And then again, only worse. My final downfall and humiliation—Naomi, The Jewish Pumpkin, The Heroine, that hardy, red-headed, freckled, ideological hunk of a girl! I picked her up hitchhiking down to Haifa from a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, where she had been visiting her parents. She was twenty-one years old, nearly six feet tall, and gave the impression that she was still growing. Her parents were Zionists from Philadelphia who had come to Palestine just before the outbreak of World War Two. After completing her Army service, Naomi had decided not to return to the kibbutz where she had been born and raised, but instead to join a commune of young native-born Israelis clearing boulders of black volcanic rock from a barren settlement in the mountains overlooking the boundary with Syria. The work was rugged, the living conditions were primitive, and there was always the danger of Syrian infiltrators slipping into the encampment at night, with hand grenades and land mines. And she loved it. An admirable and brave girl! Yes, a Jewish Pumpkin! I am being given a second chance.
Interesting. I associate her instantly with my lost Pumpkin, when in physical type she is, of course, my mother. Coloring, size, even temperament, it turned out—a real fault-finder, a professional critic of me. Must have perfection in her men. But all this I am blind to: the resemblance between this girl and the picture of my mother in her high school yearbook is something I do not even see.
Here’s how unhinged and hysterical I was in Israel. Within minutes of picking her up on the road, I was seriously asking myself, “Why don’t I marry her and stay? Why don’t I go up to that mountain and start a new life?”
Right off we began making serious talk about mankind. Her conversation was replete with passionate slogans not unlike those of my adolescence. A just society. The common struggle. Individual freedom. A socially productive life. But how naturally she wore her idealism, I thought. Yes, this was my kind of girl, all right—innocent, good-hearted, zaftig, unsophisticated and unfucked-up. Of course! I don’t want movie stars and mannequins and whores, or any combination thereof. I don’t want a sexual extravaganza for a life, or a continuation of this masochistic extravaganza I’ve been living, either. No, I want simplicity, I want health, I want her!
She spoke English perfectly, if a little bookishly—just a hint of some kind of general European accent. I kept looking at her for signs of the American girl she would have been had her parents never left Philadelphia. This might have been my sister, I think, another big girl with high ideals. I can even imagine Hannah having emigrated to Israel, had she not found Morty to rescue her. But who was there to rescue me? My shikses? No, no, I rescue them. No, my salvation is clearly in this Naomi! Her hair is worn like a child’s, in two long braids—a ploy, of course, a dream-technique if ever there was one, designed to keep me from remembering outright that high school picture of Sophie Ginsky, who the boys called “Red,” who would go so far with her big brown eyes and her clever head. In the evening, after spending the day (at my request) showing me around the ancient Arab city of Akko, Naomi pinned her braids up in a double coil around her head, like a grand mother, I remember thinking. “How unlike my model friend,” I think, “with the wigs and the hairpieces, and the hours spent at Kenneth’s. How my life would change! A new man!—with this woman!”
Her plan for herself was to camp out at night in a sleeping bag. She was on her week’s vacation away from the settlement, traveling on the few pounds that her family had been able to give her for a birthday present. The more fanatical of her fellows, she told me, would never have accepted such a gift, and would probably disapprove of her for failing to do so. She re-created for me a discussion that had raged in her parents’ kibbutz when she was still a little girl, over the fact that some people owned watches and others didn’t. It was settled, after several impassioned meetings of the kibbutz membership, by deciding to rotate the watches every three months.
During the day, at dinner, then as we walked along the romantic harbor wall at Akko that night, I told her about my life. I asked if she would come back with me and have a drink at my hotel in Haifa. She said she would, she had much to say about my story. I wanted to kiss her then, but thought, “What if I do have some kind of venereal infection?” I still hadn’t been to see a doctor, partly because of a reluctance to tell some stranger that I had had contact with a whore, but largely because I had no symptoms of any kind. Clearly nothing was wrong with me, and I didn’t need a doctor. Nevertheless, when I turned to ask her back to the hotel, I resisted an impulse to press my lips against her pure socialistical mouth.
“American society,” she said, dropping her knapsack and bedroll on the floor, and continuing the lecture she had begun as we drove around the bay to Haifa, “not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possessions, money, property—on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success. Meanwhile,” she said, perching herself cross-legged upon the bed, “great segments of your population are deprived of the minimal prerequisites for a decent life. Is that not true, too? Because your system is basically exploitive, inherently debasing and unjust. Consequently, Alex”—she used my name as a stern teacher would, there was the thrust of admonition in it—“there can never be anything resembling genuine equality in such an environment. And that is indisputable, you cannot help but agree, if you are at all honest.”
“For instance, what did you accomplish with your quiz-scandal hearings? Anything? Nothing, if I may say so. You exposed the corruption of certain weak individuals. But as for the system that trained them in corruption, on that you had not the slightest effect. The system was unshaken. The system was untouched. And why? Because, Alex”—uh-oh, here it comes—“you are yourself as corrupted by the system as Mr. Charles Van Horn.” (By gum, still imperfect! Dang!) “You are not the enemy of the system. You are not even a challenge to the system, as you seem to think. You are only one of its policemen, a paid employee, an accomplice. Pardon me, but I must speak the truth: you think you serve justice, but you are only a lackey of the bourgeoisie. You have a system inherently exploitive and unjust, inherently cruel and inhumane, heedless of human values, and your job is to make such a system appear legitimate and moral by acting as though justice, as though human rights and human dignity could actually exist in that society—when obviously no such thing is possible.
“You know, Alex”—what now?—“you know why I don’t worry about who wears a watch, or about accepting five pounds as a gift from my ‘prosperous’ parents? You know why such arguments are silly and I have no patience with them? Because I know that inherently—do you understand, inherently!”—yes, I understand! English happens, oddly enough, to be my mother tongue!—“inherently the system in which I participate (and voluntarily, that is crucial too—voluntarily!), that that system is humane and just. As long as the community owns the means of production, as long as all needs are provided by the community, as long as no man has the opportunity to accumulate wealth or to live off the surplus value of another man’s labor, then the essential character of the kibbutz is being maintained. No man is without dignity. In the broadest sense, there is equality. And that is what matters most.”
“Naomi, I love you.”
She narrowed those wide idealistic brown eyes. “How can you love me? What are you saying?”
“I want to marry you.”
Boom, she jumped to her feet. Pity the Syrian terrorist who tried to take her by surprise! “What is the matter with you? Is this supposed to be humorous?”