The Hilltop

by Assaf Gavron

  They agreed to see the pregnancy through. Anna thought about her mother and her father, the volunteer who disappeared, but it wasn’t the same thing. Gabi was her man. And Anna was his woman. They had been through enough to know that, insofar as someone can ever really know something like that. True, they were students who were scraping by, but Anna had always thought she wouldn’t wait until she was much older to have a child. They didn’t believe the home pregnancy test, were convinced they were the lone percent against the 99-percent accuracy rate the test boasted on the box. By the time they walked out from the first scan, which showed a minute beating heart, they were both spooked and excited, and in the middle of the street Gabi stopped and gripped Anna’s shoulders, and she looked into his eyes, and they both smiled in amazement, as if to say “Wow!”

  Gabi completed his first year and announced he wouldn’t be returning for the second. Not now, anyway, maybe in the future. One of them had to bring in money. Anna didn’t argue. It was clear to both of them that her degree was more important than his. That, unlike him, her goals were clearer—a degree, then integration into business. That she owed it not only to herself and the faculty but also to Samuel Lax. And in some way, they both felt, to the baby too, to the livelihood of the family.

  The Wallet

  Two days after landing in New York, Roni found a wallet in the snow. It was a fat, bloated wallet, a woman’s wallet. It contained almost two thousand dollars in cash. For Roni it was simply the natural progression of his life: the world smiled at him. He recalled something Baruch Shani once said to him at basketball many years back: Fortune favors the good. A few minutes earlier he’d seen an apartment on the Upper West Side that appealed to him, but it was a little expensive and he left without deciding. After finding the wallet, he returned and signed the lease. He felt worthy of the apartment and it of him. And just like success came easily to him on the basketball court, with the cattle, in the commando unit, in the bar business, and eventually with his undergraduate degree—there was no reason why it shouldn’t continue to come easily in New York as well, and as proof of that—a nice fat wallet in the snow two days after landing. When he fished through it, he found a driver’s license bearing the pleasant face of a black woman. Her date of birth was close to that of his brother’s, he noticed. Thoughts of his brother seeped into his mind, but he chose to focus on the wallet. He wondered about returning it without the money, so the sweet-looking black woman would at least get back her license, credit cards, various club cards, and the rest of the junk that filled the wallet. He found her address and decided he would mail her the cards. His kindheartedness pleased him. Yes, fortune favors the good.

  The MBA was harder and more competitive. He got used to listening to the lectures in English pretty quickly, but in the first months he struggled for hours on end with the mountains of reading assignments. On the other hand, he didn’t have to work at the same time, like he did in Tel Aviv. He had money, thanks to the loan he was automatically eligible for as an MBA student. He was shocked by how simple it was to take the letter from the university to a branch of Citibank and immediately open an account containing $120,000.

  * * *

  His last year in Tel Aviv had started out nightmarishly: university in the morning, Bar-BaraBush at night, tons of material to study and absorb for his research seminar paper, Oren Azulai, who showed no consideration for his partner’s time constraints—he simply couldn’t understand why Roni bothered with university—until, in the middle of the year, with New York appearing sufficiently close and alluring, with the smell of stale beer coming out of his every orifice by then, he sold his share in Bar-BaraBush and dove headfirst into completing his degree and applying to an MBA program in New York.

  In Tel Aviv he’d met other Israelis who were going to business school in New York on the way to a career on Wall Street, and with most he didn’t connect. Spoiled rich kids whose paths were padded by their parents’ money, who didn’t know what hard work was, who gave off an air of arrogance that rested on sharp intelligence, an indulgent mother, and an easy life. Two of them, Meir Foriner from Savyon and Tal Paritzky from Kfar Shmaryahu, were accepted along with Roni to the same university in New York. But in his cluster, in class, he befriended other foreign students—a Japanese, an Italian, and Sasha the Bosnian in particular—and observed the efforts of Meir and Tal to ingratiate themselves with the American WASPs. Roni understood them, he wasn’t there to seclude himself among foreigners, either, and realized that to fit in, he had to make connections and do some aggressive networking—the word that everyone mumbled dozens of times a day—the spinning of a spiderweb of contacts, primarily with Americans. But when he saw Meir and Tal partying and playing drinking games like beer pong, just like the Americans, talking music and football just like the Americans, copying them in dress and gestures and accent, he felt uncomfortable and returned to the warm embrace of his foreign gang.

  Idan Lowenhof guided his progress and served as his mentor. Together they had put together the perfect admissions essay, spinning a narrative about his groundbreaking business initiative, which changed Tel Aviv nightlife and created the first chain of gastro-bars in the country; the success story that began in tragedy—the path of the boy who lost his parents in a horrific car accident, from a simple life on the kibbutz to the commercial success story, on his own steam, with hard work and persistence. Idan continued to help Roni in New York: advised him on what courses to choose based on the topics and the lecturers, led him through the degree’s maze of politics, and hooked him up with several graduates and professors. Most important—he showed him the ropes when the cocktail season started during that first autumn.

  The cocktails: dozens of financial firms hunted talent from the ranks of the leading business schools. Already within the first weeks of the first year, the companies staged cocktail receptions on school premises, and sometimes at bars around the city—up to three different cocktail receptions in an evening—and invited students to watch presentations about the firms, drink alcohol, and try to convince their representatives that they were the right fit for them. After the cocktail receptions, the students sent the representatives ingratiating e-mails, in the wake of which came one-on-one meetings, after which the candidates received invitations to formal interviews. At the end of the process came an offer of a summer internship in the break between the first and second year, and the internship generally led to a full-time job following graduation.

  Roni didn’t like it, but Idan insisted he play the game and coached him ahead of the meetings and interviews. Roni embarrassed himself at the initial receptions. When the small talk turned to sport, he didn’t have a clue about the rules and names of baseball players. He tried to steer the conversation toward basketball, but didn’t do too well with that, either. He mentioned Nadav “The Dove” Henefeld and Doron Sheffer “The Iceman,” names of the most successful Israeli players in the NCAA, who Roni was sure were well known in America because that was what the Israeli newspapers claimed, but no one knew what he was talking about.

  Roni worked to improve his conversation skills, and at the same time pressed Idan Lowenhof to set him up with a personal interview at Goldman Sachs. Idan promised he was working on it, but the development came unexpectedly from elsewhere. He received an e-mail one day from Dalit Nahari. Dalit was in the same year as Gabi at school, four years younger than Roni. She was a friend of Anna, Gabi’s partner, and Anna had told her that Roni was in New York. Dalit had been living in the New York area for many years, ever since the post-army trip with Anna. She invited Roni to dinner. Anna had told him in an e-mail that Dalit was married with three children, so Roni wrangled his way out of it. He saw no reason to go all the way to Plainsboro, New Jersey, to devote a precious evening to Dalit and her family at the expense of his studies. But she insisted until he consented. He recalled her as a small and pretty Yemenite girl, and in a moment of loneliness he imagined that she was bored, that her husband was away on a business trip or s
omething, and that she was looking for an adventure with no strings attached.

  The door was opened by her husband, a round-faced Indian man, potbellied and thick-lipped, with jet-black hair parted at the side. The fantasy crashed in on itself, and went on crashing when from behind his broad back appeared Dalit—small and pretty she was no more. As he walked into the huge home, he began formulating excuses to leave early. He never would have imagined that he’d be leaving the apartment after two in the morning, coming away with the most effective piece of networking he ever could have achieved.

  Jujhar Rawandeep, Dalit’s husband, was a Punjabi. He was also a Muslim. And a senior executive at a hedge fund that belonged to a small investment bank, Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments. Juj, as his wife affectionately addressed him, admired kibbutzniks, particularly kibbutzniks from the Galilee, and soon became an admirer of the Galilee kibbutznik whom Dalit recalled as a talented basketball player and brave soldier, and who offered a wealth of amusing stories about childhood on a kibbutz and the nightlife in Tel Aviv. Jujhar promised at the end of the evening to look into job placements at the investment bank, and the following day Roni received an e-mail invitation to a Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments recruitment cocktail reception.

  One of the bank’s headhunters at the cocktail reception was Alon Pilpeli, a hook-nosed and green-eyed Israeli. Biting down on small shrimp sandwiches and sipping cava at a trendy bar downtown, he and Roni Kupper got on, as the Americans say, like long-lost friends: Roni could tell that Pilpeli was less staid, was wilder and more of a go-getter than people like Idan Lowenhof, and Pilpeli was enamored of Roni, because, so he claimed, he chilled at Bar-BaraBush whenever he visited the Holy Land. The formal process of submitting an online application was completed a week later and then came personal interviews that the well-prepared Roni passed with flying colors. Shortly afterward Roni was offered a summer internship.

  The Ages

  Mickey arrived on a cold and clear day, sounded a brief wail of shock, and went quiet. While a nurse helped his mother wash herself in the adjacent shower, Gabi held him on his knees, bundled up in a sheet, looked at his tiny, moist chin, and said, “You’re twelve minutes old,” and then “You’re nineteen minutes old,” and then “Twenty-three minutes.” Those were the first things he told his son, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  Gabi was Mickey’s nanny. He very quickly found his footing. He continued to tell his son his age, it became a habit. He’d say, “Mickey, today you’re three months and two days old, and we’re going to the park.” Anna took a short maternity leave, and when she first returned to school she kept shorter days, especially when she was still breast-feeding, but she slowly began spending long hours on campus again, like before the birth. Gabi and Mickey continued to count the days and learn how to move arms and smile and roll over and crawl and sprout teeth and swing on swings and go for walks in the park and hear remarks about the Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish kid, which to begin with annoyed Gabi a little but slowly turned into a source of pride for him—as if the compliments about the beauty and distinctiveness of the baby mirrored a compliment about his own beauty and distinctiveness; as if the attention were intended for him, and the jokes (“Specially imported?” “Where can I buy one like that?” “Diplomat parents?”) were designed to impress and amuse him, and not the ones who made them. They shopped at the minimarket and greengrocer on the way home for the afternoon sleep, and while Mickey napped his two hours, Gabi prepared dinner like in the good old days before his studies.

  He didn’t have any free time, but he did have time to think. Was he missing the criminology degree? A little, but it certainly wasn’t a burning passion. He planned to read the material from the first year that he hadn’t gotten to, but the heap of papers didn’t budge from the bedside table during the first year of his son’s life. What he did read, while paging through a magazine one day in a pediatrician’s waiting room, was an article about Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recounted that he went to university because it was expected of him, and decided after a year to leave because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life and couldn’t understand how studying would help him find the answer. In retrospect, Jobs said in the article, it was the smartest decision of his life. Gabi liked the article—Jobs even grew up with adoptive parents.

  Anna would get back late—sometimes after Mickey’s dinner and bath and sometimes after he had fallen asleep. It seemed a little strange to Gabi, but when he tried to raise the subject, Anna called the line of questioning chauvinistic, because when fathers work hard and get home late and don’t see their children, no one says a word, but when a woman does it, then there’s something wrong with her.

  “I didn’t say there’s something wrong with you,” Gabi parried. “A father who doesn’t see his children is also something strange to me.” But she was angry. He understood that the demands and responsibilities of motherhood were hard on her. She asked for a little more freedom for herself, and he accepted it and gave it to her.

  He said to Mickey, “You’re five months, two weeks, and three days old,” and took him for a long walk by the sea. He offered to dress him in long-sleeved shirts in the fall and winter, but Mickey insisted on short sleeves all year round, and because he never got the flu and the confrontations were exhausting, Gabi gave in. He said, “You’re six months and six days old,” and took Mickey on a rare visit to Uncle Roni, who was always busy and under pressure. “It’s your eight-month birthday, mazel tov,” on the way to an activity class for babies that accomplished nothing other than to pass time for the mothers—they were all mothers aside from him.

  “Today you’re ten months and one week and one day old,” he said the day he found out that Anna had been lying to him. He was out walking with Mickey at Tel Aviv Port and a pretty young girl smiled at Mickey and made faces at him. It was nothing out of the ordinary, of course, Mickey attracted a lot of attention from strangers and loved it; Gabi frequently brought the stroller to a halt and allowed his son to babble with the nameless female admirer.

  But this girl, after the obligatory coochie-coo, said, “Just a sec, is this Mickey?” She studied together with Anna. She recognized Mickey from a photograph Anna had shown her. She continued tickling and caressing and making sounds and eventually looked up and asked, “Where’s Anna?”

  “Anna?” Gabi questioned, like it was the first time in his life he had heard the name.

  “I mean, what’s she doing on the day off ?” Anna hadn’t said anything about a day off school. Gabi shrugged disconcertedly. “Ah, hang on,” the girl continued, “didn’t she go with Sami to Afula?” Sami? Afula? Gabi was about to open his mouth to respond, but Mickey shrieked in order to recapture her attention, and got it. And then her phone rang and the father and son continued their walk, and she waved good-bye while talking to some “darling.” Gabi didn’t get her name.

  When Anna returned late that evening, Gabi didn’t ask, and she didn’t say a thing. Years later he’d think, if he had asked, perhaps she would have explained. But that evening he looked at her as she slept and felt something unfamiliar, a new wind blowing. What do we say to ourselves and to the world? he thought. We think that love is good and life is good and all that, and still. He didn’t confront Anna. Didn’t investigate and didn’t probe and didn’t question. Didn’t check her cell phone while she was sleeping. Didn’t look through her notebooks for inadvertent doodling, telephone numbers, or reminders. He didn’t want to hear about the anguish and the excuses, didn’t want to play along with self-pity and give her a chance to blame him or to make him responsible for her actions, for denying her the warmth and passion that she went elsewhere to find. Perhaps he feared that if he allowed her to explain, he’d understand. And he didn’t want to understand. So he told himself again that Anna was asking for time for herself, more freedom.

  He took Mickey in the stroller to the swings and merry-go-round in the park and told him he was ten months and two and a half w
eeks old. Drove him to a swimming lesson for toddlers at the age of eleven months and nine days, and dressed Mickey after the pool in his short clothing despite its being the rainiest day of the year. As usual, the boy didn’t catch a cold, but was suffering during that period with pain caused him by his sprouting teeth. When he cried, Gabi would lay him down on his chest and gently stroke his yellowish, soft hair, until he dropped off and slept like an angel.

  On his first birthday, Mickey suddenly waved his arms like a butterfly: rapid movements, for several seconds. Anna looked at Gabi with a smile and shook her head in wonder. Her eyes shone with pride. The boy uttered a syllable and started walking. The first step merged into a fall, which merged into a wail and brief sob, and a gleeful crawl until his father picked him up and sat him on his knees, and everyone burst loudly into a melody of Israeli birthday songs for children and a Hebrew rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” to the traditional English tune. And then the boy got to taste chocolate cake for the first time in his life, and loved it with passion.

  They were at Anna’s kibbutz, at the grandmother’s (the English grandfather sent a greeting card, had yet to see his grandchild). The step-grandfather, Yossi, who now had a girlfriend, came from the kibbutz, and Uncle Yaron, the brother of Asher, Mickey’s long-since-dead grandfather, was there, too, was very excited by the antics of the blond toddler. Uncle Roni didn’t come.

  Where Mickey got the blond from, no one could say. The grandmother thought it came from the English volunteer, she was certain he once told her he had Nordic roots, although he himself was ordinarily pink-cheeked and brown-haired—the entire area of northeast England was once a colony of Norwegians and Swedes who set sail westward in their Viking boats until they struck land. That’s why the northeastern accent, the most difficult to understand in the English language, aside perhaps from certain variants of its Scottish neighbor, sounds similar in tone and emphasis to Nordic languages. There’ve been studies about it, you can check, the grandmother said, and Gabi made a note to himself to look it up on the Internet. The blond, whatever the case may have been, remained, and only Mickey’s eyes were, without doubt, the almond-brown eyes of his father.