The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

  The business began turning a tidy profit. And despite the skeptical look on Oren Azulai’s face, Roni insisted that the two owners draw a modest salary and invest the rest back into the business. Oren went along with it because he could see the results, and realized that Roni’s vision, which was backed up by hard work and admirable diligence, though it might not have been precise and clear even to Roni himself, would take them forward. Azulai was smart enough not to intervene, a great business decision in its own right.

  Prosperity and growth were the signs of the time, and Tel Aviv teemed with young people and tourists and foreign investors and Russian immigrants and frazzled soldiers, each in his or her own way needing a glass of something, which Roni happily and competently provided. He moved into an apartment in a high-rise on Basel Street with a view of the sea and a sixty-square-meter balcony with a wooden deck, scored the best weed from acquaintances who did reserve military duty in Lebanon, and puffed sweet smoke into the warm skies of the Middle East, usually in the company of a pretty young girl. He cultivated a trendy beard and allowed his curls to grow.

  He worked hard—harder than he had ever worked before. Being a boss was a learning curve for a kibbutznik: managing finances, wages, income tax, and social security. Being tough, unpleasant. Maintaining a daily routine. In the morning, after a coffee and cigarette on the deck, he’d arrive alone, sit in the office, and go over the bills, the orders, and the calls, and receive suppliers. The first workers showed up toward noon, and the initial customers began trickling in. Afternoons he freed up for his studies. His second year suffered significantly due to the workload at the bar, but he didn’t want to stop school entirely and focused his efforts on those hours. He returned to the bar in the early evening, made sure everything was ready, and at some point lost track of time. Time stretched and whirled like a small tornado that came through the gates of Bar-BaraBush a little after nine and exited its doors after midnight: shards of memory, a conspicuous incident or two—usually shouting in the kitchen or a celebrity customer—and a general buzz in the air, sore feet, the smell of frothy beer at the pouring stations. The time he liked most came just before one. The pressure eased, but the place still teemed with people, who continued to pour in from cinemas, from restaurants, or after a long day at work. Those were his favorite customers. They had more time on their hands. That was when Roni took charge of the bar, poured, chatted, flirted. Invited customers to join him for a chaser on the house, and at some stage turned to fill his glass with water. If things were really quiet, he’d move to a barstool and cradle a glass of Scotch on the rocks between his fingers.

  The Drinkers

  He didn’t have friends. But in the small hours, the quiet ones, people came to sit with him. Customers he met there and who became regulars, random customers who passed through and whom he’d never see again. Colleagues from the restaurant and hospitality industry who talked business. And faces from the past: from the commando unit, from his kibbutz, from the surrounding kibbutzim. How they knew to go there, Roni didn’t have a clue. But they drank. And after they drank, they rambled on.

  Yifat came in one night. His sweet Yifat from high school who’d broken his heart. She was with another guy and ignored Roni, apart from a few glances. She came in the following day and apologized. She didn’t want to have to explain things to her boyfriend. They were serious, she said, and she didn’t want to jeopardize anything. She really hoped it would work out this time. She ate lunch and drank a little wine and told Roni that she was doing well. She had “found herself” in Tel Aviv, studied fashion at Shenkar, didn’t miss the kibbutz.

  “And I think that Yoav,” she said, “is the best thing that has ever happened to me. He has a band. Wow, it’s so weird for us to be sitting here and talking about it. You don’t mind, right? I’m sure you have lots of girlfriends.” She giggled.

  He glanced at his watch, bored, and told her he needed to head out for a while, she could join him if she liked.

  “Out for a while?” she asked.

  He showed her his apartment with the wooden deck and poured her another glass of wine. At some point she told him she wanted to tickle his funny beard, and they spent the next two hours in bed—since her childhood she had learned a few things, loosened up—until she looked at the alarm clock and said, her hair disheveled, “Wow, I have to get home,” and he never saw her again. He didn’t care.

  A few weeks later, as the night was winding down, Baruch Shani came into the bar. Holy shit, what happened to him? was Roni’s first thought. Baruch from the cattle, from the commando unit, Roni’s mentor, who’d transformed a few young girls on the kibbutz into women. Now—balding, unkempt, a strange twitch at the corner of his mouth—he drank with an unhealthy disposition. Not an end-of-the day drink to air out the thoughts, but drinking for the sake of drinking. He appeared to have been through a rough time; however, Baruch didn’t want to talk about it but rather about days gone by, and Roni didn’t press him, he had learned not to press, whoever comes by is welcome, whoever wants to talk can talk, and whoever wants to can keep quiet.

  After a few beers, Baruch recounted how he had slept with Orit from Roni’s class at school, when she was fourteen and Baruch twenty-three. It wasn’t news to Roni—he remembered seeing Orit slipping into Baruch’s sleeping bag at the summer camp—but he was curious now to hear all the details. Baruch told him that Orit was now happily married with two children in Kiryat Ono, and that efforts he’d made to renew the connection, including recently, were met with stubborn resistance. “She’s still beautiful,” he summed up, as if to explain the reason behind her refusal.

  Baruch came to the bar from time to time, always looking the same, swallowing words and drinking and rambling on about the past. Roni wasn’t able to understand what he was doing with himself. He mumbled something about a job in insurance, but Roni couldn’t imagine him selling insurance to anyone in his state.

  Kibbutz old-timers who were vacationing at the kibbutz’s apartment in the big city showed up on occasion, until financial problems forced the sale of the apartment. They always spoke about Tel Aviv in relation to the kibbutz: different worlds. Sometimes pretty young girls would turn up and tell him they were younger sisters of his former classmates. Ezra Dudi came in one day, with his thick beard and sullen Theodor Herzl–lookalike face. Roni enjoyed those encounters, so surprising and haphazard. But most of the nights were simply pleasant Tel Aviv nights, and most of the customers were anonymous until they started talking and went back to being anonymous the moment they left.

  One night after midnight, a good-looking, well-built man in his twenties entered, walked in, and sat at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. The song “Tarzan Boy” with its “Oh ho oh ho oh ho oh ho, oh ho” Tarzan calls was playing in the background. Roni placed the glass on the bar. “You don’t recognize me, huh?” the customer said. Roni looked at him again. Focused his stare. The buzz cut, the gleaming eyes, the askew smile. Just a sec. The askew smile. No, not the askew smile, the askew jaw. Hang on a sec, no, yes, it has to be, those were the eyes, for sure, how had he not recognized him right away?

  “Eyal?”

  By then he was already smiling, his head rocking back and forth on the fulcrum of his neck. Eyal’s father, Yona, had been sent to Buenos Aires on behalf of the kibbutz’s instant-lawn enterprise when Eyal was fifteen, and they hadn’t been seen since. Eyal was now telling him about the two years in Buenos Aires, followed by two years in Paris, at the end of which his parents, Yona and Yona, got divorced, and he stayed with his mother and studied architecture in a small French town, and then the kibbutz factory decided to scale down its operations abroad, and his father went to live in a village in northern Spain with his secretary from the office. Dad was back in Israel now, alone, and trying to regain membership of the kibbutz and his job at the factory, and Eyal had come to help him.

  In the background Haddaway was asking what is love and pleading for his baby not to hurt him no more, and Eyal asked if
his was the craziest story Roni had ever heard here at the bar.

  “No,” Roni replied, “but it’s not bad.” Eyal’s father came in the following day at the same time. This time Roni recognized him immediately, though Yona also no longer looked the same as he used to. Fatter, grayer.

  “What can I get you, Yona?” Roni asked, and reached out for a handshake.

  The evening was the antithesis of the previous one, at least one aspect of it. The evening before—as Roni had quickly picked up—Eyal grabbed the attention of almost every girl at Bar-BaraBush: those there alone, with friends or partners, waitresses or clients. When Roni pointed it out to Eyal, he smiled and gestured with his hand, as if he no longer noticed it. This evening, his father was the one who shot imploring looks at all of them—those there alone, with friends or partners, waitresses or clients. And they, of course, acted as if he didn’t exist, and he was used to it, but couldn’t stop.

  “Did he tell you he’s a homo?” Yona asked Roni, and that explained a few things to Roni, but he wasn’t able to work out if the disappointment on the father’s face was related to the women’s disregard for him or his son’s tendency to disregard women. “Are you a homo, too?” Yona asked. “What’s that little beard?”

  Yona drank more than Eyal. Roni got tired of the man’s ramblings about Argentina and the kibbutz and the bastards who had forgotten all he had done for them. When Yona began chatting in Spanish with a tourist girl, he seized the opportunity and slipped away to the storeroom. When he returned, Yona signaled to him with a finger.

  “Yona,” Roni said, “haven’t you had enough to drink for one night? Should I call you a cab?”

  “Just a moment,” Yona responded, his voice low and gravelly from exhaustion and alcohol.

  “It’s just that we’re going to close soon. Would you like me to find Eyal, for him to come get you?”

  “Did he tell you he’s a homo?”

  “You told me,” said Roni, and cast his eyes over the clients still at the bar. It was nothing out of the ordinary, naturally, a drunk who needs help at the end of the night, but Roni felt a twinge of pity for the kibbutz member. Yona mumbled something in Spanish.

  “What?” Roni asked.

  “A homo is what I ended up with,” Yona concluded, and stood up on shaky legs.

  Roni could have said good-bye and gone about his business, but he came out from behind the bar and said, “Come, Yona, I’ll call you a cab. Where do you need to go?” Yona didn’t respond. “Or should I call Eyal?”

  “The homo?” the father asked, resting an arm on Roni’s shoulder and stumbling along beside him.

  The acrid air of the bar was replaced by the heavy night air. And there they stood, the inebriated adult and the uncomfortable youngster, one arm on a shoulder, a second arm having no alternative but to be around a waist, waiting, in silence, and then Yona cleared his throat, and then spat out a curse in Spanish, and then asked, “How’s your loco brother doing? He’s okay? Recovered?”

  Roni was thrown for a moment, and then said, “He’s fine. He’s in New York now.”

  “New York? Very nice, very nice.”

  Roni lifted an arm to signal a passing cab. It didn’t stop.

  “I’ll never forget how we took him, Yona, Eyal’s mother, and I, how we stuffed those stinky beetles into his mouth.”

  “You?” Roni stepped away from the embrace and stood facing Yona. He could fall, for all Roni cared. But his balance was better than it appeared to be. Another lesson Roni had learned—people who appear to need to lean on others, leave them be and you’ll be surprised by just how well they manage.

  “Me and Yona, Eyal’s mother. That kid, your brother, the loco—he was a bad kid. Wait, what’s with him, he’s recovered?”

  Thoughts flashed through Roni’s mind. “But how . . . What about the hairy arms?” Gabi’s only clue from that night. That, and the fact that there were at least two people, and lots of decomposed legs in his mouth.

  “Hah . . .” Yona broke into the slow and beaming smile of someone who is completely wasted. “That was Yona’s, Eyal’s mother’s, idea. She wanted everyone to think it was Shimshon Cohen. Because look, I have smooth hands, look.” He held out his arms.

  “But wasn’t Shimshon Cohen a friend of yours? Why did she want to incriminate him?”

  “Ooh. A long story. We’ll have to save that one for another time.”

  The thought of having to spend another evening with Yona made Roni shudder.

  “Taxi!” Roni shouted, and when one appeared and stopped out of nowhere, Yona chuckled and said, “God’s on your side, kid.”

  He got into the back and closed the door, and after the cab pulled away, the window came down and he yelled, “Regards to your brother the loco. Let’s hope he recovers.”

  Only after the cab disappeared did Roni realize that Yona hadn’t told him how Yona and Yona had given the father hairy arms like those of Shimshon Cohen.

  The Assistant

  When Roni told Yona that Gabi was in New York, he had no idea that Gabi had left New York in favor of Hollywood, Florida. Roni wanted to call Gabi to tell him of his discovery. He got the number of a kibbutznik who was working in the moving business in New York, but he told Roni that Gabi had been there with him for a few days and had then disappeared. With only this flimsy lead to go by, Roni decided on second thought that he didn’t want to inform Gabi of his discovery. What for. Why pick at old sores.

  Gabi Kupper returned to New York on one occasion. It was to meet the daughter of Cyril Zimmerman, a millionaire from Boca Raton, an important client of Meshulam Avneri and the JNF branch. Zimmerman had agreed to leave a significant portion of his estate to the Jewish National Fund, and was about to amend his will to arrange the bequest. Meshulam had met with him several times, some together with Gabi, and made a note to himself that Zimmerman fit the profile of a candidate who could very well come up with a large contribution, if they could maneuver around a number of obstacles on the way.

  One such obstacle was Jennifer, Zimmerman’s fifty-nine-year-old daughter, who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The elderly man told them about her one day. He said she was asking questions about the JNF and the inheritance. He didn’t believe it’d be a problem, but he didn’t want to create unhealthy tension, or as he put it, “to leave this world on a discordant note,” and therefore wanted to give her the answers.

  “What’s she asking?” Meshulam pleasantly inquired. He had told Gabi about such cases. The children of a potential donor ask questions, particularly when it came to an inheritance. Meshulam stressed the need to display understanding for the suspicion, and to propose a series of confidence-building measures—a presentation, lecture, meeting, even an invitation to Israel, so the children could see with their own eyes the work being done. There were cases in which children had secured a post facto annulment of the will on the claim that their lonely parents had been exploited, and there was no point in butting heads over such incidents, as it would tarnish the image of the organization. All such problems had to be resolved in advance.

  “Well, what could she be asking—how come all of a sudden I plan to give half my money to people I don’t know?” Zimmerman said, and sipped his white wine. He had pinkish skin, glasses, and a full mane of white hair. He’d made his fortune as a lawyer. “I say to her, Jenny, it’s the JNF, it’s the State of Israel, it’s what’s written in the will, the text is being scrutinized by a thousand pairs of lawyer eyes, including mine, everything’s kosher, everything’s been defined and reviewed, the bank accounts, the money will go to recognized institutions. So she says, with all due respect to the State of Israel . . .”

  The thing is, Zimmerman said, Jenny doesn’t even need the money. She married, and then divorced, a Jew who’s even wealthier than me, Shulman, the steel magnate, know him? They didn’t. She had a lot more than she could spend in her lifetime even if she tried, and she’s also still supposed to get half the inheritance of her father, as his on
ly daughter. Her intentions are good, she only wants to protect him, to make sure his head isn’t being turned, he said. So all that needs to be done, in his opinion, is to send this young man to see her—he pointed at Gabi, who had been sitting there in silence through most of the dinner, eating politely and slowly, smiling at all the right times—so she can see that the money really is going to the “good guys” and not some Israeli swindler. Gabi sat up straight when Zimmerman said that, with a piece of wonderful rustic bread in his mouth, which he tried to swallow whole. He looked at Meshulam in surprise, and noticed a glimmer of recognition in his boss’s eyes. A flight to New York was scheduled for the following week.

  A few months had passed since Gabi moved into the separate apartment in Meshulam’s Hollywood home. He felt comfortable there. It wasn’t really like the kibbutz, he soon realized, but there were the yard, the single-story homes, the nearby beach, with its grains of white sand on the backdrop of warm turquoise water in which beautiful-looking girls waded and splashed. He often visited the cinema and wandered among the theaters, which screened the same movies over and over again.

  He was fortunate—two junior positions had just opened up at the local JNF office. They were supposed to be reserved for local employees, Americans, but he was able to land a temporary work permit that would tide him over until all the visa paperwork was completed. He began by getting to know the local staff and their work: establishing ties with Jewish institutions in the area, organizing gatherings in homes, identifying donors and keeping in contact with them, putting together delegations to Israel, distributing and collecting the blue collection boxes. He sometimes accompanied Meshulam to meetings, and the rest of the time he spent in the office. The first project he handled entirely alone was a lecture tour by former Israeli justice minister Dan Meridor to a pair of local retirement homes.