Murder on a Kibbutz, page 1
Dedication
To Amos
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
Also by Batya Gur
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
In the open field next to the kibbutz entrance they had stacked the big bales of hay into a broad, high golden wall. The spaces between the bales were filled with massed bunches of flowers. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look as if the flowers were growing there of their own accord. Strips of blue, cloudless sky peeped through other apertures in the wall.
Aaron smiled as he imagined the battle that Srulke must have put up over every single flower. Srulke’s lips tightening in his lined, sunburnt face, hiding his pride and exposing his objection to waste, his back bent and his expression resentful at the demand for this floral tribute. For a moment Aaron wondered whom they had sent to extract the tribute from him this time. In the past they had always sent Estie, but after seeing her, hard and shriveled, in the dining hall today and remembering with a pang the delicate silhouette, the winsome grace that had once been capable of influencing Srulke, he knew that by now they were sending someone else. Every few years they would change the delegate, but it was always someone of whom Srulke would say, “She’s a sweet, refined girl, not like your sabras,” and then he would cut the flowers for her.
Aaron saw the splendor of the big roses, distinguished the yellow and red of the gerberas, the purple of the snapdragons, the modest white of the daisies, but as always a dusty earth brown dominated the colors of the flowers, and it seemed that the golden shade of the hay only made it more pronounced. Briefly Aaron felt the rare delight of encountering himself, as he suddenly noticed in the flowers and their colors the changing seasons of the year. There was a moment when he saw things as they were, and it seemed to him that his better part, the part that had forgotten for a moment to be cautious and calculating, anxious about every word he said, the part that could even sometimes be poetic, had come alive.
Moish was already standing at the microphone on the platform that had been erected in front of the wall of hay and was looking at the gathering crowd. Assembled in a distant corner of the field were the groups bearing the first fruits. The kibbutz choir, four men and three women in blue and white, stood, song sheets in hand, at another microphone. The whole kibbutz was there. They had begun streaming to the site just before the ceremony was due to begin, after the hour set aside for coffee and cakes baked specially for the holiday. Already at lunch he had heard Matilda complaining in her aggrieved tone that there wasn’t a single package of margarine left in the big dining-hall refrigerator, and later in the afternoon the smell of cheesecake rose from all the “rooms,” as the kibbutz members’ small houses were still called. Even Matilda had to admit—he had just overheard her as he walked past her room—she was pleased that the young scatterbrains had used her recipe book to bake the holiday cakes.
Gradually the area next to the water tower filled up with kibbutz members and their children, as well as the many guests who could be recognized by their elegant clothes, so unsuitable for sitting on the dry ground that raised brown dust with every step. The dust clung to everything. For hours afterward Aaron would still feel it in his nostrils, and he remembered how when he returned from roaming the fields in summer the smell of the dust would go on clinging to his body, even after he had taken a shower. He looked at the tractors parked at the side of the field. Children were clambering over the big chains of the D6, the yellow Caterpillar, which had been decorated with red and pink geraniums, and fathers lifted toddlers in the air to let them touch the top of the cotton picker. Like a big slumbering animal, the cotton picker stood at the head of the line of tractors, crowned with garlands of yellow, pink, and purple zinnias looking like the flowers the kindergarten children diligently draw, gravely coloring in one petal after the other. Tractors of the old generation were there as well, Aaron saw—two big, green John Deeres whose wheels had been polished and decorated with enormous yellow roses, the ones Srulke particularly cherished.
The crowd didn’t quiet down even when Moish intoned into the mike, “One, two, three, testing.” It was only when the little choir began to sing, softly at first and then louder, “Baskets on Our Shoulders, Garlands on Our Heads” that people began hushing their children, and the old women standing in the first row said “Shhhhh,” not in rebuke but with satisfaction.
Aaron stood on one side and looked at their wrinkled faces, their thin, wispy hair, the floral dresses that seemed cut so as deliberately to blur the lines of their figures, and at the old men who had begun by standing next to them and afterward settled down at their feet. He looked at Zeev HaCohen, whose tall body seemed to have shrunk with the years but who still, despite his striking thinness, looked impressive with his mane of white hair. Srulke’s voice echoed in his ears, as it always did when he saw HaCohen: “That politician,” Srulke had called him angrily, vigorously soaping an empty coffee cup. This was an image from many years ago, Srulke in a gray undershirt standing at the sink, Miriam sitting at the table, which was covered by an oilcloth, stiff at the corners and sticky to the touch and decorated with brown flowers on a beige background. “You shouldn’t talk about him like that,” he remembered her saying, her voice alarmed and pleading, and their sudden silence when they noticed Aaron standing in the doorway.
Zeev HaCohen was now sitting at the feet of Matilda, the kitchen-complex manager who also ran the kibbutz minimarket; a small boy sat on the floor next to him playing with the buckle of his brown biblical sandal. One of his grandchildren, the son of one of his children by who knows which of his wives, thought Aaron, vaguely remembering what he had heard from Moish about the complex domestic life of the acknowledged leading intellectual and philosopher of this kibbutz as well as others of its kind. “How old is he now?” Aaron had asked Moish when they arrived together at the scene of the celebration. “I don’t know exactly,” Moish had said absentmindedly, lifting his child off his shoulders and heading for the platform. “Maybe seventy-five. No, definitely more than seventy-five.”
The kibbutz itself was now fifty years old. A half century had passed since the oldest members had settled on this land. It was not the oldest kibbutz in Israel, but it was certainly well established. The atmosphere today was festive, but at the same time it was clear that nobody was taking the celebration too seriously. Only the children looked excited, but they were drawn to the lineup of agricultural machinery, and none of them paid any attention to the platform and the little choir standing on it. And apart from the members of the choir, hardly anyone was wearing blue and white. Not even the kindergarten children, Aaron noticed with a trace of disappointment that then amused him, and there was no sign anywhere of the national flag. He would have to ask Moish about that too. And at the same moment he thought of the nostalgia that would overcome him on national holidays, and of the excitement with which he would look forward to Shevuoth, the Festival of Weeks, in particular, the feeling of participation in great and important events that had really and truly pervaded him then.
He could not entirely suppress the feeling that once you took away the blue and white and the flags on the Caterpillar, the whole ceremony seemed archaic and foreign, as if it were taking place on a collective farm in Soviet Russia. And yet, he thought, chewing a straw reflectively, he felt that time had stood still, as if he were watching documentary footage from a movie about early Zionist history. But now it was the farce of an agricultural ceremony in a place where agriculture was almost bankrupt—a kibbutz, a Zionist agricultural commune, that derived its income from an industrial plant that, of all things, manufactured cosmetics, having given its name to an international patent for a face cream that abolished wrinkles and rejuvenated skin cells and was advertised in all the newspapers with two photographs of the same woman captioned “Before” and “After.” No one else seemed to be showing any recognition of the absurdity of celebrating an agricultural rite where only the manufacture and sale of face cream made it possible to go on working the land. It could, he thought, be why Srulke hadn’t appeared. When Aaron had looked for him in vain in the dining hall in order to greet him, Moish had assured him that he would show up for the ceremony, “if only,” he said, grinning, “to inspect what they’ve done with his flowers.”
As he looked around, ostensibly keeping an eye out for Srulke but actually trying to catch a glimpse of Osnat, Aaron concluded that at least one sector of the kibbutz economy was blooming: There were so many children that a stranger might be excused for wondering how anybody had time for anything else. The products of this intensive reproductive activity scampered about, and the apparent contentedness and good humor of the large families gave him a pang of vague longings. But his other voice nipped them in the bud. The little devil inside him immediately scoffed at his wish to belong, and the skeptical inner voices that had grown louder over the years now asserted themselves and conjured up the image of a herd of placid Dutch cows, spoiling his sense of festivity beyond recovery. He tried to suppress the feeling that there was something stupefying about the tranquility here, recalling the rage that would seize hold of him in the past and that had attacked him today too, on his way to the dining hall with Moish for lunch.
It was only a short distance from Moish’s room to the dining hall, but it had taken a long time to get there, what with having to greet everyone they met and with Moish’s delaying them by remembering one little chore after another, stopping at the children’s houses to see if a dripping faucet had been repaired and the sandbox in the kindergarten refilled with fresh sand, and then at the secretariat to find out whether someone who was supposed to phone had phoned, and only after he had studied the notices on the bulletin board, extracted the newspaper from his pigeonhole and read all the notes he also found there, and answered the phone ringing in the big lobby on the ground floor—only then did the two of them climb the stairs to the building’s second floor, to the dining hall itself.
At the door, Moish lingered to take in the scene, and an eternity seemed to pass before he picked up a tray. As they stood before the trolley holding the trays, Aaron suddenly felt fatigued and impatient with the waste of time, the idleness. He summed it up for himself: The minute you walk into the door of the dining hall, your oxygen supply drops, your productivity declines; that phlegmatic calm, that slowness, they’re enough to drive a person crazy. He retreated behind the protection of the guessing game: who was who, who belonged to whom. He succeeded in identifying members of three and even four generations standing together in groups, the youngest children on their fathers’ shoulders. Which of the adults had been born on the kibbutz and which had married into it he couldn’t guess, but he could tell at a glance which of them were guests like himself.
The ceremony began. He still hadn’t seen Osnat, but he didn’t dare look for her openly. The first to be called up to the platform were the orchard and vegetable-garden workers. Two children and two men in dark blue work clothes laid their offerings in two big straw baskets next to the wall of hay and stood in front of the microphone. In a short declamation about the fruits of the year, they mentioned such exotica as mangoes, avocados, and kiwi, even star fruit and pineapples, but not grapes or apricots. Once more Aaron felt betrayed. The brimming baskets looked as if they had been brought straight from the display window of a fancy fruit shop in Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda Street or like a fruit arrangement in a hotel room. “What good are these things,” he said to himself, thinking of the anachronism of the big straw baskets, so like those in the posters of the old pioneers, “with that kind of stuff inside them?”
Then came the cotton workers, and after them the workers from the sewing shop and the clothes factory, “dressed in our latest models,” announced Moish, pointing to Fanya, the elderly head of the sewing shop, who was standing to one side, at some distance from the microphone. The field-crop workers came next to last, followed by the landscape gardeners. Srulke was not among these, and again Aaron asked himself where he could be, for despite his age nobody had yet dared to challenge his status as the kibbutz’s father of horticulture. But his question was quickly thrust aside by the big basket containing giant pots of face cream, one of which, in a transparent plastic box decorated with a gold ribbon, was held aloft by Moish, who announced, “Eternal Dew!” This was the uninspired name of the face cream that had earned the kibbutz hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years. The basket was decorated with the cactus from which the cosmetic was produced, and Aaron stared in bemusement at the dull, ordinary-looking thick-stemmed green plant.
Before the big tractors began rolling in formation around the area, the children who looked after the animals in the little menagerie marched by, escorting a brown foal and a month-old donkey with a garland of carnations around his neck. A little girl in a white dress held a fluffy white rabbit on her shoulder, and a boy and a girl carried a chicken in a big straw basket.
Finally eleven young women paraded in front of the flowery wall holding their babies born that year, and the audience again applauded, perfunctorily, with the general noise continuing unabated. Then the tractor parade started, with the young girls on the slowly moving floats scattering confetti and silver stardust in all directions.
It was hot but not muggy, with the dry heat characteristic of the northern Negev. Although it was already six in the evening, the sun still seemed near its zenith, and the children rushed about excitedly in the clouds of dust raised by the big machines. Everyone stood up and moved back, grabbing hold of the little ones to stop them from getting too close. The children of the various agricultural managers sat in the drivers’ cabins with their fathers. At the wheel of the big cotton picker sat an adolescent boy with a bare, bronzed chest, his expression blank, almost indifferent, as if he were unaware of the impression he was making on the kibbutz children and the teenage girls, some of whom wore white dresses, emphasizing their youthful blooming health and beauty.
“Our barns are packed with wheat, our vats are brimming with wine. Our homes are full of babies,” sang the choir, and Aaron thought that the words had never been so apt as they were here. Everything proclaimed abundance. The economic difficulties of the kibbutz movement, which had recently made headline news and been discussed in the Knesset as a whole and in its Education Committee, were unrecognizable here. The profits of the cosmetics factory were so high, as Moish had explained to him on their way to the ceremony, that they subsidized everything, including some other kibbutzim that were sunk in debt. Here members could still afford to go on trips abroad, and the projected change to family housing, with the children to sleep at their parents’ rather than in the traditional children’s houses, had been rejected not because of budgetary problems but because of a decision by the Kibbutz Artzi, the national council of the most ideologically traditional wing of the kibbutz movement, to which they belonged.
Aaron, who had been scanning the crowd for Osnat, now suddenly noticed Dvorka standing not far from him and shading her eyes with her hand. A small child, perhaps five years old, held her other hand. With a shock Aaron realized that this must be Osnat’s son, Dvorka’s youngest grandchild. Even from a distance he could see that she was more stooped than he remembered her. “She must be over seventy by now,” he had remarked to Moish at lunch, and Moish had nodded: “Seventy-two. But still a bulldozer. You should hear her at the sicha,”* he said, smiling. “Still the same voice, the same energy. She’s a holy terror.”
Almost eight years had passed since Aaron’s last visit to the kibbutz. And now too, when he accepted the invitation to attend the double celebration of Shevuoth and the kibbutz’s jubilee, he had thought of Osnat. It was years since he had seen her. How many years exactly, he asked himself, carefully calculating and wondering whether Arnon had already been born when he was here last, and then dimly remembering that Dafna had still been pregnant at the time. But it wasn’t only because of Osnat that he had kept away. Even after becoming a public figure, even after becoming an M.K., a member of the Knesset, he was flooded with uneasiness whenever he remembered the kibbutz. In his autobiographical references he frequently mentioned that he had once been a kibbutz member, and some newspapers had made much of his having been a child from outside who had been successfully absorbed by the kibbutz and left after completing his studies. Someone had even written in so many words that he had studied at the expense of the kibbutz and then left it behind. “One of the great disappointments of the kibbutz movement,” a well-known journalist had once called him, explaining in psychological terms “M.K. Meroz’s indignant objection to the demand to alleviate the debts burdening the kibbutz movement.”
The fear of feeling ill at ease, the sense of oppression that descended on him whenever he drove thorough the gate, prevented him from visiting. Each time the visits became more difficult, “instead of the other way around,” he had thought to himself on his way here this morning, trying to shake off the heaviness taking hold of him. On the phone Moish had said to him, “Have a heart, fifty years, it doesn’t happen every day—can’t you make an effort?” He didn’t have to make too much of an effort. He could even have given it an official justification, made it into a public relations exercise, but somehow—presumably it had something to do with Osnat, he thought now as he looked around again in the hope of seeing her—he had preferred to keep the visit private and told nobody but his daughter where he was going, and to her too he had said “maybe.” He had set up a meeting with the head of the Education Department in the Ashkelon municipality first, and when it was over, without coming to any conscious decision (on the phone he had said to Moish, “I’ll try, but I can’t promise; you know how it is”), he had turned the steering wheel sharply at the last minute, and the car had driven him into the kibbutz.
