NONFICTION        

During the days Shira and I went to the beach,   -   -   -
                                      Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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A Serendipitous Adventure in Israel
by  Mary Noel Pepys

​I did not expect to meet a sophisticated Swedish model wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt on my flight to Israel. She was tall and thin as most models are, with startling blue eyes and an enthusiastic grin of perfect teeth. She looked just as foreign as I did, both being gentiles on a plane of Jews returning to the land of milk and honey. I watched her walk with confidence in her childish T-shirt towards the back of the plane where I was sitting. I was eager to talk with her, curious why she was flying to Israel. Could her reason be like mine?
 
Even though it was after midnight, I jumped up from my seat with a grin almost as big as hers. “Hi,” I blurted out. “You’ve been to Disneyland?”
 
“Disney World,” she responded. “I was in Florida and fell in love with Mickey Mouse.” She spoke with such joy, and seemed comfortable acting half her age. “I’m Shira from Sweden.” She gave me a quizzical look that seemed to be asking for my name.
 
“I’m Mary Noel. I live in San Francisco,” I said, trying to sound as enthusiastic as she. I specifically said San Francisco as I had moved there four years earlier. When traveling abroad, I always say San Francisco rather than California. Foreigners are excited to meet someone from San Francisco, knowing its iconic Golden Gate Bridge. I do not need to fudge like other Bay Area residents who say they are from San Francisco even though they may live in East Bay towns like San Leandro or San Pablo. I’m always tempted to correct them when abroad. But I never do. I know it’s their one moment to geographically shine.
 
 I asked Shira if she were traveling alone, trying not to reveal my real question, which was why she was traveling to Israel?
 
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m not really alone,” she added. She gave me a devilish glance. “I’m returning to Israel to be with my boyfriend, who just happens to be married with three children.” We both laughed. Too loudly, though, as other passengers began to grumble. We had awakened them. Their sleepy eyes widened when Shira described meeting her married boyfriend in Paris while working as a model. She moved to Israel to be with him, admitting that she had been his mistress for two years. Wow, I thought. The first self-proclaimed mistress I’ve ever met.

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​“And you?” she asked. “Why are you going to Israel?” I knew my answer would surprise her. I had been traveling alone for seven months through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, and was returning to Israel where I had spent two months working as a volunteer on a kibbutz (a communal settlement). Three days before, I had arrived in France and on an impulse decided to return to my kibbutz, Kfar Masaryk.
 
“But why a kibbutz?” she asked.
 
“I like experiencing life in an agricultural setting that allows foreigners to volunteer during harvest season.” I explained. “The kibbutz also practices the Marxist slogan ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his need.’”
 
Since I was an idealistic college student in the 60s, challenging a capitalistic society was de rigueur. We explored living in hippie communes, turning on, tuning in and dropping out. For me, milking cows and injecting chickens, picking oranges and grapes at 4:00 am to avoid the midday sun as a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz was my idea of experimental bliss. Working on the kibbutz just 24 years after Israel became a nation gave a city girl at heart a treasured taste of pioneer living.   
 
Shira was speechless. But not for long. Also in her early 20s, she and I stood in the airplane aisle talking as if we had known each other since childhood. As with most Scandinavians, Shira spoke English fluently. She also traveled as extensively as I did, and we traded stories of the countries we had visited. For me, our conversation was comforting. Finally, I met someone as peripatetic as I.
 
We talked about our families (mine was much larger than hers), our friends (she had more than I), foods we liked (coffee-flavored yogurt, crispy French fries and carrot cake) and didn’t (vegetables, except for carrot cake). Her favorite singer was Elvis, mine as well. But was there any female on Earth who didn’t love Elvis at that time? Oh yes, our mothers.
 
The five-hour flight seemed like two hours. As our flight approached Israel, Shira asked if I wanted to spend the night in the two-bedroom cottage her boyfriend had rented for their trysts. I was thrilled since I had yet to make a hotel reservation in Tel Aviv.
 
“But, won’t your boyfriend be upset if I come?” I asked.
 
“No,” she responded. “I won’t be seeing him until the weekend and I would love to keep our conversation going.”
 
I wasn’t surprised by Shira’s invitation. Traveling abroad in the 70s was a time of camaraderie and serendipity. The hippie social phenomenon had permeated Europe. I had traveled alone through several countries before arriving in Israel and was accustomed to changing my plans because of a serendipitous encounter with other young, like-minded explorers. Enroute to England, I changed my plans after meeting a couple at a café in Budapest. We then spent the next week touring Germany together.
 
Traveling in the 70s was also the essence of free-spirited vacationing. Sharing hotel rooms with the opposite sex was common, more often than not only to reduce costs. On my first night in Europe, I shared a hotel room with a Dutch guy I had met by chance on the plane to Amsterdam. I got the bed; he slept on the floor. And that’s the closest we ever got to each other. 

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​After arriving at Lod Airport, Shira and I took a taxi to her cottage in a suburb south of Tel Aviv. As we drove closer to her cottage the streets were lined with functional apartment buildings cut out of the same fabric and surrounded by barren landscape. Not a tree in sight, nor a blade of grass. And then, as if the driver waved a magic wand, Shira’s cottage appeared in the middle of the block, wildflowers growing in the front. But there was nothing wild about the flowers, as Shira had planted them so their colors would complement the fruit trees in her backyard. In its center was a patio of comfy chairs tucked around a small table topped with a Swedish vase in blues and yellows.
 
We stayed up for hours sipping wine on her patio and talking like best friends. I’m sure we woke up the neighbors who were probably just as annoyed as the airline passengers. But we had not a care in the world. Instead of leaving the next day to begin my volunteer work, I stayed another day and then another and before I knew it, six weeks had passed. I never returned to the kibbutz.
 
Shira and I had similar personalities, both outgoing and über positive, eager to explore and experience the unknown. We bonded and our friendship quickly grew. Our friendship taught me a lesson. It matters less the country of one’s birth and more the attitude with which one approaches life. I found a soulmate with a Swedish woman I barely knew. And yet, some of my California childhood friends were more foreign to me than Shira.
 
During the days Shira and I went to the beach, just blocks away from her cottage. I felt at home on Israeli beaches as they are similar to those in Southern California, where I grew up before hightailing it to Northern California after high school. In those days, it was more important to get a tan than to prevent a sunburn, and we bought Baby Oil wherever we could find it.
 
Few Israelis had the luxury of spending weekday afternoons sunbathing, so Shira and I often had the beach to ourselves. Sometimes, we invited stares of envy when we rode our bicycles in our bathing suits to the beach. But on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Israel, when Israelis must abstain from numerous physical pleasures, I suspect their stares may have been scornful. Shira and I were oblivious, riding our bicycles throughout Tel Aviv carefree and tanned while Israelis spent the day in the synagogue, devoted to repentance and prayer.
 
Most evenings we sat on her patio and talked until midnight. That is, unless Shira’s boyfriend, Azriel, arrived. At that moment I retreated to my bedroom to read. I knew my place, second place, and it was fine with me. As much as I enjoyed spending time with Shira, I also needed my solitude. Azriel gave me many opportunities. He was a well-known and wealthy Israeli. Still is today. He was handsome as many Israeli men are, well-built with rugged good looks. Not sure he looks the same today. 

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​Azriel was thrilled that Shira had a foreign girlfriend who did not know who he was, nor care. That’s because her Israeli girlfriends could not learn about him out of fear of creating newsworthy headlines.
 
He also liked that I was living in the cottage. That meant the number of their trysts could increase since I would be their shill. I was comfortable in that role. The social movements of the 60s and 70s promoted free love in any form. By providing them cover, they took greater risks in public and the three of us began eating at fancy restaurants, taking walks together and visiting historic sites.
 
After a few weeks, Shira and I decided to learn Hebrew at an ulpan (Hebrew school). For me, it was a lark; for Shira, it had the potential of cementing her relationship with Azriel. We agreed on a three-week residential course at the well-known Ulpan Akiva in Netanya, sadly now closed. The cost was excessive for my travel budget, but not Shira’s. She offered to pay my tuition just as she had paid for other joint expenses. At first, I was uncomfortable with this arrangement, but she convinced me that her modeling income was substantial. Besides, she did not want to be alone.
 
“I am much happier in Israel now. Before you came, I was miserable waiting for days, even just a few hours, to be with Azriel,” Shira said. And then added as justification for paying my tuition, “I also feel guilty because I know you wanted to return to the kibbutz.”
  
At Ulpan Akiva, Shira and I studied Hebrew six hours daily and were required to speak only Hebrew in public. Perhaps not surprisingly since we were alike in many other ways, we were disciplined and worked hard. Both of us were singularly focused on learning Hebrew. We diligently practiced speaking and writing elementary Hebrew. At the end of the day when we finished studying, we talked and laughed in English.
 
Our class was multi-ethnic. Jews who recently immigrated to Israel from Russia, Argentina, Brazil and Ukraine were our classmates. With such diverse students, it was impossible for our teacher to translate Hebrew into the native language of each student. Instead, she taught Hebrew by speaking only Hebrew. To this day, I cannot comprehend how I learned to speak Hebrew without learning one word of English translation. For instance, how did I know when our teacher said “אני ארצה כוס קפה” it meant that “I would like a cup of coffee?”  Sure, children easily learn a language from listening to their parents speak, but as an adult I have always needed translations in English when I studied French, Italian and Russian.
 
By the end of our three-week class, Shira and I could ask for directions, order our meals, buy food and clothes, albeit using simple words. It was such great fun to speak Hebrew with Israelis, one of whom even asked me after I ordered coffee yogurt if I were a sabra (Israeli-born Jew). Although I had blonde hair and blue eyes, I resembled some Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from European countries. Decades later I still treasure the compliment of being taken for a sabra. 

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​After two more weeks enjoying Israel as if I were a native, something surprising happened. I began to worry about getting older, about being unemployed. At the age of 26, I’m getting older?  How could I have thought that working is better than living a fun-filled, free-spirited life? As I write this today, it’s hard to believe that I wanted to end my wanderlust, return home and get a job.
 
Just as impetuous as I was in flying back to Israel from France, I was equally impetuous in returning to San Francisco. My determination to focus on a professional life was tested, but barely, when Shira suggested we visit Sweden at her expense before I leave. Even that did not deter me. What a moron I was.
 
Shira was deeply disappointed. She had come to value my company, and did not want to return to those painful days of solitude waiting for Azriel. Their trysts would now decrease and the public excursions protected by a shill would come to a halt. Shira and I were soulmates as friends just as she was Azriel’s soulmate as his lover.
 
In less than a week, I made flight arrangements and packed my bags. Before leaving her cottage, Shira startled me by confessing that Azriel had paid for all our expenses during the six weeks I stayed with her. He simply doubled her weekly allowance from $200 to $400. He even paid for Ulpan Akiva.
 
I was startled. “Why? This is embarrassing. I’ve never had a man pay for my expenses.” Being a child of the 60s and a fervent supporter of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s, I assiduously paid my own way whenever I was with a man.
 
“Azriel insisted,” she replied. “It was his way of making me happy, being with you when I couldn’t be with him.”  
 
At Lod Airport, we exchanged our shaloms and agreed to never forget the magical time we spent together. As my EL AL flight ascended and began cruising across Israel—in such a small country it took about five minutes—my spirits soared as I thought about my trip.
 
I came to Israel to volunteer on a kibbutz and left as a mistress’s best friend. Serendipity had, once again, intervened. 

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​Mary Noel Pepys is a senior attorney with a specialization in the rule of law, specifically international legal and judicial reform, and corruption within the judiciary. Since 1993 she has helped emerging democracies develop justice systems that ensure the protection of citizens’ human rights, equal treatment of all individuals before the law, and a predictable legal structure with fair, transparent and effective government institutions. Mary Noel has worked in over 45 countries, lived five years in six former communist countries, and 20 months in Afghanistan as the Justice Advisor for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement of the U.S. Department of State. While in Afghanistan, Mary Noel focused on strengthening the criminal justice system and the correctional system.

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