We Were the Future by Yael Neeman

Author:Yael Neeman [NEEMAN, YAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781468313864
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

11

Sometimes we were so happy that we would freeze in the air for a second, and glide. The gliding happened suddenly, as we moved. We glided every day at 10:30 in the morning, when we ran through the shortcut to the soccer field after we finished working. We glided when we walked on the goal post on one end of the field, hovering as we balanced ourselves above the ground.

Sometimes we ran to the long, high laundry lines, checking to see that there were no grown-ups around to catch us red-handed as we hung like clothes, our hands clutching the long, strong ropes, while one of the kids turned the pulley so that we rode along them, breaking away slowly from the concrete, then breaking away from the world, our feet hovering high above the ground, our heads spinning in the air.

We glided when we drove in the race cars Zohar and Amram built in the fifth grade: a board on four wheels was the frame of the car, an iron chain served as the steering wheel, and a pole with a rubber-tipped bottom was the brakes. For endless days, we rode on carts from our biological parents’ houses back to the children’s houses. We said to them: “You don’t have to take us back, we have our car here,” and we took off, dragging the carts up the hills and flying down them on it, floating over the sharp turns, navigating with the chain, slowing down with the rubber brake.

We started working in the second grade. We worked in our rooms, we helped the metapelet, we worked on the children’s farm, and in our classroom. We worked on a weekly rotation, in teams of two to four children. Every week, we’d move on to the next job, and so on. The class work consisted of erasing the blackboard, picking up the chairs and putting them on the desks, and washing the floor of the classroom, which was in the Narcissus building, adjacent to our dining room. Helping the metapelet was easy work, but had to be done at inconvenient hours. Split shifts. We had to clear and clean the tables after breakfast and lunch in our dining room, then we had to make all kinds of deliveries with the metapelet’s cart, bring the sacks of clean laundry from the communa, bring food from the dining hall. Each task at a different time.

We hated working in our rooms the most. Our four rooms, each inhabited by four children, one in each corner, were always neat and orderly. We each made our beds and covered them with the thick yellow bedspreads right after we got up in the morning. But straightening things out was only the beginning; the order was meant to expose every corner and every baseboard that would then have to be scrubbed.

During the week we were scheduled to clean our rooms, we washed the floors every day at ten in the morning. After that, the metaplot washed them again.

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