When the war was over, the old house was bleak: the only people living there were thirteen-year-old Dovid and his mother, who with her newborn son squeezed tight in her arms had succeeded by some miracle in escaping during the confusion of the Sobibór uprising and subsequent mass escape. She was no longer a picture-perfect beauty, for how could anyone be picturesque when her own family and her dear Izajasz and Izajasz’s mother and all his family except for one miserable brother had been killed, when her dreams had been killed, when her future languished in Dovid’s broken stare? Agnieszka closed her mouth up tight. Sobibór, where Dovid had been born and which they had both almost incomprehensibly escaped through a series of coincidences, ceased to exist.
But the promised land existed. Degania, Israel’s first kibbutz, which the locals called the kvutza, bordered a 166-square-kilometre freshwater lake, which Dovid referenced in the same longing way as Zachariasz by the name Kinneret. Kinneret as in kinor, a violin: the dulcet lapping of the water reminded everyone who stood on its shores of that noble stringed instrument.
“Close your eyes, and I’ll tell you,” Dovid said to Sheila and kissed her closed eyelids. Sheila’s full stomach gurgled melodiously as her carefully chewed food worked through her intestines, which were used to emptiness but now eagerly delighted in their new work, and squeezed the food rhythmically forward, compressing it into an ever tighter mass free of liquid, into the poop that was soon to come. But first this tale, this bedtime story, then evacuation and copulation, their evening routine, then kissing and more kissing, until sweet sleep came and rocked them toward the next day, once more a little closer to paradise.
Kibbutz Methuselah: coming to her senses & breaking up (one of the stories ends)
“Malka. Is. Not. Going. To. The. Babies’. House . . . Tonight!”
Thus shouts Sheila, red in the face and now Shlomith, but not yet Shkhina. Shlomith as in shalom! as in peace, as in give peace a chance, as in what opponents to the Vietnam War sang in the summer of 1969 and what she still sang to a tremulous tune, to calm herself, four years later. Fundamentally it’s very simple. She had just wanted to be a new person. She had wanted to be a “new Jew”, the kind the kibbutzes grew in almost laboratory conditions, concealed as verdant vineyards, blooming Papaver somniferum poppy fields, bitter lemon groves, and sweet angiosperm dicotyledon Jaffa orange oases. Shlomith (now we must get used to this name again) had wanted peace of mind by the double handful, in ten-gallon servings. But there she now stood, in Kibbutz Methuselah, on the porch of a white stucco house, shouting at her legal spouse as if he were her worst enemy:
“Malka. Is. Staying. With. Me. Tonight!”
Of course that isn’t possible. Dovid’s face goes dark with irritation as he stares at his wife, who tries furiously to appeal to him with the strength of her anger. Nearby stands Malka and the nurse to the kibbutz’s five other two-year-olds, the metapelet, as these women are called, in this case a fat, repugnant child-hater named Zmira, whom Dovid blindly reveres. Zmira says aloud what Dovid has also come increasingly to believe within himself: “I’m sorry to say that Malka’s emotional difficulties are being caused by you, Shlomith.” Unfortunately Malka isn’t adjusting because her mother is coaxing her into missing her, because during her daily visits her mother is cunningly creating an attachment that plants the seeds of sadness. That’s why the girl screams and cries and pulls Zmira’s hair and kicks Zmira in the stomach. That’s why each evening’s goodbye turns into a drama where, depending on the point of view, the wicked witch is either played by Shlomith or Zmira.
But Dovid isn’t interested in different perspectives. Dovid believes one hundred percent in the kibbutz. When the kibbutz says through Zmira’s mouth that it is a parent’s duty to have fun with his child, Dovid believes it and has fun. When the kibbutz says through Zmira’s mouth that parents should give their children a little (but not too much) emotional fulfilment, Dovid does. A little. He tickles three-year-old Moti’s tummy, he rocks one-year-younger Malka in his arms, but he does it differently than Shlomith, who, as she tickles and rocks her children also plants something in them that she shouldn’t plant. How does she do it? And above all: why does she do it?
They’ve been happy for four years. Dovid believes so. Four years of joy, but then, after Malka was born, everything suddenly begins to crumble in their hands. Shlomith develops strange symptoms. No, Shlomith is scheming, Dovid corrects himself. In his mind, Dovid assembles piece by piece the ragged image that is beginning to emerge of his wife, his dearest beloved, whom he brought here, away from the evil world, whom he healed and impregnated twice. Now the picture is recognizable again: in it is Shlomith, thankless and resentful Shlomith, mentally disturbed Shlomith. Shlomith has picked up the heaviest weapons of all, their two children, as pawns in her game. Why on earth is she doing this? Dovid clenches his left hand in a fist, crushing this question, smashing it ever smaller as he squeezes his fingers, and then it’s gone, and only the answer remains. Because Shlomith is evil. Evil, evil, evil.
With Moti everything went perfectly. Shlomith relinquished her firstborn to the infants’ house at four days of age, as was appropriate—at that point she was “OK” with it. She visited the house to nurse their son for six months and not a day more. Only the twenty-four weeks that were allowed. Shlomith even thought it was fun to call herself “the mother organism”—a term Dovid thought up—as she left with her breasts dripping milk to walk the three hundred meters
