Safekeeping (7 page)

Fingers raw and stiff from having lost her gloves earlier that winter, she struggled with the fastener, the red string seemingly wrapped around the buttons a hundred times, but at last she got the envelope open and pulled out—a fashion magazine! In English! Between glances to see if her mother was returning, Ulya riffled through the vivid pages, glimpsing legs in bold purple stockings, unnaturally red or platinum blond hair, shiny high heels, gold purses, and outrageously padded shoulders. A two-page spread featured a dizzying nighttime wonderland where yellow cars streaked down streets and glittering towers pierced the black sky with silver and gold pinnacles; it would be a year before she dared to show the magazine to a
classmate's father, a playwright rumored to be lax about contraband, and learn that this place was real and called
Manhattan
.

While she and her mother waited for the next train, her mother turned to her. “Why do you stare at me? I disgust you, selling
vobla
?”

Ulya had been busy daydreaming about later that night, when she would study the magazine behind the locked bathroom door, and had forgotten that her mother was even there. “No, Mamochka.”

Her mother shrugged and absently rearranged the fish. “You will grow up and you will see. Learn for yourself. That in life you don't have a choice. It is what it is.”

Ulya peered sideways at her mother, wiping her stinky fish hands on a tattered cloth, and considered for the first time whether one of her parents might be wrong. It felt like betrayal to think such a thing, but she couldn't believe she had no choice, no say in who she could be or what she could have. Look! She had chosen to snatch the magazine, and now its magic was tucked inside her coat.

Ulya straightened her jean skirt, reaffirmed that the cropped pink T-shirt showed off her flat stomach, and faced the shadows of the mandarin grove where the useless man awaited her. This fling was for the time being. While she was stuck in this boring collective-farm hell, spending her days in a windowless milk house, straining yogurt. She was young, and flings were a part of being young. If he got all caught up in it and had his heart broken, that was his fault. It wasn't her responsibility to look after other people's hearts. She had never had her heart broken. Why? Because she was so beautiful nobody would leave her? No. Because she took care of hers and didn't stupidly hand it over to someone else to safeguard.

When Ulya reached the barbed wire that ran along the perimeter of the kibbutz, she called, “Farid!”

Her Arab lover rose from where he'd been sitting on a boulder. He approached the cattle fence, his wide smile betraying how thrilled he was to spend another night lying with her among the hill's wildflowers and silvery olive trees. Ulya's stomach stirred again, but in excitement. Though they had been meeting like this for half a year, it still surprised her how coppery-gold his eyes were, even in the shadows. She had to grant him that much: he had extraordinary eyes.

Farid chucked his cigarette, leaned over the moonlit barbs, and kissed her, not only with his lips, but with the smell of tobacco and coffee and
musk and a grassy whiff of the kibbutz's avocado orchard, where he had worked all day.

“What's this?”

She felt him tugging on the back of her T-shirt and realized she had forgotten to remove the price tag.

“Oh, it's new.” She hurried to rip off the tag before he saw the price. It wasn't even that expensive, not even a hundred shekels, but still, if he saw the price he'd know she couldn't possibly have bought it. And he wouldn't like that most of her clothes were shoplifted.

He brushed her exposed belly. “It's a nice shirt.”

She gave him an aren't-you-lucky look.

He pulled on the top barbed wire and stepped on the lower ones, creating a hole for her to climb through. Ulya shook her head at the way he parted the barbed wires, as if he were holding open a shiny car door for her.

“I don't know why I come here,” she said.

Farid grinned. “I do.”

“W
e have no choice.” Eyal spoke into the microphone, relieved his voice wasn't quivering as much as the notes in his hands. He couldn't remember the last time a meeting garnered such a crowd. Even the emergency assembly on the eve of the Gulf War, when they doled out gas masks, hadn't drawn this many people; never mind the usual meetings, when at most eight or nine people came to discuss the broken irrigation system or the output at the plastics factory, everyone else preferring to stay home and watch
The Simpsons
. In the corner of Eyal's vision sat the one person who hadn't missed a communal meeting in sixty-one years, and she was watching him with livid eyes.

“The ending of equal pay. I know it flies in the face of everything the kibbutz has stood for. It's difficult to accept that some of us will get more money for our work than others. The street sweeper will no longer earn as much as the doctor.”

“Why?” A scraggy man jumped to his feet, propped his hands on his narrow hips. “I only see a doctor once a year, but I walk on the streets every day.”

Eyal turned to the man whose job for the last two years happened to be sweeping and weeding the kibbutz's paths, but before he had a chance to say anything, a woman standing along the wall shouted: “So what? You have to be smart to be a doctor. Any moron can sweep.”

This got titters from the crowd, and the street sweeper reddened.

A bellow came from the back: “Maybe you're the moron! If the streets are dirty, more people get sick!”

“Friends.” Eyal clutched the microphone stand. He'd barely started his speech and had already lost control of his audience. His mother was visibly pleased. Her eyes now observed him with a victorious gleam, her lips fighting back a smirk. Couldn't she see the only members defending equal pay were the freeloaders and the unfortunate few who were going to find themselves at the bottom of the salary scale? “Friends, please!”

A fiftyish woman with a thick American accent rose from her seat. “Soon people with bigger incomes will have bigger houses. Nicer clothes. A car! How will it feel when your next-door neighbor has a nice car and you don't? I might as well have stayed on Long Island!”

Next stood a woman with bleached hair and a leathery face. “If we have different pay scales, then we're no longer a kibbutz! That's it!” Bolstered by a chorus of approval—
So true! Amen!
—she continued, turning as she spoke to take in the whole crowd. “We could keep calling ourselves a kibbutz, but so what? We could call ourselves France, that wouldn't make us France.”

A grizzled man from the accounting office shot up, sending his chair crashing behind him. He pointed a shaking finger at the woman. “You make me sick! You don't deserve to get paid anything! You're a lazy
bat zona
! A parasite!”

“A parasite?” The woman's husband charged at the accountant, sending onlookers scrambling.

Eyal brought his mouth closer to the microphone. “Please!”

“When was the last time you worked outdoors?” Spittle rained off the husband's mouth as he held his right fist low and back, as if struggling not to throw a punch. “I would like to see how well you pick bananas! My wife has skin cancer from picking goddamn bananas!”

Eyal's lips brushed the microphone as he shouted: “ENOUGH!”

The speakers shrieked, drawing the hall's attention back to the stage, where Eyal stood, his notes crunched in his hands. The sound guy, a twenty-something who DJed the kibbutz's weddings and bar mitzvahs, leaped to the controls. Eyal uncrumpled his papers while everyone settled back into their seats. He glimpsed his mother shifting all her weight onto one hip and realized he should have made certain for her sake that the seats onstage had cushions.

He took a deep breath and faced the crowd. “Before we go into specifics, I want to make it clear right now that as kibbutzniks we will never consider one job more valuable than another. We understand everyone
contributes to a society. We are only talking about market value, not any other kind of value. How much money a person makes says nothing about how much a person is worth.”

“Yeah, right!” came from the last row, but the house resisted further eruption. Eyal hoped his mother, craning to glimpse the heckler, would see it was Chaim, a man who had called in sick twice a week for the last three decades and spent whatever days he did go to work on endless cigarette breaks.

Eyal searched through his notes. He was lost. He had let the crowd and concern for his mother veer him off course, and now he had no idea where to resume his speech. Rows of expectant faces watched him. He would have to ad lib. He patted his brow. All he had to do was tell it like it was, and there would be no room for argument. He wished the situation weren't so dire. He wished he didn't have to be the one to ring the death knell. But such was his duty.

“If half of you had shown as much interest in our books over the last twenty years as you're showing tonight, maybe we wouldn't have to do this. But now it's this simple: the banks won't lend us any more money. We don't earn half as much as we spend. The country doesn't hold up the kibbutz as a national icon anymore, which means no more government subsidies. Kibbutzim are privatizing all over the country. Like it or not, if we keep doing things the way we are, we're going to go bankrupt before the end of the year. Before the end of the year! Imagine it for a second.” He pointed beyond the dining hall windows, to the black night. “We will all have to go out into that world alone. A world none of us knows anything about. A world of job interviews and mortgages and layoffs and retirement plans . . .”

Eyal caught sight of Dana, the frizzy-haired gossipmonger, covering her mouth and whispering to her neighbor. The woman was a menace. Last week, as he and his mother passed her table at lunch, she had babbled in a raised voice:
My mom said Ziva was a slut. Eyal's dad could be anybody.
Over their plates of spaghetti, his mother had sighed and said she'd long ago accepted that kibbutzniks, like the residents of any small town, like their forefathers in the shtetlach, were bound to gossip, but an old woman's love life? Eyal shrugged too, as if the rumor were new to him, though he had been hearing it since he was a little boy, since that autumn morning in 1959 when in the middle of the teacher's story about the great Dov
Margolin, who had founded their kibbutz, smuggled Jews out of Europe, and died fighting in the War of Independence, another boy had leaned over and whispered through his buckteeth, “Don't get all stuck-up, Eyal. He wasn't your real dad.”

“We don't have to think of it as pragmatism versus idealism.” He had found his place in his notes. “Is freedom not an ideal? Is personal expression not an ideal? Of course they are! You should be able to spend your earnings on what is important to you, not what a committee has decided it was your turn to have.”

The room erupted with applause. Everyone had a stereo or airplane ticket they had applied for and been denied. Eyal waited through the clapping, not daring to look at his mother. For someone who did everything for “the people,” she hated people. They had argued for so many years that he could hear her thoughts:
Look at them, clapping for freedom—the freedom to buy, buy, buy! By “personal expression,” these good-for-nothings meant owning a certain car or walking around like billboards in oversized sweatshirts emblazoned with brand names.
As far as his mother was concerned, no better place existed for the “self-expressive type” than the kibbutz—not that she held much esteem for these types, but she acknowledged that they existed, and claimed that the kibbutz gave them everything they needed: paints, a printing press, dance classes, musical instruments, and, most importantly, an abundance of free time. She believed they had no idea how unusual their amount of free time was, having never had to come home after a long day at work and pay their bills or cut the lawn or do the dishes. She liked to shout statistics: the average American spends two hundred hours a year in commute.

Eyal wrapped up his speech, feeling it had gone well despite the rocky beginning, and introduced the woman in the purple frock, a representative from a kibbutz that had privatized a year ago. The guest speaker smiled at Eyal as she passed him. While she adjusted her glasses and lowered the mic, Eyal sat in the chair she had vacated, next to his mother.

Rubbing his sweaty palms on his jeans, he whispered, “Is your speech ready, Ima?”

Ziva sat up straighter. “Did that woman just say
privatized commune
with a straight face?”

While the visiting speaker relayed how her kibbutz had earned twice as much money since privatizing than it had made in the previous five years
combined, Eyal looked sidelong at his mother. Her cirrhosis was worsening. Her fingers, gripping the thighs of her faded blue work pants, were thicker than ever, and beginning to curl back. Her gut, drained only two months ago, already bulged out of her rickety frame. Her old skin grew ever more yellow, and she constantly shifted in her seat, obviously in pain. And yet every morning the old woman consulted the task sheet, reported to her work assignment, and labored all day, often without a rest. She was tough, his mother. Such a tough, dedicated idealist that part of him couldn't help but wish that he would lose tonight, and she would triumph.

The visiting speaker's voice faded into the background as Eyal's eyes floated over the audience. He knew everything she was going to say anyway. In the front row a young redheaded mother kissed the pudgy cheeks of the redheaded boy wriggling on her lap. The image brought home how absurd it was for even the smallest part of him to wish that his mother would come out on top tonight. His mother had taught him nothing if not that the community should come before the individual—before his mother. When he was that redheaded boy's age, it was normal for kibbutzniks to sneer at the bourgeois idea of the nuclear family and be all gung ho about the communal upbringing of children, saying yes, yes, of course, children should be brought up separately from their parents in a large children's house—until a woman had her own child. Then the new mother would sneak into the children's house and leave chocolates on her
bubeleh
's bed or make up reasons why she had to steal him away for an afternoon. Every mother, that is, but Ziva. She took the tenet that each child belonged to the whole community and the whole community was responsible for each child as seriously as she took everything about Socialist Zionism; if anything, when she was on duty in the children's house, she went out of her way to make sure Eyal was the last to get a lemon popsicle or a turn at the toilet. She preferred to ignore him rather than risk anyone thinking she played favorites. If he awoke in the middle of the night screaming from a nightmare, Ziva would sit back, waiting for the other woman on night duty to attend to him. Eyal shook his head. It was pathetic how long a child could keep resenting his mother, keep yearning for her approval, keep hoping their relationship would change. He was a fat, balding, forty-six-year-old man, for God's sake.