A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [52]
Martin:
While we’re on the subject, I haven’t seen soup bits on
the table in three weeks.
Edna:
They’re going to the Children’s Houses. The kids love
them.
Naftali:
We could plan a midnight raid on Osem headquarters.
Anyone know where they’re located?
Martin:
The army won’t release that information. Torture has
been attempted, without results.
Naftali:
We’ll have to infiltrate.
Isaac:
Much as I’m enjoying the jocularity of our comrades,
I suggest we address Edna’s concern. Let’s vote on
whether to restrict meat from improvised sources to
adults. It’s not like we’re desperate—our food situation
has improved over the past few years.
Martin:
That’s true. We’ve moved from shoe leather to sardines.
Isaac:
Who’s in favour of restricting meat for the children to
certified sources?
Vote:
For: 11 Abstentions: 1
Dori
Today I’m the luckiest girl on Eldar. Daddy did something he’s not really supposed to do. We were talking about the sandwiches I didn’t get in Meron and Daddy took me to the Kitchen and poured a huge amount of soup bits into a pot and he gave me the pot. The whole pot! I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I wander off in the direction of the barns. I don’t want to meet anyone. We almost never get soup bits and when we do we’re only allowed one spoon each.
And now I have a whole pot to myself. A whole pot!
I wander to the barns eating my soup bits. I don’t meet anyone. I walk and eat. This is a happy day. Better even than a birthday.
Our First Year
9 September 1949. The First Rain has arrived. Clouds piled up like a dark flotilla and cruised over the Atzmon mountain range, and then very unexpectedly a few drops began to fall on the grape leaves and drop from the fruit like tears.
In the course of the day there were sudden drenching outbursts and the wind blasted away. There was mud and the smell of wetness.
Tomorrow we expect to put 30 people in the field to finish off the grape harvest. Meanwhile the figs grow larger and juicier.
The main topic of discussion these days is “elections.” The administrative and committee positions in the kibbutz are reshuffled at this time of the year, and the process is complicated and yields heated controversy. Our big problem is to find a general manager and a secretary. Nobody wants the honours.
Dori
There was a movie for everyone today. It was about a boy and his bull. I didn’t understand most of it but at the end the bull got shot with arrows and the boy couldn’t get there on time. It was very sad. The arrows hit the bull and stayed in his skin and he was bleeding but the man kept shooting more and more arrows in him. The bull tried to escape but he couldn’t. I began crying so hard that someone had to take me out of the Dining Hall.
In some places shooting arrows into bulls is a sport and everyone cheers. Some people care about bulls and some people don’t.53
Our First Year
11 September. This seems to be the season of gremlin wounds, those tiny, unserious lesions and abrasions that pop out on the body in the course of the day’s work: a blood blister here, a scraped area here, a scratch, an opening, a puncture there.
A collection of these little beauty spots can upset one’s disposition quite seriously.
You can’t move this finger, must remember not to bend that elbow in such an angle, the foot can’t be exposed in this position, don’t sit on that particular spot on the left buttock, can’t allow the left lower palm to touch anything, etc.
They appear mysteriously, these clotted, discoloured, swollen, scaly, or rashlike decorations; they metamorphose continually, persisting against all kind of balms and smears and bandages.
It may be the climate, the season, the dust, or a kind of juvenile delinquency in the department of providential retribution.
Dori
My brother David is reading about a trickster called Till Eulenspiegel. He plays all sorts of tricks on people. The tricks are funny. In one story he goes to sleep in a beehive and when two thieves steal the beehive he pulls their hair and they