A Delayed Life

by Dita Kraus

  If Sara was thin, her husband was even thinner. His chest looked like the inside of a soup plate, and the knees that protruded under his floppy khaki shorts were the thickest part of his legs. In time the two of them produced a baby boy with limbs like toothpicks.

  The husband used to come to the sewing workshop to discuss some important topic with his wife in his quiet monotonous voice, such as who would fetch the milk and bread for their afternoon tea from the dining room and how many slices they would need. Sometimes he would return to say that perhaps he should bring only four slices instead of five.

  Still, I loved working in the sewing workshop, because I was fond of clothes, and being close to the source enabled me to have the first pick of the material when the rolls of fabric were delivered. Women in the kibbutz were allocated one work outfit per year and a Shabbat dress every other year. I still remember the sky-blue dress that was meant for work but was so pretty that I wore it on Shabbat, although it was made of the cheapest material. At least two chaverot imitated it after me.

  After my daughter was born, I was allowed to continue in the sewing room for several weeks longer. All the babies were kept in the infants’ home, and the mothers came from their workplaces to nurse them every few hours. It was therefore convenient to work in the kibbutz and not in the fields or orchards. But after my baby was weaned, I was again considered an able-bodied laborer who didn’t need to be coddled by light work.

  After supper I was called before the “labor officer.” Every year a kibbutz member was obliged to become the “labor officer,” whose job it was to appoint workers to the various sectors: a hated but necessary task. As the year progressed, the “officer” usually became more unpleasant and aggressive. He was constantly short of people, as demand always exceeded supply. Here, someone fell ill and had to be replaced; there, another worked on Shabbat and had to be given a free day during the week; a third one had to go to Haifa to visit a sick relative.

  For some disagreeable jobs there were just no takers, so they had to be foisted on the newcomers. The new aspirant members were more easily persuaded to wash dishes or mop the dining-room floor after they had been told that all the old-timers had done these jobs when they first came to the kibbutz. Of course everyone had to contribute, even if it was not in his or her line. A green newcomer just couldn’t counter such a morally charged demand.

  As I was already a full member who had passed her dishwashing phase, Ezra, the labor officer, offered me more appealing jobs. I could become a helper to one of the kindergarten teachers or an assistant to the cook, while another person was needed in the vineyard to pack the grapes into crates. I shook my head.

  “I would like to do something with my hands, some kind of handicraft. I am good with my hands, I can sew quite well—”

  “No, no, those jobs are only for the disabled. You are young and strong.”

  We parted without a solution.

  For the next few days I was sent all over the place to substitute for various absent workers. I didn’t like any of those jobs. Soon it was my turn to do night-time guard duty. Every female member was taken off her regular work once or twice a year for two weeks. The males did night-time guard stints with a weapon on the kibbutz periphery. The children slept in the children’s homes, and it was necessary to listen for children crying. In winter we had to make sure the children were warmly covered and hadn’t kicked off their blankets. When children cried, we’d give them drinks and comfort them until they fell asleep again. If a child cried for a long time, we would wake up the mother. We knew every child, and of course also where their parents lived.

  I liked night duty, because when I finished folding all the diapers from the huge baskets in each of the nurseries I would sit on one of the porches, where I could hear the sounds from the other buildings and knit or read. During my stint the year before, I had produced birthday presents for our little son, a picture lotto game made from cardboard, and some stuffed animals. The best part of the night watch was at dawn. From every room emerged the sleepy-eyed chaverim in their overalls and khaki hats1 on their way to work, while lucky me was looking forward to a sweet sleep in my bed. At noon I got up, showered, went to the dining room for lunch, and then had free time until it was time to fetch little Shimon. I loved it.

  But two weeks later it was over, and I had to decide on a permanent workplace.

  Ezra seemed to have relented. He now offered me a job at the barrel-making plant. Wasn’t it a craft requiring skill, which I had demanded? Here was work with timber, fresh-smelling wood—certainly I would enjoy that?

  It sounded good. I knew the workshop where the finished barrels were stacked along its outer wall, the virgin chestnut planks lying in neat rows inside. Wood is one of my favorite materials, and I looked forward to handling it and producing such useful objects as barrels. The principal customer for them was our canning factory, which needed them for pickling olives.

  Ezra accompanied me personally and told Lova, the barrel boss, “Here’s the new worker you asked for.”

  Lova looked me over doubtfully but seemed not disinclined to give me a try. The work I was supposed to do did not require much physical strength or prior knowledge. He led me to a machine, a kind of tall metal frame with a slot and something like a press. He pushed a lever and two buttons, and the thing started rumbling. Now he demonstrated what I must do: pick up a narrow board from a pile of cut-to-size pieces and shove it into the slot. In went a straight plank and out came a bent one, much like a banana or a cradle. It was really not complicated or difficult to learn. They watched me put two or three planks through the press, Lova nodded, and the two men walked away.

  And so I worked at it for hour after hour. At the far end of the workshop were other machines attended by a handful of chaverim, but the noise was so great that conversation was impossible. I bent down, picked up a plank, pushed it into the slot, went around to the other side to remove it, placed it on the pile—one layer facing right, the next one left—went back again to the front, bent, picked up another piece, shoved it into the machine, on and on and on without pause. The day seemed interminable; time did not pass. I was getting dumber and number by the hour. At long last it was over; the machines were turned off, and I could go home.

  But I had made up my mind. Despite the friendly material, despite Lova’s satisfaction with the output of my first day, I was determined not to remain a barrel maker.

  * * *

  I have to pause here and provide some explanation about the status of women in the kibbutz. The basic philosophy of the whole kibbutz movement was the absolute equality of its members. Property was owned by all: each member had equal rights and responsibilities. Managing positions such as treasurer or kibbutz secretary were filled by rotation. No person was worthier than any other, be they field laborers or teachers, plumbers or accountants.

  Yet beneath this enlightened liberal ideology remained the age-old conviction of the male of the species: that he was master of the universe, and despite his benign indulgence toward the female, he was still her superior.

  For example, no woman was a truck driver, a job that enabled the men to save some money for their private use. Truck drivers got an allowance for food on their long hauling trips but took sandwiches from the dining hall and spent the money on sweets for their children. Naturally they never admitted the real reason for their monopoly, claiming that it would be above a woman’s endurance to drive a truck.

  None of the chaverot could travel abroad like Lova, who went to Italy every year to personally select the timber for the barrels. In the kitchen, however, all the staff were women, except, of course, for the “kitchen boy,” who lugged the milk cans and heaved bucketfuls of peeled potatoes into the huge vats.

  I resented this macho attitude. I felt that the labor officer was only waiting for me to give up and admit that these male tasks were too much for me. I returned to him saying that the deadening labor at the wood-bending machine was not to my taste, and, as I consi
dered myself a reasonably intelligent person, such robot-like work would turn me into a cretin. He nodded condescendingly. “I knew it,” he said, “but you were so eager to do a man’s job.”

  “I can do some of the men’s jobs,” I reminded him.

  I was referring to my stint in our canning factory, where I’d sat at a long table along with other chaverot, filling tins with grapefruit segments. Once, on a night shift, the man who’d been operating the tin-capping machine had uttered a scream and jumped backward. His finger had been caught in the machine. He had to be taken to hospital. What now? The whole shift would be lost. There was no one to fill his place on such short notice. I offered myself as a substitute. I had watched David at work, and it looked rather simple. The cans would come sliding along a winding chute. He picked the nearest one with his left hand, and, with his right hand, he reached for a lid from the stack and put it on top of the can, then pressed a pedal. The machine clamped the lid on, and the closed can rolled on to a moving belt, where it was packed by the women into cardboard boxes.

  The foreman was doubtful: Should he allow a woman to operate such a sophisticated contraption? He dragged the labor officer from his bed, not daring to decide on his own. They conferred together, glancing in my direction. At last the foreman approached me and said, “Would you really try? It is dangerous; you saw yourself what happened to David.”

  They stood with bated breath, one on each side of me, and watched me perform the perilous feat, which no woman had ever been allowed to do. It was child’s play; one only had to be on guard to protect the fingers. Soon I developed a rhythm, and the shift could go on. In the end, the usual quota was filled, and I felt elated to have pierced the balloon of their male self-righteousness.

  “There just isn’t a vacancy in any of the workshops at present,” Ezra told me, having consulted his list. “The only job is in the cobbler’s workshop. But as you are not a skilled cobbler”—he looked up at me and grinned—“you couldn’t possibly fit in.”

  “I might become an apprentice and learn cobbling on the job,” I ventured.

  Ezra shook his head. “You probably don’t know Yaacov the cobbler. Nobody would want to work under him.”

  I did know Yaacov; his youngest boy and ours were the same age and lived together in the same kindergarten. I saw him every evening when we were showering our children and putting them to bed. He didn’t look frightening to me. “If Yaacov doesn’t object,” I said, “I’m ready to try.”

  The next day I started my career in the shoe-repair shop.

  The cobbler’s workshop was located in a spacious low building, well ventilated by large windows on all four sides. It was shaded by eucalyptus trees, which had been planted when the kibbutz was still young. Around the inside walls ran shelves on which lay in disarray shoes of all sizes, colors, and ages, together with the shoemaker’s lasts (wooden foot-shaped models used to produce shoes). There was also a small locked room where Yaacov kept the leather hides, the uppers, stocks of needles, twine, and knives. The greater part of the storeroom was filled with discarded old shoes, all those that in the course of years had been declared unmendable. There were also boxes with pairs of shoes made to measure by Yaacov’s own hand, which had been rejected by the people for whom they had been created. He didn’t throw them away, in the hope that one day they might fit somebody else. They were Yaacov’s skeletons in the cupboard, and he tried to forget their existence.

  As with the women’s dresses, every member was entitled to one pair of sandals a year and one pair of Shabbat shoes every third year. Work shoes were more readily available, and if you brought your worn-out ones, you could obtain a new pair. Of course the discarded shoes were never thrown out, but added to the pile in the storeroom, and when that became filled to capacity, a new mound was created in a corner of the main room.

  Traditionally, Yaacov and his helper, Mimon—of whom more later—produced all the shoes themselves. When I joined the workshop, the growing number of kibbutz members had already made it impossible to catch up with the demand for shoes. So a decision was reached by the general assembly, which convened every Shabbat evening, to buy the children’s footwear and the work shoes at the central kibbutz supply store in Tel Aviv.

  Of course, this obliged Yaacov to travel to Tel Aviv at least once a week. He received the usual allowance to cover the fare and a meal in town. Poor Yaacov; he must have stayed very hungry, because as we were putting our children to bed in the evening, I enviously eyed the sweets he brought his little son after a day in Tel Aviv.

  For the chaverim and especially for the chaverot, Yaacov sewed quality shoes. The client would sit on the only normal-height chair in the workshop, place his foot on a sheet of paper, and Yaacov would trace its outline with a pencil, bunions and crooked toes included. Then he would measure the instep and arch with a tailor’s tape, write them on the paper in thick characters of his very own hieroglyphs, adding the name—first name only—and also the customer’s wishes as to color and type of leather.

  With the men the thing was easy; they could have the moccasin style or the classic shoe with shoelaces, colors either black or brown. The women were choosier.

  “I want the same model as you made for Miriam, only with a higher heel and not in white, but in green. You know, not dark green, but a light shade to go with my new Shabbat dress.”

  Yaacov, tight-lipped, would nod and add a scrawl on the paper.

  A week later the chavera would appear to fetch her new shoes, but Yaacov would send her away: “Perhaps next week—ask me on Thursday.”

  Thursday came and went, another week passed, and another. Five or six weeks later, the shoes were ready, with high heels, all shiny and new in their box. Only instead of green, they were white.

  “But I asked you to make me green ones,” wailed the woman.

  “What are you saying? I wrote it down here. See? Exactly what you wanted. White like Miriam’s.”

  The chavera had one of two options. Either she took the white pair or she left it in the cobbler’s shop and waited for her next turn two or three years later.

  A third possibility was out of the question. It was well-known on the kibbutz that Yaacov suffered from a heart condition, and no one dared to make him lose his temper, which might lead to hypertension and, God forbid, a heart attack or worse.

  Sometimes it wasn’t the color but the size that was wrong. Yaacov might have written Chaim on the footprint paper, but there were three Chaims on our kibbutz, and the foot of the tallest one was, of course, two or three sizes larger than that of the short Chaim. The small one could perhaps take the large shoes and stuff newspaper into the toes, but tall Chaim could never wear the small shoes of short Chaim.

  And so the orphaned, unclaimed shoes added to Yaacov’s skeletons in the cupboard, gathering dust in the locked storeroom. From time to time he managed to palm off a pair on some indifferent member who was oblivious to changing fashions. None of us dared to mention the rejects in front of Yaacov.

  I started my first day in the shoe-repair shop full of goodwill and eagerness to learn the trade and to make myself useful. I got an enormous blue apron, took my place on the low stool at the worktable, and put a thick wooden slab on my lap. A heavy cast-iron tripod was placed on the slab. All the hammering was done on the tripod, and in the first few weeks my thighs were blue, violet, and yellow. After some time I got used to the ache and didn’t mind it any longer.

  I was given the special cobbler’s hammer with a wide blunt end and a forked front, which could be inserted under bent nails to pull them out. Yaacov gave me an old sandal and told me to replace the heel.

  “The heel is built of layers; you insert the screwdriver between them and peel away layer after layer until you reach the one that isn’t worn down. You make a paper pattern of its size, copy it onto a piece of leather, and cut out the new heel. You nail it on with these medium nails, taking care not to leave their sharp end sticking out on the inside.”

  How I lov
ed it! Mending old things and making them useful again is one of my life passions. Sandal after sandal, heel after heel, I repaired away and didn’t even feel the passing of time. The foot odor that emanated from the sandals didn’t put me off. Only one thing kept bothering me: What if I did something wrong, made some blunder, or asked a silly question that might make Yaacov angry and raise his blood pressure? I tried to behave with restraint, meek as a lamb, which is not in my nature, but I always said yes and watched his face for any sign of displeasure.

  I had good reason to be wary. I had seen with my own eyes the frightening scene when Baruch, one of the most respected old-timers on the kibbutz, demanded new Shabbat shoes a year ahead of his turn. Baruch was a heavy, large man with an awkward lopsided gait, and his shoes simply did not last the required term. He held them in his large hands, and there was no question that they had ended their life.

  “This year you are not entitled to new shoes” was Yaacov’s verdict.

  “But I cannot wear these any longer,” implored Baruch.

  “I said you are not going to get another pair this year. Come back next year. And that’s final.”

  Any other chaver would have given up and perhaps worn his sandals during the cold winter months or his work boots on Shabbat. But Baruch was a stubborn person. He didn’t relent but continued to explain in his slow, even voice that, in spite of the rules, he must get a new pair of shoes, though it was against the principle of equal rights.…

  Yaacov didn’t answer. We fell silent, stopped hammering, and stared at him. He puffed up his chest, his face became red, his veins stood out on his forehead, and it looked as if at any moment he would succumb to an apoplectic seizure.

  When Baruch saw what he had caused, he stopped midsentence and started retreating backward to the door like a crab. He was soon gone altogether, with the ruins of his old shoes still in his hands. Yaacov’s face gradually regained its normal color, and after a while he was able to resume his work.