Farid chucked his cigarette, leaned over the moonlit barbs, and kissed her, not only with his lips, but with the smell of tobacco and coffee and musk and a grassy whiff of the kibbutz’s avocado orchard, where he had worked all day.
“What’s this?”
She felt him tugging on the back of her T-shirt and realized she had forgotten to remove the price tag.
“Oh, it’s new.” She hurried to rip off the tag before he saw the price. It wasn’t even that expensive, not even a hundred shekels, but still, if he saw the price he’d know she couldn’t possibly have bought it. And he wouldn’t like that most of her clothes were shoplifted.
He brushed her exposed belly. “It’s a nice shirt.”
She gave him an aren’t-you-lucky look.
He pulled on the top barbed wire and stepped on the lower ones, creating a hole for her to climb through. Ulya shook her head at the way he parted the barbed wires, as if he were holding open a shiny car door for her.
“I don’t know why I come here,” she said.
Farid grinned. “I do.”
“We have no choice.” Eyal spoke into the microphone, relieved his voice wasn’t quivering as much as the notes in his hands. He couldn’t remember the last time a meeting garnered such a crowd. Even the emergency assembly on the eve of the Gulf War, when they doled out gas masks, hadn’t drawn this many people; never mind the usual meetings, when at most eight or nine people came to discuss the broken irrigation system or the output at the plastics factory, everyone else preferring to stay home and watch The Simpsons. In the corner of Eyal’s vision sat the one person who hadn’t missed a communal meeting in sixty-one years, and she was watching him with livid eyes.
“The ending of equal pay. I know it flies in the face of everything the kibbutz has stood for. It’s difficult to accept that some of us will get more money for our work than others. The street sweeper will no longer earn as much as the doctor.”
“Why?” A scraggy man jumped to his feet, propped his hands on his narrow hips. “I only see a doctor once a year, but I walk on the streets every day.”
Eyal turned to the man whose job for the last two years happened to be sweeping and weeding the kibbutz’s paths, but before he had a chance to say anything, a woman standing along the wall shouted: “So what? You have to be smart to be a doctor. Any moron can sweep.”
This got titters from the crowd, and the street sweeper reddened.
A bellow came from the back: “Maybe you’re the moron! If the streets are dirty, more people get sick!”
“Friends.” Eyal clutched the microphone stand. He’d barely started his speech and had already lost control of his audience. His mother was visibly pleased. Her eyes now observed him with a victorious gleam, her lips fighting back a smirk. Couldn’t she see the only members defending equal pay were the freeloaders and the unfortunate few who were going to find themselves at the bottom of the salary scale? “Friends, please!”
A fiftyish woman with a thick American accent rose from her seat. “Soon people with bigger incomes will have bigger houses. Nicer clothes. A car! How will it feel when your next-door neighbor has a nice car and you don’t? I might as well have stayed on Long Island!”
Next stood a woman with bleached hair and a leathery face. “If we have different pay scales, then we’re no longer a kibbutz! That’s it!” Bolstered by a chorus of approval—So true! Amen!—she continued, turning as she spoke to take in the whole crowd. “We could keep calling ourselves a kibbutz, but so what? We could call ourselves France, that wouldn’t make us France.”
A grizzled man from the accounting office shot up, sending his chair crashing behind him. He pointed a shaking finger at the woman. “You make me sick! You don’t deserve to get paid anything! You’re a lazy bat zona! A parasite!”
“A parasite?” The woman’s husband charged at the accountant, sending onlookers scrambling.
Eyal brought his mouth closer to the microphone. “Please!”
“When was the last time you worked outdoors?” Spittle rained off the husband’s mouth as he held his right fist low and back, as if struggling not to throw a punch. “I would like to see how well you pick bananas! My wife has skin cancer from picking goddamn bananas!”
Eyal’s lips brushed the microphone as he shouted: “ENOUGH!”
The speakers shrieked, drawing the hall’s attention back to the stage, where Eyal stood, his notes crunched in his hands. The sound guy, a twenty-something who DJed the kibbutz’s weddings and bar mitzvahs, leaped to the controls. Eyal uncrumpled his papers while everyone settled back into their seats. He glimpsed his mother shifting all her weight onto one hip and realized he should have made certain for her sake that the seats onstage had cushions.
He took a deep breath and faced the crowd. “Before we go into specifics, I want to make it clear right now that as kibbutzniks we will never consider one job more valuable than another. We understand everyone contributes to a society. We are only talking about market value, not any other kind of value. How much money a person makes says nothing about how much a person is worth.”
“Yeah, right!” came from the last row, but the house resisted further eruption. Eyal hoped his mother, craning to glimpse the heckler, would see it was Chaim, a man who had called in sick twice a week for the last three decades and spent whatever days he did go to work on endless cigarette breaks.
Eyal searched through his notes. He was lost. He had let the crowd and concern for his mother veer him off course, and now he had no idea where to resume his speech. Rows of expectant faces watched him. He would have to ad lib. He patted his brow. All he had to do was tell it like it was, and there would be no room for argument. He wished the situation weren’t so dire. He wished he didn’t have to be the one to ring the death knell. But such was his duty.
“If half of you had shown as much interest in our books over the last twenty years as you’re showing tonight, maybe we wouldn’t have to do this. But now it’s this simple: the banks won’t lend us any more money. We don’t earn half as much as we spend. The country doesn’t hold up the kibbutz as a national icon anymore, which means no more government subsidies. Kibbutzim are privatizing all over the country. Like it or not, if we keep doing things the way we are, we’re going to go bankrupt before the end of the year. Before the end of the year! Imagine it for a second.” He pointed beyond the dining hall windows, to the black night. “We will all have to go out into that world alone. A world none of us knows anything about. A world of job interviews and mortgages and layoffs and retirement plans . . .”
Eyal caught sight of Dana, the frizzy-haired gossipmonger, covering her mouth and whispering to her neighbor. The woman was a menace. Last week, as he and his mother passed her table at lunch, she had babbled in a raised voice: My mom said Ziva was a slut. Eyal’s dad could be anybody. Over their plates of spaghetti, his mother had sighed and said she’d long ago accepted that kibbutzniks, like the residents of any small town, like their forefathers in the shtetlach, were bound to gossip, but an old woman’s love life? Eyal shrugged too, as if the rumor were new to him, though he had been hearing it since he was a little boy, since that autumn morning in 1959 when in the middle of the teacher’s story about the great Dov Margolin, who had founded their kibbutz, smuggled Jews out of Europe, and died fighting in the War of Independence, another boy had leaned over and whispered through his buckteeth, “Don’t get all stuck-up, Eyal. He wasn’t your real dad.”
“We don’t have to think of it as pragmatism versus idealism.” He had found his place in his notes. “Is freedom not an ideal? Is personal expression not an ideal? Of course they are! You