IN CONSTANTINOPLE, Menahem soon managed. A busy black-market traffic to Odessa was being carried on by small vessels, and in one of these, chartered by a Jewish lawyer from Moscow, who had escaped to Odessa and was trafficking in dried figs, bolts of cloth, olives, whatever he could find, they sailed. Menahem passed from the ship as a sailor. A woman—who noticed a woman, even such a large one? Leah walked ashore in the company of the Moscow lawyer who had just completed his arrangements with the customs inspector. What did it matter how much you paid, he laughed—in Odessa there were no price limits. Anything you could bring in you could sell for any price you named. Indeed he had noticed that Menahem was a clever man, and if perchance he wanted to go into business—fortunes could be made on a single trip. Fortunes.
There they were, before the great broad stairs that led from the harbor up to the city. Down these stairs, fourteen years ago, she had hurried with Reuven, in their departure for Eretz! Menahem too was filled with memories of the harbor, from his sailor days.
He walked swiftly, he knew just where he was going. Before the courtyard entrance of a large gray building, neither impoverished nor affluent looking, a pair of young men lounged, distinctly chevreh, on watch! It couldn’t be—but it was true. In the old headquarters of the Jewish Self-Defense League—they were still here in the same back-rooms! Young Jews. Defenders. Zionists.
The emissaries from Eretz were surrounded, hugged, deluged with talk, questions, inquiries, names. Was it true—a Jewish nation? And could they really get in? How could they go? What were the conditions in the land?
Here, things were in a turmoil. The French had come a few months before, but it was believed they would leave. Perhaps soon. No, they interfered little, and at least they kept off the roving bands of murderous Ukrainians. The Ukrainian nationalists were everywhere, killing Jews, seizing entire areas from the Bolsheviki, from each other. The Whites too were said to be on the march from their stronghold in the Caucasus. But here in Odessa, the Jewish Defense was holding fast. In this place, they had a garrison, a kitchen; many slept here. In the city, turmoil. Jews had fled here from Moscow, from Petrograd—starvation in the cities. Money had no value. Speculation, madness. Some lived like kings. The old Zionist leaders were still here, they would meet them. Trumpeldor? Not here in Odessa. It was rumored that he had come with a kvutsa as far as the Crimea and was on the way to Eretz.
Even before they had half-adjusted themselves and begun to make lists of contacts in various towns, the event came—overnight the French evacuated. Boarded their ships and sailed away. The next day the Red Army was in the city. It was better, it was worse. The Jewish camp remained unmolested. A red flag went up. Black marketeers were being arrested, shot. Many of the speculators were Jews, but who could defend them? The best was to sit quietly until there was a semblance of order.
Leah could not sit quietly, now that the way was open. What of their mission? They must go to the centers of Jewish life, they must find what remained of the movement.
Menahem could not leave; he was already involved in complex, secret negotiations to charter a ship. In the end he agreed that Leah should go. A lad named Meier, who knew his way about, was going to Kiev, just now freed from the Ukrainian separatists.
To wait in the station for a train was hopeless, Meier said. Among the thousands besieging the station, it would take a week to pass through. However, he knew the place where the engine stopped for water.
Even there, the ground was covered with those who waited. Peasants with bundles and wicker crates, townsfolk with suit- cases. Why did people move about, where were they going, did they all have a purpose as she had? A day and a night on the ground, but at last they were successful. As the train approached, they pushed themselves so close to the tracks that they might well have been pushed under the wheels. Meier would wiggle his way between elbows and legs, and into the crack he made, Leah would press with all her bulk. Now the lad scrambled to the roof of a boxcar and she climbed up on his heels. To make room, Leah took a peasant woman’s huge basket onto her lap.
Before Kiev was Cherezinka.
And yet, in the early morning, as the train bumped on uneven rails through the region of her childhood and from the cartop she saw the endless vista of the fields of wheat swaying in a broad slow movement as though the great skirt of heaven had brushed over the land, it was hard to keep thinking of all the dreadful things that had happened and were still happening here in the Ukraine, and instead Leah’s heart rose in anticipation of her childhood home.
On the roads she could see the peasants driving their long dray-wagons, the same sort as were used in Eretz after all, and in the fields she could see the squat women in their many broad skirts and cover-aprons, with their kerchiefs on their heads, bent over as before, as always, and the squat moujiks trudging in their boots. Then how could it really all be changed?
At last the train made the halt at Cherezinka, and the station hut looked the same, unpainted, mean and small, but even more dilapidated, the windows half-boarded up or stuffed with rags where panes were missing. But once she had scrambled down to the earth and turned her head to look this way and that, Leah saw that war had passed through—many times, as she had already heard. Petlura and his pogromists, and the Reds, and again Ukrainian bands, and now it was once more the Reds; they had seized everything, they arrested, they shot, but at least they put an end to pogroms.
A militiaman examined the travel pass that the lads in Odessa had arranged for her. He screwed up his eyes for a moment, then shrugged and waved her by. On her first steps along the familiar central street, Leah half-expected at once to recognize people she had known, but not a face seemed familiar. Red flags hung from various buildings; she recognized the apothecary’s shop, but the Jewish name on the sign was gone. Here and there lines of women stood, with market bags, and that air of long patience—they didn’t even seem to be gossiping. A few faces she almost knew—but she wasn’t sure. Now she turned into a Jewish lane, her heartbeat quickening. Surely here she would see old school friends, neighbors—and she’d hurry to the big house of her uncle, where she would find everyone.
First, here was the courtyard where she and the family had lived. This house too had been owned by Uncle Kalman the Rich; considered an excellent building, it had four stairways spaced around the courtyard, and dwellings for some thirty families, all told. As Leah passed through the wagon gate, she felt relieved—the yard was the same. There in the center stood the low-branched apple tree over whose fruits everyone used to quarrel, and two small boys sat on a branch swinging their heels over the heads of four little girls who were playing, just below. Such pretty children! Leah could have swept them up in her arms to carry them straight back to Eretz!
“Who are you?” one boy called out in Russian, not Yiddish, and already a young woman was running from a washtub—still in the same place by the pump—calling incredulously, “Leah!”
It was Marusha, the daughter of a neighbor from her own stairway. Two of the little girls were hers, and a life-story tumbled forth, even as Marusha spirited Leah into her flat “before everyone seized her.” She lived with her mother and father, the glazier—no, he no longer had the shop opening into the yard, but at least he had been accepted into the glaziers’ artel; Marusha’s husband had been killed in the war fighting for the Czar, she said with a bitterness that seemed to embrace both the Czar and her dead spouse.
“You remember Pinya the Philosopher, as everyone called him —he was always with your brother Reuven, he too was a young Zionist—if he had only gone with Reuven he would be alive today—I married Pinya. How is Reuven—is he married, and you, Leah?”
But swiftly engulfing Leah’s answer, Marusha’s words tumbled on, not even giving Leah a chance to ask about her own cousins, her Uncle Kalman; the Germans had been here, yet somehow everyone here in the house had got through the time of the Germans; then the revolution—but then came Petlura, savages, the foulest of scum—the whole yard was a gehenna, blood, dead Jews.
“They raped me, too, they found me and dragged me out and raped me here on the stairs—” Marusha sucked in her lip just like when they were little girls and did something naughty. “I was lucky, only one of them, and then he took me for his—I begged him, if it must happen, then not on the stairs. But we never speak of those things and now things are better.”
Yes, she now had a good friend, a comrade, a Red Army man, and he was very fond of her children, and they were very fond of him, though—and this time with an intimate whisper, a secret between them as in the old days, her mother must not know, “Leah, he’s a goy!”
They had reached Marusha’s door. From her mother, in a long singsong interspersed with sighs, Leah heard that very few Jews were left in the building, the Russians had sent them all away during the war and few had managed to come back; as to Leah’s uncle, he was no longer the landlord, the building was appropriated, and she didn’t know what had become of him—though she said it with an intake of breath that left Leah uncertain what she meant. This was no longer a Jewish courtyard. “Others” had taken over the flats.
Then the mother gazed on Leah with watery, compassionate eyes and whispered, “They killed him.”
Her huge powerful uncle, the house-owner, the mill-owner, the loud Kalman before whom the entire family trembled? Who had killed him? the Germans? the Petlurists? No, no, even with those bandits he had managed, he contributed gold. “But when the Red Army men came, they shot him.” The woman said it without comment in her voice; so it was, and Marusha again uttered her little giggle.
After a moment Leah asked—her cousins?
Oh no, not them. Nor her aunt.
—Where were they, then? Again, Marusha’s mother sucked in her breath.
—And her school-day friends? Leah recalled several names from their youth group, the Tzirai Zion Club, had Marusha heard from any of them? In those days Marusha had come now and again to the meetings, it was there that girls met boys.
Oh, she had long ago forgotten those things, Marusha said. Now there was the revolution!
But perhaps some of their old friends were to be found? Perhaps some of them still dreamed of coming to Eretz Yisroel? “Now all can come! The doors are open! We have a Declaration—it will be a Jewish land!”
The mother seized Leah’s arm. “Truly? Is it all true?” It had been whispered, but no one believed it. And now she wanted Leah to tell her how it was with them there, and at each detail, of the farm, of their cattle, of the cooperativa and Reuven’s Garden of Eden, she clucked her tongue and sighed, “And Eretz Yisroel will really become a Jewish land?”
Suddenly Marusha rattled out, “The British imperialists have seized Palestina, and Jews are helping them to protect their Suez Canal and their colonial empire!” Then again she giggled.
It was necessary at once to register her presence in Cherezinka, and as Leah inquired for the commandatura, she was given a familiar address. But—it was her uncle’s mansion!
Naturally enough, since they had liquidated the capitalist counterrevolutionary, they had taken over his big house. And there in the grand entrance hall Leah found, sitting behind the broad mahogany table with carved legs that she remembered from her uncle’s library, a comrade secretary to whom she addressed herself. On the walls there still hung several huge gilt-framed paintings of which her uncle had been proud, a portrait of himself in a frock coat, and opposite it a painting of the prophet Elijah with a tangled gray beard, wearing an animal skin. There was also a vast painting of Moses on a thunderous mountaintop, with a streak of lightning illuminating the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments that he held aloft over his head. Strange that they hadn’t taken down these pictures. Indeed the house looked undisturbed, even cared for with respect, yes, a possession now of the people. And this gave her a feeling of approval, even of kinship to the revolutionists, though surely it might not have been really necessary to shoot her big, loud uncle. It was Kalman Koslovsky, people said, her mother’s brother, that she resembled in her great size. But perhaps Uncle Kalman had done something foolish. A provocation.
The comrade secretary, studying her ancient Russian document, suddenly arose and disappeared down the broad dim hall. Would there be difficulties now? Leah scarcely had time to speculate before she saw the comrade returning, followed by an officer who stepped quickly around the table and came to her. But it was her cousin Tolya! Fine-looking, erect, with steady half-narrowed eyes as analytical as ever, and on his face, even while he was smiling there remained his characteristic look betokening the seriousness of life.
“Leah! What brings you here!”
He took her at once into the library, which was his office. The Hebrew volumes had disappeared from the glass-doored cases, which now held official-looking publications and dossiers. Extending his pack of cigarettes, then lighting one for himself, Tolya settled back and gazed at her, his examination speedily measuring many things—his eyes first showed an objective approval of a strong-looking female, then they were the eyes of a thinker cataloging the forces of history, and then, as if the analytical part was concluded, they were even the remembering eyes of a cousin with whom she had grown up.
“First,” Tolya declared, “since you undoubtedly will hear of it if you have not already heard, I must tell you that my father was liquidated as a class enemy.”
“I’ve already heard.”
“At the time, I was not here. I was fighting on the northern front against Kolchak. However,” he added, as a man who makes no exceptions in the face of truth, “my poor father unfortunately remained to the end a slave of the belief among his type of Jew that you could buy your way out even of historical necessity.”
She didn’t reply, and as this disposed of the question, Tolya now gave Leah news of the rest of the family: his mother was well and was living in this house as always—Leah would see her presently; a few rooms had been reserved for their use, for he and his wife and children also were housed here. Yes, he had two boys!
Though curious, Leah did not feel she should ask if his wife was Jewish; however, Tolya let this fact drop out at once, with an ironically understanding smile, as though to say it was merely a happenstance, but that he was in any case quite tolerant of such sentimental remnants of long inculcated but fortunately disappearing tribal atavisms.
“Well, Leah, you didn’t really make your way back to us on such a difficult journey only to find out what has happened to the family and to your old school friends,” Tolya said with his smile.
No, naturally, she said, she also hoped to find out what had happened to her friends in the movement. That was to say, her movement.
Oh, not much was heard of it nowadays, young people were so busy with other things, there was so much that was urgent to do, the revolution had so many enemies. But Zionism was by no means illegal, he said reassuringly; indeed, he had heard that in the Vilna region there was a certain amount of activity.
—Had he by any chance heard of the whereabouts of Josef Trumpeldor? Some said he had been arrested.
Tolya laughed his tolerant laugh. Oh, their hero was free, he could assure her. “But what do you want, Leah? He arrives here in the midst of the first phase of the revolution, when we were pressed on every side, when our first need was to get out of the capitalist war, and he talks of raising an army of half a million Jews to march through Turkey and conquer Palestine! After the October revolution I seem to remember some Bundists had him arrested at one moment, but never mind, he was let out almost immediately; he organized the Jewish Self-Defense in Volozhin and I’ll say this for him, they did excellent work against the Whites.”
Where was he now? Did Tolya know?
Of this he had no idea.
As for himself, Tolya had served his exile in Siberia—oh, come to think of it, even there in Irkutsk he had encountered one of her chalutzim, a fellow who had had enough of it and returned to the revolutionary movement—
Instantly all that Leah had been pretending to ignore in herself was a-clamor, shouting Moshe’s name within her. She even felt she was blushing. Yet she held it all back until after she had asked Tolya about his own years in Siberia, and until she on her side had related, without opening the way to ideological discussions, the story of each of the family in Eretz. And then she even exchanged with him the meager bits of information that each had received through these years about those of the family that had migrated to America. Since the end of the war, Tolya’s mother had received one letter from her sister-in-law in America, carried here by a townsman who had hurried back from the capitalist paradise to become part of the revolution. Aunt Hannah wrote that they owned their own automobile, Tolya snorted. Now Leah asked again about his Siberian days, and about that fellow from Eretz he had encountered, had he perchance been a tall one called Moshe? She was flushing.
The measuring and recording look had returned to his eyes. “A tall one, yes! The Handsome Moshe they called him!” Her cousin waited an instant for the effect on her, smiling, then added that by another coincidence he had even known this Moshe afterward, in the October days. “He did excellent work.” And it even happened that Comrade Moshe had been sent to this very same region, in the campaign to clean out the Petlura gangs, and if Tolya was not wrong, this Moshe of hers was just now stationed in the town of Pogorna. “You’re not going to try to convert him back to Zionism!” he said with an indulgent chuckle.
Tolya took her upstairs; her aunt lived in the former bedroom, turned into something of a bed-sitting room, and there she had placed the great samovar. Aunt Minna sat straight as ever; it was from her that Tolya had his eyes of cool judgment, but her cheeks were of a remarkable softness that carried Leah at once homeward to her own mother. It was the look of Jewish women who tenderly hold to their own woman’s wisdom, while they endure uncomplainingly the stupidities and brutalities of a world carried on by men. Now she brought out the letter from America that told of children who were first in their class, and of a growing manufacturing business, and, thank God, a good living, and asked about the dreadful happenings they had heard were falling upon the Jews in the old country, and declared since at last now the Czar was fallen, might his name be blotted from eternity, they all hoped the family had not suffered and hoped for good news, and that one day the whole family might be able to meet again.
Without Jewish sighs or groans, her Aunt Minna now told of all that had happened to their relatives near and far; once even nodding and declaring that Leah’s mother had after all been the wise one, in taking her children to Eretz Yisroel. This she repeated with a cool side-look at her Tolya; then she added with an air of one acknowledging what was just, that things were better now, for it had to be said for the Bolsheviki that they had made anti-Semitism a crime, and indeed many Jews were high up—on the highest rung Trotsky himself, and Kamenev, and Zinoviev, and this one and that one, and the wife of this one and that one, so Jews no longer had anything to fear from the government. If only her poor husband had listened to their son … And she straightened her back and pressed her lips together and was calm.
For four days Leah stayed with them, for she could not allow herself to run off to satisfy her foolish longing without first working here on her mission. From one courtyard to another in Cherezinka she managed to thread her way to members of her old-time youth group. So much had happened to each one, how could they have held together? In one or two she encountered a wistful reawakening. But this one could not convince her husband, and that one had aging parents to care for …
She must look to the younger generation. Only when Leah had managed to gather nearly a dozen lads and girls who listened with wonder to all she told of the communes, and agreed to meet together and study Hebrew with a veteran of the Poale Zion she had unearthed, and to perhaps form their own little kolhoz and practice growing vegetables, did she decide she had good reason to go on to Pogorna, as there had been a lively Young Zionist movement there even in the time of the Czar.
And to get him off her mind so that she could work wholly on her mission, in Pogorna Leah went directly to find Moshe. He was, her cousin had told her, a commissar of agriculture, organizing collective farms, and the central administration building was readily pointed out.
At first, Leah decided, she would only get a look at him, just to find out her own reaction. She even had the door to his section pointed out. Then, scolding herself for such juvenility, she decided she would walk directly into that office.
Just then the door happened to open; Leah heard his voice calling out cheerfully after a pair of young kolhoznicks who emerged laughing. She walked into the room.
There he sat, the same Handsome Moshe, his black curly hair perhaps slightly receded, his form exuding energy as ever—no sign of Siberian suffering, she saw with relief, or of war injuries —and before she could form more of an impression, he had leaped up, cried out her name, and was embracing her with a full kiss on the mouth, and another, while bursting out to his comrades with a great joyous laugh—she had scarcely noticed there were several more tables in the room—two men and a woman—“Excuse me, comrades! My greatest love has just walked in, returned to me out of the past!”
The two men chortled broadly; the woman, who was middle-aged, made a pulled-down mouth over the incorrigible Moshe and his many loves, and the Handsome One cried, “No! This is not for the office!” and bundled Leah out of the room, calling back, “I’m going on an inspection!” The men laughed, while the woman comrade groaned as though to say: What can you do with a rascal like that?
Keeping stride with him down the corridor, Leah already felt a liberation all down the length of her limbs. For always, walking with men of average stature, there was a restraint even on the size of her steps. Beaming sidewise at each other, they still didn’t speak; all there was to say and ask was in such a tumult, the many subjects were like a crowd at a door blocking each other, each trying to get out first, and meanwhile the sheer tumultuous sense of their physical closeness seemed to overwhelm everything.
“Siberia agreed with you,” she declared.
“Oh, Siberia, that was a long way back. Before the revolution!” he laughed. She had spoken in Hebrew, he answered in Russian. Doubtless his Hebrew was rusty—how many years had passed?— As though she wasn’t aware!—it was almost as long as the number of years Jacob served Laban— No! what a muddle was in her head—yes, that had been fourteen, and besides the comparison didn’t really fit, no, not at all.
“We could go to the canteen—” he hesitated. “No, the devil, a restaurant is no place for us to talk.” They were outside the building. He gazed on her afresh, grinning appreciatively. “Leachka! How did you manage to get here!”
“I came for our women’s movement,” she declared, her beaming face belying her, virtually admitting she had come to find him. “But I couldn’t resist going to Cherezinka to look for my family,” and she told how her cousin had known of him and had got travel documents for her.
“Oh, Comrade Tolya, oho! With papers from Tolya, you can travel on the Moscow Express!”
But they still hadn’t really spoken to each other. A dozen times Moshe had been stopped by comrades with problems to straighten out, but now that they were in the open air, he drew her aside, and, as they gazed at each other, she could hardly longer beat back the real question: Was he still with the one from Siberia, was he really married? And whatever the answer to that question, she had also to know from within herself now that she was near him again—was she forever fated, or not?
“I know!” Moshe cried. “I know where we will go!”
He called to a guard near the entrance. In the sentry-box, the soldier picked up a telephone, giving the crank a few turns, and she heard him tell a Comrade Anatol to bring the machine for Comrade Mitya. Naturally Moshe would have taken a party name.
“You are high up!” she laughed. “An automobile!”
“I have to do field work,” he chortled, the old Moshe who always managed to arrange things.
“And all this time you couldn’t send me a letter?” She couldn’t stop beaming, and it was not really a reproach.
“The Czar allowed me one letter a month, so I wrote home.”
The recollection of the first touching letter from his mother swept upon her. “Only from your mother we knew you were arrested. Moshe, she wrote to me so tenderly. Your parents are all right?”
“All right,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Luckily Father didn’t do anything foolish and I was able to get him legitimized as an expert in hides.”
The automobile, a battered but meticulously polished vehicle with a patched top, halted before them, and they squeezed into the back. Moshe gave instructions.
“Where are you taking me?” she laughed.
“On your mission!” he laughed back, but would tell her no more, and as he settled into the seat, their thighs molded as one, and she felt Moshe’s arm pressed by their closeness against the side of her breast.
They turned their faces to talk to each other; instead their mouths met, and in the sensation it was as though layer after layer of longing dissolved away within her, as though the prolongation of the contact of their lips was in itself a necessity, a part of the intervening years of separation dissolving away, like a lump of sugar held in your mouth the old Russian way while the tea seeps through and dissolves it, and this must be given a certain length of time.
The vehicle had already passed through the town into the open flat countryside where stacks of reaped grain stood at intervals. A quaint notion came to Leah—in the land of the proletarian revolution, she and her lover had met to kiss in a motorcar driven by a chauffeur!
How long was it since she had thought of anything so light-heartedly!
Simultaneously they broke off the kiss. Now they could delay questions no longer. —And the revolution? she asked. —And the chevreh in Eretz? Moshe asked.
And when Moshe started describing the revolution, how even with Kerensky the prisoners had at once flocked back from Siberia, she had to keep interrupting, “But you. You got to St. Petersburg and then? Where did you live?” She still could not make herself say “with whom?” And why didn’t he himself speak of that part of it? Perhaps after all that part with his Kati had ended? Perhaps after all it was unimportant?
On her side, Leah told of how it had been for the chaverim, Dovidl and Avner deported, Galil and Nadina sent off into exile in Turkey’s own Siberia, leaving their child in the collectiva—
“They have a child?”
“And you?” It had come out of her.
Yes. He had a little boy— And they gazed at each other with faces that said, we are mature. We must be honest with each other.
“I will admit to you when I first found out you were in Siberia, I was about to leave Eretz and go there to join you, Moshe. And then I heard you had a chavera there already.”
His hand covered hers with an honest, friendly grasp. “Leah, I would a thousand times have preferred if it was you that came to me there.” And, “But you know I am not the kind of man who can remain long without a woman.” She did not draw away her hand. Then he inquired, “And you?”
Instead of replying, Leah asked, “And she?” Coyness was not in her, but she could not leave herself altogether helpless by at once telling him the truth about herself. And it would be as though she were making a claim on him by revealing her long chastity.
“She?” Moshe repeated.
“The one who came to you in Siberia, isn’t she the one you knew even long before in Odessa? And she is now the mother of your son.”
“Yes,” he said, still holding her hand and gazing frankly at her, “Kati. She and the boy are in Kiev. Kati is in the housing administration.”
“And so you are married.”
Still keeping his eyes on her, Moshe nodded. “We registered our union.”
“And you still have to do with other women, the Handsome Moshe,” she remarked, as over an old friend’s inevitable foibles. But even while she concluded it was finally broken between them, an image came to Leah of a broken candle still held together by its wick, and who knew, if lighted it might even be melted whole again. Moshe had nodded to her last question as well, a helpless wicked boy; it was as though to her alone, not even to his wife, could he show himself, as though they two had a truly profound understanding that engulfed more than a past sexual episode.
His marriage seemed somehow to recede into another such sexual matter, not much deeper than the rest, and perhaps leaving open for them the profound relationship that went beyond.
To Leah it was as though her soul were passing through a swift series of adjustments, of comprehensions, beginning with the simple self-accusation, “But, foolish one, you knew perfectly well that Moshe couldn’t have remained alone and unattached. And even before you started on this journey you knew that you had to meet him, not so much to find out his own condition, whatever that might be, but to find out in what way and how deeply you were still bound to him. In coming this far, you already admitted that even his being married might not release you. So now you have arrived at this point and you must find out what remains.”
“And you?” Moshe repeated. “I thought of you often and much in these years, Leah, and I am not saying this only to please and to appease you. Nor will I pretend that I never also remember other girls, from before. There are some that I remember with great fondness and joy, as I hope they remember me, even if they are married and faithful to their husbands. But when I thought of you, it wasn’t always so much of our love-making, though, truthfully, Leah, and I don’t ask what other experiences you had, but what happened between us was as good as ever happens between a man and a woman. At least my philandering serves for me to tell you this. But with you it wasn’t only sexual memories, it was all sorts of things. In the kvutsa once, the time your face was covered with smoke and smudges from cooking over the stones, and you screamed at us in a real fury, a real Chaimovitch rage, that the kvutsa once and for all had to buy a stove! And the boys were so terrified, they agreed so quickly that you burst out laughing, and said it didn’t matter, you didn’t want it!”
He chuckled softly, as though all that in Eretz had been his true life, and she had been the center of it.
“So you don’t really intend to come back?” she said.
The same honest gaze as before met her eyes. “I can’t say, Leah. Something within me keeps believing that one day I will go. Sometimes it is as though I am hearing someone relate the story of my life, and I hear them say, ‘And then Moshe suddenly gave up all he was doing and went back to Eretz to look for his chavera, Leah—’”
She laughed at his playacting. “You see, instead it was Leah who came to look for you.”
“No, truly it might have been the other way—” Was he again only the charmer, Handsome Moshe who said to each girl what she wanted him to say to her? He went on, “Leah, as for my life with Kati and Volya, I can tell you it is not fundamentally this that holds me here. Well—perhaps Volya—”
“She wouldn’t come with you? Kati?” It had been hard to speak the name.
Moshe considered, but briefly, as one who has already considered and only re-examines. “No. If it came to such a decision. She is so deeply Russian—and even when the revolution is secure, there is still the whole new society to build. You understand.”
“Who understands better than we in Eretz?”
“And I—” Moshe blurted with the touch of helpless admission that—oh, curse the ways of nature—was a lovable trait in him— “I want to do both.” Just as he wanted every woman that attracted him.
All along the road were marks of war. Red Army units were moving, with long plodding lines of horses pulling supply wagons, each with a cannon attached behind. Or else there would be an encampment in a field. Petlura had been driven all the way out into Polish territory, Moshe said, resuming his other voice, the voice of a commissar, confident, contemptuous of the enemy. There were other nationalist bands not twenty versts away, but they and remnants of the Petlurists were just now busy fighting each other. All the better. Let the hyenas and wolves kill each other off.
The automobile turned into a by-road, and not far before them Leah could see, reaching above the poplars, the pointed roofpeaks of a baronial estate house.
“I’ll tell you where I am taking you,” Moshe now said with a kind of teasing satisfaction that she still had no idea, and as though this were the real answer to her last question. “I was able to requisition this estate as a training farm.”
Startled, her heart suddenly became flooded with love, love after all; Leah gazed into his face for confirmation. “For our chalutzim?”
He nodded. “You already have nearly fifty youngsters here, for your labor battalions.”
What a conniver! The old Moshe! She glowed at him. He had really brought her on her mission! “Girls, too?” Leah asked.
“Boys and girls.”
“Oh, Moshe, Moshe, I see you haven’t lost your gifts!”
He looked so pleased, and there was such an attraction in his pleasure, that Leah, startled by something happening in her body, blushed violently. It was as though the devilish Moshe could be aware of a throb that had come within her sex.
From every direction they came hurrying—how eager, how young, with such good faces—see, despite all that had happened, there were real Jews here still! The girls were in blouses, peasant skirts and work boots—how on earth had they learned this was the way girls now dressed in the kvutsoth! And the boys—several of them had in their eyes that untainted idealistic look that Reuven had had, while a few others had around their mouths that bitter thin line of disappointed idealists who nevertheless saw no other way in the world; still others kept their heads cocked a little sidewise, like Dovidl judging you and planning.
Without a moment to think out what to say first, Leah found herself in the salon of the estate-house, a large parlor with a huge glass chandelier and an ornate ceiling painted with naked cherubs flying about; there were red velvet-covered sofas, and in the corner stood a grand piano. And—startlingly—on the walls were banners inscribed in Hebrew with quotations from A. D. Gordon, from Borochov; and on a flag with the hammer and sickle embroidered inside a Star of David were the words Zionism and Socialism.
Before replying to the storm of questions, some in hesitant Hebrew, most in Russian, she was trying first to find out a bit about the leader, whom Moshe had brought to her, a long-headed fellow somewhat older than the others, old enough to have been a soldier in the war. From Kiev, he was, as were perhaps half of the chalutzim; the rest were from Kamenetz, from Ooman, from shtetlach in the area. Yes, their leader said, he was in contact with a few other chalutz centers. What was needed was a united program, he himself had attended a meeting where Josef Trumpeldor had spoken of this—No, that had been six months ago, but recently he had heard that Trumpeldor had left for Eretz to find out about the possibilities for immigration. The difficulty in this area was that not everywhere was the training of chalutzim permitted—
’It’s an agricultural school here,” Moshe interrupted, “to bring back Jews to productive labor on the soil.”
“Right here you see we are lucky.” The leader, whose name was Koba, grinned appreciatively at Moshe. “But if we had happened to get an old Bundist in the commissariat—Oho!”
Then all at once she was standing behind a table to lecture to them, to answer their questions. Some were seated on tapestried chairs, which they handled most carefully; several girls sat on the floor at her feet, and in addition a few plain chairs and a roughly made bench had been carried in. Questions flew at Leah, and while Koba tried to control the meeting, sometimes, if it was an ideological question, a comrade would start answering for her, and cross-arguments would develop, and Leah had to cry out laughingly, “Nu, chevreh, it’s just like a meeting in a kvutsa at home—everyone talks at once. So now you know what life is like in Eretz!”
—Was it really to be a Jewish state? Was there a democratic Jewish governing body as yet? Could the workers gain control of the future Jewish state—would this be possible under the British imperialists? Was it true that smoking was everywhere forbidden on the Shabbat? Were the women fully equal in their rights? What was the agreement between the Arab leaders and Chaim Weizmann? Would the Arabs really allow Jews to become a majority in Palestine? Could the British be trusted? What were the best crops to cultivate?
Leah was talking in something of a jumble, she realized; if only someone like Dovidl were here to explain it all in orderly fashion. She had started by telling of when she had first arrived in Eretz, of the first kvutsa, of the family’s own meshek, of her sister married to a shomer and living in a collectiva, and the children, and also of another of her sisters married to a hotel owner’s son in Tiberias. To the upturned faces of the girls, she talked of her own training farm for chalutzoth.
Was a kvutsa the same as a kolhoz? someone interrupted, and someone else answered, “You fool, in a kolhoz the members receive wages and live separately. We here are more like a kvutsa. You can see the difference—the moujiks of the village here are forming a kolhoz.”
“No, I want to hear from the chavera herself—!”
All Leah’s blood was warm, her energies streamed out of her, called forth by their eagerness. Just when she had left Eretz on this voyage, she told them, one of her brothers—the one who had fought in the Jewish battalions—yes, there had been Jewish battalions in the British army in Eretz—this brother and his friends were starting a new kind of settlement altogether, something between a kvutsa and a kolhoz. “We are experimenting with many ways, we are trying to find the right way for each person.”
Were there Arabs in the kvutsoth?
No, she said, but they must not misunderstand. “We would not refuse Arabs, surely not on principle, but it is not their way. They have their own way of village life, but perhaps some of their young people will want to change.” Her broad smile came back. “We have so many problems—this is all still to be. You too will help to work things out, when you come!”
As in every group there would be one to whom you found yourself talking, one whose face seemed to drink in every word, and here it was a girl with a sprite-like face framed in short cropped hair; a girl who kept nodding at everything she said.
—The kvutsoth were spreading, Leah kept explaining, but also capitalists and merchants were arriving in the cities, there was even land speculation in Tel Aviv, and there were the old schnorrers in Jerusalem—
“But I don’t understand,” a young man interposed. He had a dense, troubled face. “What kind of country will it be? Socialist or capitalist? Religious or what?”
“We don’t know yet how it will come out, because we are only beginning to make it. So when you come, you will take part in making it the way we want it, too.” That was why they were needed right away, to make it their kind of country, and not a land for speculators and exploiters, and that was why she had come to them …
Until the meal and through the meal and after the meal, the cluster with its excitement and warmth was around her. The borscht was good—“What do you eat in Palestine?”
Not borscht, she laughed.
“Why not?” She hadn’t thought about this. “Yes, we grow beets. But we eat more—some of the crops of the land, lighter things for the hot climate, some things we learned from the Arabs.
—Did it ever happen, a girl asked shyly, that a Jewish girl married an Arab? There was a bit of laughter. Had she nothing else to think about? “But why not!” the girl persisted, flushing.
“Then why not an Arab girl and a Jewish boy?” one of the boys demanded, half-teasingly.
“But seriously,” the chavera persisted, “I only asked on principle.”
Well, Leah explained as best she could, naturally there were cases, more in the older cities perhaps, you heard of it now and again.
“Just like intermarriage anywhere,” one of the boys answered for her.
“But you see—” Leah tried again, “they have deep family customs, their matches are arranged between families—”
“Like ours in the old days—”
“We would like to bring them into the more modern way of life, but it will take time and it is not for us to push them. We have so much to do among ourselves—”
By now the cycle of questions was being repeated over and over, and long after the meal they clung around her. Her presence, Leah saw, was at last proof to them that all they were preparing for really existed. That was the main thing. She was “from there.”
Finally the group thinned, the youngsters going off to bed, and only the leader, Koba Lederman, sat with Moshe and Leah over a last glass of tea, discussing his problems with Moshe, chiefly problems with the moujiks who kept making claims on their fields. These were the fields that had once been reserved for the estate itself, and were now given over to the training farm.
—Never mind, he’d settle it, Moshe assured Lederman. Those cunning Ukrainian peasants wouldn’t get anywhere with him. And Moshe rose.
The sprite with the cropped hair had still been hovering about, bringing them tea—Manya she was called, and clearly she was Lederman’s chavera. Now she and Koba led them up the curving stairway and opened a door on a palatial bedroom, preserved untouched. This was for the guest from Eretz.
No, no, Leah laughed, she would feel utterly out of place! But they insisted. She was putting no one out, they all had good beds, she needn’t fear—and she must not deny them the opportunity to honor a chavera from Eretz with the baronial bedroom!
The enormous bed, piled high with a feather quilt, was covered with a crocheted spread, and above all was a regal canopy. Leder- man and Manya were backing out of the room. Of Moshe nothing had been said. True, there was a wide sofa by the window, also prepared with a pillow and a feather quilt.
Leah went to the bed, tested it with her hand, and laughed, to cover her whirling uncertainties. In a way the regal bed was like an approval even from on high. And it would be hypocritical to pretend that this day could end in any other way. As soon as she had come into his presence, even before the explanation, in the automobile, she had known that no matter what she learned of his present life, she would have to extend herself into this experience, this final test, this release, whatever it would be. Perhaps simply a sexual luxury. This one night at least she would put out of her soul all the troublesome questions, and simply gratify her body. After so many years.
And so Leah turned into his arms and filled her mouth with his. Let there be no talking while their hands began undressing each other. Then it needed a moment of separation to finish with the clothing, still in silence. She was naked first. Folding back the crocheted spread and the sheets, she lay, her body full and glowing in the lamplight, and silently watched Moshe’s last movements, half turned from her. As his buttocks became bare, her womb contracted within her, and as he quietly mounted and his face was over hers, and she felt Moshe entering her, the contracted womb relaxed, and the sigh of eleven years of abstinence was released like the first breath of a body coming into life, and at the same time as a heavenly surcease and a surmounting of all the lesserness of what a person did with his life. Even a light lewd thought, from a Yiddish word, came to her—all this long way she had been carrying her frauenzimmer to him, like a small sealed jewel box, and for Moshe alone it was opened.
Even during the first interval they hardly spoke, except for a “Nu, Leah?” and a “Nu, Moshe?” their eyes gravely questioning how deep it might be with them, while their hands again slowly and luxuriously stroked in long smooth movements. Then the lamp guttered, and this made them laugh, and he entered again.
In their repletion, in the darkness, it was Moshe who finally felt compelled to speak. “Don’t misunderstand me, and don’t be offended, Leahleh—but with you I feel even more as with a wife than with my own wife.”
Her heart caught in a beat of ecstasy that momentarily erased all the errors of eternity. Yes, Moshe had felt the need to say this, to say something so good to her that it would seal the night of their reunion. And even so she must not allow it to have a meaning in regard to the rest of their lives. Not yet.
Then perhaps in the same need to give assurance, the same desire to seal away forever this achieved and beautiful time, she responded, “Moshe, you asked me something before, and I didn’t answer. Moshe, I don’t want you to feel that I imagine what I say gives me some right to you. But the truth is, in these years—I never had another man.”
He was quiet, and his hand sought hers and grasped it. “But you are a passionate woman, Leah. I—I simply feel—I feel honored by this, Leah. Yet surely you understood I wouldn’t have asked such a thing of you.”
“It wasn’t for you. I suppose I have a high idea of myself. Or I was afraid that this—in the body—would cease to have a meaning. If I gave in simply to desire. I never in my thoughts imposed the same on you. I suppose it really is not the same with a man as with a woman, because with men—it doesn’t happen to you inside of you. It is something you release from yourself.”
“Perhaps,” Moshe said. “As you say, in a man the desire for release drives him, sometimes it doesn’t matter where. And yet I believe such times haven’t destroyed in me—when I am in love, it is simply not the same as when I am only driven by the need of a woman.”
“And how many times have you been in love?”
“With you. With Kati.” Her heart stopped. “And I don’t pretend to you that Kati and I no longer love each other. It is not the same as in the beginning. But it is love.”
“And no others?” She forced herself to keep on, though everything had been answered.
“Well, there was one other,” Moshe said quietly. “The very first one.”
“And what happened? It stopped?” Perhaps something from him would yet help her.
“A person should always keep something for his own self alone.” Moshe’s voice was so removed, she didn’t know whether this admission had brought him closer to her, or made everything false. Was this why something within her had always felt that in the end he was unreachable?
He resumed talking. “Leah, we are trying to make a revolution in man himself. A political revolution, to achieve freedom, yes, to free our whole selves. Here and in Eretz, it is really the same, it is the same universal revolution, isn’t it? To tear away all pretense and dishonesty, between men and women as well, so that people will be able to be what they truly are, and to be completely honest with each other.” Was he really being true now? or were these only words that he liked to hear himself say, to have a feeling of profundity? “So I can tell you, as a man, as a male, I don’t want to be a slave to a Czar, or to a capitalist, and I don’t want to be a slave to my own schmekel either. I don’t want to have to make pretenses or tell lies to some vain and stupid female just because my schmekel is dragging me on—but that is how it often is with a man. Maybe women aren’t dragged so much by their sexual demand. Right now because women have equality, we say that they are the same as men and have the same force of desire as men, but really it doesn’t seem so to me.” What was he trying to tell her? Their moment of intense understanding seemed to be dissolving away into some kind of discussion … yet even this was not without comfort. It was the sort of talk that sometimes came in the kvutsa when you felt utterly comradely and honest, it was perhaps the sort of talk that happened between a man and wife, accepting each other as by nature different beings who cannot ever entirely be fused yet who entirely respect and love one another, and with this they drift off to sleep. She would let the problems go for the time.
He was away early, gone back to his post, and all day Leah worked in the fields with the young chalutzim, mostly the girls, little crop-headed Manya never leaving her. All day Leah heard their life stories, Manya telling how her mother had cut her hair and dressed her as a young Hasid, her breasts tied flat—good they were small—and two curls left for payes, see, the ringlets were still there, though brushed back into her locks. And thus as a Hasidl she had escaped violation when Ataman Grigoriev’s brutes stormed into their town. Oh, he was the worst, worse than Petlura. Their house had been burned down, yet the whole family, hiding with a peasant, had survived, and then when Makho had driven out Grigoriev, they had emerged and gone to Lvov, but Petlura had come and seized Lvov. Again she had dressed as a young Hasid. Petlura’s men were drunk, wild. On horses they burst into every yard, but if you managed to hide, in a few days it was over and not so dangerous.
“Like a pogrom under the Czar,” Leah understood.
But fleeing again, they had fallen among the Whites. It was an army. You heard them marching into your street. Then they closed off the whole block. Then they marched to the first house and closed off the courtyard, and then mounted up each stairway to each door, soldiers with bayonets—and into each flat, into each room—they took everything, the bedding, the cooking pots—what they didn’t want, they smashed, the pictures, the glassware —if they felt like killing, they killed—they seized hold of a woman and three or four soldiers would hold her arms, her head, and then one after another, they changed places—
“Don’t speak of it any more.”
“I saw it. I saw it.”
“I know, I know.” And Leah taught her how to move along the ground with least effort in a squatting position so as not to be bent over all day while weeding.
Moshe returned at dusk.
Presently she went with him to a meeting he had arranged with the peasants of the village, and Leah listened with admiration as Moshe explained and cajoled, reaching behind the suspicious eyes of the older ones, even salting or sweetening his words with Ukrainian proverbs, as needed. The situation was far from easy: their grain had been requisitioned; though they had been paid, the price had been set by the Soviets and they were discontent. Yet somehow Moshe turned them to discussion of a school; of course the teaching would be in Ukrainian.
“What of the manor? Put our school in there!” a stolid young man demanded. “It was promised to us.”
“You’ll have it. The Jews won’t be there forever!” He said it with such good humor, as one who understood them, indeed as one of them, that she did not resent it, especially as he added, “The Jews want to go, perhaps even more than you want them to leave!”
It was all a kind of playacting, she could see it was necessary, and when the meeting ended and they came away, Moshe explained that the situation here was still very delicate, a few—like that young man—were good communists and therefore had to be taken seriously, as the rest of the village was still honeycombed with Petlurists and every other brand of Ukrainian nationalist. Therefore he had had to emphasize Ukrainian culture. He was deep in the problem, and Leah told herself that of course Moshe had to speak of the young Jews as “they” and not as “we.” In the situation anything else would be absurd.
Moshe must have known how the moment troubled her, for now he said “we.” “Leah, do you realize how we need you here?” In this single day she had restored the morale of the entire training farm, which had been slackening—indeed a number of chalutzim had left. The old, Bundist arguments were making headway again. Jews would simply be a cultural unity within the revolution. But not separatist nationalists. Now, for these youngsters, she was the answer. She must be the one to clarify things. She must go through the entire district—he would arrange a mission for himself so that he could open the way for her. They would go to Zhitomir, even up to Minsk. Yes, at this junction in history it was here in Russia that she could be most useful.
And as they walked, Moshe expanded his thoughts without any allusion to their personal relationship, but only in the excitement of the cause they shared. For they must look at it in the largest perspective, not only from the Palestine scene but from the situation of the whole Jewish people.
“How many are we, Leah? Despite all that were starved and slaughtered, and our young men killed in the war, we are nearly five million here in the old Jewish Pale. And in the entire world we Jews are perhaps fifteen million. In our greatest dream, even with the most intense development of the land, four, at most five, million can be supported in Eretz. Then what happens to the remainder of the Jews? Will they be lost to us? Will they all assimilate in different lands in a generation or two?”
But this was an old question; from the earliest discourses of Ahad Ha’am it had been debated. The answer was that the Jews of the Yishuv, of the Jewish state that would now soon arise under the British—they would be the core of Jewish life. Not the old Russian Pale of Settlement but Palestine would be the heartland of Jewry, and from there the new kind of Jew would go out to the Diaspora, to teach, to fortify—
“Exactly. And you are the first emissary—you are already here! You saw the effect that you have on the youngsters?”
It was not yet a dismay that was creeping up in her, but a curious uncentered doubt. This was a discussion in which they both seemed to have the same honest passion—the very purpose of their lives. And what Moshe said was true. She would dispatch kvutsa after kvutsa from here to Eretz. She would win their tongues back from Russian and Yiddish to Hebrew. And even if there was a touch of cunning, even if there was a breath of opportunism, in this for Moshe, even if it enabled him not yet to have to make a decision about his own life, indeed even if it made it possible for him for a time to have two lives, two wives, one in Kiev and one to travel about with, why should she not, in the very nature of a woman, seize every circumstance to win her man—yes, win him from the other woman, from the other, the non-Jewish life? If such was the condition into which events—or history, as they called it—had put her?
This was not like herself, not like the self Leah had always seen as herself. But perhaps she had been wrong, naïve, unfinished, still a romantic idealistic girl despite her brief early experience with Moshe. Now, the reunion had proven that the bond—some sort of powerful inexplicable bond—still held, with him as with her. His plan she could understand—Moshe always found a way! His plan was to give himself time to search out, to test, his full relationship with her, for Moshe’s case was more difficult than her own; Moshe had a child now that he would have to leave. Yet Leah felt that his union with her and with Eretz would prove to be the true one, it would grow stronger; like every plant, it had a full right to be nourished and given its natural growth, and one day it would bear its fruit.
Down the lane of trees as they walked back, lights awaited them—how like it was to approaching the kvutsa late at night long ago, in those weeks when they would go out into the field to lie together, and return for supper, famished. Moshe had the same recollection, for he took her hand and said in Hebrew, “Remember the time Araleh was the night watchman and nearly shot us?”
Tonight too they were challenged by a guard; one of the young chalutzim started up at their approach and called out in Russian, “Who is it?” Then the boy quickly murmured, “Oh, excuse me, comrade” to Moshe, and, with a winsome knowingness said goodnight in Hebrew to Leah, “Layla tov, chavera.”
All Moshe had suggested continued to ferment in her over the next few days. It was true she must go on to all the other training farms, perhaps even prolong her mission. Here, the youngsters were already excited about starting on the way to Eretz, and long sittings were held every night. Should the entire group leave in a body? No, the farm must not be given up, but kept as a training center, constantly replenished. Then came arguments as to who should go in the first group? Lederman and his Manya wanted to go, but wasn’t he indispensable here, to train the next kvutsa? Manya had already changed her name—Leah helped her to find just the right Hebrew word—Mayana it would be, springing from “water”—a water sprite!
And as for herself, before going north, Leah worried—shouldn’t she first report back to Menahem? —Why consume time traveling back and forth, Moshe argued; she could send her report to Menahem with the first group, and meanwhile, he and she could go on to some of the other centers. That was what was most necessary. “Besides, running back and forth from here to Odessa is dangerous. Who knows where the Whites will be tomorrow?”
They were upstairs in their vast bed, but they had been conducting the discussion as though it were impersonal. Only at the last, about her staying on, his voice changed with a tinge of selfishness, and a little wave of gratification went through her.
“No, I really ought to go with them,” she repeated, and her body turned to his as though already to store up love against their temporary separation.
Moshe covered her; then, just as he began to enter her, he said playfully, yet masterfully, “You’ll see, good old schmekel will convince you to stay!”
And in that instant everything broke.
Her body reacted involuntarily and thrust him out. His own word, the coarse word that in the playful reaches of love was only a further intimacy, a laughing mark of joy and freedom, this word had now thrust itself into her as her enslavement. Not by the schmekel would her life be decided. Not by the demand of her sex.
“But, Leachka, what is it?” Moshe said, as though he didn’t know. He was still lying over her, she could feel his thigh muscles taut, and his member almost touching her sex lips; she could even feel its throb, and in astonishment, even grief, as over some tragic revelation, Leah knew she must not allow her lips to draw it back in. Instead, by an act of will, she made her hips pull away from him. No. Moshe was not an honest man within himself, he was a conniver, a twister, she had always known this, but now she must pay attention—he was a man who deceived even himself about his final beliefs.
At her pulling away he reacted with masculinity. “Don’t be foolish!” and thrust himself in, his force pounding insistently within her to master her. Instead an agony augmented in her, a cry in her soul, “It’s not him, it’s not him—after all, he is not really the one.”
Her body rolled from side to side, as much through agony at her discovery as to avoid him; her shoulders rolled as in the keening of sorrow, and her head rolled away from the driving pressure of his mouth. The words repeated themselves within her and in the sway of her mourning, they emerged half-muffled, as from a delirium, moaning to the man, “It’s not you. After all, Moshe, it’s not you.” This was the true answer to what she had come here to find; the first answer had been one of a seven-year hunger.
Now he altered his movement so that uncertainty came creeping back in her. Moshe lifted his weight from her, slowly withdrawing, not in the way he had used to do so as to give her the greatest, the most unbearable pleasure, the slow withdrawal almost to the very end while her inner lips throbbed and waited in exquisite suspense for the instant of reprieve, when instead of going completely out, the withdrawal would at the very last tip of contact turn into a wild thrust reaching through her to her very heart. No, Moshe withdrew carefully as though he were respecting whatever strange notion had come over her, and did not want her to feel his movement, did not want to take this sexual advantage to influence her decision.
And at the very tip of contact he was gone; his might did not come down on her again, nor his sex thrust back into her; this was perhaps the dissolution forever, it was perhaps the immeasurable emptiness that a chavera had described to her after an operation in which the womb had had to be removed. And now he was lying, off of her, in careful separation so that no part of his skin touched hers.
What had altered? Perhaps she was entirely mistaken about him; but all at once Moshe had appeared to her as a person somehow sinister. That he was clever and adaptable and able always to find a way to arrange matters, she had always known, and it had seemed a resourcefulness, even a good quality in him. But now it suddenly appeared as of a low order in human morality, close to hypocritical, akin to his readiness to flatter and even deceive a girl, some orange-grower’s daughter, or any creature with breasts and a vagina, that he momentarily craved, in order to get inside her. All at once Moshe no longer seemed a strong personality, but ap- peared to her as a man of weak character, puzzled that his “final argument” had this time failed.
Yet another, womanly part of her argued back that she herself was at fault, that in full womanhood this itself—the discovery of a loved one’s shortcomings and even weakness of character—was part of what made him endearing. Did her mother not love her father despite all the absence of joy that was between them? Never in Leah’s whole life had she thought there was an absence of love; her mother knew his irascibility, his narrowness—and look at this clumsy body and the potato-face behind the untrimmed beard; yet her mother, Leah was certain, felt a full tenderness and respect for her man.
And so perhaps she herself was at fault that a great wave of compassion did not rise in her to engulf the very weakness that she had suddenly felt in Moshe, a compassion to carry her beyond what had been a blind girlish attachment, and a lust, and even something of hero-worship, to a profound and all-embracing womanly understanding.
But a new thought came and caused her to recoil from herself in shame. Was not this the deep understanding that his wife Kati felt for him?
Moshe had remained silent; all that was unsaid throbbed between them. Yet when he spoke it was not on a wave of these thoughts, and did not help her. For he carried on from the moment before all this had happened in her and had caused a watershed in her life. “After all,” Moshe said, “I myself was sent here on such a mission as yours, even before the war, and I suffered for it in Siberia, but I am continuing this mission now in whatever way I can manage. Then what is wrong with your remaining here, to join in it? That is all I suggested, and if you think it was only out of selfishness, so that I can live two lives, believe me, Leah, you can remain and carry on your work without seeing me, and I will still help you all I can. What is between us as man and woman is another question.”
Even this, which should have touched her, now left her with suspicion. Could Moshe truly mean it, or was he deceived by his own ruse? Poor Moshe, he wanted it both ways. And the only true test would be if she went back home, and then, should he come to recognize it was the Zionist way he wanted and that she was his woman, then he would come.
This thought too instantly tormented her as being perhaps a woman’s wile: to go away to make herself more desired. Perhaps the more honest way would indeed be to give themselves more time here to be together, until he could decide which was his true wife. And why was it necessary that the true wife should turn out to be the one who was bound to the way of life he most desired, whether in this land or Eretz? Perhaps there too was a profound tragedy between men and women: that a person’s life partner, and a person’s life did not always go together.
She was already losing that clear vision of Moshe that had come to her, and slipping back into the illusion, seeing him as a man tragically torn between ideals. Leah arose from the bed. She stood undecided, there in the large luxurious room, and slowly her eyes became accustomed to the dark, as must his; he must be looking at her naked body standing there. So she reached and drew on a petticoat, feeling his puzzled gaze on her all the while. Then she went and lay down on the couch-bed by the window.
It was strange, but she dozed off and didn’t know how much time had passed; in her troubled consciousness, she lay in something like the nighthaze that you felt when you had to get up for the milking, but still half slept; the pre-dawn light would then come brushing like a veil of dew over your body, and she felt it now, the tenderest caressing on her skin along her thigh.
His lips moved there; Moshe was kneeling alongside the couch, and his head moved along her bared thigh, and gently his hand raised her slip. Languorously Leah felt his lips brushing over her belly and beneath the curve of her breast. Her entire body burned and trembled while she yet pretended to herself to sleep, until his mouth touched her nipple, and she gasped.
“No, no it’s not right, it’s not fair to do this to me! No!” Leah moaned, while the hollows of her hands ached to stroke the black curly hair on his head, and in anguish she seized his hair and put his head away from her, his mouth away from her breast.
Then Moshe went over and sat on the edge of the large bed. She arose and dressed, and Moshe dressed too.