When I Lived in Modern Times (6 page)

O
ne 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.

Then there was the business of rules. In the camps they had survived because they were good at playing the system and circumventing it to suit their own ends. The sense that rules were to be gotten around by some means or other was instinctive with them. They shirked their work duties, slept in, refused to share anything and were constantly arguing for a larger
amount of pocket money to buy chocolate with, of which they were inordinately fond. Thefts began to occur. Small piles of hoarded items like shoes began to be found under their beds.

They spat when they heard what my nationality was. They had picked up some English from their captors. They were young men, graduates of a very different school of life from the one that I had attended.

“The British are anti-Semites,” they said.

“That’s not true,” I told them, “not all, anyway.”

“The Labour Party is anti-Semitic.”

“No, it’s not. They’re socialists.”

“Like the
National
Socialists.”

Inside they were ash, burned out from within. They were receptacles for hatred and there was nothing I could say to them. Their families lay beneath the earth of Auschwitz or were incinerated into nothing. Or they drifted on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, fishes eating their flesh with tiny teeth or buried beneath a shoal of sand and shells. Meier said they reminded him of a whole tribe of Jonahs. They had been swallowed by the whale and survived its dark belly and miraculously they had been washed up on dry land. Still they stank of that vast, obscene darkness filled with half-digested flesh in which it was not natural for anything to live.

One day they all disappeared, transferred on a night when there was no moon to another kibbutz and I thought I should not see any of them again.

A
fter a while fragments of sentences started to appear in my mind in Hebrew. The names of the plants and the animals and the different kibbutz buildings were Hebrew now. I had forgotten their different equivalents and many of them I had never known at all. When I spoke in Hebrew I was not Evelyn Sert but Eve from the kibbutz and Evelyn lived inside me, my private self.

It was Evelyn who remembered, in English, an archipelago of wet brown leaves on the pavement on Tottenham Court Road one autumn morning, emerging from the lift at Goodge Street tube station, looking across the street at the windows of Heal’s and at the backs of couples staring at sofas and cupboards. Or the Christmas lights decorating the façade of Selfridges before the war. Or the flames of the bonfire they lit on Primrose Hill on Guy Fawkes Day when we burned in effigy the Catholic traitor, the terrorist of his times. Or the smell of beeswax polish on the wooden floor of the assembly hall of my school. Or the small waves dashing their heads off on the gray shingle on the beach at Brighton on summer weekends, when my mother and I walked along the pier to see a music-hall turn. Or the smell of tram oil along Kingsway.

And all these memories were in the English language and what I saw when I opened my eyes was in Hebrew, so how could I know what I was any more, when I felt just as much a composite character as I had at school where the blond girls with blond eyelashes felt like members of another race?

Something was starting in the country. When we gathered around the radio, on the news we heard that the Irgun underground had attacked the police station at Ramat Gan, escaping with British weapons but leaving behind one of their own wounded, whose name was Dov Gruner. The Lehi penetrated an encampment of the 6th Airborne Division in Tel Aviv and killed seven paratroopers in the car park. The day after, British troops went on the rampage in Netanya and Be’er Tuvya. A nighttime curfew
was imposed on the cafés and restaurants of Tel Aviv. All this happened in the course of one week.

They talked about the political situation all the time, but it did not really affect our lives. We lived in a self-enclosed world with its own internal order. Some evenings, out of a need to escape, I would walk a little way along the road and then turn back again. I felt despondent when I realized how far I would have to walk to reach the nearest settlement that was not just another kibbutz.

Occasionally I looked at the babies in the communal kindergarten. There was a kind of controlled anarchy in there, like a Marx Brothers picture. They crawled about without any discernible regulation and made various colorful messes. I wished my own life were so free from regulation.

I had come to a place where life was stripped back to the basics, where survival was, if not the only point, the underlying system from which everything else flowed. Once there had been an original community of wanderers who had come together from the Soviet Union and had acted always through a sense of joy. But where was the joy now? It was no longer the dream of a collective life which seemed to urge them on, but the efficient maintenance of the collective life’s conditions in order that crops were grown and buildings erected. And the happiness which saturated their early labors had seeped away with their sweat into the dry soil.

As I hosed down the urinals I longed for the city’s friction, for its disorder and everything else that made things interesting. And
still
there was no sign of Meier wanting to have sex with me, a desire which had started to occupy almost all of my attention.

A group was putting together proposals to paint a mural on the side of the administration block, depicting the founding years of the settlement. There was no official rejection of art as an inappropriate activity for a kibbutznik, just an understanding that it came very low on the list of priorities for building the utopian life. There was one artist, but he was so embarrassed about being seen going out with an easel strapped to his back and a box of colors, that he preferred to paint indoors, depicting over and over again the same rectangle of scenery that lay more or less unchanging apart from the minor differences made by the seasons, outside his window. I had had no great urge to paint since I had been on the kibbutz. How could I paint the heat? I had no idea.

A mural, however, was considered to have a utilitarian function. It would act as a visual record, particularly useful for new arrivals who did not speak the language, and would motivate them to continue the same
back-breaking labor as the original pioneers without which there would have been no housing units or kitchen or dining room or showers—those luxuries the latecomers like me seemed to take for granted. I was approached and asked if I would like to contribute, and with a paintbrush in my hand I was Evelyn again, even while sketching out scenes in which I showed Meier digging the foundations of our houses or addressing a meeting of the council.

“Do you like Meier?” Leah asked me.

“Of course not,” I lied. “He’s ancient.”

“He likes young girls.”

“What do you mean?”

“He has a young girl sometimes. His wife doesn’t approve but she has to put up with it. It was discussed in a meeting last year but he defended himself. He says is it a bourgeois romantic illusion to believe that one person can fulfill everything for another person.”

“What happens with these girls he has?”

“Just a little sex, a little talking. But the sex always comes before the talking.”

“He talks to me.”

“Well, if he hasn’t wanted sex with you yet, he isn’t going to. Maybe you’re too old.”

“I’m only twenty.”

“Fira was seventeen when she had her time with him.”

“Why does he do it?”

“He likes to remember what it was like to be young. He wants to be a young pioneer all over again, and not a man of forty-five with a wife who is also forty-five.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Everyone knows. And anyway, it’s perfectly clear if you understand psychology. I want to leave here soon and go to Jerusalem and study at the university.”

“This isn’t enough for you?”

“No.”

“It’s supposed to be utopia.”

“Did Meier tell you that?”

“He said that was what they were building.”

“He’s such a romantic. He’s an old-country type. It will be better here when people like Meier stand aside and let the next generation take over. Our parents are the most ideological people who have walked the earth. It’s senseless. Pragmatism is the future.”

“I’ve just arrived. I don’t see what I could contribute.”

“To be frank, I don’t know either. I wonder what you’re doing here in the first place. What’s the point of someone like you on a kibbutz? When you dreamed of studying art in London and couldn’t, was it your aim instead to spend the rest of your life washing floors and disinfecting urinals? You think it’s hot now? Just wait. I sound unkind but I’m speaking the truth. You don’t fit here and you never will. It’s just a romantic dream you have.”

“Where would I go?”

“To one of the cities. To Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.”

“And what would I do there?”

“I don’t know. Get a job. There are always things to do.”

“What about you?”

“Absolutely I will leave. Maybe I’ll come back, but only when I’m ready. I’m going to read Freud and Jung and Adler.”

“Aren’t they just more old-country types, like Meier?”

“It depends on the use you make of their ideas.”

“How would you use them?”

“To understand how your enemy is thinking. To get inside their minds. In the long run, when we have our own country, we’ll need everything a country has—an army, for example, and an intelligence service.”

“Spies?”

“Yes. You would make a good spy, by the way, if you could do away with your sentimentality.”

“What do you mean? What do you know about me?”

“You are a girl who feels herself divided and you don’t like it. You want to be a whole person, to mend what you think are fractures in your personality and you seek to do it in this romantic dream of the radiant tomorrow. Why bother? Do you really want to be the new Jew that Meier and the others want to create, which is some fantasy from a poster about collectivization in the Soviet Union in the 1920s? We used to have a poster like that on the wall when I was growing up.”

“My uncle had them too.”

“Then you know what I mean. Men with big muscles and women with bodies not much different. Not a type of woman Meier is himself attracted to, of course. If we do have a new Jew he will be exactly what we want him to be and he will be dedicated to more than growing a bunch of bananas.”

“How are you going to do that? Make the new Jew the way you want?”

“We have a library here. Have you been to it? At first it had one book. A Russian encyclopedia. You didn’t just fall asleep when you opened it,
the book itself was half asleep. Now we can vote for which books we wish to include and we order them. It takes months for them to arrive but they come in the end. I am the only person who is interested in psychology so if I am sparing, and don’t request a book too often, I am unopposed. As a result, we have two books by an American called John B. Watson. From him I have learned that we can discard introspection. All behavior is determined. Behind every response lies a stimulus. You just have to find the stimulus. And by manipulating the stimulus you can alter the response so it’s possible to do away with all neurosis such as sexual deviance which can be cured. It’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“Do you think it’s possible,” I said, “for there to be a new kind of woman?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, with the new science, anything is possible. We can be what we want.”

Something occurred to me. “What if you like your neurosis? If you want to be a homosexual?”

“That isn’t logical. Who would choose to be unhappy?” And it was true. The homosexuals who hung around in Soho did not seem to be happy though it was possible that this was because they always had the police breathing down their necks.

Talking to Leah was like looking through a sheet of glass. Everything was crystal clear and I was exhilarated. She
was
the new kind of woman herself, the kind who thought with her brains, not her womb; who took no notice of hairstyles but wanted more than a life of rural servitude; who sized people up and recognized them for what they were; who knew what she wanted and how to get it; who did not live through men.

“But despite everything you say,” I told her, “I still want to be a Jew in a Jewish land.”

“What do you think a Jew is? Am I a Jew, for example?”

“Of course.”

“How? I have no religion, just the same as you. The British call us Jews to distinguish us from the Arabs but when the British are gone, then who will we be? It is always other people who define what a Jew is. Whenever someone asks, what’s a Jew, they’re posing a slippery question. In Germany before the war there were Jews with blond hair and blue eyes. Who was saying they were Jews? Non-Jews. Did
they
think they were Jews? Maybe not. Maybe they would have been happy to forget about the whole thing. When we have our own state people will enter here as Jews but then we will remodel them and they will be turned into something else.
They will be citizens of a country and that is an entirely different matter. Everyone knows what a citizen is. It’s someone who holds or is entitled to a passport. And when that happens, all our troubles will be over.”

Leah was right. I didn’t belong there and I was bored. Apparently it was possible for utopia to induce ennui, which the books Uncle Joe gave me to read had never mentioned. Perhaps if I had been there at the inception of the kibbutz, in the days when women still shimmied with red scarves tied around their hips and the men had formed human pyramids and everyone had danced for the sheer delight of being alive, I could have subsumed my identity into its common purpose. In two weeks, I had six lovers to try to make Meier jealous, make him notice me, but that didn’t work.

I lay on the ground as they pumped away on top of me, wondering why I was aroused when I thought of Meier on my own, but felt like a lump of meat when a young and thrusting sexual organ was actually inside me. I went through all that dreary boredom for him, the fumbling hands, the jerky spasms, the wetness sliding down into my shorts an hour late. My reward was for him to say, “You are very popular, I hear. Good. You’re young. Enjoy yourself.”

And that, I realized, seemed to be that. There was no future here for my search for the liberation of the spirit and there was no future in being attracted to Meier. And because I was only twenty and had not yet had my heart broken, I simply stopped being attracted. How easy it is to recover when you are young.

When I did, my thoughts turned away from the kibbutz and I began to wonder what lay beyond its fields and what the town was like on the other side of the lake.

I did not tell Meier I was leaving. I packed my Selfridge suitcase and arranged a lift with Gadi who was going to Haifa with a shopping list of items he wanted to try to buy from a certain British corporal who had set up a black-market shop in a hut on the Jaffa Road and usually had blankets, primus stoves, petrol, picks and shovels and fire extinguishers available, pilfered from stores.

Driving out of the kibbutz and skirting the perimeter of the lake towards Tiberias, the world I had known for the past six weeks dissolved into vapor, like Brigadoon. I regarded it if not as a false start, at least as an overture. It had not been a complete waste of time. I now had some command of Hebrew and was sexually experienced. I had a tan, which went well with my dark hair. Oddly, my breasts seemed to have grown a little, and my brassiere strained uncomfortably. I could feel the weight of them in my hands. I abandoned to the common storeroom the shorts and the shirts, glad to acquire femininity again.

In the hour before I finally left communal life, I put on a green dress, the color of the leaves on the trees in an English spring, and with a mouthful of pins began to address my attention to my hair.