The Writers' Circle

CHAPTER THREE

THE ISRAELI

	
	Asaf's reason for wanting to get out of his life and into another one may have appeared different to Tony's, but he, too, was a man with responsibilities that right then he didn't want. Didn't choose. His life on one of Israel's two hundred and fifty or so kibbutzim was not that different from so many other lives of kibbutzniks. Nor was his attitude. His opportunity came by nothing more gracious than luck. And we all need it sometimes. He took it with both eyes.

	
	Kibbutz Ramat Tiqwa (pronounced 'Teag-va) was all Asaf had known, except for three years in the army.  If you took a northern dogleg journey from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, you would have passed Kibbutz Ramat Tiqwa just before you hit the half-way mark. An hour to Tel Aviv in heavy traffic, a bit more to Jerusalem. He felt that he didn't know either of them any better than he knew Paris. Asaf had never been to France. 
	The kibbutz was small compared to many others in Israel, but it was well sighted at the foot of wooded hills and just about rich enough to struggle from one year to the next. He was a member, which meant that he had shares in the wealth and thereby the wellbeing. He didn't care. And when he got lucky he thought he would never care.
	Dreamers, idealists and young socialists think that life on a kibbutz is easy. Asaf didn't. 


	Everything, each movement, they knew. If he sneezed three times, the next day, Schmulik, Nissim, Michal, Dalia, Rachel, had a handkerchief for him.
	Shit. They know what I think before I do.
	Am I me or a product of them? I don't know.
	How could he know? No response that was ever his. Do it, when told. Everything was so close. Houses, walls, people. When he pissed they heard, when he fu... made love, they knew. They didn't care. It wasn't care. Just knew. Like some biologist watching a germ. Felt nothing, just watched and knew.
	He knew, too. Knew them. 
	All in the same fucking zoo.
	Everyone watched. Everyone knew. No-one nodded. They all knew that they all knew; knew it so well that they played without caring. 
	Same fucking stage, same fucking play, same fucking day. Every day.
	Atishoo - fuck you - kibbutz.


	Yael had always come to him before his eyes found her beside him. Yael came to him first. In his mind. She always did, always had. Now, so many times waking without her. Never got used to it.  Before his ears and his eyes brought the world to him, Yael came. She was supposed to be there. She was his wife. It's six already, what are you doing? Are you sick? Asaf, yalla, (Move).
	His ears were next. They woke. A buzz. He flapped at it, but it saw his huge hand almost before he thought of using it, and had no trouble missing the swipe. Didn't think about it. Didn't bother him.
	His eyes. An open, a flutter, an open. Open. Light and sun. Just like last year, and every summer. Like every nine months. Sun. It was summer. He was wet. Sweat ? Not Israel. In Israel he did not wake up wet. Air conditioning. Yael was not there - but in Israel she was not always there. Was supposed to be.
	He woke up hard. Always hard, never for long. You going to work or you going to fuck? 
	No-one to fuck. 
	Yalla,(Quickly).
	The buzz came back to his ear. This time he flapped and looked. Nothing.
	No-one.
	His hand went to his hardness. He rubbed it. Maybe for ten seconds, maybe twenty, but then he lost the charge. It shrunk. In his hand. His hand. Where was hers?
	Light and sun, and no telephone. No ring and ring and ring and ring. You waiting for the Messiah to get it? Asaf, kum. (Get up). 
	No ring, no reason. Lie there. No-one to know.
	The mosquito net was new to him. In Israel he used no net. An electric, smelly thing kept them away. Here, no electricity. No telephone. No work. The Raffit's got no power. They're going to milk in an hour. Cows won't milk without a shower. 
	He parted the net and his feet found his sandals without looking. His eyes found all of the room. The walls, the floor, then the ceiling. A new habit. Nothing suspicious. No animal life to be seen. 
	The sun. Nothing new. What to do now. Swim? Walk? Eat? Eat - you haven't done an hour's work yet, and you want to eat already? 
	Eight was the time to eat. It was six. Or thereabouts. Two hours to breakfast. Maybe he should kill something. Last night's food was gone. He hadn't saved any food for breakfast. Never needed to before. Asaf, the Raffit's got no gate. Cows can't shower without the gate. Shev po, (Sit here), I want to talk to you. The Raffit gate isn't working.
	Six-thirty.
	He checked with his watch. The watch said six forty. Okay. What's the hurry already?
	He sat on the edge of the bed with the net draping over his shoulders. He looked down. His leather sandals, brought from the kibbutz, were all he wore. His legs were short, strong and skinless. No flesh, just black hairs. His penis had waned and shrunk into the cosy comfort of the coarse, curly hairs. His stomach was flat and hairy. His chest was good. Muscles and hair. Hairs down his back, too. Yael liked that. Like primeval man. Coarse, strong and taking her when he wanted - at first. First doesn't last long.
	He ran his thick hand over his three day stubble. With stretched stumpy thumb and matching index finger ran his hand over his eyes and across his balding head. His thumb and his forefinger found the bits of hair that hung desperately on around his ears. 
	The buzz came at his left ear. He turned but didn't see it. Didn't care. As he stood up he carefully placed the net back to stop any intruders getting into his haven, his bed, his peace. Peace. Peace for fuck's sake.


	The day before he left, Hamas had hit a bus in Jerusalem. Some Arab freak blew himself up on a bus filled with office workers and five soldiers. A week earlier it had been Netanya - outside the cinema while people were queuing to see a Stallone movie about how easy it is to kill people and win - if you're American. Two months ago a friend of his, from his kibbutz, had been killed by a shell fired from inside Lebanon. Hit Kiryat Shimona. The friend was in a chemist's shop. He was the only one to die. The chemist's assistant lost an arm.   
	Peace for fuck's sake. He was tired of peace. Talk, talk, talk, talk. Arafat, Yanks,  Golan Heights, Syrians, Hizballah, Hamas, Palestine. Gaza and bombs. Rabin. Shalom Khaver. Goodbye Friend, Hello Friend, Peace Friend. Bang.
	

	He was usually in the dining room for eight o'clock, depending on what urgent electrical work needed doing. Every day - Sunday to Friday - eight o'clock. Every day since he had returned from the army. Fifteen years ago. Kibbutz until he was eighteen, then the army - three years - and then the kibbutz. Four weeks a year in the army, forty-eight weeks in the kibbutz. One year fifteen times. Always told what to do -  from crib to then. Not counting the two trips to Turkey. Two weeks each time.
	Six o'clock was when he woke. Every day except Shabbat, Saturday. Six o'clock and hungry. 
	'Eat now? You want to eat already? No work and you want to eat already. Go now, Izhar will have coffee waiting. Yella. (Quickly).'
	Asaf would arrive at the brick and corrugated roofed shed at 6.30. Izhar, child survivor, one of the 7,600 that made it out of Auschwitz, would have arrived ten minutes earlier and made the thick, black Turkish coffee that they both liked. At seven, or sometime after, Sara, bossy wife of the all-powerful kibbutz secretary, would arrive to spend the day taking telephone calls about electrical problems and relaying the messages via a beeper to Asaf. The rest of the time she spent making personal phone calls to her hoard of friends around Israel - spreading and creating threatening gossip. 
	Izhar, did little work, he was too old but he liked to show up and potter around. It made him feel like he was still contributing. A foreign volunteer would sometimes be available to help Asaf on jobs requiring more than one person.
	Every working day, Asaf drove the tractor and ramshackle wooden trailer around the kibbutz visiting houses, the Raffit (cowsheds), the chicken coups, the factory which made motor distributors to be shipped around Europe and numerous telegraph poles to repair telephone cables damaged by weather or carelessness. 
	He knew every centimetre of the kibbutz and the kibbutz knew every millimetre of him.


	Coffee. On the top shelf in the other room. He pulled his shorts on - denim, 615's cut from his old jeans, the one's Yael liked - and went into the other room. He wanted coffee and he wanted a piss. 
	'Which first? Coffee.' 
	He pulled the bamboo chair to the wall that held the shelves. He needed the chair to reach the coffee. The place wasn't made for tiny Israelis. Average Israeli could have reached. Yael could have reached it. He couldn't.
	The tin of thick black coffee - which he called, 'Turkish' - wasn't really Turkish but left enough dense sediment and perfumed fumes to be close enough - was the last one. After that, Nescafe, which was there when he arrived.


	He shook the five Thermos flasks for the lightest one. Enough water in it to fill the enamel mug. A pregnant spoonful of coffee, filled to the brim with almost-hot water. Wait for it to cool down. Now he could have a piss.
	He went to the mesh door. The door took him onto the balcony, ten feet above the forest floor. Trees to the left and the right and behind. In front, the beach, the sea. And, eventually, if he sailed around the island, Australia. 
	He studied the light first. It was harsh. Looked out to the sea. The sun was high enough now to reflect the sky's blueness in it. Nothing on the sea. There never was. He turned left and a few paces later found the plastic bucket with a wooden made-to-measure lid. When he lifted the lid, he saw that the bucket was almost full. Enough room, though, he figured. While he peed, he looked up, as men all over the world seem to do. What he saw were trees. He studied the huge, broad leaves of one particular tree, smaller than most of the others but one he had been watching for some time. Nestled close to the trunk was a large bunch of upward pointing green fruit. He knew them. He grew them in his garden on the kibbutz. He was looking to see if they were ready yet. Bananas. 
	'Another week.'
	He looked at his watch again. Six-forty. 'Shit.' He shook the watch. Nothing. Six-forty. Dead battery.
	While he was watching the dead watch he felt something wet on his toes. He was wrong about the capacity of the bucket. 'Oh, shit.' Piss.
	Hands and feet washed. Time to eat. Shnitzel, today, Asaf. Kill something. 'Fish.' 
	He climbed down the almost-vertical bamboo ladder to the forest floor. The clearing in front of his hut was littered with bits of his handiwork - some finished, some started, some abandoned. His fishing net was always easy to find. It was big, made of a thick, bamboo, pole handle of about two metres long, a hoop of about  half metre wide which he had made by weaving , wicker-style, thin strands of tree creepers around a flexible piece of some unidentifiable wood. The net was two of his linen shirts, doubled and sewn together.
	He took the net and headed towards the sea. After one hundred and fifty metres, the feeling below his sandals changed from foliage to sand. For thirty five metres, the white sand sloped away to the sea. Turning right, south, he walked at an angle towards the sea. After twenty minutes he came to a small lagoon. Here, there was a dip in the beach, forming a salt lake which the ebb tide left twice a day. At its deepest point, somewhere near the middle, the water reached his thighs. At its shallowest, it barely covered his ankles. Careful, you know what the tide is like round here. Don't want you to drown already.
	There were fish. Always. Every time. Sometimes a few crabs and, occasionally, a lobster. Lobster's not Kosher.
	Pushing the net into the water in front of him he cautiously paddled in. A crab pinched his foot once. Before he reached the middle he saw three fish, good size, swimming slowly away from him. He let them get into deeper water before he slid the net underneath them. When he was certain, he scooped the net up. The pole bent, the hoop dipped towards the water, the thrashing inside increased as the linen shirts trickled away the water.
	He slid his hands down the pole to get better leverage on the increased weight and walked backwards out of the water. Three fish. 
	'Enough for breakfast.'
	There was a driftwood log, big enough to sit on, close to the lagoon. It was also his killing log. The fish were thrashed against it and stopped thrashing. He would eat them raw. He wasn't used to a cooked breakfast. Maybe a few fried eggs.
	As he walked back along the sand there was a noise. It was one he had not heard for a long time. He stretched his neck, raising his head into the air. At first, he did not want to trust his ears, but then his eyes came to his aid.
	Behind him, back along the beach and just visible over the trees, he saw the aircraft. Small, probably private, jet. Within seconds, he lost sight of the plane, and ran back towards the sea to increase his angle. 
	The aircraft was heading towards the centre of the island, towards the mountain. He had climbed it once. Nothing of interest.
 	The engine cut, started, cut. The plane went behind the mountain. He stopped breathing. He heard it. Then the smoke.