Raquela (12 page)

She looked at Meira. “Is it all right to leave her alone?”

“We'll take only a few minutes, and there is still plenty of time. I'll tell the nurse in the hall to look in on her.” The cafeteria was crowded. Raquela noticed the heads of some of the doctors and nurses turning to watch her as she strode self-consciously into the room. She smoothed her uniform and straightened her starched white cowl. What were they thinking?

He seemed oblivious as they stood in the cafeteria line, poured their own coffee, and made their way to a small table.

“Well, young lady,” he began, “how do you like nursing?”

“I love it. I can't wait until next February to graduate and really dig in.”

“That's good. I like to see enthusiasm in our young nurses; it bothers me when I see some who look at nursing as just another job.”

They sipped their coffee slowly. Dr. Brzezinski leaned across the table and picked up her right hand.

“You have good strong hands,” he said.

Raquela did not know how to react.

He went on, “They could be the hands of a surgeon. Or a musician. Do you play some instrument?”

“I played the violin. At one time I even considered becoming a professional violinist.”

“And?” He lit a cigarette.

“I chose nursing over music, I guess because of the war.”

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and flipped the ashes into a metal ashtray.

“I'm glad you made this choice, Raquela. May I call you Raquela?”

She felt flattered and uneasy.

Her hand dropped to her lap; Carmi's letter burned through her apron pocket…
There is no question—I love the most beautiful and fantastic girl in the world
.

“Where did you disappear?” Meira asked.

“Dr. Brzezinski invited me for coffee.”

Meira raised her eyebrows. “Really? That's nice. I think all the nurses around here are in love with him.”

Raquela busied herself straightening the sheets.

Meira went on. “He has time for everybody. He sits beside you as if there's nobody else in the world. He comes in and reads me Sholom Aleichem stories. He always has
etzes
—advice—for everybody's problems. If there are six women in the ward and each one speaks a different language, he can shift from one language to the other. You should hear him—Yiddish, Polish, Russian, French, German, English. What did I forget? Oh, Hebrew, of course.”

Raquela felt a cold sweat of guilt moisten the back of her uniform.

“Raquela, help me, help me!” Meira shrieked. “I think the baby's coming.”

Raquela ran to the nurses' station. “Can you get Dr. Brzezinski right away?”

Within minutes he appeared.

He examined Meira, talking in a low voice, comforting, reassuring.

“You're ready,” he said. “Fully dilated.”

Meira smiled weakly.

Raquela and an orderly eased her onto a hospital cart and wheeled her into the delivery room. They put her on the delivery table, covered her with sheets and waited for Dr. Brzezinski.

A few minutes later he appeared in a green operating-room uniform and cap. He scrubbed up and pulled rubber gloves over his hands.

Raquela stood to the side, watching. Dr. Brzezinski was an artist, a sculptor, maneuvering, turning, molding. His capable hands were drawing life from her body.

A cry pierced the delivery room.

Meira had a son.

Each day, Raquela listened to the radio reports and clipped articles from the newspapers. The Jewish Brigade—part of the British Eighth Army—was now fighting with the Americans under General Mark Clark, Commander of the U.S. Fifth Army in Italy.

On the northern Italian front, along the river Senio, the Brigade was separated from the Nazis only by the river, which was no-man's-land. They faced a German parachute division and Panzer units on the northern bank and in the hills.

Raquela kept a scrapbook of eyewitness accounts by two Jerusalem correspondents, Ted Lurie, of the English-language Palestine
Post
, and Israel Finkelstein, of the Hebrew daily
Haaretz
. Lurie described the enemy artillery pounding in the background while the troops conducted a Passover Seder in a barn.

That Passover week was the worst thus far for the Brigade; it was typical of the Nazis to inflict their crudest attacks during Jewish holidays. The Brigade, suffering its heaviest losses, buried its men in a small Jewish military cemetery in the Italian hills, under the star of David.

While the Nazis were being pushed back on the Italian front, Allied forces were racing across Europe. Liberating parts of Germany, Austria, and Poland, they came upon the concentration camps whose names no one had heard before: Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Mauthausen. Treblinka. Theresienstadt. Oswieczim, which the Germans called Auschwitz.

Raquela read that tough, battle-hardened British and American generals wept when they entered the death camps. Strong American soldiers vomited and weak ones fainted when they saw and smelled the charred bodies and human bones inside huge ovens. They saw bodies piled on top of one another, some naked, some in prison garb, half eaten by lye, hastily tossed together by the retreating Nazis. They met cadaverous-looking survivors. They gave them their rations and some died from the food their emaciated bodies could no longer accept. American GIs gave the morphine syringe each front-line soldier carried to the doctors and medics to alleviate the suffering of the half-dead concentration-camp victims.

As Raquela cut and pasted the clippings, tears of anguish fell on the scrapbook. She felt anger. Disbelief. Even animals had more humanity.

She was home on a Saturday evening with Mama and Papa when they heard Moshe Sharett on the radio. Head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, Sharett had landed in Italy on April 14 to visit the Jewish troops. Now, two weeks later, in carefully chosen, emotion-packed words, he was reporting what he had seen:

Thousands of our young men and women have gone from Palestine to Italy, not as exiles, but as liberators. Not as victims, but proud of their strength…in fulfillment of a mission to fight shoulder to shoulder with the sons of other nations against the foe of their people and all mankind.”

Raquela felt a surge of pride. He was talking of Carmi. She leaned forward, listening:

“For the first time since our exile, Jewish soldiers have appeared on the field of battle as members of a nation rooted in its homeland, and representing a distinct national civilization.”

“Good!” Papa hit his desk with his hand clenched.

“They appear as the messengers of the beginning of their people's rebirth.”

People's rebirth
. The words had never had so much meaning. After the war. After the obscene deaths. Now the rebirth.

Carmi wrote constantly. He had been gone more than a year and a half. She found him receding in her consciousness. She tried to hear his voice, to see his face, to feel his presence. But it was as if she were walking in a fog.

“You have begun to write less and less,” he complained in his last letter. “Has anything happened? Are you sick? We are still fighting our two wars. Nobody has to be jealous of me….”

She had stopped reading. How odd that he talked of jealousy. The memory of his jealousy in the university garden, when Shmuel, the young intern, had approached them, was like the taste of sand in her mouth.

How little we know each other, she thought. Only his letters and those brief visits on home leave. Can one really know another human being this way?

The traditional Friday-afternoon peace settled on Jerusalem. Offices and shops closed early. Men hurried home bearing flowers for their wives. The Shabbat crier, in a long black coat, walked through the city, blowing the
shofar
—the ram's horn—announcing the approach of the Sabbath. Men in silk caftans and round fur hats walked like kings to the synagogues; women, in their freshly scrubbed homes, lighted their candles.

Raquela, working the late-Friday shift on Mount Scopus, felt the Shabbat peace envelop the hospital. The wards were filled with flowers; on night tables near their beds, the women patients blessed their candles; the men wrapped themselves in their prayer shawls and sang the Sabbath prayers.

She was at the nurses' station when Dr. Brzezinski approached. “Do you have time for another cup of coffee?”

She looked at the clock on the wall. Eleven
P.M.
“I'll be off duty in one hour, if you can wait, Dr. Brzezinski.”

“I'll come back.”

Using a little pocket mirror, she freshened her lips with lipstick, and rearranged the white cowl on her hair.

The nighttime hospital corridor was eerily quiet when Dr. Brzezinski returned, carrying a bouquet of flowers. “I picked them for you from the garden,” he said.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“I'm sorry we can't have coffee,” he said. “I've just been called on an emergency. Are you free tomorrow morning? We could go for a walk.”

“I'm free,” she said.

“I'll pick you up at the nursing school, say about ten.”

The night passed slowly. She read; she chatted with her friend Rena Geffen, who had entered the nursing school a term behind her. But she could not discuss either Dr. Brzezinski or Carmi even with Rena. She was worried. She had read that the Brigade had crossed the river Senio, pushing back the German front. The Nazi parachute and Panzer Divisions were in retreat.

Was Carmi safe?

At last she fell asleep.

Dr. Brzezinski was waiting in the lounge the next morning as she entered. She had dressed carefully in a white summer blouse and a cotton skirt.

“Would you like to walk to the Old City?” he asked. “I see you're wearing walking shoes.”

Did he guess that she had borrowed flat pumps so she would not be taller than he?

They set off, descending Mount Scopus, cutting across Sheikh Jarrah down to the crenellated walls surrounding the Old City. The hills were carpeted with spring flowers; gentle breezes blew from the Hills of Judea.

It was hard to believe in this Shabbat peace, that men were dying in Europe.

They entered the Old City through the huge vaulted Damascus Gate. The narrow streets were crowded. Jewish men in long black silk coats were hurrying toward the Western Wall to pray. In the Jewish quarter, children in holiday clothes strolled in the sun; synagogues rang with the sounds of men and women at prayer.

The Jewish shops and kiosks were shuttered for the Sabbath, but in the other quarters Moslems, whose Sabbath was on Friday, and Christians who shut their shops on Sunday, called to Raquela and Dr. Brzezinski, “Come inside…beautiful jewelry…you want rug?…copper tray…Turkish coffeepot?…Come in, don't cost you no money…looking is free…”

“Let's go into one of the shops and look.” Dr. Brzezinski took her arm.

From a tray he chose a necklace of blue beads made of Hebron glass. He draped the necklace around Raquela's throat.

“But—but, Dr. Brzezinski. I—I—”

“No arguments, Raquela. I like what blue beads do for you.”

She glanced at herself in the mirror on the counter. She saw red spots on her cheeks.

“I know a restaurant right outside the Damascus Gate that has the best fresh fish in Jerusalem,” he said. “Let's go there and have some lunch. Are you a fish eater?”

“I eat everything, Dr. Brzezinski.”

Just outside the Damascus Gate, on one of the main thoroughfares of East Jerusalem, they stopped in front of a small restaurant. Live fish swam in tanks inside the window.

“We can choose our own fish,” he said, “and they'll cook it for us.”

They chose St. Peter's fish, brought down from the Sea of Galilee, entered the little restaurant, and gave their order to the owner. A young Arab, probably the owner's son, showed them to a long family-style table. A few Arab men sat at another table, eating.

The smell of fish cooking made Raquela ravenous. The young waiter brought a plate heaped with hot
pita
and an order of
hummus
, a delicious paste of chickpeas. They devoured it and ordered more.

For the first time Raquela felt confident enough to ask Dr. Brzezinski about himself. She knew only that he was a bachelor; that he lived right in the hospital, in the bachelors' quarters, in the underground level of the maternity wing; and that he had come from Europe.

“A piaster for your thoughts, Raquela.” He smiled indulgently.

“I was just about to ask you about yourself, Dr. Brzezinski.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Where are you from?”

“I was born in Poland. In Lodz. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. But a Jew couldn't study medicine in Poland. So my father sent me to Paris in 1928. I spent seven years in medicine at the Sorbonne. Then I came here, in 1935.I went directly to Tiberias.”

“Of all places. Why would a young doctor fresh from Paris go to that tiny village?”

His round face broke into lines of laughter. “I had written my thesis at the Sorbonne on the healing powers of the waters of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. I wrote it only to please my father. He was a Zionist leader back home. So when I came here I thought I would go to Tiberias and start practicing. I was a real yokel. I found there was one doctor there already. He said to me, ‘Young man, get out of here as fast as you can. I don't have enough bread myself. If you stay here, we'll both starve.'”

Raquela's laughter rippled through the restaurant. She was unconcerned that everyone turned to look at her. This man, gracefully dissecting the fish on his plate, was different from anyone she had known before. He had European charm, European manners, like a courtly gentleman in a Russian novel. She compared him to Carmi. Carmi was far more handsome than he. But Carmi was unworldly, immature, self-absorbed. Dr. Brzezinski could laugh at himself. Imagine a famous doctor calling himself a yokel.