Leah's Journey (2 page)

The child’s scream moments before—it must have been Zvi Goldenberg’s little girl, a toddler who often sat in fields of wild flowers singing softly to herself. The child might be trapped in the burning house, she thought, and she flung open the door, angry with herself because she had delayed so long and even more angry because she knew her delay was rooted in her fear.

Fear was familiar to her. It clung to all Jewish children like a stubborn shadow woven of tales of terror and pinned to them by muted memories of death and destruction. She struggled against it as she stepped outside and felt the grass crunch beneath her bare feet and the gentle stroke of a soft breeze against her unbuttoned back. The air was thick with smoke and her eyes teared against the acrid ashen odor. A crow circled above her and settled itself on a branch of the Lombardy tree, cawing a harsh chant of warning to its mate in a distant wheat field.

“Yaakov!” she shouted in wild hope. She had seen a figure weaving toward her through the thick dark air and for a moment she had caught sight of a familiar mass of bright red hair.

Of course, Yaakov had heard about the fire, or perhaps had even seen it from the outskirts of the village, and hurried back for her. She ran toward the approaching figure, her arms outstretched. She reeled backward in surprise, almost falling, when she was seized in a rough grasp and a voice she recognized but could not place sneered, “So it’s young Adler’s new bride. Why are you barefoot, bride girl, when all Jewish women have shoes?”

His fingers kneaded the soft flesh of her arms and she wrenched away from his clutch, summoning up strength she had not known she possessed, causing her to fall backward against the Lombardy tree. The marks of the man’s fingers against her skin were like searing welts and she pressed herself against the fortress of bark, wondering whether it would be best to dash for the house and bolt the door or try to run across the fields toward the town. Her thoughts, tumbling over each other in bursts of fear and indecision, were interrupted by a deafening crash and showers of bright orange sparks soaring skyward like rockets of fiery flowers.

“Aha, the center beam has gone. The house is down,” the man said calmly as though he were a contractor analyzing some structural mystery. There was no satisfaction in his voice, only an insouciant calm. He moved toward her, his step and eyes holding her prisoner, impaling her against that tree under whose branches she and her young husband had so often laughed and kissed.

“But the child,” she cried, “what of the child?” How dark the small girl’s eyes had been, as she played among the blue flowers that bowed and waved in the summer wind.

“Oh, the kids got out the back door and ran for the town. The miller and his wife too. But there’ll be trouble there too for them. There’s trouble all over Odessa today.”

“Why today?” she asked, her voice controlled, disguised with a calm she did not feel. She knew she could not outrun him across fields he had known since childhood and she knew too that to escape to the house—if it could be done at all—was no escape at all but simply a reprieve until he broke the door down or tossed a flaming torch against the fragile wooden structure. Her only hope lay in conversation, in leading him through the wasteland of irrational hatred to the calm plateau of reason. They can all be reached, Yaakov had said often. They only need to understand. Leah girded herself now with her husband’s faith and struggled to reach with words the man who made no move toward her but stood sniffing the smoke-filled air. He laughed harshly before answering her and his voice was rough with fury.

“It’s August, bride girl. The crops are burning in the fields and what the sun doesn’t eat Grigoriev’s men steal. Hungry men cannot sleep. Their wives walk barefoot and their children’s mouths are dry. Others take what belongs to us. Others.”

“But whose fault is that? What good will setting fires and killing people do for your wives and children? The thing to do is to work. We must build irrigation ditches, learn new ways of planting, share the harvests and timberlands.” All the theories she had heard expounded at countless meetings shot out at him in verbal bullets which he fended easily with another brutal burst of laughter.

“We cannot wait for your ditches and your collectives. We need food and clothing now. We will take what we are not given. We need other things too, bride girl. Other things that we do not put in cupboards or larders.”

He laughed fiercely now and started toward her, roaring with amusement as she skirted about the tree, using its wide trunk as a shield so that it seemed they were engaged in a child’s game of tag, trapped in a leafy enclosure of shade from which they could not move for fear of losing.

The bark scraped her legs and she ran even faster, waiting to dash from the tree and take her chances across the field but, bored with the game, he seized her skirt and held her fast, pinning her arms behind her back and trapping her legs within his own.

“What do you want, Petrovich?” she shouted, for she had recognized him at last, knowing him through his wild burst of laughter as a foreman of the timber lock which her father-in-law managed. He had laughed that way with Yaakov’s father one evening as he drank a glass of schnaps offered to celebrate Yaakov’s marriage. He was a tall man, redheaded like Yaakov, his arms and chest billowing with muscles raised through years of battling the woodlands with great strokes of the steel ax that hung from his belt. She caught sight of her own face in the shining metal, and the face that had pleased her in the attic mirror was now a mask of fear so that she closed her eyes, terrified at her own image.

“You know what I want, bride girl. Of course you know what I want.”

He flung her to the ground, still holding her arms and legs immobile and laughing as she spat into his face and bit the heavy features he thrust against her mouth.

“Yaakov!” she screamed wildly, “Papa! Oh God!”

He ripped her skirt in one sharp sure movement and thrust himself against her, forcing himself into the resistant narrowness of her body, thrusting upward against her while she writhed and screamed, fighting his weight and force. The last thing she remembered before sinking into a darkness of mind and numbness of feeling was biting fiercely at the hand he held over her mouth. When she drifted from that darkness into a shadowy wakefulness, a sliver of pink flesh clung to her teeth and she spat it out and covered it with her own vomit. The fire had died and the mound of charred wood and ashes rose from the earth like a gentle grave.

*

A month later Leah sat in her brother Moshe’s flat, slowly pulling a needle and thread through a gaping rip in a blue cambric shirt and absently listening to the rise and fall of the voices around her. She had mended that shirt almost a dozen times but each time something about her work had displeased her—the stitches were too small or uneven, the mended fabric bulged where it should have remained flat, the thread was of the wrong shade. The shirt had belonged to her husband Yaakov and had been peeled from his body by Moshe who had thought his brother-in-law might still be alive when he was found on an Odessa street, his head shattered and a farmer’s gleaning tool stuck in his chest. Moshe had ripped the shirt to probe for life in the heart that had stopped beating hours before, and Leah worked now to repair it as though the fabric made whole would mysteriously restore her husband to her.

She rethreaded the needle, but her eyes had grown tired in the dim light of the paraffin lamp and she put her work aside and looked about the room as though startled to find herself there, surprised that she was in fact alive and that the words of those about her had any meaning.

Moshe sat on the low cot which Henia had covered with a bright woven cloth. Next to him David Goldfeder, who had also come to Odessa from Partseva, slowly sorted a pile of papers, arranging them on a wooden plank that served as desk and table. Moshe and Henia had lived in the Odessa apartment for five years but they had never furnished their rooms, thinking their stay temporary. Their future lay to the south, in the ancient land of Palestine which they referred to only as Zion. They did not want to encumber themselves with possessions which they would not be able to take to the small settlement in the Huleh valley they hoped to make their home. They knew that there they would live in a tent mounted on planks against the encroaching dampness of the swamp and that all their energies would be needed to struggle with that swamp. Only that day Moshe had had a letter from a comrade in Palestine telling him of the death of yet another pioneer who had succumbed to malaria carried by the mosquitoes that infested the stagnant waters.

“It’s a terrible thing about Rackman,” Moshe said now. “He was so full of hope.”

“What else do we have to be full of?” David Goldfeder asked and Leah saw that his hands trembled slightly so that the papers he held fluttered like forlorn white flags.

David Goldfeder’s brother Aaron had been killed in the pogrom and also his fiancée, tiny Chana Rivka, who had written long manifestos on social justice in metered rhyme and traveled the countryside lecturing peasant women on concepts of hygiene and nutrition. She had died trying to save two small girls who were being taunted by a group of marauders who tossed the youngsters up into the air, passing the terrified children from one to the other as though they were balls, laughing as a child dropped and a small bone cracked. In the end they had killed Chana Rivka and the body of one of the children had been crushed beneath the wheels of a passing lorry. The surviving child, a thin dark-haired girl, hobbled about the streets of the town, using a crutch constructed of a red-painted table leg. The child did not speak but when an adult approached she would scream wildly and hover in the shadow of a doorway. When Leah, during one of her rare excursions from Moshe’s house, had passed the small girl the child had followed after her, hopping in the protection of Leah’s shadow, as a lame animal will often follow another maimed creature as though shared misery assured protection.

“We must be full of plans,” Henia said, answering David Goldfeder’s question. “Hope is a luxury. We must decide what to do. One thing is certain. We cannot stay here. Russia will be a graveyard for Jews.”

“Why only Russia?” Moshe interjected. “All of Europe will be a graveyard for Jews. They will need only a few years to recover from the Great War and then they will turn around and begin. Already in Germany they are saying that it was the Jews who made the Kaiser lose the war. No, Palestine, Zion, is the only answer, the only place for plans, the only place for hope.”

“And when do you leave?” David asked. “I hear that the Rothschild family has offered money to help at least one thousand more immigrants.”

“He doesn’t want the Russian Jews coming into France and Germany,” Moshe said, laughing, but his gaze was heavy. He and Henia looked at each other and then each darted a nervous glance across the room where Leah had resumed her sewing.

In the dimly lit room she seemed more like an old woman than the beautiful teen-aged girl who only a month before had danced naked before an attic window and watched leafy shadows move across her bare breasts. She sat erect, her long dark hair knotted into a severe bun, her large dark eyes staring from a face whose pale skin was stretched too tightly across the fine bones. She wore the same black dress she had worn to her husband’s funeral and her fingers moved now and again to touch the symbolic tear the rabbi had made in her mourning garment at the burial. She had worn that dress to all the other funerals held during that week when the streets of the Jewish quarter of Odessa rang with the moans of the dying and the wild grief of the mourners.

Leah had watched, dry-eyed, at Yaakov’s funeral, as the pine box slid into the shallow grave. The coffin had rattled lightly as the stones and earth within it slid about. Yaakov had been killed on a cobbled street, his head bludgeoned so that the cranium had crumbled and the spongy white mass of brains had littered the bloody stones. The members of the burial society had carefully scraped up that mass of decaying detritus that had been the mind and thoughts of the young Socialist and placed it in the coffin. They had even dislodged the cobblestones stained with his blood and the earth around that had been drenched with it. According to Jewish law it was essential that the corpse be laid to rest with every particle of the body that could be salvaged, and so the stones and earth had been placed in the coffin on which the widowed bride dropped a handful of graying earth that crumbled beneath her trembling fingers.

Leah had observed the seven days of mourning at her brother’s home, refusing to return to her in-laws’ house where they mourned Yaakov using the same mourning benches upon which they had sat shiva for his brother, killed only two years before in the Czar’s army.

The Czar was gone now but still Jews sat in mourning for their young men, Leah’s father-in-law observed as Yaakov’s Socialist friends came to comfort him.

“You should sit shiva with Yaakov’s family,” Leah’s father had urged, but the girl had cried out in wild protest and they were afraid to insist.

Moshe and Henia did not know what had happened to Leah during that first morning when the pogrom began. She had come running into their apartment, her legs scratched and scarred by her journey across the fields, her hair tangled and loose, and a small network of scratches etched across her cheek. She wore a dark winter dress and brambles and nettles clung to the sweat-stained wool.

“Leah, what happened? Are you hurt?” Henia had cried but Leah had not answered. She had instead remained at the window, hour after hour, moving her lips soundlessly, searching the street for a sign of Yaakov.

He was dead even as she stood at the window, but she did not relax her vigil until Moshe came home, carrying the blue cambric shirt, his face collapsed with grief and loss. She held the shirt against her cheek and when she fell asleep at last, she cradled it in her arms and the pale blue turned dark with the tears that would not stop falling even as she slept.

“I don’t know when we will go to Palestine, David,” Moshe said. “But it must be soon. Henia does not want to spend another winter in Odessa.”