Raquela (47 page)

She turned to her son-in-law, sitting beside her. “I'm going to wait up all night.”

“We will wait together, Mother,” he said.

Raquela telephoned Hadassah in Jerusalem to cancel Arik's and her schedules. All night Golda sat, smoking cigarettes, keeping vigil. At intervals Arik and Raquela came to report. No change.

In the morning Raquela took Golda and Zechariah across the street to the staff dining room for breakfast. The desert air was transparent, the sky immaculately blue.

In the hospital courtyard Raquela suggested they sit on a bench in the morning sun. Golda sat on a stone bench, watching a Bedouin family encamped with their children and some goats, but her eyes kept returning to the small yellow stucco building where her daughter lay unconscious, hovering between life and death.

The reports continued. No change.

The second day passed. No change.

Golda's face was pinched with worry. She clung to any shred of hope Raquela could bring from her daughter's room.

The third day. The fourth. Golda hardly moved from the bench, weeping unashamedly.

The fifth day.

Still no change. Neither she nor Zechariah was allowed to see Sarah.

On the seventh day Sarah moved her eyelids, opened her eyes. “Where am I?” she asked.

“You're going to be all right,” Arik said. “You're in the hospital in Beersheba. And you're going to be fine.”

Raquela raced into the courtyard to tell Golda and Zechariah.

Back in Jerusalem, Raquela saw the hospital filling up again with victims of Arab terrorist attacks.

Infiltrators crossed the borders, laid mines on the roads, planted explosives, tossed hand grenades. Schools were a favorite target.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced that he was ready to sit down, face-to-face, anytime, anyplace, to talk peace with the Arabs.

They refused. The Arab states openly prepared for a second round.

Only King Abdullah of Jordan dared to talk peace.

And for this he paid with his life. On July 20, 1951, as he was leaving the silver-domed el-Aksa Mosque in the Old City with his young grandson, Prince Hussein, he was shot down by a relative of his hated rival, the former mufti of Jerusalem.

FEBRUARY 1951

Raquela hurried through Hadassah A to Arik's office. He jumped up as she entered, his eyes wide, searching.

She smiled. “I came straight from the lab. I watched them do the rabbit test.”

“Tell me. Tell me.” He looked at her. “No…you don't have to tell me. I see it in your face.” He held her tightly.

“Two months,” she said wonderingly. “Two months pregnant. Can you believe it?”

“Believe it? I've been dreaming it.” He moved away from her for a moment. “But you—how do you feel?”

“So excited you'd think this was the first baby ever born in the world.”

He led her to a chair. “Now, Raquela, you'll have to start taking care of yourself. We ought to decide right now how long you should work.” He stopped. “Maybe you should think of giving up—”

“Come on, Arik.” She bounded out of the chair. “I've never felt healthier in my life. I'm going to go on delivering babies until I'm too fat to stand in front of the delivery table.”

Through the next months Raquela watched the changes in her body, as aware as if she were seeing it on film: the tiny embryo taking shape inside her, with legs that kicked her gently, a life making its presence known unconcerned whether she was lying in bed or marketing or sitting with Arik in the movies or helping another baby into the world.

“Rest, Raquela,” Arik pleaded. They had just finished dinner. “Go lie down on the sofa.”

Raquela scoffed. “Stop wrapping me in cotton batting, Arik. How many babies have we delivered between us?”

He led her to the divan in the living room, made her stretch out, and covered her with an afghan. “Now you rest. Eighth month, and you still insist on delivering babies and waiting in those queues for rations.”

“We're lucky. I got everything you like; they had frozen carp today, and eggplant.”

Arik beamed. “I'll fix you a banquet.”

She heard him bustling around the kitchen. Her mind was on the calendar she had hung on the kitchen wall. With red crayon she had circled September 29, 1951. Four more weeks.
Our baby
must
be born on the twenty-ninth
.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth, her pains began. For the first time, she was the patient, experiencing what her patients had experienced: pain, anticipation, more pain, relief.

They taxied to Hadassah A. Arik alerted Miriam Oppenheimer, the midwife who was closest to Raquela. Raquela went through the familiar routine, surprised at her own excitement and mounting tension.

The midwife prepped her. The bag of water had burst.

Arik sat at her side as the pains grew closer. Resting on her pillow after a sharp contraction, she turned her head.

“Arik, you look petrified. The greatest gynecologist and obstetrician in the country”—she laughed—“acting like any nervous father.”

He bent down and kissed her tenderly. He mopped the perspiration on her forehead.

Another pain convulsed her body. She breathed into it, telling herself, as she had told countless mothers, “Breathe. Relax. Breathe. Relax.”

An hour passed. Two. Three.

At last she was ready.

Arik helped wheel her into the delivery room and onto the white delivery table.

“Push down,” she heard the midwife commanding.

Every muscle pushed with her.

“Good. Now relax.”

She filled her lungs with air.

She was wide awake. Aware. Aware of Arik, standing at her side. Aware of her baby, pushing its way out of her body into the world.

She heard Arik shout, “It's a boy. Oh, God, Raquela. We have a son.”

TWENTY-FIVE

APRIL 1952

T
he El Al plane lifted off from Lydda airfield.

Raquela, holding seven-month-old Amnon in her arms, looked out the window. Tel Aviv lay below—a patchwork of little cement houses and red roofs sewn together with white roads like surgical tape laid on the April-green earth.

Soon they were over the white beach that curved like a scimitar around Jaffa, and now they were flying over the Mediterranean itself, its waters reaching westward, somewhere on the horizon, to Egypt's still-hostile shores. But the sea, blue-green, looked unbelievably, surrealistically peaceful.

Raquela put her hand in Arik's. He closed the medical journal he was reading and leaned over to kiss her cheek.

They were on sabbatical; they had both taken leave from their jobs so Arik could work in Beth Israel Hospital in New York, with the world-famous gynecologist Dr. Henry Falk.

Arik took Amnon in his lap, rumpled his curly golden hair, and kissed his forehead.
How alike they are
, Raquela thought.
Father and son. Unruffled, composed, easy to live with. Born to give happiness to those they love
.

She looked out as the plane climbed into a featherbed of clouds. She was euphoric. They would have a whole year away from pressure. Time to be together. Time for Arik to enjoy his baby son.

New York was a wonderland. From their apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Raquela explored the city, wheeling Amnon in a large black baby carriage. She stared at the shop windows on Broadway, devouring the dresses; feasted her eyes on pyramids of fresh fruit; entered butcher shops still pinching herself that there was no austerity and she could buy meat; prowled happily through drugstores to fill her lungs with the old familiar odors; scouted for little toys for Amnon in the five-and-ten.

After a few months they bought a secondhand Chevrolet; Raquela took lessons, became a passionate driver, and knew that for the rest of her life she would have a love affair with automobiles. She drove Arik to medical centers in Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago, so he could bring back to Israel America's newest techniques in performing hysterectomies and caesarean sections.

While he worked, she visited museums and art galleries; Amnon was walking now, and he held her hand patiently as she moved through the galleries to find the paintings of the French Impressionists she'd discovered in New York.

Saturdays and Sundays, they picnicked in Central Park. She spread a red checkered cloth on the grass, unwrapped the sandwiches, and, after lunch, lay back while Arik, never without a volume of Sholom Aleichem, read her stories of America.

Amnon was at the pond, watching the children sail their toy boats. Arik was reading his favorite story, of Mottel, the cantor's son. Mottel had left Kasrilovka, sailed the Atlantic, and was about to put both feet on the shores of America. Arik, pretending to be Mottel's friend, Pinney, read:

“‘
How do you do, Columbus!
'
     “‘
Greetings to you, land of the free—golden, happy land!
'”

Raquela smiled, looking up at the majestic Fifth Avenue buildings cutting the summer sky.

Golden, happy land
…

Once again Arik was Pinney, this time cursing the enemies, the anti-Semitic tyrants from whose lands they had escaped:

“‘
Listen, you asses, brutes, drunken sots! Listen, you hooligans, you murderers! We have to thank you for having reached this haven, this refuge, this great and blessed land, the land of the free. If not for you who persecuted us with your evil edicts and your pogroms, to this very day we wouldn't get to know Columbus, and Columbus wouldn't get to know us
.'”

She closed her eyes, no longer listening. She was back at training camp. She saw Miriam, the young corporal from Morocco…the parade ground…the young women who had fled from tyranny and pogroms…from Morocco…Tunis…Egypt…Poland…Russia…Yemen…Iraq…

Listen, you hooligans…thank you for having reached this…great and blessed land…the land of the free…Israel…America…the lands of the free
.

She heard Arik's voice, reading:

“‘
Try not to love such a country!
'”

Back again in Jerusalem in April 1953, Raquela was prevailed upon to teach midwifery in Hadassah.

Each morning, leaving Amnon with her housekeeper, she drove the Chevrolet they had brought back from America and parked it on the street near the hospital. She kissed Arik good-bye, watched him enter Hadassah A, and crossed the Street of the Prophets to the green barracks where she taught student nurses. The moment her classes were over, she raced back to her car, drove home to give Amnon lunch, and rested while he napped. Then she dressed him, took him to visit Mama and Papa, played with him in Independence Park, or went marketing.

Austerity was ending. Agriculture was flourishing; there was fresh food in the markets, and even meat. Industries were opening in the little development towns. Israel Bonds were floated in America and Europe to establish the new industries and to build highways, museums, and high-rise houses for new immigrants. Money from German reparations flowed into the state, to people who had been robbed by the Nazis of everything they owned, and to the survivors of concentration and slave-labor camps.

The German government, under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, was trying, in part, to expiate its guilt for the Holocaust.

West Germany became a friend. France, under President Charles de Gaulle, was friendly.

The United States continued its friendship and patronage of the five-year-old democratic state.

The people yearned for peace.

But terrorists continued to infiltrate, and the Arab states continued their threats of war.

“Listen to this,” Arik said one afternoon, hurrying into the apartment, his newspaper under his arm.

“What is it? You're white as a ghost.”

He handed her the paper. “It's the king of Saudi Arabia this time,” he said. “You read it.”

He bent to pick up Amnon as she wiped her hands on her apron, took the paper to the sofa and read: “‘Israel, to the Arab world, is like a cancer to the human body. The only remedy is to uproot it, just like a cancer. Why don't we sacrifice ten million of our number to live in pride and self-respect?'”

She was stunned. “
Ten million!
Willing to sacrifice ten million human beings to defeat us!”

“They won't defeat us,” Arik said. “But they're preparing for it. Like those armies in Megiddo.”

He walked around the living room with Amnon in his arms. He spoke softly. “If only there will be peace by the time Amnon grows up.”

A few months later, Raquela was pregnant again.

Arik was overjoyed; his dream of a house full of babies was being realized.

But, unlike her easy first pregnancy, this time she contracted
herpes zoster
: shingles, a stripe of blisters ran along the right side of her abdomen where the nerve endings had become inflamed. She stopped teaching; the rashes itched and burned and ached; she was tormented mercilessly.

But worse than the pain was her fear. Raquela knew the
herpes zoster
virus might penetrate the placenta and infect the fetus. It could damage the unborn baby's brain. Its heart. Its kidneys or its liver.

Would her baby be normal?

Raquela blocked the possibilities out of her mind. She forced herself to keep house and take care of Amnon; she tried to hide some of her misery from Arik. But each day, she saw the lines around his mouth grow deeper, his eyes sunken with worry. They tried to spare each other, and both failed dismally.

Somehow the interminable months were coming to an end. The baby was due in late January 1955.

January was a bleak month, anyway. It was in January 1952 that her oldest brother, Jacob, just thirty-three, had come home from his mission with the Israel Army in Paris to die of Hodgkin's disease.

On this third anniversary of his death, Raquela and Arik drove Mama and Papa to Jacob's grave. Papa's face was mournful as he intoned the prayer for the dead. “A son should say Kaddish for his father,” he said sadly, “not a father for his son.”