Deborah sat on the steps of her srif, breathing the jasmine in the evening air. Inside, her roommates chattered, wrote letters to their parents and boyfriends, while Frank Sinatra was “doobie doobie dooing” on the “Voice of Peace.”
Her gaze was fixed on the main hall, some three hundred yards down the hill, which sloped gently to the edge of the Sea of Galilee.
An unfamiliar male voice shattered her reverie.
“You must be Deborah.”
She turned quickly to see a short, wiry young man standing beside her, the glint of Air Force wings on the shoulders of his khaki shirt.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said in heavily accented English. “But I know the kibbutz is voting on your membership tonight. My father said you’d be nervous, so I came to hold your hand. By the way, I’m Avi, Boaz and Zipporah’s son.”
“Election’s not automatic, you know,” Deborah declared to justify her anxiety.
“Of course I know,” Avi conceded. “I’ll only be a candidate when I finish my tour of duty.”
He added with a smile, “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“That depends on how ‘personal.’ ”
“Is Ulla still living here?”
Deborah sighed, thinking to herself, Typical Israeli Casanova, then she answered, “You’re in luck. Ulla’s inside. She doesn’t leave till next week.”
“Thanks,” said Avi, as he mounted the steps. “And stop worrying.”
Half an hour later, Deborah could hear chatter and the scrape of chairs from down the hill—noises of a large meeting breaking up.
Moments later Boaz was hauling his heavy frame up the hill, shining his flashlight in the direction of Deborah’s hut. Though badly out of breath, he still managed to blurt out, “Deborah, it’s official! You’re a chavera.”
As he hugged her tightly, lifting her off the ground, she thought: At last I really belong somewhere!
To celebrate her new equality, the next day Deborah was assigned to wash pots in the kitchen.
And what pots! They seemed more like aluminum barrels. By the time she and her co-workers had finished the first half-dozen, her right arm felt ready for a sling.
About an hour later, Avi appeared.
“See, I told you there’d be no problem,” he said blithely. “Anyway, I missed breakfast. Can I steal a roll and coffee?”
“ ‘Steal’ if it makes you feel good,” Deborah answered. “It’s all common property, anyway.”
By this time, he had already opened the door of a huge refrigerator and pulled out a chunk of cheese. After pouring himself a cup of coffee, he sauntered back to Deborah.
“You don’t have to work so hard anymore,” he joked. “You’re already in.”
Deborah merely scowled and continued scrubbing.
He leaned against a counter, and as he munched on the cheese, said, “I still don’t understand what made a Jewish-American princess want to become a kibbutznik.”
“Did it ever occur to you that there might be a Jewish-American girl who wasn’t a ‘princess’?”
“Well, I’ve never met one. Aren’t you filthy rich and spoiled? What big business is your papa in?”
“He’s a rabbi—the Silczer Rav if you must know.”
“Really?” said Avi with surprise. “And how does he feel about his daughter working in an unkosher kitchen?”
“Why do you keep asking so many questions about me?” she demanded.
“Because you won’t ask any about me.”
“Okay,” said Deborah, playing along. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Well,” Avi began. “I was born on the kibbutz, I went to school on the kibbutz, and when I finish flying around, I’ll go to university, write a thesis, and then come back to the kibbutz.”
“A thesis on what?” Deborah asked, genuinely intrigued.
“Not on the Talmud—it’s more down to earth. In fact, it’s under the earth. I’ll be studying new forms of irrigation.”
“And you’ll really come back to live here?” Deborah asked.
“Unless you lead a movement to reject my application.”
“That’s wonderful,” Deborah said sincerely. “They say lots of the kibbutzniks who go into the Army don’t come back after they’ve seen the glitter of the outside world.”
“Well,” Avi answered, “not all kibbutzim are as nice as Kfar Ha-Sharon.”
“You mean they haven’t got such pretty Swedish volunteers.”
She detected a glint of embarrassment in Avi’s eyes.
“You won’t believe me, Deborah,” he replied. “But they’re a very important aspect of our lives. Men almost never marry women from their own kibbutz. We’re all brought up like brothers and sisters. It seems somehow incestuous.”
“So you exploit the female volunteers as sexual objects.”
He laughed. “It’s funny to hear that feminist bullshit in a place like this. For your information, six volunteers—two of them men—have married kibbutzniks and are living here as chaverim. Maybe this summer when the new volunteers come in, you’ll find a handsome Dutchman.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Deborah answered tartly. “Why does everybody always want to marry me off?”
“Why ‘off’?” Avi asked. “I’d think people would just plain want to marry you. Anyway, why doesn’t a frum girl like you have a husband already?”
Discomfited, Deborah retreated into scouring the huge pots.
“Did I touch a sore spot?” he asked sympathetically.
Deborah looked up, said, “Very,” and went back to her scrubbing.
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Be my guest,” she answered, handing him an extra scouring brush. “Now tell me what a pilot does all day.”
“It’s pretty boring actually,” he said ingenuously. “I pull a few levers, I go up in the air. I push a few more levers, and suddenly my sonic boom is breaking people’s windows.”
“What’s so boring about that?” Deborah asked.
“Well, you don’t exactly get to see much of the world. At Mach Two you can go from one end of Israel to the other in about three minutes.”
“That fast?” said Deborah, genuinely impressed.
“No,” he answered wryly, “Israel’s that small.”
They were suddenly interrupted by an angry voice.
“Deborah—is this what you call work?”
It was the gargantuan Shauli, head cook and absolute monarch of the kitchen.
Deborah blushed.
Avi leaped to her defense. “I shouldn’t have been talking to her.”
“You,” Shauli bellowed. “You aren’t even allowed in here.”
“Yes, sir,” Avi responded with a salute. “May I just be permitted to ask Chavera Deborah a single question?”
“Only if it’s short,” the cook replied.
Avi quickly asked, “Have you any plans for after dinner—I mean after you wash up and everything?”
“No,” Deborah answered, off balance, “not really.”
“Why don’t I get some wheels from the kibbutz car pool? The Aviv in Tiberias is showing Butch Cassidy—which is so great I’ve seen it four times.”
“You mean a movie?” Deborah asked uneasily. How could she tell him that she still felt guilty watching television newscasts and had even avoided the Friday night films at the kibbutz.
But Avi quickly sensed the problem. “Listen, if you’ve got religious scruples, you could keep your eyes closed all the time.”
He laughed. And she laughed.
And, as Avi bounded off, Deborah felt somehow unsettled. Simultaneously happy and curiously apprehensive.
I think I like him.
Deborah was not morally shaken after having seen the film. Indeed, she had found the advertisements that preceded it—especially those for bathing suits—far more risqué.
They had coffee and cake in a restaurant on the Tayellet, a seaside promenade making a heroic effort to resemble the Riviera. When they climbed back into the car, Avi boasted, “I once made it from here to the kibbutz gate in seven minutes and thirteen seconds. Shall we try to break that record tonight?”
Recalling the many curves on the road, Deborah suggested, “Why don’t we try to beat the record in slowness?”
Avi cast her a meaningful look.
“Fine.” His eyes twinkled. “We’ll go as slow as you like.”
Twenty minutes later, he brought the car to a halt in a quiet corner near the orchards of Kfar Ha-Sharon. Below them the Sea of Galilee was a vast, pearl gray reflection of the moon.
He turned toward Deborah and touched her gently on the shoulder.
“Are you nervous?” he whispered.
“Why should I be?” she asked, trying to be nonchalant.
“A rabbi’s daughter must have led a very sheltered life.”
She looked at him for a moment, and then conceded, “You’re right. I feel sort of … uncomfortable with you. Besides, didn’t you yourself say that kibbutzniks are like brothers and sisters?”
“Yes, that’s true,” he said softly. “But I didn’t grow up with you. To me, you’re attractive as a woman.”
Though Avi was unaware of their significance, his words struck her like lightning. In the nearly twenty years of her lifetime she had been variously referred to as a girl, a shayne maidel, and a sweet young thing—but never as a woman. And what was more astonishing, she felt like one.
She welcomed Avi’s arm around her shoulder and tried to enjoy his kiss, but she was worried that he might try to go too far.
Yet it was his questions that became too intimate.
“Why did your parents send you to Israel?”
She hesitated, then replied unconvincingly, “The usual reasons.”
“No, Deborah,” he said firmly. “I’ve lived on this kibbutz long enough to tell a volunteer from an exile. Were you involved with someone?”
She lowered her head.
“And they didn’t like him?”
This time, she nodded in the affirmative.
“Did it work?” Avi asked quietly.
“What?”
“Did the separation cure you?”
“I wasn’t sick,” she answered pointedly.
Avi was silent for a moment and then asked, “And are you still involved with him? I mean, in your heart?”
Her feelings had been pent up for so long that she wanted to shout: He’s the only person in the world who’s loved me for myself.
Yet the voice that answered Avi was barely audible. “I think so … yes.”
His questions followed with a delicate persistence. “Do you write to each other?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have his address.”
“Does he have yours?”
Again, she shook her head.
A look of hope—or was it relief?—crossed Avi’s face.
“Then it’s just a question of time,” he murmured. “Sooner or later, when you’ve mourned enough, you’ll be free.”
She shrugged. “I suppose so.”
He held her by the shoulders, whispering, “And when you are, I hope I’ll be right there.”
Then, trying to raise her mood, he said jauntily, “I’d better get you home. I’m due back at the base by six.”
As the motor revved, he shifted the gears and drove back to the road and into the parking lot.
“How are you going to get there?” she asked, as they walked to her new srif.
“I’ll hitchhike, how else?”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“No,” he joked. “Thumbing a ride here is perfectly safe. It’s only when you get in with an Israeli driver that you risk your life.”
He squeezed her hand, kissed her on the cheek, turned, and headed down the gravel road, finally vanishing into the shadows.
Deborah stood there and watched him, suddenly having seen through his bravado and discovered the sensitivity it tried to camouflage—the constant fear of living a mere sixty-second scramble from mortality.
She only wished with all her heart that she could like him enough to forget Timothy.