“Well, then he turned to Miss Peterson and reminded her of the small arms drill. And he told me to report at the armoury in the morning. Just like that.”
“I know,” said Judith sympathetically. “Ugh!”
Grete told her how Anna had suddenly bandaged her eyes and walked her blindfold to a staircase which led deep underground. She had said, “We have one of the largest and most skillfully concealed armouries of all the Palestine kibbutzim — even a small arms range. The fewer people who know where it is and how to get there, the better.” Then, after a sound of closing doors and some heavy pushing and shoving, her bandage was whipped off and she found herself face to face with David. The armoury was a strange subterranean building with enormous vaulted bays, which showed a tremendous wall thickness like the crypt of a medieval cathedral. The walls were damp and covered in a soft cocoon of verdigris, such as one might see in a choice wine-cellar in France. Long racks of weapons stood against the side walls and a dozen girls were busy oiling and proving them. The extent of this building was immense, and at the far end there was a miniature range perfectly adequate for small arms and tommy-gun practice.
“Come along,” said David, “and try your hand. There are no prizes, I’m afraid.”
She wondered how the infernal racket of rifles was not audible outside and, as if he had read her thoughts, David said: “Partly because we’re deep in the ground, and partly because of the thick walls. During the last arms search we carried on throughout down here and if they heard anything they might have thought it was a couple of typewriters.” He seemed to say more, but at that moment a burst of gunfire broke out at the end, and the cloth and cardboard dummies wavered and danced grotesquely under the hail of shot, like wet shirts hanging on the line in a high wind. David motioned her forward and Grete obediently took her place in a line of girls. He brought her a Sten gun and said: “Before I break it down, I’d like you to try it for weight and for kick. Take a shot at those targets.”
“I started trembling violently. The targets had turned into the frightened and bewildered faces of Jewish families standing in the snowlit square of a German town, hands above their heads, waiting to receive the sweep of steel bullets across their chests. I threw down the weapon with a cry and, putting my hands over my ears, I ran in a blundering attempt to find the way out. David watched me for a moment in surprise, and then in apparent pity. I suppose I was rather like a wild animal in a trap, yelling ‘Let me out! let me out! I want to go!’ ”
Judith remembered her own first experience of arms drill at the kibbutz, and mentally compared her own irritation and frustration to the other girl’s terror. Neurotic, she thought, but thought it kindly. She nodded as Grete continued her story. David had come towards her with outstretched arms, saying, “Calm yourself, please... but she had run round the walls, from point to point, bay to bay, as he followed her, speaking in a cajoling voice. When she could go no further, and he had her cornered in an archway, he put his hand on her arm. “Listen, Grete,” he said, “if we are attacked here, there is nowhere to go except into the sea. There is no choice. We must learn to defend ourselves.”
But with quivering lips and pale face she repeated, almost beseechingly:
“I can’t do it! Don’t you see, I can’t do it! I have seen so much of it. Don’t make me!”
Then he made the mistake of saying:
“Lives were risked to bring you here. Doesn’t the existence of Israel matter to you?”
“Nothing matters to me!” she screamed. “Please let me go.”
“Very well,” he said coldly. “Anna, bring the bandage.” He motioned Grete gently forward and tied the bandage round her eyes. “I’ll send you back to your room,” he said softly, but there was a deep note of disdain and chagrin in his voice.
She turned her pale face to him and said:
“Listen, I’m sorry if I... but he cut her sentence short abruptly, saying:
“There is no need to be sorry. You’re clearly a very egotistical person, and we don’t want people like you. Ours is a voluntary organization, so please don’t imagine that I’m going to press-gang you. Anna, take her.”
And as he turned away, she heard him call:
“Cross Grete Schiller’s name off the roster.”
It seemed like a black mark against her, and she bit her lip furiously and said nothing.
A few minutes later, she found herself standing on the river bank by herself. The figure of Anna, foreshortened by distance, stumped off into the surrounding field. Grete made a half-gesture, as if to restrain her or to call her back. Then, a sudden impulse overtook her. She turned and ran towards the administrative building where Peterson sat doing accounts. Grete burst in on her breathlessly.
“Pete,” she cried, “I’m no good, I’m no use to you at all. You must send me away somewhere. I shall only disgrace myself and prove my uselessness if I stay. Already they are beginning to hate me.”
“Pull up that chair,” said Peterson sternly, after a pause. She pushed a box of cigarettes across the table. Grete refused. She burst out vehemently:
“Oh, I wish it was different! Perhaps I am an egotist, perhaps that’s what it is! David is probably right.”
“Of course he’s right! You couldn’t be a woman without being an egotist, any more than you could be a man and not be an opinionated ass. David’s a fool. What’s he been saying to you?”
Grete shook her head. “No, he’s right,” she said. “I care nothing for Palestine. It means nothing to me. All I care about is to see my child again.”
A girl came in and brought cups of tea. “Drink this,” said Peterson and, taking a little tube of pills from an attaché case beside the desk, she dropped a couple into Grete’s cup.
Peterson stared at her for a long time without saying anything. Then she said:
“Of course I can send you away, and perhaps I shall have to. We can’t carry too many pairs of idle hands and large appetites around here. We already have a share of old people whom we look after and who contribute nothing to the work.”
“I’m ashamed of myself,” murmured Grete.
“That,” said Peterson, “is the final egotism. I’m going to give you one more chance before sending you away. If you can’t get on with the grown-ups, we’ll see if you can help with the children. How do you feel about that?”
Grete stood up and said: “Thank you, I will try again.”
“Good. Then you can take night duty, tonight,” Peterson said. “I’ll have you called.”
As Grete turned to the door, Peterson added:
“Grete, the worst of all our weaknesses is self-pity.”
Grete turned to her and replied:
“I see, you are beginning to hate me too.”
“On the contrary,” said Peterson. “You can count on me.”
But Grete shook her head sadly, and went down the staircase in a deep despondency, head bowed. Halfway down, she met David coming up. He hesitated and opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, then changed his mind. He looked away, and passed her without a word.
He found Peterson standing at the window and smoking. She did not turn round when he came in.
“Pete,” he said, “we’ve done our shoot, but I’ve had to cross that wretched Schiller girl off the roster. She’s an uncooperative prig and a true-blue hysteric. It is infuriating that she is as attractive as she is.”
“She also happens to have spent her last eighteen months in a German officers’ brothel.” She turned and faced him, and they stood staring at each other for a long time without saying any more.
Peterson was as good as her word, and that evening Rose Fox came over to Grete’s table at dinner.
“I hear they’ve posted you to night work with the children. I’m glad and I hope you are too. There is a lot to observe and a lot of them who are sympathy-starved.” Her own two boys were among the inhabitants of the children’s camp. Grete liked her immediately, and together the two young women f
inished their dinner, gossiping lightly before traversing the gardens which the children themselves had planted and were working, as part of their education.
“Here,” said Rose, “the future farmers of the settlement are making their first experiments with flowers and vegetables. As you see, some are lazier than others. But no one could accuse David’s son of laziness.”
“David’s?” asked Grete with surprise.
“You know David,” said the girl Rose. “David Eveh...
“I had no id... idea... stammered Grete, “that he had a... child.”
“Well, all these trees are his work,” said Rose, pointing to a clump of eight young peach trees.
Rose whispered about the sleeping children; they came to a cubicle with four beds in it. The psychologist pointed a finger and whispered to Grete:
“That’s David’s son.” An exceptionally handsome boy about eleven or twelve years old, bearing a marked resemblance to David, lay asleep. One hand protruded slightly from under the pillow. It held an imitation pistol of wood. The doctor quietly removed it and put it on the shelf.
“Like father like son,” she said, and added: “Now I’m going to leave you. Call me if there’s any need. This bell rings above my bed.”
But neither that night nor on the succeeding nights of that week did it prove necessary. For the first time, Grete began to feel that she had found a sphere in which her efforts could prove useful. The work was not only rewarding from the point of view of psychological interest, but because the hours were long and her duties tired her sufficiently in order for her to sleep well.
The children were very various in background and education and temperament. They were treated already as budding farmers and, apart from tending their personal cottage gardens with a fervour bordering on religiosity, they played quite a part in the adult settlement. They sometimes stood in for old Karam, the shepherd from Yemen, and grazed the settlement flocks on the rich water meadows by the border. They harvested the apples and the potatoes with the grown-ups. All this activity was quite apart from their regular school hours, and Grete played a role in most of these activities with them. Though the night duties appealed to her most because of the silence, and the time to reflect, in the practical field she found she had a lot to learn from the children themselves. They proved kindly and spirited instructors. They treated her a little patronizingly, and at the same time took an almost paternal pride in her achievements through their teaching. Paul, David’s son, a mischievous good-looking small version of his father, a self-appointed teacher in matters military and agricultural when it came to showing off either to her or to her charges, found her one day digging in the vegetable patch. He approached her nonchalantly, his wooden pistol tucked in his Arab belt and his American tee-shirt emblazoned by a sheriff’s star.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, seeing her standing with both hands on her haunches, massaging them ferociously with an exasperation bordering on tears. She had never had to contend with an ordinary pitchfork before, and the experience was a bitter one. “Broken your spine again?”
“Just about,” said Grete angrily. “This is real work, Paul!”
“Of course it is.”
“Yet you kids manage. How is it?”
“Technique,” he casually said, imitating a grown-up. “You are wasting your energy and working the wrong way. You look as if you were going to play golf.”
“No,” she said half-humbly, “that I could probably teach you.”
“Everything has its technique.” He used the word “technique”, which he had lately picked up, as often as he could get it in.
“Well, show me again.”
“All right.”
In his good-natured, enthusiastic way, he showed her and then thrust the tool into her hand with his grubby paws and said:
“Now let’s see you try.”
Laboriously she followed his example. “Better,” he remarked after a critical pause. “I reckon in about ten years we shall be able to trust you with the middens.”
But though, superficially, she was leading an idyllic pastoral existence, her period at Ras Shamir was not to end before she had come up against some dangers as well.
One day, while the children were looking after Karam’s sheep on the river bank, they strayed up rather too far and, all of a sudden, out of a clear sky, they saw the Jordan water being threshed by bullets and heard the crisp rattle of machine guns. The flock scattered, and Grete managed to get the children into a bunch and race them to the shelter of an overhanging rock where they took refuge, both excited and a little shaken. The machine-gun fire had alerted some of the tractor drivers, and they saw two tractors racing towards them, one driven by a man and one by a girl. Both were armed with Sten guns and kept up an answering volley in the direction of the target which, from her own position, Grete could not see. The panic-stricken flock of sheep had made off towards the kibbutz, but it had left a lamb kicking and moaning on the grass, and this sight was too much for Paul, who dashed out of cover and brought it back. He acted so swiftly that Grete was not able to restrain him, and it was lucky that the child was not hit.
By now the tractors were approaching, and while the girl on the one vehicle turned eastward towards the frontier, still firing, the second tractor stopped and Grete saw that the driver was David. He ran with great strides across the intervening field, calling out anxiously whether anything or anyone had been hit. Luckily the only victim was the lamb, which was still alive but bleeding profusely. Grete held it in her lap and David knelt down to examine it in his swift authoritative way.
“We’d better take it back to Naomi,” she said. But he shook his head.
“It’s too far gone,” he replied. “I’d better put it out of its pain.”
Swift as a thought, without waiting for anything further, he picked it up in his arms, took ten long paces away from them, and, placing it on the ground, shot it through the head. It quivered and lay still. He came back to the horrified group of children who surrounded her in her now bloodstained skirt, and said with a smile:
“We’re lucky. It could have turned out much worse.” He then listened with his head on one side like a dog. The firing had stopped.
“Stay here five minutes more and then return as fast as you can with the children.” And then, turning to Grete, he said: “You carry back the body. I’m going up to the border to see if we need any covering fire.” Without waiting for any reply from them, he ran with great loping strides back to his tractor and set it into gear with a roar.
Grete obeyed orders, and in five minutes the party set off with all speed for the kibbutz, Grete holding the still-warm and bleeding body of the lamb in her outstretched arms. She walked in a kind of speechless daze, and when one of the smaller children asked: “Isn’t David brave?” she only managed a nod, though she saw his son’s eyes kindle with pride.
At long last they got back to the camp, and Grete surrendered the lamb to the kitchens and the children to the school-room. For her part she still felt numb and a trifle dazed. She went down to the river instead of going to the room to change her clothes and, kneeling, washed the blood off her hands and from her frock, gazing as she did so at the pale white face which stared back at her from the water.
She was kneeling thus when she heard the rumble of a tractor and on the opposite side of the river she saw David riding into camp. He stopped the tractor opposite her and turned off the engine. She paid no attention but went on scrubbing the hem of her dress, sitting there like a mute child under strict orders to finish her task. There was a long silence during which she was conscious of his eyes upon her.
“Grete, you are very beautiful... I came to thank you.”
Receiving no response, he leaped back into the bucket seat of his tractor and switched the engine on with a roar. He disappeared without looking back and left her there, gazing at her own pale features rippling in the water.
Listlessly, heavily, she pondered as she stared, wondering what the
word could now mean, if anything. She turned it over awkwardly in her mind and even repeated it aloud in a sardonic voice as she looked into her own floating eyes:
“Beauty!”
12
David and Grete
Now the work of the kibbutz engulfed her, and she found herself enjoying its strict routines; even its privations were welcome. The fact that she had acquitted herself honourably, if recklessly, after the illegal landing, gave her a new measure of self-esteem and confidence. David made no new move towards her, but she could not help thinking about him with anxiety. The old nightmare of the past had not been excised, and she thought herself to be a woman whose emotions were prematurely exhausted, a woman incapable of love.
A sudden twist in events disabused her of this idea, and replaced it by an even more alarming one, namely: that she had no right to meddle with the affections of David. It came about in the following manner — preceded by an hysterical attack as unexpected as it was unwelcome.
One of the smallest of the children fell out of an apple tree and hurt itself. This type of incident was common enough, and her reaction seemed out of all proportion to its seriousness. Or was it simply the desperate screaming of the word “Mother!” (Hebrew: “Imma!”). At any rate, Grete took the sobbing child in her arms and found herself cradling it, to still its crying, murmuring as she did so her old German nurse’s lullaby, the words of which she had last recalled singing to sleep her own child: “Schlafe süss... Gradually, as she cradled the child, the swinging movements became mechanical. Her mind seemed to have left her with her feelings alone. The child was quiet now, gazing at her curiously. She stared open-eyed into the void with unfocussed eyes. She continued like a monomaniac, rocking and staring, rocking and staring. The child in her arms suddenly took fright, aware in an obscure way of something abnormal in her behaviour, and started to scream out in terror. Instantly, the fear was communicated to the other children around her, and the panic spread. Some babies began to cry too.
There is no knowing how long Grete would have gone on, fixed in this posture of mad concentration. She suddenly felt the hand of Rose on her shoulder, and heard the firm voice admonishing her. Rose gently released the child and took Grete’s arm:
Judith Page 15