by Yael Neeman
The Narcissus group playing “We Are Indians.”
Yael stands second from the left, in pigtails.
For the subject “We Are Indians,” we set up a totem pole camp below the fortress, split into teams and slept in the tents we put up. We wore canvas sacks, our faces were marked with camouflage stripes day and night, our hair was braided and ribbons were tied around our forehead. We made a peace pipe. We lit a campfire every evening and ate potatoes that we roasted in it. At night, we guarded our Indian camp, two guards for every two-hour shift. The two camp guards on duty were on constant alert: one kept his ear to the ground to listen for noises, the other kept his bow drawn. The guards warned us when enemies were approaching: Nazis, terrorists, jackals or kids from the Oak group, who were always plotting to paint us with shoe polish. We all went out to fight the enemy with bows and arrows. We felt invincible; we were Indians.
When we were learning math or history in class and couldn’t listen or concentrate, Rivka would send us outside. “If you feel as if you’re disturbing the group,” she’d say, “please go outside.” At first, we didn’t move, either out of politeness or shame. “Outside, please,” she’d say in a sharper tone to whoever was disrupting the class. We went out. When the lesson was over, she asked what we’d done outside. We told her that we sailed on a raft in the reservoir, or, if there had been enough of us outside, also from the Terebinth or Oak groups, we played paper chase. She wanted to know all the details, as if she were the one who’d missed the break and the games, and we weren’t the ones who’d missed the lesson.
We studied the subject “Bird and Nest” in the fourth grade. They split us into pairs, and each pair observed a nest and, using stenciled pages prepared for us in advance, reported on what was happening in it. Idit and I managed to be together again. They said we were a bad influence on each other. That this would be the last time we’d be together if we didn’t learn to stop dragging each other into mischief.
We found a nest near the members’ clubhouse, our favorite place. The members’ clubhouse was a stone building different from all the other buildings on the kibbutz. It had hidden gardens and steps on both sides, so it wasn’t clear what was the front and what was the back. You could picture a servants’ entrance and an entrance for the ladies and gentlemen, and a place where cookies were served on the small lawn next to the library. And on the front lawn—or was it the back lawn?—was a white statue of a naked woman.
On that lawn, in a tree next to the statue, Idit and I found our nest. A sparrows’ nest. A real nest with fledglings in it.
After breakfast, each pair of birdwatchers (when “Bird and Nest” was our subject, we were all called birdwatchers) was given two hours to watch the birds and write a report that they’d read aloud in class the next day. Those free hours were a temptation for Idit and me, who dragged each other into mischief.
At first we thought, we don’t have to spend two whole hours at the nest every day in order to report on what’s happening inside it. And then we thought, actually, an hour is too much. And on the fourth or fifth day, we’d already stopped watching the birds.
We wrote our report every day, part of it entirely fictional. In our nest, the mother brought food for her chicks. The food suddenly dropped out of her beak, and the father would dive down to save it. Falcons (which were plentiful in the fortress) swooped over the nest and endangered the lives of the chicks. Suddenly, after we’d been watching for three days, the father stopped coming. Did he die, we asked the Narcissus children, and also Rivka, who had been listening raptly to our descriptions.
We used the time we were supposed to be bird watching to plan the great break-in—the break-in to the clubhouse. There was only one very obvious reason that we broke into places and committed crimes: candy. We weren’t envious of city kids because of their clothes, bicycles or skates. But we fantasized endlessly about candy, the way young boys fantasize about girls, the way young girls fantasize about love. They might not have suspected us, Idit and me, of that break-in, even though we were always dragging each other into mischief, because we were both so skinny. And girls, of course. And also, our reports on the birds and the nest were so believable.
The members’ clubhouse was an entire quarry of candy. There, in the closet, was where the refreshments were kept for the members who played chess there, or read newspapers or did other things about which we had absolutely no idea. They would go there after they had supper in the dining hall of their parallel universe. The dining hall and the clubhouse were part of the after-work lives of the members, where they talked about work schedules and holidays, where they mourned, where the endless rounds of anger, accusations, reconciliation and silences took place.
There were huge boxes of wafers and cookies in the clubhouse, and we could simply lift off a layer or two without anyone noticing, or so we thought. But in reality, the break-in was a lot more complicated. The clubhouse was locked, and we had to go in through the window. But the window was visible to anyone who came out the back door of the dining room. Anyone just happening to pass by would catch us.
Climbing up to the window, which was higher than we thought it would be, took a long time because neither one of us could boost the other up to it, and hanging there on the window, we couldn’t help each other open the screen, and when we finally got inside, covered in scratches from the rough wall, we had nothing to put our loot in, and we were terrified that we’d be caught.
We just wanted to get out of there, and in the end, we decided to take a full tin of wafers. We didn’t break in again, not after we had so much trouble closing the screen when we were outside. For the entire time we studied “Bird and Nest,” we lived on a stash of wafers that we buried under the tree where the bird, the fledglings and the nest were perched.
Later, in different contexts, they threatened to separate us again, or send us to a psychologist who, unlike the dentists, didn’t live in Nahariya or the northern suburbs of Haifa. They were further away and more expensive. And only when there was no other choice were we sent to them, to Haifa, usually to the upscale Merkaz Hacarmel neighborhood. We were sent to them in the hope of sweeping our problems out of the kibbutz, or at least, to keep the psychologists away from it. The Hungarians didn’t believe in psychology or psychologists, who they thought were more like astrologists than healers. Psychology served as permanent comic relief in Zambo’s parodies. For example, in the parody he wrote about the famous notebook diary, in which the nursery metapelet and the night guards, who were on weekly rotation, exchange instructions and reports on the condition of the babies and children sleeping in the children’s houses.
The metapelet writes to the guard:
Dear Guard,
Zohara is sick. She’ll most likely cry at night (the bed opposite the door). Give her a suppository. Don’t forget that she’s just a baby and the theory of how to treat babies we once learned in the agricultural college applies only to calves […]
All the best,
The nursery metapelet
And the guard replies to the nursery metapelet:
Dear nursery metapelet,
You left your book, Infant Psychology, in the nursery. I browsed through it, it’s very interesting, especially the chapter on bed-wetting during the oral stage. Ronit and Amit must have gone through a very difficult oral stage. I asked them if they read the book. No, they didn’t read it. But they still wet the bed three times. Just through healthy instinct. As you instructed, I changed their sheets twice, and the third time, they’d already learned how, and did it themselves.
All the best,
The guard
The children who were sent to a psychologist in the fancy Carmel neighborhood of Haifa were first diagnosed on the kibbutz with “special problems.” Sometimes the “special problems” diagnosis occurred after they set the granary on fire, or stole and drove a fire truck, or of course, if they killed an inordinate number of animals or killed them in a manner radically different from the accepted method.
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nbsp; Most of our dogs did not live long.
Many dangers lay in wait for them, both from the children and the adults. In the adult world, there was the person who poisoned them, who was also the vet. There was nothing to be done about that, because he was from there, from the land of the frozen Danube. There were many explanations for what he did. They said, among other things, that it was because there, the Nazis set dogs on him or his family.
Sometimes the poison was left for a specific animal, and sometimes it was spread throughout the kibbutz. They said that he had a certain quota. No one knew exactly how many, or whether it was really a matter of a quota. We didn’t know if it was a particular dog, or its color, or the fact of its existence that got on the poisoner’s nerves.
We, the Narcissus children, had Barak. We didn’t remember who found him and how he came to be ours, or even how we chose his name. We called him Barak. He lived only a short time, but his brief life was a happy one.
When he came to us, he was a tiny puppy and he especially loved our four shoe compartments, which were arranged according to the four rooms we slept in. He would burrow inside them until he grew large enough to live in the doghouse we built for him outside. We left him every day for only one hour and fifty minutes, when we went to visit our biological families as invited guests at 5:30 in the afternoon. At 7:20 in the evening, we returned to Barak, petted and hugged him, and he jumped on us and licked us.
Less than a year later, he died the natural death of all our dogs: he was poisoned. Most of the dogs on the kibbutz were poisoned to death. Either targeted or randomly. The poisoner, who was also the vet, really loved animals, and made sure they were given penicillin when they were sick. Everyone knew that we could call him in the middle of the night, anytime, anywhere, to treat an injured animal, and he would do everything to save it.
When Barak died, we buried him in the plot we’d prepared in front of the place we called “The Lovely Corner,” a natural, green lean-to very close to where his doghouse had been. We decided that there would be a seven-day mourning period, a shivah, during which we wouldn’t eat sweets between 5:30 and 7:20 in our biological parents’ houses. We lasted two days, and on the third, we went back to eating wafers, but we never forgot Barak.
The Oak children had the oldest dog. No one understood what was so special about Kushita, a small black dog, that kept her alive for so many years. In Narcissus, we called her “Dragon-Tailed Kushita.” We were jealous of the Oak kids for having their Kushita. Even though she was small, tangle-haired and black, she was alive, she survived.
She survived all the poisonings, both targeted and random, but she didn’t die of old age either.
There were several versions of Kushita’s death, but they all had one thing in common. A tractor driven by one of the children ran back and forth over her, and it was done right in front of the Oak kids.
Some people said that before she was run over, she was thrown off the top of the silo, which was ten stories high. Others said that before she was thrown out of the ten-story-high silo, she was put in a canvas sack with rocks so she’d fall faster, and still others said that she was put into a canvas sack without rocks so she’d fall slower.
Maybe Kushita’s surviving presence was too in-your-face for some people, and maybe her death had nothing to do with that. She died a natural death; it was natural for a dog to die that way on Kibbutz Yehiam: in a fall, run over or poisoned.
None of the grown-ups asked who ran her over, or even how Kushita died. Only the children speculated about the various accounts. When things happened, we never saw them happen. We would turn our backs in order not to know or see; or sometimes it was the other way around, we watched with wide-open eyes without knowing, without seeing. Back-turning was our native language: our backs saw like our eyes. Our eyes were as blind as our backs. And if the grown-ups were looking for one of the children, we crowded around him and around ourselves—we didn’t remember and didn’t know which one of us did what, or what was done to us or to our dogs.
The Oak group buried Kushita on their favorite piece of land and moved on. The sky didn’t fall. Maybe some committee dealt with the driver who ran her over.
When all the committees of the socialist method gave up on those children with “special problems,” they were removed from the kibbutz, like the jackals, and exiled to “special institutions.”
Our dogs were poisoned by the grown-ups, or dropped like rain from the silo by the children. Nevertheless, we were happy with our Subjects and with our recesses, when we dashed outside to play on the soccer field, Barak and Kushita running behind us, wagging their tails.
11
Sometimes we were so happy that we would freeze in the air for a second, and glide. The gliding happened suddenly, as we moved. We glided every day at 10:30 in the morning, when we ran through the shortcut to the soccer field after we finished working. We glided when we walked on the goal post on one end of the field, hovering as we balanced ourselves above the ground.
Sometimes we ran to the long, high laundry lines, checking to see that there were no grown-ups around to catch us red-handed as we hung like clothes, our hands clutching the long, strong ropes, while one of the kids turned the pulley so that we rode along them, breaking away slowly from the concrete, then breaking away from the world, our feet hovering high above the ground, our heads spinning in the air.
We glided when we drove in the race cars Zohar and Amram built in the fifth grade: a board on four wheels was the frame of the car, an iron chain served as the steering wheel, and a pole with a rubber-tipped bottom was the brakes. For endless days, we rode on carts from our biological parents’ houses back to the children’s houses. We said to them: “You don’t have to take us back, we have our car here,” and we took off, dragging the carts up the hills and flying down them on it, floating over the sharp turns, navigating with the chain, slowing down with the rubber brake.
We started working in the second grade. We worked in our rooms, we helped the metapelet, we worked on the children’s farm, and in our classroom. We worked on a weekly rotation, in teams of two to four children. Every week, we’d move on to the next job, and so on. The class work consisted of erasing the blackboard, picking up the chairs and putting them on the desks, and washing the floor of the classroom, which was in the Narcissus building, adjacent to our dining room. Helping the metapelet was easy work, but had to be done at inconvenient hours. Split shifts. We had to clear and clean the tables after breakfast and lunch in our dining room, then we had to make all kinds of deliveries with the metapelet’s cart, bring the sacks of clean laundry from the communa, bring food from the dining hall. Each task at a different time.
We hated working in our rooms the most. Our four rooms, each inhabited by four children, one in each corner, were always neat and orderly. We each made our beds and covered them with the thick yellow bedspreads right after we got up in the morning. But straightening things out was only the beginning; the order was meant to expose every corner and every baseboard that would then have to be scrubbed.
During the week we were scheduled to clean our rooms, we washed the floors every day at ten in the morning. After that, the metaplot washed them again. Every inch of our rooms was exposed. Except for the nightstands next to our beds, there was nothing. The rooms were spotless, almost sterilized, and the walls were painted in yellow oil-based paint so that they would also be washable. We were constantly told that cleanliness alone was not enough; absolute cleanliness was necessary to prevent the infiltration of germs, which might lead to epidemics in the children’s houses.
Children’s work included harvesting vegetables.
Our system, particularly the communal sleeping in the children’s houses, bred many disagreements, and maybe that was why everyone was so fixated on the cleaning rituals, which focused mainly on the bedrooms, as if the cleanliness proved the success of the children’s houses. The cleanliness was much taller and broader than we were. It was the cleanliness of a hospital,
of a prison. The head metaplot, the temporary metaplot, the rotating metaplot and we, the children, all functioned as workers in the cleanliness machine.
We swept the floor, then we scrubbed it with a stiff-bristled straw broom, soap and a river of hot water, and then we swept the river out through the corridor.
During the floor-washing ritual, which was repeated daily, we changed the hot water in the pail three times so that it wouldn’t be contaminated by the washrags, or the opposite, so that the washrags wouldn’t be contaminated by the water. We washed the rag over and over again, wrung it out as hard as we could, and dried the floor with it.
Three of the bedrooms lined the corridor, at the end of which was “the last room”—the one whose door opened onto the length of the corridor—and opposite it at the other end of the corridor was the metapelet’s room (where our clothes compartments were, divided according to rooms). From that room, the metapelet could, with one quick look, observe everything that was going on in the corridor. Sometimes, when the rotating metaplot worked with us, we tricked them with the last room, the fourth one. We used the entrance to the room as a façade: we placed the pail at the door with the washrag on it, as if we were in the middle of washing and would be back in just a second. We spread a bit of cleaning liquid on the floor, and then jumped out the window. From a quick metapelet glance from the end of the corridor, everything looked fine, and she was going to wash the floors after us anyway. She could yell at us later, we told ourselves, but now it was time to run. We jumped out the window and ran far away from there, gliding to the field so we’d have as much time as possible to play.
The children’s farm, meaning the children’s kibbutz (in parallel to the grown-ups’ farm, meaning the kibbutz) wasn’t a petting zoo as it sometimes seemed to the city people who came to visit us. The children’s farm was a kind of exemplar, a smaller model of the farm problems on the kibbutz. There, we were supposed to not only become attached to the animals, but also, and primarily, we were supposed to become educated in work, organization, cleanliness, self-discipline and teamwork, and it was also meant to hone our sense of responsibility (which, in any case, had been honed into the conscience we felt so constantly alive and burning inside us that it became an inner hump).
