Leah's Journey (45 page)

“Do you know what I’d do if I were you? I’d take a trip to Palestine. I’d do it now myself but I feel that I’ve wasted so much time—that I’m years behind. Finally, I feel that I’m really ready to study, to work toward what I want to be. But over in North Africa, I listened to our cousin Yaakov and the other Palestinians talk about the country. If I hadn’t focused on the law, if I weren’t sure of what I wanted to do, of what I should do, I’d hop a boat for Palestine tomorrow. Maybe I will do it in a couple of years. But right now, I know where I’ve been and I know where I’m going.”

Rebecca envied him that peaceful certainty. “Palestine?” she said and thought of Joe’s letter, of his description of the Belsen children bound for that sun-parched strip of territory where an elusive freedom waited. Palestine. Why not? She would meet her mother’s brother, the legendary Moshe, and her cousins. She had seen photographs of the stark hills of Galilee and had thought then of sketching trips through that forbidding landscape. And of course she could stop in Italy en route and visit the museums. Yes, of course, she would go to Palestine.

And so she had traveled through a war-ravaged Italy and come at last to the dreamy port of Bari to await a ship for Haifa. She hurried now, along the winding ancient streets, to the hilltop post office. These might be the last letters she would mail from Italy. A ship for Haifa was due in port within a few days, and a new excitement at the thought of the journey dispersed the loneliness she had felt in this town where the aroma of rising dough mingled with the fragrance of a thousand flowers.

She posted her letters quickly and dashed off a picture postcard to Joshua and Sherry Ellenberg.

“Perhaps, Signorina Goldfeder, I can offer you a stamp for your postcard,” a man’s soft voice said. She looked up in irritation, prepared to ignore the clumsy attempt to pick her up. But then she remembered that the man had used her name and she hesitated.

“How do you know that I am Signorina Goldfeder?” she asked and studied him with her frank artist’s gaze.

He was a tall man in his middle twenties and his thick hair was almost the same shade as his deeply bronzed skin—skin which had a leathery texture, as though sun and wind had burned their way onto and through his body. From that lean bronzed face glinted gray eyes, sleek as silk, and a thin slit of mouth betrayed startling white teeth. He wore khaki slacks and a blue nylon shirt open at the neck, the standard uniform that year for student tourists and seamen at liberty.

“I bring you greetings from your Uncle Moshe and cousin Yaakov on Kibbutz Beth HaCochav. Your cousin knew that you would be here. My name is Yehuda Arnon.”

“And my aunt—does she too send her regards?” Rebecca asked warily.

“Your aunt—the good Henia—yes, she too sends regards. Have I passed the test?” He smiled at her in amusement. “May we go now to the square and have a cold coffee? I am very thirsty.” He pasted a stamp on her postcard, his eyes sliding over the name.

“Ellenberg. There is an Ellenberg family on our kibbutz.”

“A cousin of my friend’s. His family and mine came from the same town in Russia.” Joshua. Her friend and nearly-brother. Her protector and almost-husband. How lucky they had all been that Joshua had met and married Sherry. She dismissed the thought too quickly, not wanting to remember how she had almost surrendered her life.

“All right then. Let us go to a café. But I hope you don’t mind if I have a gelato instead of coffee. If there’s anything I hate worse than ersatz coffee, it’s cold ersatz coffee.”

He laughed.

“In Palestine the coffee of the Bari cafés would be considered manna from heaven,” he said. “But of course you may have whatever you wish.” He paused then and searched her face. “And I would not be very surprised if that is not what you have always had—whatever you wished.”

She did not answer, reading an odd contempt in his tone, and they walked down the hill in silence and remained silent even after he had given their order to the waiter. It was the siesta hour and they sat alone in the deserted café and watched the high afternoon sun sweep in a golden arc across the deep-blue waters of the Adriatic Sea.

“Your uncle Moshe thought that perhaps you might help us with a small endeavor here in Bari,” he said, when at last the waiter, annoyed at being disturbed during the siesta hour, had slammed down the coffee and gelato and disappeared into the shadows of the café.

“Us? Who would that be?” she asked. She heard the hostility in her voice and wondered what it was about this tall, self-assured stranger that provoked her annoyance.

“Us. Ah yes, who are we? Simply Jews concerned about other Jews. Specifically today, here in this port, about Jewish children. Survivors of the death camp at Oswiecim in Poland. Auschwitz, as the Germans called it. They are here in Bari, these orphaned survivors, and we want to get them to Palestine. Ah yes, I used that mysterious we yet again. That we includes your family, myself, and practically every Jew in Palestine. We work here in Europe through an organization which we call Bericha—the Hebrew word for flight. And the Jews of Europe are in flight, my dear Miss Goldfeder. They are in flight from memories of death and near-death, from the countries of their birth which now reject them, from the camps for displaced persons that remind them of the camps which consumed their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters. They flee their own fears, their nighttime terror and their daytime memory. And in all the wide world there is only one place which can give them refuge—Palestine.”

He took a long sip of the coffee and looked out toward the harbor, marking the progress of a V-formation of gulls gliding toward a parapet of rocks. She saw how the color rose high beneath the deep bronze of his skin and how his eyes glistened with that dangerous brightness she had seen long ago in Gregory Liebowitz’s eyes when he spoke fervently of a new society, of a world reborn. Her father had remarked dryly then, “Idealism has a strange effect on the adrenal glands.” Poor Gregory, dead of dysentery in Ethiopia, never to know either the brave new world of which he had dreamed or the weary recovery of the old world he had so disparaged.

“But Jews are being admitted into Palestine,” she said.

Only that morning the Paris Tribune had carried a front-page picture of a group of Jews disembarking from a British naval vessel at Haifa port in which a smiling British sailor carried a Jewish child ashore.

“Yes. The British make good propaganda. I too read this morning’s paper. But surely you know that the British have a very strict quota system—a White Paper, which allows only a few Jews into Palestine. They are more concerned about placating their sources of oil than with Jewish lives. They run a blockade against immigrant ships and if the ships are caught, the passengers are sent back to the Europe of their nightmares or to detention camps on Cyprus. Our organization helps to get the Jews to ports on the Mediterranean and then we try to smuggle them into Palestine. Illegal immigration, the British call it, and we call it Aliyah Beth. But you must know something of this—your family has been involved in it for many years.”

He looked searchingly at her and she turned away, not wanting his eyes to capture and thus command her own.

She knew, of course, about her Uncle Moshe’s work but she had thought about it, when she thought about it at all, as a part of the war. Her own life had absorbed her and the problems of the Jews of Europe were pitiable but remote. She was not visiting Palestine out of any deep ideological conviction but because her relatives were there, because it had seemed a logical place to go, because in a way she too was in flight. Flight. Bericha. She did, after all, have something in common with the man who sat across the table from her, his smooth gray eyes staring openly, contemptuously at her American clothing, her oversized new leather bag, the smooth skin of her bare, sunburned arms.

“But why have you come to me? What can I do?” She asked the question reluctantly. She did not, in fact, want to do anything. She wanted to board her ship, select a deck chair, and lie in the sun, not thinking, not remembering.

“Whatever I tell you is in strictest confidence. Whether or not you decide to help us, you must never speak of what I say to you today. Is that agreed? Please, I am not being dramatic but it is necessary that we understand this.” He leaned closer to her and suddenly put his arm around her, bent his head laughingly toward her, kissed her on the lips, and spooned some gelato from her dish into his mouth.

She looked at him in amazement and then saw the shadows across the sunny cobblestones of the piazza. Two men in business suits stood on the church steps and watched them. She too laughed lightly then, took the spoon from him, and playfully fed him, knowing that her heart was beating too fast and a pool of sweat had formed between her breasts. The men crossed the square and as they passed, she heard them speaking softly in English.

“You did that very well,” he said admiringly and she blushed.

“I’m an international intrigue film addict. You know—Ingrid Bergman, Lilli Palmer. Who were those men?”

“Probably British intelligence agents. They’re swarming over all the Mediterranean ports trying to get a line on Bericha and Mosad people. Mosad is a kind of network intelligence operation for the Jewish community in Palestine over in Europe. They’ll ask about us, but my guess is we’ll be described as an itinerant seaman type trying to pick up a naive American tourist.”

“I don’t think I like the ‘naive’ part,” she said and realized that she was beginning to enjoy herself.

“All right. A pretty American tourist. You are pretty, you know.” He offered this not as a compliment but as a dry observation, a professional assessment, and she stiffened.

“All right. What do you think I can do? I am, after all, ‘naive.’”

He bent forward, speaking so softly that she had to strain to catch his words.

“There are ten children hidden here in Bari. We call them the Auschwitz infants. They are the children of Jews who were gassed at Auschwitz. They survived because they were hidden in an underground tunnel in one of the women’s barracks. One of these children, Shlomo, was born in the camp, delivered by the women, hidden by them, and saved by them and the other children. The children watched, from that underground tunnel, as one by one their mothers were taken off to die. They were alone, in what the Germans thought was an empty building, for two weeks, sharing among themselves the small amount of food and water the last survivor had been able to get to them. You can imagine how they are traumatized, terrified, by the thought of another camp—whether it be a displaced persons’ camp in Europe or a detainment camp in Cyprus. They cannot again endure barbed wire and bunks and searchlights. We cannot risk putting them on an illegal ship which may be taken by the British. The British have, so far, seized every other ship which we have sent. These children are special. For them we have arranged identity papers and travel documents saying that they are Dutch orphans en route to a mission school in Nazareth. Through our good friend Father Joseph, at such a school, we have even managed to get school uniforms for them. We have arranged for their passage on the ship which you now await. But they must have an adult with them to supervise and chaperone. This is the rule of the steamship company. The Mosad agent, the girl who was to do this, has been detained at the Belgian border. We ask you to take her place.”

Rebecca did not reply but looked out toward the rock parapet where the gulls strutted now, their heads arched upward above their slender elegant necks.

“You know that I have an American passport,” she said at last. “It is unlikely that an American with the distinctly Jewish name of Rebecca Goldfeder will pass as the supervisor of a mission group.”

“Yes. We thought of that. But then such a person might well be a Jew who has converted to Christianity, and I happen to have here such a certificate of baptism in the name of Rebecca Goldfeder as well as a set of credentials from the Mission of Saint Paul. This is, of course, a missionary school and missionaries convert. You are one of their successes, diligently continuing the good work. Your documents, I assure you, are exemplary. They were manufactured by the same man who produced the children’s papers with the cooperation of our good Christian friends in Nazareth. Yoselle was a master printer in Hamburg in the days when Jews were allowed to be master printers in Hamburg, before it was feared that they would contaminate the reading matter of Aryans. I assure you all his documents are impeccable.” He smiled and patted the battered portfolio which he kept close by his side.

“I see. And if I do not agree to do this? What will happen to the children?”

“We will discuss that after you meet these children. Please. You will come to see our Auschwitz infants?” There was a naked plea in his voice.

“Yes,” she said, knowing that she could not say no.

The children, he told her, were staying at the home of Dr. Rafael Sarfadi, a Jewish professor of semantics at the University of Bari. His home was an ancient villa, nestled into a low hillside that overlooked the port. Signora Sarfadi, a tall, elegant woman who wore a gold linen dress, greeted them as though they were casual guests for tea. She stood in the open doorway and thanked Yehuda for the flowers he carried and kissed him on the cheek. Rebecca wondered at this until she glanced across the street and saw the two Englishmen, in their too-proper business suits, looking out toward the ocean.

“The more we display the less they will think we conceal,” Yehuda said softly when he followed her gaze.

They walked after Signora Sarfadi through the archways leading to the enormous rooms of the ancient mansion. The polished tile floors were covered with Persian carpets of intricate rich design and the black mahogany furniture smelled of lemon oil. Fresh flowers stood in tall crystal vases and Rebecca thought of Leah and the garden flowers she cut each spring and summer morning. Her mother and Signora Sarfadi would understand each other. In each room through which they passed, there was a framed photo of a young man with dreamy liquid eyes. The last door led to a small utility room and Signora Sarfadi pushed aside a clumsy floor-polishing machine and pressed the corner of the wall against which it had leaned. Rebecca gasped as it slid open to reveal a narrow staircase. They descended it single-file until they reached a dimly lit basement room littered with small cots, toys, and children’s clothing. As she first entered, Rebecca thought that the room was empty. A heavy quiet hovered in the air and there was no discernible movement. But then she saw the children’s eyes.