The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

  This time, the first thing Giora said after his secretary transferred the call was “Othni, what’s this I’m hearing about Japanese kamikazes running around over there?”

  Jenia Freud was summoned to Othniel’s home that same evening. Together, he and Hilik had constructed a detailed action plan, a stage-by-stage takedown of the mole, the good cop and the bad cop and all that. Jenia cracked in the first minute.

  Othniel and Hilik glared intensely as the math teacher sobbed in front of them, spouting fragmented apologies and excuses.

  “Jenia,” Othniel demanded, and she raised frightened eyes. “Go on home. We’ll do some thinking and figure out how to right this situation. Meanwhile, you stay quiet.”

  She left the trailer in tears, her hands covering her face, and Hilik and Othniel exchanged meaningful looks.

  The Soul

  Gabi returned to the trailer, pricked up his ears—was Roni around? The silence reassured him, but then he heard the toilet flush. He sat down in the living room and took a religious book from the shelf. He didn’t look up when Roni sighed and lay down on the sofa, his bed.

  For several long minutes, not a word was said between them.

  Gabi thought about Uman, the trip he had forgone. The dream. How much he craved the experience, the closeness to Rabbi Nachman. Abandoned for the sake of his brother. Man is the fruit of joy, and without joy there can be no faith, but where, where’s the joy? Gabi went to Jerusalem that day, thinking he could manage to find a way after all. He visited the travel agency, the bank. Realized he didn’t have a hope. It was $1,265 for a basic five-day vacation package, plus a visa, plus transportation from the airport, plus food. It would cost less if it were not Rosh Hashanah, but Rabbi Nachman said, “My whole mission is Rosh Hashanah . . .”

  He couldn’t and also didn’t want to take out a loan. He didn’t want to have to work the entire year to cover the cost of the trip. He added up all he had given Roni. He was his brother, flesh of his flesh, he shouldn’t think that way. He tried to read verses from the Mishnah but couldn’t concentrate, rested the open book on his chest, and closed his eyes.

  Roni picked up on the energy flowing from Gabi. When he chose to break the silence, the first thing he said was “I’ll get you the money, don’t worry. It’s on the way. Shame you didn’t mention that Rosh Hashanah comes early this year . . .”

  Gabi, in response, reached out his palm and waited. Roni looked at him without speaking. Gabi waited. His palm remained empty of money. “If you want,” he finally said, “put four thousand shekels down here right now. But without talking. Without saying ‘soon.’ Without promising that orders are about to start coming in or that you’re going off to the bank to arrange a loan or that Rosh Hashanah comes early this year.”

  Roni looked at the outstretched hand.

  “Put four thousand shekels down here,” Gabi said. “Now. You’re always telling me that I should be doing the things I truly want to do, so here goes. That’s what I truly want. Show me the money, and if you can’t, get out of here. Because if I don’t go to Uman over Rosh Hashanah, I won’t be able to live with you in this trailer for a single day more. This is my home and you invaded it and I accepted you without a word and with love and maybe I’m not good enough, not strong enough, not loving enough, but I can’t take it any longer. Either I go to Uman or you leave me be.”

  Roni looked into his brother’s tearful eyes, his outstretched hand, and stood up. He put on a shirt, pulled down the suitcase he had stashed on the top shelf of the closet, and began tossing his belongings inside. Without a word, he collected them from around the house, put them in the suitcase, and zipped it shut. Went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Gabi remained in the same position, his hand out in front of him, as if he was giving him another chance, wasn’t retracting the offer. He should have told him to stop, to stay, but he couldn’t. After the glass of water, Roni returned to the living room, gripped the handle of the suitcase, and started wheeling it toward the door. Not another word was said. A gust of wind slammed the door shut, shaking the trailer’s slender frame.

  * * *

  There are some days when enough is enough, when the waters rise up to flood the soul, there’s something in the air, something in the wind—and something, of course, in the waters and the soul. Because at the same time the waters slowly rose up in Gabi’s soul; at the same time Roni headed out, wheeling a suitcase along Ma’aleh Hermesh C.’s ring road, without a clue as to where he would go; at the same time the waters collected and trickled into the soul of Shaulit, and as a result—and only as a result and in that order—the soul of Nir, leading them both a bleak assessment concerning the future of their life together; at the same time the defense minister of the State of Israel received yet another angry call from the State Department and realized that the waters had risen up to flood his wounded, war-scarred soul.

  At the very same time, the waters approached like those of a swift-flowing alpine river after a sweltering summer has melted the last year’s snows, and would soon come crashing down like an ill-fated waterfall on the tender souls of Nachum, Raya, Shimshon (Shimi), and Tehila (Tili) Gotlieb. Roni was still walking down the road as an old edition of the Washington Post—the same infamous edition—tumbled along in the quiet twilight wind. Roni didn’t notice the newspaper, but he might have heard Tili Gotlieb’s cries.

  “What happened? What happened?” Raya cried as her daughter and son came crashing through the door like a gust of wind in a storm. Tili opened her small mouth, which was missing two front milk teeth along its bottom jaw, gasping for air. “What happened? What happened?” Tili finally found the air and released it in the form of a long and violent sob. “What happened, Shimi? What happened to her?”

  “Condi bit her,” Shimi said.

  “What, where?” She picked Tili up, wiped her tears away, soothed her. “Where, show me, sweetie.” Tili pointed to her ankle. Raya raised her eyes and encountered the gaze of her husband, Nachum. Her head shook from side to side in despair. He responded with a somber stare and knew the waters had arrived.

  “That’s Othniel’s dog,” he said to her, the implication being, Listen, there isn’t going to be a state commission of inquiry into this, there isn’t going to be an apology, there isn’t going to be any quarantining or punishing or educating about pets, because it’s the sheriff ’s dog, and no one lays a hand on the hilltop sheriff.

  Raya dressed the wound. Tili’s sobs subsided into snivels. Shimi went off to play with blocks in a corner of the room, struggling to erect towers on the uneven floor. Talking about waters rising up. They hadn’t had rain for months, but a thin and persistent stream of water from a leak in one of the pipes had made its way to the same corner, and the PVC flooring had swelled and cracked and warped into mountains and valleys. Nice perhaps for a game with a train, but not for blocks, or for positioning a sofa or lampstand.

  “She needs a shot,” Raya said to Nachum, implying, Look, this place, with all due respect, as if the fact that it’s harsh and basic isn’t enough, the fact that we as newcomers are on the bottom rung of the status ladder and that if we’ve been bitten by the dog of the man on the very top rung we have no right to complain; as if it’s not enough that the work is hard and the traveling long and the people few—it doesn’t even offer basic services like a clinic.

  Nachum didn’t respond. What could he have said?

  “I want to take her to the clinic.”

  “Where will you go at this time of the day?” he asked, and looked at his watch.

  “I can’t take it any longer, Nachum.” That was the moment the waters found their way and completed their journey to Raya’s soul. “I can’t take it any longer. Just give me a clinic. Give me a village administration, Nachum.”

  The husband looked at his wife and daughter. His hair and beard were scruffy and dense, both cropped just beyond what could be considered short. His face was narrow and long like his body and nose, which served as a base for a
thin aluminum frame—selected as suitable by Raya—that surrounded the lenses of the glasses. The optical store he was trying to establish in Ma’aleh Hermesh A. wasn’t taking off. He was patient, but sometimes he wondered what for. He motioned in a manner that shifted the glasses on the bridge of his nose without actually touching them and said, “Give me rabbis. Give me a daily portion. Give me three prayer services with a minyan.”

  Tili was smiling by then. Her parents looked at each other.

  “Give me a grocery store. Give me a bus into town. Give me a kindergarten and a preschool and a school.”

  “Give me an air conditioner. Give me stone walls. Give me hot water.”

  Nachum looked out through the screen window toward the Hermesh Stream cliff face, and beyond it to the homes of the Yeshua settlement. This kind of life didn’t suit everyone. They supported them wholeheartedly, their right and its realization. But from afar—at demonstrations, in petitions, at the polls. The newspaper continued to tumble in the wind down the road along the edge of the cliff face.

  “Give me a library. Women’s evenings. Proper parties for the holidays.

  “Give me a community center. Give me a swimming pool.

  “Give me shows for the children. Dancing classes and judo.

  “A babysitter.

  “Yes, a babysitter.”

  Raya Gotlieb smiled at her husband. She knew the business wasn’t going to work. She had been in the store twice that week, helping with the office work, waiting with Nachum for customers to come in. They were told they’d get some from the settlement, from neighboring settlements, from Jerusalem, even. The percentage of people with glasses among the religious was twice that of the general population. But there were only a handful here. And they were thrifty, went to the Halperin Optics discount center at the Malcha Mall. They were told they needed to be patient, that thousands of new settlers were on their way. But this government, those Americans. Raya shifted her gaze from her husband to the tiny kitchen.

  “Give me a normal kitchen. With a normal-size oven. A normal-size fridge.”

  “And a normal floor?”

  “Definitely.” Raya looked at the linoleum-free square on the floor of their kitchen. Over the past months, the glue that had been under the linoleum had attracted dust, leaves, webs, and nests. Life-forms could be detected in there. Raya gave up on cleaning it. She grew accustomed to the sound of shoes sticking and releasing. She accepted the empty square, the void, as an integral part of her abode. The mystery had been solved just a few days earlier: she was talking to Shaulit Rivlin on the playground, and the conversation went on for quite some time—the usual topics, children and kindergartens and breast-feeding and cooking—and when the heat rose and the two women looked for shade, they slowly began pushing their baby carriages from the playground to the ring road, and when they approached the Rivlins’ home, Shaulit invited her to stay and they sat on the swing bench in the yard while the older children played inside and sounded content.

  Shaulit didn’t tell Raya about her moribund relationship with her husband. And Raya didn’t say a word to Shaulit about her general despair with life on the hilltop. The two enjoyed the conversation, supported each other with more than just words, just by listening. And then, while in the middle of breast-feeding, Shaulit needed a diaper and a pacifier and explained to Raya where she could find them inside the trailer. Raya went in and noticed a square of green linoleum that had been stuck down in the kitchen, cleaner and newer than the rest of the linoleum around it. She moved closer and checked and measured the length and width with her thumb and finger so she could compare later at home, though it wasn’t necessary, it was obvious.

  She didn’t say a word when she emerged with the diaper and pacifier, but back at home, after confirming her measurement with her finger and thumb, she told Nachum and he looked at her in disbelief and then grew angry and said, “I’m going over there right now. I’ll rip it off their floor. I’ll show that scoundrel.”

  Raya, however, smiled indifferently and said, “Let it go, Nachum, it doesn’t matter now,” because by then she knew they wouldn’t be staying long at that outpost, in that trailer, in that kitchen, with the partial floor.

  The Vomiting

  “Yakir!”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Do me a favor, do a search on your Internet for some Japanese sect or group that . . .”

  “That what?”

  “That . . . I don’t know. Supports the idea of a Greater Israel? Likes Arabs? God knows, is looking for something here . . .”

  Yakir did a search. There’s the Makuya sect in Japan, they’re Israel lovers. But Othniel had met some nice tourists from the Makuya, and those businessmen didn’t appear to be connected to the sect. So Yakir searched some more. There were all sorts of right-wing neo-fascist movements. There were several terror groups. There were organizations opposed to the regime, opposed to minorities of various kinds, including Arabs. When he typed in the word Japanese, followed by Judea and Samaria, he found, among the slime that Google presented, a short report on an unfamiliar website, with fluctuating numbers and green and red graphs at the top and bottom of the page. He showed the report to his father, and Othniel narrowed his eyes, trailed a thick finger—callused and yellow-nailed from the work in the fields—across the small flickering letters, and mumbled as he read:

  Japanese Farming Machinery Company

  Penetrates Israeli Olive Oil Market

  Japanese company Matsumata (MATS—Dow Jones and Nikkei) has announced plans to enter the Israeli olive oil market. The Japanese giant, whose operations include the manufacture of electronic devices and engineering and agricultural machinery, has branched out into the field of food imports and exports. Olive oil has become popular among the middle and upper classes in Japan, Korea, and China. These countries have also seen an increasing consumer awareness of the advantages of organic food and the benefits of olive oil in terms of reducing cholesterol and fighting cancer. Matsumata employees reviewed olive groves in various locations in the Mediterranean basin, and the company has displayed particular interest in Palestinian groves. The European Union and the Japan International Cooperation Agency previously announced a special program of support for the Palestinian economy, wherein investors receive tax breaks and favorable financing. Thanks to this program, Palestinian olives may be cheaper than the European olives, despite the security situation. Furthermore, for millions of Christians in East Asia, the significance of olive oil from the Holy Land . . .

  Othniel’s finger moved away from the screen. “It’s killing my eyes,” he said to his son. “Where does it mention Ma’aleh Hermesh?”

  “Ma’aleh Hermesh isn’t mentioned. Only Judea and Samaria.”

  “So what’s it got to do with us?”

  “I didn’t say it has anything to do with us. You did. It only says they’re looking for olives from Arabs in Judea and Samaria.”

  “Anti-Semites,” Othniel said. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he took it out and went into the yard to talk. Yakir continued to browse quickly through the article—the phrases machine equipment, regional olive presses, and cans of tuna jumped out at him from the screen, but the financial terms exhausted him. He listened to make sure his father was still engrossed in his call and, heart pounding, returned to Second Life.

  He went into Revival virtual region. King Meir rushed over in welcome. “Where’ve you been, champ?” he asked, and reached out for a handshake. If sensations could be conveyed on Second Life, King Meir would have deemed Yakir’s handshake weak and limp.

  “You won’t believe it,” continued the bearded and yellow-T-shirted character in the speech bubbles floating above his head, “things have gone crazy, there’ve been demonstrations, they want to kick us out. I think the people who run Second Life are looking for me.”

  Yakir panicked. Looking? Soon would come the days of repentance and the Day of Judgment, but King Meir was rejoicing, and the other friends were excited, spoke about
the ban, the curses, the Arabs’ pathetic attempts at retaliation. They wanted to continue, to intimidate, to blow things up, to show the Arabs who they were. But Yakir couldn’t share their fervor. He was worried. He didn’t want to get into trouble. Didn’t want anyone showing up at the door, or anything arriving by e-mail, accusing him of causing destruction, disturbing the peace, breaking Internet rules of conduct. Not only that, as hard as he tried, he derived no joy from the bombing of the mosque. He struggled to understand why he had done it, and for whom—who are these people, his so-called friends, an odd collection of guys from where? Texas? Germany? The neighboring settlement? Why blow up a mosque, a place of worship? He was a person of faith, who visited a place of worship all the time.

  King Meir must have sensed something because he asked, “What’s up, Yakir? Everything okay?” If Second Life could have displayed facial expressions, Yakir’s friends would have been looking at a pale, agonized face. He heard his father bid farewell on the phone with wishes for a good year and inscription in the Book of Life. Inscription in the Book of Life—how would he look his Creator in the eye? How would he be rewarded with inscription in the Book of Life? He had committed a crime, sinned, and now his punishment would come. If you could have seen someone’s eyes on Second Life, the exultant, messianic Jews on Revival would have been looking at frantic eyes, racing back and forth like a lab rat’s.

  His father’s footsteps approached, and Yakir left Second Life, fled, shut down the computer, dropped to his knees, and quickly disconnected the Internet cable, the power cable, and just as he was asked, “Yakir, what are you doing down there? Something happen to the computer?” a light brown stream speckled with bits of meat, pasta, potatoes, and chunks of fruit shot out of his mouth, and another, and another, with his chest heaving violently and a terrible tightening of his throat. His eyes welled with tears as the waves rose up and burst forth from within him, emptied his stomach until nothing remained, and he continued to retch and cramp up and eject awful-tasting bile, and Othniel laid his large and warm hands on his overwhelmed son, one tenderly stroking the back of his neck, the other offering a glass of water, and all he said was “Small sips, small sips, small sips.”