Really, maybe the thing that really bothers me about this place is the vicious, biting flies. I can deal with the heat, I can deal with eggs and turkey legs all the time, I can deal with disgusting smelly laundry seven days a week (hoo-boy, would Totty have a fit if he knew we don't keep Shabbos over here!), but the flies are something far beyond annoying. And if that weren't bad enough, there are also the mosquitoes who carry wonderful diseases like malaria. Dalia won our eternal gratitude by supplying both of us with mosquito netting for our beds. Her bed looks like a draped throne for the Princess of Baghdad, which is what Goldie and I call her behind her back, it has so many layers of the stuff. And she still complains how much she misses her nanny and other slaves (well, they might as well be slaves, there are so many of them) back in Surabaya.

"What do you miss the most about Krakow?" I asked Goldie, tossing her a crisply folded pair of coveralls.

"Sneaking away from my parents and taking trips to the beach with my friends," she said, putting the coveralls on the top of the pile of pressed clothes. "When I go back, I'll be able to go as much as I want, because I'm going to move to Warsaw and work in the theatre there. I'll be as famous as Marlene Dietricht and my mother and father will have nothing to say about where I go and what I do and how late I can stay out. They think I'm going to come back and marry stupid Maury and live a frum life - ha! Little do they know I have a job waiting for me when I go back at the playhouse. I can't wait to see the look on their faces when they find out I'm moving to Warsaw!"

"You are really awful! How in the world did you manage to get a job before you left?"

"I told my parents I was visiting some cousins visiting from South America and instead I took the train to Warsaw and tried out for a part. When I got it, I told the owner I could only be in the play for a few months because I was getting ready to spend a year at a kibbutz in Israel. He was very understanding because I was so good and so he said it would be better if I start after I get back and he'll set me up as an understudy right away so I can get used to acting again before I take on a major part. I don't like the idea of being the understudy, but hey, it's better than marrying Maury and having 15 little monsters running around the house driving me crazy."

"Wow, your family must really be religious. We're Young Israel in my family."

"You're lucky. I think I'm going to be like that when I go back to Poland. I don't see what the logic is for married women going around in a wig that is more attractive than their real mousy grey hair, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah. They get so stuck in that old fashioned mindset, it just makes me crazy."

...

In the evenings Dalia and I sat in a basic Hebrew class with the other girls on the kibbutz who never learned it in school and didn't have time to attend classes in the morning. The class was far too easy for me, but it was the only one they were offering at night. Most of the students were married and had small children who were too young to move to the children's quarters. The teacher was a bitter young man who had once been a rabbi before he decided to be an atheist. It was my last month of Hebrew classes, and I was far from fluent. Once again, I was deathly ill with another one of the Holy Land's glorious tropical diseases. Dalia was fanning herself with a collapsable fan she always carried with her. I felt my insides turn to liquid and hoped I could last until the class ended in fifteen minutes. Sweat was beading on my forehead and dribbling down my face in thin sheets. My stomach stopped spasming and then I felt my head start to jerk back and forth. The teacher was staring at me, and he looked alarmed. He asked if I didn't feel well, and the only thing I could manage in Hebrew was, "I am sick." I lose my ability to speak other languages when I'm sick or upset, and this was one of those times. I must have looked really bad, because he asked Dalia to take me back to the room so I could rest. Once I was lying safely in my bed, she went back to class. The room was spinning around me, and the hot night air had not yet cooled enough for me to be able to rest. I stared at the ceiling in the dark and waited to die. I wondered what I would do if I had to go to the outhouse again. I drifted in and out of consciousness.

Thinking I was away at class, Goldie slipped quietly into the room with young Sabra sporting a Palestinian Brigade uniform for the British Army. He looked very serious until they sat down on her bed and began doing something I was always taught that nice girls never, ever do: they started necking in her bed. I was so embarassed! I turned my head the other way and wondered whether it would be more embarassing to everyone if I did say something or if I didn't. I decided to try to sleep, which wasn't really working. I would pretend to sleep, and then maybe at least I wouldn't see anything. I quietly turned and put my head into my pillow. But I could still hear, and then I heard the distinct sound of a belt being removed. No, I could not allow this, no matter how embarassing this would be for everyone. I managed an agonized moan into my pillow, just enough to let them know I was there and I was too sick to care what they were doing, but not too sick to want to be in the room with them if anything else happened. They started mumbling back and forth in Hebrew and then Goldie flipped on the light. After the obligatory apologies and Yossi's hurried goodbye, Goldie sat on my bed and apologized again.

"Really, I don't care," I lied. "You had no reason to think I would be in the room."

"Yossi and I have been seeing each other for a while now."

"That's your business. But don't you think you should marry if you're letting him kiss you in your bedroom?"

"No. I don't want to marry him. He lives here, and I'm going back to Poland. It will never work. We don't want to marry. Maybe you have a hard time understanding that because you're American."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, come on, it's the twentieth century. Only Americans have a problem with couples necking before they get married."

"Oh, shut up. That is such a stupid stereotype. I just think you would want to save something special for your husband."

"Oh, that. You're assuming I still have something special to save."

Sick as I was, I was completely floored. "You're not a virgin?" I gasped.

"Look, some people never had the choice whether or not they wanted to save it, do you understand what I'm saying?"

"You were raped?" I asked, shocked that I actually was friends with someone who had been through such a thing.

"Something like that. Look, I don't want to talk about it, if it's okay with you. I'm just really sorry about doing that while you were in the room. You must really think I'm a bad person."

"No," I said. "Now I feel really bad for you. I can't imagine what it would be like to go through such a horrible experience."

"Just drop it. I told you I don't want to talk about it, and I don't want you feeling sorry for me all the time." Goldie was sitting on the end of my bed, staring down at the floor. We both had the same kind of eyes. I wondered if we might be distantly related. Probably not. Suddenly, as if to break the tension, my stomach started spasming again.

"Oh G-d," I said, jumping out of the bed and running toward the door. I was so dizzy I almost tripped over my own feet.

"I'll walk you to the outhouse," Goldie offered. "You look like you're not doing so well." I leaned on her as we walked toward the bathrooms and I felt the moon and the stars spinning around over my head. The air was so crisp and that made me feel even more dizzy as I stumbled down the sidewalk. I was surprised she was still waiting for me when I finished, because I was in there a while. She was sitting on a wall, talking to the guard in the language she so detested, Hebrew. And hers was flawless.

"You really didn't have to wait for me," I said.

"It's okay. I suddenly have a lot of free time today anyway," she laughed. "Are you feeling well enough to walk on your own, or do you need help?"

"I think I can make it okay, but I'm pretty dizzy so if you don't mind, I'd like you to stay nearby."

"No problem."

sre 9/28/03