Between Friends

by Amos Oz

  Since Nina Sirota had sought out Yoav Carni, the kibbutz secretary, the night he was on guard duty, their relationship had become one of cautious fondness and heightened awareness. Sometimes he asked her advice about matters on the kibbutz agenda. He didn’t always agree with her opinion, but he always found her to be original, lucid, and trustworthy. Early one Thursday evening he found her sitting on a bench in the garden watching her children play in the sandpit. He sat down on her left and they spoke a bit about the heat and the problem with the swimming pool. Then, as if reading his mind, Nina said that at the meeting on Saturday night, it might be a good idea to try and find a compromise on the question of Yotam’s trip to Italy. After all, when the time came, the kibbutz would send him to college anyway. And now that his uncle had invited him, maybe they should let him go before it was his turn, but only if he learned a profession the kibbutz chose together with him, instead of the irrelevant one his uncle had chosen. Yoav asked, “For example?”

  Nina replied, “For example, veterinary medicine. We have cows, sheep, and chickens here, not to mention our pets, and a vet comes from the city at least once a week. Yotam can study veterinary medicine in Italy. When he gets his degree, he can come back to Yekhat and be our vet and work in other villages in the area too. Why not?” Then she added, “I think he’d make a very good vet.”

  Yoav thought about it for a moment, shrugged, and said that they might be able to sell the idea, though it wouldn’t be easy, and only if Yotam agreed to postpone his trip for two years until it was his turn to go to college.

  Nina said, “One year?”

  Yoav shook his head, opened his mouth, closed it, hesitated, and finally said, “We could try. I’ll talk to him. The problem is that his mother is pressuring the whole kibbutz, making everyone angry and turning public opinion against him. And the second problem is that all the old-timers are still furious with Arthur because they think he deserted the kibbutz when he was sent to Italy. Yotam is a little in love with you, isn’t he? Maybe you should talk to him?”

  “I like him, too, but I’m not sure I want to talk to him about this. I think I’ll embarrass him too much. It’s better if you speak to him. Have you noticed that he has no friends?”

  Yoav said, “On the kibbutz, it’s hard to know. We’re all supposed to be friends, but only very few really are. Take me, for example. I only have two or three personal friends, people I enjoy being with even if we don’t talk. I don’t think you have more than that either.” He had a strong urge to tell her that what they, he and Nina, had together was close to what he considered friendship, but he hesitated, then decided not to say it.

  “In ten or twenty years,” Nina said, “the kibbutz will be a much more relaxed place. Now, all the springs are tightly coiled and the entire machine is still shaking from the strain. The old-timers are actually religious people who left their old religion for a new one that’s just as full of sins and transgressions, prohibitions and strict rules. They haven’t stopped being true believers; they’ve simply exchanged one belief system for another. Marx is their Talmud. The general meeting is the synagogue and David Dagan is their rabbi. I can easily picture some of the men here with beards and sidelocks, and some of the women in head coverings. But slowly, times will change and other, more relaxed people will come, and like you, Yoav, they’ll be people with patience and doubts and compassion.”

  “You’re completely wrong about me, Nina. I also have principles that I try not to deviate from. I also think that the kibbutz can’t exist without a framework and rules and basic principles. Veterinary medicine, maybe, yes, it’s an idea. And it suits Yotam much more than mechanical engineering. Yes. Maybe. But not now. In two years, when it’s his turn to go to college. That, I might be able to push through at the meeting Saturday night. Not mechanical engineering and not now, but veterinary medicine in another two years.”

  “One?”

  “It’ll be difficult. There’ll be a big battle at the meeting. David Dagan will sound off. The old-timers will object on principle to taking money from the uncle—they despise Arthur—and the young people will probably be split on the vote. It’ll be difficult and complicated, Nina.”

  On Saturday morning, the day the kibbutz general meeting was scheduled to discuss and vote on the matter of Yotam’s attending college in Italy, David Dagan went to Yotam Kalisch’s room. Yotam, who’d slept late, was still in bed clad in only underpants and undershirt, and his large hands pulled the sheet over the lower half of his body to hide his morning erection. David was wearing sharply creased khaki trousers and a light-blue short-sleeved shirt with a battery of three pens sticking out of the breast pocket. He had very straight, almost military, posture and his shoulders were strong and square. His full head of graying hair was tousled just enough to look dashing but not completely unkempt. David, who’d been Yotam’s teacher a few years earlier, gave him an offhand hello and sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed. Yotam hesitated and, moving awkwardly under his sheet, pulled on the work trousers he picked up from the floor, then leaned over and turned on the electric fan. David scrutinized him until he was finished and had sat up, then gestured for him to take a seat on one of the wicker stools. Yotam obediently moved over to the stool.

  “I’m worried,” David began without preamble, “about Henia. She’s taking all this very hard. You’ve put your mother in a difficult position with our members.”

  Yotam was silent and stared at the window.

  “And just when I’ve been hearing that you’re doing such an outstanding job in the orchards.”

  Yotam remained silent.

  “Do you want to be a mechanical engineer?”

  “Not exactly, but . . . ”

  “But you feel suffocated here and the big world is so alluring,” David said without a question mark at the end of his sentence. “You’ll be surprised to hear that I also find the big world alluring. I’d love to see Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples.”

  Yotam shrugged. David put a hand on his knee and said quietly, “But every Jew of the generation that witnessed the Holocaust, and especially now, so soon after the rebirth of the State of Israel, must see himself as mobilized to a cause. These are the most critical years in the entire history of the Jewish people.”

  Yotam said, “The thing is I can’t take it anymore. I have no air.”

  David looked at Yotam with affection and curiosity. Then he said, “All right. Go.” And added, “Just give me a minute to set things straight. At tonight’s meeting, I’ll recommend that the kibbutz grant you two or three weeks off out of consideration for your personal crisis. Go to Italy. See your uncle. Breathe some new air. Then return to us with renewed energy and go back to your job in the orchards.”

  Yotam tried to say something, but David Dagan placed a fatherly hand on his shoulder and interrupted him, “Please, think it over. Think it over till tonight.” And as he was leaving, he said, “Don’t force the kibbutz to slam the door in your face tonight, Yotam, and especially not in Henia’s face. Think calmly about my offer. Please decide by tonight.”

  At two in the afternoon, when the oppressive heat had crushed the life out of everything and the low sky was a polluted gray color, Yotam left his room and walked down the paved path through Housing Area 3, past the cow barns and the chicken coops. There was no one outside because they were all having their Saturday afternoon rest. Not a single living soul saw him except for a thirsty dog, and Yotam stopped for a moment to turn on the garden tap for it. The dog lapped up the water noisily, its head and snout getting wet in the flow. Then it shook itself, spraying water in every direction, panted, wagged its tail rapidly, and knelt down on its front legs as if prostrating itself in front of Yotam. He petted the animal distractedly, then continued walking across the heat-choked lawns and among trees that looked inanimate because no wind touched them.

  Passing Nina Sirota’s apartment, he quickened his steps, hoping she wouldn’t happen to emerge just then, wishing at the same time that the d
oor would open and she’d come out and talk to him about Italy and perhaps understand him. Even though he really had no idea what he could say to her. The entire kibbutz was talking about his request to be sent to Italy, and that night, he’d stand in front of everyone and the secretary would give him the floor and three hundred pairs of eyes would glare at him, and he still had no idea what he could say. And if Nina came out of her apartment this very moment? What could he say to her?

  Piles of slop lay between the cow barns, and old tires and bits of scrap metal were scattered on the ground along with a few discarded, rusty milking pails. Yellowing bits of newspaper were trapped among the nettles and bindweed that grew between the barns. Yotam crossed the area of the barns and coops and went out to the fields through the back gate, known on the kibbutz as the Dung Gate. The path soon led to a plowed field on the right and a vineyard on the left, both swathed in dust because of the intense, dry heat. Very quickly Yotam felt the dust slip beneath his clothes and stick to his sweaty skin. Not a single breath of wind stirred the congealed air. He lingered at the cemetery, thinking for a moment that he might visit the grave of his father, who had died of kidney disease when Yotam was eleven, but then he decided to sit on the bench at the cemetery gate for five minutes. He thought about his father, one of the kibbutz founders, who had spent his life working in the sheep pen. He’d been seriously injured in the War of Independence on the night Kibbutz Yekhat was invaded and burned to the ground by an Arab mob from Deir Ajloun and the nearby villages. Six weeks later, the tables were turned and Deir Ajloun was destroyed by the Israeli army, all the inhabitants driven off to the mountains and their fields divided among the kibbutzim in the area. Then Yotam thought about Arthur, who’d dared to disobey the general meeting, had cut off all contact with the kibbutz and the country, and refused to serve the cause when the war was over. He’d built the life that he, and only he, had wanted. I can get up and go too and build the life I want. David Dagan said that in this generation, the generation of the Holocaust and Israel’s War of Independence, each of us must be mobilized to the cause. Yotam could find no argument against that claim. But suddenly the phrase “his days are as grass” came into his head and made him think how fleeting life is.

  He stood up and walked for another twenty minutes along the path that wound between the plowed fields until he was in the hills. For some reason, Yotam thought that here, in the hills, the heat would be less brutal than on the plains. But the thorns, the prickly cacti that grew along the side of the road, and the exposed rocks on the slopes seemed to smolder, and Yotam felt as if he were drowning in sweat. His throat was dry and rough, and his feet in their open sandals were rubbed raw by the mixture of sweat and sand.

  At three in the afternoon, when the predatory sun was crushing the ruins and boiling the soil and the stones, Yotam reached the destroyed village of Deir Ajloun. He wandered around for forty minutes or so, ran his hands over the vestiges of the decapitated mosque, bent over to pick up a piece of earthenware that once had been the neck of a jar, passed a grindstone half buried in the ground. He wandered along paths strewn with pottery shards and thorns. A frightened lizard darted past his feet. And the smell of smoke hung in the air like an echo; it wasn’t clear to Yotam where that smell was coming from, perhaps from thorns burning somewhere in the distance. Finally he reached the blocked well with the faint stench of dead animals rising from its depths. Yotam sat down on the edge of the well and waited, though he didn’t know what he was waiting for or why. He heard the sounds of the kibbutz in the distance, strange, melancholy noises that seemed to come to him through a thick stone wall: a dull beating; the clang of metal against metal; the faint barking of dogs; the whirring of a raspy motor, maybe a tractor someone was having trouble starting; and also a person’s voice shouting and shouting beyond the distance and the blazing heat. He leaned over the well, saw only darkness, and thought he heard a steady, unbroken murmur, the soft whisper of a distant sea, the sound you hear when you put a seashell to your ear. For a moment, he imagined that he had already left the kibbutz and gone off to a new life, a life without committees, general meetings, public opinion, or the-fate-of-the-Jews. A moment later he thought of Nina Sirota and asked himself if she, like almost everyone else on the kibbutz, would have voted against him tonight. Then he answered his own question: neither Nina nor anyone else on the kibbutz had any reason to support his request, and if it had come from any of the other young people, he himself might have thought, What makes him so special? and would vote with the nays. It was clear to him now that the real issue wasn’t Arthur’s invitation but whether he had enough courage to leave the kibbutz, his mother, and his brother and go out into the world with only the shirt on his back. To that question he found no answer. Thorns and dry leaves stuck to his clothes and he stood up and brushed off his trousers and shirt. Then he began to walk, though what he wanted more than anything was to remain sitting there among the ruins of Deir Ajloun, on the edge of the blocked well, to sit there utterly still, his mind empty of thoughts, and to wait.

  Esperanto

  MARTIN VANDENBERG’S NEIGHBOR, Osnat, stopped by to see him one evening carrying a tray set with a plate covered with another plate and a cup covered with a saucer. Martin lived alone and had a respiratory condition, the result of years of smoking. In the afternoon, he would sit on his small porch and read the paper, occasionally breathing through a mask attached to an oxygen tank because his lungs were failing. He sometimes used the mask at night, too. Nonetheless, when he had the strength, he got up at six in the morning and went to work for three or four hours in the shoe repair shop. He was a firm believer in the principle that we must all devote ourselves to physical labor. “Work,” he said, “is a moral and spiritual necessity.”

  “I’ve brought you something light from the dining hall. How about putting the paper down now and eating?”

  “Thank you. I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat. Just the omelet and the salad.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Later the omelet’ll be cold and the salad’ll lose its crispness.”

  “I’m getting cold and losing my crispness, too. Thank you, Osnat. Really. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “So who will?”

  For several months now, ever since Boaz left her and moved in with Ariella Barash, Osnat had been living alone next door. Early every evening, she’d bring Martin supper on a tray because the uphill walk to the dining hall had become too difficult and left him short of breath. He had come to us, alone, from another kibbutz, where all the members were from Holland. He had left them over an ideological disagreement: they allowed Holocaust survivors to keep part of their German reparation money in private bank accounts, while Martin, also a survivor, thought that property was original sin, especially reparations from Germany, which amounted to blood money.

  A stubborn, opinionated man, he was thin and had frizzy gray hair as stiff as steel wool, small eyes that were black and penetrating, thick eyebrows, sunken cheeks, and stooped shoulders. His breathing was loud and raspy from the emphysema. But, despite the disease, he occasionally smoked half a cigarette, wheezed, and refused to give in. He had taught Esperanto in Rotterdam when he was a young man, but since his arrival in Israel in 1949, he had no opportunity to use that remarkable language. The small Esperanto course he had wanted to give here on Kibbutz Yekhat never panned out. It was his belief that states should be abolished and replaced by an international, pacifist brotherhood that would reign after the borders between peoples were erased. When he came to us, he wanted to learn how to be a shoemaker, and not only did a fine job of repairing our shoes, but also made children’s shoes and sandals himself. Dr. Shoemaker, we called him.

  On the kibbutz, he was considered a model of morality. At general meetings, he often reminded us of why the kibbutz movement was founded and what its original ideals had been. Nevertheless, there were those who thought him odd because in all the years he’d been with us, he never mis
sed a single day of work. If he took sick and had to stay in bed for a day or two, he’d open the shoe repair shop on Saturdays to give the community back the time he’d missed. He believed that the entire world would wake up one day soon and abolish money altogether, since money was the root of all evil, a constant cause of war, conflict, and exploitation. On top of all this, he was also a vegetarian. Roni Shindlin, the comedian, called him the Gandhi of Kibbutz Yekhat. Two years ago, Roni came to our Purim costume party dressed up as Martin Vandenberg. He wore a white sheet and dragged a goat behind him with a sign in Esperanto hanging around its neck that said: I’m a person too.

  Osnat said, “If you eat, I’ll stay with you for a while. And I’ll play two or three songs for you until you fall asleep.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “If you eat at least half the omelet, I’ll play you one song, and if you eat half the omelet and some yogurt, I’ll play you two, and if you eat the salad and the bread, too, you can give me a short lecture.”

  “You can go. Go. There’s music outside, lots of young men, and there’s dancing. Go.”

  But a moment later, he relented. “Okay. Okay. You win. I’ll eat a little. Here, see for yourself. I’m eating.”

  Osnat had brought a simple recorder with her, the kind we give to young children, and as he ate, she played “On the Shore of Lake Kinneret” and “They Say There’s a Land.” Martin ate a few mouthfuls of the omelet and a little yogurt, grimaced, and didn’t touch the salad or the bread, but let Osnat help him sip some of the lukewarm tea from the cup she’d brought from the dining hall. On principle, he didn’t keep a private kettle or cups in his room: accumulating possessions is the curse of human society; it is the nature of possessions slowly to take over the soul and enslave it. Nor did Martin believe in the institution of family, because a family unit, by its very nature, creates an unnecessary barrier between itself and society. He believed that the community, not the biological parents, should raise the children: everything here belongs to all of us, we all belong to each other, and the children should belong to all of us, too.