by Yvonne Fein
My father took us to this textile fair in Munich. I could not believe the richness of colour and fabric on display. At the English pavilion there was this amazing stand of futuristic design and material. I looked at the fashions and believed I could stand there all day, gaping. Perhaps my father would find a place for me in the fashion part of his empire. Perhaps that was why he brought me here to see it in the first place. There always was method to his madness. But that’s future music. Studying at Cambridge first. All Biancardi kids must do it.
A young man approached me at the fair. He wore a skullcap and had the sacred fringes dancing beneath his raw cotton shirt. I knew what they were because of the discussions you and I had had. I know it’s crazy but I felt somehow that I knew him, having known you. He told me he was a rabbi without a congregation; that his father was old and dying and had left him the business to run. He loved business, possibly more than his rabbi-ness, and we started to talk, achieving great depth and even a sort of strange intimacy very soon. When my father came to find me, the rabbi gave me his card: Ariel Gold is his name. He laughed as he told me ‘Ariel’ means ‘Lion of God’. I didn’t laugh with him. For some reason I found it quite apposite. He is based in London and I know I will contact him soon.
What about Aristide? I wanted to write. Has he kept pace with your ever-changing heart? Does he know that you are deciding to dance to an entirely different melody? Have you thought how your infinite detachment might hurt him? Your vast carelessness? Fitzgerald’s term, not mine.
And what will happen when you tire of Ariel, or meet with others who arrest your attention? Will you hurt them too?
Words I could never write to her, let alone say. What faintheartedness.
Oh, Carla, Carla. The precipice.
Fatigue and exhaustion. I wanted to go back to the nursery and change shitty nappies. The orchard, which so encapsulated my desire to live the Zionist Socialist Dream, was a place of arduous, gruelling labour. You climbed a ladder with an empty canvas sack slung around your neck and over your shoulder. You clipped an orange or a lemon or a grapefruit from the tree; you clipped it in exactly the right place so that you didn’t cut it off at the very end of the stem, but a little way up. That way, it wouldn’t rot. Once cut, you dropped it into your sack and kept going till the sack was filled. After that you descended the ladder and tipped the contents into huge containers waiting on the trucks. Then up the ladder again. (Attention please jeunes dames: to ascend we keep our carriage erect and dignified; to descend we may touch the banister lightly for balance.)
On my first day, with my sack only half full, I had already begun to wilt. My shoulders and neck were screaming for relief from the load. Gingerly I made my way down the ladder. I thought I might fall at any moment as I staggered towards the container to unload the contents of my sack. A kibbutznik taking time out for a smoke, looked at the paltry cargo I was contributing and shook his head.
‘Mitnadevet’ he said with disdain. Volunteer!
Ivory writes (but not often; Maria-Elena, not at all):
Miss you. Miss our walks. Miss getting lost. Well maybe not getting lost. Things sound dire for you over there. I don’t think I’d mind it so much. When you described the guys and their work in the dairy, I thought: I could do that. Orchards, dairy, gardening—I’m built for it. 5’8, sort of muscley. You’re 5’3 and sort of not.
Seriously though, I’m enrolled at the University of Sussex, far enough away from home so that I can live on campus, which is a relief. Boarding school for six years followed by Lac d’Or has made my parents and me strangers. I don’t think we could stand it if we had to be around each other day and night.
I like this place. I’m staying at South Down Flats and studying International Relations and a Language. Of course, my language is French and I get to study it abroad for a year. My love-life, as usual, barren. I like this Danish guy in my international history tutorial but I think the tutor’s quite partial to him too. Probably not wise to get between them. Can just see my grades plummeting.
Heard from Maria-Elena. The briefest couple of lines. Not happy. They’ve walled her up again.
There was a heightened air of excitement. In a couple of days or so, the Israeli Olympic team were to head to Münich for the Summer Olympics. Weightlifters, wrestlers, some track and field athletes and even two women—a sprinter and a swimmer—as well as coaches and referees. There were parades and special dinners and in S’dot Ester we decorated the dining room with Olympic rings and colours. One of the weightlifters actually hailed from our kibbutz. Each evening for the last week when he came into the dining room there was applause while all of us called out his name in time with the clapping. ‘Yossi! Yossi! Yossi!’ We knew he would do us proud.
And in the middle of it all, a letter from Tommy:
I’m going to Munich. The university newspaper is sending me to write an article about multi-culturalism and sport. Well, when I say, ‘sending’, the whole thing was my idea and I’m paying for it but they’re very keen to have the piece and I reckon it’s a great way to finish off my time here. So I’ve been in touch with the Israeli team’s wrestling coach, Moshe. He’s a friend from way back and has arranged it so I can stay with the Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village. Not sure if that’s 100% kosher from a security point of view but if it’s okay with him ... Perhaps afterwards, I’ll pop by and see you. I’ll still be on summer break and you could show me around.
Tommy and me in Israel, both of us free and consenting. It was well past time that I relinquished the virginity that was starting to hang like a stone somewhere around my nether regions. And it was also past time for the two of us to act on whatever it was that had been simmering between us for so long. There was another thought, daunting and unnerving, yet somehow tinged with unfamiliar colour. I was not even sure when it had appeared on the canvas: but what would I say if he asked me to love him?
For all that, the daily burning heat tortured us relentlessly and not even Tommy’s letter could impact on my exhaustion. What made matters more arduous was that there was never the possibility of a long soak in a bath. It was all showers here and nobody stayed under for very long because of the water shortage. Coming from my beautiful but often arid home state of Victoria I was familiar with the mindset, but it did not make the rigour any easier to bear.
SEPTEMBER 1972
Oh God, Oh God, it was true. First reports coming in from the US said no casualties. But they were wrong. Eleven of the Israeli team had been assassinated, murdered, shot dead by the Black September, a Palestinian terrorist outfit demanding the release of hundreds of brethren in exchange for the hostages. I thought I could not bear the pain of it, the pain of the kibbutzniks who had all done army service, many of whom were veterans of the Independence, the Suez and the Six Day Wars and countless other reservist sorties. If they broke down and cried, how would the rest of us stand firm? God, where are you? Have you turned away your face as you did in Auschwitz, in Bergen-Belsen? Have you no shame?
Tommy also died in the massacre. They said he had been trying to disarm one of the attackers. In the nights that followed, I hardly slept. When I did close my eyes, I would see Tommy’s face. I could touch him, his hair, his skin. But then I would dream the sound of shots. They would wake me; and I would see only blackness.
I didn’t think I would ever be able to forget now the way we had been in love— almost—so many times.
Then Carla sent me a long telegram:
Dearest Kate, I cannot believe what has happened to your people at Munich. And I can’t help but think of you every time I watch the news. What is it with Jews and the rest of the world? I look at Ariel—we see each other at every opportunity—and I see only kindness and good humour. I look at you and I remember how I loved you: your brain and ultimately your courage. I know that two Jews do not comprise a demographic pool from which to draw conclusions, but I’m struggling to understand
things. Didn’t you tell me once that Jews were God’s chosen? Chosen for what? Annihilation? Ariel said it’s not for us to question God’s ways, but if we don’t, doesn’t that mean we allow Him to get away with murder? If we don’t, won’t He simply think that such events are okay?
Such existential meanderings. You can see I must be having very deep conversations with my new-found rabbi friend. Long letters, long phone conversations, long dinners when he eats only salad—it’s a kosher thing. You probably understand it—and we talk until the restaurant throws us out. I am seriously in love, Kate. Where can such a relationship go?
Carla
And although our country was in mourning, life did go on.
Here in S’dot Ester the volunteers and the regulars still picked oranges, milked cows, peeled potatoes and did the laundry. We had to try to rediscover normality even if our Yossi ben Gershon had come home not to a parade but in a box.
The days went on. I began waking up before the alarm; I adjusted to the heat incrementally, though I still found the little fan we were given for the nights an insult. And either the oranges were getting lighter or I was growing stronger. Now I could fill up my canvas sack almost to the top and empty it into the truck’s containers without my shoulders aching or my feet stumbling.
Nor was there any shortage of company.
There was Annie, of course, and Rachel from Scotland. Her fair skin and fiery red hair stood out among the rest of us who were mainly dark-haired. There was Dov from LA, broad, tall and beautiful with his blue eyes and gold skin, endlessly pondering over whether or not he was gay. I knew I wasn’t and actually suggested he try me as the best way to sort it all out, but I made no headway. I suspected he was simply too conflicted to have anything to do with his own desires, let alone mine. Whatever the case, it was becoming quite urgent for me to have my virgo intacta status radically altered.
And then of course there was Friedrich; Austrian, not Jewish, but wanting to exorcise some parental darkness—they never, under any circumstances, mentioned the war, so Friedrich assumed the worst about them—by coming to the Land and working it. He was keen to get me into bed. With Dov out of the picture I thought I might have to settle for Friedrich’s quiet speech, his pale blondness, his intensely green eyes and his tough wiry body. Could be worse.
So I went to the Kupat Holim and asked the doctor for the Pill. No questions, no counselling. Just, here you are. Remember to take it daily at the same time.
OCTOBER 1972
A couple of weeks later I gave Friedrich my virginity. Then I wished I could take it back. Not because I had any moral qualms, just that afterwards I felt like one of those pull-tab cans of Coke. I’d been opened, and the tab had been discarded.
The fizz was gone.
And it just wasn’t that good. No real foreplay and forget about afterplay. He slapped me on my bottom a couple of times, in a you-can-go-now spirit of conviviality, rolled over and went to sleep.
Oh, Tommy.
Well before independence in 1948, all the Israeli collective farms shared a dirty little secret. In the years of the first kibbutzim, the men were paid monthly wages; the women were not. Women were mostly consigned to work in the kitchens and laundries while men worked out of doors.
So, what do I do with such knowledge? My mother would smile and say, ‘You’d think they’d have learned after all this time. There was no discrimination in Auschwitz. We were allowed to die alongside the men.’
My father, whose idealistic fervour sprang to the fore every time someone uttered the word ‘kibbutz’, would have been an apologist for the system had I ever pointed out to him what I knew. But I was loath to do so. He didn’t have many dreams from the past to hold onto. He had been married and had two little girls before the war, but they had died in the camps. Once, fuelled by the whisky he drank when the memories became too intense, he confided in me. If the dark years had never come, he told me, he would have taken that first family of his and they would all have been in Israel among those hardy, those sturdy pioneers. They would have carved out a land where, so the fable went, Jews would always be safe.
Which meant, I suppose, that he would never have met my mother and that my sister and I would never have been born. Strange to think we had Hitler to thank for our existence.
Pick an orange, toss it in the bag, ride back to the main hall in the afternoon. Drink a beer with the crew after dinner. Eat a breakfast of salad, herring, white cheese and occasionally eggs. This was not all that I’d hoped it would be. For all its strictures and constraints, Lac d’Or had kept my juices pumping, my head alive with possibilities. Here, the heat—oh God, the heat—sapped me, undermined me, deflated me. And Annie and I had to share that miserable little fan, so we pointed it at one of us until the other woke up and repositioned it.
NOVEMBER 1972
Cambridge, 24 /11/1972
Dearest Kate,
It is all so exciting, I can hardly decide what to tell you first. I am reading English Literature at Cambridge. The workload is demanding but immensely stimulating. Ariel comes to visit me on weekends or I go to London to visit him. We have become intime, as you must surely have suspected since I last wrote to you. He has not told his parents about me and I’ve not told mine about him. Both would be equally horrified. I said I must convert to Judaism; he asked me why I assumed he would not convert to Catholicism and I laugh. A rabbi converting? I can’t see it. He nods and agrees but with discernible compunction. I love him for that.
To marry him, he has told me, an Orthodox conversion can take anywhere between one-and-a-half to three years, a long time, but I believe I can do it alongside my secular studies. It will take three years to complete my Bachelor’s and once I’m in possession of it, I will have a double degree, as it were.
When it’s time for us to be married, will you come and stand close beside me? I hold you responsible, you know, for the direction my life has taken.
Much love,
Carla
How could I reply? If I tried to change her mind she wouldn’t listen. I know how she works. I would just alienate her. Instead I wrote to her warmly with best wishes for her future. And that, of course, I would come. I would always stand beside her or rather behind her to…what? Save her from toppling backwards into the abyss? And taking me with her?
DECEMBER 1972
I could not wait to get home. Even my law degree looked inviting from here. At the beginning of the year I’d had so many dreams. Now I found myself confronting reality. If I had my time over, I might have done things differently. Or I might not. We always assume that if we could do it all again we would do it better.
As the final weeks, then days, in Israel dwindled, I found I was exhausted with exchanging my life for the someone else I had been before the year began. Who was this entitled jeune dame studying Etiquette, Cuisine, Couture and French? Who was this sweaty nappy-changer and fruit-picker who drank beer at 3.30 in the afternoon and who had lost her virginity to the guy who worked in the dairy? When I looked at myself in the mirror back home, having explored the finishing school for privileged young ladies and the Zionist Socialist Dream for hardy young pioneers, I realised that I’d found them both wanting, one way or another. But I suspect that it was not so much the fault of the dream as it was of the dreamer.
I’m home. This other sunburnt country. Thank God. I was cautious but excited about leaving at the beginning of the year and now I can’t believe I’m back. In one piece. So many things could have gone wrong. I could have been booted out of Lac d’Or for that indiscretion with Carla. Or I could have been on a bus in Jerusalem or at a discotheque in Tel Aviv where suicide bombers detonated their deadly loads. Didn’t happen.
Only to Yossi.
And Tommy.
And now I’m actually here. Home. Ultimately, even though so much of the year had forced me into dreadful contortions—mind and body—in order
to fulfil my parents’ dreams for me, much of it was also joyous, an adventure shooting me into a time and space far beyond my Melbourne life.
I sent Carla a letter, catching her up on the months that had passed since our previous correspondence. She sent me one straight back saying Ariel was coming to Australia, to Melbourne, where he had some cousins he hadn’t seen since they had come to London for his bar mitzvah. She had told him how much she would like him to meet me.
Three weeks later a tall, serious-looking man knocked at my door. He had grey-green eyes and a surge of dark curls. A yarmulke barely managed to balance on top of them and he also wore tzitzit, the four-cornered fringed garment of the Orthodox. Had he not been clean shaven, I would have mistaken him for one of those Ultraorthodox types who roam the Jewish suburbs seeking donations for misogynistic learning institutions in Jerusalem.
‘You must be Ariel,’ I said.
We went for dinner to a little kosher bar and grill near my place. It felt like being back in Israel with the falafel, the salads and the pita. The vodka was of the good Polish type and we both drank a little more than we probably should have.
‘So, Katherine,’ he said at the outset, very proper, very British.
‘Katie, please.’
‘All right, absolutely.’ He grinned at me and it was a great grin, not the least self-important—very unrabbinical.
‘Carla loves you a lot,’ he said.
‘She loves you, too,’ I replied.
‘It seems we’ve all been talking about each other.’ I nodded, and we fell silent.
‘Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’ I asked.
It was a question I tipped into a silence that was in danger of becoming awkward—and then it became really awkward.
‘I think I do, yes.’ His voice and gaze had switched rapidly. Glacial. ‘Why would you ask me that?’
‘You’ve only known her for five months,’ I said.