The Last Rain (2 page)

Jonathan is yellow because he has yellow hair. He likes me.

Shoshana makes fun of the way Simon walks because he doesn’t lift his feet. Every day she says
look how he walks! look how he walks!
and she wants everyone to laugh with her. But no one laughs. I don’t know what’s wrong with walking any way you want.

Our First Year

13 January 1949.
Last night was our farewell party at Ein Hashofet. The Dining Hall was packed: long white tables loaded down with cakes, candies and later, coffee; a sea of familiar faces; speeches; readings, including a satirical but friendly study of the idiosyncrasies of the gang; on all the walls beautiful photos of our life here; two original dances prepared by our modern dance group; folk-dancing and singing with a rip-roaring spirit until two a.m.; culminating in a wild hora that had the walls quivering. After that we finished loading trucks, by starlight, and left in a convoy for Eldar at five in the morning.

The ride was extremely cold, and when we reached the Galilee, the roads became tortuous and the wind cutting and icy. We rode through a landscape of majestic mountains, red earth in some sections practically turgid with fertility, and monstrous rocks, bulbaceous and knotty.

Eldar itself squats on a hill, white, silent, about 900 meters above sea-level, with its mosque and surrounding dwellings stuck right into the contours of the elevation, as if pushed tightly and economically into place by the finger of a giant. A Shell gasoline pump stands at the foot of the road leading to the village, a grotesquely modern totem in the midst of the red-grey mountains. To the north, quite a distance away in Lebanon, and as white and awesome as something out of Tibet or Alaska, looms the snow-covered Mount Hermon, a magnificent view.

By the time most of the vehicles had arrived, there were nearly 200 people present, and we immediately began laying the foundation for the Dining Hall. Prefab sections, tools, pots, sacks, trunks, beds, picks, shovels, and touriyas
⁹
and boards were moving and swinging in all directions. Reporters and cameramen seemed to be as thick as flies.

At noon the work was interrupted and the official ceremonies were conducted. Flags and coloured banners beat violently in the wind. There were cakes, oranges and wine. The army men who had been stationed there up to our arrival walked around with rifles slung casually from the shoulder over greatcoats and sheepskins. It could have been opening night at the Met, only in the opposite, non-bourgeois direction of course.

When the celebration was over, the guests began to leave, and the kibbutzniks got down to business, began to get settled for the night, took over military positions, cleaned out some of the deserted buildings on the edge of the village, and assigned work duties. “It’s all yours,” the soldiers said as they pulled out. “It’s all yours.”

Dori

Everyone is already sitting at the two round tables. I’m the last one. Lulu waves at me. I sit down next to her and she gives me a hug. She has curly hair that matches her name. Lulululululu sounds like a lot of curls. It goes back to where it started like a circle and curls are circles too.

For supper there’s bread and margarine and green beans and beet soup and cheese triangles. No soup bits
¹⁰
unfortunately. We don’t get soup bits that often. My three favourite foods in the world are figs from a tree—not the dried kind—and pomegranates and soup bits. You can’t get any of those foods in Canada. It’s too cold to grow figs and pomegranates there and they don’t know how to make soup bits.

My favourite dessert is chocolate leben but today there’s carrots and raisins.

The carrots and raisins are never the same. Sometimes the carrots are sweet and thin and there’s just the right amount of water and the raisins are big and delicious and the water gets sweet from the raisins. Other times the carrots are in big pieces and they taste bitter and the raisins are small and yellow and sour and there’s so much water you can’t taste anything. I wish the Kitchen would get it right all the time.

Thane of Eldar

Here stands Jeremiah ben Jacob, sometime of London, risen to Thane, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water. The rats however I am killing. Peace, Smulkin!

Dori

Shoshana doesn’t notice that I’m not drinking my milk. That’s one good thing about Shoshana—she never notices what anyone eats or drinks. She’s too busy at the sink. I pour my milk into Gilead’s cup. He likes everything.

I only like milk when there’s cocoa in it. The cocoa in Canada is different from the cocoa in Eldar. In Canada it’s sweeter and you can make it yourself. You have to squish the pieces that float up and you can add a little more if it isn’t sweet enough though it’s harder to squish when the milk is already in the cup. The cocoa in Canada is called Quik. Here they make the cocoa in the Kitchen. It’s not as good as Quik but it’s better than no cocoa.

Hot cocoa sometimes has skin that you have to take off with your spoon. I would die if I had to eat the skin. Or lumps in semolina. Or soft-boiled eggs. Semolina is very hard to make without lumps. Every time Shoshana brings semolina from the Kitchen I get worried. Sometimes you bite on a lump by mistake because you can’t see it. I try not to eat semolina at all. It’s not worth it.

Hard to believe but Simon likes the skin on hot milk. That’s because his parents like it.

Shoshana says whoever is good can help her wash the dishes. She thinks we’re dummies. Pioneers have to work hard but we’re only children. Why would we want to help her wash dishes?

But Simon does. He stands on a chair and dries the dishes. He looks funny with an apron on because he’s round. I whisper to Lulu
aprons look funny on round people
and we laugh until our stomachs hurt.
¹¹

Archaeology

House of the Second Mukhtar of the village of El-Daar (1872–1948); now an archaeological museum containing artefacts found in the vicinity.

“The Hyksos built a village here a little less than six thousand years ago; I ran into their village when I dug the foundation for the high school. We found one of their graves with some lovely Middle Bronze Age pottery. After the Hyksos came the Canaanites; they turned Eldar into a walled village. We found very good pottery with glazed decorations, and one of the altars on which they sacrificed children twice a year. The Israelites came next; they built a fort here. They were technologically primitive but monotheistic. The Assyrians wiped Eldar out in 722 BCE; we found a layer of ashes; it was burnt. The Babylonian and Persian conquests don’t show up here at all. The Greeks show up, however; the army of Alexander the Great probably built an army outpost here. And then the Romans came—we have thousands of Roman coins. During the late Roman period Eldar was a Jewish village. We found a synagogue, a ritual bath, twelve burial caves. The cave opposite the chicken house was identified by the Talmudic rabbis as belonging to Rabbi Sisi. The Byzantine period was very strong here. We haven’t found a church, but the Byzantines often used the synagogues as churches. Just yesterday we ran into a whole Byzantine complex and an Israelite complex below it. The bulldozer cut a cross-section, you can see it all. After the Byzantines we have the early Arab period, 7th to 10th century. Then came the Crusades; Eldar was a small Crusader outpost with three large forts nearby. Then of course we have the Egyptian conquest; we found some beautiful Mameluke jewellery here from the 13th century. After that, the Turks ruled the region but the population remained Arab. During the British Mandate, Eldar was a headquarters for the commander of the Palestine Liberation Army. That’s why Eldar was raided in 1948. The villagers left overnight and Eldar became an army outpost on 29 October. We arrived two months later, on 13 January, to found the kibbutz. The belongings of the Arab villagers, what they had not taken with them that night, lay scattered all over the place.”
¹²

Dori

We’re supposed to conserve water because water is scarce in our land. But Shoshana doesn’t care. At first it looks as if she cares because she turns the water off for the soap part. We cover ourselves from top to bottom with the soap. Every time it slips out of our hands we laugh and yell
it slipped it slipped
.

When we’re finished Shoshana turns the water back on. She’s supposed to keep it on just enough to get the soap off but she lets us shower for as long as we want so I don’t know why she turned it off for the soap part. We get a little wild. Shoshana doesn’t care about that either. She’s not in the room.
¹³

Finally she shuts off the water and we get our towels from the hooks on the wall. There’s a piece of sticking plaster over my hook with my name on it. I can’t read it yet but I like seeing my name there. And I love sticking plaster. It smells good. Dafna the nurse lets me have the metal reels when they’re finished because she knows how much I like them. How does she know? I can’t remember. Maybe Daddy told her. She also gives me the tiny bottles with the rubber caps that you put needles into. I love those bottles.

In Canada they have Band-Aids that don’t hurt when you take them off. Mummy bought me a book in a train station in Canada that had two real Band-Aids in the back.
Nurse Nancy
. There wasn’t much of a story and the pictures weren’t very good but I loved the Band-Aids. On my birthday in Canada my aunt asked me what I wanted and I said
Nurse Nancy
so I could get two more Band-Aids. Daddy didn’t like that I got a book that was exactly the same as a book I already had but I was very happy. My old grandmother came to look after us while Daddy and Mummy went out and I put one of the Band-Aids on her finger where the top part was missing. I forget what I did with the other one.

Plaster hurts a lot when you take it off. Shoshana pulls it off very fast. Pulling it off fast hurts more—but at least it only hurts for a second. Does Shoshana do it the fast way because it hurts more or because it only hurts for a second? I don’t know. I prefer the slow way.

In Canada children take baths instead of showers and after the bath you get a big soft towel. All you have to do is pat the towel a little on your body. Pioneers rub themselves dry with a small thin towel. I like the Pioneer way better. Pioneers are important. We’re building our land.

Our First Year

16 January 1949.
I’m so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open (it seems as if we’ve been awake for the last three days straight). I’ve just returned from the shower room where I met Naftali, who tells me that tomorrow we receive military training for guard duty. Syria and Trans-Jordan are in our backyard.

The wind is now blowing more powerfully, and it whispers loudly, like a thousand lips shushing high up in the sky, as it sifts through the Poinciana, eucalyptus, and pepper trees. The moon shines down on a piece of wall, a burnt-out house, a pile of rubble, a tile floor without walls and ceiling. In the weaving moonlight one can almost see the ghosts of the spirited life that flourished here.

I am thinking of the deserted village of Eldar, which we entered so proudly and energetically this morning, and the lives of the Arabs who lived here. I wandered through some of the hovels, looked at the overturned jugs, grain, books, baby shoes, and smelled the smell of destruction. Are we also destroying, pillaging, being cruel in this ancient land, with our ideals and our refusals to stoop to the world’s rottenness? Perhaps. We have moved into Eldar; it is ours; we are responsible for our acts, even though we are bound under the direction and discipline of our Movement. But do we have an alternative? Can we step aside, refuse to be morally sullied by Eldar and demand some other section of our Homeland on which to build our homes? I do not think so.

We are not responsible for this cruel and forced contradiction; we would prefer to disown it if we could; we bear no hatred towards the Arab workers and peasants.