The Hilltop (53 page)

The rain turned down the volume a little, and Othniel said to his children, “At least the car will be clean!” He laughed and stroked his beard. They didn't laugh. Despite the pause in their argument thanks to the rain, they were still in an agitated mood. When they drove by the officer, Gitit echoed her father's sentiments and cursed, “Bloody traitor.”

Yakir responded, “Watch your language, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I should be ashamed? You should be ashamed. And shame on the army that sends us those ingrates and then they give interviews and badmouth us. Screw him, the bastard.” Othniel searched for a radio station but got static.

“You're a hypocrite,” Yakir said, “they're protecting us. Guarding the roads, the settlements. Dad, why didn't you stop, I think he drove over a ninja.”

“Guarding?” snorted the big sister. Ever since she was sent to the all-girls' religious high school in Samaria, she'd adopted more extremist views, and every time she returned for a holiday, she sounded more adamant and aggressive. Othniel and Rachel had conferred between the two of them about the changes in her.

“Yakir,” Gitit continued, “I really hope you won't enlist, and if they force you, then God forbid, only a
hesder
yeshiva, a year and four months instead of three.”

Yakir responded that the army took precedence over everything, that if everyone were to dodge their service, there'd be no army, and then who would protect the country and us? Othniel stroked his beard and remained silent. The windshield wipers provided the rhythm. Yakir wouldn't be enlisting for another three or so years. Who knew what would happen by then? Who knew what was going to happen by next week? His children joined in his silence. The rain slowed but didn't stop. Who would protect us? Yakir's question reverberated through the silent car. Perhaps the image of Yoni, the Ethiopian soldier, flashed through their minds. Rage flared in Gitit's eyes. “You know that Yoni gets discharged next week?” Yakir asked. Gitit shot him a look.

An engine emitted a huge roar and propelled a large truck past the sputtering Renault. The Assis family turned their gazes to the rear of the large vehicle, which was emblazoned with a decal:
Weizmann Bros. Renovation & Construction
. Herzl Weizmann waved a plaster-casted arm and flashed a broad smile from the driver's compartment during the passing maneuver. Othniel smiled back. “The road belongs to everyone, pop, be my guest.”

Captain Omer Levkovich stepped out into the rain. He went to the back of the jeep and removed the spare tire and the tools. He shouted to the driver and medic to come out. The driver was new, he wasn't familiar with the jeep. Omer barked instructions in the rain.

A car signaled and stopped next to them. “Need some help, sir?” asked a bespectacled gentleman with graying hair. When he stepped out with a large black umbrella, Omer saw the dark suit he was wearing.

“Excellent, hold that umbrella here over us,” Omer said, and loosened the wheel nuts of the flat tire.

The man stood over him and the driver. “What rain, huh?” he said. Omer's face was flushed red. He continued to instruct the driver. “Tell me,” the man tried, “do you know where Ma'aleh Hermesh C. is?”

Omer turned his head up toward the man with the umbrella. “Why,
are you a journalist or something?” he asked, a glint of apprehension in his gray-green eyes.

“Journalist?” the man repeated, and chortled. “God forbid. I'm from the Antiquities Authority, the unit for the prevention of antiquities theft . . . Never mind, it's a little complicated, in any event . . .”

“You're going to Othniel?” Omer asked.

“How did you know?” asked the man.

“Well, have you brought him the coins at last?”

The man appeared confused. “Do you know Mr. Assis? How do you know about the coins?”

“He just went by, in the Renault Express, you didn't see him?”

The man shook his head. “I don't know him.”

“Come,” Captain Omer said, and rose from his crouch, while the driver tightened the wheel nuts. “We'll take you to him.”

The David jeep roared up the incline, passed Ma'aleh Hermesh A., and turned onto the dirt road that had been prepped meanwhile for tarring by God knows who, who had flattened and leveled it and made it far more travel-friendly. The driver stopped at the guard post at the entrance to C., and Omer extended a hand to shake Yoni's. He sensed a kind of pre-longing, a feeling that always arose before the discharge of a soldier with whom he had spent a long time and who would soon leave, never to return.

“Call your soldiers,” the company commander said, “we'll go post these things up.”

“These things” were new demolition orders he'd received from the Civil Administration's Inspection Unit. They were similar to the orders that were posted on the same walls the year before, but this time they came with final authorization from the High Court of Justice. The defense minister's decision, from that fateful meeting at the end of the summer, to evacuate the outpost without delay, suffered delays in the form of legal petitions, appeals, government and cabinet debates, and other time-wasting actions, which included lengthy commentaries and analyses of the meaning of the word “Scram!” But according to the new orders, the residents of Ma'aleh Hermesh C. would now truly and seriously be required to evacuate the hilltop within ten days.

Omer and his team, along with Yoni and his soldiers, went in thick army coats from trailer to trailer, from house to house, silently sticking up the sheets of paper with a special adhesive, like workers hanging posters to advertise shows on a municipal notice board. The wind howled and no one disturbed them; everyone was tucked away indoors next to their heaters. Only when they approached Gabi's cabin did he open the door to receive them, but didn't say a word. Just stood there, his beard sparse and unruly, his broad skullcap motionless despite the wind, and looked into the eyes of the officer. Omer looked over the cabin and, after a few seconds, said, “Leave this, it's a different procedure. An order to suspend work will be issued against this.” He turned and walked back to the jeep, sensing Gabi's stare on his back.

H
e stood at week's end on the looted linoleum floor, his hands in the sink, and began washing the pile of dishes that had accumulated. The average family washed this number of dishes after every meal, but the thought didn't comfort him while he checked the temperature of the water, which in the winter was never hot enough and in the summer never cold enough, and got to work. He looked for a moment at the dish scrub sponge. It was heavy and soaked through with stale water, the once-coarse scouring pad worn down to almost nothing; all that remained was a strip of faded green that within days would fray and tear and leak bits of sponge and disintegrate among the simple tableware he had amassed from here and there, three plates and a mismatched collection of cutlery and a mug that read
THE BEST DADDY IN THE WORLD
. He focused on the green remnants that had been scoured to oblivion on nameless frying pans and the remains of egg, toast crumbs, and baked bean sauce from a can, and wondered, Which of them causes the most wear and tear? Does the sponge prefer to clean a specific food? A specific dish? And on the other side of things—particularly loathsome food remains, prickly, painful? What kind of grip does it prefer or hate? Does it enjoy being
held lightly between two fingers or when you smother it with your entire hand?

He suddenly realized what he was doing. It was a moment of clarity in which he gazed at himself from the outside and saw the lonely man, the bachelor, in a dilapidated trailer seeped in a sour, manly, odor, standing alongside a pile of dishes and contemplating a sponge. And he realized he was debating a dish sponge like his brother and his friends debated Jacob and Joseph and Esau and the Holy One, blessed be He. So much babble, so many interpretations and commentaries on some stories from the Bible, and a year later the cycle is repeated and they reinterpret the very same stories anew—in pamphlets and in synagogues and in homes. How much bullshit can you feed people about what to drink and how to eat and what to wear and what to say when and which button to push with which finger, all the questions and the answers. At first he even admired it, thought it might help people keep life in check, save one from the endless considerations of the secular world, the questions that relentlessly buzz in one's thoughts—What color? At what time? What should I eat now? But eventually he realized he preferred the secular considerations, despite the agonizing. He couldn't live according to a random interpretation of a few old books.

Roni let out a chuckle. He hated the smell of the sponge and its worn-out feel. He hated the fact that he had learned from his brother and his sheep to quibble over nonsense. Enough. He had to get out of here. He'd go to Tel Aviv the next morning, that was final. He had been avoiding it for a full year. Initially he feared the Israelis whose money he lost in New York. After that he was deterred by the thought of running into former colleagues and schoolmates. After a while he began toying with the idea, but always found excuses not to go. At some stage he grew so accustomed to the hilltop that he stopped thinking about it.

After Gabi sent him packing from his home, and Musa politely declined his request to sleep in the oil press, not to mention to earn a living with him by marketing Palestinian olive oil to the yuppies in Tel Aviv, he was so crippled, at such a dead end and so out of options, that he simply stayed. He couldn't begin to imagine returning to one of the former stations in his life, let alone beginning a new life elsewhere. The quiet, the
negligible living expenses, the opportunity to remain cut off overcame the sense of being unwanted. Moreover, he understood later, it wasn't a matter of being unwanted. Musa did the right thing, from his perspective. Gabi, too, was right—living together was intolerable. Gabi had changed since then. Started showing concern for Roni. Come to visit. Already a reason to stay. After months of viewing his little brother only as a sanctuary and questioning his way of life, his choices, beliefs, Roni realized just how hypocritical he had been. Now he wanted to remain close and try to understand and give something back to his brother, who accepted him despite the patronizing and scorn, who gave up his trip to Uman for the failed venture. He wanted to make it up to him.

He moved into the Gotliebs' abandoned trailer. They had returned to Shilo, more balanced, more bourgeois, more suited to their level of tolerance. At first Roni simply squatted, without asking, without requesting, without paying. It proved effective—establishing facts on the ground, and later, acquiring the official stamp of approval. The Absorption Committee, which sought to redeem itself for its failure to select a suitable family the last time, agreed he could remain there temporarily until a family was selected from the waiting list—something that could happen only after Herzl Weizmann renovated and made the place livable for use by a family, and that would happen only after he completed the renovation of the synagogue and set up the prefab day-care structure.

To make a long story short, Roni remained on temporary-resident status that stretched on and on, and in the meantime paid the modest rent from money he scrounged up here and there, and did his share of guard duty and kept a low profile. He didn't bother anyone, and from the point of view of the outpost, any settler was a blessing—Roni even agreed from time to time to make up a minyan when he was asked.

But he withdrew into himself. The solitude weighed heavy on him. In Gabi's trailer there were arguments, tension, the feeling of claustrophobia, but at least there was interaction. Now Roni went days without going out, without saying a word, filling the small space with the stifling cigarette smoke and the rancid air of his guts, listening to the winds whistling and the muezzins wailing and Beilin and Condi performing their duet, and the current affairs programs on the transistor he got from
Gabi. The money started running out, to the point where he found himself subsisting on slices of bread, or resorting to the tactic of calling and hanging up so that people would call back at their expense, which caused his conversations with Ariel and Musa to trickle down to just a single drop here and there, and brought an end to the activity he could still term “work”: his futile efforts to salvage something from the venture or at least repay Ariel and Gabi a portion of their investment.

Something wonderful, meanwhile, happened to Gavriel, practically a miracle: following a number of delays—the heavy rains of the start of winter, a cash-flow crisis that held up delivery of the roof tiles—he finally completed construction of his cabin, and with a single-coil electric heater and a single mattress moved into his new home on the edge of the cliff above the Hermesh Stream riverbed. The house was tiny, and the bathroom, sink, and refrigerator were outside, and the winter winds in the afternoons and evenings shook and rattled, and the power and water sometimes failed to materialize, and he slept curled up under a comforter and in four layers of clothing, and so on and so on—but all that was nothing. The place was his corner of the world, the humble abode he had built from scratch with his own two hands. It was his pride and joy, his great achievement, and he thanked God for it every day.

He didn't make an effort to conceal his disappointment and anger over giving up on the trip to Uman at Rosh Hashanah because he lent Roni thousands of shekels to purchase an electric motor for Musa's oil press, which in the end was never used. But after Roni left his trailer, Gabi was filled with compassion. He felt a little guilty for preferring to be alone. And from a distance it was easier for him to see the true extent of his brother's precarious situation, and to come to realize that this was the life of the Kupper-Nehushtan brothers. They were bound to each other, they protected each other, they were each other's family—every attempt by anyone else to join them was a resounding failure. So Gabi went to visit almost every day, dragged Roni out for a walk along the ring road, spoke to him, forcibly yanked him from total isolation.