Between Friends (8 page)

Roni took his son in his arms, carried him inside, removed the wet pajamas, and cleaned off the mud and mucus with a washcloth, then rubbed his frozen body with a large, coarse towel to warm him. He swathed the boy in a warm blanket and turned on the heater while Oded recounted what had happened in the children’s house. Roni told him to wait beside the heater and bolted out into the rain, running, panting, burning with rage, as he raced up the hill.

When he reached the children’s house, his shoes heavy with mud, he saw the night guard, Berta Brom, who tried to tell him something, but he didn’t hear and didn’t want to hear. Blind and deaf with despair and fury, he burst into Oded’s room, turned on the light, bent over and yanked a gentle, quiet boy named Yair from under his blanket, stood him on his bed, and slapped his face savagely over and over again until the boy’s nose began to bleed and his head banged against the wall with the force of the blows, as Roni shouted in a rasping voice, “This is nothing! Nothing! I will kill anyone who touches Oded again!”

Berta, the night guard in the children’s house, grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off the child, who flopped onto the bed, his sobs thin and piercing, and said again, “You’ve gone crazy, Roni, completely crazy.” Roni punched her in the chest, then ran outside and dashed through the mud and rain back to his son.

Father and son slept with their arms around each other all night on the sofa that opened into a double bed, and in the morning, they stayed in the apartment. Roni didn’t go to work and he didn’t take Oded to the children’s house; he spread jam on a slice of bread and warmed a cup of cocoa. At eight thirty in the morning, Yoav, the kibbutz secretary, appeared grim-faced at the door and curtly informed Roni that he was expected in the kibbutz office at exactly five o’clock the next afternoon for a personal interview at a joint meeting of the Social and Preschool Education Committees.

At lunch, Roni’s friends sat at the gossip table without him and talked about what the entire kibbutz had been talking about since morning. They speculated about what Roni would say if someone else had done those things. You can never know, they said, such a quiet guy with a sense of humor, and look at what he’s capable of. At three in the afternoon, Leah appeared, having been summoned by phone from her course. Before going home, she stopped at the children’s house and left warm underwear, clean clothes, and boots for the boy. Tight-lipped, a cigarette burning between her fingers, she informed Roni that after what had happened, she and she alone would be in charge of Oded, and, what’s more, she had decided that, for the boy’s own good, he would return to the children’s house that night.

The rain had stopped, but the sky was still heavy with low clouds and a cold, damp wind had been gusting in from the west. The room filled with a cloud of cigarette smoke. At seven thirty in the evening, Leah bundled Oded into his coat, pulled his green boots firmly on his feet, and said, “Come on, Oded. You’re going to bed. They won’t bother you anymore.” And she added, “No more running wild for them. Starting tonight, the night guard will do her job properly.”

They went out, leaving Roni alone in the apartment. He lit a cigarette and stood at the window, his back to the room, his face to the darkness outside. Leah returned at nine and didn’t say a word to him. She sat down on her wicker armchair, smoked, and read her education magazine. At ten, Roni said, “I’m going out for a walk. To see how he is.”

Leah said quietly, “You’re not going anywhere.”

Roni hesitated, then gave in because he no longer trusted himself.

At ten thirty they turned off the radio, emptied the ashtray, opened the sofa, and made up the double bed. They lay under their separate blankets because tomorrow they had to get up for work before six again. Outside, the rain had resumed and the wind blew the stubborn ficus tree branch against the shutters. Roni lay on his back for a while, his open eyes staring at the ceiling. For a moment, he imagined that he heard a faint whistling in the darkness. He sat up in bed and listened hard, but he could hear only rain and wind and the branch brushing against the shutters. Then he fell asleep.

I
N FEBRUARY, IT WAS
Yoav Carni’s turn to be night guard for a week, from Saturday to Friday. He had been Kibbutz Yekhat’s first baby, and the founders, including his parents, were very proud when, years later, he was elected to be secretary, the first person to hold that post who was actually born on the kibbutz. Most of his friends were tanned, muscular, and sturdy, while Yoav was gangly and slightly stooped, pale and big-eared, carelessly shaved, absent-minded, and contemplative. He looked like a Talmudic scholar. His head always jutted forward as if he were examining the path before him, his gaze usually fixed beyond the shoulder of the person he was speaking to. He managed kibbutz matters with delicacy and tact. He never raised his voice or banged on the table, but the members knew that he was honest, quietly persistent, and good-natured. He, for his part, was almost ashamed of his good nature and always tried to appear scrupulous, strict, and zealously adherent to kibbutz principles. If you asked him for an easier job or fewer work hours, he would answer gravely that such things were absolutely out of the question here and that we must always abide by our principles. But he would immediately begin a discreet search for a loophole, a way around the rules, in order to help you.

A few minutes before eleven at night, Yoav pulled on his boots and dressed warmly in his heavy, worn-out army jacket and a wool hat that covered his ears; then he went to the duty night guard, Zvi Provizor, to take over the rifle. Zvi, the gardener, said sadly to the secretary, “Did you hear, Yoav? Minnesota is having its worst snowstorm in forty years. Eighteen dead and ten missing so far.”

Yoav said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

Zvi added, “There are floods in Bangladesh, too. And Rabbi Coopermintz died suddenly an hour or two ago in Jerusalem. They just announced it on the radio.”

Yoav reached out to pat Zvi on the shoulder but withdrew his hand when he recalled that Zvi didn’t like to be touched. So he smiled at him, instead, and said affectionately, “If you should happen to hear one piece of good news, come and tell me right away. Even in the middle of the night.”

Yoav left, and when he passed the fountain that Zvi Provizor had installed in the square in front of the dining hall, he thought that a lonely, aging bachelor had a harder time here than he would in other places because kibbutz society offered no remedies for loneliness. In fact, the very idea of a kibbutz denied the concept of loneliness.

Now that he had taken the gun from Zvi, Yoav made his first round of the kibbutz grounds. As he walked past the old-timers’ houses, he switched off lights that were burning needlessly here and there and turned off a sprinkler someone had forgotten before going to bed. He picked up an empty sack that had been tossed near the barber’s shed, folded it carefully, and left it at the door of the produce barn.

Lights still shone in some windows, but soon the kibbutz would be shrouded in sleep, and only he and the night guard in the children’s house would stay awake till morning. A cold wind was blowing and the pine needles whispered in reply. A faint lowing came from the cow barn. In the darkness, he made out the rows of buildings where the old-timers lived, four two-room apartments in each building, all furnished with plywood furniture, plants, floor mats, and cotton curtains. At one o’clock he had to go to the brooder house to check the temperature, and at three thirty he had to wake the dairy workers for the predawn milking. The night would pass quickly.

Yoav enjoyed these night shifts, far removed from the daily routine full of committee discussions and members’ complaints and requests. Sometimes people much older than he would come to pour out their hearts to him, and there were all sorts of delicate social problems requiring discreet solutions, or budget concerns, relationships with outside organizations, and kibbutz representation in the various institutions of the movement. Now, at night, he could wander alone among the lean-tos and chicken coops, stroll along the length of the fence illuminated by yellow lights, sit for a while on an upturned crate near the metalwork shop, and sink into night thoughts. His night thoughts revolved around his wife, Dana, now lying in the dark, listening drowsily to the radio in the hope that it would lull her to sleep; his mind also turned to their twins, now sleeping in their beds in the children’s house. In an hour he’d stop in there and cover them. Maybe he’d also drop by his house and turn off the radio, which Dana usually neglected to do before she fell asleep. Dana didn’t like living on the kibbutz and dreamed of a private life. She’d begged him to leave many times. But Yoav was a man of principle who fought constantly to improve kibbutz life and he wouldn’t hear about leaving. Nonetheless, he knew in his heart that kibbutz life was fundamentally unjust to women, forcing them almost without exception into service jobs like cooking, cleaning, taking care of children, doing laundry, sewing, and ironing. The women here were supposed to enjoy total equality, but they were treated equally only if they acted and looked like men: they were forbidden to use makeup and had to avoid all signs of femininity. Yoav had thought about that injustice many times, had tried to come to a conclusion about it, find a remedy, but could not. Perhaps that was why he always saw himself as the guilty party in his relationship with Dana and felt constantly apologetic.

The night was cold and clear. The croaking of frogs punctuated the silence and a dog barked somewhere far off. When Yoav looked up, he saw a mass of low clouds gathering above his head and said to himself that all the things we think are important really aren’t, and he had no time to think about the things that really are. His whole life was going by and he had never contemplated the big, simple truths: loneliness and longing, desire and death. The silence was deep and wide, broken occasionally by the cries of jackals, and Yoav was filled with gratitude both for that silence and for the cries of the jackals. He didn’t believe in God, but in moments of solitude and silence such as this, Yoav felt that someone was waiting for him day and night, waiting silently and patiently, soundlessly and utterly still, and would wait for him always.

As he walked slowly between the cold-storage room and the fertilizer shed, the rifle slung over his shoulder, he saw a thin silhouette between the shadows of the walls and suddenly a figure wearing a coat blocked his path. A woman’s voice, deep, pleasant, slightly husky, said, “Don’t be frightened, Yoav. It’s just me. Nina. I’ve been waiting for you to pass by here. I knew you would. I have to ask you something.”

Yoav drew back, then focused his eyes in the darkness, pulled Nina by the arm to the nearby streetlamp, and asked worriedly if she was cold and how long she’d been waiting there alone. Nina was a young woman known on the kibbutz for her strong, unwavering opinions. She had green eyes, long lashes, and thin, finely sculpted lips. Her forehead shone in the dark and her blond hair was cropped short.

“Tell me what you would do, Yoav, if you had to live every day and sleep every night of your whole life with someone who repulses you. Has repulsed you for years. The things he says, his smell, his jokes, his scratching, his hiccups, his coughing, his snoring, his nose-picking. Everything. What would you do?”

Yoav put his hand on her arm and said, “Tell me exactly what happened, Nina.”

In the light of the streetlamp, he saw that her face was pale and tense, but her tired green eyes, looking straight into his, held not a single tear. She clenched her lips and said, “Nothing happened. He even argues with the announcer on the radio.” Then she said, “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Can we wait till tomorrow? Come to my office tomorrow and we’ll talk. There are things that seem terrible at night but in the light of day, they look completely different.”

“No. I won’t go back to him. Not tonight, not ever. Give me a room tonight, Yoav. Even in a shed. In a lean-to. You must have one empty room.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I just can’t go on any longer.”

“And the children?”

“The children will come straight to me from the children’s house every afternoon. To the room you give me.”

Yoav felt uncomfortable standing and talking to Nina in the dim light of the streetlamp in the narrow alleyway between the cold-storage room and the fertilizer shed. If anyone happened to walk past and see them standing there, whispering, rumors would fly tomorrow. He said firmly, “Nina. I’m sorry, but I really can’t arrange something like this in the middle of the night. I don’t have rooms in my pocket, you know. I’m not the one who allocates rooms here. The committee will have to discuss it. And I’m on guard duty now. Please go home to sleep and we’ll meet tomorrow and try to find a solution together.”

But even as he spoke, he backtracked and found himself adding in a different tone of voice, “Okay, come with me. We’ll go to the office. There’s a key to the lecturers’ guest room hanging there. You can spend the night in the guest room and come back tomorrow so we can figure out what to do. I’ll speak to Avner tomorrow too.”