Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (6 page)

The kibbutz was a kind of paradise, with little white red-roofed cottages, winding rose-lined paths, a swimming pool, horses, and long-legged bikini-clad volunteers from the Scandinavian countries. Swedes, Danes, Finns strolled around in flip-flops, laughing languidly, making eyes at me.

I was young, tall, broad-shouldered, Jewish, unfettered, single. Could hardly believe my luck.

The kibbutzniks, tough, browned, good-natured men and women in blue work clothes, took an immediate liking to me; hoped perhaps that I might someday marry one of the kibbutz daughters—mainly homely old maids in their late thirties.

The kibbutzniks' instantaneous and positive assessment of my attributes cheered me. In New York, no one had said anything nice about me in many years. It was interesting that the same person could seem so unpromising in one place yet appear so worthwhile in another. Perhaps a change of scene was all it took. But on the other hand, I harbored a gnawing unease that the kibbutzniks didn't really know me.

The most promising kibbutz daughters had moved to the major cities or left the country altogether to study at university or practice their trade or marry an urban professional, while the sons, on the whole, were less socially mobile, more apathetic, stayed behind.
Their chief goal was to serve in crack frontline commando units in the army, and when at home, on kibbutz, to man their tractors, perform the duties assigned them, and sleep with the bombshell Scandinavian volunteers.

The volunteers lay at poolside after the day's work, sunning themselves in skimpy outfits, slender, busty secretaries and stenographers with frost-blonde hair and ice-blue eyes. For them, kibbutz was the next best thing to Club Med.

Some liked it so much they stayed on year round, worked in exchange for free room, board, medical care, the frequent fun tours sponsored by the kibbutz. On these jaunts everyone piled into buses along with tents, oil drums, big gas burners, musical instruments, sacks of potatoes, vats of homemade salads, boxes of plastic-sealed chocolate pudding desserts, plus fresh baked breads, coffee, tea, sugar, blankets, flashlights, handguns, and assault rifles.

In a big caravan of buses, jeeps, and vans, we traveled to some remote spot of natural or historical interest—Masada, say, where in Roman times a handful of Jewish fighters made a valiant suicidal last stand against the Roman Empire. Piling out, we would set up camp for a big
kumsitz
or “come sit” gathering.

Everyone around a bonfire for days, singing songs, cuddling, necking, playing accordions and guitars, dancing, and gorging on huge plates of fresh-made French fries and other foodstuffs.

Later, newly paired hand-holding lovers disappeared into the harsh landscape for a few hours of naked coupling under the desert moon. At some ungodly hour, the kibbutz men shrugged off blankets, kissed their lovers' sleepy foreheads, roused everyone, and shouldering weapons prodded us forward for a quick march to the summit of Masada.

It was on such a trip that I met Helka, a Finnish girl with a
pretty affect of bookishness belied by shockingly blue eyes, blonde hair, a tan, slender, long-legged body, and small perfect breasts. She had no bikini lines—she sunbathed nude at every possible chance: a real uninhibited free-swinger. Our bodies contrasted comically: me, New York Jewish, sun-starved, almost blue tinged, against her warm sweet apricot-colored silk.

But the contrast excited her, I suspect. We drew close to each other with knowing half smiles of wanton, intelligent, slightly churlish lust.

It also helped that she spoke great English. Our talk did not struggle, it flowed—a tone, a theme established immediately between us of personas cut whole cloth from urges, masks we could wear to hide from ourselves, or each other.

We were, we felt, rootless cosmopolitan expatriates on the make for escape, passion, whatever scraps of meaning we could salvage, whatever clues would yield us to ourselves, show us whatever the hell it was we were supposed to be doing in this world.

But clueless though we were about ourselves, we also thought ourselves better than everyone around us. Even in that first exchange, I sat a little removed from the singing kumsitz circle, recessed in shadow, alone, Byronic. She dropped beside me on her knees, in a pretty, sweetly submissive pose, and said: “All alone? Why? Are you not having fun?”

“No.”

“May I please sit?”

I shrugged.

“I can tell: you're a thinker. What are you thinking?” She smiled.

“That I don't belong here. That I don't belong anywhere. Look at them.” I nodded toward the noisy celebrants. “The normal world.”

The smile vanished. “Everyone belongs somewhere,” she said, but sounded unsure.

“Do you really believe that?” I asked disdainfully.

“No,” she said with a sad smile. “Maybe. I don't know.”

“You don't belong here either. Or wherever you come from.”

“Finland. Helsinki. No. I don't feel at home there or here.”

“That's why you're talking to me. You can see the stranger in my face. No one else looks familiar to you, except me.”

She laughed. “Yes, in a way, that's true. You don't seem like anyone I've ever seen. Yet I feel I know you.” She touched my face with her fingertips.

I kissed her, softly, gently. Then, looking into her eyes: “It's not that we're better than everyone else. We are. But it's got nothing to do with that.”

“You're nice.”

“Maybe. I'm sure only that I don't belong anywhere. And, I sense, neither do you. In fact, I'm sure of it.”

“What's your name?”

“Alan.”

“I'm Helka.”

I didn't offer the usual pleasantry. We sat silent for a time, gazed at the fire-silhouetted partyers clapping and swaying, singing and dancing—normal ones with a sense of place, who felt they belonged wherever Fate put them.

Then I stood up, offered her my hand, pulled her to her feet, and went off with her to find a spot in the desert where we could merge, disappear from ourselves, our estrangement from everything, at least for a while.

SOON, THE KIBBUTZ WAS BUZZING ABOUT OUR affair. Everyone knew everything about each other. Privacy did not exist. The kibbutz men grinned suggestively and clapped my shoulder and said: “Hey, Alan. How's Helka?”

“Up yours,” I'd say with a smile.

They'd laugh: “You're a good boy, Alan! A man who gets to the point!” A very high compliment in Israel.

She asked to read my published short stories, poems. Their content mattered less to her than the fact of their appearing in print, and she regarded me with unconcealed awe, submerged in her own world of delusions. “You're the first writer I've ever met.”

“And the last, I hope.” Adding: “For your sake.”

She hesitated, unsure of how to respond. I didn't really know myself exactly what I meant. Was always blurting out dramatic-sounding, bitter, often cryptic or contradictory pronouncements from off the top of my head, trying to seem profound or bizarre but also hoping to accidentally hit on something that might ring
true, about myself, about anything whatsoever. I was woven into a fabric of lies and illusions so long-standing that I couldn't tell where I began and the fabrications left off. In effect, I had become a living, walking, talking lie—my very existence an ambulatory falsehood.

When alone, I could detect nothing within myself that I could quantify as depth or substance. In private soundings of my innermost self I heard only echoes of ricocheting emptiness, a hollow nightmare of synaptic distress signals. Or else felt flat-out void, seemed to have the emotional and intellectual texture of a protozoan or a basic protein.

For this reason I read voraciously. Books filled my vacant psychic well with content: social codes, subtleties, perspectives. I had an aptitude for absorbing and regurgitating quantities of commentary, ideas, tastes, preferences, attitudes, drawn from whatever book I happened to be immersed in at the time. I would be Faulknerian one week, Hemingwayesque the next, and Hamsun-like the week after. Even my ways of speaking changed to reflect these shifts in reading.

I read not for amusement or even knowledge but to draw from language regiments of details with which to reconstruct myself from day to day. Should days go by when I read nothing, there was no me, no one home. Sat and said nothing, numb, for all intents and purposes dead. But the glue that held me together, cemented the details, was booze. And that was blessedly plentiful on kibbutz, easily obtained. The commissary sold brandy, vodka, beer, wine, as much as I needed.

I needed a lot. Chose vodka for its low-cost lethal efficiency. A fifth, diluted and imbibed by the glass at regular intervals, could get me through a couple of days. Vodka was the blackness that filled the vast interregnums between my dead star constellations. Without it, there was no one home. Nothing more terrifying than to find yourself alone at home with no one home.

In this regard, Helka, who was also a hodgepodge of self-invention—an emptiness with eyes assembled from mostly cliché sources—was like a figure from a familiar novel whose plot I knew by heart. She didn't have a reflex that I could not anticipate. I saw clearly what she chose to believe about me and could easily fill in the blanks with dialogue, attitudes, airs that perfectly fit the roles she had assigned me. I was the tragic gifted American writer experiencing foreign cultures for the first time—an important step in my personal and artistic development. She, the fascinating lover whom I met en route to fame and someday would write about, the beautiful and moody enchantress who taught me the true meaning of love in a foreign land rocked by war, a mirror in which I could now see myself as I never had before. I could practically write the jacket copy for this turgid and tiredly cliché narrative.

There was more. She was scheduled to return to Finland in three months. She could return home alone, back to her lonely twenty-nine-year old life as an anonymous secretary, or remain with me in Israel. Or, possibly, return in triumph to her hometown, Helsinki, with a handsome young American writer husband in tow. Who knew where it could lead? Finding Helsinki too much the backwater, we might decamp for New York. The way lay open to a big adventurous life, with moppet-haired little Jewish-Finnish tykes running about underfoot as she knitted scarves and mufflers for the clan and I hammered out my novelistic masterworks.

I lay on a cot in my cottage, whiling away yet another afternoon sipping vodka with a novel by August Strindberg spread on my chest. Outside the door, some faded tough stalks of grass poked through the dusty ground. The sound of work boots on gravel crunched past. The air smelled of cowshit. I sipped more vodka. Helka's dream was a pretty picture. But she didn't understand me. Pounding out whole books—that wasn't about to happen anytime soon. The way ahead
would be longer and harder for me than for most. I was earmarked for cosmic martyrdom. Could not even count on a James Dean–like early victory and quick, legendary death. My bones moved slowly. My brain stuck on rutting. My writing, I knew, was immature. I was incapable of sustained effort. I sipped the vodka, let it dribble down my chin as a sign of my ingrained rugged bachelor independence. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, a free adventurer. Noted with satisfaction the vodka that had soaked, staining, into my T-shirt. Mingled with my unwashed skin, it made me reek like a Bowery hobo. Family with her? Fat chance.

Helka might have proved a perfect wife for a career, if only there were something to sacrifice oneself for. But there was nothing. An infrequent story or poem or article I cranked out on a whiskey high, because at dusk the light in my room turned a certain shade of blue or a line in a poem sent shivers down my back, caused me to pick up the pen in response. But there was no programmatic pursuit of my art, no particular theme I wished to express. Virtually everything I wrote was in some way Jewish or Holocaust-related, but there was no coherence in my approach. I still believed in the lie of inspiration—that one must be struck by holy fire. Keeping fixed hours, a set routine, something I'd read about in numerous interviews with famous authors, was, to me, repellent. That worked for them. I was different. God's messenger, a hidden genius, I'd show them.

The idea of pursuing a single task over an extended time filled me with gloom. In fact, I was loath to finish anything whatsoever. Stories or poems or jobs or relationships—the moment I could foresee the outcome, I lost interest. In this respect, I told myself, I was a true avant-gardist. It never occurred to me that my distaste for endings concealed a phobic fear of loss and death. So that even as I did all in my power to traduce love the moment I had it, the
prospect of losing the woman inspired nightmare feelings of fatal abandonment. Endings equaled the grave. I did not want lines of existence to travel from point A to point B: preferred that they remain indeterminately fixed in limbo.

FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS HELKA AND I MADE love with unhappy urgency anywhere we could grab some solitude. Sex became our creative act, our cultural statement.

Once, after a tough day hauling fish in nets across the kibbutz fishponds, naked and knee-deep in mud, I found Helka stretched out lounging in a nearly invisible bikini beside the swimming pool. Stood over her, reached down, pulled her to her feet and marched her off to a spot behind the volunteer quarters. Was so excited that my hands shook as I positioned her to take my thrusts, the crushed swimsuit so flimsy that I pushed it aside and entered her with a groan of shuddering pleasure. “I love you,” I whispered into her soft, curving ear. She held me so tight. “I love you too, Alan!” she gasped.

We made love at night out near the orange groves and behind the cowshed. We made love too in a piano practice room, after which she took me home and fed me sandwiches of fresh-baked challah bread and canned smoked reindeer meat sent to her in a parcel by her parents.