The Hilltop (48 page)

They thought about putting Mickey in day care. The long hours with him were no longer smooth sailing for Gabi. The sweet and ever-smiling baby had turned more demanding, more frustrated, sometimes on edge. Gabi lost it sometimes, too, in return, and with time Mickey learned exactly which buttons to push to anger his father. Gabi wondered about what would become of him, and about what he was giving up by devoting most of his time to the child. He knew at some point he'd have to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. On the other hand, Mickey gave him an excellent excuse to delay his decision. He couldn't honestly think of a better way to spend his time. And he loved his boy, enjoyed most moments in his company.

The problem was, they couldn't afford to live without salaries. Anna wasn't going to land a job immediately, it would take her some time to find the right fit. During the adjustment period, would she be able to spend more time with Mickey? Gabi asked. She appeared to recoil at the thought. Gabi got angry, felt used. It was decided: day care.

Gabi dropped Mickey off every morning and missed him from the moment he closed the day care's gate and went to work. The friend from the flyers business welcomed him back gladly and gave him an office job in sales and marketing, with short hours and modest pay. Mickey adjusted. Anna attended lectures and conferences and supplementary courses and job interviews. On one occasion, when she told him about an offer from a factory in Afula, his ears pricked up.

“A factory for toasting sunflower seeds?” he asked, referencing the snack the town was famous for producing.

“No, funny guy,” she answered. It was a municipal garbage recycling plant, one of the most sophisticated in the world. They had an opening in the business development department, and they liked her CV and had invited her to come in for an interview and get a feel of the place. She'd probably have to spend a night there at a hotel at their expense.

“Afula has hotels?” he asked. She laughed again. “And if you get it, will you travel to Afula every day?”

She turned serious. “We'll see,” she said. “Maybe we'll move to one of the kibbutzim in the area? There are wonderful kibbutzim in the Yizrael Valley. We've always said we'd like to give Mickey the kind of childhood we had, instead of the soot and the buses and the closely packed apartment buildings and the parks full of dog shit.” We said that? Gabi tried to recall, but couldn't place the conversation. He didn't “want to give” and didn't wish a childhood like he'd had on anyone, certainly not his beloved son. And what she said about Tel Aviv, maybe there was something to it, but he was pretty surprised by the contempt Anna suddenly expressed toward the city in which they had lived for three years, felt a little offended on its behalf. When he tried to play things back, he remembered her speaking differently. Once upon a time they'd enjoyed going to the beach, the long evening walks along the boulevard on the way back, stopping on occasion at a café. Until Mickey was born.

Ebb and flow, spring and fall. She returned from Afula enthusiastic. That weekend he noticed that she held his hand when they walked along the boulevard, smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek every now and then for no reason. She felt good, was excited about the new job. It wasn't a long-term thing, she said, she'd like to start a small business of her own one day, but it was an excellent starting point: a sophisticated and innovative plant, a product that benefitted the environment and nature, nice people she clicked with from the first moment. Gabi began to imagine life in the valley, despite his aversion to the kibbutz idea. But perhaps he'd be able to continue his studies remotely. Perhaps he'd be able to get involved in an interesting kibbutz industry. Mickey would love it. And then Anna said that if he wanted to remain in Tel Aviv, she could maybe
find a room at one of the kibbutzim, stay in the north a few days a week, and return to Tel Aviv for long weekends. The idea blinded him for a moment, he couldn't see a thing around him. It sounded to him like a suggestion—albeit delicate, veiled—to separate. Not only from him but, like her father thirty years earlier, from her only child, too. The ebb and flow of the tide are intrinsically linked. He looked at her with moist eyes and she smiled and said, “Don't panic, it's merely a suggestion. In the event you want to stay in Tel Aviv.”

“You're two years and eight months and three days old,” he said to Mickey on the way to day care. And Mickey said, “Yes, Daddy?” and Gabi said, “Yes, Mickey.”

Anna worked in Afula. She was given a company car and drove there and back three days a week, and on the fourth day spent the night in a guest room at one of the kibbutzim in the area. She was content, and Gabi discovered that all was not doom and gloom. He took Mickey to day care in the morning, collected him in the afternoon, and in the interim sat in the office and missed him and tried to interest potential customers in advertising on flyers that were distributed in mailboxes and under the windshield wipers of cars.

“You're two years and eleven and a half months old.” Two weeks later the three of them took time off and spent a day of fun at the beach and the café. Ate schnitzels and fries, and brown ice cream just like Mickey loved. And played on the playground. The experiences of that day were etched in Gabi's memory: The sweaty, happy expressions on Mickey's face. The sand that stuck to his forehead. The mouth adorned with a dry brown crust. And the annoying kid who tried to snatch the wolf doll Mickey brought along on the walk, an older kid, curly-haired, bored, and cheeky.

*  *  *

What are you doing here, you annoying little boy? Where's your father where's your mother where are your friends? Why do you insist on running to every ride and every game that Mickey wants to play with, pushing in front of him, stamping your feet? How dare you lay your filthy hands on Peter, my boy's wolf ? Why do you insist on making my blood boil? My blood's boiling, the air's streaming from my nostrils, my child wants to climb this ladder, so I stand next to the ladder and physically block the annoying kid, once, twice,
and a third time, when he tries to push forcefully with his small body and again touches Peter, I give him a little one with the tip of my shoe in the kneecap, pinching and fiercely twisting his ear at the same time, and hear the shocked, the pained cry, and clench my teeth in response to the angry look directed upward at me at foreseeable speed, in terror, to the accompaniment of undulating howls, and say to him, “Don't mess with me,” and look around discreetly to ensure that no one saw.

*  *  *

When Gabi and Mickey returned from a turn on the slide to the bench where Anna was sitting and speaking on the phone, she looked up and asked, “What happened there?” Gabi simply mumbled, “Nothing,” but was surprised by the short-circuit in his brain.

In time, Gabi stopped telling Mickey his age almost entirely. The relationship between the father and the son cooled. Anna added another night in Afula and now slept there two nights a week, said she was under a lot of pressure at work, but she told him practically nothing about the work. He sensed that on weekends she simply waited for the time to pass and for Sunday to come around, and she'd go back to her Afula, with her Sami or whoever she had there. There was someone there, of that he was sure. He persisted nevertheless in not investigating, not prying, not asking. He simply knew. And Mickey perhaps recognized the weakness in his father, and sank his teeth into it—don't wanna dress, don't wanna go to day care, don't wanna eat, don't wanna wash hands after pee-pee. Gabi's patience wore progressively thinner, his frustration increased. No longer could he boast of quality time with the boy, because there was no quality to the time with him. No longer could he offer an excuse for the absolute sacrifice of his advancement, of whatever kind—a career, studies, self-fulfillment. He was chained to the little shit, lived for him, while she managed to live for herself. When Mickey began resisting Gabi's cajoling with his silences, his improving intellect, his increased physical strength, too, Gabi responded in kind. A shove was rewarded with a shove back. A kick was rewarded with a counterkick. The rationale was—this way Mickey would learn that violence is not an effective means of achieving goals, and also, that his father would not allow him to twist him around his little finger. Gabi was swept into a dangerous cycle.

R
oni sometimes saw the Moishe's trucks driving around Manhattan, the Israeli salesgirls in the shoe stores, his basketball teammates from the Sunday pickup games, and snorted to himself with an air of self-satisfaction. He looked at all those Israelis, who came to get into America through the back door, to crawl slowly upward from the lowest rung of the ladder, and felt pride. He'd entered through the front door. He'd gone straight to the top. And he didn't even have to take the money from his own pocket to get there—the bank financed it, and the bank would get the money back within . . . ? five years, Idan Lowenhof said? So Roni decided—four years at the most.

He allowed himself to take his foot off the gas a little in his second year of studies. The summer internship at the Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss boutique investment bank was a success, insofar as “a success” was the correct epithet for two months in which he wrote up the minutes of meetings, prepared Excel tables and PowerPoint presentations for analysts and managers, collected suits from the dry cleaners, and made a particularly good impression with his extraordinary ability to repair printers that malfunctioned. One way or another, his people inside the company, Alon Pilpeli and Jujhar Rawandeep, with whom he made a concerted effort to nurture a relationship, promised him that a formal job offer for the following August would soon land on his desk.

An offer was indeed extended, and a contract was signed, and the first $45,000 was transferred into his account, a signing bonus, and close to $3,000 of it was promptly spent on a shopping spree at Hugo Boss and Brooks Brothers and Barneys, during which the tune of the “Who Knows One?” Passover song played over and over in Roni's head: Ten are the socks, eight are the shirts, five are the ties, four are the pants, three are the shoes, two are the suits, one is the belt, the belt, the belt, the belt, the belt, in heaven . . . although he did in fact buy two belts.

So, by the start of year two he was already guaranteed a job, like most of his fellow students—2005 was a good year for job seekers on the pendulum of crisis and growth of the financial world since the '90s—but Roni continued to attend lectures, especially the math ones, which delved into the obscure particulars of bond derivatives, for example, where he sat next to quiet geeky Asians, because he had the chance to learn from the finest lecturers, to get tips for a rookie financier who was just starting out in a very competitive and sometimes cruel world. From time to time he was invited to dinners with the Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss team, and even received handsome gifts from the company for his birthday and for Christmas.

One summery Monday, neatly wrapped in a light, casual Hugo Boss suit, Roni spilled out of the 3 train onto the platform of the Chambers Street subway station in lower Manhattan, and from the station onto the street. He stopped for a moment among the chaos, flexed his broad chest, and held his head up high. He inhaled the salty air from the Hudson River into his nostrils, and started walking, initially west along Chambers Street, and then south down West Street, passing by the Battery Park sporting facilities, until he reached a tall office building. He stopped again for a moment to survey the entrance and then looked up—somewhere there, on the thirty-first floor, lay the offices of Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments. He stopped because he knew that from then on he wouldn't notice those details, would simply walk in for another day at work. Look where Roni Kupper is now, he thought, and look where Oren Azulai and the rest of the small fries are. He spat on the sidewalk, and then walked into the building.

Roni crowded into the 3 train every day in the company of hundreds and thousands of suited-and-tied financiers just like him, who, from a few blocks in lower Manhattan, managed global deals worth billions of dollars. While he continued to prepare Excels and PowerPoints and write up the minutes of rather dull meetings, he didn't really feel a part of that nerve center, but Alon and Juj and others said that in a small and diverse institution such as theirs, the opportunity would come quickly. So he waited, continued to weave more strands into the expanding network,
kept his eyes open, efficiently carried out whatever was asked of him, and tried to be charming.

At the start of 2006 the opportunity arose. Two traders—stockbrokers—retired from the hedge fund's trading desk, and one day when Roni walked into the office of one of the senior partners, Eliot Lieberman, to deliver a pitch book he had requested—a presentation on a potential client—he said to Lieberman at the end of the meeting, “Let me sit on the desk. You won't regret it.”

Lieberman stared at him with watery blue eyes and remained silent for a moment. And then he asked, “Do you have experience in sales and trading?”

“No,” Roni responded, “but I have common sense and the ability to focus. I'm an Israeli, I have a tough mentality and know how to make quick and sharp decisions.” He smiled and added, “I've read many books about trading.” He didn't add that he had also learned a lot from the characters of Gordon Gekko in the movie
Wall Street
and Jack Bauer in the TV series
24
.

Lieberman asked his secretary to summon Jujhar Rawandeep, and in the meantime asked Roni, “Are you aware of the implications? You won't get much sleep, you'll wake up in the small hours of the morning with the markets in Asia, spend the morning with the ones in Europe, and then you'll start working. You won't go to the toilet during trading hours between nine-thirty and four, and then you'll meet with teams to analyze the day gone by and prepare for the one to come. In the evenings you'll go out with fellow workers from the desk and meet colleagues and drink a lot and go to sleep late and get up at five for a new day with Asia. Relationships, family, a life—you'll have none of those, only colleagues who aren't friends but predators, and you'll love and hate every minute with them and you'll feel constantly sick to the stomach from shitty nutrition.”