Fiction: Bugs

On the wall of our kibbutz apartment, in the corridor, I hung a map of Yorkshire, aerial reconnaissance, the biggest you can find. You could reconstruct the lanes and valleys, you could triangulate the position of every stone between the outposts of Hebden Bridge and the county line bisecting the Calder valley on our kibbutz corridor flat wall.

I hate this land. I hate the way they look you up and down, to make sure you know you don’t belong. I hate how every thread of color on your skirt, every hair’s breadth of uncovered forearm is scrutinized to place you in one corner or another of one of the twelve tribes—no not this tribe, that tribe.

I just wanted to be Jewish. Is that so wrong? I wanted to know saying my prayers and cooking my food right would make me decent in God’s eyes. I wanted to join this people that were small and exiled and all warm inside each other. And here—you could be in churches—everyone is shouting how they’re right and it’s like Christians all over again, believing God will save them and the rest eternally dwell in hellfire.

I spent so long weeping in churches because I couldn’t believe I was saved. And then I found the Old Testament underneath the New one and it all made sense—you just had to do things. You just had to do the right things, and you were safe. Your milky pots and pans were either kosher, or they were not. And if they weren’t, you bought a new one, or you took it down to the mikva and you dipped it. Then it was fine.

Rav Michael seems a reasonable man. He has conversion class, once a week, an hour out of all the other hours. And he answers questions. Late at night, in his room outside his little house, he answers questions, gives advice. His wife’s a nurse. Ever so nice. Slim as a horse. She wears her little hat and smiles. She’s had four children, one is ten already, and she’s all of—I don’t know—young. She’s still young. Not like me.

i went to her when I found out I was pregnant. I went to her. I said, “Should I do anything?” She smiled, said, “What? What is there to do? God’s done it all.”

“Should I stop working?” I said. “I milk the cows.”

“Stop working?” she said, and she gave it a little thought. “Why should you stop working?”

So I go to the cows. I wash them off sometimes at the end of a milk. I heft this hose—it’s the whole cow shed length. I hose them down. They stand there, stumbling and crying sometimes, leaning one against another. I sometimes think they sing.

i saw one give birth once but it was dead. She had an awful time. You could hear her howl, all the way to putting the hose back. It lay with its hooves flat, next to her on the ground. She wouldn’t let us take it away.

I went back to the rabbi’s wife. I said, “There’s bleeding.”

She said, “How much?”

I said, “I don’t know. Bleeding.”

I showed her my knickers. You’re only supposed to show your knickers to rabbis—to tell you if you’re clean again after menstruating, if your stain’s allowed. But this was different. This was after sex. This was to say if our child would live.

She said, “It’s in God’s hands. A little bleeding… no one can tell.”

“Should I stop working?”

“Stop working?” she thought. “Why should you stop working?” She gave a little smile and shut the door in my face.

The bleeding wouldn’t stop. It’s funny about Rav Michael. They all have their little things. Just like it was funny us coming to the back of his house to ask advice on God, and to the front of the house to ask her if there was any chance it would live. If my Scottie would ever live.

We called him that because we kept talking about Star Trek. First it was Star Trek, then we said, “the Next Generation”, then it was “beam me up, Scottie”, then the name stuck. Scottie. It could be a boy or a girl, with that name.

I went to her back door again. Still bleeding, slow, steady like rain. She said to take another test. She said, “There’s nothing I can do.”

She didn’t smile. I didn’t ask, just stopped working. Stopped going to the dairy. That cow must have stopped crying by now.

Rav Michael doesn’t like bugs. It came out once in class. He seems reasonable enough, but then he talked one day about supervising kosher food in a restaurant, how you had to wash each lettuce leaf meticulously, hold it up to the light. “They’re crawling with bugs,” he said, “I could show you pictures. I have them at the house. Under a microscope, you look at them. Crawling. Each leaf has to be washed, and held up—if at all possible—to naked sunlight.”

He may have shuddered. He certainly wiped his hands on his beard.

A week after my Scottie died—the bleeding finally stopped, there was nothing left to bleed—Rav Michael called on me and then invited both me and my husband for a chat, late at night.

We had to part, he said, not touch for three months. For what? “That’s the law,” he says, “three months before you convert. In case…”

In case of what?

“In case of a baby,” he says, “so we know it’s Jewish. Not seed planted before you were permitted.”

We try to say that isn’t terribly likely. We try to say we’re obviously not touching one another because I’ve only just seconds ago now stopped bleeding. We try to say—there isn’t very much communication going on between Rav Michael’s two doors, front and back. We try to say—I lost a baby, maybe the judges could have mercy?

He looks like I slapped him. “To tell the judges there was actually a…?” He looks at me.

“A Jew isn’t supposed to sleep with a non-Jew. You’re supposed to understand that by now. When you first came, well, we made allowances, but now—to tell the judges that? Under no circumstances should you tell the judges there was any…”

He didn’t want to go on talking.

Once, when he taught us the laws of family purity, he said if he drank from a Coke can that I had drunk from it might be unpleasant but it was permitted. If he drank from his wife’s glass while she was menstruating, that was not unpleasant and disgusting, that was sin.

Hold lettuce leaves up to the light. Hold every lettuce up against sunlight, strip its leaves and bare the heart. Then when the heart’s under the tap, open it, to make sure there’s no bugs.

I hate this land. I hate the way they look at you. Like bugs. Like bugs in their wine glass. I hate the way the rocks cover your heart up. And how eventually every dream here turns to dust. And blows away. And has to be fought for, every grain, before it flies out of your hand.

There’s a part of me left in that cow shed, buried under the muck. When I first came here I was young. Young like the rabbi’s wife. She’s still young on her seventh child. I want my Scottie back. I want to know why I’m still here when he is gone. I want to know what I’m meant to believe when they’ve all finished shouting and saying what’s wrong with me.

What is the color of my skin, inside? And where will it go when the land is gone? Where will I be, when everyone is done shouting?

Will I ever meet Scottie again, and did he have a soul, that was not Jewish, or was he a finished object, not like me, if he had been born out of me in this land would he have been right, would he have been Jewish?

Atar Hadari is the author of Rembrandt’s Bible and Gethsemane and translator of Songs from Bialik and Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin.