They both leaned the rifles they carried against the wall and embraced and kissed.
“Oh, Dov! At last!”
“I’ve almost died from missing you,” he said.
They kissed again and again ignoring the burning midday desert sun, ignoring everything but each other. Dov led her to a corner and they sat on the earthen floor, Karen lying in his arms, and he kissed her and caressed her and she closed her eyes and purred with happiness.
And then his hands became still and he just gazed lovingly.
“I have some wonderful news,” he said.
She looked up. “What could be more wonderful than this minute?”
“Sit up,” he commanded teasingly.
“What is it, Dov?”
“You know about me being transferred to the Huleh Project?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, I was called in yesterday. They want me to stay up there until the end of the summer only … then they want me to go to.America for advanced studies! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology!”
Karen blinked her eyes.
“America? To study?”
“Yes … for two years. I could hardly wait to get here and tell you.”
She forced herself to smile-quickly. “How wonderful, Dov. I am so proud. Then you will be going in about six or seven months.” 584
“I didn’t give them an answer,” he said. “I wanted to talk it over with you.”
“Two years isn’t forever,” Karen said. “Why, by the time you get back the kibbutz will all be built up. We’ll have two thousand dunams under cultivation and a library and a children’s house full of babies.”
“Wait a minute …” Dov said. “I’m not going to America or anywhere else without you. We will get married right now. Of course, it will be difficult in America. They can’t give me much of an allowance. I’ll have to work after classes but you can study nursing and work too … we’ll make it.”
Karen was very quiet. She looked out and saw the rise of Gaza in the distance and the guard towers and the trenches.
“I can’t leave Nahal Midbar,” she whispered. “We have only started here. The boys are working twenty hours a day.”
“Karen … you’ve got to take leave.”
“No, I can’t, Dov. If I go it makes it that much harder on everyone else.”
“You’ve got to. I’m not going without you. Don’t you understand what this means? I’ll come back here in two years and I’ll know everything there is to know about water tables and drilling and pipes. It will be perfect. We’ll live in Nahal Midbar together and I’ll be working around close by in the desert. The kibbutz will have my salary. Karen … I’ll be worth fifty times the value I am now to Israel.”
She stood up and turned her back to him. “It’s right for you. It’s important for you to go to America. I’m more important here, now.”
Dov turned pale and his shoulders sagged. “I thought I would make you happy …”
She faced him. “You know you have to go and you know I have to stay.”
“No, dammit! I can’t be away from you for two years! I can’t even take it for two days any more.” He stood and seized her in his arms and covered her mouth with kisses and she returned kiss for kiss and both of them cried, “I love you” over and over and their cheeks were wet with perspiration and tears and their hands felt for each other’s bodies and they slipped to the floor.
“Yes! Now!” she cried.
Dov sprang to his feet and stood trembling. He clenched his fists tightly. “We’ve got to stop this.”
It was still except for Karen’s soft sobbing. Dov knelt behind her. “Please don’t cry, Karen.”
“Oh, Dov, what are we going to do? It is just as though I’m not living when you are away. And now, every time we see each other it ends up the same way. When you leave me I am sick with wanting you for days.” 38 585
“It’s just as hard on me,” he said. “It’s my fault. We’ll be! more careful. Nothing is going to happen until we marry.” He helped her to her feet.
“Don’t look at me that way, Karen. I don’t want to ever hurt you.”
“I love you, Dov. I’m not ashamed or afraid of wanting you.” i
“I’m not going to do what’s wrong for you,” he said.
They stood still, eyes shining with love and bodies taut with insistence.
“We had better go back to the kibbutz,” Karea said at last, with desolation in her voice.
Kitty had traveled over most of Israel and she had seen the most rugged of the settlements. She knew when she traveled to Nahal Midbar that it was the brink of hell. Yet in spite of preparing herself for the worst her heart sank at the sight of Nahal Midbar, a bake furnace planted in the path of angry Arab hordes.
Karen showed Kitty around with obvious pride over what had been accomplished in three months. There were a few new wooden shacks, a few more dunams of land plowed, but it was a heartbreaking sight. It represented boys and girls working agonizing hours during the day and standing guard during the night.
“In a few years,” Karen said, “there will be trees and flowers everywhere, if we can only get enough water.”
They walked out of the sun into Karen’s hospital tent and each had a drink of water. Kitty looked through the tent flap. Barbed wire and trenches. Out in the fields, boys and girls worked in the sun while others walked behind them with rifles, guarding them. One hand on the sword and one on the plow. That was the way they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. Kitty looked at Karen. The girl was so young and so lovely. In a few years in this place she would age before her time.
“So you are really planning to go home. I can hardly believe it,” Karen said.
“I told them I want to take a year’s leave. I have been terribly homesick lately. And now, with you gone … well, I just want to take things easy for a little while. I may come back to Israel, I am not sure.”
“When will you leave?”
“After Passover.”
“So soon? It will be dreadful with you gone, Kitty.”
“You are a grown woman now, Karen. You have a life of your own.”
“I can’t think of it with you away.”
“Oh, we’ll write. We will always be close. Who knows, 586
after living in this volcano for four years, I may find the rest of the world too dull for me.”
“You must come back, Kitty.”
Kitty smiled. “Time will tell. How is Dov these days? I hear he has finished school.”
Karen avoided telling Kitty that Dov had been asked to go to America, for she knew Kitty would take Dov’s side.
“They sent him to the Huleh Lake. They are planning a project to dig channels and lower the whole lake into the Sea of Galilee and reclaim it for farmland.”
“Dov has become a very important young man. I hear tremendous things about him. Will he be able to get here for Passover?”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
Kitty snapped her fingers. “Say! I have a splendid idea. Jordana has asked me to come to Yad El for Passover and I promised I would. Dov is working close by. Why don’t you come up to Yad El?”
“I really should stay at my kibbutz for Passover.”
“You’ll be here for many Passovers. It will be a farewell present to me.”
Karen smiled. “I’ll come.”
“Good. Now, how is that young man of yours?”
“Fine … I guess,” Karen muttered glumly.
“Did you have an argument?”
“No. He won’t argue with me. Oh, Kitty, he is so damned noble sometimes I could scream.”
“I see,” Kitty said raising her eyebrows. “You are quite the grown-up woman of eighteen.”
“I just don’t know what to do. Kitty … I … I go crazy thinking about him and then every time we see each other he gets noble. They … may send him away. It may be two years before we can get married. I think I’m going to break open.”
“You love him very much, don’t you?”
“I could die for wanting him. Is it terrible for me to talk this way?”