Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Gabi took to walking more and more on his own to the mountain that lay beyond the perimeter road, beyond the fence, beyond the plum orchards. That was many years before his nighttime hours of solitude on distant hilltops, before he knew that solitude was a supreme virtue, and the greatest of them all. Back then, there were other reasons. Roni had finally reached the age at which the four-year gap between them could no longer be bridged. Gone were the years in which Roni was the big brother who watched out for his smaller self, who took him into his bed, who drew strength from his all-powerful abilities in relation to him — all-powerful in speech, all-powerful in comprehension, all-powerful in the strength of his muscles that allowed him to impose his will unchallenged. And thus Gabi remained a boy, with Roni, in his own eyes at least, already a small man, slowly but surely falling hopelessly and deeply in love for the first time. Yifat, from a neighboring kibbutz, was in the same year at the regional school, and he’d known her since first grade, but in tenth grade, they suddenly hooked up and stayed that way. Yifat’s roommate on the kibbutz spent most her time with her soldier boyfriend in Haifa, so Roni and Yifat would go back to her room after school, and after dinner they’d go to the pub and drink beer and play darts with the volunteers, and they went to a Tislam concert in kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar, and to a HaGashash HaHiver show at Kfar Blum, and a Shlomo Artzi concert at Tzemach, and one by the Bootleg Beatles at the kibbutz pub, and to the home games of the Galil Elyon basketball team with its deadly sharpshooter, Brad Leaf (Roni, meanwhile, was no longer an active player, much to the dismay of Baruch Shani and his other fans on the kibbutz). Yifat visited their kibbutz two or three times, but Roni didn’t introduce her to his little brother, or to Mom Gila and Dad Yossi.

They, too, were another reason for his frequent hikes to the mountain. Mom Gila and Dad Yossi’s room wasn’t a home. They still lived there, shared a bed, went together to the dining hall, but Gabi knew they hardly spoke to one another; and when they did speak, they usually yelled; and when they were done with the yelling, Dad Yossi would go out on his rounds, which, based on Gila’s screams, included visits to the rooms of volunteers and other female members of his groundskeeping team; and Mom Gila would stay at home and drink and smoke.

In all likelihood, even if their parents’ room had been awash with harmony and love, Roni would still have spent most of his time on the neighboring kibbutz, and Gabi would have made his treks to the mountain; because at the age at which Gabi and Roni were now, the phrase adoptive parents took on a different meaning. Following a childhood in which those terms, real versus adoptive , are meaningless because Mom is Mom and Dad is Dad — they’re simply there — the time had come when the thing that cut and hurt the deepest, that screamed out loud and clear, was: You are not my parents! At those ages, even birth children alienate and distance themselves and are left astounded when confronted with the slimmest chance of there being a link between themselves and the pair of adults who purport to exercise authority over them, so it’s easy for the adopted ones to justify to themselves their need to disengage — to the room of a neighboring kibbutznik, to a distant mountain, to wherever it may be.

Gabi, too, had had a girlfriend, Noga. He, too, had tasted his first kiss, behind the tractor at the Lag Ba-Omer bonfire, near the storehouse. A month later, however, Yotam asked if he minded becoming her boyfriend. He said okay, and never spoke to her again, which was a little weird because Yotam was his roommate, so he’d see her from time to time. Once, Yotam was showering while she waited for him on his bed and Gabi lay reading a book on his. The radio was tuned to Menachem Perry’s Hot Chocolate show, which was playing a song by the Thompson Twins. Gabi knew she liked the song, yet still not a peep. Gabi didn’t get all the fuss that was made out of girls, or how Roni could be so caught up and distant and alienated because of a girl. So Yotam was with Noga, and Ofir hung out with other friends, and the real truth of it was that Gabi liked being alone. To seclude himself. To slowly ascend the mountain. To see his shadow cast on the earth in the light of the sun or the moon or the streetlights. To think. To converse with himself. To discover and find things.

The mountain was where he found the falcon. The bird’s leg was injured, bitten by a snake, perhaps? Or maybe a larger animal had hurt it in a fight? Gabi spotted the falcon lying on the ground, moving its head, lightly flapping its wings. He approached and stared at it, and stared at it some more, and didn’t know what to do, so he sat down on a rock and watched. When he saw that the falcon could do him no harm, he moved a little closer, kneeled down alongside it, and reached out to touch its head with his finger. The falcon flinched at his initial touches but was incapable of really moving. Gabi could see its leg was broken, and after a few attempts, he stroked the falcon’s head and carefully lifted it. The bird flapped its wings in panic and tried to resist, but Gabi reassured the animal—“Shhhhh… Shhhhh”—and made his way back down to the kibbutz.

Gabi installed the falcon in an unused room, a small storeroom, in the children’s house, and then went with Yotam to the dining hall. When he told him about the bird, Yotam got excited and asked to see it. Gabi said he’d show him after they had eaten and asked Yotam how they could find out what to feed it. Yotam said there was an encyclopedia of birds in his parents’ room, and if that didn’t help them, he would ask his father.

“Okay,” Gabi said. “Maybe you should get the encyclopedia so we can see exactly what a falcon looks like. I think it’s a falcon, but how would I know? We always see them from afar, in the sky.”

While descending the mountain with the falcon, Gabi thought at first that he wouldn’t tell anyone about it, that it would be his secret, and that he’d send the falcon out on spying missions and use the bird to convey notes and messages to his allies. That evening, however, he felt fortunate to have told Yotam in particular. Not only was his father a bird enthusiast who owned an encyclopedia that confirmed the bird was indeed a falcon and offered other crucial information, Yotam also vaguely remembered his parents’ storeroom containing a large cage that once served as home to two parrots, Pinches and Simches, which his father had raised when Yotam was a young child. Yotam located it, somewhat rusted and dirty, and not very big after all, but a perfectly suitable starter home, and brought it over to their room.

Apparently, they needed to find pigeons, the flesh of which, Yotam’s father said while engrossed in Maccabi Tel Aviv’s basketball game against Squib Cantù on TV, falcons loved to feed on. The encyclopedia offered other alternatives — millipedes, scorpions, lizards, snakes, frogs, bats, grasshoppers — but Yotam and Gabi believed pigeons to be tastier and easier to lay their hands on, and there were pigeons at the kibbutz, on the roofs and electricity poles. And thus, the two boys retrieved their biggest slingshots, of the many they had patiently fashioned from the electrical cable covered in colored plastic that was dumped on the kibbutz by workers from the electric or phone company, and went to the field adjacent to the children’s dormitories. The pigeons perched at ease on the high-tension wires. The boys took up position, peeled a clementine, and began firing folded pieces of the rind — a fast-moving, accurate, and readily available projectile.