Leah's Journey (41 page)

“Are you married then, Yank?” the woman asked, passing the picture back to him. “She’s a pretty gel.”

“No. I’m not married,” he said and wondered again why it was that he and Rebecca had not married.

They had, of course, talked about it often, and it was acknowledged between them that sometime, in a vague, mysteriously deferred future, there would be a formal ceremony that would put the stamp of legal commitment on their lives and their love. Before he left for the army—his draft notice, too, arriving after years of deferments he had not sought—Rebecca had insisted that they marry. But then such a marriage had seemed to him unfair, selfish, and he had refused, gently and firmly. One did not take a wife and go to war. It had been one of the few times he found himself able to say no to his gay dark-haired girl, who had received so few denials.

But had he been right, after all? he wondered, as the London shelter tumbled into a sudden darkness. He took the child from the trembling young mother and held it gently, his fingers smoothing its fine white hair. Women screamed and children cried in the subterranean darkness—then with that swift British assertion of determined control, there was sudden order, sensed though not seen, and a girl’s sweet clear voice began to sing, “There’ll be blue birds over, The white cliffs of Dover…” Around him other voices, old and young, strong and faltering, took up the song and when they had sung the last chorus, their voices surging upward with hope at “Tomorrow, just you wait and see,” the lights flickered weakly on again.

He too sang and, because he could not look at Rebecca’s picture in the darkness, he thought of the shaft of moonlight gliding across her black hair. No. It would not have been right to have married then, a feeling shared, he knew, by Leah and David Goldfeder. He thought then of David’s troubled gaze and Leah’s large sad eyes.

Rebecca’s parents had never openly objected to him nor to the unorthodox pattern of the life he and Rebecca shared in Vermont. Even at Bennington, it was unusual for an unmarried couple to live openly together. But he had been welcome at the Goldfeders’ Westchester home although he and Rebecca made it a point never to stay overnight there together. Only once, in his hearing, had David spoken of their relationship, and even then, the reference to their different faiths had been oblique.

A letter had arrived from Palestine, from Rebecca’s uncle Moshe, her mother’s brother whom she had never met. Because it was written in Yiddish, David translated it for them as they sat over coffee. It had arrived during the bad days of the war, when the harsh voices of weary newscasters brought them bloody accounts of the invasion of Sicily and Michael moved the tacks on the war maps in David’s study, in uneasy circles, until at last it became clear that Allied troops would win the Italian peninsula in the end.

Moshe’s son Yaakov was fighting with the Jewish Brigade of the British army in Italy, and Moshe himself was involved in the illegal operation of smuggling refugee Jewish children from Europe into a Palestine sealed to those children by a quota system. He wrote cautiously about this clandestine operation in familial code.

“I am sure you remember Uncle Beryl,” he wrote his sister. “I find myself using some of the business tricks I learned from him.”

Their Uncle Beryl had been a genius at sneaking Jews past border guards. Once, David told them, he had put three young Jews in enormous kegs of beer and when the Russian guards had stopped them, he had offered them drinks, his ladle scraping the heads of the emigrants. “The guards complained that there was hair in their beer but they drank it anyway and asked for more,” David recalled, laughing.

Moshe’s letter concluded on a pessimistic note. He told Leah that he had all but given up hope for the safety of their parents in Europe. The soldiers of the Jewish Brigade had intelligence reports on the European camps for Jews. Their reports made him pray for his parents’ deaths rather than hope for their lives. In Palestine the Jewish community looked to the future and prayed that the skills of men like Uncle Beryl would benefit them all.

“It’s ironic,” David had said then. “My brother-in-law and his family risk their lives for Jewish survival and we here in America treat it so lightly.”

“What do you mean, Daddy?” Rebecca asked.

“I mean you, Rebecca,” David said heavily and left the room too quickly, allowing the heavy oak dining room door to slam.

“You mustn’t think he really minds that you’re not Jewish,” Rebecca reassured Joe later. “I mean, I suppose he does mind in a way but he would never make an issue of it.”

Joe had not answered her then but he knew that while David and Leah would not have objected to their marriage, they were relieved when they did not, after all, marry.

But why hadn’t they married? The question that had teased him in the London shelter recurred weeks later, as he shivered in the hills north of Saint-Vith, waiting with his unit to launch the assault which the freezing infantrymen, in their khaki wool face masks and double thickness of leather mittens, did not even know was called the Battle of the Bulge.

He thought about it as his platoon trekked doggedly through the winding roads of frozen mud, coated with snow and ice, and followed a mysterious network of paths. They ascended evergreen crested hills that overlooked narrow rivers bordered by steep banks that meandered through the dense hill country. Men sang softly or cursed bitterly as the snow and ice invaded their combat boots and icy rain crept into their helmets. They were approaching Christmas of 1944, a Christmas they hoped to celebrate by controlling the foam-locked waters of the Roer River.

“I’m hoping for a white Christmas,” the lanky soldier marching behind him sang. “Hey, Stevenson, who you dreaming about? Your girl?”

“I’ve got my mind on Betty Grable. You think I’m un-American?”

Joe shifted his backpack and held his rifle high as they forded one of the small brooks that riddled the Schnee Eifel hills they were now passing through. Here they heard the sounds of long guns, the thunder of an onslaught of artillery. They checked their rifles and forgot about the water freezing into ice within their boots. A strong wind, heavy with the breath of unfallen snow, battered their faces raw, and their lips bled where they had bitten through the frozen skin.

Rampant rumor flew through the columns, as swiftly as the snow that broke into brief fitful flurries around them. The Germans, it was said, were launching twenty-two divisions against them. The entire Sixth SS Panzer Division had been deployed for a confrontation. Now it was confirmed that there were Germans dressed in American uniforms, speaking English and manning captured American tanks and trucks. Intelligence officers moved through snowdrifts, issuing instructions.

“Don’t trust anyone. Ask questions they’d have to be from stateside to answer. Who won this year’s World Series? What does ‘hold the mayo’ mean? Where is Yankee Stadium? What does ‘mairzy doats’ mean? Who was Nick Carter?”

Joe Stevenson, sculptor-in-residence at Bennington College, began to sweat within the heavy folds of his uniform.

“Who the hell won the World Series?” he asked. He did not even know which teams had played.

It occurred to him then that it was highly probable that he would be killed, and at a rest stop he wrote a long letter to Rebecca and immediately tore it into pieces, thrusting the pale-blue scraps of tissue-paper V-mail into the trunk of a tree strung with ribbons of ice. He might die and he had never confronted his life. He had feared his gift, doubted his talent, and so he was not a sculptor but a teacher of sculpture. Just as he had feared to commit himself artistically, so he had feared to commit himself personally. Many things had prevented him from marrying Rebecca, he realized now, the teasing conundrum routed at last. He could not have married her before he knew himself as an artist, as a man. Nor, he recognized, with startling clarity, could he have expected Rebecca to marry him until she too had faced herself. It had been too easy for her to slip from her parents’ home into their cocoon of easy, uncommitted love.

Rebecca, too, had played with her talent, struggled very briefly with it, and then allowed the war to excuse her from meeting its demand. She worked now in Eleanor Greenstein’s factory. Like her mother, Rebecca had a sharp eye for detail, a natural talent for piercing design and production problems. Eleanor, struggling with a harried schedule of government contracts, needed her help. The job became Rebecca’s war effort. It was a natural niche and Rebecca had slid into it as easily and enthusiastically as she had slid into all the other situations in her life.

These thoughts came to Joe on Christmas Eve, on the day he killed his first German soldier, a very young man, almost a boy, whose pale-gray eyes Joe picked out with the sights of his rifle. The young soldier’s steel helmet fell from his head when he toppled over, and Joe saw that his hair was milk-white in color, the same shade as the curls of the child he had held in the London shelter. After that he did not seek out the eyes and faces of the men he aimed to kill. In that same battle he somehow lost Rebecca’s picture and then had only the memory of the moonlight sliding across her sleeping face. Months after that same battle, he woke in a sweat. The eyes of the soldier he had killed rolled about loosely in his dream and somehow collided with the brooding stare of David Goldfeder. It was a dream of drifting orbs and wooded paths, but he had no time to puzzle out its meaning.

It was winter’s end now and the rumors that rushed through the columns of those who had survived the march from Saint-Vith were fleshed with tales of the concentration camps deep within German-occupied territory. It was to these camps that Jews and gypsies, communists and dissidents had been taken. It was said that such camps—they were as large as small villages and towns, in fact—were surrounded by electrified wire and from within their confines was heard the barking of dogs and the soft desperate weeping of children.

Joe remembered, then, that long-ago day in Scarsdale (was it only a year and a half ago?) when David Goldfeder had read the letter from Palestine in which a son had wished his parents dead rather than exposed to the mysteries of those camps.

“But nothing could be that bad,” he thought uneasily and wrapped himself in his sleeping bag, knowing that he had seen things that were beyond imagination, rational assimilation. He had seen the throat of the good-natured lanky Texan who marched behind him pierced by a bullet and the man choked by his own blood foaming up through the perforated flesh. He had marched past a burned-out Panzer tank to which the body of a corpse clung, the skin clinging blackly to the exposed bones of the skeleton from which flesh and uniform had been scorched. The man lay with his feet pointed upward, still encased in their tightly laced combat boots, tied with an impeccable military knot.

He had bitten earth and felt the mud grit against his teeth and cake his eyes when he heard the unearthly cry of “Moaning Minnies” and watched them leap across the fiery orange skies. He had listened then, waiting for the reptilian hiss of the projectiles, and watched the missiles hurl earthward and rip the air with red fires of hate and destruction.

Often on the march now they passed burned-out houses where women and children rooted in the rubble like foraging rodents. Once he saw a small girl, thin cheeks smeared with ashes, one blonde braid oddly longer than the other, scream with excitement as she discovered a spoon and waved the silver utensil in the air. The sun glinted across it and the child suddenly cried—perhaps because she had seen her own small face mirrored in her treasure.

During a brief skirmish among the scrub pines that dotted that mountain network, he was surprised by a German corporal moving swiftly toward him, pistol raised and cocked.

“Stevenson, look out!” the GI next to him screamed in warning and Joe seized his bayonet and plunged it through the flesh of his attacker, feeling the blade’s force as it ripped through the layers of uniform, speared soft mounds of skin and body meat, severed muscle and artery. He was a sculptor, as familiar with human anatomy as the most expert surgeon, and he used his weapon now with fierce, blind skill, knowing instinctively when he had severed the carotid artery. He withdrew the bayonet as the blood spurted blackly forward, drenching his dead assailant’s gray uniform. Carefully, the skirmish over, the German dead across the fragrant pine needles, he wiped the blade to which shards of pale-pink flesh hung, tossing away a small piece of human meat, the epidermal skin bluely ribboned with vein. His fellow soldiers looked at him with rare admiration, but he wept that night and for nights afterward. He who had spent his life creating in wood and clay was now skilled at destruction with rifle and bayonet. Bitterly then he would place one hand on another and feel the weatherbitten crust of his skin, the broken edges of his nails, and wonder if his fingers would ever be free enough of death to work for life.

Finally, he went to speak to his commanding officer. He explained, with some diffidence, that he was an artist. He wanted to be reassigned to some unit that might use his skill—perhaps public relations, information. The officer looked hard at Joe, noticed how his hands trembled and how a tic jerked his lip up and down. Two weeks later he received orders directing him to report to a British public information unit near Breslau which was preparing for the occupation of surrendered territory.

The British adjutant who briefed him for his new assignment wore the gray mask of exhaustion and his instructions were terse, his voice stretched to a weary thread.

“This isn’t simply an ‘occupation of surrendered territory.’ We’re going into a concentration camp which was principally used for the internment of Jews. I don’t know what stories you’ve heard but whatever you see is going to be worse than anything you can imagine or anticipate. We’re sending a sizable information and propaganda team in because here, more than anywhere else, we’ve got a chance to show the world the kind of bastards we’ve been fighting, what Nazism is, what it’s been responsible for. In this war there’s no need to fake ‘Hun atrocities.’ No propaganda expert with science fiction inclinations could dream up the things these bastards have perpetrated. You’re an artist, Stevenson. Go in there and draw what you see. And I hope you have a strong stomach.”