When I Lived in Modern Times (4 page)

I
TOOK
the boat train to Marseilles. Farther along the coast, across the Chaîne de l’Estaque at Port-de-Bouc, others were also casting anchor. They were setting out on a more perilous voyage than mine. They had nowhere to go but forward, no choice but to make an illegal journey or stay where they were and rot.

I sat on deck and thought how the whole story was about coming home. As I sailed the Mediterranean Sea, all over the world people were in mass transit. We were moving like tides across the continents and the seas, troopships full of men stamping their boots in impatience, hats flying into the air at the sight of land. The roads and railways were engorged with human, sweating, shivering, stinking, parched or pissing flesh, traveling not for adventure or for pleasure or to take a rest cure or acquire a tan or out of boredom or to find romance or to cure a broken heart—but because they had a hunger for the good earth of home under their feet.

Then there were those, like me, who understood on some primitive level that the state of flux was the one we were in. The political map was changing. A lot of people were about to acquire brand-new nationalities, if not entirely new identities. And I was one of them, on both counts.

My fellow passengers on board ship were mostly returning officers of the Palestine Police and Mandate civil servants with their wives and families. There were a few biblical tourists, as I was pretending to be. They swallowed whole my impersonation of them.

Every morning a small group of Christians held a prayer service and I joined them, for appearance’ sake. I told them that I had undergone a revelation the previous year, when I felt that God had touched my hand. I withdrew my rosary piously. A woman looked at it.

“Are you going over to Rome?” she asked, nervously.

“No. Why?”

“I see you have those beads the RCs use.”

But how was I to distinguish between the different sects of Christianity? They were all just mindless Gentiles to me. I threw the rosary overboard, where it floated on the dirty foam for a few minutes before being swept under.

How much longer could I have kept up with this invented personality? Not that long. The person I pretended to be was beginning to get on my nerves. But it didn’t matter because I was nearly home.

When I saw the Promised Land I nearly cried out: “This is it! Now history starts!” But that would have betrayed me and I was trying as hard as I could to be circumspect, to play simple card games in the second-class lounge, to flirt with the young police sergeants and the Mandate pen-pushers, to make small talk and never to say a single thing that was intelligent, let alone controversial. It was no effort at all for someone who had stood, day after day, winding the hair of middle-class women on to curlers, speaking of film stars and shortages and the infinite virtues of Mr. Churchill, their hero.

I took my first step on Jewish soil, then another. The port was swarming with red-faced Englishmen, burned by the sun, going about their business. A sergeant looked at my passport and entry permit.

“Sert. Evelyn Sert. It’s an odd name.”

“My father was from the Outer Hebrides,” I said.

“Oh. That explains it.”

An invention, but I had only done what my mother had done and her parents before her, when they left the lands the Jews had inhabited for centuries and set sail for a new world and a new life. And all the dissembling had just that very moment ended with me because I had come to the place where no Jew need ever invent himself again or pretend to be someone he wasn’t. I had read in the books Uncle Joe had given me that the elemental nature of the Jews, stripped of the accents of a foreign language and its customs, was going to reveal itself for the first time since the Exile. We would cease to be composite characters.

I walked through the town to the office of the Jewish Agency, got lost and found myself in an Arab market. It was strange beyond belief. The air smelled of things I didn’t know or understand. Eventually I would be able to recognize the difference between cardamom and cumin, to know that the round, flat things were bread and that the bulbous, purple objects were vegetables with the name aubergine. I had never seen a lime, let alone a prickly pear. Palm trees, removed from the artistic impressions of them in paintings, were smaller and browner than I expected and didn’t have coconuts hanging from them, but dates. In the streets were little horses which I took to be donkeys because they resembled the creatures I had
been hauled on to the back of as a child and which were led, plodding, along the Brighton shingle. I saw a camel.

In the balmy, delicious air, with a light sweat which would soon become a second skin, I felt my center dissolve. The things I seemed to have always known (like a popular song you can’t remember hearing for the first time) were useless: how to judge whether or not to heed an air-raid warning; how to increase one’s allowance of chocolate; where to obtain black-market stockings. I was going to find out that what I needed to know was how to distinguish whether something was edible; how to squat while defecating in the toilets; how to avoid dengue fever; and how to work out who was an Arab and who was a Jew when surprisingly they sometimes looked much the same if you saw them walking the streets of the cities in a suit or a summer dress.

All my life my world had been bounded by Soho in the east and Hyde Park in the west. I was a West End girl. At first sight, Palestine looked like an untidy oriental dump and I was alarmed, but it excited and unnerved me in a way that even Soho never had.

At the Jewish Agency, they were indifferent to my arrival. I thought they would congratulate me on my daring and audacious achievement, hoodwinking the British. All they were concerned about was evacuating the huge prison camp which the continent of Europe seemed to them to be.

I said that I had come to build the new Jewish state.

They looked me up and down.

“Have you any military experience?”

“No.”

“Were you with any of the women’s services during the war? The Wrens or the Wracs?”

“No. I did fire-watching. I had to look after my mother, who was ill.”

“Have you any agricultural experience?”

“No.”

“You’ve never studied engineering?”

“Of course not.”

“We have women engineers from Russia here. What about architecture?”

“I didn’t study that.”

“Have you any practical skills at all? Have you ever done anything with your hands?”

“Yes. I’m not totally useless. I was a hairdresser.” Then they all began to laugh at me, those hard-bitten Jewish men who had seen it all and were impressed by nothing.

“Listen,” they said. “Go to a kibbutz. They always need help. Try it, see if you like it. If you don’t you can have a little tour of the country and go home when you’re ready.”

“I thought Zionists wanted every Jew they could get their hands on.”

“In time, yes. Now we have other problems. Wait here. Someone is coming in from a kibbutz in Galilee this afternoon. Talk to him. He’ll take you back with him.”

So I sat on a chair in the office and waited.

Telephones rang. The air was dense with smoke. Through the window I caught sight of the sea, where I had just come from. The excitement and infatuation with all that was new and difficult ebbed away. I felt nauseous with anxiety. What had I done? I looked at my shoes.

At lunchtime they brought me a strange meal: bread with onions and a green pepper and a glass of hot sweet tea with lemon in it. I had been in Palestine for several hours and I was tired and thirsty. I wanted a
cup
of tea, made properly in a pot, with milk and two spoons of white sugar. And a biscuit. I felt very alone and far from home. But I had no home. That was the point. That was why I was here.

Finally two people turned up, a man and a girl. She had a hard, sunburned body and her legs were covered with long, black hairs. When she lifted her hand in greeting I could see even more coarse, dark hair in her armpits. I was revolted. Hairy Hebrew girl.

The man addressed me in English. He said his name was Meier. “What languages do you speak?” he asked me and I hardly understood his voice at first.

“English. And a little French.”

“Hebrew?”

“No.”

“Russian?”

“No. Why?”

“The founders of this kibbutz came from Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and Kharkov twenty-two years ago. English is not the language we use here. We know it because we have to deal with the British authorities from time to time. Can you work hard?”

“I don’t know.”

“There won’t be any place for you in Eretz Israel if you cannot.”

The girl, who had not spoken, said something to me in a language I didn’t recognize. “She doesn’t speak English,” Meier said.

“Where is she from?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“Yes. This is where she was born. The young people don’t bother to learn English because the British will be going soon. But we can teach you Hebrew. Soon it will be the language you think in.”

In my heart of hearts I had thought I was coming to a land full of bona fide aliens like myself. When they spoke of Palestine as a land without people for a people without land I had imagined it as a deserted place, an empty quarter crossed by Arab nomads until the Jews arrived, escaping Hitler.

I climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck, gripping the edge with one hand and clinging to my new leather suitcase purchased from Selfridges by Uncle Joe with the other. The city of Haifa receded and now we were driving north across stony ground, through what they later said were olive groves, to nothing I understood, though they kept on saying I was home now.

Earth. Smells. Hills. Dust. I was speechless.

I
T
was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, a ramshackle encampment, guarded by look-outs. They grew bananas and other crops.

“It’s hot,” I said to Meier, as he showed me where I would sleep.

“No,” he replied. “This is still spring. The real heat will be later.”

My clothes were taken away and I was issued with a wardrobe pared down to a utilitarian simplicity: two pairs of shorts and two sleeveless shirts, a pair of boots and a pair of sandals and a cotton hat without a proper shape. We looked anonymous, all of us, like so many overalled factory hands. Gender was dissolved, annihilated.

I was to share a dormitory with five other young women in a single-story structure, part of a group of eight in a quadrangle with the male and female shower and toilet blocks at one end.

I stood under the water as Evelyn, and scrubbing at the dust and grime on my skin from the journey. I felt that she had been left behind in the office of the Jewish Agency, that confused, conflicted girl who was a mistress of disguises and of duplicity. I was washing away what remained of her. Water streamed down my head and on to my eyes. My hair was stuck to my face and I was returned to the beginning of time, to where things started, not where they ended. I was no longer Evelyn, I was Eve and that as it turned out was what they called me, one syllable being more serviceable than two.

The girls on the kibbutz were matter-of-fact types, friendly but not warm, who took the view that either I would fit in, or I would not. It was up to me. They were indifferent either way having seen other new immigrants come who had rhapsodized in the cafés of faraway Vienna and Berlin about the uniquely Jewish experiment in the formation of new social relations but had slunk off back to Tel Aviv and Haifa when they found cow shit on the soles of their leather shoes and their hair sticky with bull semen.

I was shouted into life at four o’clock the following morning and dressed and washed in darkness. Breakfast was laid out on the tables in the communal dining hall, creaking under its tin roof, its concrete walls audibly cracking. Our meal consisted of bread, which smelled strange, and green peppers and onions and slabs of white and yellow cheese and black tea. There were jugs of milk but it was warm from the cow and had clumps of cream floating on the surface. I did not touch it. I was used to cold milk in bottles. Sometimes, when I cut off the top of my boiled egg I found the bloody cooked corpse of an embryonic chicken inside. It was plain food and usually wholesome but a dreary diet without any of the sensual pleasure of the Belgian cakes I remembered from Soho and the spaghetti in a rich, red meat sauce or the Swiss tarts made with cream and bacon or…(the memory of the foods from home was a constant torment during my brief time on the kibbutz).

As it got light, I followed the other girls as they walked toward some trucks. We climbed onto the back and I tried not to fall off as we were jostled along a track and the sky grew more lucid and small fingers of cloud hung on the horizon. After about half an hour we stopped in the middle of a plantation of very small palm trees which grew bananas, they said. Now, I had imagined palms as waving in the breeze on a desert island, curving toward the sand above the crashing waves, because in one of my classrooms at school hung a bad illustration cut out from a magazine. It was supposed to show both the journeys of Robert Louis Stevenson to faraway Tahiti and the pleasures of the tropics where some of my teachers had actually lived and worked as missionaries to what they described as the savage peoples of the Far East. But these palms had nothing to do with storybooks or flights of fancy or the imaginary journeys of daydreaming English schoolgirls in outgrown cotton dresses on sleepy summer afternoons, but had been scientifically modified in an institute to make them closer to the ground and easier to pick the fruit from. Nature was in retreat under Jewish hands.

I was given a small sickle and followed the others up and down the rows of trees and, bending over, sheared through the brown leaves that flaked from the trunk. It was monotonous and made my back ache. After a while, the sun rose above the Golan hills and warmed, then later scorched my head and face and arms. The brown leaves were like sharp Saracen swords that cut my hands.

At first, I was a few trees behind the others, then half a row, then a whole row, then two or thee rows behind, like the fat laggard girls who always came last in school races and whom nobody wanted or spoke to.

Soon, I was lying on the ground, vomiting my breakfast. The sun was behind my eyes and when I opened them things were black. All I wanted was to leave the light, to crawl under the earth. The other girls and boys passed me, unconcerned. I walked on my knees, like a dwarf and I said that I had to go back but they told me they would not be returning for some hours.

“Take me back,” I implored. “Can’t you see I’m ill? But they weren’t interested in me. I climbed onto the metal bed of the truck. It was like a sheet of flame, after an hour in the sun.

“Stupid,” they said, and gestured underneath it. So I lay there, until eleven o’clock when the sun was approaching its zenith and now it was deemed too hot to work.

I slept all day and in the evening I got up and sat in a wooden chair and watched fireflies and moths crash into the lamp that lit the way into out sleeping places. I heard them in the dining hall, eating and singing. They had brought me my free ration of cigarettes and I smoked a couple of them, raw gaspers they were, a brand I didn’t know. The moon was over the Golan hills and the air smelled of things that were immeasurably mysterious to me.

The next day I went back to the fields and things were no better. The sunlight was tormenting me. When it shone on my head, even when I was wearing the cotton hat, I began to vomit and was prone to blacking out. I had escaped from the brown days in London when the skies were coffee-colored, days that oppressed my spirit, to a land where the sun would not let you be. There was nowhere to hide from the sun, from its relentless light and clarity. There were no corners where things could be left alone and ignored. The sun found its way into everything.

My work rate did not improve. I lasted only half an hour longer before being sick and I lay under the truck and then returned and slept. But in the evening I joined them for dinner in the dining room. The meal wasn’t much. They only served meat at midday and here, again, were the inevitable tomatoes and peppers and onions and bread, with lumps of white, tasteless cheese. Some of the girls had bars of chocolate but I didn’t know where they got them from. We sat at long tables, all together. It reminded me of school.

They did not try to welcome me. They passed me dishes of things if I pointed. As Meier had said, many spoke no English. They never went to the cities, to Haifa or Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, never came across the military presence of the British. They stayed here and everything they had was enough for them.

Meier came and asked me how I was getting on.

I was lonely and frightened but I could not admit it to him.

“Very well,” I said.

But he had heard different.

“It’s the sun. I seem to react badly to it.” Escaping the light was all I wanted.

“I can give you a different job.”

They woke me even earlier the next morning. I went with the old people to prepare the breakfast. I did not wash the dust from the tomatoes or put the knives and spoons and cups on the tables. I was lower even than that. They gave me a hose and I sluiced the floors, sending tidal waves of water beneath the feet of the old ladies, the women who had come to the kibbutz before the war, to join their sons and daughters (once held to have had crackpot ideas but now regarded as almost god-like in their prescience) where it was safe. The old people’s Hebrew was garbled and they lapsed into Yiddish at any opportunity, another language I didn’t understand. I ate my food standing up. While the dining hall was full I was sent to the lavatories with my hose to clean them out.

They smelled exactly of what you would expect—of three hundred men and women who had just washed and pissed. I did not expect that they would send me into the men’s block.

“I can’t go in there,” I said, but they laughed at that. I had never seen a urinal before. I didn’t know its purpose. I held my breath as I aimed my hose at the wall.

In the women’s block I thrust a jet of water down the hole in the ground with its marks for where the feet were placed.

I returned to the kitchens when the people were leaving to go to work in the fields and I cleared the tables and washed the floors and then the tables were laid again for the midday meal. And the sun came up over the Golan hills.

Work and rest, work and rest. In the afternoon I saw that some people went to lie by the shores of the lake and read and swim which was a skill I had never acquired. They took all their clothes off without concern and so I did too. Their bodies were nothing like mine, they were brown and hard and the women were without curves or voluptuousness. I was thin, but flabby. My skin was very white. They looked at me and I felt that they were disgusted.

Across the lake, where Jesus Christ had supposedly walked on the water, was a town called Tiberias and behind us, on the other side of the hills, was Syria, a land of many enemies. So I mapped the boundaries of my new country.

It was appalling. I wasn’t cut out for this. I made my mind up that I would be off and I went to tell Meier. “Sit down,” he said. “Listen, let me tell you a story.”

The one he told me was, it turned out, the best I had ever heard in my life. It was about the founding of the kibbutz: of the mobile band of young laborers in the service of the Zionist enterprise who came at the age of eighteen in 1922 from the Soviet Union to have their skin roasted and their flesh pricked by thorns under a Jewish sun, because behind their eyes and in their heads was an Idea: the dream of Bolshevism on Jewish soil. Of how for years they roamed the country, setting up camp in olive groves, planting pine trees on Mount Carmel, cutting roads through limestone rock. Of the months they spent draining the Yarkon River, lifting sand from its bed which they loaded on to pack animals to be sent to the construction sites of the new city of Tel Aviv, the first Jewish metropolis since the destruction of the Temple. Of pitching their tents beside a malarial swamp and wading in and draining it. Of the bad time, when life was so hard there was mass emigration from Palestine, a fatal tide of people ebbing back to Europe later to be eliminated from the earth. Of an earth tremor that killed two hundred people. Of the women who died of tuberculosis and the men who died of things that no one had heard of.

But he talked also of their practice of free love, of their abolition of private property so that a letter from home was read out to everyone and how there were no family photographs but the pictures they had were owned by everyone and were kept together in their collective album. Of the children born to them who had no mothers or fathers but who belonged to them all. Of their rejection of religion and their celebration of certain festivals like Passover and May Day with a torch-lit pageant, the men forming a human pyramid, the women dancing with red scarves around their hips. Of the debates about promiscuity, which some thought was a characteristic of a decadent, parasitic ruling class, and about the smoking of cigarettes which some believed showed a lack of willpower among a group whose principal characteristic was the very strength of its will.

Of how they put on plays and held concerts—at first with instruments as simple as paper-covered combs that they hummed into and clacking spoons. Of a dance they called the hora, linking arms and stamping their feet.

Of how some of them determined that it was time to stop being a traveling band and found their own home. Of the bitter discussion that followed, with others arguing that this was a betrayal of their original ideals in making their way to Palestine. Their position was rejected and they left. How the remaining sixty journeyed north and found a site with a
ruined cowshed, which could form their immediate habitation. Of waking each morning to the slapping of the water on the banks of the lake, the men and women sleeping together because there were no divisions left between the cow stalls, walking along a dirt road to the fields they were planting, which turned to a mudslide during the rainy season, the endless meals of lentils and the intestinal and digestive disorders they developed as a consequence, of the cold and damp…on and on and on he talked but repeatedly he came back to the intense, deep happiness those original founders felt, to be there in the Zionist homeland while on their radio all they heard from Europe was bad news.

And still they stuck to their socialist principles as they built a permanent community. They took their clothes from a common storeroom, which drew heavily on British Army surplus garments. No one owned a clock or a wristwatch. Marriages took place when the girl was ready to give birth and the ceremony only lasted five minutes. A few times the bride was in labor, or too heavily pregnant to stand even for that long, so a substitute represented her. Marriage, he said, was not the highlight of a woman’s life, but having children was, for with each infant the kibbutz acquired another member.

They read agricultural journals to determine which crops were suited to their land, which still remained an enigma to them. They built a water tower and administration offices and two-story housing units and communal washrooms and tried to figure out a way of bringing power from a nearby hydroelectric plant.

One night, after there were riots in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a group of Arabs from a neighboring village attacked them. Someone was killed by a sniper. The Arabs were getting organized so the kibbutz put up a perimeter fence and watchtower and now every member had to do guard duty. Out of these home-guard defense units came the Haganah, David Ben-Gurion’s righteous underground against the cruelty of British immigration policy. They felt they were fighting a war on three fronts: against the British, against the Arabs and against their original enemy, the mysterious, inhospitable soil that thwarted their attempts to grow things in it.