When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant Read Free Book Online

opened them things were black. All I wanted was to leave the light, to crawl under the earth. The other girls and boys passed me, unconcerned. I walked on my knees, like a dwarf and I said that I had to go back but they told me they would not be returning for some hours.
    “Take me back,” I implored. “Can’t you see I’m ill? But they weren’t interested in me. I climbed onto the metal bed of the truck. It was like a sheet of flame, after an hour in the sun.
    “Stupid,” they said, and gestured underneath it. So I lay there, until eleven o’clock when the sun was approaching its zenith and now it was deemed too hot to work.
    I slept all day and in the evening I got up and sat in a wooden chair and watched fireflies and moths crash into the lamp that lit the way into out sleeping places. I heard them in the dining hall, eating and singing. They had brought me my free ration of cigarettes and I smoked a couple of them, raw gaspers they were, a brand I didn’t know. The moon was over the Golan hills and the air smelled of things that were immeasurably mysterious to me.
    The next day I went back to the fields and things were no better. The sunlight was tormenting me. When it shone on my head, even when I was wearing the cotton hat, I began to vomit and was prone to blacking out. I had escaped from the brown days in London when the skies were coffee-colored, days that oppressed my spirit, to a land where the sun would not let you be. There was nowhere to hide from the sun, from its relentless light and clarity. There were no corners where things could be left alone and ignored. The sun found its way into everything.
    My work rate did not improve. I lasted only half an hour longer before being sick and I lay under the truck and then returned and slept. But in the evening I joined them for dinner in the dining room. The meal wasn’t much. They only served meat at midday and here, again, were the inevitable tomatoes and peppers and onions and bread, with lumps of white, tasteless cheese. Some of the girls had bars of chocolate but I didn’t know where they got them from. We sat at long tables, all together. It reminded me of school.
    They did not try to welcome me. They passed me dishes of things if I pointed. As Meier had said, many spoke no English. They never went to the cities, to Haifa or Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, never came across the military presence of the British. They stayed here and everything they had was enough for them.
    Meier came and asked me how I was getting on.
    I was lonely and frightened but I could not admit it to him.
    “Very well,” I said.
    But he had heard different.
    “It’s the sun. I seem to react badly to it.” Escaping the light was all I wanted.
    “I can give you a different job.”
    They woke me even earlier the next morning. I went with the old people to prepare the breakfast. I did not wash the dust from the tomatoes or put the knives and spoons and cups on the tables. I was lower even than that. They gave me a hose and I sluiced the floors, sending tidal waves of water beneath the feet of the old ladies, the women who had come to the kibbutz before the war, to join their sons and daughters (once held to have had crackpot ideas but now regarded as almost god-like in their prescience) where it was safe. The old people’s Hebrew was garbled and they lapsed into Yiddish at any opportunity, another language I didn’t understand. I ate my food standing up. While the dining hall was full I was sent to the lavatories with my hose to clean them out.
    They smelled exactly of what you would expect—of three hundred men and women who had just washed and pissed. I did not expect that they would send me into the men’s block.
    “I can’t go in there,” I said, but they laughed at that. I had never seen a urinal before. I didn’t know its purpose. I held my breath as I aimed my hose at the wall.
    In the women’s block I thrust a jet of water down the hole in the ground with its marks for