Establishment

by Howard Fast

  “I have reservations at the Dan Hotel.”

  “Yes, very nice. On the shore. There will be taxis outside of the hotel. From the hotel to the kibbutz, it’s about an hour and a half. If you don’t plan to stay too long, the driver will wait.”

  Like most people, Barbara had her preconceived notions of Israel. Knowing that Tel Aviv had been founded by a handful of Jews on the sand dunes of the Mediterranean shore less than half a century before, she was more prepared to see a tentative, frontier sort of place than the enormous, throbbing, modern city that greeted her.

  After she had unpacked her single small bag, bathed, and changed clothes, she left the hotel to walk. It was still only noontime, and it struck her that she could hire one of the taxis in front of the hotel and complete her mission before the day was over. But now that she was here in Israel, her mission appeared to her to be meaningless and she could make no sense out of the fact that she had come eight thousand miles to look at her husband’s grave.

  Walking down Frishman Street from the Dan, she came to Dizengoff, turned left, and walked along the broad avenue with the whole world meandering along around her, boys and girls and young soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders, old men and old women, black people and white people, Jews, Arabs, Christians—every face mankind had ever made for itself, short, tall, fat, thin, everything that was human—an easygoing, unhurried mixture not quite like anything she had ever seen anywhere else.

  She bought a frankfurter in a roll and a bottle of Israeli beer and sat down at a small wrought-iron table in one of the many cafes that line dizengoff. The beer was good, and suddenly ravenously hungry, she ate a second frankfurter.

  Better now, her hunger gone, Barbara sat there on Dizengoff and tried to have a sense of this place, a feeling of this place. Like so many white Protestant Americans, she granted Jews and being Jewish a peculiar position in her thinking. The thinking was always prefaced by a denial: “I am totally indifferent to whether someone is Jewish or not.” Only it was never just someone. A Pole or a Russian or a Hungarian or even an Englishman could have been someone. Jews were specific. Jews were the reality of what she had experienced in Nazi Germany. A Jew was the man who had shared her bed and who became her wedded husband. A Jew was her father’s partner. Jake Levy had been Jewish. Sally was part Jewish. If she saw her life as a fabric, it would be woven through and through with Jewish threads. Barbara’s mother had conquered her own anti-Semitism by ceasing to refer to anyone as Jewish. She simply Christianized a whole people and left it there; sitting in Tel Aviv, Barbara began to giggle at the realization. Jean was wonderful. Why couldn’t she be like her mother? But suppose, she asked herself, Jean was here, recognizing that this was a Jewish country? Ah, well, Jean would solve it. Jean solved things. Tom solved things. Even Sally and Joe came to a working arrangement. That left Barbara. Barbara solved nothing, finished nothing, concluded nothing. Was her father the same way? she wondered. Did the two of them sit on the edge of the world looking at it, the way she now sat at a table on Dizengoff?

  For the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth time, Barbara asked herself why she had come and what she was doing here. Surely she was in no need of an emotional bath, and the picture that arose in her mind’s eye, the picture of herself kneeling by Bernie’s grave and placing flowers on it, was so sentimental and fraudulent that she turned away from it in anger and exasperation. She got up, paid her bill, and walked with long strides back to the Dan Hotel. She was now self-confessed, she felt, and whatever scales had clouded her eyes had fallen off. She was entirely occupied by a fine liberal rage at all of those who fracture the world and mankind into nations and races and religions. She herself would not stoop to it. She had seen enough of war and death and suffering to abhor this whole business of Jew and Gentile. She had married a man. He was a man, a member of the human family, a tall, easygoing, capable human being. In some way she could not entirely comprehend, he had understood her and had been able to give her some moments of great happiness. Now he was dead. That too was a part of existence. She was not the only widow in the world. But in his case, the mythology, as she saw it now, of this place, this Israel, was the force that had killed him. Well, whatever it was, she would not indulge it. She had made a mistake in coming here; she would not add to the mistake by performing the sentimental journey to the cemetery. She would return to the hotel, pack her things, and go back to America where she belonged. And without guilt. She had done her share to make this snake pit men called civilization a little more tolerable. She would not succumb to guilt.

  She was back in her room at the hotel, packing her suitcase, when the door opened and the chambermaid entered with fresh towels. She was a small, wizened woman who smiled tentatively at Barbara and said, “Are you leaving? But you just came.” Her English was heavily accented, and it occurred to Barbara that it was a French accent rather than Israeli. Looking at her more closely, Barbara noticed the number tattooed on her forearm.

  “Yes, I’m leaving,” Barbara replied.

  “You just come—this morning.”

  Angry with herself, with the whole world, provoked at herself for succumbing to a sentimental notion that took her away from her son after being separated from him for six long months, Barbara found herself resenting the intrusiveness of the chambermaid. They were like that, aggressive, pushy; and where else in the whole world would a chambermaid pry into the business of a guest she did not know? And then the thought itself sickened her. How, how could she think in such terms? What was wrong with her? All this little woman had done was to reach out to another human being with a question, and in her mind Barbara had rejected her, condemned her in terms of the most vulgar racism. It did not matter to her that she had not spoken the words. The thought was sufficient to make her feel that she should beg the chambermaid’s forgiveness; yet if she did that, it would only make matters worse.

  The chambermaid put the towels in the bathroom. She was turning to leave.

  “Please don’t go. Stay a moment,” Barbara said. “Can you?”

  The chambermaid paused and stared at her.

  “Are you all right, miss?”

  Barbara dropped down onto the bed and clenched her hands. “Yes—yes, I’m all right.”

  “I bring something—maybe a cup tea.”

  “You’re French,” Barbara said.

  “Yes. How you know?”

  “Your accent.” And in French, Barbara said, “Can we talk in French? It’s so long since I’ve spoken to anyone in French.”

  The wrinkled face broke into a smile. “How nice,” the chambermaid said, speaking in French. “How very nice to see a Frenchwoman here. We don’t get many French guests in the hotel.”

  “I’m not French. I’m American,” Barbara said.

  “But your French is perfect.”

  “No, hardly. I lived in France for years. But I’m rusty now. Can you stay a moment or two? I want so much to talk to someone, and that’s the worst of it when you travel alone. There’s no one to talk to. Can you stay a few minutes?”

  “Yes. Surely.”

  “Please sit down,” Barbara said. “My name is Barbara Cohen.”

  The chambermaid nodded eagerly and seated herself on the edge of a chair, sitting very straight, as if to take the edge off the intimacy of sitting down. “I’m glad. My name is Annette Tilman. I mean I’m glad you’re Jewish. Or American. I don’t feel warmly toward the French.”

  “I’m not Jewish. My husband was Jewish.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t like the French?” Barbara asked. “But you’re French.”

  “I’m Jewish. Now I’m Israeli.”

  Barbara didn’t know what to say to that, and for a moment or two they sat in silence. Then, suddenly, the chambermaid said, “How old do you think I am?”

  The question was a trap. Barbara felt defensive and bewildered. Why was she sittin
g here talking to a chambermaid? Why wasn’t she arranging for her passage on the first plane out? She felt that she was being ensnared, and there was a touch of something woeful in her face as she stared at the chambermaid. How old was this woman? The face was seamed, and next to the chin was a row of welts, scars. Had she ever been a beautiful woman? The face was battered and broken and as wrinkled as old leather. Only the pale blue eyes staring out of it made it something else than ugly.

  “I don’t know, really—I can’t guess ages,” Barbara said, thinking that the woman was at least sixty, but at the end of sixty years of suffering.

  “Yes, you have a heart, Madame Cohen. You are very young and beautiful. I’m not envious. I am alive. My health is not bad. I live here in the land of Israel. I enjoy my work, and each day my Hebrew improves. I shall tell you how old I am. Twenty-nine years. You don’t believe me? Credit the Gestapo. I don’t speak about these things, ever, but you appeared so upset, so astonished because I said that I do not feel warmly toward the French. We lived in Rouen. I had a husband, two children, a mother, a father, three sisters, and a brother. I also had two nephews and a niece and a very old grandmother.” She held up her hand and began to count on her fingers. “We count. Myself, but I am alive. We count with my husband, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. All dead, turned in by our good French neighbors to the Gestapo. So I hate the French with all my heart. But that is stupid, isn’t it? I don’t understand people, even myself, because all I can think about right now is how pleasant it is to sit here and talk to a nice lady like you in my own language. And meanwhile, who does my work?” She leaped to her feet. “I do my work. Who else?”

  She smiled apologetically and left the room. Barbara sat on the bed, staring at the door. Then she unpacked for the second time, and went downstairs and had some dinner.

  At eight o’clock the following morning, dressed in an old gray flannel skirt, a sweater, and comfortable shoes, Barbara asked the doorman of the hotel which of the cabs had a driver who spoke English.

  “All of them,” said the doorman. “You take from the front of the line. I don’t play favorites.”

  The driver at the front of the line said, “My name’s Sol Katz. Where to, lady?”

  “Can I take you by the day?”

  He looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded. “Twenty-five dollars, American.” He was about fifty, slope-shouldered, with heavy belly, purple growth on his shaven cheeks, heavy brows, and curly black hair. “Get in,” he said. “Where to?”

  She told him.

  He got into the driver’s seat, twisted around to face her, and said, “You’re sure that’s where you want to go? Kiryat Anavim? It’s just a kibbutz.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He pulled out into the traffic. “You got relatives there?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. You don’t look like nobody got relatives there.”

  “I guess not. You’re American, aren’t you?” she asked him.

  “If you call Bensonhurst America.”

  “Where’s Bensonhurst?”

  “In Brooklyn, with everything else. Well, I been here since forty-eight. I came over to help out and I stayed. What are you, miss, newspaper lady?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You going to write about Israel?”

  “I write about most places where I’ve been. I suppose I’ll write about Israel.”

  Barbara had no desire for conversation. She wanted to look at the countryside, to let it impinge on her, to feel what her husband might have felt about this place. It was like nothing she might have anticipated. In all her travels as a wartime correspondent, she had missed this tiny sliver of land. The very fact of her husband’s commitment had caused her to erect her own wall against anything Israeli. It had been her rival, the single contender for the man she loved, and in the end it had won, and he who had been her man lay not in her bed but in the soil of this place. It was a place that for her had never had a real existence. Her religious upbringing had been perfunctory at best. Dan Lavette had been born a Roman Catholic and had put aside his religion to marry her mother. Sunday school classes in the proper Episcopal precincts of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill taught the mythology of a place called the holy land. That holy land was a place where a man who was a god walked on the waters of the Sea of Galilee, where He dragged a cross along the Via Dolorosa, where the dreams and hopes of mankind had been nailed to a wooden cross, and where Roman soldiers ruled a people who were shrouded in the uncertain mists of antiquity. None of it bore any relationship whatsoever to the teeming streets of Tel Aviv through which Sol Katz expertly steered his taxicab, leaning on his horn and shouting at other drivers in that strange, throaty language called Hebrew. The older, broken-down sections of Oakland made a more familiar equation.

  Out of the city, they drove along a two-lane asphalt road past villages, junkyards, and factories; then there were the farms and the meadows. She sought for comparisons and recalled places in Ohio and Illinois that were not unlike this. It was a cool, lovely morning, the sky wonderfully blue, the air as sweet as honey.

  They came to a place where the land swept away to the north in a great, beautiful unspoiled stretch of meadowland, like the rolling meadows she remembered from the south of England, and Sol Katz called back to her, “Miss, out there”—he pointed—“out there, that’s where King Saul fought his big battle with the Philistines. They came up from the coast, around Tel Aviv, and he came down from the hill.”

  So it was not lost entirely, the myth of Grace Cathedral, even with a cab driver from Bensonhurst. Her eyes were wet, and she fought against the tide of emotion taking hold of her. It’s an illusion, she told herself. This is simply a place, a part of the earth. We are people, and wherever we are is equally sacred, and if we can’t learn that, then nothing is any use. And I will not give in to the dreams and battle cries that took Bernie away. I am going there because I am here already. I’ll see it and get it over with.

  They were climbing into the hills. Here, too, it was unlike any of her imaginings. The hills were covered with young green trees, cedar and pine and the air was sweet with pine fragrance. Now it evoked New England out of her memories.

  “We planted them,” Sol Katz said.

  “What?”

  “The trees, miss. Every one of them. We planted them.”

  “But there are thousands. The hills are covered with them.”

  “That’s right. Used to be nothing but bare rock and grass. That’s something, ain’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” Barbara agreed.

  “There’s Kiryat Anavim,” he said, pointing to a cluster of white, red-roofed houses in the distance. The kibbutz lay in a little valley against a hillside, the buildings climbing the hill above orchards, fields, and cultivated terraces.

  “Who is in charge of a place like that?” Barbara asked after a moment.

  “Miss—say, what’s your name, lady? We’re spending a day together, I should call you something beside miss.”

  “Barbara Cohen.”

  “All right, Miss Cohen—”

  “Mrs. Cohen,” Barbara said.

  “All right, Mrs. Cohen. A kibbutz, it’s usually run by a committee. There’s a secretary or a president or someone like that.”

  “Will they speak English?”

  “Someone will. You got to remember, Mrs. Cohen, we were occupied by the English for a long time.”

  Then they were at the kibbutz. There was an asphalt parking place that held a collection of old cars, trucks, and two tractors. Beyond it, an open shed of a machine shop, where men, stripped to the waist, were working on a third tractor. The road from the parking lot wound up the hillside to a stone and stucco building. The place clung to the mountainside and climbed it, and along with the stone walls and buildings, blazing red ramblers clim
bed and tumbled everywhere. The morning sun was hot, the air still. Honeybees buzzed over the flowers, and a huge black and yellow butterfly paused for a moment on Barbara’s shoulder. A young woman in shorts came down the road, glanced at her curiously, then got into one of the trucks and drove off. A mongrel dog came up to her and licked her shoe.

  Sol Katz walked around his car, observing the tires. “Nice place,” he said. “You don’t know anyone here?”

  “No one, I’m afraid.”

  He called out in Hebrew to the men working in the machine shop, and they shouted back at him. He got the information he desired, and he said to Barbara, “I’ll take you to the office. The secretary’s name is Sarah Perez. They say she’s there now. How long do you think you’ll be here?”

  “No more than an hour.”

  “All right. I’ll be by the car. If you want to, we can drive up to Jerusalem. It’s only a few miles from here.”

  “I’ll see.”

  Barbara followed him up the road to the long stone building. “In there,” Katz said. “They tell me she talks English, so you won’t have no trouble.”

  He left her and went back to his car. She had a feeling that it made him nervous to be away from his taxicab. Evidently it was the central focus of his life. She opened the door and went inside to find a hallway with doors opening off it and all the signs in Hebrew. She knocked at the first door to her right, and when a woman’s voice responded in Hebrew, she opened the door and went in. The room was furnished with a plain wooden table, several wooden chairs, and some filing cabinets. Behind the table sat a thin, dark woman of about forty. A ledger was open in front of her.

  “I’m looking for Sarah Perez,” Barbara said.

  “Myself, yes. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m an American. My name is Barbara Cohen.”

  “Please, sit down.” She pointed to a chair. “You’re a journalist?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you were because you know my name. Sometimes they send journalists here to write about a kibbutz.”