Leah's Journey (25 page)

Damn—with his thoughts wandering this way he had missed sketching that last evening dress. But perhaps the dark-haired American woman had caught it.… With an effort he forced himself to concentrate on the show.

The last model, wearing a lemon-yellow evening dress with an accordion-pleated skirt, danced across the stage. The sleeves were like gossamer butterfly wings and the model moved lightly, balanced on her toes and coming to a graceful halt so that the patrons might see how gracefully the flowing fabric settled into rich folds. The girl’s flaxen hair matched the gown and Leah thought that S. Hart might manufacture it in brown for brunettes, yellow for blondes. She visualized a series of dramatic color advertisements with each model photographed in a dress that matched her coloring. What was that song Aaron played on his guitar—“Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair…” They could use that as the heading for an advertisement and the dress would be of a midnight-black crepe—they had a lot of such fabric left from a style cut last year which had not done very well.

The show was over and polite applause filled the room as the overhead lights flashed on. The audience, jarred back into the real world, blinked reluctantly and moved awkwardly, slowly returning to the demands of an atmosphere where lights were not muted and soft music did not soothe the air. Women adjusted their hats nervously and men felt for their wallets. The salesladies moved quickly about the room, answering questions and accepting checks and folded order forms. Someone opened the window and the sounds of early evening traffic on the Champs Elysées filled the room.

Leah slipped her papers into her large shoulder bag and pulled her bright-red cloche hat down over her sleek dark hair. After a week of attending showings in Paris fashion salons, she no longer felt any trepidation after a show. The patrons chatted in small groups at the exits, some making plans for dinner or the theater that evening. Several of the men viewers had disappeared and could probably be found at the models’ exit, waiting for the lovely slender girls with porcelain features who seldom fulfilled the tantalizing promise of the rose-colored spotlight. Leah’s exit would go unmarked just as her invitation (obtained by Seymour from a friend of a friend on a New York fashion journal, at considerable cost) went unchallenged at the door. In her smart red, belted dress and hat to match, she looked the role of a buyer for a small Manhattan shop and the only time she had ever felt any apprehension was that afternoon when the saleswoman approached her. She would take the Métro now, as she had every evening for the past week, and return to her small hotel on the Rue du Bac where, after a light dinner, she would spend the evening doctoring her sketches with as many details as she could recall. It was difficult to be accurate in the perfumed dimness of the showroom and occasionally she added small details of her own.

“Madame, excuse me if you will.”

It was the moustachioed German buyer who stood before her now, his black leather portfolio tucked under his arm, his well-brushed gray felt hat in his hand. She felt herself stiffen but smiled politely and replied in the cool, controlled voice which she had cultivated through the years.

“You wish to speak to me, Monsieur?”

“Allow me to introduce myself.” He held out a card which identified him as Frederic Heinemann, proprietor of a shop for women on Kurfuerstendamm in Berlin.

“I’m afraid I do not have a card with me,” she said, “But I am Mrs. David Goldfeder and I am from New York City.”

“So pleased, Madame.” He bent to kiss her hand and as she had supposed the hairs of his thick zebra-striped moustache tickled her skin, causing her to smile and breaking her apprehension.

Together they walked out into the cool of the evening. The Paris sky had thickened into the purplish-blue tones of early twilight and the faint aroma of chestnut blossoms sweetened the air.

“Does Madame Goldfeder stay in this district?” Frederic Heinemann asked.

“No. I am a guest at a small hotel on the Rue du Bac,” she replied. “And I am afraid that I must hurry there now, Mr. Heinemann. I have some work I must do this evening.”

“Yes. I understand, of course,” he said and glanced at his watch. It was not, after all, too late to visit his old friends, the Schreibers. “But if you will forgive me, Madame, may I make a great presumption in thinking that you might do me a great favor. I could not help but observe that you have great skill with the drawing pen.”

Leah glanced warily at him. So there would be a price to pay, after all, for his protective intervention. She continued to walk toward the Métro station without breaking pace.

“I think we are involved in a similar undertaking here in Paris, Madame. And you are enjoying a singular success. You recall the voile evening dress shown by Madame Chanel this afternoon?”

“The one with the stole and small sheer cuffs?”

“Ah. Exactly. I neglected to copy it and I wondered if you might share your own effort with me. For a fee, of course. The ladies of my clientele are much involved with the cabaret life and this dress would sell well in my salon.”

“A strange request, Monsieur. If indeed our projects are similar, then we are competitors. Why would I help a competitor?”

“Perhaps because your interests are in New York and mine in Berlin. And perhaps because I would guess that you are interested in ready-to-wear production and you see by my card that my clients are exclusively private. And most important, perhaps, because if you are of service to me, then perhaps I might be of service to you.”

They stood at the station entry and a newsboy dashed by carrying the evening edition of the L’Express and shouting the headlines:

NEW ANTI-SEMITIC MEASURES INSTITUTED IN GERMANY! ARSONISTS ATTACK FRANKFURT SYNAGOGUES! DUKE OF WINDSOR GUEST OF HITLER!

“Has it not occurred to you, Monsieur, that I would not be particularly inclined to be of service to a colleague from your country, no matter how mutually beneficial such an arrangement might be?” Leah asked, staring after the newsboy.

Frederic Heinemann blushed deeply and his finely shaped hands trembled.

“You do my country a disservice to think that all Germans subscribe to the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. There are many of us who are horrified by him. But we are sustained by the knowledge that ultimately he cannot succeed. He is the craze of the moment, the unhappy political remnant of Weimar, the Great War, and the inflation. Soon, Madame, he will be as dusty and forgotten as the unsuccessful design of years gone past. I am as distraught and repelled by his words and actions as you are, Madame Goldfeder.” He stood erect and Leah saw the small Medal of Honor in his lapel.

“With all due respect, Monsieur, I do not think you can be as upset as I am,” she replied and took a copy of the Paris Tribune from another newsboy who stopped long enough to wait for the few centimes she dropped into his outstretched grimy hand.

“I assume that Madame is Jewish?” the man asked gently.

“You assume correctly.”

“I wonder, Madame, if you would do me an even greater service than the one I originally sought. I have friends in Paris, newly from Berlin. They are a Jewish couple, the Schreibers. They have endured a great deal because of the Nazi madness and now await a visa to the United States. In your great country they have neither friends nor relations. I planned to visit them now, and if you could accompany me, it would mean a great deal to them.”

The homeward-bound crowds were hurrying into the Metro now and they moved aside to allow them to pass. Leah looked thoughtfully at the elegantly dressed man who stood before her. The distress in his voice and the gentle urgency of his request had touched her and stirred a forgotten chord. How willingly good people believed that evil could not endure, that it had neither power nor tenacity but withered like weeds with weakened roots. Yaakov had dismissed with contempt Gregoriev’s hordes and Eli had fought greed and injustice with only his own courage and conviction. David daily battled the invisible demons of ignorance and terror, and this successful German businessman, who reddened with shame for his country, did not give credence to the very newspaper whose angry headlines they shared together in the darkening street.

“If you will have dinner with me at the hotel, Monsieur, I will then visit your friends with you. It may be that my family can be of service to them. And, of course, we must compare our drawings and see how we can be of service to each other.”

Her decision made, she smiled warmly at him and allowed him to help her into the cab he hailed to carry them to the Rue du Bac.

*

The Schreibers had found temporary refuge in one of the small apartments in that section of Paris known as the Pletzel which Jewish relief agencies such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Joint Distribution Committee had leased as German Jews began crossing the border into France. The streets of the Pletzel, those winding narrow alleyways clogged with men pushing handcarts and housewives engrossed in their marketing with the intensity of the poor, their string bags bulging with onions and potatoes and hunks of meat wrapped in Yiddish papers soaked with blood, trailed by small parades of sad and frightened children, reminded Leah of New York’s lower east side. Here too, she supposed sadly, air was expensive for the poor. Twice their taxi swerved to avoid hitting groups of bearded, earlocked men, who looked to neither left nor right as they crossed the street, their heads bent together in earnest argument over a point of law. Like her father, their lives were lived within the Talmudic study hall where they erected elegant arguments on ritual purity for vanished priests whose Temple had been destroyed thousands of years ago or debated the disposition of a wandering goat as the traffic of urban Paris trundled by them. How safe they were, she thought, how unworried and insulated from the shouts of “Heil Hitler!” and the guns that were poised in readiness only a border away.

The long black gabardine of one rabbi was splashed by a speeding cyclist and he looked up with seeming mildness, followed the cyclist with his eyes, and shouted after him, “Cochon!” and then turned calmly back to his companions and continued his conversation in eloquent Yiddish.

Leah smiled and saw that Frederic Heinemann was smiling too. She had to remember to tell the story to David, she thought, and felt a pang of homesickness. It was almost three weeks now since the sun-drenched afternoon she had waved to her family from the deck of the Queen Elizabeth. They had, of course, all come to the pier to see her off: David, who had clutched her tightly in the night but wakened to mask his fear with calm; Aaron, withdrawn and silent, who suddenly, as the last warning call to dockside visitors hooted over the ship’s bullhorn, grabbed his mother and bent his head to her breast so that her bosom was damp with her tall son’s tears when he turned away, shielding his eyes with his hands; Rebecca, laughing and excited, dashing about the deck with Joshua Ellenberg in joyous pursuit; and a small Michael, who kept tugging at his mother’s skirt and asking her what she would bring him from “Your ope.”

“Perhaps your grandparents,” she had said and the cheerful little boy in his carefully pressed sailor suit had nodded happily.

“All right. And a little car. And candy.”

“Don’t forget. Candy,” he reminded her, as she hugged him tightly in good-bye. “And don’t cry. You’re not a baby. I’m the baby.”

She laughed but the tears had continued to stream down her cheeks and David had taken her arm and walked to the railing with her.

“You don’t have to go,” he said gently.

“I know.”

He took out a large clean white handkerchief, wiped her cheeks, and lightly kissed her hair.

He wore a small beard now, its fine dark growth threaded with streaks of early gray, and a gold watch was strung across the light-gray vest of his summer suit. How handsome he was, she thought, and how distinguished-looking, this man who had been in turn her friend and brother, her protector and companion, and finally her lover. She took his hand in hers and pressed it to her lips.

“Just three months, David,” she said and he nodded, his arms enfolding her, his head pressed to hers.

Now, on this crowded Paris street, so foreign and yet so familiar, she thought of the weeks that still must pass and the borders she would have to cross before joining her family. A heavy sadness stole over her, and Frederic Heinemann, as though sensing her change of mood, leaned forward.

“Madame suffers from la tristesse?” he asked softly.

“Yes, I am missing my family,” she replied.

“I too think of a friend now,” he said. “My young friend and companion, Heinz. It is the hour and this magic Paris light. But you will return to your family and I to my friend. I have the true tristesse when I think of those who cannot return.”

The cab stopped on the Rue des Rosiers, before the entry of a narrow gray stone apartment building. Concrete pots of dusty red geraniums stood on the windowsills and the steps were cluttered with small children who jumped up and down, weaving their way teasingly in front of the heavyset concierge, a tired woman in a faded housedress who was listlessly trying to clean the steps with a basin of water and a stringy gray mop.

The narrow stairwell smelled of urine and cheap talcum powder, and the odors of stewing vegetables and frying garlic seethed from each open apartment doorway. Twice, as they made their way up the steps, apartment doors opened slightly and Leah saw pale frightened faces peer from the narrow slice of light before the heavy doors slammed shut.

The Schreibers lived on the top floor; Frederic Heinemann knocked sharply twice, waited a moment, and knocked again. The door opened slightly, and quickly he took Leah’s hand and they slipped inside.

“Ah, Frederic, I knew you would come. You see, Ilse, he has come, our good friend. I told you he would not disappoint us. I told you.”

“You told me many things,” the woman said dryly, but her husband, a small dapper man impeccably dressed in tie and waistcoat even in the unbearable heat of the small flat, did not answer but embraced his friend and held out a hand of welcome to Leah. Frederic Heinemann introduced them.