Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

The following morning, while they lay side by side on the beach, the earth trembled. He looked at her and she looked at him, and they smiled, and she placed her hand on his and squeezed.

“Did you feel the earth move?” he asked.

“Yes, an earthquake,” she responded. The beach around them remained unfazed — the bodies sprawled, and the swimmers swam, and the fish were probably napping, and the tents stood firm. Nili squeezed his hand again. “It’s okay,” she said. “It happens here a lot. The Great Rift Valley.”

Just then, a new group of guys and girls arrived in Ras Burqa. Gabi glanced over at them, and his body tensed. Among them, he recognized from afar, was Anna, a classmate from school, from a neighboring kibbutz, the same kibbutz as Roni’s ex, Yifat. Anna, so named because her father was a volunteer from England or Sweden or wherever (Gabi couldn’t quite recall that day in the Sinai, though in time he would become very familiar with her biography) who fell in love with her mother on the kibbutz. Gabi couldn’t take his eyes off the new arrivals, who set up camp a few dozen meters from his Haifa group. All the layers he had shed during weeks of sand, sea, fish, and Nili returned to encase him.

“What’s up?” Nili asked, glancing over at the new group. Gabi didn’t answer, his gaze unwavering. He had recognized her in an instant, but wanted to be sure he wasn’t imagining things. He wasn’t. Anna, with the round face and the sad eyes and the lone dimple and the straight, dark hair, cut neck-length in a style he wasn’t familiar with but liked nevertheless. Anna, with her kibbutz gait, her flip-flops and shabby jeans and gray-blue tank top with its kibbutz laundry tag clearly visible from afar. It was Anna for sure, and he needed to get the hell away from there. To go on the run again, hide. He couldn’t risk her returning north and telling someone where he was; he didn’t want anyone who knew him to learn where he was.

With the head of hair he had grown, he was going to have a hard time passing himself off as a soldier, and he was too young to be a reservist, but he donned the uniform again and it helped him nevertheless to land a ride just minutes after managing to slip away to the road with his bag, without a word of farewell to anyone, only a mumbled, incomprehensible explanation to the stunned Nili. Any regrets faded the moment he entered the car. The Ras Burqa chapter of his life was behind him now. It was best not to stay, not to become attached. He had to move on.

“Where do you need to get to?” the driver asked.

“Where are you going?” Gabi replied.

“Me? To Faran,” the driver said.

“Great, it’s on my way,” Gabi responded, completely in the dark.

“To Dimona,” the next driver said. “Great,” said Gabi.

“Me? To Beersheba.” “Ofakim.” “Beit Guvrin.”

“Excellent.”

And the accompanying questions and remarks, too, of course: “Do they allow you to grow your hair like that in the commando unit? What’s that all about, have you been on leave? Be careful the MPs don’t catch you, Kastina is full of them. What? Is there a Golani base there?” Gabi didn’t respond.

He got out of the car at Guvrin Junction, just as darkness fell.

“Where do you need to go?” the driver asked, apparently sensing his hesitancy. “Are you sure here is good for you?”

“Sure, sure it is, thanks,” Gabi answered, not turning to look at the man.

“This area is a bit of a hole,” the driver continued. “There’s nothing here. Who knows when another car may pass by. Where do you need to go? I don’t mind going out of my way a little.”

“It’s okay, thanks,” Gabi said, and the man let it go and drove into his community, the sound of the car’s exhaust gradually fading until only the silence remained. And he didn’t have to wait long after all, a Peugeot 404 pickup truck was approaching from the opposite direction of the one he had just come from. Moments before the vehicle reached him, Gabi Kupper’s mind wandered to the earthquake from that morning, the feeling of sand moving beneath him, his helplessness in the face of nature’s unbridled power. What if some subterranean plate had decided to move with a little more force? He’d have been buried under the sand in a flash. Inadvertently, Gabi held out his thumb at the two circular white lights that chugged toward him.

A seasoned hitchhiker by then, Gabi sensed the difference the moment he closed the car door and the driver released his foot from the brake and stepped on the gas. It filled the air of the car like cement in a bucket, heavy and gray, solidifying gradually. Often, he had accepted a ride without exchanging a single word with the driver, not even “Where do you need to go?” or “Where are you going?” They’d come later, on the understanding that if he had held out his thumb and a car had stopped for him, they’d probably be on the road together for a while, the taker and the giver, the requestor and the facilitator. This time, however, the silence was different, steeped in tension, churning with rage. His body froze, and he felt his hair stand on end. He felt aggressive and ready, catlike, to strike back at the first scratch. There were three men in the car. The driver, a man next to him in the passenger seat, and another behind him, alongside Gabi.

“Where are you going?” Gabi finally asked.

“Right here, nearby,” answered the man next to the driver in an Arabic accent.

“You know what,” Gabi said, his voice steady but his throat trembling, “I’ll get out here, I left something behind, I need to go back.”

“Want us to take you back?” asked the speaker.

“No, no, here is just fine,” Gabi said, the earthquake, the Great Rift Valley, images from the morning flashing through his mind. And suddenly, out of nowhere, he recalled his ride with the Gam-zu-Le-tova family, too. The speaker said something to the driver in Arabic and the driver signaled, slowed down, and pulled over to the side of the road. Turning on the light inside the car, the speaker turned to look at Gabi. The driver turned to face him, too. There was no need for the man sitting next to him to turn, Gabi had been feeling his stare from the moment he got into the car. An unpleasant odor filled the car, and Gabi, his heart pounding, looked back at the speaker.

“Is something wrong, something bothering you?” the speaker asked.

“No, everything’s fine. I simply need to get back to Beit Guvrin, I forgot something in my last ride.”

The speaker said something to the driver. The man sitting next to Gabi added some words of his own. “You’re a soldier where?” he asked, reaching out to take hold of the Golani pin. “What’s this, a cat?”

Gabi didn’t answer. Nor did he remove the man’s hand from his shirt. Beads of sweat began trickling down his brow. I guess this is it, he thought, and through his mind flashed images of Nili and her kiss, and Anna with her newly styled and straightened hair on the backdrop of the yellow desert, and Gam-zu-Le-tova’s blue eyes.

“What do you want from me?” Gabi eventually asked, looking directly at the speaker. The driver snickered.

“We want a soldier, a combat soldier,” the speaker said. “Where’s your rifle?”

“I don’t have a rifle. I’m not a soldier. I’m at school. The uniform belongs to my brother,” Gabi responded, now on the verge of tears. “I’m a kid. I’m not a soldier.”

“No rifle?” the speaker said. He added something in Arabic and the man next to Gabi began frisking him, ripped a button off his shirt, felt his chest, slipped a hand into his pants, gripped his penis, and caressed his testicles.

“You’re a kid? Not a soldier?”

Gabi sat there paralyzed, waiting for the slashing knife. He closed his eyes, a cold sweat told him he had made a mistake, a really big mistake. Why did he take to the road again? Why did he leave, why today, why at all? The Arabs spoke among themselves in high tones. The man sitting next to him let him be. Gabi opened his eyes and saw a car drive by from the opposite direction in a flash of blue. The Peugeot raced ahead, the Arabs continued to argue, louder and louder. Then they went silent. Gabi didn’t know what was happening.