Leah's Journey Read Online Free Page A

refuge there just like the small crippled girl who huddled in shadowy doorways. She could not stay there forever, she knew, and the time was coming when she would have to make a decision.
    She was certain now, not with joy but with terror, that she was pregnant. There was no longer any need to count the weeks since her last menstrual flow or to touch her breasts, now grown full and tender. The child within her was growing and in a few more months it would stir with life. And soon too, her condition would become obvious and her secret would be common knowledge.
    She knew there were those who might seize strands of hope from her pregnancy and the birth of her child. A life had been taken, they would say, but one had been given, blessed be the name of the Lord who fathered the fatherless. An infant had been named in the synagogue just after the pogrom had at last been squelched by government forces. The aged rabbi who during his years of service in Odessa had intoned the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for more Jewish souls than he could remember, had lifted the newborn baby high for the entire congregation to see. It was a girl and its mother’s cries of labor had mingled with the screaming of dying children and the moaning of bereaved men and women. The child had been born on a night when the town blazed with fire and shards of broken glass littered the cobbled streets so that the horses of the funeral carts kicked wildly and would not pass through. But the newborn was a healthy baby, weighing almost ten pounds, and the assembled congregation smiled as the infant stretched luxuriously and purred through dreamless sleep.
    “The parents of the child name her Tikva—hope,” the rabbi told the worshipers. “Her birth and her name are a message for all of us. Where there is death there is also life. We dare not despair. We go on. We bring forth new children to take up our faith and we entrust them to God’s care because in His mercy He shall see that Israel will endure, that new generations will rise up.”
    Leah, sitting in a rear pew, leaned forward with the other women, as they lifted the thick gauze curtain that separated them from the men so that they could see the child. They murmured softly, with satisfaction, as the strong baby kicked away its swaddling and they smiled when the young father, wrapped in his prayer shawl, carried his child down from the pulpit.
    It would be said of Leah’s child, also, that the new birth marked the continuity of the generations, that Yaakov’s child was an obscure compensation for Yaakov’s death, that it would provide comfort for her, grant her a gain against the magnitude of her loss. But what would happen to their emotional bookkeeping if she were to announce that it was possible that the child that clung so tenaciously to her womb was not of her dead husband’s seed, that it might have been conceived through struggle and hatred? She had thought she was pregnant in the innocence of that August morning but it had been too soon to know. In moments of calm she assured herself that the child was Yaakov’s, born of their tenderness, but the stormy moods of uncertainty tore into that calm, forcing her to recognize that she might have been impregnated by the redheaded woodsman whose laugh was tinged with fury and whose eyes had burned with hatred.
    It had taken her weeks to organize her thoughts, to recognize the consequences of that anguished struggle. Even in the blind hours that followed Petrovich’s attack, when she had at last struggled to her feet, removed the ripped dress, remembering to shred the fabric even more and to consign it to the rag pile, she had thrust all thought from her mind. She had washed herself over and over, using a coarse sponge and rubbing the lower part of her body with such fierce strength that for weeks afterward it remained red and raw. She had put on a winter dress, thinking of the thick material as a shield, and run through field and thicket to