Chapter 66 Summer work & Chapter 67 Murderer

“I can’t wait for the Americans to arrive.” Said Mark from Morocco.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Every summer the school converts to a dormitory for American teenagers who come here as volunteers to work in the fields. Just in their honor they feed us better than ever. We have rolls instead of yesterday’s dark bread every morning. I think they even hire different chefs.”

“What about us?”

“Oh, we will be working 6 hours every day and we are free to spend time in the swimming pool or whatever we want.”

It was the last day of the school year. Half of the students were getting on the busses to drive them home. During the year we had busses taking us toward our homes every other month for a long weekend or holiday vacation. It would stop at a station on the shore highway of the town entrance and we would have to continue our way on our own, I usually continued by foot. This time I was staying at the school for the first half of the summer vacation. Each one of the students had to put some time to help maintain our farms and fields.  They made us vacate our rooms and move to another building with more beds in each room. No closet space, we had to keep our belonging in a suitcase under our bed. They needed the other buildings to host the American kids.

At last, I was assigned to work at the fields. Since it was summer, and we didn’t get an assigned task I didn’t know what job we would do every day. I quickly learned that it is important to wear long pants and high boots no matter how hot it was. My first task was at the corn field. We were about 5 Israeli kids and 20 Americans. Our task was to pack bundles of dry corn stalks on a big truck to be delivered to feed the cows. It was a very hot day and unfortunately, all of us wore sandals and shorts. Walking on a freshly cut corn field is no fun, the short and sharp stumps of the corn would slide through the sides of the sandals and cut our skin. The bales were heavy and sharp. They were held together with two thin ropes. We had to hold the ropes, one for each hand, pull it onto our knees and from there swing it up to the truck where some other kid would catch it and set it up on a pile. The sharp edges cut our legs and the thin rope eventually cut through our hands. By the end of the day, we were all covered with scratches and blisters. The American kids were the first to give up and the Israeli kids had to finish the work. The only comfort was the knowledge that we will have a great dinner that evening.

To my delight, the next day I was assigned to the apricot grove and the following day to the grapes. Needless to say, I enjoyed eating the fruit until my stomach hurt. But my favorite task was the melon field. I ate so many melons, by the end of the month I was able to tell a good melon from a bad one from a long distance. The good melons had an orange/golden shine to its skin that I could see from a distance. Every afternoon I got to relax at the pool and improve my swimming skills. And the best of all I finally learned to enjoy the English language. I started to make American friends. I was too shy to talk to the girls, but I made a friend from Pennsylvania, his name was Mike. Mike had many comic books. I loved comic books. A few years before, I was introduced to Hebrew comic books. I spent all my allowance on Hebrew comic books. Unfortunately, it looks like I was the only one buying those books because after less than a year they stopped printing them. As disappointed as I was at losing them, I was very happy to find the English comic books. Before I left for home Mike gave me all of his comic books.

“I can’t take them back with me to the USA,” he said. “I will not have room in my suitcase for all the stuff I bought in Israel.”

Now I had a good way to practice my English reading skills and vocabulary. Playing the guitar and singing English songs also helped and from that day on it only got better. Slowly but surely. 

The second half of the summer was just as exciting. I got to spend more time with my friend Efri and for pocket money I found a job. Remember the blisters and cuts I received from the ropes of the corn bales? They came pretty handy. Now that my skin was rough and strong, I was able to do the task I was given. Next to our favorite sand slide hill, a new seven floor building was being built. A neighbor of mine was a tile layer. He was laying the tiles of that building and needed help. My job was to mix the mortar, fill 2 buckets and carry them all the way to the floor where my neighbor was kneeling and laying the tiles. Every day one more floor. I had to get up very early and get to work quickly so we will not have to work in the hottest part of the day. By 1:00PM I was already napping. At 4:00 I was having my biscuits and tea and took my walk to visit my friend Efri.

“Man, are you telling me you were working all morning?”

“Yup!”

“Let me see your hands again.”

“Forget about my hands, get your guitar, we need to work on those songs I learned.”

It was fun, I learned to play a few songs by then; “Venus” by shocking Blue, “Bad Moon Rising” by Credence Clear Water, or “The House of the Rising Sun.” I am not sure how many times I have repeated playing those songs, but the tips of my fingers became the next victims. The calluses became stronger than the ones I had on my hands from the ropes and buckets I was carrying.

 “Hey, how is Hana?”

“Oh, I forgot to write to you about it, we broke up a while ago. I am with Shulamit now,” Efri said with a smile.

“Shulamit, eh?”

“Yes, she is a lot friendlier, very smart girl, but she doesn’t put out.”

“Hmm, really? All the girls at our school put out. And don’t even ask about the American girls,” I said expertly, as if I was getting any.

“Are we going to the beach tomorrow?

“You bet!” I answered. “I have an inflated pillow with a bag. We can take some fruit and take them with us as we swim from Zevulun to Ein HaThelet.”

“You want to swim the whole way? That is more like two kilometers.”

“We can try, if we get tired, we’ll get back to the beach and walk.”

----

Italian Meatballs

The challenge of creating vegetarian food tasting like meat has been baffling many chefs. As far as I know and the response from my friends, this recipe is tasty and light. 

Here we have two options: meat and vegetarian. I replace the meat with a combination of beans and oatmeal. When using canned beans, I use ½ the salt.

Ingredients:

¼ lb. Ground Beef

¼ lb. Ground Turkey

4 Slices White Dry Bread

1 Celery Stalk 

¼ Bunch Parsley

¼ Bunch Cilantro

3 Garlic Cloves 

1 Anise Section

½ Onion 

½ tsp Salt

A Pinch Black Pepper

½ tsp Paprika

Vegetarian replacement

    1 Can of Beans

½ Cup Oatmeal

1 tsp Cocoa Powder

 

Preparation:

 Toast the bread or let it dry over two days. Soak the bread and squeeze the water out.

Chop the onion, celery, anise, cilantro, parsley, and crush the garlic. 

Sauté onion, garlic, Celery, Anise in this order to soften. Let it cool to room temperature. Mix in the meat, bread, spices, and herbs. Create balls and deep fry them until you see a brown crispy skin. 

Top with Marinara and heat before serving.

Vegetarian Version: Pour ½ cup of boiling water on top of oatmeal and let it cool down. If you want to use dry beans, Boil a cup of beans in 2 cups of water and simmer for an hour. Once the beans are soft mash them with the oatmeal and cocoa powder. Use it instead of the meat with the above ingredients. Create the balls and deep fry.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Murderer

The beginning of the years looked promising. I finally got a new position in the chicken coop. Mean Shimon was moved to another room and a new Moroccan immigrant also called Mark. I will refer to him as Tall Mark. He didn’t speak Hebrew yet, so I had to communicate with him in French. Tall Mark was a very talented artist. He also had an odd hobby, he collected bugs in little shadow boxes that he made. Tall Mark showed me how he injects them with alcohol and pins them to the board with a little note of how or where he caught them. On one of my walks in the woods I found a black scorpion and brought it to Tall Mark in a jar. He shot it with alcohol, we made a small frame for it and we painted the scorpion in red. We hung the frame on the door of my closet. But my favorite works of his were his comic books characters. He drew so many new superheroes and they all looked realistic. On the first floor of our dorm, we were given a large room to function as a club room. Last year I helped an older kid to draw an old ship in a stormy sea on the far end of the wall. Tall Mark was asked to paint something else, less dramatic. He Painted 3 white horses coming out of a dusty cloud. Again, they were so realistic I stared at them for a long time. 

Every morning, after breakfast, which became my favorite meal of the day. Making my usual cut up cucumber and tomato mixed up with a mushed hard-boiled egg, sprinkled with a little salt. I would walk the long walk to the chicken coops up on the north side hill of our campus, way pass the cows shed. My first task was to collect the eggs. I would walk along the hens’ cages with a bucket and collect the eggs. They would be waiting on a shelf under the cage. If a hen didn’t lay at least one egg we would take a note of it. If after a week that chicken still didn’t lay her quota, she would be moved out and sold as meat. After collecting the eggs, I had to feed the chickens, both the egg layers and the meat chickens. Each had a different diet and even different troughs. My favorite task was to feed the little chicks. I still remember the embarrassing incident I had with our chickens when I was a little kid. But feeding the baby chicks was fun. The job I liked the least was to shorten the beak of the egg layers. Chicken are not vegetarians, the sight of blood makes them very aggressive, they could kill each other if triggered. Often, two chickens would be in one cage and sometimes when a chicken lays an egg she might bleed. Her cage mate might get aggressive and peck her friend to death. There for we had to cut the tip of each chicken’s beak. Cutting the top part shorter than the bottom. To do so we had a special tool with a very hot blade. We would hold the chicken with both hands and literally hold it against the hot blade and cut the beak. I don’t know if it hurts the chicken, the chicken didn’t bleed, but It surely wasn’t comfortable. Lucky for me, we didn’t have to do it every day. Only when we had a new batch of egg layers.

Please, let me warn you, this next paragraph has some graphic description I am not proud of. But it was an act of anger instinct I never knew I had. There was a talk around the farm that some animal was attacking the chickens. Every so often we would find a dead carcass somewhere around the coop. We were talking about having guards over night to watch over the chickens or set traps. Nothing really came out of it because the next morning after collecting the eggs and feeding the hens I walked into the coop of the baby chicks. I was pushing a wheelbarrow full of chick’s feed. With a shovel on top of it. The tanker where we kept the feed was empty and we were waiting for a new shipment to fill it up. As soon as I walked in, I almost fell to the ground in shock. The whole floor of the coop was covered with dead chicks and blood was splattered everywhere. At the far side of the coop, I saw the oddest cat I have ever seen. It had a small body almost like a kitten and a huge head. He was chasing the chicks bighting them and throwing them up in the air. Without thinking I picked up the shovel and threw it toward the cat missing him by an inch. The cat froze in space. I don’t know why he didn’t move or whether I moved way too fast. I managed to catch him by the neck, I opened the hatch of the feeding tanker, shoved the cat in and closed the hatch before it had the chance to slide back out. I could hear it squealing and hissing trying to climb up the slippery tube to no avail. I was so angry I acted without thinking. I opened the hatch a crack and I saw his hind legs slide out. I pressed on the handle and like a guillotine it came down and crushed the legs. The cat screamed. I picked up the shovel and with the handle I pushed the cat back in and closed the hatch. I opened a crack once more, now the front legs came out and again I crushed them with force. Again, I pushed him back in and now when I opened the hatch his head came out and before he slid out, I pushed with my foot the hatch handle so hard it crushed his head. He screamed no more. I stood there shaking like a leaf, finally realizing what I just did. I just murdered a cat. It was not premeditated, yet it was a murder. Yes, he killed about 300 cute baby chicks, but I killed him an a most horrifying way. 

It was Friday and I had a lot to do before going back to the dining room which didn’t interest me at all that moment. I walked like a robot. My mind was somewhere else when I was in class and even when we went to the Israeli folk dance session after dinner, I sat on the bench around the basketball court and stared. Not that it was different from other weeks. For some reason when I came to Shfeya I suddenly became shy and was afraid to get up and dance. Later, at the club room, again, everyone was dancing to the beat of the beetles and Tall Mark was shaking of beat like he was possessed, I was still looking at the horses and still trembling from that morning fiasco. 

The next semester I asked for a transfer. I was assigned to “Agromechanics”. That is what we called the people who worked on Tractors and agriculture machines. My teacher discovered that I was a good drafter, and I was able to take apart a motor and put it back together without having any screws left. It was something to think about. I might become a mechanic when I grow up. 

 

***

 

Fake Chopped Liver

 

  This is one more of my favorite concoctions. You have the option to make it vegan by not using the egg. Yet it still will taste like chicken liver. 

 

Ingredients:

Oil for deep frying.

2 Eggs

1 Eggplant

1 tsp Kosher Salt for eggplant.

1 Onion 

½ Cup Walnuts

3 green Olives

2 Black Olives

½ tsp Salt

1 TBSP Olive Oil

1 TBSP Chopped Fresh Parsley

 

 

Preparation:
Slice the eggplant and salt it, let it sit for at least 2 hours. Dry the eggplant on paper towel. Boil the eggs for 7 minutes and peal them. Deep fry the eggplant until dark brown and cut to small cubes. Chop the onion and sauté until golden brown. Lightly toast the walnuts. Put all the ingredients in a blender and blend to smooth consistency. Serve in a bowl and sprinkle olive oil and parsley.

-----