Leah's Journey (50 page)
“Shut up,” he said and slid her down, leaving the vagrant light to waft across the empty pillow as his hands slid across her body, his lips burying themselves against the soft golden tufts of hair that peaked below the gentle mound of her stomach. His red hair nestled into the curve of her shoulders, his body rose and fell in steady urgent rhythm, and when the full light of morning pierced the slatted blind, his full love thrust forward within her and he lay back, sweetly spent, and fingered the curl on her cheek, damp now with his own sweat.
The radio played on and they lay in each other’s arms, listening to the announcer’s insouciant voice tell them that President Truman had just returned to the White House after a weekend in Missouri, Senator Robert Taft had condemned the Marshall Plan for aid to Europe, milk prices were up, bread prices were down. Locally, Representative John F. Kennedy would speak that afternoon in Harvard Commons. On the international scene, in Tel Aviv, the interim Jewish government was preparing to issue the declaration of the independence that would declare it the State of Israel. Drifting back to sleep against Kate’s shoulder, Aaron dimly remembered now, that that was why he had awakened so early that morning. He had wanted to hear just that announcement. Rebecca would be coming home soon, then. Yaakov would insist that she leave before war broke out and he could not imagine his laughing impetuous sister, for whom life had been a series of enthusiastic triumphs, lingering in a land at war. Perhaps when Rebecca came, he and Kate might marry. He looked down at the small blonde girl who lay beside him. Her eyes were closed and her pale gold lashes were wet with secret tears. Sweet Katie, he thought and kissed her eyes, licking the mysterious salt on her cheek. Sweet Kate, who wept in the depths of love, who lived slightly apart from others, hovering on the edges of their lives, grasping at the tales of their childhoods. He understood that strange apartness of hers, remembering with tenacious clarity the days and nights of his boyhood when he had hovered in doorways and peered through darkened windows. Poor sweet Kate, he thought, and his heart was mysteriously heavy for the young woman beside him and the vanished boy he had been.
*
In New York City that same afternoon, Leah and David strode up Park Avenue from Grand Central Station on their way to Charles Ferguson’s new art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, where several of Leah’s paintings were included in an exhibition. As always, when he walked with Leah, David was conscious of the admiring glances of passersby, who looked back at his tall dark-haired wife, dressed in a navy-blue cape suit of her own design. A silk scarf with geometric patterns screened in shades of deep purple and pale blue fluttered at her neck. The design was taken from one of Leah’s large graphics, and Joshua Ellenberg’s company had manufactured scarves and blouses in that pattern and others of Leah’s creation.
“Do you know what I’m thinking of doing?” Joshua had asked her the last time he had visited her studio, where his watchful eye scanned her recent work. “I’m thinking of taking your designs for a whole line of linens—tablecloths, sheets, draperies―why not?”
He slapped the black leather fingers of his prosthetic hand against his thigh for emphasis and picked up a small painting in red and gold tempera.
“Wouldn’t you want to sit down to a Thanksgiving table set with this kind of cloth? Listen—I’m telling you America is moving on. It’s had it with white sheets and cloths. Look to the future with J. Ellenberg. Hey, let me write that down for my ad man.”
Leah had smiled up at the tall young man in the well-cut Italian suit, his bulging leather portfolio always at hand, seeing him again as the tiny gamin-faced merchant scurrying down crowded east side streets. Joshua was cultivating a moustache now, as sleek as his thick pomaded hair, and his name appeared frequently on the pages of Womens Wear Daily. “Enterprising Joshua Ellenberg, offshoot of internationally famous S. Hart Inc., keeps an attentive finger on fashion’s pulse” “Could the mysterious L. G. who signs Joshua Ellenberg’s fabulous new fabric collection be Leah Goldfeder, whose stunning, innovative designs put S. Hart Inc. on the fashion map?”
Little Joshua, her children’s playmate, now father, husband, entrepreneur, en route to becoming a fashion tycoon, urging his shy petite wife from an attached house in Queens to a split level in Great Neck, moving farther and farther from the teeming streets of his boyhood. Leah had sold Joshua several of her designs, smiling to think that people would be stretching to sleep against the patterns she created in the redwood and glass studio behind their home.
David, as always, moved too quickly for her down the crowded avenue, and she hurried now to keep up with him. It was as though the habit of rushing had been grafted onto his nature so that he seldom slowed his pace, fearful of losing precious minutes as he rushed from the hospital to his consulting room. The years spent dashing from his grueling factory job to his evening studies had established a life pattern which he could not break although he knew with precise, professional detachment that he must. Too often now, his breath came in short frenzied gasps and a sudden arrhythmic escalation of his heartbeat left him weak and worried. But still he walked too fast, climbed steps two at a time, and answered the telephone on its first demanding ring. He left Leah several paces behind him now and waited for her at the entry of Waldorf-Astoria, looking upward at the flag flying over the facade of the great hotel.
It was the custom of the Waldorf to fly the flag of the country of a visiting head of state. Only the week before David had attended a psychiatric conference at the hotel when de Gaulle was visiting, and had seen the French tricolor sway in the young springtime breeze. But the flag that fluttered easily and gracefully in the wind today was one the Waldorf had never flown before. A little breathless still, he waited for Leah to catch up to him and clasped her gloved hand.
“Look,” he said, “we are watching history.”
Above them the white satin banner, with the blue star of David stitched between two slashes of matching blue, fluttered in the sun-tinged air. Leah stared up at it, remembering the first time she had seen the banner of Jewish independence in the Zionist meeting room in Odessa. She thought of the whirling horas of her youth, of the passionate discussions of agricultural settlements, a philosophy of collectivism, of her brother Moshe astride a podium, Henia learning to use a rifle, of Yaakov lying dead in an Odessa street. She remembered the fierce wind that had blown the day Moshe and Henia sailed for Palestine almost two decades earlier and she thought of the young men of her village who had died of malaria in the swamps of the Huleh. It had all led to this day, to this reading of a document of independence in a Tel Aviv museum.
“May fifteenth,” Leah said. “A Jewish state at last. And Weizmann is here in New York. A flag is flying for the head of a Jewish state. Oh, David, what does it mean? Will Rebecca be all right? And Moshe and Yaakov and the new baby? David, a Jewish state. Does it mean another war?” Gladness and grief mingled in her voice, and he gripped her arm in the familiar posture of comforter and protector to the woman who had become his wife because of shared grief and loss. His voice took on the soothing cadence he had discovered years ago in that Odessa park.
“Rebecca will be all right. Probably she’s planning now to come home. And your brother’s family has survived so much that they will survive this too. Come, we must hurry. Charles will be waiting for you at the gallery.”
They took a cab the rest of the way, sitting like frightened children against the cracked leather seats. Now, again, they would listen to news broadcasts on the hour, mount a war map of Palestine in their book-lined study, move the small pins from battlefield to battlefield, hear the phone ring with beating heart and sweating palms. A sudden sharp pain seared David’s chest, paralyzed his arms, and he was glad that Leah was content to sit quietly without talking. By the time they reached Fifty-seventh Street the pain had disappeared, but he promised himself that as soon as he had time he would go for a checkup. It was just fatigue, but still it would not hurt to have it checked. Next week, perhaps when his appointment schedule was lighter, after he had written up his lecture for the Psychoanalytic Institute. He dismissed it then and followed Leah into the gallery where Charles Ferguson stood lost in thought before the largest painting Leah had ever done, one which had absorbed her for almost a year. Lost in Flames she had called it, and the large canvas was alive with tongues of fire through which scorched black silhouetted figures danced, some leaping forward, some gliding slowly back toward fiery devastation.
“Perhaps I should feel jealous,” David thought with the peculiar clinical objectivity he brought to his own life.
He read the inscription, feeling sadness and loss coupled with a strange gratitude. “In Memory of Eli Feinstein, So Good and Brave,” the small brass plaque read. His wife’s lover had been good and brave, David acknowledged, and pressed Leah’s hand to his lips. How fortunate they had been, he and Leah, who had married seeking only solace and yet had journeyed through the years to love.
“David,” Leah said, “Charles has been asking about the children.”
“Well,” he said, “Aaron is at the Harvard Law School. Michael is studying hard and Rebecca seems to be quite involved in her painting. She’s studying at the Bezalel Art Academy in Palestine. No, not Palestine. I stand corrected. Today, Rebecca is in Israel.”
A sudden spray of sunlight tossed a rainbow across the soft white breast of a sculpture in alabaster of a mother and child and he moved closer, as though to listen for a wordless cry.
*
Rebecca awakened early that first morning of statehood, after a night spent dancing in the streets. It seemed as though all of Jewish Jerusalem had converged in Zion Square to hear the rasping voice of David Ben Gurion, via radio from Tel Aviv, read out the Declaration of Independence. Rebecca trembled as she heard the white-haired grocer’s son from Poland call for peace and dedication. Loudspeakers boomed his words into the square.
“We extend our hand in peace and neighborliness to all the neighboring states and their peoples and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution to the progress of the Middle East as a whole.… With trust in Almighty God we set our hand to this Declaration at this session of the Provisional State Council on the soil of the Homeland in the City of Tel Aviv, on this Sabbath Eve…”
The silence which had prevailed during the reading was broken by a sudden shout of joy, by a wild hora in which the dancers whirled in an ancient dervish dance of celebration. Accordionists played feverishly. Kiosk owners threw open their stands and passed drinks and food to the singing, dancing crowds. No money changed hands in Jewish Jerusalem that day. The dancing crowd parted for a Haganah half-track and a young officer in battle dress saluted them with a bottle of orange soda.
“Save your strength, chaverim,” he called. “Tomorrow we fight.”
Now that tomorrow was here, and Rebecca watched as the pale-gold Jerusalem light streaked through the high-arched windows of her room on the Saint George Road in the Musrara quarter of Jerusalem. The muted sounds of early morning floated on the gold-tinged air with reassuring familiarity. From the Damascus Gate she heard the ululating call of the muezzin summoning the faithful to worship, the ancient summons resounding from a public address system and wafting above the matins murmured by the monks in the compound of Notre Dame. It mingled with the muttered Sabbath prayers of the aged Hasidic rabbi’s followers who met in a prayer quorum two houses away.
In the hallway just outside her door, Rebecca’s Arab landlady, Nimra Halby, was sloshing down the marble floor with a huge rag attached to a stick and soaked in water and disinfectant in a battered aluminum bucket optimistically marked, “Property of His Majesty’s Government.”
“I doubt that King George misses it,” Danni Friedman, a fellow boarder who studied medicine on Mt. Scopus, remarked one day.
On the street below, mules drawing small carts moved at a steady pace, pausing at strategic points so that the vendors might advertise their products in proud insistent calls. Rebecca waited for the matutinal threnody, the summons to seize cucumbers that would tempt Allah Himself, tomatoes which were the jewels of the vine, melons the color of sunlight. She was proud that she now knew the words for the produce in both Hebrew and Arabic and occasionally engineered a small purchase of her own, using words instead of pantomime. But this morning the carts did not pause and it seemed to Rebecca, listening carefully now, that they rolled across the cobblestone road at a more rapid pace than usual. She went to the window and looked down into the street, suddenly conscious of a new sound, punctuating the muezzin’s call and the monks’ chant. A staccato of gunfire, distant enough to take on the sound of muted irregular drumbeats, issued from the direction of the Rawdah School, and it was toward that sound that the laden carts were moving.
On this Sabbath morning, they did not carry pyramids of tender green cucumbers or mounds of lacy lettuce but were packed with sacks of clothing and household goods, battered chairs and mattresses. On one, an ancient wooden ice chest, moisture still dripping from its opening, had been trussed with frayed rope. Small children, their eyes wide with fear but glinting with an adventure they did not comprehend, rode atop their household goods, clutching odd treasures. One boy held his shoeshine kit while his elder sister clutched a ragged one-armed doll in one hand and balanced a live infant in the other, crooning to both as her father led the cart and her mother walked behind, two goats, one white and one black, trailing her on a leash.
The strange procession moved steadily toward Suleiman Road, one cart pulling to the side when a copper tray careened off it and clattered across the cobblestones of Saint George Road. A man, his black-and-white checked kaffiyeh askew, hurried to retrieve it while his wife, in her festive purple robe, carrying an infant, waited for him, tears streaming unheeded down her cheeks.
