Leah's Journey (64 page)

Lights flashed on, doors opened, and men with rifles and guns dashed across the compound, shouting orders with fierce staccato efficiency. David fell then, his face sinking into the softness of the blanket of desert grass. The pain washed over him and then with blessed swiftness, vanished. Briefly, his fingers opened and closed and opened again.

He was dead when she reached him, when she bent over his body and covered it with hot, unbelieving tears. She took his hand, the palm outstretched as though searching for her absent touch, and pressed it to her mouth, biting at the flesh, scraping her face with her husband’s lifeless fingers.

“No, David,” she protested wildly. “No. No. No!”

He was not dead. He could not be dead. They had traveled too far together to be separated like this.

It was Mindell and Danielle who moved forward at last, shivering in their long white nightdresses, their soft eyes bright with new grief. Gently, each took one of Leah’s hands and led her away from David’s lifeless body to the bungalow where dim lights burned against the danger and the darkness of the night.

FALL ARRIVES EARLY in Russia. Its warning chill begins even before the last crops of summer are harvested and the leaves turn gold and russet while the flowers of late summer bloom with a desperate brightness. The workers in the communal fields wear heavy jackets in the cold light of dawn, shed them as the sun slowly rises, and put them on again only hours later when the sun’s brief life wanes and its harsh gold pales against the sky that turns so swiftly from blue to gray.

The tall woman who sat in the rear seat of the Intourist car, which traveled slowly north along the road that parallels the Sea of Azov, wore a hooded cape of thick blue wool. The driver, swiveling slightly in his seat, had noticed that her shoes and bag were of the soft American leather his own wife yearned for. But when she spoke to him, to advise him of a runoff where the sea road cut into a forest clearing lined with dwarf pines, she spoke in a clear but oddly accented Russian. She carried an American passport, he knew, having checked it routinely at the Odessa hotel when he picked her up. Leah Goldfeder. It was not a Russian name but he had gone to school with a boy whose name was similar—Goldenkrantz or Goldenberg. A Jewish boy, he knew, having once seen his identity card where the line which calls for nationality had been marked “Jew.” Perhaps this woman too was Jewish. He had heard that once many Jews had lived in this part of Russia where the sea air penetrated the green thickness of forest lands. It was, after all, beautiful country.

He drove slowly, enjoying the ride, enjoying the luxury of having only one passenger with whom he could talk in his own language when usually his touring car was full of foreigners and he struggled to explain his country in languages painfully learned and painfully used.

As the day grew warmer the woman removed her hood. Her long hair was pulled softly back from her face and nestled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. Waves of white rippled through her hair and when he caught sight of her face in his rear-view mirror he saw that she was older than he had thought, close to sixty perhaps, and very beautiful. She had a rare face, the sort of strong face which was denied prettiness in girlhood but became proud with beauty in age. He saw that a small half-dimple lurked at one corner of her mouth which was just a bit too wide.

She leaned forward in her seat, her eyes raking the road. Once she asked him to stop and he waited as she knelt in a meadow, thick with long wild grass and varicolored flowers. She gathered up long-stemmed yellow buttercups and bright-red flowers from whose dark hearts wiry black tendrils sprang.

“Just north of Osipenko,” she said, “there is a small village. I am looking for a farm just outside of it.”

“Osipenko.” The name stirred no memory and he pulled over and reached for his map. It was marked but a note recorded that the town had been razed some years back because a new road had been built through it.

“The town is no longer there,” he said, and she sighed.

She had not really expected the town to be there. The week before she had visited the site of the village of her birth and that village too had not been there. Fields of silver-green alfalfa grew where once small wooden houses had stood, behind rough planks spread to create a road through encroaching mud. Only one very old man remembered that once there had been a village there, a tiny town of
Zhids—Jews
. What had happened to them? He did not know. He did not remember. He smoked a long curving pipe of the sort her father had smoked, its bowl carved of ivory. Wistful blue strands of smoke wept about his mouth and he watched them rise in the sunlight as though they might contain the answers to the urgent questions this strange woman asked. The Zhids had gone during the war, during the days of shooting and the nights of fire. She had turned away then, and the old man was briefly bitter because she did not thank him, but later a woman had told him that the American lady had been crying.

Leah leaned back against the seat of the car, her fingers deftly moving among the flowers. Perhaps, after all, she should have allowed Aaron or Michael to travel with her from Israel. They had wanted to come, had argued and insisted. But she had remained firm and Moshe had advised them to let her do as she wished. She had wanted to return to this land where her journey had begun, to the fields bright with wild flowers and the city by the sea from which she and David had gone forth to their new lives.

It was a journey which David would have wanted her to make, she knew, a journey which they had vaguely planned to make together. Instead he lay buried in the first grave to be dug in the small cemetery the young kibbutz had reserved for its dead. Small children, his own grandchildren and others, would come to his grave each year and place tiny pebbles of tribute on the headstone, knowing that the man buried there had died protecting the lives of sleeping children. Already the American doctor, the visiting grandfather, had become a kibbutz myth. And Leah too would come, with Aaron and Michael and the families that would be born to them in turn. Through the years they would journey again and again to visit their dead, to see how Rebecca’s children grew, how the sand turned to earth and how the newly planted date palms gently brushed the sky.

But to Russia she had journeyed alone, yet she was not alone. Gentle ghosts traveled at her side, memories both harsh and sweet whispered to her through long silences.

“Now, Madame,” the driver said. “We are just north of Osipenko and there are no farms here.”

“Ah, but once there were,” she said, too softly for him to hear. She raised her voice. “But this is the road I want. Drive very slowly now.”

She opened the window and leaned out, her eyes marking a passing bramble bush, looking hard at a hedge where chinaberries would sparkle in a month’s time, her hands still busy with the flowers on her lap.

“Here. Stop here,” she said at last.

She got out of the car and walked toward a tree, a Lombardy tree, bent so low with age that the leaves on its lowest branches trailed across the twig-littered ground. The tree had a wide trunk and she knelt before it, touching its bark, rising to move about it in a slow circle. It was midday now and the sun, at its strongest, broke forth among the leaves. She leaned against the tree, her fine white skin dappled by sunlight and leafy shadow.

The driver followed her eyes as she gazed northward. Yes, once a house had stood there. He saw the single broken gray cinder block that must have been a foundation stone. But she, the tall woman in the dark blue cape, seemed to see the house itself. As he watched, she slowly loosened her hair, shook it free of the confining pins, and allowed it to flow about her shoulders—a cascade of thick black hair through which white waves dipped in gentle strokes. Briefly, she seemed to dance, moving slowly in the steps of a mysterious secret rhythm as young girls sometimes do when they are alone and unseen. He turned away and went to smoke a cigarette on the other side of the car.

After some minutes she joined him, her hair once more replaced in its soft neat bun, her face set again in the comfortable lines of accepting age.

“We can start back now,” she said. “Perhaps we will reach Odessa in time for a late lunch.”

As they neared the city, she leaned forward.

“Do you have a daughter?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Perhaps she would like this.”

She handed him a wreath of woven flowers, of the tall buttercups entwined with the dark-hearted red blossoms which, he remembered now, were sometimes called “The Blood of Russia.” He thanked her and she leaned back. She had reached journey’s end and had no need for souvenirs.