Читать книгу Safekeeping - Jessamyn Hope - Страница 14

“We 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.

He noticed his mother kept looking toward the back of the dining hall. He followed her eyes and spotted the new volunteer, the troubled kid from New York, lolling in the side entrance. His mother shifted her weight yet again and brushed the front of her shirt. He knew it wasn’t only her distended belly and aching back behind her restlessness. She was eager to take the microphone. The truth was his mother could win tonight regardless of what he wished or what was good in the long run for everybody. She had always been the kibbutz’s best orator. She had been rallying people for sixty years. When she was only seventeen years old, she had inspired other adolescents, including his father, Dov, to abandon their families and the parlor rooms and universities of Europe for the desert and swamps of the Promised Land. Soon after, she roused men and women to meet Syrian and Lebanese and Transjordanian armies with nineteenth-century rifles stolen from a museum in Haifa. Alone she had ventured into nearby Arab villages to persuade their elders to share the river with the new Jewish settlement. And now, she had told him this morning, she had to be as persuasive as ever, because here at the end of her life was the most important fight of all, the most important because if she failed tonight, she might as well have failed all along.

Eyal heard clapping. The speaker had finished, and he hadn’t registered a word. He rose, shook the visitor’s hand, and approached the microphone again.

“At last, we will hear from Ziva, who will present the arguments for sticking to our socialist principles.” He had saved his mother for the finale. Why? Because whether she deserved it or not, he loved her. He also loved her socialist principles; it wasn’t his fault they didn’t work. Besides, his speech wouldn’t have sounded as good following hers.

His mother stood, smiling as if she had already won. She had ignored him when he asked if her speech was ready because she knew he was well aware that it was beyond ready. She had been perfecting it for two months and had committed it to memory over the last few days, practicing until she could say it with a driving rhythm that soared in all the right places.

Strangely, his mother didn’t move for the microphone. She stood in place, staring at the crowd. Was this an oratory trick, a way to commandeer the audience’s attention before she started? He thought he knew all her techniques. Ziva groped behind her, but her deformed hands couldn’t seem to find what she wanted. The back of her chair? Her eyelids fluttered.

Eyal took a step toward her. “Ima?”

She lurched, the crowd gasped, and Eyal dropped his notes and ran. He grabbed his mother by the upper arms; so frail, all he could feel in his hands were the canvas sleeves and bones. The fat on his own arms shook as he held her up while her legs buckled beneath her. Ziva’s head dropped back, offering her yellow face to the ceiling lights. Had she stood too quickly? Had her heart been pounding too violently while she waited for her turn to speak? Her hazel eyes blinked at the overhead lights.

“Ima, can you hear me?”

She let out a groan.

“Ima?”

She stopped blinking. The consciousness rushed back into her eyes. She closed her mouth. Lifting her head, she tried to jerk out of Eyal’s grip, but he wouldn’t let go, not until she was securely on her feet. Then he hovered while she brushed her sleeves.

Ziva cleared her throat, turned to the audience. The whole dining hall had risen. Eyal knew this wasn’t the standing ovation his mother had imagined for tonight. Her eyes darted as if she were searching the back of her mind.

“Ima,” he whispered. “Do you want me to help you to the microphone?”

She didn’t respond. Wordlessly, she sat back down in the plastic chair.

Eyal didn’t want to believe it. His mother wasn’t going to give her speech. Couldn’t.

He walked back to the microphone and spoke over the crowd that was already gathering its stuff and heading for the doors.

“At the end of September, we will vote on whether to institute different wages. This gives you the whole summer to consider it. No one will be able to say they weren’t given enough time to think about this very carefully. If anyone wants to come by my office and ask questions, please do. And—”

He gestured toward his mother, sitting straighter than ever, but looking terribly small. Reduced. She glared into the emptiness above the crowd. He raised his voice.

“And, please, please, if anyone would like to hear the arguments of the opposing side, I encourage you to go to Ziva. I know she would be happy to speak to you. Please, please do not hesitate to talk to her.”