Leah's Journey (51 page)

There was a knock at Rebecca’s door and she turned from the window and opened it, hoping that Nimra Halby had brought her coffee as she often did. But this morning Rebecca’s landlady was dressed to go out, her long black gown covered with a shawl of the sheerest blue mohair, which she pulled over her hair.

“I am going now, Geveret Rebecca,” she said. “There is coffee in the finjan on the stove—also some good goat cheese and pita. Please finish it. It will grow stale. The floors are all cleaned and the garbage is out. I have a great deal of lamb in the ice chest. Please, if I am not back by tomorrow and it is possible, add another block of ice.” The Arab woman spoke in the clipped Mandate English shared by both the Jewish and Arab residents of Palestine, who had been educated by the British and employed in their civil service network.

“But where are you going? And why are you going?” Rebecca asked.

She liked her landlady. In the months she had lived in the large stone house an intimacy had developed between them, an instinctive understanding peculiar to women who have been used always to the support of men and are living without them. Nimra Halby was a widow who spoke softly to the shade of her dead husband, asking his advice about monies to be sent to her daughter who lived with relations in Lebanon, and transfers of documents to her sons studying medicine and architecture in Paris.

“It is better for a girl who speaks English and can read and write to live in Beirut,” Nimra had told Rebecca. “There she will have the opportunities you have had to make her life her own. Here, in Palestine, it could not happen.”

“But what am I doing with that life which is my own?” Rebecca had wondered then, thinking wistfully of Beth HaCochav where each day had been purposefully linked to the next, where she had heard Mindell’s laughter, shared the warmth of her uncle’s family, and been involved in important, exciting work. She thought, too, of the starlit nights when she had watched from the window and seen Yehuda standing in the shadowed tent of the cypress tree, looking through the darkness to the room that was her own. Here in Jerusalem she was alone except for the students she worked with at the studio and the boarders in Nimra Halby’s house.

But within that aloneness, within that guarded quiet she had imposed upon herself, she felt a slow magic evolve. Her work was taking form. The seeds of talent which Charles Ferguson had observed so many years before, the talent that had sent her into Joe Stevenson’s studio, was slowly taking form and growing. She worked in broad brush strokes now, taking a long time over the colors of her palette, her lips pursed like a cautious pedantic cook, as she added a modicum of gold to a splash of pink oil and produced the delicate, elusive rhodochrosite shade of a Jerusalem sunset on a winter’s day.

“Soon, I think, you will begin to see people with your brush,” her instructor told her. He was a tall bearded man who had walked across Russia four decades earlier and arrived in Jerusalem with a handful of sable brushes and three canvases sewn into the lining of his quilted jacket. One of these canvases hung now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, another in the Tate Gallery in London, and a third in the Bezalel Museum, just below the art studio where he both worked and taught.

Rebecca had, in fact, begun to think of painting Nimra Halby, seeing in the Arab woman’s face the lines of strength mingling with a soft sadness, in her eyes the reflection of a shared struggle. Nimra Halby had worked hard to make this strong stone house her own and to maintain it. She had forded her neighbors’ and relatives’ disapproval by taking a job in the British civil service and moving painfully up the administrative ladder by dint of perseverance and talent. She had had the courage to send her children off in search of better lives. She reminded Rebecca of her mother and she often thought of how well Leah and Nimra would understand each other—strong women both, who had seized the reins of their own lives.

“Why am I going?” Nimra Halby answered her boarder with barely concealed impatience. “Are you not living in Jerusalem? Don’t you see what is happening in the city? Listen carefully. Perhaps you will hear the Jews near Notre Dame telling the Arabs to leave Musrara.”

She motioned to the tumultuous street below where now a parade of ancient American taxis followed the carts. Three chickens, their necks clutched by a boy’s brown fingers, clawed the windows of an old Checker cab.

“Which Jews are asking you to leave your home, Nimra Halby?” Danni Friedman asked, moving across Rebecca’s room to stand at the window with them.

The young medical student came from Degania Aleph, a kibbutz in the north, and during his three years in Jerusalem, Nimra Halby’s home had been his own. Rebecca had seen the Arab woman carry trays of coffee and sweet cakes to Danni’s room when he studied for exams, and she had heard her get up in the night and pour naphthalene fluid into the hot-water heater so that Danni might bathe when he returned from his hospital duties on

Mount Scopus. She remembered the grim April day, exactly one month earlier, when the convoy to Mount Scopus had been ambushed. Danni was to have traveled with the convoy and his Arab landlady had sat frozen by her radio, listening to reports of the dead and wounded, weeping, stopping only when she heard the sound of his key in the latch and he entered the room. He had missed the bus, he told them sheepishly, but had spent all those hours at the Shaare Tzedek Hospital working with the wounded. The Arab landlady and her Jewish student boarders wept with relief and toasted each other in vinegary arak, celebrating Danni’s survival and their own.

This morning Danni did not wear his medical whites but was dressed in the khaki fatigues of his Haganah uniform. An enormous Colt revolver hung clumsily from the holster at his waist and although the day had not reached its full heat, circles of sweat stained his loose army shirt. Rebecca had not heard him leave that morning and it occurred to her that he had been out all night standing guard duty.

“The Jews who call upon you to leave Musrara are not members of the Haganah, or of the new Jewish government. They are from the Stern Gang, wild terrorists, and there aren’t many of them. You know this. Stay here, Nimra Halby. Please. Do not turn yourself into a refugee. This house is your home. This city is your home. Stay.”

The Arab woman remained at the window, her young Jewish boarders flanking her. The air vibrated with the static of a loudspeaker which no longer carried the chant of the muezzin. Arabic words, frenzied, passionate, tumbled over each other. The muted staccato sounds of gunfire were supplemented by the tumultuous crescendo of rockets spewing flame and noise.

“The damn Davidka,” Danni muttered. “Misfiring half the time. Can you hear it?”

“And can you hear him? The spokesman of my people?” Nimra Halby asked and they stood quietly and listened to the impassioned Arab’s plea.

“I hear him. He says to leave and tomorrow you will return to claim Tel Aviv,” Danni said. He had learned Arabic from the goatherds of the Galilee, English from the Mandate police, and Hebrew from his grandfather who had cleared the first rocks from the fields of Degania.

“I don’t want Tel Aviv,” Nimra replied. “I want only my house built by my husband’s father.”

“Then stay in it,” Danni pleaded. “Stay in it and nothing will happen to you. We will protect you.”

“No. I cannot. But I will return. You will take care of the lamb?” she asked Rebecca.

Rebecca nodded.

“I will put fresh ice on it tomorrow if you are not back.”

“Good.” The Arab woman pulled her shawl around her head, draping it across her face. She drew herself up tall and her eyes narrowed. Slowly, without turning back to the young people who stood watching her, she left the room and they heard her walk softly down the stairs, heard the heavy door, carved of cedar, girdled in brass, slam behind her. Through the window, then, they followed her progress down the street, where she trailed long lines of Arabs who hurried by on foot, laden with packages and suitcases. Nimra Halby carried nothing but her large purse and did not once look back at the large stone house to which she had come as a bride and where she had borne her children.

“Oh God,” Rebecca cried softly, shivering in her nightdress, her bare feet cold on the tile floor which Nimra Halby had so proudly shown her the day she rented the room.

“He won’t help us today,” Danni said grimly. “Today we fight for Jerusalem ourselves. Come, Rebecca. Get dressed. Have some coffee and come back with me to the emergency clinic at Saint Joseph’s. You’re a doctor’s daughter. You know how to bandage a wound.”

“My father’s a psychiatrist,” Rebecca said and she and Danni laughed with a sudden explosion of uncontained mirth, as though she had said something wildly funny. They laughed until tears came and they realized, by the wordless gaze that arrested their laughter as suddenly as it had begun, that it had only shielded the fear and sorrow they felt for the Arab woman in whose home they stood and whom they knew they would not see again.

“I had meant to paint her,” Rebecca said in a small, almost aggrieved voice, as though angered by the wars that again and again upset her life. The promises of her laughing childhood had been broken and like a betrayed child she thought of all that had been denied her.

“This is not a time to paint.” Danni’s voice was harsh and she saw, for the first time, a scarlet crescent of blood across the sleeve of his shirt. She dressed swiftly then, and seized as many linens as she could carry from the carved cabinet where Nimra Halby had kept her sheets and pillow slips.

The Saint Joseph Convent School was nestled into a gentle hillside in one of those Jerusalem cul-de-sacs where the city is suddenly fenced off by a brace of tamarisks. Here, a self-contained community conducted an islandic existence, independent of the ancient city which surrounded it. Through the generations, young girls in uniforms had come to this enclave, with their book bags and writing tablets, heavy crucifixes suspended about their necks, and prostrated themselves before the east windows of the church, which looked out toward the Hill of Calvary, and studied geometry and home economics, irregular Latin verbs and the histories of Shakespeare.

But there were no students in the old classrooms today. The tenacious smell of chalk dust mingled with the odor of ethyl alcohol, the sweet cloying scent of morphine, and the stench of vomit. The corridors were crowded with stretchers and the air rang with the sounds of men weeping and moaning with pain. Above them, on the bulletin boards, brightly colored posters invited the convent students to take a botanical hike through the Judean hills, to join a bus tour of Crusader sites, to go on retreat at a monastary in Jericho. Relics of another life before Palestine had become a battlefield, some of the posters were now smeared with blood where the wounded had leaned against them.

“We’ve got all the casualties from the battle at Neve Yaakov,” Danni said. “Thank God you thought to bring that linen.”

“Are you here to work?” a Magen David Adom nurse called to Rebecca. “Good. We can use another pair of hands. Put this on.” She tossed Rebecca an enormous white surgical coverall and watched approvingly as she struggled into it, glancing incuriously at the patch of dried blood on the shoulder. “Cover this corridor and the reception area, please. The water is in the chemistry lab but give only half-cup portions and then only if it’s desperate. Dr. Joseph is operating in the chapel. I’m Nurse Rachel and Nurse Dalia is in the library.”

She disappeared into the chapel and Rebecca stood still for a moment, remembering what Aaron had told her about the battlefield in Ethiopia.

“It happened like a slow-motion film. I moved through it as though it were happening to someone else. I didn’t shoot. Someone else shot. My ears didn’t hear the screaming of the wounded. That someone else, that slow-motion ghost who had taken over my body, heard it. Even Gregory, poor dead Gregory, he was ‘someone else’s’ friend.”

Standing in the makeshift hospital, her eyes riveted to a pool of blood, her ears filled with screams and the muffled sounds of shamed weeping, she understood what Aaron had meant. Grimly, she commanded the “someone else” who inhabited her body to move down the corridor, to rip sheets into bandages, to apply a compress to the bloodied forehead of the fourteen-year-old boy who still tightly grasped the grenade he had not had time to throw before a bullet shattered his kneecap.

She learned that morning not to look at faces but to concentrate on wounds. She had made the mistake of looking up into the familiar deep-blue eyes of a young man delirious with pain, blood running from his right hand. He had held his other hand out to her and in the dirt-encrusted palm were three mangled fingers belonging to the bloodied right hand. A grenade had severed them by the muscle from his palm but he had plucked up the scraps of tendon, flesh, and bone and hurried with them to the clinic. His hands were his life, Rebecca knew, because he was Amnon Harel, the artist whose easel stood next to hers in the Bezalel studio and whose subtle use of line and color reminded her of Joe Stevenson’s work. She took the proffered fingers—the flesh soft and spongy against her own, one sharp knucklebone shimmering like milk-white ivory where the flesh had been scorched from it—found a glass of water and some salt, and plunged them into it. She had heard her father talk once about preserving severed flesh in a saline solution and she prayed that there was hope for saving Amnon’s fingers, the fingers whose magic gift captured the Judean hills in pastel tones as soft and delicate as the morning breath of a sleeping child.

At another bedside she held a block of ice in place against the groin of a tall, red-bearded man whose Number 6 bus she had often ridden to the German colony. A volley of submachine gun bullets had pierced his trunk and although the blood was staunched he moaned and writhed on the narrow cot. She did not look at him until he was quiet, and she thought then that the ice must have anesthesized his pain so that he slept at last. She moved to adjust his blanket and saw his hand dangling, blue and motionless. She pressed her ear against his mouth but she had known from the moment that she saw the hand that he was dead. Almost angrily she pulled the blanket over his face and seized the block of ice, taking it to where a mother sat with her seventeen-year-old son, waiting for Dr. Joseph to amputate the boy’s left leg, mangled into shreds of broken cartilage where an Arab half-track had ridden over it once and then shifted into reverse and ridden back across it to compound the crippling.