The Hilltop (49 page)

Roni had heard about Eliot Lieberman's elliptical speeches. He looked him straight in the eye throughout his address, and didn't lower his gaze when he responded, “I'm aware of the implications, sir, and they don't deter me. To the contrary.” Jujhar had entered in the meantime and Roni spoke of his passion for the stock market, told of an account he had managed
for himself that produced handsome yields. He spoke about the stock of an Israeli company, not very well known, and analyzed its performance. Jujhar smiled with satisfaction. And then Roni repeated what he said at the start: “Give me a chance, you won't regret it.” Jujhar and Lieberman looked at each other, and Jujhar said, “Dale Savage needs a trader.”

So Roni Kupper worked at an investment bank on Wall Street—a rung on the ladder. And soon achieved the position of trader—another rung. He knew by then that every rung of the ladder would appease him only for a time, until he would cast his eyes upward to the next one. That's human nature, he thought.

The first decade of the century began with a crisis, then came a recovery. America went to war, the Dow Jones index reacted positively, the mood was good—the world was a playground filled with opportunities. Roni learned quickly. His seven computer screens—two for the stock prices, two for making deals, one for the Bloomberg channel, one for e-mails from brokers and the team, one for chatting—were burned into his retinas, the columns of financial commentators passed under his scrutiny, he sat in meetings with partners and analysts and traders and clients. Spoke with brokers, studied products, and compiled tables and presentations about them, deepened his understanding of the various aspects of the market, and in particular honed his expertise in the field of technology stocks.

The Israeli social club, or as Idan referred to it, “the Thursday Hummus Forum,” was Roni's most important networking arena. There he not only met dozens of other Israelis who were scattered among key positions in the New York finance and corporate world, expanding the web exponentially, but also participated, when he had the time, in seminars the forum organized for its members: methods of establishing connections (“How to Be a Networking Ninja”), better dress sense (at Barneys' menswear department), and a workshop on “Accent and Refinement,” to smooth over the Israeli coarseness of speech and style. It was a diamond- polishing plant, which Israelis on Wall Street went through and emerged from a little less Israeli and a little more American, on the exterior, at least.

Despite his aversion to some of the Israelis in New York, Roni enjoyed
Thursday nights at the forum, and understood, too, that it was an inexhaustible source for connections and work. There he took off the jacket, loosened the knot in the tie, opened two buttons in the shirt, ate hummus and drank Goldstar beer that someone took the trouble to supply, and spoke in his mother tongue. Got a good dose of home, which was actually better than home itself—he realized that on a visit to Israel over Christmas, while he wandered the streets of Tel Aviv and didn't know what to do with the direct and pure dose of Israeliness that struck him. He was there for a week and did nothing aside from soaking up the sun's winter rays during the day, and going to Bar-BaraBush in the evening, as just another customer.

One evening he bumped into his friend Ariel. He looked the same, slightly balder, perhaps. Still an accountant, but had married in the interim.

“What about the soup-vending machines from Japan?” Roni asked.

“Ah,” Ariel responded, and waved his hand. “I'm working now on something new. A mousetrap that doesn't poison and doesn't kill. A humane solution, clean, effective. Look”—he retrieved some papers from a case—“it's a tube of sorts, which opens here . . .” As he explained, Roni looked at him without hiding his sense of amusement. People don't change, he thought, they carry on doing the same things over and over again. He was thinking the very same thing a few hours earlier, during his visit to Gabi. All that his brother had been through in the past years was pretty surprising, after all, when you thought about it. All the yuppie trappings—university, a wedding, a kid, an apartment in the Old North of Tel Aviv—who'd have believed it of his little brother? And then, just as you had grown accustomed to the new Gabi, more upheavals and dramatic changes. And still, with all those changes, Roni asked himself over another beer alone at the bar, after Ariel had gone on his way with his revolutionary mousetrap, had his brother really changed? Is the Gabi of today different from Gabi his little brother, the somewhat detached, somewhat impressionable, somewhat searching Gabi? The detachers, the impression-makers, and the search objectives change, the set changes, like in that English learning show on educational TV when they were children, with Sheriff Goodman, who would drink a glass of milk while
the stagehands changed the backdrop—but was he a different person on the inside?

It was late at Bar-BaraBush. Roni looked around. Everyone here, he felt—at this bar, in this city, in this country—is pathetic, is swimming in the shallow waters of provincialism, doesn't realize what world is out there. He diverted his attention to a girl left alone at the bar.

“What do you say, Ravit,” he said—he'd caught her name earlier, when she said good-bye to a friend—“can people change, or do they always remain the same?” And when she merely looked at him and didn't respond, he added, “In your opinion?”

I
n the end, only a few persistent memories remain. They manage to achieve prominence and survive from among the infinite medley of life, from among the hundreds of daily events, the vast majority of which sink and remain forever in the depths.

One memory: Gabi, Anna, and Mickey, surely just a few months old because he's lying in a baby carriage, and it's winter, they're out walking. Gabi and Anna are arguing. She's wrapped the boy in layers and all-in-ones and blankets, and Gabi thinks he's probably too warm—it was before Mickey put his foot down and stubbornly refused to wear warm clothing at any time of the year—because it's not that cold, the rain's stopped and wind's died down and what's all the fuss. And Anna, not only was she insisting on all the layers but she was now kneeling down and removing from the small basket under the baby carriage the plastic covering against rain and starting to attach it.

Memories usually come with footnotes of context, time, frame of mind, and the footnote accompanying this memory would explain that this was a time of tension between the couple. They fought a lot, almost every day, often yelling, Gabi in particular.

“Why are you putting that on?”

“Because it's cold.”

“But he's already got a million layers. That's for the rain. It isn't raining now. Look at the sky.”

She didn't look at the sky. The sun breaking through the clouds could be felt without lifting one's head.

“It's for the wind. There's a strong wind.”

“Strong wind? Where's the strong wind?”

She didn't respond, simply stretched the plastic cover over the carriage, packaging the well-bundled baby in a thick plastic wrapping.

“You're going to suffocate him! No air will get in! For God's sake, Anna!”

Memories usually come with a punch line, a line or thought or high point that offers meaning, and for Gabi in this instance it was the thought that settled in his mind at that moment and whispered, If only he would suffocate. If only he would die. And then she'd have nothing more to say. Then she would spend the rest of her life feeling sorry for all her wild exaggerations. She'd stop arguing about every little thing. She'd be eaten up inside. Gabi would return to that thought many times, the death wish on his son, simply to win an argument with his wife.

Other memories: Mickey's silences. Sudden, without apparent cause. Something he didn't like, something that was said, or any slight change in the way his toys were arranged in his room or the living room. It pushed Gabi over the edge, and Mickey soon mastered the technique and used it as a weapon, without restraint or accountability, as is the wont of children. Gabi tried various tactics—repeating the question, raising his voice, using logical explanations, yelling, threats of punishment, tempting with rewards, countersilences, leaving the room. With every attempt he turned increasingly helpless, and the ever-increasing helplessness saw Mickey become more and more entrenched in his silence, and that led to gritting of the teeth, tightening of the jaws; to rage, which always clutched Gabi to its bosom with open, comforting arms. The rage, which evolved into a small debt-collection department: the forcible removal of clothing, twisting arms and legs and pinching at the same time; ear tugging, firm pressure on the head, squashing up against the wall while growling, shoving a heaped spoon into a gaping crying mouth.
You're not talking? Take that, you little hero, take that into your silences, cheeky thing.
And the adrenaline pumping inside him while he did so, and the screams of the crying child, and the deep sense of regret five minutes later, the mutual apologies and the oath to himself not to get to that point again, not against his toddler son.

Alongside the memories, the mitigating footnote, which says, We spent too much time together while Mom was studying and traveling to Afula, we got on each other's nerves, we learned to live together, we were just learning to live together, we were in the throes of the process, and we would have made it, it would have worked out, if only we'd had the chance. But the stern footnote says, You didn't deserve to be a father, and you never have. The role was too big for you to play, and thus the role was taken from you. You were put to the test, and you failed.

When Gabi would come to learn sometime later about the power of silence (“Silence—as if to say, ‘Be silent, thus is the highest thought.' The righteous man is silent”), he'd appreciate his son even more, he'd see in his silences the legacy of the strong man, the righteous man, who left the weak behind to learn and improve himself.

A red traffic light—often it's merely a suggestion. When you're young, and brimming with confidence, and look right and left like you were taught, and don't see a car on the horizon, you cross on red, too. Once, in your childhood, at the Tiberias central bus station, a policeman stopped you and gave you a token fine, but you haven't heard of a fine like that in years and you assume the police no longer bother with such trivialities. It begins with an empty street at a crossing, and moves on to crossing a street not at a crossing, and gets to decisions to cross not only when there are no cars, but also when you see them and judge that you can make it. Once or twice it's a close call, you get honked and yelled at, on rare occasions your heart will race or your skin will bristle and your brain will think you need to watch out, because it could end badly. You think about that word,
almost
. You even imagine sometimes what would have happened if that car had hit you, if you hadn't noticed it at the last second, or it you. A wheelchair? A complete life change? But when it remains “almost,” those thoughts drift away with the flow of life. Because it hasn't changed, because nothing happened. So what's the point of waiting for green?

And then you have a son and you walk with him in a stroller through
the streets of the city and become responsible. You stop on red. When it comes to the life of a child, there's no playing around and no taking risks, even if you've looked right and left and there's no real danger, and the road is empty. Because it's a child, and it's a stroller, and it moves slowly, and if suddenly out of nowhere there comes a car traveling overly fast, you won't be able to hustle out of the way like you're used to doing. You discover alongside you the people who wait at a red light. You've always seen them, when you were younger, you thought about them, obeying the rules, not cutting corners, not questioning them. People who would wait at a red light even if they were to come across one in the middle of the desert with the nearest living soul several days' journey away. Now, stopping and waiting alongside them, fists gripping the handles of the stroller, you come to respect them.

Bottom line, however, you are not one of them. With time, the defenses drop and the self-confidence rises. You walk with the stroller day after day, learn it, and if you've become more responsible now that the life of a toddler and not only your own life is in your hands—fuck it, the road's clear, what's the point of standing around? It's a matter of principle, after all. When you, too, were alone, you didn't want to risk lives, you crossed when you felt sure no harm would come to you, so what's actually the difference? So you begin to cross with the stroller and with the baby, too. Even when from time to time you almost get caught up in an unpleasant situation and regret crossing, and your thoughts wander to What would have happened if ?—they vanish into thin air as usual. Because it's only “almost.”

The last age that Gabi told Mickey was three years and two months and twelve days. He collected him from day care and asked, “How was preschool today?” And Mickey responded, “Fun,” and asked, “Where's Mommy?” And Gabi answered, “Mommy's in Afula, she'll be back in the evening.” Mickey hummed a song. Gabi listened, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes and brought his ear closer, and eventually recognized it, a birthday song.

“Was there a birthday party at kindergarten today?”

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

“Ido's.”

“And did you have cake?”

“Yes!” And he began singing again, and Gabi joined in. They walked like that, leisurely, the weather was pleasant, there was no reason to go home.

“When I have birthday I wear crown,” Mickey said.

“What?” Gabi said. And the boy repeated the sentence and the third time his father understood and asked, “A crown? What crown?” And Mickey said, “With red flowers,” and Gabi remembered there's a crown like that lying around at home somewhere, and said, “Sure, sure, when it's Mickey's birthday, he'll wear the crown with the red flowers,” and added, “But that's only in another nine months and two weeks and three days, so there's time.”