by Yael Neeman
It was all an illusion that lasted for only a few moments. Just an illusion. There was no nightmarish death of the kind I always feared. No one froze in place. It was I who cracked.
It was I who cracked, and that’s why I was discharged from the army for psychiatric reasons, with two sets of discharge papers—one blue and one gray. The blue was given to me by the induction center officer, who typed it on a typewriter, his hands shaking with anger, after he said to me: “You don’t understand, this is a document that will hurt you your whole life. Think about it again, think about your future. You’re a smart girl; you’re going to screw up your life. It can’t be that someone with a brain like yours will be walking around with blue discharge papers.”
It’s a fact, Mr. Kindhearted Officer. You tried so nicely, really, really nicely, who would have believed it, such kindness in the middle of all that authoritarianism, but it wasn’t about the future, it was about the past and the present. The ongoing present. The endlessly ongoing present. That’s what I thought, but I stammered apologetically: “I don’t know, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Thank you, don’t worry.”
On the outside, the blueness already symbolized someone who was not part of the norm, and on the inside, the code sentence read: “Has been found unsuitable to serve.”
A week later, I received gray discharge papers that had been sent to Yehiam by mail, with one of the digits of my identity number wrong. The gray, regular discharge papers had been sent to me by that officer without any request from me, without any benefit to himself, and he even typed a rank on it that was three ranks higher than the private I had been when discharged, and included high praise from my superior officers about how well I carried out the tasks I had been given. Those papers he sent me, without signing his name on them, reflected nothing about me. They were a reflection of him, of a man of good will.
But in the induction center, as I tried to concentrate on the list of things I had to do, I wasn’t the least bit concerned about the blue papers that had upset him so much.
Since the discharge was unexpected and happened quickly, I was called to the center on the boys’ discharge day. While another soldier handling the discharge procedure, trying to sound authoritative, announced which items of clothing had to be returned and thrown on the long table in front of us, I tried to match his rhythm as best I could. Two pairs of pants, he ordered, and I threw down my Dacron dress pants and regular uniform pants. New model uniforms, he said, and I threw down a skirt. Sweater, and I threw down a tunic. The procedure seemed to be identical to all the other military ceremonies and texts, and it was hard to tell that this time, the gear was rotating in the opposite direction. A moment later, I was free. Tossed into the unformatted, post-army world.
I was discharged after eleven months. I had spent most of my army service in an armored corps battalion in the Jordan Valley. There were religious soldiers there from yeshivas10 that had an arrangement with the army, as well as secular ones. There were soldiers from kibbutzim, moshavim and cities. Rich and poor. It was winter there, untamed nature, intoxicating red-yellow-purple blossoming, and endless mud.
There, I had been alone for the first time. After nineteen years of talking, seeing and living only in a group of people who grew up like me, I came to a place where I didn’t know anyone, without the spoken language and body language needed to talk to strangers. I began to learn a new language, translated, as if there were an echo to whatever I said to strangers, as if I were hearing my effort from outside myself.
In the armored corps battalion in the Jordan Valley, we hardly did anything. We made toast on heaters, like in the Educational Institution. There, we toasted the bread on kerosene heaters, and in the battalion, on electric heaters. We used to turn the heaters over in the girls’ barracks and place slices of challah on the back of them.
The army was kid stuff for us, the kibbutz girls. Our basic training had been much harder. And so had the dining hall shifts. We already knew how to work, our hearts had been broken a long time ago, our rites of passage had taken place hundreds of years ago.
In the armored corps battalion in the Jordan Valley, I started smoking in the intensive Hungarian style that was in my genes, with Amit, a city boy, the battalion operations sergeant, and someone you could talk to about books and movies. I started right off with a pack a day, one cigarette after another, to get through the emptiness, to embellish it.
City people liked to visit kibbutzim. We hated their visits. We were embarrassed by the double translation. “Who’s that?” the kibbutz members would ask. Sometimes with a look, sometimes in actual words, sometimes behind our backs. Ah, nothing, no one, we’d reply or evade. Sometimes we’d leave the visitors in our rooms and bring them their food there, to avoid answering questions.
Amit’s visit fell on Independence Day. How would I stand there, in that U-shaped formation that allowed all of us to see the Memorial Day military parade that led into Independence Day, that same U-shaped formation that kept everyone visible? Everyone saw everyone else. There was no way to hide in the second row. How would I translate for him “Kibbutz, attention!” and then “Kibbutz, at ease!”—military orders spoken in Adam’s booming bass voice? How would I translate Gilad Flash’s trumpet on the dining hall roof, and then the readings, and between them, the terrible, emotional moment when Haim, our group mate Ronen’s brother, read out the names of our members who had been killed? How would I explain to him about the children in their white shirts and the Everlasting Red pins? And how we all go up to the fortress, the celebrations, the fireworks, the enormous flaming banners?
Amit insisted on not staying in the room. He stood beside me. He roared with laughter and enjoyed every moment (whispered a question to me in the middle: “Why have a military parade on a kibbutz?”) I didn’t answer him, I wanted him to melt away or fall into a sprinkler pit, to disappear one way or the other.
A new soldier was assigned to the armored corps battalion where I served in the Jordan Valley. He sat next to the headquarters sheds—a delicate young man, a kind of short-haired version of Che Guevara—and every night, accompanied by his guitar, he sang the Beatles “Nothing’s gonna change my world” with religious fervor. I’d seen weird sights like that in the army before, and the volunteers on the kibbutz had also sung that song in harmony, but our unusual commander explained to me: “It’s a protest.”
“Against what?” I asked.
“Against serving in the occupied territories,” the commander replied, maybe quoting the new soldier.
“They’re sending him from here to the occupied territories?”
I asked.
He looked at me in astonishment. We’d had many conversations before that, during which he tried to sway me with all sorts of facts. He was a different kind of commander, one who’d already traveled in the Far East when he was called up and pressured into “returning and contributing a little more to the army,” in the kibbutz terminology commonly used by the military. “We need people like you,” and all the other arguments aimed straight at the conscience. He returned for a limited time to command an armored corps battalion in the Jordan Valley.
The geographical issue hadn’t come up in our previous conversations. He said slowly: “This is the occupied territories.”
Only then did I realize that the battalion I’d been serving in for six months was in the occupied territories. How was the Jordan Valley connected to the occupied territories? Until then, I’d had no idea. I knew that Hashomer Hatzair did not establish kibbutzim in the occupied territories, except perhaps for the one in the Golan Heights, Kibbutz Gshur, which was endlessly discussed and debated in committees and conferences, pro and con, and we all knew whether we were pro or con.
Under the heading “Everything You Wanted to Know about Gshur and Never Dared to Ask,” Yoav wrote in our newsletter:
If you object to settlements in the Golan Heights, the following is not meant for you. But if you are an open-minded person who is prepared to at least l
isten, the following is meant for you. In a few words, we will try to tell you Gshur’s brief story.
Also, the ironic phrase “occupied territories” used by city people was a bit foreign to my ears. We called them “the territories,” and it was clear that they were occupied. There was no one to argue with about that. And since there was no one to argue with about that, miraculously enough, it had vanished from my sight.
The commander said that the soldier had been outstanding during basic training, that he wanted to serve in the army, but not in the occupied territories. He said that he would be the one to try him for refusing to serve in the occupied territories, because if others tried him, he would fare much worse. In other places, in the brigade or the division, they’d impose the heaviest punishment on him. But that commander couldn’t save him from additional trials. The imprisonment he would sentence him to would be only the first in a series.
What began before the sleepless night of the soldier assigned to our battalion in the Jordan Valley, who refused to serve in the occupied territories, intensified afterwards. Things seemed to happen for no reason. I didn’t understand the connection between that battalion being in the Jordan Valley and the actions that were being taken, and I didn’t understand why there was a debate about Gshur and no debate about other places.
One thing led to another, one thing dropped away from the other. I wanted to serve on a base close to Tel Aviv, to leave the battalion where I did nothing. To spend my nights in the city. It had nothing to do with refusal to serve. True, I said “no” to the job of clerk in battalion headquarters, and “no” to the job of clerk in company headquarters, but what is a clerk’s refusal worth? It is clear, well reasoned and based on knowledge, it is in sync with the orders, it is clear and direct. I had no counter-proposal to offer, I had no just or beautiful world to go to.
I left the people I’d grown attached to in the battalion, and was alone again. I arrived at a maintenance base in Tel Hashomer, outside of Tel Aviv.
Waiting on line to be interviewed for assignment to the maintenance base, I met Benny, who had lived on a Kibbutz in Emek Yizreel as an “outside child,” not the child of kibbutz members. That’s what he told me when we met. Then an idea came to us while we were waiting: to suggest to the interviewer that we be made the base gardeners; we’d give their neglected base a beautiful garden. We said it first as a joke, as a kind of metaphor for the absurdities of the army, though we couldn’t really find what we were comparing it to. We agreed that each of us, when our turn came, would suggest it to the interviewer. We’d try. The interviewer agreed at once, saying that it was an excellent idea.
From that moment on, I didn’t even have a daily schedule to hold on to. We came to the base whenever we wanted to, explaining that with gardening, things were seasonal, that too much meant too little and could only hurt. We said that we’d be sure to be there for every duty assignment we were given, but there should be no special times to work in the garden. They accepted that. We planted small, beautiful gardens throughout the base, on a miniscule purchasing budget. Everyone was satisfied. And most of our time was our own.
We met in the evenings—the kibbutz soldiers serving in the city—in the apartment above the slaughterhouse in Givat Shmuel that the kibbutz rented for us. We were thrilled to see each other in the evenings. As if we’d run away from the children’s houses, as if for a moment, we were again Noriko-san, the girl from Japan; we didn’t have to explain anything, there were no city kids there, everything was clear; we drank instant coffee with three teaspoons of sugar, sitting on broken chairs around an invisible campfire in the living room, and we went out to see movies and talked about our day in the army. The city cockroaches crawled through the cabinets and on the kitchen counter, the city cows in the slaughterhouse bellowed their weeping all night in human voices—we knew that they knew they were going to the slaughter.
We felt that something amiss was creeping under our gardens on the base, that something had been ripped out of our crazy daily routine; I decided to go to the mental health officer; I wanted to ask her whether I needed to do something else, whether, despite everything, I needed to believe that what we were doing there had meaning, and what were Benny and I doing there anyway? I felt that the joke we’d made was coming straight back at us and was about to run over us in revenge.
I appeared in front of the health officer, who wore a uniform and had a high rank, in Tel Hashomer, near my base, and stammered out my strange, patchwork history in the army. She listened and made only one remark: “Forget it, the army is not for you.”
At first, I was frightened; I thought she saw a terrible prognosis, some latent madness, let’s say, and didn’t want to tell me or take the responsibility upon herself. But she said no, it was too bad, there had been no way of knowing, but the army didn’t suit everyone.
“But the kibbutz, and my parents, what will they say,” I said. “It’s not so easy to explain.”
She would talk to my parents and explain it to them, the mental health officer said. And she did.
A week later, I was discharged on the day the male soldiers were discharged, partly hoping to die, partly hoping to find a new life, when I appeared at the induction center and returned the trappings of a life that had never been mine anyway.
But what would happen to me now? What would they say on the kibbutz?
My discharge from the army was never explained. It was a dramatic event for those times, and for the kibbutz. No one ever asked me point blank to explain, except for once, when Yochai, my brother, drove me to a meeting I had been invited to and came inside with me. As usual with such meetings on the kibbutz, it was not completely formal. I don’t remember where we drove and who was there, only that it took place on another kibbutz. It was clearly partly a conversation and partly an inquiry, someone who was trying to sniff out whether there was some kind of insanity involved, and maybe help was needed. And if not, alternately, maybe a reprimand was in order, either overt or covert.
My brother—who had been an outstanding officer in the artillery corps, and was already working on the kibbutz and had a good reputation—was the intermediary. He fielded the questions that spun around in the air. I didn’t speak. I was asked many questions on the kibbutz as well, but more in a tone that was almost concerned and implied a desire to know. With no rebuke.
My discharge had no explanation. But if it did, it wasn’t psychological, so I didn’t ask my parents what the mental health officer who wanted to help me had told them. Clearly, the explanation wasn’t geological either; after all, there had been no earthquake; it was I who had cracked.
Perhaps the explanation was zoological, as if the rib that held us together—the Narcissus children, the Seagull children, the Ramat Gan commune children, all the Hashomer Hatzair children—had broken and I was suddenly alone, without anyone who knew me all my life, from my time in the babies’ house, to the right or left of me, in front or behind me.
Maybe the explanation was geometric, as if I’d gotten lost in open space after we’d always lived in the same bounded places, with the same questions.
Questions had no answers now, as if we’d shouted to the hills the way Eliezer and Rivka had taught us to do on our walks to Tree Hill, so we could hear the echo come back to us. We shouted, but the echo no longer came back from anywhere.
18
At twenty-one, the eternal age of the volunteers who came to us from all over the world for several weeks of work and then returned to their countries, we had to choose one of three possibilities, about which an endless number of rules and regulations had been made.
The first possibility: choose freely to live in the socialist experiment. Even though we were born in it, were children of the system and the place, and even though we knew nothing about any other kind of life, we were supposed to choose, of our own free will, to be in it. After all, on the kibbutz we lived by free choice, voluntarily, not by coercion, like in the totalitarian Communist regimes of the Soviet
Union, China or Hungary.
The second possibility: take a year off to work in the regional kibbutz factories among the salaried workers, as the privileged children of the factory managers. The money we earned would not be sent to the kibbutz, but an exception would be made, and we could keep it to pay for a trip abroad.
The third possibility: leave.
We left.
In an instant, we were transformed from children of the kibbutz to the ones who left it.
It was that the kibbutz “children” left, not the communal sleep issue, that tore the kibbutzim apart. The parents’ inability to help their children broke their spirits. The blankets that had irritated them in their beds back when they parted from their children in the hospital could no longer cover them. Their feet remained planted in their voluntary lives, but their hearts leaped out of the kibbutz, beyond the fence, to their children, or to their own youth, which had been left behind. They wandered through their present lives as bereaved parents, wanting one thing more than anything else: to help their children. The rift occurred everywhere. Only a very small number of families were not split apart. Nearly half the kibbutzim children left during that period, some to other kibbutzim, most to cities.
We didn’t blame our parents for anything. On the contrary. We took the iron double beds that Feivel made for all of us in the metalwork shop when we were in the eleventh grade; we took the double bed sheets we received from the communa, a double blanket, two pillows, and left. With a happy heart, but an aching conscience.
A kibbutz is not a village in a pastoral setting, filled with colorful characters, chickens and Judas trees. It is a political act, and we defected. We weren’t traitors, as the ones who’d left ten years earlier, when my oldest brother did, were called; we tiptoed out quietly. We moved beyond the fence, to the place where jackals roamed, and from then on, every visit to our biological parents was a return to what had been the entire setting of our lives.