The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

  His eyes clouded over.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asked Ariel, who had been waiting on the line all this time. “I thought we’d settled that issue by now.”

  “The quality of the oil from millstones is inferior to that from modern presses with centrifuges. My expert says no one uses them these days for good reason. They’re dirty, you need more people to operate them, they get moldy, and the oil acquires a more acidic taste, an unpleasant aftertaste, it goes bad. He says the Arabs are fixed in their ways, they don’t spray against the olive fruit fly—”

  “Of course they don’t spray! It’s organic! Ariel, forget about the pretentious Tel Aviv experts! Despite all their fancy explanations, Musa’s oil tastes way better than the lot of them, and precisely because of everything that has touched on those stones over the years. Do you truly believe that anyone gives a damn about centrifuges when tasting olive oil? Who cares? Bring them a flavorful, cheap oil, tell them it’s organic, made in the traditional way, tried and tested through the ages. It’ll sell like hotcakes.”

  Silence at the other end of the line.

  “What’s your problem with the deal with Musa?” Roni asked.

  “I don’t want to do anything illegal.”

  “Just a moment,” Roni said. He threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, slipped his feet into his flip-flops, went out, and walked to the playground, sat down on a bench. A handful of children were still swinging and sliding before darkness fell.

  “We’re not breaking any law,” he whispered into the mouthpiece. “We’re doing business.” He felt a tremor of déjà vu down his spine. Someone had said the very same words to him not too long ago. “That’s what’s so great about the territories,” he continued. “There are no rules, you can make them up as you go along. It’s so cheap here, it’s another country. The Chinese produce for the Americans, but many people don’t realize that the territories can produce for Israel. The genius of simplicity.”

  “You want to label it extra-virgin without receiving the Olive Board’s stamp of approval.”

  “Everyone does it. Didn’t you read about it in Yedioth Ahronoth? So we won’t mention the Olive Board. We’ll simply label it extra-virgin. You know what, we’ll write it in English only.” He removed his sunglasses to gaze at Gitit Assis’s long, black hair as she pushed her brother Shuv-el on the swings. Talk about extra-virgin, he thought.

  “Did you find a boutique that will buy from us in cash?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to do this properly, with books and all?”

  The sunset was in its full glory, accompanied by a strengthening wind. Roni scratched behind his ear. “I don’t want to get involved with the tax and VAT authorities until we’re certain that the business is going somewhere. It’s not breaking the law, it’s a running-in period, until we find our footing and know if it’s worth the effort. What do you want, to get started with all the red tape, and to set up a company, and register, and begin paying taxes to those shits before we’ve seen a single shekel?”

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “Jesus Christ! Lighten up.”

  “I don’t know, Roni. I need to think about it.”

  “What’s to think about? Come visit again. First of all, there’s a check waiting here for you—my share, which you rightly requested. Besides, you need to loosen up a little, you know. It isn’t so scary the second time, you’ll see. Five minutes with the desert spread out before you and you’ll be talking differently. You’re so, so, soooo tight-assed down there.”

  “And what if we don’t find a boutique who wants to sell it? What if they find out that it’s oil pressed by some Arab and his donkey?”

  “That’s no way to speak about Roni and Musa’s Oil. Put a drop on their tongues and then let’s see what the centrifuges do for them. Tried and tested for five thousand years, nothing beats millstones!” The last sentence, said in a higher tone, caused Shaulit Rivlin to look up from little Zvuli’s baby carriage. Roni smiled and waved at her; she smiled in return and resumed her singing to the infant. “Ariel, you’re wearing me out, man. As they say in Spanish, muqa-muqa, one thing at a time. Come visit, let’s discuss it when we’re chilled. Then you can go to the boutiques. I’d like to see the boutique that doesn’t take it at this price.”

  “You know what? Maybe. I’ll see when I can come by.”

  Roni chuckled. “I knew this place had grabbed you, you settler boy, you!” He hung up and thought, It hasn’t grabbed me. He was still bristling from the power outage and slow Internet service, and he wanted a haircut and a Diet Coke in a glass bottle and a cigarette and cashew nuts. But where would he get them now? How did people live like this?

  The Doubts

  Evening settled on the hilltop. Cars passed through the gate and guard post—drivers returning from their daily routines, attending classes and teaching and visits to the hardware store in the city. They waved to the smiling Yoni, pulled up outside their homes, and retrieved their shopping bags from the backseat. The wind picked up when the light faded, in perfect harmony. At this time of the year, the wind can be a real nuisance, rattling the trailers, the swing sets in Mamelstein Playground, the Donald Duck in Gabi’s yard, passing under the floors, through the hole where a window once was in the now-torn-up chassis of a Peugeot 104, rocking the traffic sign near the synagogue, flapping the plastic sheeting of Othniel’s mushroom greenhouse. The wind carried the lonely, angry barks of Beilin and Condi and the cries of the hungry or tired or hurting infants. The wind smacked against Roni’s flesh—he had stepped outside in a T-shirt to take a call—and it caught Gitit’s beautiful hair. It blew up grains of sand and dust, formed small whirlwinds in the distance, swirled clouds in the sky, and sometimes carried a few errant drops of wet rain.

  Mothers and big sisters played with the little ones and read stories and began bathing them, together or one by one. The men tossed their newspapers on armchairs and sat down for a while, hugged whichever child chose to jump on them, drank a cup of tea. Those who performed manual labor washed off the day’s troubles and dirt. Others lifted their fingers from their keyboards and rubbed their eyes.

  On the way to evening service at the synagogue, they hugged their prayer books and themselves, stooped but determined. Some attended the late-afternoon service before the sun went down, and then went out for a cigarette break on the wooden bench newly arrived from Jerusalem, made inquiries about the bulldozers, and verified gossip. They raised their voices and lowered their heads against the wind, patted down their skullcaps and hurried back inside, and when the final prayer service for the day ended, they returned home to join their wives and children.

  Nehama Yisraeli prepared omelets for her husband, Hilik, and her sons, four-year-old Boaz and two-year-old Shneor. Hilik had promised to help out more with the children ahead of the birth of their new baby, particularly at dinnertime. She had hatched the idea of organizing a biweekly Torah study for the women of the hilltop, and he had urged her on, declaring he’d take care of the boys. But Hilik was caught up with the evacuation threat and the absorption of the Gotlieb family and everything, and feeling sudden inspiration to make some headway with his research, he made several trips to the university. He had started to read an excellent book, Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night, which beautifully captured the mood of communal settlement and land redemption that swept the Galilee in the 1930s.

  And so, in a state of advanced pregnancy, after a day at the kindergarten watching over seven small children, Nehama found herself on her feet beating eggs for an omelet. Everything’s in God’s hands, she thought, and smiled wearily, recalling how the children that morning, led by her Boaz and Emunah Assis, had tried to sing “Lecha Dodi.”

  “Just give me two minutes,” Hilik said on returning from the prayer service. He lay back in the armchair and the boys jumped on him.

  “Take your time, rest easy,” she said. “Boys, tell Dad what you did at kindergarten today.” They told him. He was
suitably amazed. After dinner and with the boys put to bed, she tidied the mess in the kitchen and living room, washed the dishes, and was on her back in bed by nine. “I’m dead,” she said to her husband just seconds before sleep took her. He folded his glasses and placed them on the bookcase, then removed his skullcap and placed it folded alongside them, and lay down beside her, and caressed her ball-like stomach, and while deciding whether to read the op-ed page in Yedioth Ahronoth or a couple of pages of Koestler’s book, he succumbed to his deep breaths and slipped into the abyss of sleep.

  * * *

  The chaos in the Assis family had reached new heights. Shuv-el was sitting on Gitit’s lap and they recited the customary blessing over produce from the land and she tried to feed him salad that he didn’t want. All he wanted was “orange juith,” and he sipped from it after it was poured. Othniel was eating salad with a spoon and speaking on the phone with his distributor, Moran. “Yakir!” he yelled. “How much labaneh is on order for tomorrow? Oops, no, Yakir, I mean cherry tomatoes. How much for tomorrow? What? Both together? Can you all keep it down a little? Hananiya!”

  “Just a sec,” Yakir shouted back. He was on the Internet, in Second Life, the multiplayer game in which everyone designs a personal avatar that roams through a virtual world, accumulates items—from shoelaces to a home—and interacts and forms bonds with other characters. Yakir’s avatar on Second Life was a settler who looked a little like him with the addition of a beard, and he had found a number of friends, like-minded, religious Zionist Jews, and together they’d settled on an island they’d named Revival, and they’d erected a synagogue and prayed and spoke and roamed the world keeping the flame alive.

  “Why’s Yakir on the computer?” his mother, Rachel, asked his father. “He needs to eat dinner. Yakir! Come eat, get off the computer!”

  “Just a minute,” Othniel responded. “Moran’s on the line. It’s important!”

  Yakir’s friends were about to visit Islam-Online, one of the Muslim sectors on Second Life, to mess with the Arabs a little. He excused himself, logged out, quickly scanned the farm’s orders, and made it to the table just as Hananiya pushed Emunah off her chair and her head slammed into the table leg, causing her to burst into tears, openmouthed and exposing a missing tooth. Shuv-el, in a gesture of kindness, then asked to get down from Gitit’s knees, and Dvora suggested Yakir try “the excellent salad,” to which he replied, “What else is there?” and Gitit said, “Yogurt,” and Rachel said, “Hananiya, apologize right now!”

  * * *

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do this Sabbath about my sister,” Neta Hirschson said to Jean-Marc. “She eats only strictly kosher food, mehadrin. Do you think I should ask her about it? Perhaps we should ask the rabbi what to do?”

  “Or maybe we should simply buy mehadrin,” he replied hesitantly. Jean-Marc, in fact, had been born into a completely secular family, in Yamit. His father, a vintner who emigrated from France, and his mother, the daughter of a World War II partisan and a kibbutznik father, were among the founders of Ma’aleh Hermesh A. in the 1970s.

  “And what about the dishes?” Neta asked, complicating matters.

  “Ask the rabbi.”

  After dinner Neta made coffee and cut some slices of cake. “Do you think we should introduce her to Gavriel?” she asked.

  “Which Gavriel?”

  “Nehushtan.”

  “Gabi? Are you crazy? He’s a reborn.”

  “You’re a reborn, too,” said Neta, the daughter of the rabbi of Ofra and a mother who helped establish Sebastia, the very first West Bank settlement.

  “Exactly, your poor parents. Do you want to burden them with another one? Besides, your parents knew mine, and me. It’s not like I was a reborn after a mysterious past.”

  “I think he’s quite sweet, actually. A little quiet. He has faith. How bad could his past be? The story with his son is awfully sad. He looks like a really good guy.”

  “Divorced,” Jean-Marc said, continuing to play the devil’s advocate.

  “That’s life. What’s done is done. Look at him now, the way he’s taken in that strange brother of his. So tolerant.”

  “He’s a good guy, I’m not disagreeing. But not for your sister. He’s too old. She still has time, doesn’t she?”

  “She’ll be twenty-four soon.”

  “Oh,” Jean-Marc said, clutching his coffee mug as he contemplated. “I see. Okay, let me think if I know anyone.”

  “Never mind. Let’s first see what we’re going to do about this mehadrin business,” Neta said, and then flashed an inviting smile. “I was at the mikveh today,” she continued. “Instead of a new son-in-law, what do you say to giving my parents a grandchild?” Jean-Marc smiled. But his smile soon faded after Neta turned around and walked into the bedroom. They had been trying since their wedding, for more than a year, and not only had the act itself turned mechanical, businesslike, devoid of any tenderness and intimacy, Neta had begun coming apart at the seams. She so desperately wanted children, and in time her want had become an obsession, consumed her entirely and sometimes boiled over—in the form of complaints against Jean-Marc, angry online exchanges with leftists, verbal abuse hurled at soldiers or other annoying government officials who came to the hilltop. Sometimes—it usually happened the day her period insisted on showing up, an unwanted guest whom no one had invited—silence, a turning in on herself, to the point even of canceling beauty treatments she had set up with clients, closing the shutters, and sliding quietly between the sheets. And now, to the task at hand.

  * * *

  Raya Gotlieb sat on a plastic chair in the corner of the room, unable to hold back the tears. “Is this what we left our home for, Nachi?” she asked her husband. They had just put the children down to sleep. Nachum was half lying, half sitting on the mattress in their bare living room. He wanted to be positive, but he didn’t have a good answer. The list of problems with their “new” trailer was endless: the missing shower door caused a mini-flood in the bathroom, not to mention the lack of privacy, and there was no showerhead, which made for an erratic stream of water and yet more flooding. The kitchen sink was missing its hot water tap, and Raya washed the dishes in cold water only. There were no shutters in the children’s room, so Nachum transferred the ones from the main bedroom, which was then filled with light every morning at six. Perhaps the most humiliating was the square piece missing from the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Who would think of stealing a piece of linoleum? Nachi Gotlieb stared at the vacant square, the sticky edges of which had already collected bits of dirt. The nerve.

  Their possessions were brought in little by little in Nachum’s car because Othniel had asked them not to use a large truck so as not to attract unwanted attention at a sensitive time such as this. They had to watch out for the sector’s brigade commander and the company commander, who were frequently in the area, the soldiers at the guard post who would report the arrival of a moving van, and then, of course, you had the left-wing groups and Civil Administration inspectors, and—Othniel paused, looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice—we may have an informant in our midst who’s monitoring and reporting our activities, and the truth, too, is that the neighbors from Givat Yeshua won’t be too pleased to hear that a family has moved into the trailer that was intended for their community and is awaiting a transportation permit from the Defense Ministry. It’s therefore best, Othniel explained, to keep a low profile. So Nachi drove back and forth, to and from Shiloh, taking days off work, packing the car to the brim. But some things simply wouldn’t fit in the Nissan Winner—the washing machine, for instance. So Raya had been doing the washing in the sink, without hot water, or at friends’ houses in Ma’aleh Hermesh B., but she no longer felt comfortable doing so. They were still without a refrigerator and an oven, so they tried to get by with a small icebox and an electric hot plate, which blew the generator every evening.

  “But the people are really nice, they brought cakes and toys for the kids,
and there was a request in the newsletter to all those who took things to return them,” Nachum said in an effort to lift his wife’s spirits. “And Shimi and Tili love the playground.” Raya responded with another bout of sobbing, and he knew why. Back in Shiloh, their former home stood opposite an amazing playground where the children would play unsupervised for hours every day.

  “I just hope and pray this god-awful wind doesn’t keep them up tonight, too,” she lamented.

  Nachum was an optician. He loved the fashion part of the job—an aspect of the business that Raya helped with by choosing the frame catalogs and suiting frames to faces when she was in the store—but he also loved the medical element, helping to mend the body, allowing people to see the world as it is.

  “The nature here is stunning,” he said, peering into the black night through the torn netting in the window. “You can’t enjoy the view but complain about the wind. You have to see the big picture,” he added, his voice filled with tenderness.

  * * *

  Roni went out for a walk and stopped to listen to the radio for a few minutes with Yoni at the sentry post. “Don’t you ever go home?” he asked the soldier. “You seem to be here all the time.”

  Yoni, paging through an issue of the men’s magazine Blazer, smiled. “I’m home this Sabbath at last.”