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

where the feet were placed.
    I returned to the kitchens when the people were leaving to go to work in the fields and I cleared the tables and washed the floors and then the tables were laid again for the midday meal. And the sun came up over the Golan hills.
    Work and rest, work and rest. In the afternoon I saw that some people went to lie by the shores of the lake and read and swim which was a skill I had never acquired. They took all their clothes off without concern and so I did too. Their bodies were nothing like mine, they were brown and hard and the women were without curves or voluptuousness. I was thin, but flabby. My skin was very white. They looked at me and I felt that they were disgusted.
    Across the lake, where Jesus Christ had supposedly walked on the water, was a town called Tiberias and behind us, on the other side of the hills, was Syria, a land of many enemies. So I mapped the boundaries of my new country.
    It was appalling. I wasn’t cut out for this. I made my mind up that I would be off and I went to tell Meier. “Sit down,” he said. “Listen, let me tell you a story.”
    The one he told me was, it turned out, the best I had ever heard in my life. It was about the founding of the kibbutz: of the mobile band of young laborers in the service of the Zionist enterprise who came at the age of eighteen in 1922 from the Soviet Union to have their skin roasted and their flesh pricked by thorns under a Jewish sun, because behind their eyes and in their heads was an Idea: the dream of Bolshevism on Jewish soil. Of how for years they roamed the country, setting up camp in olive groves, planting pine trees on Mount Carmel, cutting roads through limestone rock. Of the months they spent draining the Yarkon River, lifting sand from its bed which they loaded on to pack animals to be sent to the construction sites of the new city of Tel Aviv, the first Jewish metropolis since the destruction of the Temple. Of pitching their tents beside a malarial swamp and wading in and draining it. Of the bad time, when life was so hard there was mass emigration from Palestine, a fatal tide of people ebbing back to Europe later to be eliminated from the earth. Of an earth tremor that killed two hundred people. Of the women who died of tuberculosis and the men who died of things that no one had heard of.
    But he talked also of their practice of free love, of their abolition of private property so that a letter from home was read out to everyone and how there were no family photographs but the pictures they had were owned by everyone and were kept together in their collective album. Of the children born to them who had no mothers or fathers but who belonged to them all. Of their rejection of religion and their celebration of certain festivals like Passover and May Day with a torch-lit pageant, the men forming a human pyramid, the women dancing with red scarves around their hips. Of the debates about promiscuity, which some thought was a characteristic of a decadent, parasitic ruling class, and about the smoking of cigarettes which some believed showed a lack of willpower among a group whose principal characteristic was the very strength of its will.
    Of how they put on plays and held concerts—at first with instruments as simple as paper-covered combs that they hummed into and clacking spoons. Of a dance they called the hora, linking arms and stamping their feet.
    Of how some of them determined that it was time to stop being a traveling band and found their own home. Of the bitter discussion that followed, with others arguing that this was a betrayal of their original ideals in making their way to Palestine. Their position was rejected and they left. How the remaining sixty journeyed north and found a site with aruined cowshed, which could form their immediate habitation. Of waking each morning to the slapping of the water on the banks of the lake, the men and women sleeping together because there were no divisions left between the