Raquela (26 page)

“If you're ready, Miss Levy,” Josh Leibner said, “I'll take you to the hospital in Nicosia.”

“Can I see a little of the camp before we go?”

“Of course.”

They entered the gates and walked through the streets of sand. Under the scorching sun women in shorts stood in front of their tents, washing laundry in little pans. Men and women were cooking over open stoves, sweat pouring into their makeshift pots.

She noticed garbage piling up and wooden outhouses. She told herself, I'm going to write this to Arik—you have to smell Cyprus to believe it.

She looked down the streets of tents and iron huts; Caraolas seemed to stretch to the horizon. Athlit, in comparison, seemed very small.

Near the barbed-wire boundary, she saw half-naked children holding on to the wire, looking longingly at the Mediterranean, which creamed their shore. She watched them intently.
Even the cool sea is denied them
, she thought bitterly.

Suddenly there was a commotion. A squat British water truck materialized out of the dust. Several boys carrying tin cups flew down the camp streets shouting “Water! Water!” A man emerged from a tent with a five-gallon tin. A woman followed him with a small evaporated-milk can.

“There's no water in the camps,” Josh explained. “The British have to bring it in. It comes to about a cupful for each person per day. That's for everything—drinking, cooking, washing.”

People pushed and shoved to get to the spigots. A youth shinnied up onto the tank and pounded it madly, as if he expected a spring to spurt forth under his hand. The tank emptied quickly and the supplicants moved carefully away with their treasure.

Josh's face was tormented. “No water is only part of the degradation. No privacy is worse. A girl came to me yesterday and asked if she could use our kitchen shack in the camp. ‘I'm getting married this afternoon,' she said, ‘and I'd like to use it for our honeymoon. It's the only place in the camp where we can be alone.'”

They walked back toward the JDC hut. “That debate in the UN,” Raquela said tentatively. “They should be voting soon on partitioning Palestine. Maybe there won't be any more IJIs.”

“I wish I could share your optimism,” Josh said.

He picked up her suitcase at the hut. A taxi with a Cypriot driver waited nearby. “He's a friend,” Josh told her as they climbed into the cab and drove off. “A lot of the Cypriots are our friends. They want the British off their necks as much as we do.”

“We?” she asked. “I thought you were American.” She looked at Josh more closely. He seemed young—in his late twenties, perhaps; he had a poetic face with a cleft chin, full, sensuous lips, and wavy brown hair. But it was his eyes that held her—deep, mournful eyes that for the moment lost their sadness and seemed to twinkle.

“I'm a City College boy from Brooklyn,” he said. “My wife's a New Yorker, too. But now we're
kibbutzniks
, with a couple of Sabra kids. We live in Ein Hashofet.”

Raquela knew the kibbutz, in the hills overlooking the Jezreel Valley. Young American pioneers had founded it and named it Ein Hashofet—“Spring of the Judge”—for their hero and benefactor, Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We were neighbors for a while,” she said. “I did my national service at Tel Adashim.”

He seemed to regard her with new respect. “Here's our telephone number.” He gave her a slip of paper. “Phone me any time of the day or night. At the office or at home.”

The British Military Hospital lay on a hill on the outskirts of Nicosia. A typical army hospital, it was a vast complex of warlike Nissen huts made of corrugated, galvanized iron. The huts huddled together ominously.

Each one looked as if a huge circle of iron had been chopped horizontally in half and deposited on the sand. The entrances were bizarre, as if someone had taken a knife and slashed a sheet of iron to create a door, and above the door, a small triangle of windows. A distance from the huts but running parallel to them were two rows of impenetrable poles and barbed wire. Raquela recognized the architecture. It was straight out of Auschwitz.

Two soldiers looked at their passes and waved them in.

Josh led Raquela to a Nissen hut, introduced her to Matron White, and took leave.

Big bosomed and large bottomed, Matron White studied Raquela's name on the JDC-personnel-appointment form Josh had left with her.

“Nurse Leeveye.” She spoke in a braying voice. “These are our tours of duty. We work on twelve-hour shifts. One month on day shift. Following month on night shift.”

Raquela was silent. The matron seemed to be looking through her.

“Since this is the twenty-second of November, Miss Leeveye, and almost the end of the month, I will permit you to start on the day shift. Beginning December one, you will work the night shift. You work the entire month, no days off until the end of the month. Then you get four and one-half days.”

I'll need them, Raquela thought. I'll probably do nothing but catch up on sleep.

The matron was still braying. “You work for the JDC, Miss Leeveye; you're on their payroll. But at the hospital, you're under British military command. You take orders from me.”

She sounds like a one-woman outpost of the British Empire
, Raquela thought.

“Finally, Nurse Leeveye, when I enter the dining room, you will stand up. No one touches a knife or fork before I do.”

Then the matron called out, “Nurse Welles, show Nurse Leeveye to the nurses' quarters.”

A kindly gray-haired English nurse led her to a long arched metal hut. Inside, it was partitioned into small rooms, each with two army cots, a cupboard, a small table, and two chairs.

Nurse Welles spoke softly. “Don't let Old Battleship scare you. She's hard on all of us, but you learn to live with it.”

Old Battleship
, Raquela thought,
looks as if she'd like to ram me through like some of those broken “illegal” ships lying in the Haifa harbor. She'll discover I don't break easily
.

Nurse Welles was talking. “How long will you need to get into your uniform? Matron White wants you to begin working the minute you're ready.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“I'll be back.”

Raquela changed swiftly, pinned her silver Hadassah pin on her uniform, and fixed her cap in her hair.

She waited for Nurse Welles outside the iron barracks. The sun and heat had evaporated. Dark clouds hid the sky; the winter rain fell again, turning the dirt paths into mud.

Nurse Welles ran through the rain. “I'll take you directly to the Jewish wing,” she said.

Again the dismal pattern Raquela knew all too well: the barbed-wire fence surrounding the prison wing, soldiers outside the barbed-wire gate, and, inside the enclosure, rows of iron huts, black and desolate.

Plodding through muddy, nameless streets, Nurse Welles began pointing out the huts in the compound.
Are you ready for another descent into hell?
Raquela heard Arik's voice.

“This hut's for surgery,” Nurse Welles was saying. “This one's for medicine, this for pediatrics, this for isolation, and now”—she stopped in front of a strange array of barracks different from all the others—“here's Maternity.”

“It looks like a prehistoric bird or monster.” Raquela stared. Composed of three barracks, its sides were two elongated black wings and its front was a short round protrusion painted white. A door in the protrusion was the opening, with three windows and a chimney stack.

They entered the door. A round, friendly-looking coal stove dominated the arched hall; this was the kitchen. They walked down the right wing; this barracks held the nurses' station, the admitting room, the labor room, and two small delivery rooms. Raquela recoiled at the delivery rooms; they were filthy.

They walked back to the protrusion, then down the left wing, a long barracks with twenty-four cell-like arches and a recessed window between each arch. Below each window a woman lay on an army cot, covered with a khaki blanket. The women looked like the patients in the black and white woodcuts of cluttered, unclean medieval hospitals she'd seen in her textbooks.

A few of the women sat up in bed as the two nurses entered. A woman near Raquela burst into tears. “We have a Jewish nurse,” she shouted. “Look, everybody. Look at her cap. The star of David.”

Now all the women pushed themselves up to look; some climbed out of their cots to come closer.

“Where are you from?” one of them asked Raquela.

“Jerusalem.” She said it simply, slowly.

“Jerusalem!
Yerushalayim!
” The women's voices picked up the word and repeated it up and down the barracks until the prehistoric-looking monster seemed to change, to turn modern, light, hopeful, as if the hut itself were singing the word
Ye-roo-sha-lie-im
.

Nurse Welles was startled. “What are they so excited about? They seem to be saying one word. What is it?”

“Jerusalem.”

The kindly English nurse shook her head. “I never imagined people could get so passionate about a city.”

“It's more than a city,” Raquela started to say, and then stopped. How could she explain that these women had risked everything to reach Jerusalem?

In the hospital administration building, Raquela telephoned Josh Leibner.

“We've got to clean up the filth. It's inhuman to treat women in labor like so much—” her voice faltered. “It's like an insane asylum.”

“What do you need?”

“Some good, strong girls.”

“Okay. What else?”

“More sheets.”

“I'll try my best to get you some, but there are only a few here. The people in the camps sleep on the tent floors. I
can
get you more army blankets.”

“They stink. We'll wash the blankets we have. I can still smell the soldiers who slept under them.”

Within the hour Leibner headed a contingent of six young refugee women. One of the soldiers summoned Raquela to the entrance gate. She explained that the young women were her aides.

“How do I know they're not smuggling guns?”

Raquela looked at their ragged clothing. “I'll be responsible.”

He waved them in. Each of them had a blue number tattooed on her left forearm—all death-camp graduates.

Raquela organized her small battalion with quiet precision. They scrounged for basins, soap, a mop, rags, and first-aid supplies. The hospital had ample water. Then they set to work. One mopped the floor; another dusted the iron walls; a third scrubbed the windows; a fourth cleaned the beds.

Raquela studied her aides; then she selected two to help her sponge-bathe the patients. Gerda was a young Polish woman with dark piercing eyes and black ringlets framing her heart-shaped face. She was short, compact; she looked like a fighter. Lili, a Hungarian, was tall and fragile and so gaunt her skin seemed wrapped around her face. But her blond hair and green-blue eyes bore witness to the beauty she must once have been, and, Raquela thought, when all this is over, might become again.

Gerda and Lili learned fast. Gently they bathed the patients whose bodies were blotched with rashes. “They're the signs of deprivation,” Raquela explained to her two aides. “It's the lack of hygiene, proper food, decent medical care.”

She went to the hospital pharmacy and found salves to alleviate their discomfort.

The maternity ward was cleaned just in time. A woman entered. Raquela greeted her, smiling. “You're going to have your baby under the best conditions we can create for you.”

The woman spoke wearily. “I've been through so much already. I just want to give birth.”

Raquela helped her secure her feet in the metal foot grips.

“Just try to relax.” She spoke gently.

“Relax! I'll relax when I get home.”

“It'll be soon. And you'll bring a new citizen with you.”

The delivery was easy and fast. Gerda wept as she saw the baby's head emerging.

“It's a boy,” Raquela announced. She handed the baby to Lili to wash while she massaged the mother's uterus, through the abdomen, coaxed the placenta down, and examined it to make sure no pieces had broken off.

“
Mazal tov!
” she called out jubilantly.

“Is he normal?” The mother asked the first question all her mothers asked.

“Normal? The most beautiful boy in the world.”

She placed the baby in the mother's arms.

Later, scrubbed and clean, with the mother and baby sleeping, Raquela turned to Lili and Gerda. “I couldn't have chosen better assistants.”

“Are you as excited as we are?” Lili asked.

“If you stop being excited, you'd better stop being a midwife. Let's have tea and celebrate.”

They sat in the kitchen, around the coal stove, the experience of the birth drawing them together.

“I've never seen how a baby is born,” Gerda said. “I gave birth to my son in a cave.”

Raquela put down her teacup and glanced at Lili. They nodded and waited for Gerda to talk, or to remember in silence.

She talked. Her eyes stared unseeingly out of the hut's window, as if she were looking back to another landscape, another time.

“It was winter. The Carpathian Mountains were covered with snow. My husband stood guard outside the cave. He had to watch not only for the Germans but also for the Ukrainians. They either raped the women and then killed to steal whatever we had or they turned us over to the Germans for ransom.”

Raquela lowered her eyes from Gerda's face. To deliver your baby in a cave. The terror outside. All alone. No one to help. They never taught you that in the school for midwives.

“I was in labor—I don't know for how many hours. I didn't dare scream. Any sound would have given away our hiding place. I was weak from lack of food. All we ate were grass and berries. But we had water; we made it from snow. My son was born. I bit the cord and tied it with a piece of cloth I tore from my skirt.”