by Yael Neeman
Even though we couldn’t really feel the legend in Kerem Shalom, we believed that it existed, and were happy to be there, away from our lives for a week. We told our group mates who’d visited a religious moshav about our experience, and they told us about theirs.
They said that their hosts on the religious moshav were very warm, good people, excellent basketball players and not half bad at soccer. They told us that they slept in their houses, played with them, went to class with them and worked in the citrus orchards with them twice in the middle of the week. But the most interesting thing was the weekend, when they spent the Sabbath with them. The atmosphere was different, they said, when Sabbath began on Friday night. Loud, joyous singing, prayer, and a large, delicious meal. The next day, Saturday, they were invited to a meeting with the rabbi.
Many of our group mates were late to the meeting. They’d fallen asleep. They said that the rabbi managed to work everything that happened into his talk. He used the latecomers, for example, to provide two examples of what proper behavior on the Sabbath should be: The first took place right at the beginning, when the ones who had come on time were already seated and the latecomers rang the bell. The rabbi, half smiling and half shocked, explained that both he and they were forbidden to open the door because that would continue the desecration of the Sabbath, which began with the ringing of the bell.
But after the latecomers somehow managed to enter and saw that there weren’t enough chairs for them, the rabbi explained that nothing prevented them from walking the long way back to get more chairs, even if they thought that was strenuous work, which is forbidden on the Sabbath. He explained that there was no connection between physical labor that didn’t necessarily desecrate the Sabbath, and work that did.
At night, they slept in pairs or threesomes in their hosts’ homes. The rabbi and his wife, who also hosted them in their home, sat with their guests every night and told them so many things that they couldn’t remember all of them when they recounted their experiences to us. For instance, the rabbi and his wife told them about the wonders of nida, the tradition of married women sleeping alone during menstruation. Every month, when menstruation was over, a woman became a beautiful bride again.
The high point of all of our Broadening Horizons Weeks was in our senior year. We went to Tel Aviv to see and experience the way people worked in the big city, how the capitalist urbanites exploited the factory workers.
We slept in the Bnei Dan hostel near the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv, and for a week, we worked in factories in Ramat Hayal, which, at the time, was in the industrial area. We worked in the Sinon factory, which made air filters for vehicles, in the Shavit oven factory, owned by Booma Shavit, who was the Chairman of the Industrialists Association, and in the Til Ohn wire and screw factory.
In the factories, we sat at a real production line that seemed to have been leased from the set of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times especially for us.
We started work early in the morning. We took two buses or walked a long way to a different bus stop in order to get there on time. We pestered the workers with questions: How much did they earn? Did they get breaks? Why didn’t they organize in order to improve conditions? We were there for a week and left. They worked there for decades.
On the kibbutz, we sang, “We know nothing about taxes and fees/But we know about flowers and trees,” and perhaps because they didn’t want to make life difficult for us with problems like cash flow or overdraft, we received in advance what they said was the equivalent of a week’s wages. No one mentioned overtime, bonuses, vacation days, time clocks, etc.
We worked four or six hours a day so we would have the strength to have afternoon meetings with the urban workers, our brothers in the struggle. No homeroom teachers or metaplot came with us on our Broadening Horizons Weeks. We went out to enjoy ourselves at night. Money wasn’t a problem, because we’d received minimum wage for our half-days of work, and we didn’t have to buy clothes, pay rent, raise children, pay bills, buy food or pay interest on our overdraft. All the money was invested in bus rides and entertainment.
But instead of being convinced of the rightness of our system, or drawing the workers to it, we were drawn to city life. We went to movies, plays and teahouses. We saw Camus’ The Fall on the stage with Nico Nitai. We ordered smoked tea. We laughed constantly. Idit adopted a dog, a puppy that was walking along near the factories, and we called her Tsippi. Even though we worked seemingly monotonous jobs in the factories, many unexpected things happened to us there, on the buses and in the hostel. We saw the city and met the sort of people we’d never met before. Everything had flavor. For a week, we forgot our fear that perhaps life had no meaning. We were busy and we laughed all evening. We wanted to go out more and more.
Every summer, when the year at the Institution ended, we detached ourselves from the Shomrat kids, who had been welded to us in the Seagull group, and to the rest of the Institution kids who weren’t from Yehiam, the ones from Gaaton and Evron, the ones who were in higher and lower grades than we were—we said goodbye to everyone we loved, or were undecided about whether we loved them or not, because there were no couples from the same kibbutz, only ones made up of boys and girls from different kibbutzim. We knew that we’d be apart for months, and would only see them on a few trips and visits.
In June, right before the summer vacation, we spent a great deal of time together. Maybe because we’d soon be saying goodbye. We bought watermelons and went to the Nahariya beach at night. We swam and talked.
When we came back from the beach, we dreamed that the waves were huge, reaching up to touch the sky, and in the dream, we were shocked but excited, as if we had actually experienced a natural phenomenon in our sleep.
During recesses, we lay on the lawn and stared up at the treetops. The grass was soft, tall and very green—it sparkled. We thought about things. We were happy and unhappy with no connection to what was happening. One moment up, the next down. We talked about the boys we loved or maybe were only attracted to. We closed our eyes and opened them. The sun shone through the leaves. We wanted to know whether attraction and love were the same thing. Hagit explained to us what sexy meant. We wanted to think that anything (including attraction) but love was happening to us; we didn’t want to be dependent on the boys, as if they were dragging us, tied to a sled, from now to forever. Being dependent on love was as sweet as love and as bitter as dependence. We were flung from bitterness to sweetness as if from hilltop to hilltop, and in between, a gaping abyss—the grass on which we lay.
Shlomi left class and came to the lawn to call us in for a literature or psychology lesson. We said we’d be right there, in a minute, we’re coming. When he went back, we kept talking and forgot. Then it was too late and there was no point in going to class. Shlomi was from Shomrat, and the Shomrat girls said we’d see each other a lot, but every year, things had their own cycles, their own seasons, and in the summer, we worked on the kibbutzim and forgot the rest of the year. We went back to being Narcissus, Anemone, Terebinth and Oak, and for two months, we lived our lives on Kibbutz Yehiam.
15
Every September, we returned to the Educational Institution after two month’s summer vacation, during which we worked on our kibbutzim.
From one year to the next, everything became more. In the tenth grade, it was as if we’d moved all at once from thinking to acting, from standing to moving. We no longer exaggerated when we talked about what we did. What we did exaggerated itself. We collided with the world. The world was present, and so were we and what we did.
Love remained intangible, but its results were felt everywhere: Couples walked hand in hand all the time; some girls stayed on their kibbutzim with volunteers, or with boys from their groups, slipping back to the Educational Institution in the morning. There were couples who slept together in the Institution and went back to their beds before the metaplot went from room to room waking us up. Some couples walked along the peripheral road that encircled the Institution up
to the reservoir, or had sex in the air raid shelters on thin mattresses, or without mattresses at all, or on a blanket outside; some had sex on the beds in their rooms, and sometimes, the others who lived in those rooms were there, lying on the other beds, and sometimes they weren’t.
On the afternoons when we didn’t work, we wandered or stretched out on the lawn near our classroom in Seagull, or we sat in the basketball court stands, looking beyond the boys playing there, or stared at the ground as we drew imaginary circles on earth and concrete with branches.
“I’m late this month,” one of the girls would sometimes say in terror during those moments, as if the words were being pushed out of her mouth against her will. We caught our breath, looked at her for a moment, checked ourselves, not knowing whether it was happening in our bodies or in our friend’s, no matter if we’d had sex already or not. As if the power of fear alone could impregnate us with something we’d never known before. What was she saying now, something about herself or about us? How should we reply?
Abortions were arranged by the kibbutzim, not the Institution. On Yehiam, my mother was the nurse, and the abortions were done in Nahariya, with the kibbutz nurse. Anyone who had to go through it, went through it. Once or twice or three times. They said it wasn’t a matter of luck, that something could be done to prevent it from happening. But it was a matter of luck too—once or twice or three times.
In the morning, during breaks, we talked with the girls about what love was, and at night, sometimes with the boys. We thought constantly about what love was. We opened and closed our eyes when we talked about it, we looked at the sky or the ground to keep from looking into the eyes of the people who were speaking. We thought they couldn’t see anything on us. We hoped they couldn’t see anything on us. There was nowhere to hide. We were always in the light—the sunlight in the morning and the lamps at night, in the rooms that four of us shared, one in each corner, where someone was always reading or doing something else with the light on.
Those who didn’t want to see or be seen covered their eyes with their hands.
Idit and I wrote to each other constantly. During classes and afterwards. And we were always together anyway. When everything was exaggerated and had become more—we also moved into the same room.
We moved into the room that adjoined our classroom. An open concrete area separated those two rooms from the rest of the long building that contained all the other rooms, the two communal shower rooms (one for boys, one for girls) and the two communal bathrooms we all used. “Our” room was tiny. Until we invaded it, it had been called “the metapelet’s room,” and it contained a supply of toilet paper as well as tea and sugar for the coffee corner that was right next to it. Once a year, they held a round of homeroom teachers’ talks in it. But most of the year, it was empty. The emptiness piqued our interest. We made it habitable and simply moved into it. They couldn’t find a clause that would support an objection, and we stayed there.
Later, we opened a teahouse in an empty air raid shelter. We painted it blue, and Idit drew an enormous mural on one of the walls. Using a magic lantern, she projected the original on the wall and for days, she worked on a painting on the blue wall. In the Regional Council building, we found a huge record collection kept there by Arieh, the music teacher from Beit Haemek. We moved the collection to our teahouse. We told each other that if Arieh knew where his classical music records had disappeared to, he might even be happy about it. We made menus listing a variety of teas and announced the opening of our teahouse. People read there, drank tea, listened to Beethoven symphonies from Arieh’s collection, and sometimes held meetings of the newsletter or cultural committees there. The teahouse became one of the places to wander to. All the places that weren’t locked were also accessible in the evenings—the reading room, the painting room, the music room, the shelters where instrumental groups and singers rehearsed. We wandered from place to place, searching for quiet, searching for noise. Everyone asked, “Where is everyone?”
Idit and I saw signs in everything, as if our eyes kept opening wider and wider until the shadow of hills looked like hills or like valleys to us. We preferred living the signs to living the world. We tried to avoid the world, to keep it at bay behind the door, to prevent any contact between us and it.
Idit studied painting, music and dancing. I read, fasted, abstained and swore oaths. First I stopped eating meat for a week. Then I tried not to eat at all for a few days. Then I stopped talking for a week. When my teachers asked me about that, I handed them a page of explanation I’d written.
We felt that if we isolated things we might understand or know. We wrote down the dreams we had at night, believed that they spoke the truth. We searched for truth as if it were an object we couldn’t see in the dark.
When Margalit came to wake us in the morning, I fainted at the end of one of my fasts. She was frightened. She stood at the door to our room and explained to us the world we were trying to avoid. She said that there were people who didn’t stop observing things from the outside even after their adolescence, people who never really entered life, and that kept them adolescents ever after they’d become adults. Everyone knows where adolescence begins, she said, but no one knows where it ends.
Yael at the Educational Institution.
Two meters separated Idit and me in our room, and three meters separated my desk from hers in class—she sat diagonally in front of me. And the shorter the distance between us, the longer our letters grew.
We were all children of the system, its students, and we usually became youth movement leaders (the Hashomer Hatzair movement, of course), in the tenth grade. When we were in the ninth grade, the Grove group, which was a grade ahead of us, didn’t have enough group leaders, so I became a youth group leader together with Rami, who was already in the tenth grade.
Apart from organizing the activities, which took place once a week in the Nahariya Hashomer Hatzair chapter, Rami and I also went to camps and on trips together. Walking the road to Nahariya with Rami was the continuation of a much longer path, as if we’d walked it together even before we were born, in other landscapes.
Our mothers had known each other back in Budapest, and were already friends there. Later they were in the same Hashomer Hatzair core group, The First of May. Then after the war, each came separately to the same Shuffiya hills, my mother to Yehiam and his to Gaaton.
Rami’s parents, along with Rami and his three sisters, came to visit us on Yehiam, and we visited them on Gaaton; we lived two kilometers apart. Rami’s older sisters were the same age as my older brothers, and had been in the same groups at the Educational Institution since they were twelve. His sisters played the violin and viola, Rami played the cello and his father and youngest sister also played the violin, so that in almost any situation, they could play a quartet.
When we became youth group leaders together, we discovered that we had both signed out the same library books. The Institution library was open five days a week. It contained thousands of books: textbooks, literary fiction and reference books. All the newest books of fiction fell apart when Rami or I read them the first time. We could also borrow books from the kibbutz libraries, which were even larger. By looking at the lenders card in a book, we could tell who had read it before us.
Rami, Idit and I also loved going to shows, plays and concerts in the Evron hall.
We didn’t have to move from where we were. In those days, we were the center of the world, and everyone came to us. Performers toured all the kibbutzim; the culture committees had huge budgets. Kibbutz Evron had a modern hall with excellent acoustics. We saw major singers there, as well as fringe performers who would become major several years later. We could get in to see anything. We heard all the concerts and saw all the plays and dance performances.
When Rami and I completed our year as youth group leaders, I continued to speak to him in my mind. At first, I thought it was out of habit, that we used to talk like that while walking to our group activities in Nah
ariya, on the trips and on our way to the youth camps. Then I thought that it might be because of our families’ years of friendship.
But it was something else, something that persisted. As if the previous order of my life were betraying me, refusing to return to what it had been.
Idit and I wrote each other and talked about Rami too, asking why it was that the girls never loved the boys who loved them and vice versa. Rami asked Idit to be his girlfriend when we were in the eighth grade, and Tali, of the Grove group, would occasionally come to a Seagull girl with a proposal from a Grove boy to be his girlfriend. Idit met with Rami then and told him that she wasn’t interested. And she didn’t become interested later on either. As far as she was concerned, it belonged to the past.
But I grew entrapped in my thoughts of him, as if they had become a giant labyrinth, a hidden city, an entire world. I began to see signs in everything: After all, we borrowed the same library books and always went to the same performances; after all, Romeo and Juliet could have been Ram and Yael, like in Itzhak Salkinson’s old translation of the play, which we had both taken out of the library; after all, we could have been neighbors living two kilometers apart not only in Gaaton and Yehiam, but in Buda and Pest, and instead of swimming in the Gaaton River, we could have swum in the freezing water of the Danube like my mother had, like perhaps his mother had.
At night, I dreamt about Rami. Simple dreams, with no plot complications. As if a plot would only conceal him. The melody of the dream was sweet, like the absence of worry. And while the plot was so clear at night, I didn’t understand it in the morning.
When none of that passed, I wrote him an eleven-page letter. I wrote that I didn’t know whether I loved him or just thought about him, whether I spoke to him or just to an imaginary figure I could direct my inner speech at. (Sometimes I thought of him as a huge cat because he had soft, almost white hair and his eyes were as green as a cat’s. He always walked quietly, stepping high, as if he were drawn by the air, not the ground, and because of the total silence he walked within, he would always appear in unexpected places.)
