Chapter One from the book Land of Promises
Hagar is on a visit to Israel and joins a post-Pesach picnic with her family.
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Chapter 1
“Look! An eagle’s nest!” Pizzi, the wife of my brother, was calling from her seat in the car, while he was negotiating a dirt road looking for a spot to have a picnic. The rest of the family followed us, in two more cars, and every time my brother found himself on a track that didn’t lead to where he intended to go, he had to turn his car around on the dirt track to turn back and try another one, and this had to be coordinated with the two other cars and drivers, figuring out who would move first and leave the track to the others, and with such a narrow road it was difficult to get off it and return to the main track to find a new one.
But in the end we reached a clearance between the trees not far from the reeds that marked the landscape at the edge of Lake Kinneret.
‘Shlomo, we’re not going to disturb the eagles?” Pizzi asked my brother, who of course answered that we would not. He stepped out of the car and started taking out the blankets, the food and the drinks. “Dad, is this where you want to have a picnic??” Liat, my brother’s oldest daughter, approached him after stepping out of the car of her aunt Ilana, Pizzi’s sister.
“What is the problem?”, my brother asked.
“There’s a lot of cows here.”
“So what is the problem? The cows belong to Yitzhak, he always lets them graze here - they’re not going to disturb us.”
“Not that they will disturb us, but the place is full of cow shit and flies”, Liat said.
Shlomo was not planning to go back into the maze of tracks he had just managed to get out of, with the other cars following him. For him this was the spot for the picknick.
“Here, between the trees everything’s clean”, he said, and put the blanket on the ground. And before he could place the second blanket, Pizzi and Ilana added bowls loaded with salad, cutlery, and a pile of plates, and a large carton of wine was placed on the bonnet of the car. My father, emerging from the third car that had just arrived, didn’t waste a minute and started to try to open the lid and fill up a glass he'd found in one of the bags out of which Pizzi had taken the plates and cutlery.
“How do you open this thing?”, he asked Shlomo. Laughing, Shlomo turned the lid which then became a kind of tap stuck in the carton, and filled up the glass. From that moment my father didn’t move from the carton. He stayed standing there for the entire length of the picknick, filling up one glass after another. I didn’t see anyone else except him fill up and drink, despite his inviting everyone, “to celebrate”, as he said.
I had arrived in Israel to celebrate the Pesach with my family. I had talked with my father on the phone and he had said “Come, we celebrate Pesach together. I’ll come to Almagor, to Shlomo’s house.”
It was my brother Shlomo who had come to the airport to meet me and my then boyfriend Hans. With him we drove to the studio of my father in old Jaffa. Then we all sat in the room looking out over the sea with a glass of wine, left over from the bottle my father had started while waiting for us. Yotam, my half-brother from my father’s side, arrived a short time after us, immediately opened my father’s fridge and took out a 10 kilo piece of cheese I had taken to my father from Holland.
“I’m taking the cheese”, Yotam said to my father.
My father asked “Maybe you leave a little piece for me as well?”
Yotam looked for a knife and cut a little piece from the cheese to give my father. He collected all the presents I had brought for him and his mother Zivit, my father’s ex-de facto, like I did every time I visited. Then he promised to visit the next day, and left.
The moment he had left and the sound of his steps in the corridor had been forgotten, my father said: “Where did he learn all that?! Can you imagine, he asked me to buy him a car. From me! What does he think, that I have money to buy him a car?? Can’t he see what car I drive?? And then he comes with all these demands…”.
It was obvious that it made him extremely angry. He went on and on about the behaviour of Yotam. The car he drove should have been taken off the road a long time ago. He didn’t have anything of value in his studio except his works. The cupboard was practically empty. The warm shirt that I had bought especially for him, had moved to Zivit, Yotam’s mother, in the same fashion that the cheese was removed from his fridge before he‘d even had a chance to taste it. An old coat of Zivit was hanging in the cupboard. It had been thoroughly used for years, losing the texture that was still in my memory from when he would pick me up from the boarding school. I looked at it and laughed. “You are wearing a woman’s coat, dad”, I said to him.
“Why - can you see it?”, he asked, and continued, “That is the old coat of Zivit. She gave it to me instead of throwing it away, so now I have a coat.”
The coat was an anaemic beige with big plastic buttons of the same colour, the type that doesn’t make any statement. Kind of anonymous. Every stitch in every pocket, the colour, the sleeves: whoever wore it would disappear in the crowd in the way that no-one would remember their existence - their memory would disappear in that moment of wearing it. It was no surprise that Zivit decided to throw it away. After all, artistic pretence, in this coat, was a joke.
Yotam did come the next day. He was very interested in my new video camera. “I can sell this camera for double the price you paid and in this way you can make a profit”, he said to me.
“I don’t want to sell it. I bought it so I would be able to film my visit here.”
“But you’ll be able to buy the same camera when you get back to Holland”.
I remember that on an earlier visit I had brought a walkman for him, which I knew he wanted, and how extremely disappointed he was that it was not a Sony. Sonys were very expensive at the time and I didn’t have the money for it. But the black shirt with the large print on it he did like, so much so that he wore it on the spot and went to see his friends with it, leaving the walkman in which he had no interest at all.
I didn’t ask where he had learned that. Labels are a show of good taste and are very important in Israeli society, as life is based on money, how much you make, and how often you go abroad. There is a lot of pressure from Isreali society to be successful, measured as how much you have. To be happy with what you have attracts disapproval. It is a very materialistic society.
The camera that I had bought was a Sony and this was clearly the reason for Yotam’s interest in it, and indeed, he would be able to sell it easily for twice the price I had paid for it. But I was not interested in money, only in filming. So he talked to my boyfriend Hans, who was always ready for business and thought in the same way as Yotam. Here was a chance to make money. Now both of them tried to convince me to change my mind about selling. Eventually they gave up.
I was standing between the trees to film the picknick. The picknick was the compromise for the fact that my father did not join the Pesach celebrations at my brother’s house, despite his promise. When we had still been in the studio I had heard him on the phone arguing with Zivit. He was not able to stand up against her, and after hanging up he said “Zivit organised the Ceder evening to be celebrated with Shaptai in moshavat Kinneret.” He couldn’t stand his brother Shaptai, he utterly resented him, but for Zivit it was the solution to prevent my father from celebrating the Ceder evening at Shlomo’s place in Almagor. And that’s how it turned into meeting the day after, at the suggestion of Zivit, and Shlomo had suggested to do a picknick for the occasion. To be honest, I would’t have been able to see Zivit joining us for the Ceder celebrations in my brother’s house.
I was 13 when my father moved in with Zivit. In one of the holidays, when I arrived there, Zivit asked me “did your brother Shlomo change his family name?” I said yes. Then she said “I knew he would do that”, which of course lead me to ask why, which in turn gave her the chance to tell me that Shlomo is not my brother, that he was adopted by my father. That he was a half-brother from my mother’s side. I grew up thinking he was my full brother and I didn’t have any reason to see it differently. But nobody had told me until Zivit found the need to tell me. Some time later, when I asked my mother for clarification, she knew right away that it was Zivit who had told me. It was not important to me, but it was the first indication that it is important to Zivit. The fact is indeed that Shlomo is adopted by my father.
Shlomo told me about the secret visit of Zivit one week after my father moved in with her. She came to Almagor, knocked on his door and presented herself. Of course he had seen plenty of women with my father, but none of them forced him into a relation like Zivit did. She told Shlomo that she planned to get pregnant and because of that she asked him to cancel the adoption.
Shlomo was 5 years old when he had been adopted by my father, who raised him as his own son, and neither for my father, nor for Shlomo, did the biological part play any role. They were very close. No father and son were as close as my father and Shlomo.
In the presence of Zivit, Shlomo picked up the phone, called my father and asked him if he wanted to cancel the adoption. “Is that what you want?”, asked my father and Shlomo said he didn’t. “So not” said my father.
“The answer is no”, Shlomo said to Zivit who had brought a pile of forms to be filled to effectuate the cancellation of the adoption. Shlomo never told my father what Zivit had requested behind his back, but he did tell me.
By asking me the question about Shlomo’s family name Zivit tried to damage the trust I had in him, assuming he had not told me what had happened. She presented it as if he didn’t want to be part of the family. She miscalculated the strength of the bond between my father, myself and my brother. But she did get one thing right: that she was not part of this connection.
moshavat(f) or moshav(m) - a type of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms