Leah's Journey (49 page)

Baila, who seldom smoked, lit a cigarette and offered one to Rebecca. They sat in silence and thought of the beautiful young mother lying dead in a land no longer her own, a victim of her own love, her own courage. Rebecca felt a heavy grief for the lovely Miriam and a strange solidarity with her. She began to understand, now, Yehuda’s brooding silences, his silent vigils beneath the cypress tree, his long waits and sudden disappearances. There was a necessity for the distance he had established between them, and she wondered if that distance could ever be bridged. Her father, the specialist in emotional pain, whose sad eyes so often reflected the anguish he had absorbed through long hours of listening, had told her once that there were hurts which could not be healed. Survival did not mean recovery. She longed suddenly, to lean on her father’s shoulder, to hear his gentle voice. Perhaps, after all, she should go home. Impatiently, she snuffed her cigarette out.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said to Baila and kissed her cousin’s wife who sat now with her hands across her stomach, as though to protect that unborn life within her from the dangers which haunted her dreams and memories. Outside the truck, painted black, its headlights blinded, honked impatiently. Rebecca seized her kit bag, covered her hair with a wool cap, and hurried out. In the clear silent night, the bells of a nearby Galilean mission church tolled their last count of the year. Soon, in distant cities, women in soft gowns and men in evening dress would lift their glasses and toast the new year of 1948. Rebecca Goldfeder, too, thought of the months ahead as she huddled in the corner of the pitch-dark truck between two swollen yellow life rafts, and rolled down an unpaved coastal road to an ancient Crusader port where a battered Greek freighter flying a Panamanian flag listed from side to side in the cold darkness.

The truck trundled to a stop in a small cove and Rebecca sniffed the fresh sea air, heard the waves crash wildly against the sloping promontory which shielded them from sight. She and the others pulled on their high boots and rain gear, working in silence, preserving their concentration for the task that awaited them.

“It’s a cold night for an operation,” one man said, climbing down from the truck.

“Yes. But a good one. No stars. No moon. And the British getting drunker by the minute, celebrating their last New Year’s Eve in Palestine.”

They stood outside the truck ready to move, shifting their booted feet across the sand congealed by the cold into a gritty hardness. They peered across the water, searching for a flicker of light, but sheer darkness confronted them. From the interior of the truck they heard Yaakov speaking softly, insistently, into the microphone, but they knew from his repeated questions that there was no answer.

“Perhaps they didn’t get through the blockade,” someone said softly.

No one replied, but the air was heavy with their fear.

Two gulls, soaring in concentric circles across a cliff, hooted wildly at each other and from across the water came the mournful call of a third gull. The wind blew in keening sobs through the tall dune grass and a small jackal scurried out from beneath a brush pine and streaked off into the darkness.

“Hello. Shalom. Answer me. Are you there? Hello. Shalom. Answer. Signal.” A note of desperation had crept into Yaakov’s firm tone.

How many children were there on that boat? Rebecca wondered, and thought of her Auschwitz infants. Would these other unknown children, waiting out there on dark water, ever play with Mindell and Katia and Shlomo? Would they ever walk through gentle evening mist singing softly like Yehuda’s small daughter Danielle? She thought of her brother Michael, reading while sprawled across the living room rug, his father reading in one chair, his mother in another, bent over her sketch pad. Wasn’t that the natural legacy of any child—to sit in a circle of light, surrounded by warmth and love? A violent wind shrieked above them and lifted loose branches, which fell in dull thuds against the compacted sand.

Yaakov emerged from the truck, his hand raw with cold, twisting his fingers.

“There’s no reply. Either their radio is out or they didn’t make it through the blockade. The British are using power boats now. I’m afraid if I keep trying the British will trace our signal. We’ll wait another hour and head back.”

He mounted the promontory and looked across the inlet. Someone lit a cigarette and its tiny red glow pierced the thick darkness.

“Put it out, damn it. The British might be patrolling this beach.”

Like a tiny phosphorescent insect, the lit cigarette sailed through the air onto the sand. Rebecca searched the expanse of darkness across the rolling waves, thinking of the nights she had stared from her window and glimpsed the glowing embers of Yehuda’s cigarettes. Suddenly she saw an almost infinitesimal light across the cove, flickering on and off, staying lit for a long moment and then again extinguishing itself.

“Yaakov, look to the left,” she called.

He took out his binoculars and focused in the direction to which she pointed.

“Yes. That’s them. It must be them. They’re using code. Let me read them.”

Their hearts stood still as the light sparked on and off, growing weaker, then stronger, signaling the location of the ship, then repeating the message and waiting as Yaakov flashed an acknowledgment and a read-back, using the emergency safari light they carried in the truck.

They moved quickly now, with practiced efficiency. Two by two, they unloaded the lifeboats, spread the blankets in readiness in the back of the truck, unlashed the lengths of rope.

Rebecca was aboard the first lifeboat and she clutched the rubber side as it was shoved off into the crashing surf. Icy water settled in pools beneath her feet, traveling down over the tops of her boots. A sudden wind whipped her face and the spray was salty against her tongue. The light rubber raft moved easily now, soaring atop the waves, responding to the strong pull of the oarsmen.

“There they are!”

A lantern flickered and they saw another boat approaching them, launched from the immigrant ship. She tossed a rope to it and it was caught by a sailor. The boats were pulled alongside each other and one by one the children, small shivering bundles of fear, cloaked in layers of sweaters, were passed from boat to boat. The children did not make a sound but Rebecca whispered softly to each as her arms went about them, and passing them to the kibbutz member behind her, she saw the tears frozen in their eyes and how their small mouths twisted to subdue the screams of fear.

The rubber boat listed dangerously. Swiftly, they distributed the weight of their human cargo and rowed back to shore, the lengths of rope in readiness to be cast out again when they approached the surf. There the waiting kibbutz members lurched forward, seized the hemp, and pulled the boat to shore. Again the children were passed hand over hand into the waiting truck, where warm blankets and thermoses of soup were waiting.

“Two more trips, I think,” Yaakov whispered to her and she nodded and climbed back into the rubber raft to repeat the operation. In the darkness they passed the other yellow boat and heard the soft sobs of a very young child, muted cries, not of fear, but of agonized desolation.

The next boatload was simpler to manage because the illegal immigrants were mostly adults and adolescents who maneuvered from boat to boat easily. But the wind had changed and they knew that they were lucky there would be only one more trip out.

By the third journey Rebecca’s clothing was soaked and stiff with sea water and her fingers struggled numbly for life within her gloves. The tiny craft jostled its way over waves that veered skyward with sudden wild spurts, showering them with icy pellets of spray. At last they pulled alongside the longboat and she saw, with sinking heart, that this group of passengers consisted of very old men and women, and children so ill that they lay in immobile heaps. The rubber raft lurched dangerously, bobbing drunkenly between the waves. One by one, the immigrants were transferred. A bearded old man, the sea spray like glinting jeweled moisture against the whiteness of his long beard, murmured the Psalms in unfaltering sequence.

“A song of degrees. Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications…”

“Amen.” A woman’s frail voice threaded the darkness with ancient acquiescence.

“Amen,” Rebecca heard herself say as she gently took a small boy swathed in blankets into her arms and settled him on a tarpaulin in the corner of the boat, which sagged suddenly.

“That’s it. We can’t take any more.”

“One more. One more small boy,” a voice called from the longboat.

“We’re overloaded now.”

“One more.”

She looked toward shore. The other boat was being dragged up onto the beach and the truck’s lights were flashing on and off and on again. It was the danger signal. They would have to leave within minutes. There would be no other boat to pick up one more small boy.

“All right.”

She leaned forward and the sailor, holding a rope in one hand and a blanketed bundle of child life in the other, leaned across toward her. An enormous wave crested suddenly and dizzying hills of foam peaked between them in wildly mobile aqueous mountains. The impact of the wave sent the sailor reeling backward. The child was knocked out of his grasp and there was a sharp splash as the small body hit the turbulent waters.

“Rebecca, no! You’ll never make it,” the oarsman called but she was already over the side of the boat, her arms reaching desperately for the child who bobbed lightly above the water like a piece of aimless jetsam. She gripped him and swam toward the boat, gasping for air, feeling the harshness of the salt water against the membranes of her lungs, strangling her breath. The yellow rubber wall of the boat seemed enormously high and the child’s weight dragged her down. She could not make it herself, much less hoist him up with her. The old man’s voice, still intoning the Psalms, floated above the rushing waters. A song of degrees, Lord, a song of degrees.

“Hang on, Rebecca. Another minute. I’m behind you.”

She recognized the voice and was fired with renewed energy. She strengthened her grip on the boy, clutched his limp body, and treaded water, breathing with anguished care. Yehuda flashed through the wilderness of crashing waves and took the child from her.

“Okay. You scramble up there. Gideon is directly above you. Grab his arm and I’ll pass the boy up.”

Blindly, she followed his directions, felt Gideon’s fingers pull at her wrists, then hold her body as she lowered herself painfully over the side and took the child from Yehuda, heaving him with a wild spurt of strength onto the rubber floor of the boat, which veered dangerously from side to side. Then they were moving through the crashing white waters, to be pulled at last to safety in the surf and then to the waiting trucks on shore, their motors already grumbling. A British patrol had been sighted and they sped from the cove without looking back to the beach where a child’s wool hat on a hillock of sand was the only sign that they had been there pulling life out of the sea.

As they rumbled along the dark stretch of coastal road, the brandy seared her body and she listened again to the old man as he continued to chant the words of David. “I will give thanks in the great congregation. I will praise Thee among much people.”

“Where is Yehuda?” she asked Yaakov suddenly, as though waking from a sleep. She had thought him beside her, felt his breath against her neck, but had awakened from that half-coma of exhaustion to find it was her cousin who sat close by her, watching her anxiously.

“He went back to the ship. He sails back to Bari with them. Why?”

“No reason.”

She watched the small lights of the houses that lined the pitch-dark road, feeling a strange vacuity, an odd elusive sense of betrayal. Later that night, after the excitement of their arrival had subsided, she stood alone in her room and looked at the slender cypress. She knew, with quiet certainty, that she must leave Beth HaCochav. She had been waiting too long for something that would not, could not, happen. In Jerusalem, they said, the noon light turned the ancient stones the color of gold-dusted cyclamens. She fell asleep, wondering how such a color could be created on her palette. Perhaps in Jerusalem she would learn.

AARON AWOKE EARLY that spring morning and remained motionless in the half-darkness, watching a vagrant slat of sunshine streak through the Venetian blind and onto Kate’s bare shoulder. The soft golden glow matched her hair, matted damply now about her head, one small ringlet nestled against her cheek. Sometime during the night he had heard the shower running and knew that Kate had crept out of bed and was standing beneath the steaming water, her eyes closed and her head tilted upward, allowing the droplets to slip slowly down her body. Once, wakened and finding her gone, Aaron had watched her briefly from the bathroom doorway but had gone back to bed before she saw him. Sweet, wet Katie, he had thought sleepily then and now he lightly touched her damp curl and reached over to the night table and switched on the small bedside radio.

There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy,

A little shy and sad of eye,

But very wise was he…

A man’s voice, pitched to an uneasy softness, crooned the lyric, and Kate stirred reluctantly into wakefulness.

“Come on, Aaron. It’s too early for ‘Nature Boy.’ Let me sleep.”

But she lifted her arms and the sunlight danced between her small, perfect breasts. He laughed and thrust his head against the gliding patch of golden light that danced across her skin. He felt it warm against his head, felt her long fingers lifting one strand of his hair, then another, hiding the sun and releasing it as though the liquid rays were casual playthings.

“Now your hair is amber. No. Now it’s russet—the color of fall pears and leaves. Watch—when the sunlight jumps you’re going to turn copper, like the bottoms of your mother’s pots. Aaron, do you think our children will have your hair? Do you think we’ll have children? Do you think we could be Goldfeder and Goldfeder, Esq.? Oh, Aaron.”