Yasmine (35 page)

Reaching the kibbutz I slowed down and stopped before the avenue of palms that lined the access road like a palace guard. Not all the palms were still upright. Eighteen years had passed since I had first come here, as a thirteen-year-old boy who spoke Hebrew haltingly with a heavy Arabic accent, a little refugee from Iraq taken from his parents’ home in the immigrant camp and sent to join the youth group in the legendary kibbutz.

I restarted the engine and drove down the avenue. The smells of the silo and the cowshed, the flower beds and the laurel hedges, the quiet and the intimidating cleanliness trickled into my soul as they always did. Yasmine said nothing but stroked the back of my neck.

Noa, the wife of Haggai who had invited me to give the lecture, was waiting for me in front of the dining hall. She was surprised to see Yasmine, because I hadn’t said I was bringing a girl friend, but immediately recovered and gave us a meaningful smile.

“Noa, this is Yasmine. She’s an orientalist researching the Israeli-Arab conflict at the Sorbonne,” I said.

“It’s a pleasure. My husband Haggai is an orientalist too.
You’ll soon meet him,” she said to Yasmine and shook her hand. Noa had filled out a little and become very attractive. Her hair was neatly gathered on her nape, her back was very straight and her eyes were full of warmth. The years had been kind to her. Even in the old days she was always a good-looking girl who had a style of her own in clothes. She favoured colourful shirts with a bandana at her throat and the white shorts of a tennis player. Now she took us to the guest apartment, stopping on the way at the linen storeroom to pick up sheets and towels, and then leading us up the cypress walk. Pinkish-purple redbud bushes were blooming everywhere.

Yasmine looked around at the rich greenery and said to Noa, in Hebrew, that it was her first visit to a kibbutz.

“But you speak such good Hebrew, without an accent!” Noa said admiringly.

“I was born in this country,” Yasmine replied.

“What happened to the orange grove and the vegetable garden and the olive orchard?” I asked.

“Times have changed,” Noa said. “We did away with the orange grove and the vegetable garden, and uprooted the olive trees to grow fodder for the cattle and the poultry. Nowadays the fruit and vegetables from the West Bank are so cheap that it doesn’t make sense, simply for the sake of Zionism, to keep on growing them.”

The guest apartment, consisting of a room and a half, was furnished with monastic simplicity but was clean and pleasant. There was a basket of fruit on the table, and in the kitchen there were tea bags, coffee, biscuits and bottles of juice and soda water. Noa went into the bathroom and turned on the tap. “Good, the water’s hot. Dinner is at seven. We’ll meet you at the entrance to the dining hall.”

“That’s some title you gave me,” Yasmine laughed. “An orientalist researching the Arab-Israeli conflict at the Sorbonne, no less!”

A profound peace, and the pleasant and familiar cooing of the wood pigeons, enveloped me like an old lullaby. “Try to get some sleep, we’ve got a long evening ahead of us,” Yasmine advised and went to take a shower.

I tried to breathe quietly, listening to every rustle. The squeak of the door when she came out of the shower, her barefoot padding on the way to the tiny bedroom. There was no door or curtain between us, and I imagined her removing the towel from her head, shaking out her wet hair. I love wet hair. Now she was taking off her dressing-gown, revealing her naked body, which I’d never seen…My heart began to pound madly and my whole body grew hot. I wanted to get up and love her crazily, make her mine, my desired, my adored…but I held myself back. I took deep breaths and forced myself to calm down, to repress the storm inside me. I needed to sleep – tonight I had to face a double test.

Crazy, restless dreams filled my sleep, and one image shook me: the ruddy Tigris overflowed and flooded the loamy soil, bursting furiously on to the white dunes of Pardes Hanna, washing over the immigrant camp, submerging the tents and swallowing everything in its path.

I woke up in alarm. Where was I? It was dark. My head felt heavy. The lecture! Oh no, I’m late! I turned on the light and looked at my watch. Five past six. Where was Yasmine? She was not in the apartment. I opened the blinds, and found it was still light outside. I looked around till I saw her on the path, her camera case slung over her shoulder and a bunch of wildflowers in her hand.

“This place is like a village from another world,” she said.
“Pastoral, peaceful. The people are relaxed, sitting on their balconies and on the grass with the children. Nobody stopped me or asked who I was and what I was doing here. Everything is wide open, like one family…It’s perfect, just like the descriptions in your propaganda booklets.”

I gave her coffee and stroked her arm. “I also thought so when I was a youngster. It looks idyllic, everything is left open, there are no locks and no divisions, everyone is equal. But behind it there are tensions and disappointments. You won’t believe it, but an old kibbutz member wrote in his diary, which was found after his death, that all his life he felt like a second-class citizen because he came to the kibbutz three months after the founding group.”

“All the same,” she said, “what they’ve done and built here is really enviable.” Then she looked at me severely. “You’re not going to put on a jacket and tie?”

“In the kibbutz? You know what they call a tie round here – a kipper!” I laughed.

“But you’re not a kibbutz member, you’re a lecturer, this evening’s guest.”

Outside, red hibiscus and long-stemmed poppies glowed in the twilight. Yasmine took my arm, giving me a feeling of confidence and belonging.

“When shall we visit your old instructor?” she asked.

“After dinner.”

I stopped outside the dining hall, which had been enlarged since my last visit, uneasy about entering without someone from the kibbutz. People nodded to me, a few came over and shook my hand, and they all stared at Yasmine, who stood beside me, slender, elegant and unassuming.

The practice in the dining hall had changed from table service, as it had been in my time, to self-service. This evening the supper was lavish – boiled chicken, potato puree, red cabbage and a green salad. Yasmine took a tray and helped herself readily. No one could have guessed who she was, not even Haggai, who bombarded her with questions about her research and asked her to send him a copy of her dissertation, talked to her at length about his own research, and said he was willing to lecture at the Sorbonne.

Yasmine turned out to be a good actress. She said her doctoral thesis focused on Nasser’s influence on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the national identity of the Arabs in Israel. She showed great interest in the kibbutz, asked about the way of life, communal property, the upbringing of children, education, the status of women. Then she surprised me by saying, “I’d like to spend a week or two here. Perhaps work in the fields or the kitchen. Could I?”

“You’re very welcome. Just let me know and I’ll get a room ready for you,” said Nili, an old friend from the youth group who had stayed on and married a kibbutz member.

A group of blond youngsters came into the dining hall. I raised my eyebrows.

“Volunteers from Europe,” Noa explained. “Better than hired labour.”

“And that’s not hired labour?” Nili commented.

“No, the volunteers are something else altogether,” Noa replied. “The young people enjoy their company, party with them and have fun. There are already some mixed couples. One kibbutz-born guy married a girl volunteer and went to Holland with her.”

“How did the kibbutz react?” I asked.

“It’s not such a big deal these days,” Nili said. “You know, of our youth group only I stayed on. All the others left sooner or later.”

We spent the hour before the lecture visiting Sonia, my immortal former instructor. When she opened the door and saw Yasmine beside me her eyes lit up. “Your girl friend?”

Yasmine and I smiled. For a moment the world was ours.

Sonia, now sixty, had changed. Deep lines framed her mouth, etched by the hard years in the valley. Her thin frame exposed the signs of passing time, which in the fuller-bodied are cushioned by fat. Her room remained as small and simple as ever, and the refreshments she offered were also the same – plain chocolate, a homemade cake, and coffee.

Yasmine took a piece of chocolate. I watched it cling to her lips and wished myself in its place, but Sonia’s presence inhibited me from showing my feelings, like an adolescent feeling bashful before his mother. Instead, I took an apple from the fruit basket. “The kibbutz has changed,” I said. “It’s developed.”

“Every bit of this land is soaked with our blood, sweat and tears,” Sonia responded with her familiar phrases. “We started from nothing. There was nothing here, only fallow soil, marshes and malaria…”

“And Arabs who had lived here for generations, surely?” Yasmine put in with an innocent expression.

“Yes, of course,” Sonia agreed, slightly taken aback, but went on to explain, like a patient teacher: “You see, they were very backward, and we brought them Western values and culture.”

Yasmine’s face changed colour. I was afraid that a war of words would break out, which would have been inappropriate. Sonia’s heroic narrative was a perfect example of what Yasmine
called “obtuse Zionist condescension”, but she kept her temper and only added ironically, “That’s right, we came here to benefit the Arabs.”

Sonia ignored the irony and went on: “From our first day in the wilderness of the valley we made every effort to cultivate friendly relations with the nearby Arab villages, because to us they were part of the world underclass that was suffering under capitalism. We hoped they would understand that their real enemies were the landowners who exploited them. Our tractors ploughed their lands and prepared them for sowing, in times of drought we filled their water-cisterns, and they were free to use our clinic. We wanted to be good neighbours and we believed we could live with them in peace.”

“Then we started another war and conquered more territories…” Yasmine could not resist saying.

Sonia stared at her, amazed, as Yasmine went on in the patronising first-person-plural style, borrowed from her: “We wanted to help, but we thought we were better than them. Who gave the Arabs stereotypes if not us? – poor quality Arab labour, monotonous music, social and technological backwardness…And what we attributed to the Arabs we also attributed to the Jews from Arab countries.”

I wanted to cry out, Yasmine, who needs this now?

“You can’t bracket the Jews from the Muslim countries with the local Arabs,” Sonia said, visibly upset. “As for the Arabs, did you know that we always supported a bi-national state? It was they who didn’t accept us and didn’t want to live with us in peace. They rejected the Biltmore Programme and the Partition Plan of 1947, and went to war, and then another war, to wipe us out…”

“And now you…sorry, we, are subjugating and oppressing another people,” Yasmine responded. Sweat appeared on her
forehead. She lit a cigarette, poured herself a glass of water and drank it down.

“You don’t understand. We settled here as idealists. We believed, we still believe, that we are tested by our treatment of minorities. Here, let me read you what Ahad Ha’am wrote, and remember we were brought up on his thought.” Sonia got up, took a volume from the shelf and read aloud: “We must be careful in our conduct with the strange nation amongst whom we have come to live anew, treat it with love and respect, and needless to say, with fairness and justice.”

“You mean, we’re enlightened conquerors,” Yasmine smiled sarcastically. “Is that possible? Why should we succeed where others failed? The French tried it in Algeria, and that ended in a bloodbath.”

Sonia protested, half apologetically. “Look, we’re doing everything we can to avoid bloodshed, to protect human rights, to preserve justice, and not to hurt or humiliate.”

“I am sorry to have to disagree with you,” Yasmine said, “especially since I’m your guest.” She became openly critical. “You live inside the kibbutz and you don’t know what is going on outside. I move around and collect information and I’ve found cases of harsh treatment, sometimes very harsh. We don’t seem to care what we are doing to them – our military government, land expropriations, everything depending on permits, area closures, cultural and national repression…A lot of injustice, even if unintentional.”

Her inner conviction and passion overwhelmed me. If only she were Jewish and I could marry her according to our law! I looked at my watch and became impatient. The bitter exchange was lighting a fuse that I wanted to steer away from, especially since I was about to face an audience.

“You’re saying very hard things. I…” Sonia struggled with herself, then her voice softened. “There may be a grain of truth in what you say, and some bad things are happening…Perhaps it’s difficult for us to admit to errors and see ourselves in the mirror…About the lands – you’re making it sound worse than it is. You’re young and there are things you haven’t found out. The landowners and the heads of the Arab clans from whom we bought the lands made a lot of money from the sales. The Arab labourers who worked for us also earned well, and Arabs from neighbouring countries came here to look for work, so their numbers grew. Without the renewed Jewish presence in this country the Arabs wouldn’t have come here.” She fell silent, then added in a weary but confident tone, “Injustice is done when you want to do it. Our intentions were pure.”

“Ladies,” I broke into the silence, “it’s time to go to the dining hall. The lecture is about to start.”

On the way there Sonia whispered to me, “I’m afraid your girlfriend has been too much influenced by Arab propaganda.” Then she asked sadly, “Are you moving in the same direction, away from us?”

The dining hall was full. An accordion player was on the podium, his fingers flying over the keys, and the entire audience burst enthusiastically into song, including myself (off-key as always):

Yasmine pinched me. “It's the first time I've heard you singing in Hebrew.”

I whispered, “The religious start their meetings with Bible commentary, and the pioneers with a singsong. It's a new culture!”

A man with a violin and a young woman at the piano, both kibbutz members, played the first movement of Beethoven's Spring Sonata. “Are you sure those two are agricultural workers?” Yasmine murmured.

Finally Haggai stood up to introduce me. My mouth was dry and my head felt empty. The old guard of the kibbutz, with their hard sunburnt faces, scared me stiff.

“Comrades,” I began, “I feel like a bar mitzvah boy standing up to read the weekly portion. Only yesterday I was a pupil here and sat on the back benches of this dining hall, now I'm on this podium. So forgive me if I am a little nervous.

“Today we need a new beginning, a revolution that will take into account both the Arabs of Israel and us, the immigrants from the Muslim countries, who fought in this war shoulder to shoulder with you.

“The question is, what will be our place in the leadership? Will our knowledge, our intuition, our cultural connection to the Arabs, be put to good use, will we be a formative element in the culture and the new political reality, or will we continue to be second-class?

“And another question – Will the Arabs of Israel continue to be the third-class? I believe that what we do today will determine whether the Arabs of Israel will be our neighbours or our enemies. Are we capable of sensitivity to the Other and consideration for his difficulties? Will we have the wisdom to carry out the necessary revolution and usher in a future of peace and co-existence?”

I then talked briefly about the population of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, illustrating the distress and the hardships these people were suffering with examples drawn from my personal experience. I talked about things that weighed on my mind, and when I finished speaking my back was wet with sweat.

Many disagreed with me, and some of the same arguments were repeated in different forms. Dolek was the first to speak. “Nuri, you were educated here and you know what this place means to us. We are tied to this soil with an umbilical cord. We fertilised it with our blood, we watered it with our dreams. As
for peace, perhaps it is your youthful impetuosity that makes you lay the whole burden of it on us alone, and makes you forget the harsh facts of reality. Hasn't our hand always been extended to make peace? But what can we do, if they always push it away? The responsibility for achieving friendship and peace can't be only up to us, even if we want it with all our heart.”

Guerman, a history teacher at the secondary school, said: “This is the land of our forefathers. The Arabs came here after us. The people who call themselves Palestinians came from Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Sudan to settle here. If we recognise them, they must recognise us. Young man, your open attitude towards the Arabs is impressive. When I was young I also wanted to view the world from such a beautiful standpoint, but it can't be done. Life is not so simple. The fine vision which you presented refers to a very narrow section of reality, it ignores both the terrible fanatical violence of the Muslim world and the hideous suffering of the Jews. You speak as if what we have here is a hard-hearted Jewish conqueror confronting a wretched Arab, and nothing else. This is so narrow and so superficial! That is not how it is. We keep questioning ourselves, examining our own actions, wondering what to do in order to survive, as simple as that, and what is the right thing to do? Are we responsible for the problem of the refugees? There was a war, and they started it! Do they ask themselves how come Holocaust survivors like myself and refugees from the Arab world like you have built up a successful state, while they remain bogged down in their refugee camps?”

“And what about Jerusalem?” asked Shaike.

I had to answer them, and tried to work out a comprehensive
response that would cover the various questions and arguments.

“In my opinion this country has two histories, two languages, two cultures, two visions, two dreams. Anyone who tries to claim the whole thing will end up with nothing…”

“You haven't mentioned Jerusalem,” Shaike interrupted.

I felt Yasmine growing tense. Her eyes were on me.

“Shaike, Jerusalem the holy is a difficult place. Its entire history is paved with conflicts and wars, and precisely because it's holy, it attracts messianic weirdoes and religious nuts. The Christians have left the battlefield to the Jews and Muslims. We'll slaughter each other and they will be the observers. In my opinion, Jerusalem should be open to all, and if you ask me, the Temple Mount should fly not just the flag of Israel, but the flags of the Vatican and of all the Arab states.”

There was a deathly silence. I was afraid I'd gone too far, though in my heart I believed it was the right answer. I was standing before them as an equal, not a boy under their protection. This time my background and my knowledge of Arabic were a source of strength and respect.

When I stepped down I was surrounded by friends, both close and distant. Dolek, who had opened new vistas to me as a boy, was especially moved, and he pressed me to his chest with his huge paws.

The severe-looking Tirtzah, one of the oldest members, spoke solemnly as always, but with a little stammer. “That was…I should say…well, anyone can prepare a written lecture, look things up, summarise and read it out. But to speak like this and answer questions, off the cuff? Spontaneously? That is…” She couldn't find the right words, or perhaps she wanted to compliment the boy from the youth
group who had grown into a man, but was unable to praise him wholeheartedly.

Yasmine, who was noting everything in her balance-sheet of justice, swallowed a smile. “What's this, you're being tested?”

“Absolutely! And it's a strain on the nerves, but it also drives you forwards.”

“You know,” Haggai said, summing up, “you've broken three records this evening: people stayed till after eleven, asked a lot of questions and applauded, which is not customary among us.”

“Come to us,” Nili urged, “and we'll celebrate. You've earned it.”

“I'm bushed. Let's have breakfast together instead.”

Hand in hand, Yasmine and I walked up the dark cypress path, just the two of us, closer than we'd ever been before. Here, in Kiryat Oranim, my first home in Israel, the barriers between us finally fell.

As soon as we entered the guest apartment we turned into each other's arms. Yasmine clasped my head with her hands and I pressed her to me with all the tenderness in me. Her hands ran down my back and her nails dug into me. I had dreamed of this moment and feared it ever since the day I met her, and always knew it would be a point of no return. I undressed her and kissed every cell in her body which was revealed in all its beauty and freshness. I laid her on the bed and stretched out my hand to turn off the light, but stopped. No, let there be light tonight!

“I want to see you, to love you with my eyes as well.”

“You are my gentle conqueror,” she murmured, her eyes moist.

I'm no conqueror. I don't want to conquer. I want to live you, love you, come to you with silky caresses, envelope you with my heartbeat and my soul and the yearning of my body.

She was bleeding and I was smeared with her blood. “Sorry, it's my period,” she said, but I entered her with a sense of compassion I'd never known before. She cried and pressed me to her warm spring, and I was sucked into her with infinite sweetness, surrendering to her my essence, my seed and my being, body and soul, blending with her. We were intertwined, coiled in and around each other. We were one flesh. I wanted to say to her, in Hebrew and Arabic and all the languages of the world, all the words of love I'd stored up for a year, but the release and relief made me swoon and forget everything. I fell asleep inside her, sinking into the sweetest sleep I'd ever known.

We woke early, before it was fully light, and with my eyes still half closed I covered her face with kisses.

“I love you, Yasmine.”

“I love you, Nuri. I love your thoughts and your feelings, your speech and your passion. I love your skin and your smell and your sweat.”

“Will you live with me?”

“Are you asking me to marry you, my love?”

“Is it possible?”

She buried her face in my chest and wept. My eyes were not dry either.

On our way to breakfast with Nili we stepped into the dining hall. I wanted to smell again the old familiar odours of omelettes, semolina porridge and cocoa. Nor could I skip the two youth group houses. The lawn in front was overgrown and weedy, the sand plot in between, which served us for athletics,
was covered with planks and timber, and our beloved plum tree was gone, like all the rest of our world.

An abundant breakfast was waiting for us at Nili's. As we ate I told her that the municipality of nearby Netanya had decided to name part of a public park after our “Mister Universe”, Amram Iwa, who was killed in the war. They had invited Amram's old classmates from the youth group to the naming ceremony. In parting, Nili gave me a bottle of her home-made cherry liqueur, and we left.

We drove up Mount Tabor and visited the shadowy church on its summit, our arms around each other, locked in love. It was a breezy, pleasant spring day. I stopped beside a tangle of bougainvillea bushes that bore pink, purple and white blossoms, picked handfuls of their flowers and scattered them on Yasmine's face and neck and on the car, as they do for brides on their wedding day. In my heart I sang to her the verses of King Solomon: “Thou art fair, my beloved, thou art fair…Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon…”

We drove on to the Sea of Galilee and visited the cemetery on its bank. We walked in silence among the tombstones: here was Berl Katznelson, a towering Zionist intellectual with his wife to his right and his mistress to his left, here Ben-Zion Israeli, the founder of Kibbutz Kinneret, and here Rahel, whose book of poems lay on her tomb. Yasmine picked it up and leafed through it:

Facing each other – the twin banks
of a single stream.
Fate's verdict:
Forever apart.

Yasmine looked around at the greying stones and then at the blue lake and the distant gulls. “Tell me about the founders of the kibbutzim,” she requested, “but without the slogans that Sonia spouted. Talk without thinking, without straining to get things exactly right, just the way they come to mind.”

“What can I tell you? To me, the founders were the people of what we call the Second Aliyah, the first organised Zionist settlement. In fact, it all began right here, the great drama opened here in the hellish summer heat. There were not more than two thousand stubborn pioneers – solemn revolutionaries, with powerful motivation and strange moods, highly romantic.

“They arrived in the early years of the century, most of them from Russia, after the dreadful pogroms and the failure of the 1905 revolution, and had extravagant and colourful visions of the life they would lead here. They were like seagulls, they spread their wings and flew to a different country that was both old and new, dreaming about the revival of the Hebrew nation. Again and again they failed, but every failure led to another creation, another social institution.

“They saw themselves as secularists who rebelled against religion, but they lived like devout believers in an ascetic order. Many of them were poets and writers. Yosef Brenner, one of the most outstanding among them, once took a pioneer of the next wave of immigration, showed him a worker's room and said, ‘No woman has entered this room for months.' Then he took him to the cemetery and said, ‘Of the eleven buried here, only one died a natural death. The others were either murdered or committed suicide.'”

“And the Jews who were here before, the old community, how did they receive them?” Yasmine asked.

“They didn't want them! The Jewish farmers wouldn't employ them, they preferred Arab labourers, who were more skilful and cheaper.

“What else can I tell you? Perhaps about the achievement which moves me most – the revival of the Hebrew language. There's a story about a pioneer who took two vows when he came – one, never to return to the diaspora, two, to speak only Hebrew. He was sent to work in the winery of Rishon Lezion. There he was asked if he had any knowledge of French and of bookkeeping, and though he knew both, he said he knew only Hebrew and wanted to work as a common labourer. They thought he was an idiot and made him wash barrels and vats. The foreman kept nagging at him, talking to him in Yiddish, but he ignored him unless he spoke Hebrew. One day he was told to fill the barrels, and at a certain point the foreman ordered him, in Yiddish of course, to shut the spigot. He paid no attention and the wine was spilt. The foreman yelled, again in Yiddish, ‘Shut the spigot, idiot!', but he stood over the flowing wine, asking, ‘What did you say?' ‘I said turn off the spigot, you fool, then get out of here!' the foreman yelled in Hebrew. ‘Now I understand,' the man said, shut the spigot and was left without a job.”

“Charming story,” she smiled. “Amusing but worthy of respect.”

We decided to return to Jerusalem via Beit She'an and the Jordan Valley. On the way we stopped at a small Arab village. A woman was drawing water from a well, slices of tomatoes hung on strings between two adobe houses, an old man sat on a wooden crate, rolled a cigarette and smoked it in a leisurely way. A bored cat looked at us without stirring from the soft
ground. Apart from barefoot children who took us for tourists and ran up to us, there was a great stillness about the village, as if it was outside time. Everything was done
shwai-shwai
, without haste, moved by an ancient tradition in which a son followed his father and the father his grandfather, and the world remained unchanged. The Western frenzy had not reached this place.