Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

“Pshhhh…” said Othniel. And Yakir thought, What would you do if a global Japanese company were to build an oil press and offer to buy olives from you — would you stick with some crackpot who is promising you the yuppies of Tel Aviv?

“Couldn’t you sue him?” Othniel asked. “Find other growers? Listen, I want to plant olives at some point. It’ll take them a few years to yield fruit, with the grace of God, but…”

“With the grace of God,” Roni echoed. “I don’t know. I’ve had the wind knocked out of my sails.”

“Tsssss…” Othniel concluded, and thought, Just look how the gentiles and Arabs take everything that the Holy One, blessed be He, promised us, and the world remains silent. He said, “With the grace of God, it’ll be okay. Don’t worry. Like you said, what do the Japanese know about olive oil?” And in the silence that ensued, Yakir recalled the article about Matsumata that he had read on the financial website, he couldn’t remember all the details, but recalled that the Japanese know pretty well what they do.

The sun came out after long days of heavy rain, and like a sunflower, the hilltop folk turned toward it and basked in its light and in its warmth, but the days were still the days of winter and chill, and Purim would soon be on the doorstep. Yoni stretched that morning at the entrance to his trailer, and his army shirt fastened up to two buttons from his neck exposed a slim, tan chest, as smooth as the surface of a fish pond, and the rows of white teeth moved apart in a wide morning yawn. The last week of his service at Ma’aleh Hermesh C. had begun, though the anger of the residents had yet to subside following the events of the previous week, and he longed for one more look at his girl before he left. Today he’d start packing his meager belongings, he thought, and reminded himself to retrieve from the settlers the flak jacket he’d promised to his good friend Ababa Cohen, who was facing a court-martial for equipment he lost.

The kindergarten kids came out for their first walk outside after the rain. The older kids Amalia and Boaz helped Nehama, the kindergarten teacher, push the crib on wheels containing the toddlers Yemima-Me’ara and Zvuli, and the others trailed along around them. The children have grown so much, Yoni thought, I remember Shuv-el Assis, that little one with the ponytail on the push car, bald in his baby carriage, as if it were yesterday; and Nefesh Freud pressed tight in a baby carrier to his mother’s voluptuous chest, not too long ago, too. The older children were at school, the fathers and mothers at work, and Herzl Weizmann was finishing up something small on the porch of Hilik Yisraeli, who was drinking his mug of coffee in the glimmering sun at the window and thinking, Maybe I’ll go to the Hebrew University, I finally have to write the chapter on the indulgent attitude toward the kibbutzim on the part of the pre-state leadership, and then perhaps I’ll manage by then to get to the movement’s break from its ideological and concrete assets. Beyond the large window, Sasson’s camel cow was grazing on the soft shoots of a common desert plant, and a little farther below, Gabi Nehushtan was amassing from somewhere new wooden planks and sacks of mortar and gravel and all the other materials required to rebuild the cabin that the Israel Defense Forces had demolished the week before.

Condi and Beilin wagged their tails as a car drove by along the road, and Elazar Freud was speaking on the telephone in his modest yard, into which sneaked the sounds of Radio Breslov from inside the trailer. The water tanker arrived almost surreptitiously and hooked up to the white tank with the sloppily scribbled Star of David at the entrance to the settlement, practically opposite Yoni’s front door, where he stood with hand on forehead and looked into the sun at the experienced driver and thought, Without the clear liquid that is now flowing to the top of the tower, there’d be no life here. The children reached the Sheldon Mamelstein playground and dispersed joyfully. The desert hills yellowed on the horizon, and the settlement of Yeshua rose up beyond the riverbed, and the olive trees of Kharmish stood silent in the saddle between the settlements. And then a scream rose and burst forth from one of the trailers, seeped in alarm and surprise and urgency and compassion and love and gratitude to the Creator of the world and all-encompassing faith: the scream of Neta Hirschson, who had squatted to pass water onto a Super-Pharm test stick, which now voicelessly said to her freckled face: Yes!

And to Othniel they said no. After the fuss he kicked up in Jerusalem, the matter was reviewed and the official response arrived: The coins that were found were the property of the State of Israel and would remain in its possession until further notice. As stipulated in the documents Othniel signed, the land, along with its natural resources and archaeological finds — both fixed and portable — were owned by the state. Responsibility for any verbal declaration made concerning alleged private ownership of the cache of coins rested solely with the declarer and did not constitute an official or valid obligation on the part of the state. The Authority thanked the citizen for his discovery and would do all it could to provide him with a few coins as a souvenir, and to help him obtain digging permits in the future.

Othniel opened the door to his home and sat down on an easy chair facing the beautiful mid-January sunshine, and blinked his eyes, and closed them, and gripped his beard, and remained frozen in place for several long minutes.

* * *

Gabi couldn’t remember the dream he dreamed that morning, he hardly ever remembered his dreams, and if he did, only a handful of surreal disconnected details. But he thought that Shaulit had appeared in the dream, and that the dream was sort of stormy, and his body felt the ancient remnants of wild and fresh excitement, and so when he rose late and hurried to synagogue for the reading of the Shema and the morning prayer service, he added the Tikkun HaKlali, the set of ten Psalms that serve as repentance for all sins, just to be sure.

Shaulit, with her auburn hair in all its glory, was walking right toward him when he left the synagogue. Not exactly an unusual coincidence: Shaulit’s home was the closest one to the synagogue, and Gavriel attended morning prayers at the synagogue almost without fail. Similar encounters had occurred in the past without leaving an impression. This time both their faces lit up with surprise and a small smile of recognition, and in a fraction of the second before the “Hi,” Gabi knew that the previous Sabbath evening went through Shaulit’s mind, too.

He asked her about the creepy-crawly situation at home. She asked him about his work. The remnants of the dream unsettled him a little, and she, too, felt a little off-balance without the children there to divert attention and allay tensions. She invited him over for a cup of tea, and made Turkish coffee for herself in a glass cup, and blew on the granules that floated to the top in a whirlpool of bubbles, sipping cautiously. She asked if he also didn’t have hot water that morning. She couldn’t wake up like that: without hot water, she couldn’t brush her teeth, and without brushing, the day didn’t begin. That was the hardest thing about life here for her, the hot water. He said he needed freezing water in the morning. If his face wasn’t drenched in cold water, he couldn’t shake off sleep, even in the winter, and it bothered him when, in the summer, the water wasn’t cold and invigorating enough. He went inside to check the boiler, didn’t find a fault, the water was hot. Sometimes after a cold night it took a little time for it to come through the pipes, he explained.