the window as she rounded the corner of the narrow streets of his childhood. She and her son had spent their lives stealthily concealing their desperate concern for each other. But now, at last, perhaps too late, the distances were narrowing, the blind alleys of their emotional maze were sealed off. She held the silent phone in her hand and touched her lips to the mouthpiece.

So much remained unsaid between them. Her son was going off to forge his future but the secrets of his past remained unrevealed, mired in the emotional thicket that separated them. Perhaps he was leaving for Canada only to leave her. How would David say it in that concise psychological vocabulary of his—that Aaron had found an intellectual solution to emotional problems—a rational escape from an irrational fear. If she had only spoken to him, told him, explained, he might not be in a distant city waiting for a plane to carry him across the ocean, into a battle that was not yet his. But no. Aaron had done what he had to do just as his natural father, so many long years ago, had done what he had to do. They had come full cycle then, she thought wearily, and overcome by a fatigue strangely fierce and febrile, she rested her head in her arms, her hand still clutching the silent receiver.

Later that night Gregory Liebowitz’s mother called. She was a widow and Gregory was her only son. Tears clouded her voice and her accent grew thicker and thicker as her grief obscured the English learned so late in life that it could never be the language of her heart. At last, she spoke only in Yiddish and David listened as Leah too switched to the language of her childhood, calming the other woman with assurances and rationales that she herself could not be comforted by. The boys would be fine. The war would be over soon. A month. Perhaps two. The boys would be safe. God would watch over them.

“But why did they have to go?” the woman asked yet again.

“Because it was only right that they should,” Leah said firmly.

But when the other woman hung up, she sat quietly at the small phone table, clutching the receiver, her shoulders shaking with sobs she could not control, and David guided her upstairs to bed and sat beside her, his hands buried in her dark hair, and listened to the sound of her helpless weeping until she fell at last into a heavy sleep.

WHEN MOSHE ABRAMOWITZ was a young pioneer in Palestine―years before he hebraized his name to Abrahami—he traveled to Cairo on kibbutz business. It was then that he wrote to his sister Leah Goldfeder, in New York City, that the Egyptian city was more provincial than the Odessa they had known in their youth. But the war in Europe had infused the sleepy Middle Eastern metropolis with new life. Traffic was heavy and constant through the narrow streets of the ancient quarters and along the great boulevards constructed in the nineteenth century by French and English architects who yearned for the broad expanses of the Champs Elysées and the stately ambience of Trafalgar Square. Trucks were loaded and unloaded at the Bab al Hadeed railroad station and maneuvered their way past the indifferent, massive statue of Rameses II, en route to the British army encampments, scattered throughout the city and its suburbs. Along the Avenue Fuad the First, everyone hurried. British army vehicles thundered heavily by, creating great clouds of fine white dust, reminders that the broadest boulevards could not long vanquish the encroaching desert. Their horns sounded stridently, and barefoot, large-eyed children dashed away from their careening desert wheels and jeered after the jeeps which inevitably were forced to stop by an immobile oxcart, halted in the center of the broad busy street. The peasant driver, in a dusty robe and grimy kaffiyeh headdress, imperturbably smoked a cigarette while the ancient beasts, with stoic exertions, dropped steaming turds in neat towers of stinking detritus on the sunwashed pavement. The British drivers, their faces pink with impotent rage, shouted expletives and shook clenched fists, but the dark-skinned peasant ignored them, except for a smile which revealed astonishingly pink, toothless gums.

Bureaucrats in minor government offices worked more quickly, importantly wielding their rubber stamps with the speed and precision of a soldier handling a Bren gun.

Shopkeepers extended their hours because the British soldiers who flocked to Cairo on leave from posts in the Middle East and North Africa brought with them their leave pay. The precious sterling piled up in the cash registers of the self-effacing businessmen, who issued gold-toothed grins beneath their red-tasseled caps, and sold the boys from the Cotswolds and Shropshire linens embroidered on the banks of the Nile, brass rubbed to a soft shining glow in the metalworkers’ bazaar, and daggers which were offered with handwritten certificates of authenticity―each rusted weapon was pre-Christian, early Christian, a relic of the bloody days of Luristan.

The merchants pressed their sales with urgent confidences, oily whispers of sacrifice and esteem.

“I promise you, my good sir, this I give you as a bargain for only ten pounds. Also you must do me the great honor of drinking a small coffee with me. I say ten pounds and I am losing money, but even so, I know you go soon to fight for freedom so I will make you a special price of nine pounds. But please, you must take more sugar in the coffee and drink while my servant wraps your excellent purchase.”

Patrons thronged to the sidewalk cafés with their round tin tables shielded by striped umbrellas whose brave reds and bright greens had long since been faded by the relentless desert sun. The waiters scurried about, always hurrying, always delayed. They wore black pants that glistened with grease and sweat, bright red cumberbunds, and shirts that had been pounded to a startling whiteness on the riverbank. The thin, busy waiters, who balanced several tall glasses of cold coffee on their arms with mysterious dexterity, knew everything about the life of Cairo. They knew who was in the city and who had left. Points of origin and final destinations were their secrets, transmitted from ear to ear for a modest baksheesh, or tip.