Comrades

Adina hadn’t yet turned onto the sun-blasted coastal road and she was already sweating in the air-conditioned car. Jabbing the air conditioning higher, she followed the road up onto the final hill before the landscape flattened and the fir saplings she had been searching for came into view. The dark blue sea and the sun spread out before her.

“Whoa,” she whispered. The firs towered over the roadway, and the bushes of bougainvillea now formed a luxuriant pageant of orange, purple, and yellow along the road. Both heralded one’s imminent arrival to Kibbutz Keren Or. A small, rusted sign read: Brothers and sisters living in harmony between the earth of the Carmel mountains and the Mediterranean Sea.

Adina rolled down her window and inhaled, hoping for a whiff of the heady pine and sea salt she remembered so well. She rolled it right back up at the steamy scent of cow.

She lowered the visor to check her hair again and the car rental contract fell out. Damn, she thought, leaning sideways to feel around for the papers.

The yellow gate was before her. She had been back to Israel many times, but the last time she’d seen that gate was in the rear-view mirror, thirty-two years before. Tuesday, March 13, 1979, to be exact, “but who’s counting?” she said aloud, startling at the sound of her own voice in the silent car. It took a few more minutes to understand that the old gravelly lane was now the smoothly paved byway she was traversing through the gate.

Comrades Road, read the tidy green sign.

“Well, here I come comrades.”

Adina Zion met her husband when she was nineteen and he was twenty-three. They were summer volunteers on an archaeological dig at Ein Yael, just beyond the Malha hills of Jerusalem. Beneath the broiling Middle Eastern sun, they pickaxed mounds of poppy-covered ridges, dug up shards of dirt-caked clay, and dusted off finger-sized arrowheads as they unearthed and began their own history.

“Look at this one!” she’d exclaim excitedly, holding up a broken piece of an ancient wax seal.

“Beautiful,” Aaron would murmur, looking into her hazel eyes. “Seal’s neat, too,” he laughed.

As they sat under the canopy of trees on the cooling slopes of the wadi at the end of the day, they unfolded their life stories. Hers of a tight-fisted, hard Yemenite father who was sent in 1953 by Ben Gurion to help the fledgling Jewish state at the U.N. but stayed to live the American Dream on Long Island. His of an idyllic upbringing in the small communal farm settlement of Ein Avdat, with hippie parents and nineteen ‘siblings’, of whom only two were actually related.

Aaron had finished his army service a year and a half earlier and in September would begin his second year of agricultural studies in Jerusalem. Adina had come to Israel that summer because Professor Lichtenstein had encouraged her to study art and “not be another boring accountant.”

She only wanted to escape a tedious internship. She was shocked when her father agreed to let her go to Israel for two months instead of training at Price Waterhouse. It was a year and a half later, when she announced her intention to return to Jerusalem and Aaron after graduation that she finally understood her father’s guilt over forsaking Israel for Long Island. It was the magic charm she hadn’t known she had—particularly for expensive phone bills and plane tickets.

“So, should we get married?” Aaron had asked for her hand casually at the end of their third summer together. Not quite the romantic way Adina had envisioned, yet she was twenty-two and ready. “And you’re okay with…?” Aaron gestured towards America, six thousand miles away. Leave her New York life behind because her Israeli paratrooper wouldn’t live anywhere else? Yes. he felt bad abandoning her long-suffering mother, but her brothers could take care of themselves.

Adina carefully maneuvered the car in between all the bicycles haphazardly arrayed alongside the dining hall and parked. She checked herself in the mirror again, practicing a wide grin, a “Shalom!” and “It’s me.”

Aaron wouldn’t come. He was back at their Herzliya hotel, hanging out with his old army buddies: three marvelous hours spent speaking Hebrew, each trying to pretend they each weren’t envious of the other.

“What will you gain from going there?” He’d always been practical, her Aaron.

She got out of the car and shut the door but didn’t lock it—this was kibbutz after all—and started walking. The sun shone brightly above, yet she pushed her sunglasses up over her head. So they could see her face.

Adina and Aaron were married under another hot blazing sun. This time over Keren Or, where they had chosen to become members— “comrades,” as they would now be known. Aaron’s contented youth on his Negev commune resonated with her, and Adina liked the people she’d met when they visited the kibbutz.

The wedding was simple, warm. Yellowing patches of sunburnt wheat fields surrounded the kibbutz, framing an incongruously green patch of lawn on the central square. The fruit-laden palm trees, adorned with wedding banners and flowers, was just how she’d pictured her wedding day.

Her mother cried, and her father crowed to all his guests, “Kibbutz living is cheap.”

“She’s flipped,” sniggered some of her New York friends who had flown in for the quaint ceremony. Along with family and the comrades, they’d gathered around the couple who faced each other in matching white, and shy smiles. “I pledge my love to you forever,” they each vowed. “And I pledge my loyalty to our friends and comrades and will do everything within my physical and emotional power to support our beautiful endeavor.”

Adina was radiant in the white shift dress that barely touched her ankles. A traditional horse and cart decorated with billowy white flowers and boughs of wheat and hay pulled the happy couple along to their new home on the kibbutz. A tiny concrete box wedged into a row of boxes, their red-tiled roofs the only nod to the glimmering Mediterranean just a few meters away. Their home had two beds, a bathroom, and a small sink — the sum total of their kitchen. There was no air conditioning, obviously. And no refrigerator, no stovetop, not even a tea kettle.

“Why no kettle?” Adina wondered aloud.

“No fraternizing with the enemy,” Aaron teased, pulling her towards him. Shared communal life on the kibbutz was everything, he explained. Separate meals or even a private cup of tea between husband and wife might fray the social fabric of the kibbutz. Still, it was idyllic and idealistic, just what Adina had envisaged for her new life.

Adina slung her bag over her shoulder and followed the scent of jasmine towards the central square, passing a few people along the way. Several kids eyed her frilled collar curiously but mostly people just glanced and went on. She stopped and stared at the palm trees; the dead fronds cut close to the trunk and the enormous live ones now several stories higher. Suddenly her phone rang, breaking the stillness of the air. Aaron’s name flashed on the screen. She silenced her phone and threw it back into her purse. She wondered if the kibbutz had cell phones yet.

“We could have renewed our vows,” Adina thought wryly. She fished out her phone again to take a picture of the verdant square for Aaron, her mind drifting back. She had tried to be stoic when, a week after the wedding, the kibbutz “photographer” handed them several mostly blank cellulose sheets with a “Sorry.” Her mother sent the negatives to Marchand & Ashley to see if they could salvage anything, but none of their wedding photos survived.

Probably on purpose, she still believed.

After a short, sanctioned honeymoon where they were allotted two nights in the spartan guest house of the National Kibbutz Headquarters in Haifa, Adina threw herself into communal life. She pulled her long black hair into a ponytail, proudly donned the starched khaki uniform and signed up for work. She smiled eagerly at her neighbors and made flower crowns from daisies for the kids in the Children’s House; “Ha’amerikait” (The American) the children called her. She greeted everyone she passed with “Shalom,” even the old people who lived in the Seniors’ Home. Some of them were senile, but always friendly. They pinched her cheek and called her “shayneh”.

When she first checked the Duty Roster, Adina was thrilled to see that she’d been assigned to the carrot fields. “A chance to really work the land,” she said, rubbing her hands excitedly as she sat down next to Aaron on a dining room bench.

Two men seated at the table smiled knowingly at each other. They shook their heads while Adina jumped up quickly as if burned. She’d forgotten the married couples’ rule.

She smiled brightly at the woman whose shirt pocket was stenciled Carpentry. “Could you please pass the napkins?” Adina asked her before turning back to speak to Aaron. “So, I really can’t wait—oh, toda,” Adina thanked her neighbor for the napkin dispenser. The woman stared as Adina spread one thin napkin on her lap, took another to wipe her lips, and a third to hold the bread as she cut a slice off.

“I’ll bet my nails will turn orange,” she held her hands up to Aaron. “Do you think I could get some wax from the Carpentry shop?” Adina thought to ask her neighbor this, but the woman was scowling into her plate.

The heat and mosquitos were bothersome, yet Adina took to farming easily. She loved the sing-song rhythm of the ploughs as she walked in front of them to check for rocks. She quickly learned that grabbing and yanking the foliage often resulted in a handful of foliage – with no carrot attached. Matan, the overseer, showed her how to loosen the soil around the leaves with a trowel before harvesting the orange prize.

“You cut off the green tops about half an inch from the top of the carrot, like this.” Adina had been a bit slow at first, but now she deftly showed the Swedish volunteers, and even some of the Arab workers, what to do. Together they would rinse and dry the roots before storing the carrots.

Adina flushed with pride when Matan said “Good” as he pored over the figures she had compiled at the end of her fourth month of picking, and her second month of moonlight bookkeeping. He wasn’t much of a compliment payer, but in October they’d sent ten percent more produce to the Carmel Market. That accounting degree wasn’t a waste after all.

“Mmm,” Adina murmured as Aaron nudged her awake one morning.

“Wake up, sleepy,” he whispered. Softly he pushed aside the dark strands of hair draped over her forehead. He kissed a scar behind her right ear, and her smooth neck. Then her elbows, darkened with residue from leaning in the dirt all day long. She couldn’t seem to wash it off. Aaron’s gentle, calloused hands made their way down her warm body as she tried to pull the blanket over her shoulders again. She liked her work but getting up early was always a struggle. Aaron was the early riser.

“Your hands are cold, Aaron. Go away.” She smiled as she said it, knowing how it would all end. It was the surest way to get his young wife to wake up – that or reminding her that the comrades frowned upon tardiness.

“My teeth aren’t brushed!” Adina pursed her lips and turned her head to avoid a kiss.

“Delicious,” he licked her teeth when she broke a smile.

“Eeeww,” she laughed.

The old iron beds creaked as they made love in the early morning stillness. She never cried out anymore since they moved to the kibbutz, because surely everyone would hear them. The gentle creaking was never quite drowned out by the cicadas chirring in the yard. Adina was sure that’s why her neighbors often frowned at her. That creaking happened a lot.

They dressed silently for work, the early morning sunlight beginning to stream in through the open window. Adina watched Aaron pull a worn khaki shirt over his arms, half white, half brown from where the sun had touched them. She wished she could work alongside her husband in the fishponds, but married couples weren’t allowed to work together.

Sometimes she had the feeling that people on the kibbutz liked Aaron more than her. Maybe because he’d grown up on a commune himself.

“Don’t be silly,” Aaron said as he kissed her forehead. “Everyone likes you just fine.”

You don’t see that people don’t say hi back to you, Adina thought silently. She didn’t point out to her husband that he wouldn’t notice if someone didn’t like him, even if they walked right up to him and punched him on the nose. Aaron thought everybody was “just fine”.

Late one afternoon, all the harvesters sat relaxing in a circle, chatting, and sipping hot ginger strap tea (it was allowed with the comrades) and nibbling on little butter biscuits. Adina held her glass, breathing in the smell of musty earth and waxy palm trees as she and her fellow workers watched the sky turn a fiery red. She felt close to all these people, alive and happy.

“So Adina, why are you here?” Matan asked her gently in Hebrew. She looked confused, and it wasn’t because of the language; her Jerusalem-born father had made sure she knew Hebrew.

“Why am I here?” she repeated slowly in Hebrew. Had she forgotten to check the roster; had she been assigned elsewhere? “I’m not supposed to be here?”

“No, stupid,” Shimon laughed. He was one of the older workers. “Not here in the carrot fields. What you are doing here in Israel, on kibbutz?”

The chatter slowed; she felt their interest. The still evening air and the sweet, hot tea lent her a moment to gather her thoughts.

“I wanted to work the land, to be a halutza,” she answered Shimon proudly. “In New York you work in an office all day. You can go days without seeing grass. I want to be a pioneer and work the land of Israel.”

“What do you know about it?” Shimon rounded on her. “What do you know about being a halutza? My father and brother died in the Six Day war. “‘Working the land,’” he mimicked her. “You’ll get tired of it in a month or two and go back to your fancy America.” He finished with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Yeah!” Some workers slapped their knees and laughed. “Halutza, heh-heh!”

“Hey! What’s this?” Matan said sharply. “What’s this? Shut up Shimon, all of you.”

Adina turned red. “Maybe,” she mumbled, smiling weakly. It was all she could think to say.

Later, she walked back to the little bunker slowly, ignoring the redolent white jasmine along the path.

“I thought they were my friends,” she cried in Aaron’s arms. “They all laughed along with him, except Matan. Why doesn’t anyone like me here?”

The next day she didn’t join her fellow workers at breakfast in the dining hall.

“At least sit with me,” she had begged Aaron. “I can’t face them.”

“Let’s eat at home this morning,” he suggested instead.

Adina had a secret stash of New York treats that her parents had smuggled in for her. She didn’t want to share her Drake’s cakes, and she still remembered the shame of having to unpack, in front of the sorting room workers, that box of Devil Dogs her parents had sent.

“Her American junk food… all that makeup…” Adina had overheard through the thin post office walls as she carried her box back to the house.

She was quieter around the other harvesters after that day and kept to herself. A month later she was reassigned.

“Everyone rotates jobs on the kibbutz,” Aaron reminded her. But Adina knew what the gruff “yes” or “put it there” meant. Only Matan really spoke to her, and he wasn’t one for chitchat. Maybe it would be better in the laundry, she reasoned as she swept the dead flowers and leaves off the walkway outside their small house. A fresh start, she tried to think positively. And her skin would be protected from the harsh sun.

“So, you are the famous American, eh?” Malka greeted her.

Adina steeled herself. She’d promised Aaron she wouldn’t be so sensitive. Adina knew Malka as one of the three women who ran the laundry on a rather permanent basis. Malka, Ziva, and Ronit were never reassigned because they liked their job, and they were among the founders of the kibbutz. At least Malka and Ziva, were, and they extended their patronage to Ronit. The women started their day at eight in the morning, practically the middle of the day for most kibbutz members. They enjoyed the laundry’s air conditioning and made their own hours and their own rules.

“Parasites,” she heard people call them.

Malka was the largest of the three, which was saying a lot, since Ziva and Ronit were both pretty hefty. Every day a hapless kitchen worker had to bring six lunch trays to the laundry. Lunch started at noon and extended for well over two hours. They never invited Adina to eat with them. Once, on her second day, she’d followed them into the back at lunchtime. The three women sat themselves in the three chairs around the table, laden with the six trays.

“Oh. Yes,” Malka faltered, looking up at their new co-worker. “Well, you should go get yourself a chair and come sit. And get another tray for yourself while you’re at it.”

It took a while to convince the kitchen staff to give Adina a tray; evoking Malka’s name finally did the trick. By the time she returned, the trio had finished and were back to sorting socks and t-shirts. Their shortest lunch on record.

“When you’re done, bring back our trays too, okay?” Ronit said, covering her smile with a towel.

Soon Adina was missing the silent carrot pickers and their endless talk of the weather.

“Look at how big Engleman’s shorts are!” Ziva would cackle over a comrade’s large underwear, blissfully ignoring her own girth. Each family’s laundry was marked with a number, now memorized by all four women, and everybody’s dirty laundry was free game.  

“No wonder his wife’s undershirt was mixed in with Eli Dorot’s!” Ronit and Malka winked, laughing uproariously. “At least we know she isn’t ‘visiting’ with Eli Amir!” They laughed even harder. Adina knew Eli Amir. He’d lost both legs and, it was rumored, part of his penis stepping on a mine in the Yom Kippur War.

Those final months on Keren Or seemed to blend together. By now, Adina had blocked out most of the memories from her time in the ugly bunker that housed the laundry.

It wasn’t just their jeers about affairs and paraplegics. Nor their occasional joke about her “baby-soft hands” and lip cremes, or the way they often dropped their voices to a whisper in the back room. It wasn’t only the mean things she imagined they were saying, or that they seemed to always leave her the dirty cloth diapers and the manure-covered overalls to wash. It wasn’t even the moment when Aaron finally understood that the kibbutz members painted him with the same disapproving brush as his wife.

Now, thirty-two years later, Adina still couldn’t remember what made her leave. She just wanted out.

“Aaron, wake up,” Adina shook her husband. “I’m bleeding.” It took him a moment to grasp that her legs were covered in blood. He yanked on his boots and ran out into the night in his underwear. The room was stifling hot and dark, except for the little lamp above their bed that she’d switched on. It had been weeks since Adina had allowed him to open the shutters.

She slid over to the edge of the bed and sat up, cradling her hardening belly. All she could think of, as she waited for her husband to find a kibbutz car, was that Malka, Ronit, and Ziva would now know that she was five months pregnant. She twisted the pillow in her hand, becoming increasingly agitated as she imagined them making fun of her blood all over the bedspread. Bending over her knees to pull herself up to the bathroom, she vomited on to the bloody sheets.

Only later, when she lay in the hospital bed and Aaron went home to clean up, would Adina fully comprehend she was no longer pregnant. And that as soon as her husband had whisked her off to the hospital in the middle of the night, everyone on kibbutz would know this, bloody sheets or not.

“My wife would like to visit her parents.” Aaron folded and unfolded his hands as he stood in front of The Committee two weeks later.

“Her parents will send her a ticket. Us a ticket. I mean tickets. They will send us tickets. At no cost to the comrades,” he added quickly. “She recently suffered a miscarriage, and her parents would like her to see a specialist in New York…” His voice trailed off.

As if they didn’t all know already, thought Adina.

“The Committee has heard your request and will give you a decision by Friday,” the Major intoned. He was the head of the Committee, and everyone called him Major even though he wasn’t one.

Adina stared blankly ahead. She had pinned on her unborn child all her hopes of fitting into the kibbutz. Sometimes as she lay sweating in bed, she thought that the comrades had cursed her and closed her womb, or killed her child.

“Someone just spit on our house, Aaron! Did you hear that?” She ran to the window, but no one was there.  

“I just need to get away from here!” She stood at the public payphone, disheveled, crying piteously to her mother. “I can’t breathe. Help me, Ima.”

Ultimately, grudgingly, the Committee relented. The young woman could be spared from the laundry for a week or two. She hadn’t really worked since the miscarriage anyway. Itzik would cover for Aaron in the fish pools. The comrades already had to shoulder the young couple’s extra workload, even before they went off gallivanting to America. A taxi would be allowed to pick them up and take them to the airport, at the young couple’s expense.

“Parasites,” people grumbled.

Adina peered nervously through the dusty glass windows and saw that the empty dining hall looked the same, although they had finally given up the community benches and bought chairs. She looked at the walls, still adorned with the same photos of the early halutzim, working the fields. She spied the Duty Roster in the corner.

“Hello?” a voice called out behind her. “What do you want?”

She turned quickly to the man standing behind her. One hand on his hip, the other on a pushcart carrying a stack of plastic folding chairs.

“I’m… I…” she stammered. “I’m here for the shiva…” Her voice trailed off. She was looking over his shoulder.

“Is that, Shimon?” she whispered, half asking herself, half asking the man with the pushcart. She squinted hard at the old man limping towards them along the tree-lined path. The pushcart man turned to look at what Adina was looking at.

“Shimon, hi!” Adina’s voice cracked as she called to the man, waving as he drew closer. “How are you?”

Shimon glanced at her and said to the other man, “Shalom, Rafael.”

“Do you remember me? Adina?” she said a little louder. “I’m Adina. I used to work with you in the carrot fields? ‘Ha’amerikait’.” She gave a short laugh.

“Ho-ho – the carrot fields. That was a long time ago.” Shimon turned back to her. “What was your name?”

“Adina,” she repeated. “Do you remember my husband, Aaron? He worked in the fishponds.”

Shimon shrugged his shoulder. “We have many volunteers.”

“No, no, we were chaverim. I worked with you, and Shmulik, and Gerta. With the carrots. And Matan,” she added. “That’s why I’m here.”

Shimon looked at his watch. Rafael stood waiting. Finally, Shimon said. “Ye-e-es, I remember. You worked with us… from Sweden or something, no? But not in the carrot fields. Didn’t you used to make those little sweet cakes with Shula in the kitchen? I remember.” He nodded. “Yes. Nice to see you.” He turned to Rafael. “Yalla, let’s go.”

“No, I—” she began. “I was with…” She fell silent as he glanced back at her.

He looked her up and down. “You went back to Sweden, yes?”

“I live… I live in Herzliya,” she lied.

“Of course. Very good. Yes, nice to see you. Enjoy the kibbutz.”

“Where do you want the chairs?” Rafael asked.

“Come with me,” Shimon answered. “They need tables also.” He saluted Adina. “Nice to meet you again, Edna. Shalom.” They walked away.

Adina stood there for several minutes, staring in the direction the men walked, long after they were out of view. She looked around, surprised to find she was still in front of the dining hall. She pulled out her phone and took a picture of it. For Aaron. She tried to get a shot of the Duty Roster through the window, but the sun shone too brightly above.

She didn’t bother putting the phone back in her bag. Her pale blue blouse and sunglasses had given her away. She thought of her father.

Adina started for Matan’s house. Down past the beet fields, past the one-room post office and the Children’s House. Little had changed. The laundry had been renovated, but it was still an ugly grey building.

“It looks so small,” she said aloud to no one.

She walked on, following the black-bordered paper signs with arrows that pointed the way to Matan’s. She crossed paths with others here and there along the walkway and smiled at them but recognized no one. People ignored her. Her pace slowed as the row of small houses came into view.

Adina paused in front of her old home, slightly renovated, and enlarged from the looks of it. Air conditioners, she observed. She looked at the bubble racquets and the plastic pool, at all the toys strewn across the lawn. She listened to the muffled peal of a child’s laughter from one of the toys’ likely owners but felt no regret. This would never have been her life.

She’d come here to tell Matan’s family that he’d been kind to her, long ago when no one else had. Later on, in the car on the way back to the hotel, it would dawn upon her that she’d probably merited no more than a week or two of tongue-wagging. She expected everything to be exactly as she’d left it. Adina waited thirty-two years to come, but no one had been waiting for her.

As Matan’s house came into view, she could see people milling about outside the white mourner’s tent, some holding plastic cups in their hands as they chatted. Some older, some younger; she recognized no one. A few teenagers played soccer on the brown pitch across the way. In the distance, they, too, looked small. She saw the mourners, sitting side by side in a row of low plastic chairs. Her breathing slowed, her palms dried, she stopped.

She wished she hadn’t carried it with her all those years.

“Wasted emotion,” Aaron had said, right as usual.

“I forgive you,” Adina whispered, mostly to herself. She put her sunglasses back on, turned, and headed back to her car.