“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 17 : Bin Hur ... and the Politics of Rubbish
One of the most delightful sights in the village, especially in the winter when a strong wind might be whipping up from the valley, would be to see our rubbish collector going about his duty early on a Wednesday morning. This observation may excite a little curiosity and the story around it either complement or deplete your view of human nature, depending on your philosophy.
Pinye was our man. He was a lean, though I have no reason to believe hungry immigrant from Rumania whose background in detail was held a private matter to him, shared only perhaps with a few of his cronies over a bottle of schnapps. That said, Pinye was not often seen socialising at village events for he was a bachelor with no children, as far as we knew. No doubt there were some like the nurse and Mayor who knew a little more about him than we did. Generally speaking Ramat Yishai folk did not pry into your past, which might involve a long story, but were anxious to know about your present life. For example, when we first took on a middle-aged Yemeni woman from the village, Yemina, to help clean the house, she greeted me with affectionate effusion and the first question, “Eh, so how much does your husband earn?” That was, and still is, quite common introductory chat. Needless to say, coming from an English background, I found the question extremely rude but fielded it by saying I had nothing to do with the finances. Yemina laughed loudly and wagging a finger at her new employer replied, “Hm, more fool you, lady.” On later reflection, Jemina had a point.
But to return to our subject, Pinye seemed a mysterious character whose claim to fame in Ramat Yishai was based on the fact that for many years he had been collecting and disposing of the household waste. He also kept a black and white part Fresian, part Arabic cow on his small plot on which he grew alfalfa and clover to feed her. She was kept in milk and probably yielded no more than three or four gallons maximum daily. Pinye milked her twice a day.
Soon after we had arrived in the village I had declared my total dissatisfaction with the watery milk on sale at the local shops. Virtually all the fat is skimmed off the Israeli milk because there is a large industry in its by-products, such as cottage cheese, yoghurts, sour cream and similar foods. Fat milk had also received a government health warning and no choice was available. The milk was simply white water. Learning that we could obtain fresh milk from Pinye’s cow Arni spoke to Pinye and agreed with the man that he would drop off a small churn at his gate every other morning and pick it up after the late milking. We were happy to do the pasteurisation and cooling ourselves at home. The milk was delicious and totally destroyed our ability to drink the ‘proper stuff’. But Pinye, apart from owning a cow also had a horse and a cart and it was these tools which had enabled him to apply for and get the job of rubbish collector in Ramat Yishai some years earlier.
You might be immediately reminded of Steptoe and Son, except that Pinye had no son and was a far more grave and proud person than old Steptoe. There was also a fundamental difference in the design of the cart for Pinye’s cart had only two very large wheels between which was slung a chariot body which could be tipped on a rod towards the ground for the bins to be received into its belly or discharged. I don’t know how many bins Pinye could collect in one trip to the tip but he was up early and had finished serving the two hundred or so properties on two or three mornings a week before the sun was too high, promptly returning the waste bins to their owners the same morning as the collection.
Pinye’s horse and chariot, its rider seated high, could be seen coming at a great lick along our outer road as we were the first point of pickup at the end of the village on the western escarpment. So the horse got a good gallop before the weight of the bins slowed it down on the return journey. It was seeing Pinye on a cold and windy morning, his head clad in a close fitting leather helmet with ear flaps rising and falling with the movement of the chariot and the wind as he spurred his horse on, which prompted me to call him Bin Hur. Bin Hur provided great excitement for the children and was admired and respected by us all.
As previously mentioned the council of our village was elected on party lines. There were four members elected from the two main parties, Mapai and Herut, an Independent party member and of course the Mayor who held the casting vote. Mapai and Herut both offered candidates for Mayor and the losing candidate stood down. The council employed a permanent Secretary. This was the general structure of council politics in Ramat Yishai and at this time the Independent member represented the Yemeni community in the village. For this particular term of office a Yemeni Rabbi had stood and been elected although he did not live in the village. The Rabbi, true to his particular faith, considered that the Yemeni Jewish culture was a head above the other divergent religious branches of Judaism which had developed out of the European diaspora, a diaspora scattered to seek fortunes across the world from Babylon to Brooklyn.
The Rabbi councillor would sit in at council meetings and utter not a word about any matters that did not directly concern his community. He would remain silently aloof, contemplating the squabbles between Mapai and Herut - discussion over whether the village could afford a second-hand fire-engine and so on - with complete detachment, perhaps even praying for his ‘unorthodox’ colleagues who might well admit to an entirely secular approach to life, heaven forbid, for there were still acknowledged communists in the community who had jettisoned all but party politics. If he voted at all, our Rabbi would simply raise one finger of one hand just above the knee where it had been resting but remain silent.
Arni was present one evening, as the only member of the public, at a particularly rowdy council meeting. The business was to include the matter of the sacking of our rubbish collector and personal milkman, Pinye.
Now Pinye had done a first rate job as bin man for a number of years with his horse and cart but despite constant inflation and a request for a rise in his wages he had received no increase from the council for more than three or four years, the Secretary hoping Pinye would thus be forced to resign. Arni had already intervened in this matter on Pinye’s behalf with the Secretary, Betzalel Cohen, who was a townie at heart, happened to be Pinye’s neighbour, objected to the smell of his cow and generally did not care much for the man. He also believed in the ‘modernisation’ of Ramat Yishai for which he intended to make himself personally responsible and famous. He was ashamed for the council to be employing a horse and cart in the jet age, believing it made a laughing stock of the village.
We did not remember hearing anyone complaining about the regular collection of our rubbish or how it was done. It was done quietly and efficiently and that was that. Then suddenly Pinye was taken ill. It may have been the ‘flu or some stomach bug but it was a sickness from which he would recover within a couple of weeks. He did not have a second-in-command to do his work while he was in his sickbed and this gave the council an opportunity to vote him off the job, especially after they had received a couple of complaints after the first week about the rubbish mounting up. It seems also that two young men, prior to the council meeting, had approached the Secretary with an offer of mechanising the rubbish collection with a tractor and trailer and the promise of speeding the process up - at twice the price.
Pinye was a simple man with only his cow and sturdy horse for company at home and apart from badly needing the job to keep the wolf from the door, we really believed he felt that being the Ramat Yishai rubbish collector gave him a certain status in the village. He was recognisable to everyone. He was indeed somebody important to the community. Although not a very talkative man, surely a great advantage in terms of getting a job done speedily, he was absolutely reliable and loyal and he had never before allowed the odd bouts of the common cold or sickness to interfere with his work. All in all Pinye was a thoroughly decent fellow nearing his sixties and looking to retire with a pension with some few years yet to go.
Since my Hebrew was basic, I asked my husband to attend the council meeting on this occasion to voice genuine local disapproval of the underhand way Pinye was about to be treated and his livelihood threatened with this attempted move behind his back, especially since he had no-one to represent him at this meeting deciding his future. Lying on his sickbed, he was not even aware of his threatened redundancy without pay.
The subject was introduced by the Secretary, Betzalel Cohen, who held forth at some length in favour of Pinye’s sacking, although in his capacity as Secretary he had no right to offer opinion but only present the facts. It was soon made clear that he was primarily behind the ‘mechanisation’ programme and had persuaded the Mayor to put the matter on the agenda. He then opened the item up for discussion and nodded to the Mayor, Yudit our neighbour. Yudit declined to speak so it passed to her deputy to comment, who also declined to speak. This was a touchy subject. Our Yemeni Rabbi simply gave a cursory negative nod in the direction of the Secretary which could mean that he either did not wish to speak or was against the motion. Betzalel moved quickly on to the opposition party to express its viewpoint. Following that, a paper ballot was to be conducted.
True to party politics, the opposition member started leading off in grandiloquent language with a speech which appeared to be neither in favour nor against the matter under discussion, for during his exuberant outburst the edges of his argument became distinctly blurred. Nobody knew whether he had eaten something unwholesome, been stung by a bee or simply had another row with his wife but he evidently felt he had an excellent platform from which to run down the party in power. This he did in relation to Mapai’s every conceivable idiocy, mistake, unprincipled action, corruption and wickedness since they had been elected to represent the people, not only in Ramat Yishai but in the local government area and indeed across the State. As the minutes passed without interruption his voice grew louder and louder and his face redder and redder. Arni and the other councillors, except the disdainful Rabbi whose eyes were closed by this time, exchanged glances with increasing irritation. A full seven minutes had gone by before Yudit looked the opposition member straight in the eye and told him he was not speaking to the point, he’d had more than a fair hearing and it was time to sit down and allow the business to be concluded properly. At this the member became utterly incensed, shouting ever more loudly that he would not be censored, he had a democratic right to speak.
Now the ideal of democracy was dear to all and this set everybody off, except the Rabbi. No doubt the neighbourhood was beginning to wonder what on earth was going on since such a decibel level issuing from the council office was not a habitual occurrence. Indeed, it looked as though matters might come to blows as the Secretary waved his arms about and the member threw his fists into the air. Finally Yudit purposefully stubbed out her cigarette and in her gravelly voice declared the meeting adjourned forthwith. Rising from her seat, she vehemently pushed aside her table to proceed towards the door, declaiming fiercely that she was used to children in the clinic, in the kindergarten and in the junior school but did not expect to find them in the council office.
To say that one could make a grand exit from such a confined space as that little room of three by four metres with a full council meeting, two tables, six chairs and a member of the public present, would be exaggerating somewhat. Furniture and folk had to move swiftly and awkwardly to allow the well endowed lady Mayor to reach the door. The Red Sea, however, parted and Yudit strode out into the warm night air that was nevertheless cooler than the atmosphere of the room she had just vacated.
No decision had been made about poor old Pinye at this meeting but it was not too long before we realised we had seen the last of our charioteer when a noisy tractor and trailer appeared to collect the rubbish bins. In place of the brisk clip-clop of Pinye’s horse and his gruff but kindly words in its ears, we would be woken from our slumber with the revving of an old diesel engine, acrid smoke pouring out of its tail. Pinye did not live long enough to collect his pension. 2294