We Were the Future
Page 17
We used to take our dirty laundry to our kibbutzim every other Sunday when we went to work there for two days, and bring the clean laundry back, along with avocados and toilet paper. Boaz’s father occasionally brought us boxes of food when he came to Tel Aviv with the activists’ car that was at his disposal.
Once, twice or three times a week, Boaz and I took the number 61 bus to Tel Aviv, where we met up with group leaders in the North Tel Aviv chapter. We bought books, went to movies and art gallery exhibits. We were surrounded by the city and city people. We were like tourists in our own world, in a no man’s land between city and kibbutz, which had been “lent” to us for a year.
Boaz, Gil and I came from totally different parts of the country: Boaz was from the Negev in the south, Gil from the Jordan Valley in the east, and I was from the Western Galilee in the north. Nevertheless, Boaz and I had known each other’s faces and names even before that year in Ramat Gan. We had seen the kids in the other educational institutions, who were exactly like us, on youth movement trips during vacations, and mainly at the theoretical seminars we all attended on Givat Haviva.
At the end of our senior year, we met on Givat Haviva at a seminar on Zionism and Judaism. The subjects of the seminars had been similar throughout the years, the lecturers remained, and only the audience changed. We had various group discussions on Zionism, Israeliness and Judaism, on what it meant to be Jewish in our times, and also on what was called “current political problems”: We heard Gershon Shafat from the Gush Emunim settlements, who gave a lecture on the Gush’s political position, and we heard Meir Pail on Israel’s various conceptions of security and on a functional, territorial compromise.
We even knew—or seemed to know—Gil, who was several years older than us, from his similar past in the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim: We all grew up in the Children’s Society on remote kibbutzim. On holidays, we all sang the songs written by members of Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim with the purpose of bringing new content to the Jewish holidays.
In the first grade, on the Shavuot holiday (which we called the festival of the first fruits in order to emphasize its agricultural aspect in the celebration of the first harvests), and after the women had mounted the stage with the new babies born that year, we stood in a row on the stage, each of us with a fluttering dove in our hands.
We tried not to drop the doves as we stood in front of the entire kibbutz, concentrating on the complicated lyrics and wonderful melody that rose like a cry of longing (words by Dov Shai, one of the founders of Kibbutz Ramat Hashofet, and music by Izhar Yaron, who left Tel Aviv to join Kibbutz Ein Hashofet):
Behold, behold up in the sky:
The clouds among the blue.
Set off and carry, white-winged birds,
A message—hopeful, true.
Fly off, fly off, doves pearly white,
Fly with a trumpeting of light.
Our brothers wait for you, farewell,
Return in haste with ringing bells.
When the signal was given at the end of the song, we all released the doves to the sky, and from there, to our brothers on all the kibbutzim. Every other week, on Sundays and Mondays, we each went to our own kibbutz to work there, and every other week, on those same days, we attended a seminar called School on Givat Haviva.
We reached Givat Haviva around noon on Sunday, and first of all, we read the agenda that was pinned on the bulletin board. The agenda was organized with the same system used by Gil and Boaz: Every hour was written in four numbers, followed by a colon and then the details. Arrival and assigning of rooms, lunch, afternoon rest, four o’clock refreshments, supper, party (or a movie or night swimming in the pool), and the next day breakfast, ten o’clock refreshments, lunch and departure. The lecturers arrived between the meals, some of them intellectuals from the surrounding kibbutzim who were brought in by the “Central Leadership” for an hour or two, clad in blue work clothes, of course.
While it wasn’t written on the agenda, at almost every School seminar there was a soccer game between us, youth movement group leaders, and the “Arabists,” the ones who were studying Arabic on Givat Haviva for a year. If Hanan, a group leader from Beit Shean who played soccer for Hapoel Beit Shean, was there, our group won. If he wasn’t there, the Arabists won, even though there were a lot fewer of them and they excelled in the classroom, not on the soccer field. They won not only because of their home turf advantage (they lived on Givat Haviva all year round), but also because of the hard work of their goalkeeper, Ranen. He was methodical about keeping balls out of the net, as if that was something they taught at the seminar on Givat Haviva.
Givat Haviva was the temple of our secular gods. The secretariat of the Kibbutz Artzi held its meetings there, and the Executive Committee held its famous conferences there, with Yaakov Hazan, Meir Yaari and Haike Grossman. Givat Haviva was established in July 1949 as a center for seminars and lectures. The center was named after the parachutist, Haviva Reik, a member of Kibbutz Maanit who was executed by the Nazis in 1944.
Our system believed that everything could be taught and learned in seminars, because the Hashomer Hatzair believed that we were bringing about the socialist revolution. History is not a collection of stories and associations, but rather an organized, scientific process. One thing leads to another, which leads to another. We scorned miracles, randomness and religion. If we possess knowledge, on the one hand, and are persuasive on the other, success was certain.
On Givat Haviva, we all studied everything: courses in Arabic, seminars for group leaders of all ages, School for thirteenth-year group leaders, seminars for the various committee coordinators, for recently discharged soldiers, for singles, kitchen workers and barn workers, and even a drug seminar aimed at coming up with ideas on how to prevent smoking and drug use on the kibbutzim. Also invited to those seminars were drug users, who always promised that they’d stopped smoking (before or after the secretariat called the police to the kibbutz). Later, they said that they could never smoke in such an idyllic place. Givat Haviva was paradise for all its students.
Givat Haviva was the perfect kibbutz setting, without being a kibbutz: No cow barns, no fields, no tractors or power ladders, no work scheduler, no work and no members. There was a dining hall there, like on any kibbutz, and a swimming pool like on any kibbutz, and eternally green lawns like on any kibbutz, only in better condition, because no one trod on them. Givat Haviva was like a huge dollhouse, a sweet dream with no cracks in it, because it had no reality, no concrete world. A school for a life of socialism with no life to ruin it, no people. The only people who lived there were the lecturers and seminar students, who usually came for a few days or a week.
The Arabists studied Arabic in the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace established in 1963 on Givat Haviva. The purpose of the Center, according to the Givat Haviva website, is:
…to bring Jews and Arabs in Israel closer and to educate for mutual understanding and partnership between the two peoples…The Center values humanism and equality of all peoples. It therefore strives to be a key element towards achieving true democracy in Israel, characterized by civil equality between Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens. Through the encouragement of social and cultural pluralism, the Center believes regional peace and reconciliation can be achieved.
Our statements of intention were always written in the future tense, which is why they always remained untouched, fresh, evergreen, like the lawns on Givat Haviva, as pristine as the peace doves we all released into the air simultaneously in our first grade harvest celebration.
At the end of that thirteenth year, after delaying life by a year or serving as emissaries of the movement, Gil returned to the Beit Zera banana plantation and to reserve duty as a combat officer.
Until peace came, the Arabists—those who had studied Arabic in the interest of peace—listened in on the Arabs in wartime or during preparations for war. Since they were now fluent in Arabic after a year of intensive study, most of them were recruited into the
Intelligence Corps. Some went into the prisoner interrogation unit. A number of the Arab lecturers on Givat Haviva had served in that unit or were former members of the General Security Services.
The brotherhood of peoples and socialism always took place in the future. Our brief past and the ongoing present served as the army’s spearhead.
Boaz couldn’t decide where to go in the army: the elite combat unit or the pilots course. On our last night in the commune, the three of us weighed the pros and cons of the two possibilities. Gil said that they were both good, and that it’s well known that only a few complete the pilots course. So if he didn’t make the grade, he could join the elite combat unit. On the con side of the pilots course, I said that it bothered me that there was no real reason the cadets could only go home on leave every three weeks during a two-year course, leaving on Friday and returning Saturday, the next day, and not on Sunday, like everyone else. But giving so little time off, and so infrequently, is probably deliberate, so that the world that exists in the thoughts of the cadets slowly fades and they’re one hundred percent there, in the course, totally dedicated. “Yes,” Boaz said, “and so that people won’t remember this place, or other places like it.” We all were carried away on a momentary wave of missing our dusty commune and each other, even though we were still there.
Gil laughed and said to Boaz and me: “Guys, I knew you were a couple from the first night.”
We weren’t a couple. We went back to our beds early every morning so that Gil wouldn’t see us when he went upstairs to shower at 6:30 in the morning. But the first night, Boaz fell asleep in my bed.
The city people always asked us if we slept together when we lived in the same room, boys and girls together, with no adults present, until we were eighteen. A metapelet once said to Eyal and me, when the three of us were standing at the Institution bus stop, that the kibbutz had even managed to change sexuality, that there was no sexual tension among the boys in the group. Opinions vary on that issue. “It’s a fact,” we always answered the city people’s questions politely, “that not even a single couple came out of the group. It would have been like incest. It was taboo.”
We learned not to reveal what happened in the Institution and later. Not because it was forbidden or allowed, but rather because we were always surrounded by people who knew us, both on the kibbutz and in the Institution. We felt as if the outsiders’ eyes of the witnesses would know something about which we still hadn’t formed an opinion, that the witness’ interpretation would always precede every action.
We communicated with notes and letters to keep from being exposed. We wrote to each other all the time, even when only a few dozen meters separated us and our building from the other groups’ buildings. At night, we slipped letters under doors and under pillows and between the pages of books. On the envelopes, we wrote diagonally, in red pen: “Please don’t come to see me tonight,” meaning exactly the opposite: “Please come to see me tonight.” Sometimes, we didn’t know whether we loved people so we could have someone to be with, or so we could write and wait for letters. We fell in love with letter writing.
In the commune, we each had a room to ourselves, no roommates, one in each corner. Nonetheless, Boaz and I squeezed together in the same room. We got into each other’s single beds just as we did in the Children’s Society after the metapelet had gone and the fear stirred by the bedtime stories (or on the contrary, by life) hovered in the corridor, threatening to spill over into our rooms. Now that Gil was on the bottom floor and we were alone on the top floor, we slept together and told each other stories from books and poems, from plays that we wrote.
On our last night in the commune, after Gil said that he knew we were a couple from the first night, and after the three of us sat around an invisible campfire in the living room with its Formica furniture and drank instant coffee and talked about the year that had been, Gil went to his room and we slept in Boaz’s room. Boaz said that someone from Kibbutz Degania had told him that after Degania had split into the country’s first kibbutzim, Degania Aleph and Degania Bet, there was no communal sleeping; the children slept in their parents’ houses. The family was very important there, and the kevutza (“group,” which is what they called the kibbutz) was considered equally important, but not more so. Debates on communal vs. family sleeping took place on all the Valley kibbutzim.
One day, the poet Leah Goldberg came to visit and lecture on Kibbutz Afikim, in the Jordan Valley, the kibbutz adjacent to Degania, and spent the night. That night, she wrote two children’s poems that she dedicated to the children of Afikim (the dedication appears in the book What Do the Does Do?).
On Afikim, like on all of our kibbutzim, and unlike Degania, the children slept in the children’s houses. There, Leah Goldberg wrote “Evening Opposite the Gilad,” her feelings about communal sleeping. She took pity on the mother who had lost her son, and in her poem, returned him to her. We read the story of that lullaby to each other as if it were a late lullaby for us:
So heavy are the trees,
The fruit weighs down the boughs,
It is the hour of peace,
When the children fall asleep.
Down to the valley a tender lamb
Descends from Gilead,
A sheep bleats in her pen –
It is her tiny son gone lost.
To mother’s lap the lamb returns,
There in the pen he sleeps,
The sheep she kisses him,
And then his name she speaks.
Among the branches hides the night,
And Gilead’s prophet goes,
Into the valley silently
To watch the children doze.
To mother’s lap the lamb returns,
There in the pen he sleeps,
The sheep she kisses him,
And then his name she speaks.
The next morning, the delegation of the next year’s thirteenth-years assigned to Ramat Gan arrived. We brought them up to speed, showed them Blich High School, the building where activities were held and the grocery store where we bought on credit. They also gave us their opinions on the elite combat unit vs. the pilots course. Boaz chose the pilots course.
17
On October 27, 1980, a powerful earthquake shook the ground in several settlements that sat on a rift previously unknown to geologists: Kibbutz Yehiam, in the western Galilee hills and the epicenter of the quake; the Gaaton River, which crosses the city of Nahariya, and overflowed its banks, deluging the tourist horse-drawn carriages, their drivers and passengers; Oshrat, the Educational Institution on Kibbutz Evron attended by the children of Yehiam, Gaaton and Shomrat, the place where 180 teenaged boys and girls went to school, slept, lived and ate from the beginning of the seventh grade to the end of the twelfth; Haifa’s lower city, especially Haatzmaut Street, where the Kibbutz Movement accounting offices were located, next door to Café Eva which served coffee in glass mugs; the upscale green Carmel area, where concerts were held and where the best psychologists, orthopedists and orthodontists were located, specialists to whom all the kibbutz children with special problems were sent; 6 Havatzelet Street in Ramat Gan, where the Hashomer Hatzair commune was located; and an armored corps base in the Jordan Valley.
The earthquake was also felt on Gaaton, the kibbutz located only two kilometers from the epicenter in Yehiam; on Kibbutz Kabri, which the yellow Regional Council bus passed to take the Yehiam and Gaaton children to their studies and their lives in the Oshrat Educational Institution on Kibbutz Evron; on Givat Haviva, where everyone was always occupied with one seminar or the other on the evergreen lawns, seeking to make a better world; and in fact, on all the kibbutzim throughout the length and breadth of the country.
There were no casualties and no property damage.
There were several moments of shock, during which people froze in place where they were standing, walking or sitting: On Kibbutz Yehiam, you couldn’t tell which of the people frozen in place were Hungarian or French, workers or
idlers. In Nahariya, you couldn’t tell whether they were doctors or employees of the Carlton Hotel. On Evron, almost everyone seemed trapped in their vehicles, whether it was a bicycle or a car. In Haifa, two Carmelit trains squealed to a stop, the train that climbed the Carmel and the one that descended it. Both were stuck between the stations that led back and forth to and from the central Carmel and Paris Square in the lower city, and not in the stations themselves. In the Hashomer Hatzair Ramat Gan commune, the flames of the ever-present kerosene-doused banner suddenly died. In the Jordan Valley, soldiers froze with weapons in hand, or in the middle of outfitting a tank. The armored battalion stopped moving. It was a crushing, but shining moment, a moment when people received the respect they deserved for their simple, remarkable work, for being here, for their struggle to live and function like all living creatures, like an ant, like a tree. A moment when justice fell upon the earth without warning, and all the dreary, monotonous work was seen as a life’s work; a moment when everyone in the world was equal, similar to our compassion for the people of Pompeii, for example, compassion for people in parallel universes, for what we had never been, what we would never be. Similar to the way we wonder at human skeletons in science museums.
There was life here, there were people here. Their hearts beat, their blood flowed, they walked, they gathered, they cooked. There were traces here of men who walked upright and weren’t monkeys. There was life, and also death.