The Last Rain (22 page)

Dori

Today I’m the luckiest girl on Eldar. Daddy did something he’s not really supposed to do. We were talking about the sandwiches I didn’t get in Meron and Daddy took me to the Kitchen and poured a huge amount of soup bits into a pot and he gave me the pot. The whole pot! I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I wander off in the direction of the barns. I don’t want to meet anyone. We almost never get soup bits and when we do we’re only allowed one spoon each.

And now I have a whole pot to myself. A whole pot!

I wander to the barns eating my soup bits. I don’t meet anyone. I walk and eat. This is a happy day. Better even than a birthday.

Our First Year

9 September 1949.
The First Rain has arrived. Clouds piled up like a dark flotilla and cruised over the Atzmon mountain range, and then very unexpectedly a few drops began to fall on the grape leaves and drop from the fruit like tears.

In the course of the day there were sudden drenching outbursts and the wind blasted away. There was mud and the smell of wetness.

Tomorrow we expect to put 30 people in the field to finish off the grape harvest. Meanwhile the figs grow larger and juicier.

The main topic of discussion these days is “elections.” The administrative and committee positions in the kibbutz are reshuffled at this time of the year, and the process is complicated and yields heated controversy. Our big problem is to find a general manager and a secretary. Nobody wants the honours.

Dori

There was a movie for everyone today. It was about a boy and his bull. I didn’t understand most of it but at the end the bull got shot with arrows and the boy couldn’t get there on time. It was very sad. The arrows hit the bull and stayed in his skin and he was bleeding but the man kept shooting more and more arrows in him. The bull tried to escape but he couldn’t. I began crying so hard that someone had to take me out of the Dining Hall.

In some places shooting arrows into bulls is a sport and everyone cheers. Some people care about bulls and some people don’t.
⁵³

Our First Year

11 September.
This seems to be the season of gremlin wounds, those tiny, unserious lesions and abrasions that pop out on the body in the course of the day’s work: a blood blister here, a scraped area here, a scratch, an opening, a puncture there.

A collection of these little beauty spots can upset one’s disposition quite seriously.

You can’t move this finger, must remember not to bend that elbow in such an angle, the foot can’t be exposed in this position, don’t sit on that particular spot on the left buttock, can’t allow the left lower palm to touch anything, etc.

They appear mysteriously, these clotted, discoloured, swollen, scaly, or rashlike decorations; they metamorphose continually, persisting against all kind of balms and smears and bandages.

It may be the climate, the season, the dust, or a kind of juvenile delinquency in the department of providential retribution.

Dori

My brother David is reading about a trickster called Till Eulenspiegel. He plays all sorts of tricks on people. The tricks are funny. In one story he goes to sleep in a beehive and when two thieves steal the beehive he pulls their hair and they begin to fight because each thief thinks the other thief is pulling his hair.

Till Eulenspiegel does things for a reason. The reason is that people are bad.

David sometimes does things for no reason. One time in Canada David was looking after me and he saw that when I made a poo I checked the toilet paper to see when it was clean. He began to laugh and make fun of me. I didn’t know it was a stupid thing to do.

Then Daddy called on the phone. And David said
do you know what Dori does—when she wipes herself she looks at the paper
and he began to laugh. I began to yell
no no
and I ran to the phone and grabbed it from David and said
it isn’t true it isn’t true
but I knew it was too late and that Daddy would know it was true.

Why did David have to tell him? He just did it to be mean. Just like that.

Complicated Procedures

Dori

Shoshana takes us on a short Hike to see bees. Usually Shoshana’s Hikes are boring but the bees are interesting. Coco looks after the hives. She wears a special hat with a net and special clothes that bees can’t sting through.

Even with the hat and the clothes I’d be scared. But Coco is brave. She smiles at us and tries to explain what she’s doing but no one listens. We like the bees and the hives and Coco’s special hat but we’re a bit worried about getting stung.

Shoshana’s scared too. She laughs a little but she’s scared.

Another thing about Coco apart from her shaggy dog and the bees is that she planted a whole bed of Amnonand-Tamar flowers.
⁵⁴
I think I have to add Amnon-and-Tamar to my favourite flowers. Each flower has two colours—yellow and purple or light purple and dark purple. And they all look like velvet. Every time I see them I’m surprised that you can plant something so beautiful.

Coco is a good person to have on Eldar.

Diary of a Young Man

29 March 1922.
A full moon—spring is here—yesterday we sat on the boulders and sang. The whole commune gathered together without the ringing of the bell, and everyone sang and sang— suddenly without knowing how or why, a circle came into being and the commune began to dance. We danced for hours without pause. Our legs rose on their own, shoulder adjoining shoulder, the entire commune poured into one great soul and danced.

2 April 1922.
We do not cease to speak of the dance of that night. Will such a dance ever come again?

20 April 1922.
Unbelievable, what those moshav [community of cooperative farms] people are capable of! Simply boggles the mind!

In the middle of today’s dance, at the height of our fervour and sense of closeness, a few moshav people who happened to be in the Dining Hall burst into the circle.

Instantly our singing ceased and we all left the circle, leaving the moshav people alone in the middle of the tent. And thus our celebration was cut short. What’s really interesting is that they don’t understand what ails us.

How can they not comprehend—the commune’s dance is an internal event, like the commune’s Meeting, and a stranger cannot have any part of it.

Dori

Daddy can touch the tip of his nose with his tongue. That’s very hard to do. He also has a gold tooth.

I can stand on my head up to 100 if I have a pillow and it’s near a wall.

My brother David can move his ears. He’s the only person on Eldar who can do that. He also knows Everybody Loves Saturday Night in six languages. There was a talent show on the ship from Canada and he got up on stage and sang that song in all six languages.

I don’t know what Mummy can do.

Our First Year

2 October 1949.
I think back now to the earlier months of the year, when we looked with such wonderment and anticipation at the clean fig trees with their hard, green knobs popping out like buttons at the ends of the branches, when we kept trying to conjure forth the taste and shape of the ripe fruit.

Now those little green knobs attack our eyes as heaps of yellow, split, spoiling fruit, and behind each yellow conidial blotch leers the image of an ideologically compromised Arab. The stuff was ripening, splitting, falling, and terrifying us by the ton (the fig harvest is a countrywide problem), but now we’ve got the situation under control.

Dori

The older children are picking peas. We can pick too if we want but we aren’t really supposed to eat the peas because they’re for selling to people outside of Eldar. It’s hard to resist though. Peas straight from the pod are delicious.

The older children tell us to go play. I run around with Lulu and then I go to the Room. Daddy isn’t there. No one’s there. I go back down to look for him. Coco opens her window and says Daddy can’t see me today because he has a bad back.

And Mummy went away for two days to a conference! Daddy was all I had!

I sit on the step and cry my heart out. I have the same feeling I had last time when Shoshana caught me and the same hiccups when I try to stop. My whole heart is breaking and my stomach too. There’s no one to take me to the Children’s House so finally Shoshana comes and drags me.
⁵⁵

Thane of Eldar

In years to come, I shall be glad to be unwept, unchallenged and unsung. Farewell, dust! Farewell, Eldar!

Dori

One thing I do not like is steam houses. On the beach in Camp Bilu’im there was a steam house on the beach. I wasn’t allowed in there but I begged and begged and in the end David let me in. I sat on a bench in a tiny room. The smell made me sick and the steam made me sick. I yelled
let me out!
And I ran out and never went in there again.

What I like is the tall brown stove in the Room in winter. It has little holes and you can put your cheek against the metal and warm up. It has a such nice smell.

I love the light inside a flashlight or any kind of light inside glass. I saw a red light inside glass here on Eldar but I never found out what it was. Light inside glass is magic and real at the same time.

Stove

Dori

Mummy is taking me to the city! Just the two of us all day long. She says she has a surprise for me there.