The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

  The work was interesting, easy. He did the math and found that the moving business had actually paid more, but the JNF salary was still pretty good, and his expenses were minimal. The constant brush with the wealthy, people who all their lives chased after money and attained it but were left alone, not knowing what to do with so much, taught him something, namely that in the end almost everyone shrivels and fades away with only a few family members around, at most, and the money they’ve worked so hard for lies scattered around them like fallen leaves that someone’s forgotten to rake up.

  Even after months, he remained unable to get a full grip on Meshulam. His family status, and the motives behind his willingness to offer a job and a place to live to a young guy he barely knew. Or what exactly he did in his free time. Sometimes Gabi heard muffled noises, the footsteps of more than one person on the hardwood floor, or the turn of a key in a lock in the early hours of the morning—Gabi was a light sleeper and he’d raise his head, glance at the clock—three, four—and go back to sleep, but they always met up at eight thirty to leave for the office, and Meshulam always looked well groomed and fresh. Gabi tried two or three times to engage him in conversation—to ask about the situation with his wife’s father or what chance there was of her returning to the United States, or if he had done anything interesting the night before. But Meshulam wasn’t forthcoming, and Gabi gave up. He sensed that Meshulam was a loner. That he possessed a bitter side.

  Jennifer Shulman-Zimmerman owned a large apartment with an enormous balcony. Every corner was filled with purple—cushions, picture frames, drapes, even the shirt she was wearing. They sat on the balcony and sipped cold lemonade. Her eyes were blue and large and her hair strawlike—a full-figured woman, nothing much to look at, but amiable and funny, too. She barely spoke about money, simply asked questions about Israel, the kibbutz, the army. Gabi did as Meshulam had instructed: responded to the point, joined in the small talk, asked about the apartment, about her fondness for the color purple, about her childhood and her father, about her children and grandchild. Gabi marked her down to himself as yet another lonely individual, like her father, with too much money and luxury and lacking the ability to enjoy it all, who for the most part wanted, like so many of the donors, to spend a few hours in the company of someone who’d fawn over her.

  But then her partner arrived. She introduced him as “my young boyfriend,” a sprightly man by the name of Irving, three years her junior, the resident psychiatrist for the New Jersey Nets basketball team, short, with curly hair and beard and thick lips. The three of them went out for dinner to a wonderful Italian restaurant, and Gabi enjoyed himself so much that he didn’t know where the time went. He had been too quick to judge Jennifer, he realized. And New York, too. The city was different from the one he had encountered during his first days in the United States. It was light, thrilling, funny, and the more the wine flowed, the more Gabi developed a fondness for the two.

  Gabi and Irving discussed the drug problems of the NBA players, and the latter promised to arrange tickets for Gabi when the Nets next visited Miami. They told Gabi about a tour they once went on in the Galilee, about wonderful olive oil made with age-old millstones, about the graves of departed righteous Jews in Safed, about a good restaurant in Rosh Pina—Gabi, a Galilee resident all his life, knew nothing of any of it, but told Irving that on his next trip he should come see the kibbutz’s basketball team. They asked him about the JNF and he told them what he knew, what he had learned from Meshulam, but the wine had loosened his tongue and he confessed at some stage that he was new to the job, that he didn’t know much, that he had always known they planted trees, not that they looked for rich donors in America. Jennifer said she wanted to donate a forest in her name, irrespective of her father’s gift, at a new settlement where friends of hers from Brooklyn who immigrated to Israel were living. She called someone from Irving’s cell phone—it was the first time Gabi had seen a device like that in real life, and although Jenny had to repeat sentences and turn up the volume, he was amazed by its very existence—and wrote down the name of the settlement on a paper napkin and, after she ended the call, tried to read it out—MAALE HERMESH?

  “What?” Gabi leaned forward, narrowed his eyes, tried to sharpen his hearing amid the commotion of the New York sidewalk. In his hand was a teaspoon with the remains of a crème brûlée. Jennifer tried to pronounce the words. “Ma’aleh Hermesh?” Gabi repeated. “I think I’ve heard of it. I’ll look into it. No problem. Where is it?”

  Jenny called again. “Judea and Samaria,” she said when she hung up. Gabi nodded with a surprised smile on his lips. His mind suddenly threw up the image of a settlement he had arrived at in a Susita years ago, on his escape journey from the kibbutz. The only time he had been in the territories.

  “Oy, don’t tell me . . . It’s those crazy settlers from Brooklyn?” Irving said. Gabi liked Irving. He reminded him of the actor Elliott Gould, with his bushy eyebrows and conquering smile, only with a beard. He eyed Jenny cautiously. The boyfriend’s remark didn’t faze her.

  “So you want to buy a forest and dedicate it in your name?” Gabi asked, giving her one last chance to opt out. She nodded and smiled. Her blue eyes flitted from the wine and Gabi couldn’t tell if they held a trace of flirtation—he was never good with that stuff—so he turned to Irving with a bemused look, and Irving rolled his eyes and shrugged.

  “Sure, I’ll take care of it,” Gabi said, and downed the rest of his wine in a single gulp.

  They invited him to sleep over in the guest room, but at that stage, he was feeling bewildered by Jennifer’s blue eyes and the boyfriend’s bushy eyebrows, and besides, Meshulam had told him not to cross any lines in relationships with the donors and he feared he had already crossed them. When they offered to drive him to a hotel, he said, “What are you talking about? You live here, go up home, I’ll manage.” They hugged and parted. They’d made him swear he’d take a cab and he swore, but only after walking the streets for a few minutes, soaking up the atmosphere, seeing the big city. Gabi walked for a long time, block after block, people and cars and yellow taxis and restaurants. He wanted to ease the buzzing in his head, but the buzzing intensified, the wine pumped in his temples, and his eyes and mind were left agape by the sheer quantity of stimuli to which he wasn’t accustomed. He eventually saw a subway station and went down the stairs and bought a ticket and went in and stood on the platform. He had nothing against taxis, he was simply enjoying the New York experience so much and wanted to round it off with a ride on the subway. He stood on the platform, and a loud thundering rolled in from the mouth of the tunnel and approached, and lights crashed onto the platform with a bang and a rattle and a roar, and an incomprehensible announcer bellowed from concealed loudspeakers, and the silver train slowed and the doors along its length parted, and out from the carriage in front of him, cautiously, stepped Anna.

  The Surprise

  It comes when you least expect it, when you aren’t paying attention. Behind the back, over the shoulder, stepping cautiously in front of you. It catches you unawares, startles you with the speed at which it comes, with its fortuity. It puts things in place, explains courses of action that seemed inconsequential, incidental, inadvertent. It offers a reason, looking back and looking forward. It mostly hits you smack between the eyes and blinds you for a few moments. In that instant you aren’t thinking. The thoughts will come later, years later, on a small hilltop in the heart of the mountains, before a barren desert and freezing winds. Only then will you be able to ask: If I had known what was going to happen, would I have forsaken love?

  He saw Anna, and unlike back then, in Sinai, this time he approached her. They began talking on the platform of the nameless subway station, and didn’t stop. For two hours they sat on a bench, the thundering comings and goings, the small hours creeping in.

  He told her about that day in Sinai. The day that started with the earthquake while he lay on the sand, and continued with him seeing her arrive with a
group of teenagers. How he had panicked, and dressed, and hurriedly left the beach and started out for home. Escaped the escape. Was afraid she’d recognize him and expose his secret. Had always wondered if she’d seen him. She hadn’t. And hadn’t felt the earthquake, either. Even if she had seen him, she certainly wouldn’t have put him at any risk. She vaguely remembered him disappearing, a search for him. But at that time, in Sinai in particular, she was too caught up in herself to notice what was happening around her. She was in love with a German volunteer named Luther, quit school for a few months because of him, hung out with him, smoked with him, did everything with him that a sixteen-year-old girl discovering the world outside the kibbutz does. They stayed in Sinai for two months, she thought, and as far as she remembered, all she did was love Luther. Gabi laughed. He had been so panicked by her appearance, and she wasn’t the slightest bit interested. You’re so focused on yourself sometimes, he said to her, that you forget that for others you aren’t the center of the universe. He told her about running away. The Golani uniform. The crazy rides he hitched. The settlement—it hadn’t crossed his mind for years, and now for the second time that evening he could picture it in his thoughts: the small homes, the family who put him up in the crowded children’s room, the terraces and mountains. It happens like that sometimes, Anna said with a dreamy look, something comes out of nowhere, a memory, a thought, and there’s a reason for it. She shifted her gaze from the opposite platform, the wide steel girders, the rats wandering between the tracks, to Gabi. And then she smiled and her eyes remained fixed on him. He almost reached out a finger to touch the cute dimple on her cheek.

  He told her about the short-circuits in his brain, the fits of rage, the solace he found in Sinai. Anna apologized for ruining the solace and just then a train thundered onto the platform and he said, “Want to take a ride a little, a different vibe?”

  They boarded the train and sat on the orange seats.

  “So what’s with Luther, is he still in the picture?” he asked.

  She frowned for a moment and then laughed out loud. “Idiot,” she said, and he liked the way she called him that.

  He told her about the ride with the three Arabs in the Peugeot, about the darkness he felt the moment he got in. How they tore his shirt and frisked him and touched him between his legs and spewed their dirty breath all over him, realized he was just a kid dressed as a soldier and didn’t have a weapon, and threw him out into a ditch at the side of the road. He was with them for mere minutes, but the chilling terror, the sense that this was the end, that this was how someone who’s about to be murdered feels. He remembered every second, remembered thinking about Anna, too, and the blue-eyed man from the settlement. And how he lay stunned in the ditch with his life restored to him, and in his mind the sentence he still recalled—the eye sees, the ear hears, through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil—the tides had shifted and he began viewing the strange day he had experienced not as a mistake but as a blessing, a sign of good things to come.

  And then the news of the poor soldier who got into the Peugeot after him. Gabi cried when he told her, and she cried with him, two near-strangers in the middle of the night on an empty train, and she rested a hand on him and said, “It wasn’t your fault, they would have found him without you, they were looking for a soldier to kill,” and Gabi held her hand and between his sobs tried to say “Sorry” and “I don’t know what’s come over me,” and she caressed his hand and soothed him.

  They emerged aboveground and walked in silence. It started raining. They stopped, looked up, and at each other, and walked on. The rain came down harder. She giggled and he smiled in response and she snuggled up to him and he held her, shielded her, and she said, “I think any second we’re going to have to run and find a place to hide,” and he answered, “Don’t worry, it’ll soon pass.” And the period at the end of his sentence was the loudest and closest clap of thunder they had ever heard and a deluge washed over them, and they stood like that, rooted to the spot, hugging, helpless, breathing in the smell of a wet sweater, fading perfume, faint alcohol, washed avenue leaves, until Anna said, “We need to do something,” and Gabi responded, “Why? It’s fun . . .” And she, hidden in his arms, bit her lip and smiled and admitted that, yes, it really was fun, but he didn’t hear, so he asked, “Isn’t it?” And she simply nodded into his armpit and that was enough to make him happier than he had been for years.

  The rain eventually eased off. They looked around. They were the only ones on the street, aside from two homeless people under an awning at the entrance of a tall building and a man smoking in a car with squeaky wipers. They returned to the subway and rode two more stations to Gabi’s hotel. Showered and dried and got into one bed—Anna in the only clean pair of underpants and T-shirt left in Gabi’s suitcase, tomorrow’s clothes; Gabi in dirty ones, but dry at least, yesterday’s—and fell asleep before even having a chance to think about what happens next, because they were so tired, so dizzy, too much had happened to the two of them in one night, all energy depleted.

  But in the morning, as nature would have it, the energy was restored.

  * * *

  Anna left Luther, the German volunteer, after a few months in Sinai and a few more days on the kibbutz. Maybe she feared replicating the life of her mother, who married a volunteer who returned to his country of birth two days after Anna’s fourth birthday. She continued to see her father every two years on vacations, and decided at eighteen to forgo the army and go stay with him for a year in Hartlepool, a small town in northeast of England. It was a nightmarish, freezing-cold year, in which she figured out the vast distance between genetics and environment. She learned most of all that love doesn’t conquer all, and certainly when it cannot form a bridge between two such different worlds—that of a kibbutz girl born to two frightened Russian Jews who were thrown in their teens into a foreign and hot land and began growing tomatoes, and that of a roughneck from northeast England with parents who had never in their lives left the area and at the age of seventy still spent evenings at the pub drinking beer and talking about horses.

  “Sex can bridge everything,” Anna said, “and I’m the proof. But love? No way.” Gabi thought about that magical night and continued to think about it often over the days to come and over the years come. What determines a good match, how can you tell? Does love win out? That night they both thought it did. Anna clearly spoke about her parents who were foreign to each other precisely because she and Gabi were the very opposite. They grew up in the same environment, were made of the same stuff, saw the world through the same prism. Anna spoke about her unfortunate parents as if to say to Gabi in nonexplicit terms: We’re not like them.

  The Analyst

  Roni felt he already knew all he needed to know: about girls, about drinkers, about former fellow kibbutzniks, about the big city. And about business, or at least about running a business like that. The sour smell of beer, which he’d once inhaled with gusto, made him sick to the stomach after two years. Sometimes he’d observe the patrons and wonder, Why do people go to bars? What is it that they find in the mix of noise, alcohol, and strangers in a single room? The evenings on the deck with sweet smoke spiraling up into the sky as the sun sets into the sea—still pleasant, still “the good life,” as everyone he invited there gushed—but no longer new. Fewer people were invited. The urge to impress lessened. A touch of distaste crept into his nights, and boredom, and the feeling that he was destined for bigger things. He continued his studies and was close to completing a second year, endeavoring to stimulate the soul and the mind, but the business was demanding, required that he keep working long hours to maintain their success: seven days a week, practically around the clock, seizing opportunities, big loans on improved terms, reinvesting revenue into the development of the business. And thus it grew and expanded—he opened a second Bar-BaraBush with Oren, this time as equal fifty-fifty partners, and then he sold a franchise for a third Bar-BaraBush. Roni had a successful chain
of bars, but he wasn’t content. He wanted out of the partnership with Oren Azulai, who turned out to be lazy and arrogant. He thought about opening new places, his alone. But the Tel Aviv night scene now appeared stifling and stained with the smell of dried beer. From his place behind the bar at Bar-BaraBush, he caught glimpses and heard mentions of more distant worlds, bigger opportunities. In time, his distaste was directed toward new challenges, processed and metabolized into a new type of drive.

  Ariel was one of his bar’s regular customers, one of the after-midnight people with whom Roni enjoyed talking. Ariel didn’t hit on girls, earned a living from accounting, and spoke about business ventures that mostly sounded to Roni flighty and impractical: importing soup-vending machines from Japan, a factory for personal portable air conditioners, a bar-club that would be called Kindergarten After Hours and would function at night out of a real kindergarten, when it was closed. Roni listened, somewhat amused, semi-convinced that a good idea would emerge at some point.

  One wintry evening Ariel showed up with a friend. It was a quiet evening at the bar and Roni wandered over to their corner. The friend had come to Israel from Boston for the Christmas holiday. He worked there for a strategic consulting firm. Roni didn’t really understand what the friend did at his job, but after he left, Ariel quietly told him how much the friend had earned that year, and how much he’d earn next year, and Roni looked around at the bar and felt pathetic.