Raquela (9 page)

“I just heard the news, Raquela.”

Raquela brushed her cheek. “What news?”

“Debby's probationary period ended today. She failed all her exams. Mrs. Cantor told her she doesn't have the qualifications to be a nurse. She's been expelled.”

Winter yielded unwillingly to spring, the winds of Mount Scopus howling their last farewell.

Carmi was somewhere in Egypt with the British Eighth Army. Raquela wrote him every day. In her spare time, she knit khaki gloves and mufflers and mailed them to him, care of a British-army post office.

His first letter took weeks to arrive. Raquela found it in the wooden honeycomb where the students received messages. She bounded up to her bedroom and slit open the blue airmailer.

Dear Raquela:
     We traveled 24 hours by train from home to get to this base. I'm covered with dust from head to foot. Dust and sand are everywhere—in the water, in the food, in our lungs.
     To write you the truth, it's very hard to get used to camp life now that I've met you in Jerusalem. On the whole train ride, I thought about you every minute.
     My soul is tied to yours.

Raquela shut her eyes. Slowly, she reread the line.
My soul is tied to yours
. She read on.

     I love you, Raquela, with all my heart, and I will love you until I die.

MAY 1943

Carmi was back for a week's home leave.

Raquela was to meet him at seven. She pulled off her blue uniform, changed into a frilly white blouse and skirt, and flew down to wait in front of the building.

A cab drew up. Carmi stepped out in summer khaki, his face desert-burnished, his hair sun-bleached like corn.

He held her to him in the cab as they drove off to a café in Zion Square. They were too happy to talk.

A pianist, an accordionist, and a violinist were playing dance music as the couple entered. Jewish couples and young Arab men sat at little tables.

They chose a table far from the bandstand. Carmi gave the waiter their order: “Vermouth for the lady. I'll have a scotch.”

He reached across the little table and took her hand. “Raquela, I dream of you every night. I walk through the camp and think only of you.”

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “I've never loved anyone as I love you, Raquela.”

She drew both his hands toward her, and placed her cheek against his warm palm. She heard herself say it aloud for the first time. “I love you, Carmi.”

“Say it again, Raquela. So I will hear it when I'm back in the desert.”

“I love you, Carmi.”

The May day had been unseasonably and fiercely hot. Now the cool night wind blew off the hills of Jerusalem.

They danced waltzes; they sipped drinks; they held hands.

“You know, Carmi,” Raquela said, “in a way we're still strangers. I don't know very much about you.”

He smiled. “I can give it all to you in a few words. Born in Rehovoth. My father's a judge in Jerusalem. He wanted me to study law, but I hate dead things. I love watching things grow. I finished agricultural high school in Pardess Hanna. And when I'm finished with the army, I want to be a farmer and marry you.”

Raquela tried to visualize Carmi, resplendent now in uniform, as a farmer in blue kibbutz shorts, bending over his crops, driving a tractor. He looked like one of those posters that hung on the school walls—Sabras ploughing the fields, their faces toasted golden brown, their bodies tawny like the summer hills.

Suddenly she glanced at her watch. “Oh, my God, it's nearly ten o'clock. Mrs. Simonson will have my head.”

“Won't she understand this is a special night for us?”

“She doesn't accept any excuses. I must go. I don't want to be expelled like—” She caught herself in time.

In the taxi Raquela tried to cheer up Carmi.

“Mrs. Simonson is really like a mother. She wakes us up in time to go on night duty, and while we're dressing, she prepares tea and sandwiches and cookies. When we come off the evening shift, she's still waiting up with something to eat and drink.”

Raquela chuckled. “But her biggest problem is how to protect our purity. She doesn't even allow us to bring our brothers up to our rooms.”

“Don't any of the girls cheat?” Carmi asked.

“Of course. Especially when they have a boyfriend in the army who's back on home leave. The girls fix their blankets to look as though they're sleeping. But they don't always get away with that. She puts her flashlight right on the bed.”

“Did you fix your bed?” His voice sounded a little strange, as if he were testing her. “After all, you've got a boyfriend on home leave, too.”

“I was too excited to think about it. I should have asked one of the girls to take my place.” She laughed, still trying to amuse him. “We try to protect each other. Sometimes one girl is assigned to cover three beds. She gets in one bed, covers herself up to her chin, pretends to be asleep, and as soon as Mrs. Simonson checks her bed and room, she gets out, runs up the stairs, and gets into the next bed before Mrs. Simonson gets there.”

A cloud seemed to pass over his face. “Do you cheat sometimes, too, Raquela?”

She shook her head as the cab made its way through East Jerusalem. “I've never stayed out late.”

“Never?” Raquela detected a slight edge of suspicion, as he repeated, “Never?”

She felt a need to explain herself. “I'm an obedient, law-abiding person, Carmi. I believe if you want something, you have to accept the rules. Right now, I want to be a nurse more than anything in my life. And I don't want to do a single thing that will make them throw me out.”

“Couldn't you stay out late just one night—for
me
?”

“I'm allowed to stay out one night until twelve-thirty. Let's save that for the night before you have to go back.”

“But there's a whole week before I go, Raquela. I want to spend every minute with you.”

“Carmi, I promise, I'll see you every single evening after my classes. But I'll have to get back each night before ten—except the last night. I really must, Carmi. I don't want to be expelled.”

But Raquela was nearly expelled.

It was June 1943, a month before her probationary period was to end. Mrs. Cantor sent for her.

She walked through the sun-splattered corridor and opened the office door, half crazed with fear.

“Miss Levy, I'm very disappointed in you.” Mrs. Cantor sat behind her desk, her black
eyes
dark and troubled.

“We had high hopes for you when you started the program. Now I get reports that you come to classes unprepared; that you sit daydreaming; that you're not even aware when you're called upon, as if you were somewhere in Timbuktu. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

Raquela lowered her head. She would be thrown out in disgrace. Like Debby. All her dreams of nursing wounded soldiers would be smashed. Yet everything Mrs. Cantor said, every charge she made, was true.

Raquela had been consumed with thoughts of Carmi. She carried his love letters in her apron pocket, reading them in classes, on duty in the wards, at night in bed, until she knew every word by heart.

She was lonely for him, and her loneliness turned into fear. Was he in danger? He had told her he was stationed somewhere in Egypt. But where?

Since his last home leave, she had been studying maps. The big push for Tunisia had started early in May. It was taking a heavy toll on British and American troops. The Allies seemed to move forward only to be pushed back as the Nazis regained the territory they had lost. Why was there so little news in the papers and on the radio?
Carmi, where are you?
she often heard herself cry out in the night.

Maybe her brother Jacob would know. Suffering from colitis, Jacob had been honorably discharged from the British army. He had rejoined the Haganah and become part of Shai, the Intelligence Unit.

Jacob revealed almost nothing to the family except that he had taken a new name to throw the British CID (Criminal Investigation Department) off his tracks. In the Jewish underground army, he called himself Absalom, for the legendary Absalom Feinberg, who had worked for the British against the Turks in World War I and had been murdered by the Bedouins.

At Shabbat lunch with the family, Raquela showed Jacob the coded post-office box on Carmi's censored airmail letters. Jacob quickly deciphered the code.

“He's stationed on the border of Egypt and Tripoli. He's in Battalion Two of the Palestine Buffs, the same unit I was in.”

Jacob, short, exuberant, razor-sharp, could almost always make Raquela feel better, but today even Jacob could not stop the fears for Carmi that kept gnawing at her insides. Yair, too, was in Egypt, not with the Buffs but with the RAOC—the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

“Do you think Carmi and Yair are in danger?” she asked.

“Every soldier faces danger. It's a fact of life and war, Raquela, and you have to live with it.” He toyed with his teacup. “Probably the most dangerous assignments are the paratroopers.” The British are dropping our boys and girls behind the enemy lines in Europe. I can't tell you who they are; you may have gone to school with some of them. I can only tell you our Haganah boys and girls are making contact with the underground resistance. And we hope bringing some word of hope to the Jews that they're not alone, they're not forgotten.”

“And the Jews, Jacob?” Papa asked sadly. “What news do you have that you
can
tell us?”

Jacob's face turned grim. “Extermination! So ghastly even we can't believe the reports we get. We've seen Arab riots here. They're child's play compared to the stories our underground sources send us from Poland, Austria, Germany.”

Raquela was unbelieving. “What can be worse than the way the Arabs raped women in Hebron and ripped out their stomachs?” The memory of their weeks in the Seminar could still shoot pains through her body.

Jacob clutched the arms of his chair, almost pulling himself up. “You're like all the rest, Raquela. Naive.” He turned to Papa. “You too. Because you love the German language so much, you can't believe
das Land der Dichter und Denker
”—he spat the words out—“the land of poets and thinkers, could become a land of monsters and sadists.”

Silence fell on the dining-room table.

Back at the nursing school Raquela's mind kept returning to Jacob's words:
extermination…Jewish parachutists making contact with the underground resistance…Hitler's hordes conquering Europe…maybe America…maybe the Middle East
.

Stay alive, Carmi
.

The words were a drum beating in her head.

And now Mrs. Cantor was threatening her with expulsion.

“You have less than one month to buckle down, Miss Levy, and prove yourself. You may go now.”

AUGUST 1943

The wartime Class of Snow Whites waited in the lounge as Mrs. Cantor, immaculate as an admiral, breezed into the room, her face wreathed in smiles.

“I am happy to tell you,” she said to the twenty young women, “that you have all passed your six-month probation period.”

Twenty young women pulled off their probationers' caps. Carefully, they lifted the starched white cowls and draped them over their hair. They looked like a pageant in a Renaissance painting.

This would be Raquela's headdress for the next two and a half years.

All the next year Raquela worked tirelessly in class and in the wards, her life punctuated by Carmi's home leaves—one week every three months.

By now thousands of Jewish men and women from Palestine were in the army, navy, and air force serving under the British flag in France, England, Greece, Crete, Ethiopia, Libya, Cyprus, and Iraq. They distinguished themselves in the battles of Tobruk and El Alamein, in the landings in Sicily and in Italy. The trail of the war was marked with many of their graves. Yet many were bitter and frustrated. They yearned to go as a unit, under their own flag, to fight Hider.

Carmi's letters from Egypt told her of the restlessness among the troops.

     We're doing only guard duty and transport. You can almost feel the demoralization. Here are young idealistic boys and girls willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the murderers of our people, and we're stuck in this hot desert—no action, only boredom and monotony. When are they going to let us get to the front?

Finally, on the twentieth of September, 1944, the British War Office made an announcement that electrified the Jews of Palestine:

H.M. Government have decided to accede to the request of the Jewish Agency for Palestine that a Jewish Brigade Group should be formed to take part in active operations
.

A week later, on the twenty-eighth of September, Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech in the House of Commons that was carried by the BBC to every soldier in the desert and to every home in Palestine. Raquela heard it on the radio in the nursing school:

I know there are vast numbers of Jews serving with our forces and the American forces throughout all the armies. But it seems to me indeed appropriate that a special Jewish unit, a special unit of that race which has suffered indescribable torments from the Nazis, should be represented as a distinct formation amongst the forces gathered for their final overthrow, and I have no doubt they will not only take part in the struggle, but also in the occupation which will follow
.

Carmi heard the news the morning after Rosh Hashanah. He wrote Raquela: “I volunteered the first day. Now at last we will fight Hitler as a unit under our own Jewish flag. I pray I will get home to see you before they ship us out to Italy.”

He arrived in Jerusalem two days after his letter. He had two weeks' home leave.

Raquela managed to see him every evening after school. They walked; they sat in cafés; they danced at the officers' club; they went to the movies and the Philharmonic, clinging to each other.