The Hilltop (11 page)

After the abduction, everyone was sure it had been an act of vengeance by someone close to Eyal. There could be no other explanation for such revenge on Gabi. No one looked into it, of course; no one thought to report it to the police. God forbid! The abduction and abuse of a young boy might have been a criminal offense, but dirty laundry isn't aired in public; the kibbutz has a very efficient washing service. Gabi's cannonball
onto Eyal remained an in-house matter, too. Roni would learn the identity of the abductor only many years later.

For Eyal, the pool incident had resulted in a broken jaw. He struggled to open his mouth for months afterward. Initially, he couldn't eat; his bottom teeth were bent out of shape and pushed against his molars. He spent years undergoing mouth and jaw surgery and never regained the ability to whistle or yawn. And as long as Gabi lived on the kibbutz, every time he ran into him on the concrete pathways or in the dining room or the basketball hall, Eyal's crooked face would remind him of what he had done and what he had suffered in return—the stares of the horrified kibbutz members, dozens of pairs of eyes glaring at him at every meal in the dining hall; the attitude of his friends, or those he once considered his friends. Even Yotam and Ofir gave him the silent treatment for a long time afterward, despite being the ones who had encouraged Gabi not to hold back. They fanned the flames of the humiliation. They were the ones who ignited the fire that propelled him with outstretched legs off the high concrete diving platform and into the face of the small wiseass boy.

They didn't come to see him at Ziv after the abduction. He wasn't sent any candy, and no one sat at his bedside to help him catch up on the schoolwork he missed. Aside from Mom Gila, Dad Yossi, Roni, and Roni's girlfriend, Yifat, he couldn't recall any other visitors. They gave him an enema, and his stomach was flushed twice. Blood and urine tests were done to ensure no traces remained of food poisoning, intestinal infections, or other harmful effects from the unidentifiable creatures he was fed. It turned out he had in fact contracted a disease called toxoplasmosis, but the doctor claimed it had been dormant in his body for quite a while, long before the abduction and assault. Was he in the habit of eating beetles and other creepy-crawlies before the assault? Gabi shook his head—not since the age of two. Had he been in contact with cats or had he touched their feces? No. Had he had any contact with pigeons or touched their secretions? Gabi stopped shaking his head.

He continued to vomit at frequent intervals in the days following his return from the hospital. And after his first attempt on Independence Day to enjoy a mouthful of barbecued steak, he was overcome by such
intense convulsions that he stopped eating meat—all meat, of any animal, finned, winged, or on legs, nauseated him. He could hardly bring himself to eat salads and cheese and eggs. He wouldn't particularly enjoy food at all for a number of years. This time, the memory of the beetles would remain fresh in his mind for a long while. He was no longer the two-year-old for whom sorrowful events would course through his veins only to quickly fade from memory. He was twelve, and when the legs of beetles get stuck in your braces, when the slimy skin of a frog is dragged over your tongue, and when your lips feel the ooze of a deshelled snail, you don't forget quite so fast.

Yonah, Eyal's father, had smooth arms. The arms of the fathers of Eyal's friends were smooth, too. The volunteers' arms were smooth. Baruch Shani had large, hairy arms; but Baruch was Roni's friend, and Roni assured Gabi there was no way he would have done such a thing. Baruch aside, the largest and hairiest arms on the kibbutz belonged to Shimshon Cohen. And Shimshon Cohen, as everyone knew, had during the course of his life done far more serious things than stuff a few beetles into the mouth of a ten-year-old boy. Gabi, who had always considered himself on friendly terms with Shimshon and didn't fear him like the other kids did, tried to test his theory. He greeted him every time he saw him, smiled at him, even tried to get up close to him to smell him, to see if he could recognize the sweetness of an aftershave or a sour odor of sweat. The findings were inconclusive. Shimshon remained kind toward him, continued to smile and pinch his cheek, and never showed a hint of hostility or anger. But Shimshon did work on the avocado team with Yonah, Eyal's mother, so there was a possible link.

A few days after his discharge from the hospital, when Roni came to visit him at the dormitory with Yifat, Gabi suddenly noticed just how beautiful she was. He understood then what Roni saw in her and why he spent every free moment of his time in her company. Her eyes, deep and brown, smiled at him with concern. Her teeth flashed at Roni's jokes. Her head nodded in agreement at his promises to exact revenge, to watch Gabi's back “because no one messes with us.” Semi-prone in bed, Gabi watched as Roni's hand constantly reached out to touch hers, and how he'd lean in from time to time to kiss her and be kissed in return.

When she wasn't at his side, Roni spoke about her. They spent almost every minute of the day together. They sat next to each other in class, and they made out during recess until they got in trouble with their teacher. They skipped classes to kiss in the hallway and played hooky to linger in their room on the kibbutz, in bed, to touch and talk for hours. She knew how to touch him better then he knew how to touch himself. She told him he was her first, and he thought either she was not telling the truth and did have experience, or she had a natural talent, because she touched him so perfectly, knew precisely the right intensity, the right softness, the right rhythm, when to speed up and when to slow down. Her endless kisses sent him to a heaven from which he never wanted to return, and the feel of her body on his, the weight, the scent, the long brown hair were intoxicating.

The first time they did it was when she turned sixteen. Some girls started younger—like the beautiful Orit with Baruch Shani on the shores of the Kinneret between eighth and ninth grades, and some of Yifat's friends from the kibbutz. But she had told him not before her sixteenth birthday, and he accepted it. He was pleased he'd be her first, and she his. Some of his friends had already been baptized by fire, but he wasn't in a hurry, he wasn't wanting for anything; and in the winter, it arrived.

*  *  *

Winter on the kibbutz. The rain came down hard on the roof of the Upper Galilee Regional Council's bus; the cold seeped in through the cracks between the windows and their frames. Yehiel, the driver, his gray
tembel
hat a permanent fixture on his head, whistled softly under his mustache. The large wipers on the front windshield moved from side to side with labored clumsiness, out of sync, each emitting a dull thud at the end of its respective arc—one after the other, one after the other. After passing through the hoof-and-mouth wheel disinfection dip at the entrance to the kibbutz, the bus continued onward and tried to get as close as possible to the children's dormitories, but there was still quite some distance to cover, and the children spilled through the door of the vehicle, hunched over and breaking into a fast walk, some of the girls with umbrellas, some of the boys covering their heads with their school bags, others displaying indifference, their heads held high between the
drops. So intense was the grayness that it was almost dark out, and large brown puddles dotted the road and yards and open expanses, and a rich smell rose from the earth and blew in from the mountains and spiraled up from the agricultural fields that embraced the kibbutz.

Gabi and Yotam hurried to their room, and Ofir joined them. The rain brought them together—there'd be no walks to the mountain, no girlfriends, no swimming pool. Unrelenting rain has that quality, the ability to comfort and reunite. They paged through the magazines with pictures of totally naked girls that Roni had given his brother a few weeks ago, and also a small book with a torn cover by Shulamit Efroni that Roni had bought at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station, which contained stories about totally naked girls. When he showed up with the shopping bag full of magazines and books, Roni told Gabi that it was about time he learned about such things, but Gabi knew that Roni simply wanted to clean out his room in case Yifat showed up; he didn't want to make a bad impression on her.

The three teens, each with a magazine or small book in hand, read with complete focus and in silence. The only sounds in the room came from the rain beating against the shutters, and the radiator, which emitted a metallic groan every few minutes, and the rustling of pages. Yotam lay sprawled on his bed. Gabi and Ofir shared Gabi's, each in his own corner. Yotam cleared his throat.

“What's all this wetness?” Ofir asked.

“What wetness?” Gabi responded, looking up at the ceiling. “Is there a leak?”

“No, in these stories,” Ofir said, and pointed at the magazine in his hand. “When they say the woman is wet, what is she wet from?”

Yotam put down Shulamit Efroni's Central Bus Station book. “It means she is turned on, that she wants it,” he said.

“Yes, okay, I got that. But what exactly is she wet from?”

Silence fell over the room, accentuating the driving rain and the heater's fatigue. The three youths scanned their literature—thinking.

“Is it sweat?” Ofir suggested—and then confirmed: “I think it's sweat.”

“Sweat?” Gabi asked, and looked over at his friend, who sat cross-legged on the bed.

“No way,” Yotam said. “It's blood.”

“Blood?”

“Of course. It's inside the body, like you are going inside her body. There's blood inside there. And once a month, when she has her period, the blood comes out, and then she needs tampons. Surely you must know that.”

“We know that, but . . .”

“And why do you think there's blood the first time you do it? Because all the blood is being held inside by the hymen, and then when it tears, the blood comes out.”

Gabi and Ofir looked at Yotam, the images forming in their minds.

“Actually,” Gabi said, “couldn't it be pee? I mean, because that's where the pee comes out of, right? So if you insert a finger or . . .”

“No, no way. It's not pee. The pee comes from somewhere else, and it only comes out when you need to pee. I'm telling you, it's blood,” Yotam said.

Ofir wasn't convinced. “I don't know,” he said. “It doesn't make sense to me. I still think it's sweat. It sounds like sweat to me.”

“What makes it sound like sweat? Read it out loud, read it out loud,” Yotam insisted.

Ofir retraced his place a few lines back and, somewhat uneasily, read out the part about the woman's wetness.

“To be honest,” Gabi said, “it really does sound more like sweat than anything else.”

“No,” Yotam ruled, but now with a tinge of uncertainty in his voice.

“I'll ask Roni,” said Gabi, the only one of the three who had an elder brother to ask.

They returned to their reading material.

*  *  *

It was Yifat's sixteenth birthday. She and Roni were in his room because she didn't want to do it in hers; she didn't want someone she knew to hear or see. He arranged for his roommate to sleep elsewhere that night, and after drinking a few beers, they were necking and laughing as usual. But they were nervous, too, and excited; tonight was the night. He took off his pants. He had on a pair of boxer shorts with a picture of an openmouthed
alligator. Yifat laughed, touched the alligator, lifted her eyes to look into Roni's, and removed his underwear. Then he removed hers, and saw, and smelled, and inserted a finger—not like a lover but like a baby poking its finger into a cheesecake, and he felt the mysterious wetness and withdrew his finger, overexcited, crestfallen. He smiled embarrassedly, kissed her lips, gripped and tried to arouse himself, to no avail. So, just like that, as is, he tried to enter her, and managed to do so. The magazines from the Central Bus Station that he had cleared from his room were wrong, and so were the books by Dahn Ben-Amotz. They didn't fulfill their promises: she neither moaned nor screamed; he didn't say, “Yeah, baby”; he was still limp—not entirely, yet far from what he knew he was always able to achieve, easily, simply from reading the magazines and Dahn Ben-Amotz, simply by fantasizing, simply from looking at the female volunteers, simply from a deep kiss with Yifat. But this time, the nervousness, the beers, the pressure . . . He was in nevertheless, just so, back and forth, five or six times, for thirty seconds, perhaps, and breathing deeply, he climaxed, and giggled awkwardly again, and she smiled, somewhat confused—the first time.

The second time, a week later, was a little better. The third was already somewhat Dahn Ben-Amotz–worthy. Roni thought he was really good. A week after that, on the day they marked five months of being together, Yifat didn't show up at school but wrote him a letter to say she's confused, that she doesn't know; she's crazy about him and feels good with him, but she thinks she needs some alone time. She's going through a weird patch. The five months together were the most amazing in her life, but now she feels maybe they need to take a time-out?

Maybe? He held the lined sheet of paper on which the hurtful words were written. He didn't get it. He read again; his heart fluttered in his throat. He took the letter and went around back to the smoking den. Everyone had gone into class at the bell, and he sat there alone. He could smell the large pines and smoked cigarette butts. He read again, the drops smudged the words.

The violent pounding of his heart every time he saw her after that. Feeling sick to his stomach on being told she was seen hanging out with Ofer from the grade above them, from a different kibbutz. When he heard
they were seen together in a tent at the Dead Sea. The long hours alone in his room, listening to Foreigner's “I Want to Know What Love Is” over and over again on the black cassette player, “Don't You Want Me?” by The Human League, and Matt Bianco's “More Than I Can Bear.”