David by The Dead Sea, 1993
The year I turned 21, I went to Israel to volunteer on a kibbutz.
The year I turned 21, I went to Israel to volunteer on a kibbutz. It was a decision I’d made almost a year before, although maybe even earlier than that, as my older sister has been a kibbutz-nik at around the same age. Her experience, transmitted to us through her regular letters penned on translucent airmail paper, had fuelled a desire in teenage-me that I’d been kindling ever since: to travel to far away lands and see places with my own eyes that I’d only read about in books.
When my sister finally returned from her adventures after 18 long months — a deep tan, seeming so much calmer and older and smelling faintly of sand— I greedily devoured all of her stories, and yearned for a time when I could follow her lead.
And so it was that, years later, I embarked upon my own journey to Israel, feeling confident that I would return as she had, a fully-fledged adult, rather than the scared kid I still felt I was inside.
From the first night — when a few of the long-term volunteers came to fetch me and the other new recruits from the airport — I think I sensed that the adventure that I’d imagined was perhaps not going to match reality.
I recognised almost straight away that I had been singled out by the two girls that met me, and on our arrival at the kibbutz my heart sank when I was told I would be rooming with one of them, rather than the friend I’d made on the journey. Used to being liked and making friends easily, I awkwardly tried to make light-hearted conversation with my new roommate — who had apparently decided she disliked me within 5 minutes of meeting me — before lapsing into an uncomfortable silence for the rest of the night.
Being disliked by peers was a whole new experience for me. I was used to being treated unkindly by my siblings, and understood the jealousy that was at the roots of that, but this sort of unkindness was utterly new and confusing to me.
I hadn’t done anything or said anything that I could pin their dislike on. Very simply, they had just decided that they hated me.
As a result of their very vocal dislike of me, I found myself alone on the kibbutz a lot those first few weeks. It’s hard to express how isolated I felt, thousands of miles from my home and family and friends for the first time, unable to leave, and filled with sadness and anger that my long-held dreams of adventure weren’t turning out as I had imagined.
It was while I was wandering out in the middle of all this lonely distress, that David found me.
I think maybe we were randomly assigned to a work detail together one day, picking grapefruits in the groves out on the outskirts of the kibbutz, and somehow got matched up as a pair: one person climbs the ladder and picks the grapefruits into a canvas bag, then the other empties and measures them with a sizing ring. It was a nice job, as kibbutz jobs go. I’d worked in the kitchens as a KP (awful), on dishwashing loading the huge automatic washer (equally awful) and then had done a long stint in the dry laundry (not so bad).
Working ‘pardes’ — the orchard — was by far the best work I’d had so far. First of all, it meant working outside all day, in the fresh air and sunshine instead of a loud smelly kitchen. Secondly, there was no-one supervising us too closely, so we could goof around, climb the trees, even eat the delicious pink grapefruit if we wanted, as long as we made our (fairly low) quota by the end of the day. And thirdly, and maybe best of all, we got to stop every few hours or so and drink sweet hot coffee and eat sugar-biscuits, sat together with all the other pickers, most of whom were friendly old men.
Talking back and forth as we worked, David and I figured out we were both from roughly the same part of the UK, were both the same age, liked lot of the same authors, laughed at the same kind of things, and — most importantly of all — we both badly wanted to travel.
So it was that the next Friday, as Shabbat began and all the volunteers ended their work week for 2 days, David and I made a spur of the moment decision to travel to the Sea Of Galilee. Amidst bafflement from some of the others — “Why? What’s even there?” — and some nasty rumours started by my room-mate— “They’re probably shagging” — we borrowed a tent from another volunteer and made our way down to the main highway, where we stood side by side on the dirt verge and stuck out our thumbs.
Within minutes, a car pulled up alongside us in a haze of dust, and a grinning Palestinian man rolled down the window.
“You guys want lift?”
“Yes, we’re going to Afula?”
“It’s good! Me too! Get in! You like Madonna?”
The inside of the car was old and tatty; ‘Like A Prayer’ blaring on the stereo, the vinyl backseat stuck together with gaffer tape and a patterned house carpet on the floor. Grinning over the backrest at us, our driver handed me back a cushion.
“You are Australian?”
“No, English.”
He smiled, nodding, as he turned down the music,
“My cousin Hamza lives in Oxford. No…little way from…Kingston Blount?”
“Oh…yes! I know it!”
And suddenly we were all laughing, because here we were — 2000 miles from our home — and our driver’s cousin Hamza lived down the road from David’s uncle in Kingston Blount, and yes, he probably knew him.
Our trip to Galilee was the first of many such weekend adventures for David and I. Sometimes we’d plan exactly where we were going to go, and sometimes we’d just head in the general direction of something that sounded interesting, but open to whatever befell us.
We had an easy companionship, entirely devoid of any sexual tension, in which I felt both entirely safe and incredibly protective. Long before I understood the importance of vulnerability in building close connection, David and I decided to be totally open with each other about everything we felt: how scared we were, how unsure of our futures, how badly we wanted our freedom, and how huge and impossible our dreams sometimes felt.
Together, we formed our own tiny community of 2, supporting and looking out for each other, and always excitedly planning our next weekend away. Every week, as we finished work on a Friday, we would high-tail down to the highway in order to be on the road with as much daylight left as possible. Sometimes we made it halfway across the country with one lift, and other times we got stuck in small towns in the middle of nowhere, just as sun had started to set. Incredibly, despite our recklessness and the volatile political climate in Israel at the time, nothing bad or truly dangerous ever happened to us.
We accepted lifts from carloads of rowdy young men, invitations to dinner at stranger’s houses, people’s floors to sleep on, lifts in the backs of trucks, and we camped on the shores of the Dead Sea, where an armoured car patrol rolled up on us one morning — guns at the ready — as I was brushing my teeth.
One night, we huddled together in the dark for hours in a concrete bus shelter near the West Bank, listening to distant gunfire, before miraculously being offered a lift in a gleaming white Mercedes by man who looked a lot like Old Testament Moses.
We told each other stories, and made up songs and poems about our travels. We dared each other to speak to strangers, and to eat strange foods. We shared t-shirts and and toothpaste, and we cooked beans over campfires and took it in turns to eat them from the can with our one spoon. And night after night, we lay together in our little tent, and listened in breathless silence to packs of wild dogs barking in the hills above Galilee, leopards growling in the dark by the Dead Sea, and agreed that we had never felt happier or more alive.
When the time finally came for me to leave Israel, David and I tried to decide where we’d like to travel on our last trip together. But — perhaps because we both felt so bereft at the thought — we spent so long procrastinating that when my last weekend finally arrived, we realised that we’d run out of time.
Sad and a little disappointed in ourselves, we decided to just hitch into nearby Afula on my last night.
We plan on just buying a slice of pizza each and an ice-cold Coke, but our favourite tiny pizza place by the bus station is empty and the owner standing in the window looks so hopeful as we walk towards the door, that we pull up a couple of chairs instead.
The big plate glass window looks out over an otherwise blinded street; a clothing store with the iron shutters pulled down, windows painted over in wide white strokes. One corner of the plate glass is broken and someone has carefully stuck multiple layers of sellotape over the crack.
“One 12-inch margherita and two Cokes please.”
The owner smiles widely,
“You are English? Very good. My cousin lives in Newport!”
When the pizza arrives it is massive and fragrant. Hot marinara sauce half a centimetre deep and a thin crispy crust of cheese. It looks like a child’s dictionary definition of a pizza, like someone has taken a book and constructed the whole thing whilst looking at a picture.
The cheese on it is fantastic — the cheese on the kibbutz is rubbery and white and tastes a bit like Trex — and David eats more than half by himself, so we order another and two more Cokes from the smiling owner. We tell him that it’s a special occasion, it’s my ‘farewell dinner’, even so he asks us twice: “Another? Yes? The same again? Another whole pizza?” and we suddenly get that this is a big deal for him, that we’re spending a lot in his little shop this evening. The pizza costs the equivalent of about £7, just pocket money for privileged white kids from nice middle-class southern England.
The bell jangles ,and in through the door comes Hamza-from-Kingston-Blount’s cousin.
“Hey! I saw you guys in window! Hello! How are you?”
He greets the owner like an old friend, and pulls up another chair beside us.
“Best pizza in Israel, yes?”
“Yes, very good. Would you like some?”
He shakes his head, looking down, smiling. He can’t or he won’t — we’re not sure which — but when we finally get up to pay, he takes a bill out of his own pocket and pays the owner for us. David says ‘oh no, please’, I say ‘oh no, please’ but he just shakes his head again, pats my shoulder. He’s wearing a dark blue suit jacket, but his shirt cuffs are worn through, just like his collar.
“You are my two guests here, yes?”
“Ok, yes, but please we want to…”
“No. It is my gift to you. My guests.”
He’s still sitting in his seat chatting with the owner, when we look back in from the darkened street through the window. We smile and wave, and he waves back. When we walk to the bus-stop there is already a queue of people three rows long, tired and hollow eyed after a long work day. We stand alongside them, and sixty people try not to look at us, try not to stare at David’s white Nike trainers, at my brand new Levi 501 jeans.
We check the timetable and see that it’s an hour wait for a bus, so we walk down to the highway, and only wait maybe fifteen minutes before a dark-blue Rover pulls to a stop beside us in a swirl of dust.
“Hello! Get in! You are American yes?”
“Hello! Thank you! No, we’re English!”
The driver is an old man with dark shining eyes, and a car full of cigarette smoke and loud Arabic music. Opening the passenger door, he rolls down the window to let the smoke out, and motions to the back seat with one hand,
“My uncle, he lives in England. In…Tottenham?”
And he frowns, and pulls a cassette tape out of the over-crowded glove-compartment, before showing us both the cover with a dazzling smile
“You like Madonna?’
………………
Law Turley is a BACP Registered Integrative Therapist, Supervisor and Certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in southwest UK.
