Leah's Journey (3 page)

“No, that’s not true,” Henia said. “The truth is I don’t want to spend another day in Odessa.”

They all laughed but their laughter was dry and cracked, a humor born not of joy but of bitterness. Even Leah smiled slightly, but almost at once her fingers found the tear in the mourning garment and the smile faded as she stroked the severed fabric.

“And what will you do, Leah?” David Goldfeder asked, assembling his papers in a cardboard portfolio. “Will you go to Palestine too?” He was a thin man who worked quickly, his pale-gray eyes fixed on the job at hand, his mouth set in a thin line of concentration. Because he was in mourning for his brother and Chana Rivka, he had neither shaved nor cut his hair for a month and Leah noticed for the first time how thick and dark his hair grew, making his thin face and light eyes seem even paler in contrast. She had known him in Partseva and knew that he was always the older boy who concerned himself with younger children, marshaling them for games, telling them stories, keeping pace with the smallest during hikes across the field. A hurt animal was always brought to David Goldfeder, and women came to him often and placed their worries before him. With gentle talk he sorted out their fear and grief, just as he had sorted the papers that he now gathered together in his worn folder.

Again Moshe and Henia glanced quickly at each other and then at Leah. Clearly, it was a question they had wanted to ask her but were unwilling to. There are defined borders to the territory of grief and they did not want to trespass.

“What are those papers you are working on, David?” Henia asked as Leah remained silent, staring straight ahead.

“Affidavits. Affidavits that our society has obtained from Jews in America. These papers will make it possible for some of our people to settle there. It’s a new world over there across the ocean. A new society. A new philosophy of life.”

“All worlds are the same,” Moshe said. “There was a new philosophy here in Russia. Ah, yes. The brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of communism. But it would seem that the brotherhood is an exclusive one and Jews are not invited into the fraternity. In your United States there is the brotherhood of democracy, but such noble sentiments will do nothing to prevent pogroms there. The only answer is Palestine, Zion. The only answer is to build our own state, establish our own society, protect ourselves.”

“And when the Arabs of Palestine attack your settlements, your state, your society, what will you call that?” David asked. “Ah, you will not call it a pogrom because pogroms belong to the old world, to the Diaspora. You will have another name for such attacks, but it will be the same thing. Jewish blood will be shed. Jewish children will die. Jewish lives will be in constant danger and the British will not care just as the Czar did not care and the Comintern did not care. Would I grieve less for my Chana Rivka or my brother Aaron if they had died at the hands of an Arab instead of at the hands of drunken Russians?”

“Stop!” Leah shouted and paused for a moment as though surprised at the harshness of her voice. “Please.” Her tone was soft now, falling almost into a whisper. “Stop all this talk of killing. Please. No more. No more.” She drew the needle fiercely through the blue cambric and cried out in pain as it pierced her finger and a tear-shaped drop of blood fell on the collar of Yaakov’s shirt. She threw the garment aside and ran from the house, slamming the door behind her.

The three remaining in the room stared at each other and at the door.

“Go talk to her, David,” Henia said. “You were so fond of each other as children. You always understood her.”

“Yes, I remember,” David said thoughtfully. “I will talk to her. But in a while. Let her be alone now. It will be all right. You’ll see. It will be all right.” He repeated the phrase with practiced ease, not thinking about its reality but offering it as comfort to himself and to those who waited for placebos of reassurance. “Believe me, it will be all right,” he said again flatly and turned to a few forgotten papers, absently fingering the thin documents of hope.

*

A light mist drifted up to the streets of the Jewish quarter from the harbor and Leah felt it settle coolly on her face and dampen her hair. The familiar salt smell was pleasant and she opened her dress slightly at the throat and let the moist air settle on her skin. Her pleasure at the evening cool surprised her. She had thought herself numb to all feeling, relieved of sensation. She was a newcomer to the landscape of grief and did not know how to sift through the sands of sorrow and grab small footholds of life, grains that could be fashioned into strength. The events of the past month had paralyzed Leah with the ferocity of their impact, their terrible finality, and she had burrowed deeper and deeper into a cavern of fear. She had retreated into the shelter of Moshe’s home, taking refuge there just like the small crippled girl who huddled in shadowy doorways. She could not stay there forever, she knew, and the time was coming when she would have to make a decision.

She was certain now, not with joy but with terror, that she was pregnant. There was no longer any need to count the weeks since her last menstrual flow or to touch her breasts, now grown full and tender. The child within her was growing and in a few more months it would stir with life. And soon too, her condition would become obvious and her secret would be common knowledge.

She knew there were those who might seize strands of hope from her pregnancy and the birth of her child. A life had been taken, they would say, but one had been given, blessed be the name of the Lord who fathered the fatherless. An infant had been named in the synagogue just after the pogrom had at last been squelched by government forces. The aged rabbi who during his years of service in Odessa had intoned the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for more Jewish souls than he could remember, had lifted the newborn baby high for the entire congregation to see. It was a girl and its mother’s cries of labor had mingled with the screaming of dying children and the moaning of bereaved men and women. The child had been born on a night when the town blazed with fire and shards of broken glass littered the cobbled streets so that the horses of the funeral carts kicked wildly and would not pass through. But the newborn was a healthy baby, weighing almost ten pounds, and the assembled congregation smiled as the infant stretched luxuriously and purred through dreamless sleep.

“The parents of the child name her Tikva—hope,” the rabbi told the worshipers. “Her birth and her name are a message for all of us. Where there is death there is also life. We dare not despair. We go on. We bring forth new children to take up our faith and we entrust them to God’s care because in His mercy He shall see that Israel will endure, that new generations will rise up.”

Leah, sitting in a rear pew, leaned forward with the other women, as they lifted the thick gauze curtain that separated them from the men so that they could see the child. They murmured softly, with satisfaction, as the strong baby kicked away its swaddling and they smiled when the young father, wrapped in his prayer shawl, carried his child down from the pulpit.

It would be said of Leah’s child, also, that the new birth marked the continuity of the generations, that Yaakov’s child was an obscure compensation for Yaakov’s death, that it would provide comfort for her, grant her a gain against the magnitude of her loss. But what would happen to their emotional bookkeeping if she were to announce that it was possible that the child that clung so tenaciously to her womb was not of her dead husband’s seed, that it might have been conceived through struggle and hatred? She had thought she was pregnant in the innocence of that August morning but it had been too soon to know. In moments of calm she assured herself that the child was Yaakov’s, born of their tenderness, but the stormy moods of uncertainty tore into that calm, forcing her to recognize that she might have been impregnated by the redheaded woodsman whose laugh was tinged with fury and whose eyes had burned with hatred.

It had taken her weeks to organize her thoughts, to recognize the consequences of that anguished struggle. Even in the blind hours that followed Petrovich’s attack, when she had at last struggled to her feet, removed the ripped dress, remembering to shred the fabric even more and to consign it to the rag pile, she had thrust all thought from her mind. She had washed herself over and over, using a coarse sponge and rubbing the lower part of her body with such fierce strength that for weeks afterward it remained red and raw. She had put on a winter dress, thinking of the thick material as a shield, and run through field and thicket to Moshe’s home in the town. There, she had shrugged away all questions knowing the danger that lay in answering them.

Other women had been raped during the pogrom and each day Henia brought her a new tale of sexual violence and violation.

“Goldstein’s daughter. Only sixteen years old. They say she has not spoken since the attack. And Eisenberg’s wife. A pregnant woman with a suckling at her breast. God help them. God help the daughters of Israel.”

At such moments Henia forgot her Zionist zeal and became again the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. She swayed in silent prayer and her tear-filled eyes turned heavenward.

There was no shame, Leah knew, attached to the violation of innocent, powerless women and it was not out of shame that Leah maintained her silence but out of the terrible doubt that haunted her. For a while she had hoped that her menstrual flow would begin but now she recognized at last that it would not. It was probable that the child she carried was Yaakov’s but there was a chance that it was not. To tell of Petrovich’s attack would mean planting the seeds of doubt in other minds as well and the child would grow up in this shadow of communal uncertainty. And so the teasing half-knowledge remained hers alone and she hoarded her secret like an emotional miser, shrouding it in silence.

She would have to make plans for herself and for the child and she knew she must come to a decision soon. Moshe and Henia were eager to embark for Palestine and join their friends who were building a kibbutz, a communal settlement in the Huleh valley. They were delaying their departure, she knew, until she was better able to cope with her grief and order her life. They had urged her to join them but the thought of Palestine terrified her as did any mention of violence. The Arabs did not welcome the Jewish settlers and were mobilizing against them. Only the previous week there had been a newspaper account about the burning of a Jewish settlement in the Galilee, and she had thought again of the miller’s house and the orange flames of death that had rocketed from the thatched roof. She never again wanted to watch helplessly while the fires of hatred blazed.

Her parents were staying in Russia although every day more and more Jews from Partseva came to bid them good-bye. Most of them were leaving the shtetl for the United States and Canada, a few for Palestine, and others were sailing to England and Australia. One family had even opted for New Zealand amid considerable speculation about whether kosher food was obtainable in Auckland.

The Jews of Russia were on the move, practicing their ancient skill of tying intricate knots around clumsy bundles and trunks and suitcases that seldom closed properly. Huge cartons were anchored together with lengths of cord and rope and finally strapped with broad strips of leather. Pots and pans clattered as they were linked together on a chain of rope. They would be needed to prepare meals during the journey and some worried housewives attached them like a belt to their aprons.

Families were split asunder as one brother chose Palestine and the other set sail for New York. Husbands left their wives, planning to work for several years in the new world and earn the dollars that would purchase tickets and passports for the families left behind. Each day processions of horse-drawn wagons clogged the streets of Odessa that led to the seaport. There old men kissed their sons good-bye, urging them to remain good and faithful Jews. Brothers embraced with desperate finality and left each other without looking back. Children waved frantically to fathers they would not see again for years, and old women pulled their shawls tightly over their heads and walked slowly back to houses grown silent and empty.

Leah’s brother-in-law, Shimon Hartstein, had left for America the week before. He estimated that it would take him two years to send for Malcha and the children.

“Stay with us in Partseva, Leah,” her parents had urged, but the thought of returning to the small town filled her with dread. To return to Partseva would be to step backward, to surrender the advances she had made, to suspend a journey which she knew must lead away from that village which smelled of the past and was rooted in resignation. She could, of course, stay in Odessa and live on in Moshe and Henia’s flat. Yaakov’s parents had been generous to her and she knew they would continue to offer her money, especially when they learned of her pregnancy. She was an accomplished seamstress, she could tutor schoolchildren, and she had friends and acquaintances in Odessa. Some of Yaakov’s friends from the Socialist League had come to see her during the seven days of mourning and offered her reassurances and sympathy. But she knew that most of them had not come forward and the knowledge angered her. Still, she liked the small city with its cobbled streets and low-storied stone buildings. It throbbed with activity and life. Ideas flourished, presses rolled, urgent discussions took place in book-filled parlors. And the city held many memories for her, memories of her brief courtship and even briefer marriage.

Leah paused now in her walk, stopping at the entry of a small municipal park. She and Yaakov had often sat on the stone benches here, listening to the music of the twin violinists who played at the café across the way. But tonight only one violin filled the air with aching melodies that were lost in the rustling of the leaves. Had the other brother decided to leave Odessa, leaving his twin to play on mournfully alone? The park was empty except for a woman who sat on a low stone bench surrounded by canvas shopping bags and clumsily laden straw market baskets. The woman was reading from a Hebrew book and Leah, glancing quickly at the volume as she passed, saw that it was the Book of Psalms. Above the strains of the violin the woman’s monotonous voice echoed through the empty park.