The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings

Author:Simon Ings
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2011-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

4

In 1950, the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz, founded by the Kibbutz Artzi movement in 1930, consists of two long accommodation buildings, an armoury, a school and a canteen. There are no roads, just gaps between the buildings, tracks of beaten earth, and here and there a puddle of concrete to plug a pot-hole. The concrete is all broken up, making stones which the children kick about, viciously, as though they were harrying small animals.

The kibbutz is built on a hillside some way above the tree-line. There is no natural shade to speak of – only the mathematical trapezoids of darkness cast by the squat buildings. Anthony Burden’s dazzled eyes cannot adapt to the darkness of these dangerous metallic shadows. He is afraid to approach them. He imagines children in them, watching him with wide, unblinking eyes made dull by dust.

In the machinery store, the muscular men of the kibbutz work in silence. The middle-aged ones made Aliyah here in the 1920s. The youths, barely pubescent, are their children. An intermediate generation fled here as teenagers during the world war. Anthony imagines the stirring letter he will write this evening to Sage:

… They come from Bucharest, from Krakow, from Berlin and from Pécs. They speak Yiddish, German, Hebrew, whatever tongue will serve. They communicate with each other by means of strong, muscular gestures, miming the actions at which they are habitually engaged: ploughing, hoeing, planting, digging, driving, wrestling, shooting. They are miming out a new life for themselves, all the while expecting Soviet forces to roll in from the north, to help them realize their final vision.

Anthony raises a hand to these sons of toil.

They do not respond.

He gives them an ameliorating little wave.

Nothing.

He will write: ‘Give my love to Rachel.’

He comes to the lip of the ledge on which the kibbutz is built. Fields edge up the lower slopes of the hill opposite in a half-hearted, experimental manner. There is nothing cooling or vegetable about those squares of malarial green. They look more like swatches, trial colours for a better creation. Here and there the earth is reddish orange, in other places it is yellowish-orange. Mostly it is greyish-orange.

He misses his wife.

Oranges are the kibbutz’s speciality. The oranges of the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz grow from green pips to rock-hard little fruit the size and weight of limes. Unspeaking and unsmiling, the kibbutzim teach Anthony Burden how to prune and how to tend.

The oranges swell. Ditches are dug, cisterns are cast, sacks of concrete and buckets of sand are lined up ready for mixing. Lorries arrive bearing lengths of clay pipe to feed the new cisterns, and pumps that never work, so that the old men spend the day deep in the metallic shadows, stripping the pumps, while Anthony and men younger than him work under the blazing sun among the parched trees.

Looking around him as he works, Anthony sees that the young kibbutzim tend the trees with the same unsmiling seriousness with which they fire their guns at targets set among the rocks.

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