I spent the weekend with my fiancé Aviv, and when I returned to the kibbutz I found my roommate Lucie in bed with the covers pulled over her head.

I nudged her. "Is everything all right?"

She pulled the covers down. "I am sick from too much drinking."

I sat on the edge of my bed across from her.

Lucie sat up and stared at me, blank.

“Did something happen?”

She drew her knees to her chest, hugged her arms around her calves, and burrowed her face in her thighs. She began to sob, rocking back and forth, as if saying Yes with her whole body.

“Jeremy, he rapes me,” she said.

I leapt up and hugged her. It took her a long time to stop rocking and crying. When she did, I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. Then she told me what happened.

"I am playing poker and drinking with Jeremy, like always when you are gone from the kibbutz. He is my friend, you know, when you are staying with Aviv. So after we are finishing our poker game, Jeremy comes to my room. We are talking, you know, and then suddenly he tells me he wants to make love. I tell him, 'No, I have a boyfriend in France.' He doesn’t say anything. He turns me around, pulls down my pants, and goes in from behind." She grimaced and gestured with her hands as she described what Jeremy had done. "The neighbors hear me crying. They start knocking on the door, asking if I am okay. I don’t answer. I make him leave through the window."

"Have you told anyone?" I asked.

"I only tell you."

"We have to tell someone. The ulpan directors or the kibbutz psychologist."

"I don't want to tell. People will say I shouldn't be alone with him in my room."

“He’s your friend. Why shouldn’t he be here,” I said.

Lucie sobbed. And I sat with her, wondering what I should do.

“We have to do something,” I said.

Lucie wiped her eyes, sniffed, and looked at me like a child looking at her mother wanting her to make it better.

“Cow dung in his boots,” I said.

Lucie’s lip quivered. Then she let out a hoot. I did, too, and soon we were bent into our knees, belly laughing.

At midnight we slid on our work boots, sneaked down to the factory, and crept through an open window. We fumbled in the dark for plastic bags and scrap refrigerator shelf lips, leftovers from my work in the factory, where I sliced long silvery strips of scrap plastic into sections of trim. We crawled back out of the window, and slipped down to the cow pen. It smelled like dung. I stuck the refrigerator shelf lip into a pile of excrement and scooped it into a plastic bag, one heaping clump after another until I had enough to fill his boots. “Done,” I whispered. Then we sneaked up to Jeremy's cottage. As usual, he had left his knee-high rubber boots on the doorstep.

"They're there," I said, pointing to the boots. “Let’s make sure they’re asleep.” We slipped around the rear of the cottage to peer through the window. The lights were out. “He’s snoring, listen,” I said. Lucie put her hand over her mouth, giggled. “Come on,” I said. We tiptoed back to the porch. I set the bag down, stuck in the plastic strip and scooped dung into his boots, one clump at a time. “Let’s go,” I said. We ran back to our cabin, shut the door.

I had dung on my hands and boots, a criminal, breaking, entering, robbing, vandalizing. Now I needed to hide the evidence.

Lucie was my accomplice. She had followed me around, a silent partner, to the factory, the cow pen, Jeremy's cottage, and now the showers. We washed our bodies and boots, laughed some more, and, for the moment, the pain seemed forgotten. Forgotten in fun. Mischievous fun without consequences. Jeremy thought one of the Russians had filled his boots with dung in a drunken frenzy. A meaningless prank. We didn’t tell our secret, or his.

I called Aviv, sobbing, whispering into the dining room pay phone spare details about what had happened. I didn’t want anyone to overhear. Under normal circumstances, I could have handled this. I had been trained to deal with problems like date rape as a resident advisor at Penn. But these were not normal times. Now, finally, I snapped, a rubber band that had been stretched too far.

Aviv drove to the kibbutz and stayed with me for the night, sleeping with me on my cot in the cabin with Lucie. She looked at him, moist eyes, smiling, as she lay curled up on her bed across from us. Maybe that one night we both felt safe.

I huddled in Aviv’s arms, his warmth soothing me, his cheek pressing against mine. I knew I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t handle secrets. Any secrets. Big or small. I always told. Told on my sister. Told on my brother. Even told on myself sometimes. I wasn’t a rat, exactly, but I thought I’d explode like a balloon too full of air unless I told. Like the time my brother showed me the peanut butter sandwich he’d made to stash his pot in on a high school band trip. I didn’t want to tell on my brother, not at all. But the story pressed and pressed and pressed on me, until I thought I really was a balloon ready to burst. And then I blurted it out to my mother.

Lucie’s story made me swell up, full of secrets, the way my brother’s peanut butter sandwich had, only worse. With my brother, I didn’t worry at all that he’d become a pothead. I just couldn’t keep it in. Plain as that. But with Lucie, I felt a moral urgency to tell. Maybe I am telling her story now only to unburden myself from having had to stuff it away all this time. She wanted me to tell no one, only I am sure she guessed I told Aviv, with him sleeping across from her that night, in bed with me, comforting me with soft kisses and whispers about how soon we would be back in New York, back where everything would be okay, like it was before.

Lucie’s rape broke me, crippled my drive to fit in. I’d felt a certain moral mission to fly to Israel on the eve of the Gulf War, an act of heroism I hoped would gain favor with Aviv’s parents, Moshe and Sara. An act to prove that I could cut it, that I could handle war and terror and all that Israel was about. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t a traitor, like the Israelis who fled during war or never came home when it was under fire. I wanted to show that I could understand and cherish their world, and all the history that had shaped it. I wanted to learn a whole new alphabet and speak in Hebrew, to talk with Moshe and Sara and Aviv in their own tongue. I wanted to work hard on the kibbutz, show my colors through my solid and steady fitting and slicing and tossing. My perfect refrigerator shelf lips. I wanted to write about the constant relentless terror, the air raids, and the threat of chemical and biological warfare.

And I did. Did all that. Learned how to write a letter and speak in Hebrew. Cut plastic like a professional machinist on the kibbutz. Weathered a war without fleeing. And sold stories to my Connecticut newspaper on the intifada and the Gulf War. All of that had a moral purpose. But Lucie’s rape was different. I couldn’t muster any noble reason for keeping her secret, not at all. It felt like a dirty skeleton, the kind inmates must hold onto after prison rapes. A skeleton I carried in my backpack, trudging around hoping someone would find it and ask what it was. A secret that had no place to be told.

I ducked as Aviv ferried me out of the kibbutz. He drove past the alfalfa fields, still lolling back and forth. A lullaby.

“I can deal with a lot of things, a whole lot,” I sniffed. “But this? This is different. I can’t. Can’t handle it. Not one bit.”

I shook my head, side to side, thinking no, no, no. I won’t abide this secret. It’s not right, not right at all. I bent into my knees and wept, wrenching and sobbing and gasping.

Aviv steered his father’s Renault, gripping the wheel, knuckles so tight they turned white. He stared dead-on at the road. “I hate that my country does this to you.”

“I’m not going back,” I said. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

I hid like an escaped convict after I left the kibbutz. I slept through the night and into the next day, coming out of Aviv’s bedroom only late at night, after Moshe and Sara had gone to sleep. I couldn’t face them. I knew how it would disappoint them if I quit, but I couldn’t go back. Ever. So I holed up for four days. Aviv’s bedroom was no longer the sealed room. The window no longer had a big plastic tarp to protect us from shattering glass. The radio was no longer tuned to the station that broadcast the air raid siren when Scuds were on the way. The room no longer had gas masks, flashlights, batteries, bottled water, crackers, damp towels, masking tape—things we needed to survive a chemical attack. Aviv had put everything away, back where it belonged because the war was over.

I found Sara on the enclosed balcony off the dining room. She sat in a rocking chair knitting. Her blonde bob always so neat, like a television news anchor’s.

"Shalom," I said.

"Shalom,” she said, looking up over her reading glasses.

I didn’t want to have the conversation in Hebrew, even though I probably could have. It seemed too important, and I wasn’t sure that I knew all the right words to describe what had happened on the kibbutz and how I felt. So I continued in English.

"I’m not going back to the kibbutz," I said.

She set down her knitting. "Why?"

I told her about Lucie.

She furrowed her brow. "But was this really rape?"

Sara’s question hit me like a missile. I could forgive her and Moshe for not comforting me after the air raids. It would be as unlikely as a group of soldiers hugging and consoling each other after a battle. I understood, enough, that it wasn’t the Israeli thing to do. But this, to me, was different, very different. Lucie was my roommate, my friend, a young woman. Vulnerable, violated. And Sara was a mother, my mother away from home. How could she abandon me?

My shoulders pinched together. "She wasn’t beaten or bruised, if that's what you mean. But the guy took her against her will. That’s rape, as far as I’m concerned."

Sara no longer seemed soft, the way she had at first, when she spoke to me like a confidante, a girlfriend she could tell anything in the world. Now she stared at me with cold, unfeeling eyes that made my stomach clench. I couldn’t bear the disapproval of mothers. Aviv’s or my own.

“When I am young, like you, I am also so sensitive, so sensitive I cry over anything, any feeling that I do not like,” Sara said. “I hear you cry, and I worry because you are so sensitive, so sensitive like I was when I was young.”

“I know, I know, I’m sensitive, I try not to be,” I said.

My mother used to call me Sensitive Plant after the type of mimosa whose tiny fern-like leaves wither into its stem at the slightest touch. Growing up, I wanted her approval so badly that any criticism crushed me. Now I wanted Sara’s approval and compassion. It hurt like mad that I wasn’t getting it. Wasn’t getting my medal after the war. Instead, I was getting a reprimand like I got from my own mother for being a Sensitive Plant she had to handle with care.

“I worry you are so sensitive, and I worry that maybe my son is not always nice with you,” Sara said. “Is he nice with you?”

“Yes, yes, he’s nice to me, he’s my best friend,” I said. I did not want to tell her how things had strained between Aviv and me, but maybe she already knew. We never went out any more, never did the kinds of things we’d done in New York. We hardly ever went to a movie, or out for cappuccino and cheesecake, or for a walk through the agricultural fields, that place on the outskirts of town where I’d smoked and cried on a rock among the pansies. We hardly left home for anything apart from Aviv attending classes at school and my afternoon runs, as if waiting in limbo until his semester ended and we could get back to New York.

Sara cupped her knitting in her lap. She looked at me for a long while without speaking. She gave me the kind of look my mother would give me when she worried that I was heading down a path that would hurt me. “I had to learn to be strong,” Sara said. “Strong like a good Israeli girl has to be strong. We have no time for crying. If we are crying, then we will cry every day. Yes, the war is over, but only for now. Tomorrow will come something new. Always, always something new. So I learn, I learn not to cry. And I am strong now so I can survive, you see?”

I sniffed and nodded my head. “Yes, I want to be strong.”

I wanted to endure the war, the kibbutz, Israel. All of it. But it felt like a litmus test, and I was failing, turning basic blue instead of acidic pink.