Israel – for such a small country it sure packs some diversity. My time there was pretty weird. A couple of years ago, I was walking into a theatre in Cape Town when a girl came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Rahla? I remember sitting in your flat in Israel, having my first joint. I stared at a poster of Marilyn Monroe and thought, oh my God, I’m really stoned.’
I wondered about this information. Did I really have a flat in Israel? Did I have visitors, presumably friends? What happened to the Marilyn Monroe poster? I looked for the girl after the show, but she was gone. She’d appeared to be a straightforward, lovely girl with no reason to lie. I thought, had I been established enough as a human being to be a bad influence back then? Did I have a life in Israel? Not one photograph exists of my time there, and I’d always assumed this was because I’d had no friends to take any.
I departed for Israel on a high. It had been a wonderful summer. I’d been laughing and dancing and flirting and partying my curly head off. Without my virginity, I considered myself a sophisticated woman. Best of all, school was behind me. Forever.
I wore a denim Levi jacket that Jonty had brought back from America (those were the days of trade sanctions against South Africa, so anything remotely ‘cool’ came from abroad). Brand-new skin-tight denims followed my every perfect skinny curve, and the Reebok sneakers Daddy had bought me gave additional spring to my step. Waving goodbye were my family, my friend Brian and a boyfriend who looked rather like a Labrador. I embarked on my first international flight, singing along with the Pretenders, ‘I’m walking on sunshine …’ The world seemed a simple place. I was wild with excitement and joy.
In the beginning it was fun living in Israel. Cold, but fun. Boys liked me, and one night I had so much to drink that I got alcohol poisoning, which was considered a cool thing to happen. I mopped floors and wiped dirty tables after dinner. The kibbutzniks used to ask the white South Africans how many ‘slaves’ we had. All South Africans were automatically assumed to be racist, bad people, this being at the height of apartheid.
I found the kibbutzniks a bit hard and ruthless. The men had a system of rating new volunteers. They picked out whom they considered to be the three best-looking girls, and those girls had it easy. What none of the dumb volunteers took into account was the fact that there were new volunteers coming in from all over the world on a constant basis, and the truth was that they were all better looking when they arrived than they were after a couple of weeks of waking up at the crack of dawn, eating too much bread and feeling homesick.
The kibbutz was situated right at the sea. On bitterly cold evenings we would run across the beach to the ancient ruins of Caesarea. Without knowing much about the Bible, I could stand among the ruins under a full moon and get carried away by the melodrama of the ancient tales, believing in the misogynistic, violent stories I’d laughed off all my life.
One night I was having coffee with a friend when the owner of the restaurant approached us for a chat. He bought us a couple of drinks. He was handsome, stylish and witty, but what appealed to my overinflated vanity most was his flattery. My friend was quick to notice that he was wearing expensive shoes. This, she explained, was a good sign.
At dawn I found myself walking back to the kibbutz on sunshine. The following evening, after wiping the dirty dinner tables, we went back, this time with more friends, who were sick of the fresh, wholesome kibbutz food. We all enjoyed a free meal and admired the natty shoes.
It became a habit to hang out at this restaurant with this man, Moshe, who was willing to pay for everything. Because of the luxuries I could so effortlessly procure from my older ‘boyfriend’, I became really popular among the volunteers on the kibbutz. Moshe proudly introduced me to his ‘brothers and nephews’, none of whom was actually related to him, as Moshe explained. They worked for him and were utterly loyal to him, and if ever I needed anything, anything at all, his ‘brothers and nephews’ would see to it for me.
Moshe decided that kibbutz food wasn’t good enough for me, so every day he’d send his ‘relatives’ round to the front gate to deliver plates of food from the restaurant. One day they’d drive up in an old station wagon, the following day in a shiny new Mercedes-Benz. I considered none of this irregular, but it was around this time that I became distinctly unpopular with the kibbutz authorities.
Although Moshe owned most of the nightclubs in the area, he never seemed to do any work. He read the paper to check how his ‘shares’ were doing, held meetings with his ‘relatives’ and played an awful lot of tennis. We’d go clubbing in a nearby town and Moshe would pay for my milkshakes in Swiss francs. Still, none of this struck me as unusual.
One day, a policeman came to the kibbutz asking for me. When I told Moshe about the visit he was furious, saying that the policeman had spotted me walking about in Caesarea and that he claimed to be in love with me. This was unacceptable behaviour, and one of the ‘nephews’ would have to sort him out. The following day my friend and I bumped into the policeman, who looked at us sheepishly. He had a black eye and bore other signs of a beating.
Belatedly, I started to recall the gangster movies I’d watched, but as soon as I put the pieces together, I shrugged them off as preposterous. This was the stuff of American cinema, and I’d been raised on a diet of European art films. Then the head of the kibbutz called me into his office to explain that the men I was hanging out with were scumbags. They were the local mafia and not suitable companions for a nice Jewish girl from South Africa.
In South Africa I’d rebelled against conformity, the insanity of apartheid and the horror of school. But I had never really had much need to rebel against my family, so I remained a protected child. Out there in the land of milk and honey, rebellion left me pretty much alone and adrift. I became miserable and put on weight. It wasn’t long before loose dresses replaced my stretch denims.
The kibbutz could tolerate all manner of things, but it seemed to me that a girl getting fat was going against some ideological responsibility. I decided the best thing was to leave and go to Jerusalem, where nobody knew me.
In Jerusalem, I worked as a char cleaning apartments, a job for which I had no aptitude. One day my boss explained to me that my practice of sweeping dust under the sofa along with a pile of dirty clothes didn’t really work for him. But he added that he and his children loved having me around and that he would like me to stay on for a nominal fee, with meals provided. I did.
He introduced me to his friend Gingi. Gingi came not a minute too soon. He was completely besotted with me and had no problem with an extra kilogram here or there. Gingi was in the unglamorous business of vegetable importing. All in all, he was not a terribly glamorous man.
In all the months I’d been in Israel, I’d managed, at every available opportunity, to maintain something of a sense of luxury by going to the sumptuous King David Hotel, where I’d pretend to be a guest. I’d swan around using the pool and the gym and pilfering everything from toilet paper to tea bags.
One day Gingi bought me a new dress and we made a fancy dinner for the manager of the King David Hotel, because Gingi desperately wanted to win the contract to supply the hotel with fresh produce. It was a great occasion. I painted my nails and got sparkly, animated, slightly tipsy and totally turvey. The more tippled I got, the more confident I became until, over dessert, in a drunken stupor, I blurted out to the guest of honour, ‘I hope you get a good deal out of Gingi, because I must owe the King David Hotel a fucking fortune.’ I told everyone at the table all of my tricks, and in my drunken daze I mistook their silence for amusement.
That night Gingi drove his car out of the trendy centre of Jerusalem in silence. The white lines in the middle of the road made me think of an airport runway warning of an ominous banishment. A couple of times I made feeble attempts at conversation.
Rahla: Wasn’t Allon’s wife wearing an odd dress?
Gingi: Silence.
Rahla: Do you think they have a good marriage, Allon and his wife?
Gingi: Silence.
Rahla: I thought the manager of the hotel seemed to have a great sense of humour, didn’t he?
Gingi: Silence.
Rahla: The dessert was wicked.
Gingi: Silence.
We stared out at the white lines ahead. As the countryside became more remote and desolate, an olive tree or two appeared in a feeble attempt to break the miserable tedium. After a silence as long as Rapunzel’s hair, the car finally idled impatiently at my front door.
Rahla: All in all, I think the evening was a success.
Gingi: Goodnight, Rahla. Go inside and sleep it off.
Watching the car speed off into the moonless night, its headlights illuminating the road markings, I recalled something I’d once read: ‘There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead armadillos.’ What was I? The yellow line, the dead armadillo or the middle of the road? Who would know? The quote was out of context, and so was I.
That night, when Gingi dropped me home, he dropped me. As devastated as I was to lose him, a surprise the following day perked me up. Returning home from my work at the laundromat, I found on my bed a huge basket wrapped in cellophane with a blue bow. Inside, compliments of the King David Hotel, were towels, a bathrobe, stationery, vouchers for the gym and pool, and cosmetics. Evidently, the manager did have a sense of humour. It was a fabulous and generous gesture, but I missed Gingi already and felt lonely.
After this incident, I felt too embarrassed to go back to the hotel. In fact, I was too embarrassed to go anywhere. The streets were harsh and the people abrupt. I ate a lot of falafels and chocolates. At the time I lived on the outskirts of Jerusalem with a woman who was an alcoholic. In order to pay the rent, I’d look after her children, a boy and a brave little girl who was paralysed from the waist down. For a while I taught drama at the little girl’s school. I even managed to muster up something of a school concert. But before long I became too nervous to go to the school regularly.
I started to long for the African sun, for African music and the vibrant contrasting colours that were home, for the warmth of the people, for the summer streets I’d jogged along with my sisters.
Israel was not an adventure at all; it immobilised me. The chaos and noise silenced and frightened me. My lack of coping skills terrified me. People around me were preoccupied with the harrowing task of survival in a tough country. They didn’t have time for the fears of a small, overstuffed Jewish girl from the tip of Africa.
In a super-sized tracksuit, humming a very different, disappointed song, I boarded an aeroplane for home.