The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

  “Good evening,” Roni said.

  Othniel Assis smiled. “Well,” he said, “did you find your brother, the saint? Was it him?”

  “Yes, yes, thanks.”

  “We’re going over to see what’s up with the old generator. Wanna tag along? We may need a helping hand.”

  Roni Kupper followed Othniel and his son Yakir to the entrance to the outpost. Yoni was already there, shining a flashlight, and one of the other soldiers was restarting the generator with a sharp tug on a cord.

  “How many more years will we have to wait before we’re connected to the electricity grid?” Othniel growled as lights flickered on in the nearby homes. “There are women and children here; they shake in fear every time the generator goes down.”

  Roni continued to tag along behind the group, which headed back from the gate toward the center of the settlement. “Did you know anything about a new trailer?” Othniel asked Yoni as they passed by the latest arrival.

  “No,” the soldier responded.

  “Did Omer not say anything about it?”

  “Omer didn’t say a word aside from telling me to post the new orders. He was with you all the time.”

  “True,” Othniel said, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. “Interesting.” He took the flashlight from Yoni and directed the beam at the silent structure. “Very interesting,” he mumbled, and then walked around the trailer. “He simply off-loaded it here without a word to anyone. There’s no infrastructure here, no preparations for water or power or sewage. Hello there?” Othniel called out. “Anyone home?” He approached the door and knocked. There was no door handle.

  Roni bade farewell to the group and continued walking. Minutes later, he noticed that he had left the confines of the outpost and that the darkness now weighed heavier around him, and he was overcome with a sense that civilization was a step too far away. He turned and walked back. The sound of the guitar grew louder, the same slow, sad melody. Roni thought for a moment that he recognized the song, but the playing suddenly ceased.

  “Halt!” came a sudden instruction from the darkness. Roni turned to see a thin young man standing some ten meters away from him. It took him a second or two to recognize the glint of a weapon, pointed directly at him, and another few seconds to see the guitar beneath it. “Or I’ll shoot,” the young man added, trying to disguise the tremble in his voice.

  “No need for shooting,” Roni responded, raising his arms. He was tired and unfocused, and couldn’t decide whether to be amused by the fact that a young man with a guitar was now pointing a gun at him, or to panic. Despite the cold, he could feel sweat oozing from the pores on various places over his body. He replied confidently nevertheless. “I’m just walking around, having a look,” he said.

  “Why would you want to be walking around here? What’s there to look at, especially in the dark?” The young man approached him, still hesitantly.

  “Perhaps you should get that thing out of my face.”

  The young man’s hand remained motionless. “First you need to tell me who you are,” he said. “The generator goes down and a suspicious stranger suddenly appears. I have to follow procedures.”

  “I’m simply visiting my brother here for a short while.”

  “Who’s your brother?”

  “Gabi. Gabi Kupper.”

  “Gabi Kupper? There’s no one here by that name.” The barrel of the pistol moved a few centimeters closer to Roni’s forehead.

  “Ah, yes, he changed his name. Gavriel . . . Umm, Gavriel . . . Shit, I don’t—”

  “Gavriel Nehushtan? So why didn’t you just say so? Yes, I can see a resemblance,” the young man said, lowering the weapon. “It is subtle, but it’s there. Would you like a cookie?”

  The cookies, the young man went on, were baked by Jenia Freud, a math teacher who lived in the trailer adjacent to the gate at the entrance to the outpost with her husband, Elazar, a lieutenant in the reserves who worked in computers and had grown up in a settlement on the other side of Jerusalem. Jenia, he continued, was in the habit of making cookies for the soldiers and leaving them out on a tray at the guard tower.

  “Not that I’m a soldier,” said Nir Rivlin, armed with a guitar and pistol, as Roni enjoyed the coconut-chocolate cookies. Rivlin gave him the lay of the land. There were usually four to six soldiers stationed at the outpost; one of them, Yoni, was there permanently, while the others came and went. The soldiers did most of the guarding, but the residents helped out on occasion at night. Guard duty was divided equally among all the men, although there were some who paid others to take their shifts—men with families would usually pay the young single men, who had more time on their hands, to replace them. “Not that I’m single,” Rivlin stressed. He had a family but was happy to guard; besides, he didn’t have the money to pay someone to take his shift. He was studying to be a chef at the Kosher Culinary Arts School in Jerusalem, and he was being tested that week on his knife work, advanced dicing and slicing. The week before, there was a seminar on basic pastry making—quiches, crumble, yeast dough . . . Nir Rivlin rambled on until finally the exhausted Roni suggested, “Why don’t you play something?” Nir picked up the guitar and asked, “What would you like to hear?” Following a brief discussion, they agreed on Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

  They sat on a tattered sofa that someone had discarded and gazed up at the stars twinkling above the dark desert. The generator hummed monotonously.

  “Do the other guards pray and play music during their watch, too?” Roni asked.

  “To each his own,” Nir responded. “You can spend two hours walking around and pondering, and sometimes studying and praying. I play the guitar. Some watch DVDs on the laptop, or merely sit here with a cigarette and coffee. Sometimes you get a chance to chat with someone walking or driving by.”

  “And my brother?”

  “Gavriel? He’s a true saint. He always asks for the midnight shift and then recites the Tikkun Chatzot prayer. Do you know what that is? Have you heard ‘To declare your loving kindness in the morning, and your faithfulness every night’? You’re a nonbeliever through and through, right? Nighttime is the principal time for solitude, when the world rests from its troubles; the time to muster up the good from within the evil. Sometimes he stands in the guard tower and memorizes the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. And sometimes you can see him walking to the edge of the hilltop, with not another soul around, only him and the stars and the desert. Speaks to the Almighty’s desert. ‘In solitude, turn sadness into joy.’ Want a hit?”

  Nir reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a joint he had rolled before beginning his shift. He puffed on it noisily, exhaled a thin plume of smoke skyward, and passed it to Roni. “Grass. ‘How wonderful it would be if one could only be worthy of hearing the song of the grass. Each blade of grass sings out to God without any ulterior motive, and without expecting any reward. It is most wonderful to hear its song and worship God in its midst.’ Pretty good stuff, no?”

  The darkness lay thick and heavy, as it is wont to do far from big, illuminated cities. The outpost had no streetlights. They could hear frogs croaking, grasshoppers gnawing, crickets chirping, the occasional whinny from a horse in its stable (“That’s Killer, Jehu’s horse”), dogs barking in their yard (“Othniel’s dogs, Beilin and Condoleezza”), the wind rustling, the wailing cry of a baby (“Nefesh, perhaps, or Shuv-el”). At night, at the height of winter, Nir told Roni, the rain came down with deafening force, and the wind threatened to carry the trailers off into the heavens. The summer nights, meanwhile, meant weddings and parties and festivities in the neighboring village, and then the music would blast out loud, along with the beating of the darbukas, and singers would entertain the revelers of ever-higher octaves that rose up into the night sky, and on occasion there’d be a good dose of fireworks, too—primitive insofar as visual spectacles go, but impressively loud, thereby frightening Condi and Beilin and Killer and the young children into a long and loud symphony
of their own design, startling the men of the outpost from their slumber and causing them to reach frantically for their weapons, their hearts pounding.

  And then, too, particularly in the small, deep hours of the morning, there was the silence. When all were in their homes, after putting the children to bed, and dinner, and showers; after they had watched the news, and read, and finished off some work and housework, and had gone to sleep under thin ceilings, above which the stars shone boldly. Sleep brings a departure of the mind, its purification, and makes way for inspiration. During sleep, the soul rises to the next world, and sleep serves as the mind’s pathway.

  “I should get some sleep.” Roni yawned. “I’m still on American time, everything’s upside down.”

  Nir Rivlin turned to him with a look of surprise, as if he had forgotten Roni was there. He looked at his watch. “Almost midnight, the end of my shift!” he said, dipping his hand into his pocket to retrieve a piece of paper. “Let’s see who’s replacing me . . . Hah! Your dear brother! Thank God. Come, let’s go shake him from his dreams.”

  Approaching the trailer, they spotted Gabi stepping out into the darkness. Weary-legged, he shuffled across the hilltop in the biting cold, the coffee in the mug in his hand cooling rapidly. Carried on the wind came the sound of distant Arabic music.

  “Hey there, O righteous one,” Nir said.

  “Shalom, shalom,” Gabi’s weary voice responded. His gaze wandered back and forth between Nir Rivlin and his brother, Roni, and he stopped in his tracks for a few seconds before turning again to Nir. “How’s Shaulit doing?” he asked.

  “God be praised.”

  “When is she due?”

  “God willing. She’s just gone into her ninth month.”

  “Wow.” Gabi smiled. “I wonder if it’ll be a March or an April baby.”

  The three stood there in silence. Even Nir, who hadn’t stopped talking for the past two hours, appeared too tired to find another word to say.

  “Okay, off to bed, you guys. Good night.”

  The Morning

  When Gabi returned from morning prayers, Roni was still fast asleep in the living room. He laid down his tefillin bag quietly enough, but his brother woke to the noise of the teaspoon clinking against the side of the glass cup.

  “Good morning,” Gabi said. “Tea?”

  “Coffee,” his brother’s sleep-laden voice responded. “Wow! I couldn’t figure out where I was for a moment. I slept like a log!”

  “ ‘Sleep is sweet and good,’ ” Gabi said, quoting Rabbi Nachman. “It’s the silence.”

  Roni pulled out a cigarette from a light blue box. Gabi glanced at him cautiously. “Should I open a window?” the elder brother asked, but when Gabi stood up to open one, he continued, “Isn’t it too cold for an open window?”

  Gabi opened one nevertheless. “Listen, I don’t have much food; I didn’t know you were coming,” he said. “If I get to Ma’aleh Hermesh this morning, I’ll get some. But it’s Friday, there’s not much time.” An idea came to him. “Do you have a car, perhaps? I could take a quick drive before work.”

  “I have nothing,” Roni said.

  Gabi raised an eyebrow.

  “So, tell me, what’s this Gavriel Nehushtan all about?” Roni asked, releasing a plume of smoke through the netting in the window frame. The gray fumes drifted through gingerly, seemingly testing its boundaries.

  “It’s me.”

  “What’s you? The Gavriel, I get. What’s with the Nehushtan?”

  “Kupper in Hebrew is nehoshet. Didn’t you know? Our forefathers in Germany must have been coppersmiths. Copper is the strongest material in the world.”

  It was Roni’s turn to raise his eyebrows. Gabi looked at his brother’s body slumped limply in the armchair—no longer the muscular physique of old, but still manly, stubbled and thick-haired, a soft mane covering his dark-skinned chest. His brother was the broader of the two, shorter, and more hairy. A stranger might struggle to pick out any resemblance at first glance. Even though their brown eyes cut the same shape, Roni’s expressed warmth and playfulness, while Gabi had been told his own reflected caution and naïveté. Gabi continued, “Someone once told me that when the Ice Age returns at some point in the future—and it’ll happen for sure; after all, God spins nature in a cycle—the entire world will be covered by a layer of ice several kilometers deep. And the immense weight of this layer of ice will crush the whole world we know today into a thin layer, just a few centimeters thick. Everything will turn to dust. But if someone during that coming Ice Age were to dig deep into the heart of the earth and look at a cross section of that two-centimeter layer of what used to be humanity, they would see mostly copper. And that’s because we use so much of that material and it is so strong. Everything else will turn to dust, into nothing. But the copper will survive.”

  “And what is that supposed to say about our family? That we’re strong?” Roni laughed his small laugh. Gabi shrugged. “Did you change your name officially, at the Population Registry?”

  “No.”

  They drank in silence for several minutes. Then Gabi asked, “What do you mean by ‘I have nothing’? What’s happened?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Roni opened the screen and threw out his cigarette butt. “Not now,” he said. “We’ll find the time. Aren’t you off to work now?”

  “Yes, but I’d also like to know what has happened to my brother. And it’d be nice to know how long you intend to stay. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, no, everything’s great, nothing’s happened. I simply need to air myself out a little. Who’s that? That’s quite a look he has there,” Roni said, pointing at a picture the size of a large postcard that stood on one of the bookshelves, a black-and-white photograph of a bearded man wearing a furry hat.

  Gabi looked at the picture. “That’s Rabbi Kook, Ha-ra’aya,” he said, using the common Hebrew acronym for the revered Torah scholar.

  “Ha-ra’aya? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Such zeal, right?” Gabi responded, turning to face his brother again. “But why are you changing the subject? Is it ‘nothing’ or is it ‘a long story’?”

  Failing to elicit a response from his brother, Gabi went back into his bedroom, returned shortly afterward dressed in blue work clothes over his tzitzit, and sat down to lace up his heavy work shoes. He then smiled and stood up. “Okay, we’ll talk later. I really do need to get going.”

  “Don’t worry,” Roni said, “I won’t be a burden for long. I just need to chill, get back on my feet, and then move on. In any event,” he continued, getting up to put his head out the window and look around, “I haven’t got what it takes to live in a place like this for too long.”

  Gabi smiled. “Okay, I’m outta here. Have a good day.”

  “Have a good day, Gavriel Nehushtan!” Roni exclaimed, breaking into a loud laugh, but when the door shut behind Gabi, the smile on his face instantly disappeared.

  * * *

  “What an insane morning,” Gabi heard Shaulit Rivlin say to Nehama Yisraeli as he passed by the two expecting mothers and nodded in acknowledgment without looking at them directly. The morning sun felt good on the back of his neck. He walked by the new trailer and then the new playground just beyond it. God must be so righteous, he thought. If He had sent his brother to him on a day filled with new and joyous beginnings for the settlement, surely that must be a blessing. Something caught his eye. A small shoe. He picked it up off the playground grass. A Nimrod sandal, size 23. He took it over to the toddlers’ day-care center before continuing on to Othniel’s farm. Othniel was there already, standing outside with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun and the other holding a telephone to his ear. “Let’s get moving, Nehushtan!” he said, hastening Gabi along. “We need to prepare the crates for Moran. Just a minute, I’m on the phone.”

  Fridays were short workdays, and getting hold of anyone at a governme
nt ministry was no easy feat, but, thank God, Othniel Assis had the mobile telephone numbers of several influential individuals, the first being MK Uriel Tsur, who had spoken yesterday at the dedication ceremony for the playground.

  “Good morning, Uriel, Othniel here . . . Yes . . . Thank you . . . Tell me, do you know anything about this demarcation order we received yesterday? . . . Demarcation, demarcation . . . Captain Omer . . . Berkowitz, no, Levkovich . . . Yes, after the ceremony . . . Okay, thank you, thank you . . . But before Sabbath, right? Thank you, sir.”

  Othniel spent a fair deal of time on his phone that morning. Gavriel, meanwhile, worked alongside him, preparing the crates of vegetables and dairy products for Moran, their distributor. Regarding the new trailer, explained Natan Eliav, the secretary of Ma’aleh Hermesh A., who had personally made calls to Dov, to the council head, to the IDF Central Command, and to various other officials, apparently there had been a mistake. The new home was intended for a different outpost, Givat Yeshua, an extension of the Yeshua settlement on the other side of the wadi. After losing his way and failing to reach anyone on the phone, the truck driver simply off-loaded the trailer at the first seemingly vacant spot and departed.

  As it turned out, the removal of the trailer from the settlement would probably take some time. Yesterday, Natan Eliav continued, there was a transportation permit for the mobile structure, but there was no construction permit or approval for its connection to any infrastructure, which would have allowed for the home to be off-loaded and placed on the ground. Since then, apparently, a construction permit had come through with the help of their guys at the Housing and Construction Ministry, but the defense minister himself had intervened and was no longer willing to issue a second transportation permit. Someone must have gotten word to him, leaked something to him.