by Yael Neeman
Margalit pretended not to remember who got up and who didn’t, and every morning, she tried again to wake everyone. She didn’t argue with those who didn’t get up, and tried to wake them again for their next class.
She had an odd habit: She brought jackets from Shomrat with her, and hung them on the central coat rack in the corridor, as if she’d forgotten them there by accident. She didn’t talk to us because she knew we wouldn’t talk, but she didn’t turn her back on us either, didn’t sermonize, didn’t leave us for even one day. Except for the six months when she suddenly vanished from our lives. They said she’d come down with a rare skin disease and her entire body was covered with the signs of it. A rash? Pus? Vitiligo? We whispered our speculations to one another because we didn’t understand exactly what had happened to her. We never spoke to her about her illness, not even on the day she returned.
She never asked us to give back the jackets she brought us, on the contrary, she always made it clear that they were there if we got cold (we were always cold). She turned on the heaters in the shower rooms every morning before she woke us. “The heaters are on,” she’d say every winter morning for six years, “Maybe it’ll be a little less cold here.”
We stood in line for the bathroom and the two shower rooms, boys and girls, brushed out teeth, thrust our feet into slippers or flip-flops, made ourselves instant coffee, and went to class, five meters from our rooms, dragging our feet on the floor, slouching along behind them. We were the wrong way round: Our shadows always preceded us, and we always meandered along behind them. We could never concentrate on schoolwork.
Tom, who wasn’t in our group, wrote on the wall above his bed, in huge letters: “THE OPPOSITE.” He made it a rule never to go to class, not to establish a precedent that might add his name to the unwritten list of the kids the metapelet still tried to wake up in the morning.
He said that there had to be something else, something that was the opposite, or at least different, that this couldn’t possibly be all there was. He also said that as we walked along the peripheral road that encompassed the view-less Educational Institution. And as he said that there had to be something else, that this couldn’t possibly be all there was, he lay down in the middle of the path, in the middle of his sentence. He suddenly collapsed, as if the words and thoughts were bullets that had caught up with him.
Eli Sagi admired Tom’s “THE OPPOSITE.” That was his motto too. He said, “First say the opposite, then make a counter-offer, something affirmative, if possible. If not, you should definitely check the negative. Start with the negative,” he advised.
He was our history teacher. A Hungarian, one of the founders of Gaaton, a member of the First of May core group that had been split among several kibbutzim: Yehiam, Gaaton and Yasur. Some of our parents and some members of Gaaton, which were two kilometers apart, knew each other from Hashomer Hatzair in Budapest. As if Buda and Pest had become Yehiam and Gaaton, and the Danube had become the Gaaton River.
Eli Sagi really liked the bridges my brother and his pals built to avoid washing their bedroom floor. He was their homeroom teacher. When they were caught smoking in the Educational Institution and were suspended for a week, he was angry at them. He told them that on the kibbutz, it doesn’t matter what a person does, it matters what people think he does. If the sign says “No Smoking In or Around the Institution,” you should smoke outside, a meter away from the fence. “As far as I’m concerned,” he stressed, “you can smoke a horse’s prick, just as long as they don’t see you doing it here.” He said it was stupid to get caught for something so basic. In class, he always asked us not to be stupid, and he used curses instead of prepositions because when he told us not to be stupid, he was thinking about all the stupid things we did, which made him angry all over again.
Eli Sagi said that Hungarian curses were vulgar, which was a compliment for Hungarian, because curses should have feeling. He threw our textbooks at the wall and cursed. His cursing was like a lament, as if with every string of curses (each curse sprang from the previous one and ignited the one that followed it), he was really destroying or mourning the old bourgeois world that had been destroyed anyway for the Hungarians who came from there. (We didn’t know a thing about the former lives of the teachers, not only because we always lived separately from the grown-ups, but also because Eli, like Nehama, our home room teacher, were from a different kibbutz and we never saw them living their everyday lives.)
On Friday nights, we held cultural events in the dining hall. We moved the tables to the side, arranged the chairs and participated enthusiastically in the performances. The Institution’s cultural committee chose the theme. (The committee members rotated, the themes remained the same: seasons of the year, holidays, etc.)
Having the theme decided for us was actually an advantage. It always began with our refusal, internal and external. We said to whoever spoke to us, or to ourselves: “This time we won’t write,” “This time we won’t do it,” “What a stupid theme.” But later, as the deadline approached, we felt uncomfortable about it—after all, everyone had to be on a committee and we rotated, and we felt ill at ease, so we did it, reluctantly at first, just to fulfill the obligation, and then we got caught up in it, in the rehearsals. When the performances were over and the chairs had been piled up and moved to the sides of the dining hall, the dancing began.
Before the dancing, during the performances, Eli always stood mesmerized at the far end of the dining hall and asked us not to block his view. He liked to watch and hear everything. He came so he could give us his critique afterwards.
We, the seventh graders, the Seagull group, appeared for the very first time at an Institution show called “Autumn Evening.” Every group wrote its own play and performed it. Ours contained only two words and lasted two seconds. All the members of Seagull lined up in a row, and I stood next to the microphone, a serious expression on my face, as if I were about to speak about autumn or recite a poem. I said “Falling leaves,” and all the boys dropped to the floor as if they were falling leaves. We walked off the stage and Eli leaped up, shouting a resounding “Bravo” from the far end of the dining hall. He offered me a trade: I didn’t have to go to class—I never listened when I was there anyway—and instead, I could read whatever literature I wanted that dealt with history. (He said, “Literature and history, they’re cousins; the French use the same word for both—histoire.”) We agreed on War and Peace. He said that sitting in class could destroy people for the rest of their lives, and a book like that could teach us to think about history the entire time we’re reading, even if we just think about the title for a second before we open the book.
Eli taught us the art of bartering. He said, “Don’t do what you don’t want to do. Offer a counter proposal.” And that’s how we traded later, in the city. We tried to exchange the things we hated for other things.
After reading books instead of sitting in class, we went with Eli for a walk along the Educational Institution’s sidewalks and talked about the books, then received a new list based on what we were interested in.
Usually, we didn’t actually abandon our schoolwork, not all at once, not as a declaration, but we dropped out, slipped away, as if our hold on it had loosened when it came to listening in class, or even just going there. Even if we did enter the classroom to listen, to grasp the continuity the teachers were talking about and maintain the appearance of being serious students, we caught ourselves floating. The teachers’ sentences would crumble in the air, the thread broke, and we, who were somewhere else, reading books or writing letters, were constantly thinking about unrelated things.
Many of the things happened on the sidewalk. The French teacher stopped me on the sidewalk and said we had to talk. I was afraid of talks in general, and of one-on-one talks in particular. I said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you that I’m not taking French anymore.” He said, “Excellent, that’s exactly what I wanted to tell you.” Au revoir.
Instead of grades, we were given evaluations. The physics
teacher didn’t write an evaluation, but at the end of every year, he drew each of us a picture composed of a rear end and a head, either a small rear end and a large head, or vice versa. The first meant that you didn’t sit in class but were very smart, and the second meant the opposite. In the small Level One physics class, the boys gave themselves rhymed pedagogically relevant nicknames: Kfir Ampere, Amnon Cyclotron, Carmel Decibel, Tamir Light-Year.
I didn’t solve the end-of-year math problem in the ninth grade, but instead, wrote a few lines to the teacher. He definitely wouldn’t be able to understand, I wrote, he couldn’t get his head around it, but the fact was that I didn’t know a thing. At least right now. Maybe I did once, a week ago, but now I didn’t remember anything. When he returned my paper, he’d written that he definitely understood, he remembered what it was like to be sixteen, and better luck next time.
But there was no next time. By then, I couldn’t listen or solve problems. Before I left math and physics for good, I tried to park on Level Two for a while. That lasted half a year, and then I spent another year on Level Three, which was really small and pleasant. We had one teacher who called Level One “Galloping Level One,” and she called Level Two “Level One,” so we wouldn’t feel as if we were trailing behind.
Our homeroom teachers and our metaplot tried to convince us not to leave our schoolwork, not to give up. Nehama was our homeroom teacher, as well as our English and art history teacher. With her, we learned all the tenses in English and all the types of Doric and Corinthian columns. But we couldn’t listen or do homework. During homeroom classes, she talked to us about Erich Fromm and Jorge Semprun, about fleeing from freedom and not fleeing from freedom. We liked our homeroom classes; they were about poetry and literature, as if they had been tailor-made for us, and in addition, we didn’t have to remember anything for the next time. That was an advantage, because we forgot everything we learned. We couldn’t concentrate.
Nehama was from Gaaton, an Israeli who was a great deal younger than Margalit and Eli, the Hungarians. The staff from the Workers’ Association sometimes found it difficult to leave in the afternoon. They were sometimes troubled by things we said and did, by the thought that something might happen to us. There still weren’t any telephones on the kibbutzim, only one phone in the secretariat office, and The Educational Institution secretariat office was only open in the morning.
Nehama, Eli, Margalit and the other teachers tried to persuade us not to leave our studies completely, to maintain some kind of connection with every subject, but when they saw how determined we were, they agreed with us and didn’t mention it again. They knew that later, after the Institution, our first and last step out of the kibbutz world would be to the army, and then we’d return. The enormous, total freedom that spread now from the sea at Ahziv, to the sky and to Haifa, six whole years, would end abruptly. We would no longer be able to choose what to study and what not to study, because on the kibbutz, you learned a profession that the kibbutz needed; nor would we be able to choose where to work, because on the kibbutz, you worked where workers were needed.
We weren’t thinking yet about how life would be. They already knew.
The following item about the Educational Institution appeared in our kibbutz newsletter (and similar items appeared in other kibbutzim newsletters):
Many kibbutz members claim that our children are educated for many years, but when they complete their studies, they do not have a profession. That is true, we tell our children—and this is said explicitly to those who wish to learn a profession—because that is how they will best serve the interests of the kibbutz.
Because the only profession is being a kibbutz member. And all of you, when you become members of the kibbutz, will be directed to the work that is required of you.
The last of the adults left the Institution at three in the afternoon, on a Regional Council bus that took them eastward, toward the hills, to Gaaton and Yehiam, or slightly southwards, to Shomrat.
In the evenings, we went out, wearing Margalit’s jackets, to take in a bit of air, to stretch our legs, to wander. Sometimes, there were concerts and performances in the Kibbutz Evron hall.
Once every two weeks, there was a movie in the Institution. We saw Godard and Bergmann in our dining hall. The tables were moved to the sides again, the chairs arranged in rows, and the dining hall became a movie theater. The screening of Hitchcock’s The Birds turned into chaos during the climactic scene, when the screen filled with flapping birds’ wings. Real birds were released into the dining hall through the windows, and covered us all. The boys in the Dekel group, two years older than us, were responsible for the onslaught. They wanted to see whether Noam’s heart (Noam suffered from heart disease and was not allowed to be upset) would withstand the fright. It did.
The boys from Grove, one grade above us, asked the girls in our group to be their girlfriends. In the eighth grade, Tali appeared once every few weeks and whispered to one of us, “Tamir wants to be your boyfriend,” or “Gilad wants to be your boyfriend; be at the bus stop at eight tomorrow night.”
Students from the Educational Institution on a bicycle excursion.
The bus stop was near the Institution’s dining hall. The yellow buses that took us to work on the kibbutzim and back left from there. And it was from that bus stop that we set off on our walk along the peripheral road that encompassed the Institution in the most circular manner possible. In other words, it didn’t lead anywhere, but ended up in the same place it started.
We didn’t know whether the Grove boys really wanted to be our boyfriends, or whether the idea was all Tali’s—she was in the Grove group too. The matches were more sociological than romantic. Who should be with whom, who deserved to be with whom. We, Gilad and I, weren’t sure who initiated the proposal; nor were we sure what the proposal was. But we didn’t talk about it. We talked about the fact that we didn’t actually have a relationship. We met twice and broke up easily, like two subjects participating in the same sociological experiment.
When we returned, we realized that we’d come back to the same place on the circular path, which was really nice—not only had a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship been proposed, but no damage had been done. There we were, we’d taken a walk and returned to the same spot, and nothing had happened. But later—it’s difficult to say when—the way we stared at the ceiling was different, empty and thick at the same time. We had a thought followed by a contradictory one, and they spun around rapidly in our minds, like a sled colliding with an obstacle: maybe I don’t want him, but he doesn’t want me either. Why doesn’t he want me? And if I care, does that mean I want him? Maybe, maybe, maybe. We had set off arrogantly on the circular path of love, and we returned heavier, as if years had been added to our lives, as if we had taken part in a non-existent war. We wanted to stare at the ceiling and think endlessly about what had happened. And the more we stared and thought, the more we stayed in the same place in the loop, still asking the same question: But what actually happened there? As if the answer didn’t lie in the plot or the background, but in the folds of something hidden.
The metaplot no longer read us stories at night. We read Pinchas Sadeh, Herman Hesse, Dostoyevsky. We wandered. Sometimes we hitchhiked to Haifa and Ahzivland, and once, we rode back from Nahariya in the morning inside one of their touristy horse-drawn carriages, arriving before classes and before Margalit woke us. Our movements were slow, strange, lethargic. We were moonstruck. Our moods swung from hot to cold and back again.
The habit of saying hello to grown-ups who walked by was still ingrained in us.
In the Institution, at night, we said hello to the hired night guard who patrolled the sidewalks. He was the only grown-up there at night. Once, when we met him on the concrete sidewalk, under a huge moon, and said hello, he told us his story, even though we hadn’t asked. He said that he had nightmares and couldn’t sleep anyway, so he became a night guard. He told us he was from Argentina and asked if we knew what was going on there.
We didn’t, we were ignoramuses, preoccupied with our own things, our thoughts on our life, work, school, on who loved whom, and we were preoccupied with our moods, which seemed to come out of nowhere, as if the seasons of the year existed in our bodies and kept changing, without the regularity of seasons. We were preoccupied with our fears, which began then, that perhaps nothing had any meaning.
“People get lost there, they’re kidnapped right off the streets,” the night guard said. “They disappear, as if the earth had swallowed them up. They’re probably locked up in cellars and tortured to death.” It was obvious that the guard’s rifle posed a danger only to him. “That’s horrifying,” we said, “and there’s nothing anybody can do?”
“Nothing,” he said, and suddenly began to weep. We didn’t know what to say. So we said goodnight. “Goodnight,” he said. And we continued our wandering.
14
After supper and the cleaning-up shift, when the large sinks were empty of water and dishes, we occasionally invaded the ugly stainless steel kitchen and made French fries. We called that “the kitchen break-in” because the kitchen in the Educational Institution was locked at night.
We left traces at the crime scene—grease stains—that gave us away, and every now and then the homeroom teachers and the grownups caught us. We admitted to making the fries, but we kept the other things to ourselves: They never caught us in Ahzivland, where we sometimes went from our autonomous country in the Oshrat Institution, and they didn’t search for us in Nahariya, to which we went on foot, or in Haifa, to which we hitchhiked.
Everyone preferred the story of the kitchen break-in over all the other stories, which had no clear boundaries or motivation. It was sexless and bloodless, free of violence, drugs and alcohol, free of problems and conflicts between man and his fellow man, and was in fact free of good and evil—it was a neutral story.