Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Roni lost interest after a few minutes. He wasn’t able to follow the service. He sneaked out, suppressed the urge to light a cigarette, and stood around watching the children at play. One boy came up to him and asked who he was.

“Roni. And you?”

“Hananiya Assis,” the boy responded, looking curiously at Roni’s nonwhite clothes and the stubble on his face. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Forty and a half. And you?” Roni said.

“Forty and a half ? Whose grandfather are you?”

Roni laughed.

When he went inside to the back benches, two bearded men were talking there in soft voices about Mamelstein and the Civil Administration. Roni flipped through the Sabbath leaflets that lay scattered on the tables. The two bearded men suddenly stood and broke into song along with everyone else. Roni followed their lead, standing when they did and sitting accordingly. It wasn’t long, though, before he gave up trying to keep up with the flock, realizing that no one really cared anyway. He enjoyed the synagogue, browsed the leaflets, watched the worshippers with interest, and was fascinated by the combination of the sheeplike communal spirit (singing together, genuflecting in unison, everyone dressed in white) and the individualism (their skullcaps and prayer movements, the way they covered their eyes during the Shema prayer).

Some fifty hours had passed since he had fled the United States. He smiled wearily and allowed the noise that had been buzzing in his thoughts in recent months to subside. He’d stay here for a while. He’d take it easy out in nature, and rest. Perhaps he’d look into the possibility of doing something with that Musa guy and his olive oil. Or maybe he’d move into the new trailer that had arrived at the outpost. He closed his eyes, and all around him, the men sang to their God with increasing intensity. Yes, he thought, that’s what he’d do. He’d leave the mess behind him. He wouldn’t hurry to move on elsewhere. He’d get his life back in order.

A joyous melody started up, a Hasidic song. Initially, Roni didn’t even open his eyes, the song gelled with the prayers, but then he felt it. First, the change in the mood, the stunned stares of the worshippers, and then, the vibration in his pocket. What was the phone doing there? And who calls on the Sabbath eve? He cast a fearful look over the synagogue. Did they know it was him? Did they recognize the acoustic tune as Gabi’s ringtone? Yes, they know for sure. He lowered his head, stood up, and headed hastily for the door. The tune — which he would later discover to be “There’s a Fire in Breslov” by Israel Dagan — played on and grew louder; the glares burned into the back of his neck.

Outside again, he answered the call. It was Ariel. He had been thinking more about the idea, and it sounded fantastic. When could he come by to see and taste the oil? he asked.

Every summer, the kibbutz was overrun by the black beetles. Industrious little things, with eight or six spindly legs — he could never remember how many for spiders and how many for beetles — walking along the gray concrete paths, which they appeared for some reason to prefer to the lawns, just like the people. They gave off an awful, pungent stench, which may have been a secretion or may have simply come from the rotting bodies of the unlucky ones that lay crushed by the boots of the kibbutzniks, or met their demise by other means. In retrospect, his memory offered up the disgusting stench along with the bizarre spectacle of hundreds and thousands of small black bodies on the backdrop of the smooth, bare concrete that ran between the beautiful lawns tended by Dad Yossi and his landscaping team and the small homes that were known as “rooms.”

Of his father and mother, on the other hand, he had no image, odor, or sound to hold on to, but he did have biological facts: names, ages, causes of death, height, hair color. Where did the beetle invasion come from? From the mountain, said Mom Gila. And why did they come to the kibbutz? To look for food, to look for shade, said Dad Yossi. Mom Gila, Dad Yossi — as opposed to his real mother and father. It was never a secret. It wasn’t a story that had remained hidden until one day in his teens, the father-who-he-had-thought-was-his-father had taken him for a drive and told him that he wasn’t his father, and shock had turned into tears: But why didn’t you tell me? It wasn’t a tale about children whispering and giggling behind his back until one day, one of them had said, with a touch of curiosity, and cruelty, too, perhaps, You know, my father made me swear not to tell you, but he says that your father and mother are not your real father and mother, followed by him bursting into tears and asking, What do you mean by a father and mother not being real? There’s no such thing; and then going home and asking them, and them giving each other a look that said It had to come at some point, we could never have kept it a secret forever, and then his father taking his hand and saying to him with sadness, Listen, Gabi…

No, it wasn’t that kind of a story. Mom Gila and Dad Yossi were, from the very beginning, Mom Gila and Dad Yossi, never Mom and Dad, and Roni’s and Gabi’s family name was always Kupper — until Gabi Hebraized it years later. As for the story about their real parents, well, Roni and Gabi heard that more or less at the same time they heard their very first words.

He could remember his brother, Roni, shouting, “Mom Gila! Mom Gila!” after finding him on the other side of the perimeter road, nearby the kibbutz fence, beyond which lay the plum orchards, with two black beetles in his mouth, alive but no longer whole. “Mom Gila! Mom Gila! Gabi’s eating beetles!”

“What?” came the cry from the house.

To her credit, you’d have to say, she reacted quickly, initially with the cry and then by running outside in her nightdress to scoop him up in her arms. She wasn’t mad at him, didn’t spank his tush, didn’t scold the older brother for failing to look after the little one. Instead, she hastily washed out his mouth and gave him some juice and a candy to get the taste out. And then she looked at him, and he smiled back at her, seemingly somewhat indifferently, perhaps a little inquisitively, and she burst into astonished laughter.

When Dad Yossi returned home, he took the infant in his arms, bronzed by the summer’s labors, and said, “What’s this I hear about you, you little cannibal?” And little Gabi, who wasn’t talking just yet but certainly knew how to laugh, did exactly that, and from time to time thereafter, Dad Yossi would call him Cannibal, more frequently when he began devouring the bloody steaks that Dad Yossi would prepare on the barbecue on Independence Day and the other springtime holidays, and even after he became a vegetarian several years later, following the incident in which a few more black beetles, of the same kind he had eaten that day, ended up in his mouth again. Dad Yossi returned from work, picked up little Gabi, and called him a cannibal, and all four members of the family laughed out loud — a warm and fuzzy family picture from the 1970s.

His first memory was of a mouthful of beetles, and the memories to follow were also associated with his mouth. He always had something in his mouth. Like that pink device that pushed against his upper lip so that his teeth could grow. It was a special device that no one else, including the grammar teacher, had ever come across.

“Gabi Kupper, do you have gum in your mouth?”

“No, miss.”

“So what do you have in there?”

“It isn’t gum, miss.”

“Come here and show me.”

He walked over from his chair toward the teacher and pulled back his lip to show her the pink plastic device, trying at the same time to again say, “Ib ibn’t gub, mish,” and not to hear the other children giggling.