Leah's Journey (63 page)

“Maybe by smelling Chana’s cooking,” Noam offered.

“Now we are being silly. It must be time to go to bed.”

They rose and said good night. Yehuda, still holding the sleeping Danielle whom he would carry back to the children’s house, bent to kiss Leah, the mother-in-law whom he had met that morning and recognized at once. David held Rebecca close and felt with joy the full maternal body, smelling faintly of milk, of the woman who had grown from his small laughing daughter, his American princess, to mother the motherless and capture beauty across stretches of canvas. He was proud of her and proud too of his tall sons. They would struggle, his gentle, thoughtful boys, but they would triumph.

Aaron stood across the room and David glimpsed a new softness in his son’s eyes. Aaron would sleep well that night, he knew, and he wondered if he himself would find sleep, already conscious of the familiar pain which inched across his chest and shot with deadly accuracy into his arms. But Syd Adler had been right. The pains came more infrequently now and frightened him less. And the pills were immediately efficacious. He hurried toward them and Leah complained, as they crossed from Rebecca’s bungalow to their own, that he walked too quickly across the unfamiliar terrain.

*

The rabbi, a plump young man whose short bronze beard curled gently and whose embroidered skullcap wobbled uneasily on his thick hair, arrived just before midday, driving a yellow Studebaker caked with desert dust and overflowing with pomegranates and melons, baskets of new spring tomatoes, tiny cucumbers with prickly spines. The various kibbutzim he had visited on his swing through the aravah, the southernmost part of the Negev, sent gifts to their neighbors, and he distributed them with a shy smile and replaced a bushel of northern oranges with a basket of bright-green scallions. A rifle was slung across the crates and his blue-velvet prayer-shawl bag rested on it. He wore khaki shorts and a work shirt, but he changed into baggy gray slacks to perform the first of the marriages on the soft parched grass of the lawn.

The wedding canopy was a prayer shawl stretched on poles of fresh-cut palm wood and fringed with streamers of braided flowers. The brides wore simple dresses of thin white fabric and carried small bouquets of hardy desert flowers—the pale-white bud of the tamarisk, the pink-and-white meadow saffron, fragile spears of lavender, and rich purple wild irises that grow between moon-colored mounds of sand. The kibbutz children had collected the bridal bouquets and Leah had met Mindell and Danielle in the pale opal light of morning, their arms laden with flowers. She smiled at her adopted granddaughters’ bright faces and sniffed their burdens of sweetness. The fears of the previous night vanished and she walked between them into the communal dining hall and ate an enormous breakfast of salad, cheeses, and herring, feeling hungrier than she had felt for months.

The second bridegroom shattered a white wrapped glass beneath his foot and the shouts of “Mazal tov!—Good luck!” rang out as the lorry from Beth HaCochav drove up. The visitors from the north poured out, adding their shouted good wishes to those that already filled the air.

Leah watched her brother Moshe stride toward her and felt again the shock of recognition she had experienced when he and Henia met their boat at Haifa harbor. More than three decades had passed since she said good-bye to her brother at the Odessa port. Newly widowed, newly wedded, she had watched him begin his journey, dry-eyed because those were the years during which she refused to surrender to tears. Now at another dock-side they had greeted each other and the years dropped as easily as petals fall from a fragile flower. With her hair and his both graying, he a grandfather and she a grandmother, both of them orphaned by the flames of hell that had consumed the town of their birth, their only sister buried, the children grown, she allowed herself the luxury of sorrow and wept against the breast of her brother, distant but always close. The familiar rapport rushed back and their words flowed as easily and swiftly as their tears.

Moshe, the first out of the lorry, hugged her now and then Michael whirled her around in a small dance of welcome. Yaakov and Baila and their children—three small boys dressed only in royal-blue bloomers and bright red kibbutz hats—poured out, and Henia, always calm and controlled, her face wreathed in lines of contentment, followed her grandchildren.

The family, arms wrapped about each other as though to fend off new partings, new separations, joined the other members of the kibbutz to witness the third and last wedding to be performed that day. The groom was a grave-eyed boy who stood beside his bride in khaki shorts and an open shirt, his sandaled feet shifting nervously. The bride had made her dress out of the gauzy white fabric which the bedouins use for their kaffiyehs. The bright sun shone through the sheer fabric and the girl’s skin glinted golden beneath it. Her fingers lightly touched her shy groom’s hand and when she turned, Leah saw that her face had the sweet innocent quality of a young child. She lifted it to her new husband as a young bud rises to the warmth of the sunlight, and Leah’s heart turned.

Her brother walked up to her.

“Come, Leah. Walk with me a bit. The circumcision ceremony will not be for another half-hour and I want to see the avocado fields,” he said.

An accordionist struck up a gay hora and as they walked the music trailed behind them, one tune leading to another.

“Do you remember that one?” Moshe asked. “We used to dance to it in the Zionist clubhouse in Odessa.”

“I remember,” she said.

She looked at her brother who had been a slender boy with their father’s narrow build and delicate features. He was a muscular man, his skin stained a golden brown. His thick hair was gray and he walked with the purposeful stride of a man who has little patience for leisure but moves swiftly from one task to another.

“It was an age ago. So many things have happened,” he said.

“Yes. Do you remember those days in Odessa—right after Yaakov’s death? You asked me then to come to Palestine with you.”

“Yes. But you don’t regret going to America, do you? You did such wonderful things there. The designing. The painting. And your life with David and the children has been good.”

Moshe studied his sister’s face. The daring of the young girl he had known had evolved into the strength of the woman. His sister stood tall and straight, her dark eyes large and quiet. She wore her dark hair today in a coronet of braids, just as she had worn it when she had been a bride, as young as the golden-skinned girl who had stood that day beneath the marriage canopy. Bands of silver ran through its dark thickness and he had noticed, too, the network of fine lines about her wide-set eyes.

The brother and sister stood now at the edge of a field where young plants grew in hopeful, fragile rows of green, shivering beneath the rhythmic silvery caress of the streams of water splayed forth by a revolving sprinkler. Prisms of color danced in the crystal spray and tiny rivulets ran through the hoed fields, turning the loose sands into fertile, sustaining earth.

“I should like to paint this field. This field and the stretch of desert beyond,” Leah said. A canvas stirred to life in her mind and she wondered if she could buy brushes and paints in Beersheba.

Her brother did not reply. A patient man, he waited for an answer to his question.

“No,” she said at last. “We each had our separate journeys to make, Moshe. And we traveled forth to life—to new and different lives. What I regret is that we left so many behind to death. But that we could not help. No one can tell anyone else which roads to travel. Even our children we cannot tell. They must find their own ways, make their own journeys.”

She stooped and plucked up a clump of hard-packed earth in which loose grains of sand were trapped. She passed it to her brother, and as he took it the loose sand drifted to the ground and was lifted and carried away by a gentle desert breeze. They smiled and walked quickly back to join the others.

*

An ancient acacia tree grew just beyond the bungalow where Rebecca and Yehuda lived, and its mushroom-shaped crest, brown-leaved and thorn-entwined, cast a circle of shade onto the pebbled ground below. Here a long table had been set up and covered with a thick white cloth of heavy linen. A small pillow covered with an embroidered pillow slip had been placed on it and just above it a small blue amulet dangled from one branch of the acacia tree and a bright red ribbon had been tied to another. A polished silver wine goblet stood on the table, and Leah was startled when she recognized it as her father’s. Moshe followed her gaze.

“Yes. He gave it to me the morning that we sailed. And now we use it at the circumcision of his great-grandson,” Moshe said, and put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. All journeys have their landmarks and she confronted this one with a commingling of joy and anguish.

They heard the infant’s lusty cry and Rebecca and Yehuda moved toward the table just behind the rabbi. Baila held the baby, smiled, and handed him to Aaron, who took the infant and walked toward the chair, following the rabbi’s mimed directions. The white pillow was placed on Aaron’s lap and he put the infant on it, his large freckled hands handling the small bundle of writhing flesh with surprising ease, with a natural gentleness. The rabbi lifted a scalpel that glinted in the sunlight and the infant blinked at the sudden silvery brightness. The prayer was intoned and the guests took up the words of the rabbi in fluent unison.

“Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, king of the universe, who had made us holy through His commandments and commanded us about circumcision.”

The scalpel flashed and the blue amulet danced in a shifting breeze. A scarlet drop of blood fell on the snowy whiteness of the pillow slip as the foreskin was severed from the tiny penis.

The baby wailed piteously and a sponge of cotton soaked with red wine was pressed against his lips. Hungrily he sucked and smiled, the pain forgotten, the wine sweet and anesthesizing, and he lay quietly as the bandage was applied.

In the circlet of shade, Rebecca and Yehuda held hands and softly repeated another blessing after the rabbi.

“Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who has sustained us in life unto this day,” they said.

Leah looked at Aaron, her own firstborn, who held the child still, grateful that he had served as godfather to the infant who bore his father’s name. A cycle had been completed and new generations would begin new journeys. She moved to stand beside David and placed her hand within his.

*

A small pain awakened David later, deep into the night, after the long afternoon and evening of feasting and dancing, of song and talk, was at last over. In the darkness he spoke to it as though it were an old adversary for whom he had formed a reluctant fondness.

“You’re back again, are you?” he said. “Coming less and less often, though. Well, I’ll soon take care of you.”

Moving slowly, glad of the moon-streaked darkness, he found his pills and the glass of water he had learned to keep at his bedside. Well, he had invited this attack, he knew, by the wild dancing of the evening, but still he did not regret it. The music whirled through his head again and he thought of how his body had moved easily, the steps of the dances easily remembered, as he danced to the happy tunes of his youth.

He smiled as he remembered the feel of the firmness of Leah’s flesh beneath his hands as he whirled her around the coarse wood floor of the kibbutz social hall. She slept heavily beside him now, her mouth slowly open, curved into a smile as though she too remembered the dancing and the joy. Her bare arm was flung across the pillow and gently he eased it down, kissed the soft white flesh of her forearm, and covered it with a blanket.

The pill, as always, had stimulated him to a wakefulness which he knew he would not overcome, but the pain, blessedly, was gone. He thought of reading but was afraid the light would waken Leah. He would take a walk instead, he decided, and dressed quickly and quietly, putting on his warmest sweater and jacket against the chill of the desert night.

Outside the air was brisk and stars filled the sky, a myriad of silver flowers which clustered here and ranged there against the soft blackness. He looked up at the argentous overgrowth and found the familiar constellations, the Orion family outlined against the velvety sky, trembling so close to him that he felt his face must be bathed in the metallic light that shimmered through the night.

He walked on and passed the small bungalow of the couple wed that afternoon. A lamp glowed softly in their window and as he passed he saw the naked form of the young bridegroom, carefully holding a glass of water, his fingers cupped about it as though it were a precious offering. Rebecca’s small house was dark and David wondered how many brothers and sisters would join the infant Yaakov in the years to come, how many grandchildren he would welcome. Still, it did not matter. He had this day held his first infant grandson close. He walked on, shivering beneath a new and harsher chill. The slight breeze that wafted over him was ice-edged, reminding him of the cold night air of the Russian forest of his boyhood. He trembled suddenly, overcome by cold and by memory. He would go back to the room where Leah slept, to seek out the familiar contours of her warmth and feel her breath sweet against his neck. Now pain had gone and a sweet fatigue replaced it.

He quickened his steps, but as he passed the pink stucco children’s house, a slender figure slipped out of the shadows. He paused, thinking it was the watchman, and as he stood there the man touched a window, struggled with it briefly and when it did not yield, stole over to another. Now David clearly saw the moving figure’s white headdress, the flash of polished blue metal in his hand.

“Stop!” David called and hurried over to the building.

The stranger wheeled about and David saw the milk white fear in the Arab’s eyes, the tight terrified set of his lips. He saw the hand move upward and the blue metal flash in the silvery starlight. A shot shattered the silence of the night and David’s body exploded with heat and pain but he moved forward and shouted again, “Stop! Stop, I say!” He did not recognize his own voice but cursed it for its softness.