by Yael Neeman
Rami received the letter, and in the Institution’s dining hall, when we were stacking dishes in the large stainless steel sinks, he came over to me. We arranged to meet at eight that night at the regular place, the bus stop, where the circular paths around the Institution began. We walked to the Regional Council building. Flowers grew there and the grass was green and soft. Rami said that I was going around in circles, that everything was simple. “The complication is only in your mind,” he said. “Love is as simple as knowledge,” he said.
At the end of my first notebook of dreams, I wrote about the image of Rami that appeared constantly in my dreams:
Rami—my relationship to him is not very clearly defined. We were youth group leaders together, and at some point, I was sure that I loved him. Maybe sometimes now too. Even after writing to him and seeing him, I still feel the same way, that I don’t know. Zohar appears in my dreams a lot, and always with Rami. I think that Zohar in my dreams is a symbol of what I’d like to continue being, because on one hand, Zohar is like me, from Seagull and from Yehiam, but on the other, the relationship between Rami and Zohar is not “suspicious” because they’re both boys, and also because Zohar has a good reason to be with Rami—they both play in the same music group. Back when we saw each other a lot, because we were group leaders together, we didn’t need a reason or an excuse, and we didn’t need to define our relationship exactly, love or friendship. It just was.
All that time, Rami loved Idit. He asked her to be his girlfriend twice. The first time, when we were in the eighth grade, and the second time, he went to see her in the piano room when she was playing and tried to persuade her. That was several months after the long letter I wrote to him and after he and I walked to the Regional Council building, and at the same time, Idit and I were writing to each other about how the girls never loved the boys who loved them and vice versa.
Back then, so many things happened in a few months. The ones who loved, no longer loved, and the ones who didn’t love—loved. But between Rami and Idit, nothing changed during those two years.
I was sick, and back on Yehiam because when we were unwell or pregnant, when something went wrong, we left the Institution and stayed on the kibbutz until we were healthy again. Even when we were on our kibbutzim, Idit and I wrote to each other every day. (There were no phones in our parents’ houses, and of course, not in the Institution either. On Yehiam, there was one phone available to the members. They would turn off the meter after they used it, and write in pencil the number of calls they made. That was only so the kibbutz could keep track—no one was charged.) We sent the letters we wrote with our teachers, who traveled to the Institution and back every day.
Idit wrote to me:
This is how I felt this morning/or: The Night of the 15th …/or: The Fall
You’ll understand in a minute what all those titles hint at, and when you get well, I’ll tell you everything and I hope it won’t make you sick again. I keep thinking that you know what happened yesterday and I really don’t have to tell you, but…
Silence…
Yesterday, Rami asked me to be his girlfriend. In a totally egotistical way. He said: “I know that things can’t get any worse for me than they are now (time did not make it better). I’ve been stuck in the same place for two years,” and he thinks and asks me to be his girlfriend, no matter where it leads, just as long as it leads somewhere.
He tried to get back on his feet, but fell again—hopeless. He sees himself as a different person after those two years, even when it comes to me. He wants to get to know me and know how things will end up… He said that he knows I’m the one who has to make the effort, but he’s asking me to make it because he thinks he has no other choice now. It never occurred to him that the answer would be “no,” and he also said that he couldn’t consider the possibility of a no, but he knew about Micah the whole time.
Okay, that’s more or less what I remember of what he said, but I’ll also tell you what I said.
I hope that this isn’t making you mad… He’s smart and all that, but he’s NOT FOR ME.
I explained to him, and in a nice way (as nice as such a thing can be) that I don’t feel anything for him, and that if I said yes, it would only be OUT OF PITY, and not because I feel anything for him. It would go against my feelings, and not worth the effort because what does being boyfriend and girlfriend mean? It means doing things WITH SOMEONE, not TO SOMEONE (I’m really starting to feel like it’s pissing me off already).
He kept saying, think it over, think it over…
What is there to think about here, except the way to say no? I explained my position clearly. I told him that I have someone else in mind, and it doesn’t matter whether he exists or not, but it’s definitely not him (Rami). There’s a lot I don’t remember, I sat there like a prisoner, I didn’t feel good talking to him and it made me sad to think of how the girls never love the boys who love them and vice versa…
When I left, I decided that I definitely did not agree with anything that happened!!! I know that I would never do anything that was THE DIRECT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I FEEL, whether it’s out of pity or obligation.
Whatever is inside me, whatever I have to give, I’m saving to give to a person I feel something for, or someone I know I want…
Yael, think about it a little, and it doesn’t matter if you only heard my side of things. Always remember that Idit really doesn’t love Rami.
Okay, enough about this, I’m sick of it and of the whole mess.
It was nice in our room. Too bad you didn’t come yesterday because I brought some great chocolate milk.
Why is someone I’m not interested in interested in me and vice versa?
Idit
GET WELL VERY VERY SOON
In June, right before the summer vacation between the tenth and eleventh grades, we all wandered together before going our separate ways to Yehiam and Shomrat. We went to the beach in Nahariya at night, and bought watermelons on the way.
We talked about the poem we learned with Shlomi, “Parting,” by Gabriel Priel, the poem he’d brought from the Theory of Literature course he was taking in Tel Aviv. Idit liked her paintings to have some connection to poems, but not as illustrations. It was something else. She had the sketch of a new painting that she called the black sketch. She called the painting “Parting,” like the poem:
She sat facing me and her eyes
Were brown from the coffee
Tortured from my body
As I tried to tell her
All the green things I had learned.
She surely did not listen:
She was trapped
In a cage of strangenesses,
Or walking down a street
That refused to meet
Another street.
Yet I know that her eyes turned briefly green,
Seeing a garden praying in the rain.
The dagger seemed thus to be pulled
From the brown valleys
And great stars
On the roads
Protected a small tranquility:
It will not reach me.
We rehearsed for the end-of-year play, and on one of those nights, I wrote in my dreams notebook:
I dreamt that people say Idit is always in Rami’s room and I ask her: If Rami asks you to be his girlfriend NOW, would you say yes? And she laughs and says: Why not?
Below every dream, I wrote about all sorts of things that really happened and were connected to the dream. I gave them the permanent title “Yosef’s Column.” Under that dream, I wrote:
Idit and I were talking about something today, and we bumped into Esti on the sidewalk. She said she was going to a rehearsal in Rami’s room. And without being able to explain it exactly, I felt as if something changed in Idit, that inside her, she suddenly turned toward Rami, and I felt terrible there, on the sidewalk, as if a huge hole had suddenly opened in the ground. That’s why this dream is totally accurate in terms of my feelings, when Idit a
nswers, why not. I hope the dream isn’t a prophecy…
Idit was always painting, but that summer, in the Educational Institution, before we went back to Yehiam and Shomrat for summer vacation, her paintings began to speak, to spill off the canvas into the room. Then the hints began to add up, the signs began to add up, as if her love for Rami was only the last link in a chain that was larger than her, larger than Rami, larger than all of us.
Even though Idit and I wrote to each other constantly and were together constantly, it was difficult to know exactly when things happened, when words changed to deeds. She became an artist all at once. And it happened. At the same time. Rami and Idit became a couple.
16
The Hashomer Hatzair commune at 6 Hahavazelet Street in Ramat Gan was our first city address. That address wasn’t supposed to mark the beginning of city life, but was rather another stage of kibbutz life.
In an arrangement between the Hashomer Hatzair and the army, the army allocated a quota of up to 120 young kibbutz members who could postpone their army service for one year, the “thirteenth year” after their twelve years of school, to do volunteer work in various cities. Or they could learn Arabic for a year on Givat Haviva. Back then, you had to be gifted and curious to study Arabic seriously for a year. We had no matriculation certificate and we hardly learned anything in the Educational Institution.
During that thirteenth year, we were youth group leaders in the city chapters of the movement and were supposed to inspire young urbanites to join kibbutzim. Who would be assigned where was determined by lottery. Before receiving assignments in the cities, each of us wrote down the names of two places we preferred. I asked for Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. I was relieved to be placed in Ramat Gan, outside of Tel Aviv. Since everything was always determined by some arcane method, by some committee that weighed desire against need, and equality against other considerations, we were used to the idea that it could always be much worse than what we wanted, much further removed from what we hoped.
Boaz, Gil and I were assigned to the Ramat Gan chapter. At 25, Gil was older than Boaz and me, and a combat officer and an outstanding worker in the banana plantation before he went to the Ramat Gan chapter as an emissary. Our movement, Hashomer Hatzair, seemed to be afraid to stay in one place, and its lexicon was comprised of words related to action and motion: it was active by virtue of its name—“movement”—and those who were occasionally called to serve in its ranks, in rotation, were called “activists” and “emissaries.” All our words alluded to the future: momentum, action and missions, but we always remained in the same spot.
That thirteenth year was the first time we were taken out of the group we were born into on Yehiam, and the group from Shomrat that had been welded onto us in the Educational Institution.
Until we were eighteen, we’d been together constantly in classes, at work, socially and in the movement. The Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzims’ perception of the group was based on the belief that educating for socialism begins right at birth and is not imposed from above by adults (that would recreate the coercive parent-child relationship, and would lose its egalitarianism). Everything happened in what is known as the peer group, a group of equals, without parents and older or younger siblings, without hierarchies.
The group was always and everywhere—24 hours a day, from waking until sleeping, from the babies’ house to the end of the twelfth grade.
The group wasn’t a class, and schoolwork wasn’t the point. The classroom and schoolwork were only part of the means. Sports, music, hikes, scouting, work—they were additional means to realize our creativity and to achieve socialism. Each of us helped the other where he was weak.
The aim was not to create identical people, but to create the equality of opportunity that would allow each member of the group to grow to his fullest.
The commune where we lived was a two-story private house, attached on both sides. It was old and dusty, and although we didn’t decorate or prettify it, we still felt it was too much for us.
The three of us got along well. We’d learned to be considerate from the beginning, living our lives among a group of equals. Now we were a very small group of three living in comfortable conditions, each in his own room.
The Ramat Gan chapter of Hashomer Hatzair was small and existed in the shadow of a huge troop of Scouts. There was only one group for each age, and that was only if one of us managed to recruit enough young people to form a group. Sometimes the groups dissolved within weeks or days. A few new members chose Hashomer Hatzair and stayed for a few years. The others came by chance, wandered in to check out what was happening.
A Hashomer Hatzair meeting.
In that thirteenth year, we attended theoretical seminars in how to be youth movement leaders. We learned how to lead city children in a way that didn’t make them feel they were being lectured to or told what to do “from above.” The activities were supposed to create “value actualization,” and illustrate the Hashomer Hatzair values of cooperation and mutual assistance in action. It was called “the uniting of action and message.” Izhar ben Nahum, from Kibbutz Beit Zera, illustrates this:
If you are guiding a group in Tel Aviv, for example, you can go to the Yarkon River and talk about fishing, what the essence of that profession is, and why people choose that occupation and not a different one. From that you can continue on to a more social discussion on a breakdown of different occupations, about the rich and the poor, about what ownership of the means of production is, and what happens when someone like us goes to the Yarkon, catches fish and eats them, and the next day, he goes back to the river and sees that there is a fence, and some real estate magnate who bought the Yarkon tells him: “Now if you want to fish, you have to pay me,” and employs him as a salaried fisherman. The hard-working fisherman fishes all day for a few pennies, while the real estate magnate who bought the Yarkon River receives the money for selling the fish. And then you explain to your group about the ownership of the means of production, and from there, the way to Marx is short. You’ll see that everything moves easily, from the simple to the complex, because the activity began with a walk to the Yarkon and a conversation about fishing.
Gil and Boaz divided our daily tasks in the commune by hours. They wrote the hours in four numbers, which made the schedules seem realistic and authoritative, devoid of wasted time. Between 07:00 and 08:30, get up, eat breakfast and clean the commune. Between 10:00 and 11:00, go to Blich High School to recruit new members. Then get various permits from the municipality, prepare our activities for that evening and so on.
We bought on credit in the grocery store next door to the commune. The group leaders we took over from told us not to forget to check the bills once a month before we paid. The young members used to come to the commune to talk to us about problems with schoolwork, or problems they had with each other, who they were in love with, or just to pass the time. They said that they loved the activities even if they weren’t always interested in everything we talked about. We went to their homes to persuade their parents to let them go on hikes the movement organized.
We believed that nature hikes taught things that could not be learned in years of everyday life. They provided a look at relationships and worlds different from the ones in classrooms, at social evenings or work. There were people to help those who found it difficult to get from one riverbank to the other, people who cooked soup on the campfire, and still others who gathered wood for the fire. The group leaders were with their groups twenty-four hours a day, lived the same lives as they did, ate with them and slept in sleeping bags on the ground with them.
In scouting seminars and in preparation for those trips, Yonatan ben Nahum, brother of Izhar from Kibbutz Beit Zera, taught us how to build a shelter in the bushes for sleeping at night, and how to survive on energy-rich natural foods. We learned that, at night, when you can’t see well and background noise is greatly decreased, you can sharpen your aural sense and utilize it to its fullest to help you feel safer and more
comfortable in the dark.
In the third grade we were already going out once a week for a full day’s walk with our teacher, Rivka, instead of learning in class.
Sometimes Eliezer A. went with us to deepen our knowledge of nature, to sharpen our observation of flowers and plants, to teach us to identify cassia and poterium plants and to distinguish between pine mushrooms and poisonous mushrooms. Rivka used to say that we climbed beautifully, like ibexes; Eliezer said that we were mountain children and we shouldn’t whine when we step on thorns, because mountain children don’t cry.
In the Educational Institution, Hagit and I were terrified on youth movement hikes. We dreamt every night that we were hovering above the chasms that the boys helped us to cross as we clutched the rocky protrusions, but the rocks fell from under our feet and we plunged down, down, down. When we were on the hike, we wanted it to end. When we slept, we wanted to wake up. But after being tossed between the nightmare and the view that came after it on the trip, when our sense of having been constantly rescued had passed, we felt as if we had touched the star-strewn sky and had smelled the earth—the stars adorned our sleeping bags, we loved the campfire. We moved from extreme to extreme, as if inside us, we were moving from desert heat to Alpine cold.
Back home, after the trips, we suddenly recalled certain moments without knowing why. Sometimes, things that had been difficult, frightening and unbearable there, later became something else, as if we remembered the escape from the moment, and not the moment itself, and other times, at home, we were more frightened than we had been at the particular moment when we were stuck on a huge rock. The hikes were unlike anything else in terms of their difficulty and the richness of the nature that came to us from unexpected places, as if it spilled from the trees, the bushes, the earth, the vegetation, and from ourselves. Long after we returned, moments from the hikes leaped out at us on the sidewalk, as we went about our daily lives, like bits of a dream or fragments of a different life.
