I spent last summer on a communal farm, a kibbutz, in the middle of the Israeli desert. I was working 9-12 hours a day in the lowest of jobs in a dining hall with an array of interesting characters. We served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, scrubbed toilets, mopped floors, set tables for 500, and above all, scoured pan after pan after pan.
We were all a bit kooky, I mean, I am too. Sheldon was a British boy who was more serious about his work than anyone I’ve ever met. Aaron was also from Britain and was obsessed with survival skills and bushcraft. Leo was an American who was in boarding school a few hours north and he liked to loudly sing the Black Keys while working. But the best by far was Elka. Oh, Elka.
She was the only other girl volunteer on this rural desert farm. She was a hippie who’d moved from America to Israel and had been moving from kibbutz to kibbutz, goat farm to goat farm. She didn’t work very well. We’d catch her in the wash room singing to herself while scrutinizing a dish as the others went on rotation round and round. She was obsessed with hula hoop dancing and swinging socks. She’d stand out in the yard and swing around knee socks in a circle. Once she tried to light them on fire to impress a group of dreadlocked South Americans passing through. Instead she lit her hair on fire and burned off a solid portion. She only ate raw green peppers dipped in tahini, claiming she was a gluten free raw vegan, and was unable to digest anything other than uncooked vegetables and “pure sunlight.”
Interactions with her were beyond odd. She lived in a world of her own, often not showing up to work because “the vibes were off” or “something told her she needed to stay home.”
One week, my friend, Reba, was visiting from Poland. We were trying to get to Jerusalem to spend the weekend in another friend’s apartment. This was one of many, many moments where dealing with Elka's eccentricities drove me nearly insane. These are now moments I cherish.
We desperately needed to reserve our tickets. The bus passed by our farm in only an hour and a half and that was the last bus of the day. Reba and I sat on my bed, trying to figure out how to order tickets but the site was in Hebrew. So we called Elka over. She came in my room and sat on my bed pulling my computer towards her, scanned the page, hummed to herself.
“Elka, we’re trying to get three tickets, can you just get to the page please?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “of course.”
She hummed some more to herself, clicks around, “Oh, wait!!”
Elka stood up and hurried out of my room to the mini fridge in what barely passed as our kitchen.
She rummaged around inside and brought out a tupperware, then came back in and sat on my bed. She opened the lid revealing, surprise, strips of raw bell peppers, tahini, and date honey. She started using one of the veggie strips to spoon honey into the tahini, stirring and talking.
“Oh my gosh, I love tahini so much, especially with the date honey. I always go into the fridge and take some after work. Same with the apricots, they’re SO good…” She stopped stirring, “Ugh, I can’t do this anymore!”
She stood up dramatically and unbuttoned her pants, pulling them off, and throwing them into a corner of my room. She then sat back down and continued stirring her tahini and honey.
“Hey, um, Elka?” I asked, “Do you think you could look at the bus tickets real quick,” I asked.
“Uh huh, but try this!” She thrust a honey and tahini-covered bell pepper at me. When I declined, she tried to offer it to Reba but neither of us were taking it. She looked crestfallen. She ate the strip and then the next one, and the next one. She finished off the whole tupperware while Reba and I tried not to fidget or get too exasperated with her. Eventually she finished and tucked the tupperware onto my shelf with my work clothes.
Still pantsless, she, once more, pulled the computer towards her, muttered something about bus tickets then a good bit of Hebrew, clicked around for thirty seconds then declared, “I have no clue. Sorry!” She then got up and went back into her room without another word, presumably to do her nightly meditations.
Reba and I looked at each other, at a loss. Later on we would simply wait at the bus stop and frantically flag down the bus as it passed, paying the driver directly for our tickets.
This was nothing out of the ordinary for Elka. She floated in and out of interactions without a care in the world. I only wish I could have been so easygoing. Eventually, I relented and did try her peppers, tahini, and date honey mix.
It was gross.
