When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  And still they stuck to their socialist principles as they built a permanent community. They took their clothes from a common storeroom, which drew heavily on British Army surplus garments. No one owned a clock or a wristwatch. Marriages took place when the girl was ready to give birth and the ceremony only lasted five minutes. A few times the bride was in labor, or too heavily pregnant to stand even for that long, so a substitute represented her. Marriage, he said, was not the highlight of a woman’s life, but having children was, for with each infant the kibbutz acquired another member.

  They read agricultural journals to determine which crops were suited to their land, which still remained an enigma to them. They built a water tower and administration offices and two-story housing units and communal washrooms and tried to figure out a way of bringing power from a nearby hydroelectric plant.

  One night, after there were riots in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a group of Arabs from a neighboring village attacked them. Someone was killed by a sniper. The Arabs were getting organized so the kibbutz put up a perimeter fence and watchtower and now every member had to do guard duty. Out of these home-guard defense units came the Haganah, David Ben-Gurion’s righteous underground against the cruelty of British immigration policy. They felt they were fighting a war on three fronts: against the British, against the Arabs and against their original enemy, the mysterious, inhospitable soil that thwarted their attempts to grow things in it.

  This was existence for them. Hardship. Endurance. In danger of one’s life at every turn. Remote from the cities and remoter still from the centers of European civilization, from art and culture and refinement and fashion and hairdressing. Only a ruthless simplicity and an elemental engagement with survival, on top of which they built their hopes for the future: for themselves, but also for the Jewish race the world over, the age-old image of which was being dismantled on the spot, destroyed so that something entirely new could be created. The new Jew, but more than that—the new human being. A renewed human race out of the ashes of a catastrophically close-run thing with total extinction.

  And now Meier was asking me if I wanted to share in their vision of a radiant tomorrow, when Palestine would show the world what a Jewish land could be, where the class system had been abolished and there were no kings or tsars or feudal barons. If I wanted to enlist in the enterprise of the new humanity they were building from the ground up, the Jew that Meier was himself, untainted by the contamination of Europe and its neuroses and abandoning the dark superstitions of religion, borrowing what he needed from the model of Soviet society, but leaving behind the central authority of its power structures, for here they were creating true people’s socialism in action.

  Who, in my situation, would not be seduced by the romance of what he had told me? Who could not fall in love with that age-old dream of equality and the collective life? Not me. I’ll tell you who I was then: I was a girl without a past: my mother had dwelt in a twilight land between the tenses; my grandparents were unknown to me and where they had come from, apart from the name of the place (Latvia! two syllables, that’s all), was also unknown; all of English history just a storybook. And so how could I not tell him—with all my heart and soul—that yes, a new Jew, indeed a new kind of human being, was exactly what I had always wanted to be?

  And all this time I was noticing Meier. He was tough and thickset and he had little hair. The top of his head was brown, like his body. He wore old khaki shorts and a white singlet and leather sandals on his bare feet. The nails were like horn. Though he was just old enough to be my father I was sexually excited when I looked at him. He seemed powered, to me, by some internal electricity.

  A GIRL called Leah taught me how to float, then swim in the waters of the lake. Gradually my body became more like hers. In the afternoon, I lay in the shallows while my skin gradually absorbed the sun. The sun was part of me, now. It lit up everything.

  I was picking up more and more Hebrew. By the lake, one afternoon, a boy came and spoke to me. He asked if I wanted to go for a walk. We set off along the road and he told me how he had been born on this kibbutz, had known nothing else. His name was Gadi and this was chosen for him by the Names Committee. It meant Adam in Hebrew, which surprised me because I thought that Adam was Hebrew.

  He had heard a saxophone on the radio and wanted more than anything else to play one himself, though he wasn’t sure what it might look like. The kibbutz council agreed that if any member ever came across a saxophone and secured it for the general good of the whole community Gadi would have first priority in learning to make music from it. But no one had the slightest idea if there was such a thing in the whole of Palestine. Not, they thought, even in the palm-court orchestra that played in the ballrooms of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. If a saxophone was to be found, it was bound to be in the possession of an American who was unlikely to want to part with it for anything other than a hefty price.

  And this was Gadi’s sorrow, at twenty, to have heard a sound that resonated somewhere inside him and for it to live only in his head, growing less clear, more invented, as the memory of it receded. “I’m a big dreamer,” he said in English. He read weeks-old copies of the Palestine Post for practice. He wanted to see America for himself, one day. The British didn’t interest him. “It’s all up with those chaps,” he said, “they’re about to be bowled out and sent back to the pavilion.”

  I burst out laughing. “What a turn of phrase.”

  He looked at me, offended. He had overheard a British officer in a café in Tiberias use it during the war. “They were speaking of the Germans. It is not correct?”

  By a banana plantation, in a cloud of flies, he kissed me. His lips were like rubber and there was too much tongue in my mouth.

  “We’ll do it here?” he asked me, indicating the ground.

  What sex actually came down to was this: Gadi and I wrestled on the dry, dusty earth for a while and he unbuttoned first his shorts then my own, parted my legs and put something in me that was hard and quick, then wet and still. I looked at the sky and thought of my mother in her imitation silk nightgowns under her satin counterpane and inhaled the scent she puffed into her hair at dusk when the shops were shutting and Uncle Joe, stiffening inside his trousers in anticipation, was walking through the West End, down Shaftesbury Avenue, past the theaters and the rowdy gangs of soldiers and the statue of Eros.

  We stood up and I noticed that a little of my blood was spilled upon the ground of Palestine and had fertilized the earth of the Jewish national home. And that was it.

  “First time for you,” Gadi said. “Good. There will be many more.”

  And we walked back to the dining hall while he talked of Benny Goodman who played the clarinet in a style called swing and was a Jew.

  “We have concerts here,” Gadi said. “But all is Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and Mozart. Have you ever seen a dance called the lindy-hop?”

  “Yes. I’ve done it.”

  “Show me sometime.”

  In the dining hall we joined his friends at a table. They talked about an Arab raid the previous month and they were remembering the time when they were children and an educated Arab from Damascus tried to join the kibbutz because he had read of the socialist ideals of the movement and had packed his bags at once and moved to Palestine.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He didn’t fit in. We didn’t trust him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was too smooth, always wanting to iron his clothes and brush his hair and looking in the mirror. Anyway, the kibbutz is a Jewish idea, for Jews. How could we know what his real intentions were?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went to Jerusalem.”

  “What does he do there?”

  “He writes letters of complaint to us, pleading his case, asking to be admitted. It comes up time and time again at the meeting. Why can’t he leave us alone?”

  “What do you think will become of him?”

  “I’ve
no idea. He has legally changed his name to a Hebrew one. I suppose if he is really sincere, he might be useful as a spy.”

  Then Gadi left early to do his guard duty and I sat for a while longer, thinking of this man who belonged nowhere and was really no one, a sad case.

  NO one on the kibbutz could understand why the Arabs had turned against us for none of us really thought about the Arabs at all. They moved about as invisible men and women, they sank into the landscape like the hills and the water and the banana palms. They were a picturesque backdrop to our own industrious business. Where we acted, they just were. Meier told me that he was shocked by their backwardness when he first arrived from the Soviet Union where they had been electrifying the country and building factories and collectivizing farming.

  “How to bring socialist ideas to these people? I used to ask myself this, but obviously it’s a hopeless case,” he said. “We forced the peasants in Russia into the twentieth century but we have no power to force the Arabs and they are a thousand times more primitive than the Russian peasantry. All their alliances are based not on the proper opposition between left and right but blood ties and age-old feuds, pride, shame. They have no unions or clubs or real political parties, no contemporary ideologies even in their most debased form. The masses are apathetic until roused to hysteria and then they collapse again into lethargy. They’re the stuff of mobs not political organizations.”

  “What’s to become of them?”

  “If the British go and we rule benignly, then some of our ideas will rub off on them, they will be roused from their tribal loyalties to a modern consciousness. That, or they should leave. Surely they can find some kind of niche for themselves in these vast Arab lands that surround us? What cannot be tolerated is that they continue to attack us. And why? What have we done to them? We only took what we thought they didn’t want. We offered them money for their land and they sold it to us, that is their absentee landlords did. We gave them a very good price, we didn’t cheat them. It was them, not us who had let it all go to rack and ruin. I don’t know how long they’d been here—centuries, I think—but look what we did in just twenty years. And why? Because of what we believe in, which is the future.

  “What is a complete mystery to me is why the British take their side. Both of these peoples want us to leave. But go where? Back to the Soviet Union? They hate us there too. Why do you think we left? Listen, we’re not like the British, we don’t need an empire. Our people in the DP camps just need a place to go to and after what the world has done to us don’t you think it owes us a country?”

  We had these talks in the evenings, sitting under the dark shadow of the Golan hills, while the fireflies and moths wheeled around the light and the nights were still cool. We drank black tea and now I had received my little pocket money—the same for every member—I found the kibbutz shop and bought chocolate and I shared it with Meier. I wanted him to kiss me with his dry, parched lips but he had a wife and three children: a wife who, like him, had come from the Soviet Union and they shared a common past.

  They had been members of a Zionist youth movement together, the Hashomer Hatzair, and they tried to remember with the same intensity the day when, at thirteen years of age, they had rushed into the streets when the Bolsheviks came to power and how their parents sat at home, their fathers praying, their mothers crying, and they knew that they must cut off the past as a woodsman eliminates the diseased branches of a tree with his axe.

  I sat as near to Meier as I could. Sometimes our legs touched for a moment, like an electric shock. He turned his palms upward. Dirt was engraved in the grooves of his skin. I wanted to lick his hands. Where the physical and the intellectual come together there is always a chemistry and Meier was making sparks fly out of the dry air as he began a discourse about matters that had absorbed him for a decade or more, the old Jewish question of the nature of time and our place in it.

  “But what was the present becomes the past and it is receding,” he said, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the same ones which burned my throat and filled my lungs with corrosive smoke until eventually they turned to asbestos and like Meier I did not notice the pain anymore. “We find it harder and harder to regain the rapture we once felt. There are memories I have of my childhood and youth in Russia, from before the time of the revolution, which I keep safe in a strongroom of my mind, because I fear that if I think about them too much I will wear them out. I have memories of our earliest years in Palestine which have eroded and become not the thing itself, but only a memory of a memory. Sometimes, all I recapture is the mood I was in the last time I went into that portion of the past, or the place where I was, and what comes is the sound of the waves on the lake, or the road into the hills, or a café in Tiberias, where I was sitting with a glass of tea and a pastry when we go to buy the goods that soldiers sell us which they pilfer from the stores, the honest British Tommy.”

  And then he spoke of other memories which had been forgotten for so long that they emerged into the light like something he had read about in a book once, the creatures of the deepest ocean which the pressure of hauling them up to the surface distorts so badly that the fish bears no resemblance to what normally lived its whole life in the darkness.

  “You see! We are a country that isn’t even born yet, but we already have a past we are cut off from. Those of us who came from the Soviet Union can’t return. What awaits us? Will the Central Committee have a band and a banner out to welcome us? Of course not, they’ll murder us. And our children, who were not even born there? What rights will they have? So you see this has to be my country. Without it, I’m just a DP. I can’t go home, like you can, when you have had enough.”

  “Believe me!” I cried. “I’ll never go home.” I was in the throes of a great, unrealized passion. I had been a glacial creature up to now, a lump of shapely flesh. Despite rather than because of the rudimentary tussle with Gadi which had technically ruptured my hymen, I was discovering a sensuality, a sexual self. I saw in Meier the figure who had always been missing from my life: the father and the stranger who had taken possession of my mother, as his successor would inevitably take possession of me.

  He smiled. His teeth were quite bad. “You are a fine girl,” he said, and despite the teeth I shuddered with pleasure. “But what concerns me, too, is how hard it is to remember who we were when we were in the Soviet Union. We live here, on this kibbutz, in the present and future tenses. I feel like a man without a history. A Jew without history! It’s nonsense. It can’t be. But that’s what I feel like, it’s the truth. I look at the kibbutz and I am astonished at what we have achieved. I compare us to the Arabs who haven’t got a future, at least not unless they accept that they must cast in their lot with us and learn from us how to live a modern life and learn our language and our ways. We set out to build a new kind of Jew and we are succeeding beyond our wildest dreams and we should be happy for that, but sometimes I’m not so sure.”

  “I heard,” I said, “that a boy came from Damascus who wanted to join the kibbutz but you wouldn’t let him.”

  “Join the kibbutz? No. It’s absurd. The kibbutz is for Jews, it’s a Jewish idea, to show what Jews can do when left to our own devices. Anyway, how could we know that we could trust him? Who knows what his real motives were? Do you know? I don’t.”

  “Couldn’t you take him at his word and see how he got on?” I asked. Besides, the Syrian was educated, a university student, and it seemed to me that I was proud of the Jewish experiment in socialism and felt it should be showed off and even shared with anyone who cared to join and obey the rules we had set out.

  “Listen,” Meier said. “Be realistic. At worst he’s a spy, at best a collaborator. Anyway, he’s not the problem.”

  “What is the problem?”

  “I don’t know, it’s thorny. Everything I see is a vindication of what we came here to do and yet I still wonder, what will become of us all? To be modern, we have to deny our past, that there is a past, and I don’t kno
w if you can tamper with time, like we are doing, without consequences. Do you understand anything I’m saying, Eve?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I did not. I understood nothing at all. If Meier wanted to talk, then by all means I would listen, or pretend to, but frankly all this was too philosophical for me and not just because I was in love at that moment with action. The only thing I was interested in Meier doing with his mouth was applying it to my breasts, not talking obscure nonsense.

  He had Russian editions of the books he loved—Gogol and Dostoevsky—and he wanted me to read their English translations. What he needs, I thought, is the invigoration of a new generation. He’s haunted by the old nightmares. I can drive those cobwebs away.

  One evening the people of a bad dream were made flesh. They did not seem like people to me, but visitors from Hades, the mark of Hades on their wrists. They were the nearly drowned, literally. They had been picked up from a leaky ship that had sunk at the end of the previous year and they were the only survivors. They had been held for months in the detention camp at Atlit and promised in no uncertain terms that they would be deported back to where they had come from, which was a DP camp in Poland. Somehow, a hole had appeared in the perimeter fence at night and the next day, when the soldiers looked for them, they weren’t there.

  They had been smuggled to the kibbutz but the arrangement was not working. To start with, having spent many years in one camp or another, their sole aim in life was each to have his own room and his own everything else, and this in a miniature society set up to outlaw private property.

  They despised the language classes. Each had learned a modicum of Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah in Lodz or Vilna or wherever and then cast it aside as he got on with the business of living. They spoke Yiddish and Polish or Russian and whatever German they had picked up in the camps. After all they had been through it seemed an outrageous demand that they should be required to learn a tongue which had been discarded as a mark of antiquity, the gabbling mutter of the old men who prayed as they were led to the gas chamber instead of keeping their wits about them and looking carefully at the situation to see what tiny advantage could be snatched from it.