Leah's Journey (35 page)
Ato had stayed on Mount Belaiya with a group of other refugees and traveled with them to Soba when he heard of the arrival of the Gideon Force. He followed Aaron everywhere now, attracted by the American soldier’s red hair. He had never seen hair of such a color before, and he insisted that its radiance meant that Aaron was descended from the sun itself.
It was Yaakov who recognized Ato’s value. The boy knew the paths to Mount Belaiya and spoke both Amharic and English, which he had learned from a missionary to his village. He understood animals and nursed a passionate hatred for the Italians who had destroyed his village and murdered his father. When Yaakov told Avram Akavia about Ato, Wingate’s secretary insisted that the boy be part of the entourage that would escort Haile Selassie to the headquarters camp at the foot of Mount Belaiya. Because Ato would not leave Soba without Aaron, Aaron and Gregory were also assigned to the advance contingent. Again Aaron thought of how small incidents altered one’s life. Because he had offered a piece of chocolate to a small boy who reminded him of his brother Michael, he was now part of a historic mission that would escort the Ethiopian emperor back into his kingdom.
When Aaron was a small boy Seymour Hart, on one of his Sunday “outings,” had taken him to a science fiction film where the expanses of the moon had been portrayed as desolate naked fields, scarred by yawning fissures and steaming lava pits. The children had been frightened by the film and for weeks afterward, as a child awakened screaming in the night, Mollie had berated Seymour for his lack of judgment. The chasmed area west of Belaiya, through which the small British unit passed with tortuous slowness, reminded Aaron of that film and he sometimes thought, as the men moved slowly forward, that it was the brutal enervating heat that had dredged up the remembered nightmare of his childhood and that even now he was caught up in a fading fantasy. But the hot wind that seared his face and sent the perspiration streaming down his thighs rooted him to reality. The stench of the dead animals that littered the road mingled with the odors of men’s vomit and feces and he knew that it was not a science fiction creation he was recalling but the terror of war that he was actually experiencing. Beside him Gregory marched, his face set in grim lines of despair. His body bent and straightened as he slowly pushed himself forward, riddled by the cramps of dysentery.
As they pressed forward they hacked out a road of sorts with machete and ax. Small Ato darted in and out among them, weaving his way through gorges and small hillocks entangled with vines and scabrous brush. They passed the corpses of camels, their pale flesh already being consumed by the low-flying vultures which trailed knowingly after them, their widespread wings briefly shadowing the sun-drenched plateau. The birds hooted at each other and blood dribbled from their huge sharp golden beaks.
“Damn fools to bring camels here. This isn’t their kind of country,” Yaakov said bitterly that night as they sat beside a low burning campfire.
“Not much of a choice. The lousy Italians managed to grab every damn mule in East Africa,” Gregory said.
He leaned back in exhaustion. The cramps had disappeared but he felt himself light with weariness, weighed down by a peculiar pressure about his head, and his body trembled with febrile intensity. A new cramp caught him unawares and he writhed in pain, pulling his legs up so that he lay curled in fetal position.
Aaron looked at him anxiously.
“You’ll feel better in the morning,” he said.
Together, he and Yaakov piled every bit of clothing and covering they could find on their friend. Feebly, they tried to coax him to laughter when he could not sleep, to mine his resources of dry cynical humor, but Gregory lay back convulsed with fever and shivered even beneath the heavy covering, and when he spoke it was in the wild voice of delirium.
“No medical officer. No quinine. Nothing but the stink of those lousy camels,” Yaakov grumbled.
“Is it worth it?” Aaron asked wearily, wiping Gregory’s forehead with a damp cloth. Bitterly he remembered David’s warning that Hitler meant to destroy all civilization. Looking about him, at the desolate lunar landscape shrouded in shifting gray shadows, he wondered if all the world would look like this if Fascism succeeded.
“Of course it’s worth it.” Yaakov’s voice was impatient. He confined his anger to the lack of water and quinine but never did he doubt the importance of the long-range goal that had set them down in this ravaged African wasteland. “You know what Wingate told us just before we came here? It was at a meeting of Jewish volunteers in Khartoum and he said: ‘Whoever is a friend of Abyssinia is a friend of the Jews. You are here for the sake of Zion.’ We must believe that, Aaron. It makes some sense of what is happening here. In the morning Gregory will be better.”
But in the morning Gregory was dead, his body curled into a rigid arc, his hands reaching toward the vanished fire as though to seize the warmth of the lingering embers. They fashioned a litter for the body and Aaron covered his friend’s face with his own tunic.
“For the sake of Zion,” he said softly, bitterly. “You are dead for the sake of Zion.”
During the rest of the march he thought of the letter he would have to write to the widow Liebowitz, telling her that her only son had died of dysentery in Italian-held East Africa. But in his dream that night it was his own mother, Leah Goldfeder, who wept with wild abandon and hacked off her long dark hair with kitchen scissors, wildly calling his name: “Aaron—Aaron!” Her grief pierced his sleep and he rose to comfort her and saw the enormous stars frozen into the galactic sky and heard the gentle steady breathing of his cousin who lay beside him.
The day after Gregory’s death, they finally reached the foot of Mount Belaiya. A cheer rose up from the exhausted soldiers as Haile Selassie, the proud Lion of Judah, his uniform impeccable and his jet beard trimmed despite the rigors of the march, drove into temporary headquarters in the truck that they had maneuvered through the agonizing terrain. Aaron remained grimly silent. In the late afternoon there was a brief burial service for Gregory and two other casualties of the devastating march.
Aaron stood over the gaping hole that would serve as a temporary grave site for the puckish-faced boy who had shared his MacDougal Street apartment. He remembered Gregory his fellow student arguing an obscure point of Hegelian dialectics; he thought of Gregory his co-worker in that network of impossible dreams they had naively called the Movement; he pictured Gregory his friend laughingly flirting with Becca, squeezing laughter out of the ordinary, planning an ice cube consortium in Cairo; he wept for Gregory who hated cruelty and injustice. Aaron remained there as soldiers in fatigues, caked with the dry red floor of the Ethiopian forest, covered the grave, and he stood there still as the scarlet sun disappeared around the other side of the mountain. It was small Ato who finally plucked at his tunic and led him to the campfire where they sat together in the gathering darkness.
Gregory’s death had somehow steeled Aaron, girded him with the emotional armor he needed for the days that followed. Gideon Force was in full operation. The Italians were mystified as to the size of the British army and scattered before the approaching troops. They did not believe that only a few hundred British soldiers had been able to mobilize the enormous Ethiopian guerrilla force. Salim and his confederates had done their work well.
The Ethiopians and British marched on, taking over Fort Burye and Musaad, heading toward the goal of Addis Ababa. The British contingent was imbued with new confidence and although the heat was relentless and they still marched through wild country, cutting their own path and taking their bearings from compass readings, there was a vital new excitement. The heavy heat-soaked air rang with song. The Palestinian Jewish soldiers taught Aaron their songs and sometimes, even as he lagged behind, he found himself singing the ancient Hebrew choruses by himself. “Who will build the Galilee… We will build the Galilee… Let us sing before Him a new song, a song of victory, a song of triumph…” The Hebrew words came with surprising ease and now, when he heard Yaakov speaking Hebrew with Asaph and Nechemiah, he found himself following the conversation.
“Perhaps when all this is over you will come with us to Palestine,” Yaakov said the night after the successful assault on the fort at Jigga. They stood on a low hill, their blankets wrapped around them, watching a herd of gazelles leap with electric speed across the plain below. Behind them Ato brewed coffee over the glowing embers of a mess fire.
“When this is over, I never want to see killing again,” Aaron said. “Not anywhere in the world.”
Yaakov remembered always the heavy sadness that permeated those words and he was glad, afterward, that he had suddenly taken his cousin’s hand in his own and felt Aaron’s fingers unclench and respond to his touch.
It was the next day that they marched on the fort at Dambacha, their confidence still high. But outside the fort they were met with a fierce Italian assault. The Ethiopians and British had no sentinels, no defense positions, and their first warning of danger came from small Ato, who had ridden ahead astride a mule. Desperately the boy’s shrill voice rose in a shout that pleaded caution; again and again the child shouted and then his voice gurgled as an Italian bullet pierced his throat and sent the blood soaring into his strained larynx. But Ato’s shouts, mangled and anguished, continued until he slid from the mule, frothy pink blood streaming from his mouth. Aaron cursed, cocked his Bren, and thrust himself forward.
“Stay back, you damn fool,” Yaakov shouted. “Stay back!”
He watched as Aaron’s helmet tumbled inexplicably from his head—later they learned that the Italians, short of ammunition, had catapulted stones toward the approaching British and Ethiopian troops, and Yaakov supposed that it was such a stone that hit the helmet. He saw Aaron’s bright hair aflame in the searing sunlight and saw his cousin pivot forward, into the heart of the battle where the small boy had fallen from his mule. That was his last glimpse of his American cousin, so newly found.
He did not see him again during that battle, nor was Aaron in the group of survivors that regrouped along the bloodied escarpment in Burye. Neither was he among the corpses who carpeted the forest floor, the stench of their swiftly decaying bodies mingling with the foul vegetal odor of damp dead overgrowth.
When Akavia took the roll call that night, he wrote beside the name of Aaron Goldfeder: “Missing in action. Presumed dead.”
And that night too, Yaakov Abrahami began the letter that took him two days to complete:
Dear Aunt Leah and Uncle David,
It is with a heart full of sorrow that I write to tell you that my cousin Aaron, your beloved son, was lost in a battle near Dambacha. There is some hope that he was taken prisoner by the Italians. It was a miracle that Aaron and I met in Cairo and a gift from God that I came to know and love my gentle cousin. Please believe…
The letter went on to describe Yaakov’s last conversation with Aaron and it was David who noticed how the ink had run because Yaakov’s tears had fallen across the paper as he wrote. But it was Leah who kept the letter in her night table drawer to be read and reread in the darkest hours of the night. Her son was lost to her. She had forfeited the chance of explaining to him the mystery that had haunted his childhood and forged so wide a gulf between them that neither tears nor laughter could bridge it. This, at last, was her punishment for the years of silence, for the love withheld and the dark shadows of doubt she had cast across her son’s bright youth.
“Aaron,” she said quietly, “please, Aaron, come back to us.”
But the night remained dark and silent. A weak, aimless wind tossed the dry leaves of the maple tree and they scraped thinly across the flagstone garden path.
REBECCA GOLDFEDER’S DESK in her Bennington dormitory room was a reflection of Rebecca herself. It was littered with projects begun in a storm of enthusiasm and abandoned abruptly in a lull of indifference. A pile of index cards chronicling the history of French Renaissance poetry toppled over notes on the life of Chaim Soutine, which in turn were littered with a collection of transparencies for a research paper on pre-Columbian art, a ripped nylon stocking, a half-knit argyle sock, and a pile of letters, most of them from Joshua Ellenberg and the last one still unopened because all Joshua’s letters managed to read alike. He was working like a devil because the factory was now open on a twenty-four-hour basis. They had undertaken uniform contracts in addition to the lend-lease orders. He hoped she was eating properly, not working too hard, and not worrying too much about Aaron. Joshua himself was certain that Aaron was safe, a Prisoner of War. Rebecca glanced at the picture of her family which somehow managed to dominate the clutter on her desk. It had been taken on that long ago Labor Day weekend—it was odd how two years could seem an aeon when events that had occurred during her childhood in Brooklyn seemed vivid and recent. In the photo she and Michael were grimacing at each other, her mother and father were staring with great seriousness into the camera, and Aaron stood behind her mother, also grave, with his hand poised just above Leah’s shoulder. Studying his face now, she thought of how rarely he had laughed, of how he had always seemed to live on the periphery of the family.
Joshua had been more central to their lives than Aaron, who had moved farther and farther away from them, loosening up only with Michael. Yet, despite this distance, Rebecca had always felt a near twinship with her older brother. They had shared the loneliness and poverty of the years on Eldridge Street and the emotional tundra that had seemed to separate her parents during those early years—an iciness that had melted miraculously with Michael’s birth, or perhaps before that. She and Aaron had never talked about their parents’ relationship, but it had united them, and for all the differences in their personalities they had been much closer than she had realized. How close she had realized only when the news that Aaron was missing in action had arrived in Scarsdale, delivered by a somber British consul who drove up to the house in a black Ford Anglia, wearing a morning suit and a homburg hat as armor against their grief. It had happened in the Ethiopian campaign, the man had said in that impeccable accent that appeared to defy hysteria, and when David had brought the atlas, he had carefully marked the area where Aaron had disappeared and told them hesitantly that there was a chance, just a mere chance, that Aaron had been taken prisoner.
