Erich Segal - The Class

“Hello, Jason,” she said softly. “Are you hungry?”

It was only then he realized that he hadn’t had anything since a cup of coffee in Jerusalem six hours earlier. The food was simple — home-grown vegetables, cheese, and leben , a kind of yoghurt.

Eva introduced him to the kibbutzniks sitting nearby, all of whom expressed a welcome tempered with condolences.

“I’d like to see where it happened,” Jason said. “It’s siesta time now,” said Ruthie, one of the children’s counselors. “Can you wait till four?”

“I suppose so.”

After lunch Eva walked with him along rows of identical wooden huts toward the srif where he would be staying.

“You’ll be sleeping in Dov Levi’s bunk,” she remarked.

“Where’s he going to sleep?”

“Dov’s away on miluim — army-reserve duty. He’ll be gone another three weeks.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll be staying that long.”

Eva looked up at him and asked, “Are you in a hurry to get back to something?”

“No,” he conceded, “not really.”

Jason kicked off his shoes, lay back on top of the creaky metal bed, and pondered the events of the past seventy-two hours.

Earlier that week he had been strolling the Harvard Law School campus in the company of his friends, his thoughts preoccupied with marriage, exams, his future political career. Now here he was alone in the so-called land of his forefathers with absolutely no meaning to his life.

At last he dozed off into a troubled sleep. The next thing he knew he was being prodded gently by Yossi. He was with a broad-shouldered man of about forty, whom he introduced as Aryeh, the kibbutz security officer.

Jason quickly shook the sleep from his head and joined them to walk across toward the children’s quarters.

“It seems kind of strange to me,” he said as they neared the dormitory. “Why do you have all the kids sleep in one place? Wouldn’t they be safer with their parents?”

“It’s part of kibbutz philosophy,” Yossi explained. “The young children are brought up together to give them a feeling of comradeship. They don’t lack for love. They see their parents every day.”

The long rectangular nursery had two rows of beds, and walls decorated with some of the youngsters’ artwork. There were no visible signs of any destruction. The damage obviously had been quickly repaired.

“So it was here?” Jason asked quietly.

“Yes,” Aryeh acknowledged, pain in his voice, puffing at a cheap cigarette. “A little girl had tonsillitis and Fanny was taking care of her when …”

“Don’t you have guards here? I mean, you’re so damn close to the border.”

“Everyone in the kibbutz does a night a month walking the perimeter of the land. But there’s so much area to cover that if the Fedayeen are patient, as these fellows obviously were, they can wait for the patrol to go by, cut the wires, do their nasty business, and escape.”

“You mean you didn’t catch any of them?”

“No,” Aryeh answered wearily. “The explosions made so much confusion — they also set off flares by the water tower. And we first bad to think of our wounded. Besides Fanny, there were three children injured. By the time I organized a search party, they had gotten too big a lead on us and gone back across the border.”

“Why didn’t you keep chasing them?”

“The army took over. We just have to be sure we stop them next time.”

“You mean, you know they’ll be back?”

“Either them or their cousins. They’ll keep trying to drive us away until we convince them that this is our home.”

Jason asked to be left alone. The two men nodded.

He relived the scene of the terrorists smashing through the screen door and lobbing their grenades at the sleeping children. Reflexively he reached for the pistol he had once worn on his hip to shoot at the attackers. Rage exploded inside him. Anger with himself .

I should have been here to protect them, he thought. To protect her . If I had, she would still be alive.

Something was keeping Jason in Vered Ha-Galil. Superficially, he told himself, the hard physical labor was the only anodyne for his all-pervasive grief. And the evening discussions with the kibbutzniks were a catharsis for his troubled soul.

A week after his arrival, he managed to get through to the United States on the telephone in the main hall. The connection was weak and he had to shout. His father reported that he had spoken to the Harvard Law School dean and explained the circumstances. Jason would be allowed to make up the exams he had missed during the following spring.

“When are you coming home, Jason?”

“I’m not sure, Dad. I’m not sure about a lot of things.”

The kibbutz was one of the oldest in the country. It had been established by visionary Jews who had left Europe before the deluge, believing that they, like every other people, should have a homeland. In fact, they believed Palestine had always been their homeland. And their idealism inspired them to lead what they hoped would be a mass return.

“If you think these buildings are primitive,” Yossi remarked one evening after dinner, “imagine how it was when the older folks came. Living in tents all year round, plowing fields without a tractor.”

“It must have been intolerable,” Jason commented.

“Uncomfortable yes, but not intolerable. Most relished every minute of it, even the freezing rain. Because, like the land it was falling on, this rain was for them.

“World War Two brought us more. First, those who got out ahead of the murder squads. And later, the survivors of the camps. Some of them are still around here working a full day in the fields next to youngsters like you.”

Jason had already noticed the blue numbers tattooed on their forearms, which they made no attempt to hide.

Eva’s cousin, Jan Goudsmit, had escaped the gas chamber and reached Palestine on one of the many illegal boats. But he was caught and interned by the British as an alien.

“Can you imagine them trying to tell a man he doesn’t belong in his own country?” Yossi laughed. “Anyway, they locked Goudsmit in another camp. Not as bad as the Germans, mind you. The British didn’t mistreat them. But the barbed wire was the same. He escaped in time to fight in the War of Independence. That’s where be and I met up. We were sharing the same rifle.”

“You what?” asked Jason.

“You hear me, my American friend. We had one rifle for two people. And, believe me, we didn’t have very many bullets, so the second man always kept an accurate count. Anyway, when it was over I brought Jan home with me,”

“That’s how I found him,” Eva joined in. “Once he had a fixed address, he gave his name to HIAS, which was trying to unite survivors. Their Netherlands committee got us in contact.”

“It must have been tough to leave the country you grew up in,” Jason offered. “I mean, learning a new language and all that stuff.”

“Yes,” Eva acknowledged, “it wasn’t an easy decision. I was so fond of the van der Posts. But curiously, it was they who convinced me.”

“Don’t you ever get homesick?” Jason asked, instantly regretting his poor choice of adjective.

“I do get nostalgic for Amsterdam,” Eva acknowledged. “It’s one of the loveliest cities in the world. I went back a few times to see Fanny. But by the time Jan died he had convinced me there was only one place a Jew could ever be at home.”

“As a patriotic American,” Jason said, “I take exception to that.”

“You mean as an ostrich,” Yossi interposed. “Tell me, Jason, how many years have Jews lived in America?”

“If I can recall my grade-school history, Peter Stuyvesant let a few into New Amsterdam in the early 1600s.”