Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Approaching the next intersection, the driver signaled again, pulled over, turned, and glared at Gabi, and the man next to him exited the car and walked around the vehicle. He opened Gabi’s door, grabbed him by the ends of his army shirt, and dragged him out. This is it, Gabi thought, it’s the end for me. A whimper escaped his lips. The man threw him to the ground and kicked him several times until he rolled into the ditch at the side of the road. Long seconds passed before Gabi dared to raise his head from the ditch. His heart thumping, soaked in sweat, panting, he watched the Peugeot’s taillights disappear into the distance. As his tears started to fall, confusing words danced in his mind: An eye that sees, an ear that hears, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

He heard on the radio the following day about a soldier who was abducted at Eila Junction during the night. His dead body was found a few days later, not far from there, with a bullet in the head, an IDF bullet, fired from an IDF weapon, most likely the soldier’s.

Gabi returned to the kibbutz that same day. He walked through the kibbutz gates in the Palladium boots and Roni’s uniform, with wild hair and the soft-skinned cheeks of a young boy, and went straight to his room to crash on his bed and sleep peacefully and soundly for a few hours. When Yotam returned to their room from the basketball hall, he cautiously approached the bed to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, and then turned and raced at top speed to Yossi and Gila’s room.

* * *

Roni told Gabi that he didn’t care at all. The commando unit meant nothing, he’d completed the course, he’d lived through the experience. Been there, done that, and he really wasn’t bothered by the fact that he was now stationed in an office job at an Intelligence Corps base in Safed. He was in charge of a storeroom, meaning in essence that he did nothing, because no one ever needed anything from that particular storeroom, so all he did all week long was remove tins of leftover paint from the storeroom and paint the side wall of his living quarters in a myriad of colors, circling and spiraling, blending and mixing, a work of art measuring 4.25 by 2.80 meters, signed in the one corner with Roni Kupper, a vanishing soldier , along with the year—1989.

“We only have each other, that’s all,” Roni said to Gabi. “So fuck the army, and fuck the commando unit. If I thought I saw you in the middle of the orienteering drill and went into that kibbutz and started talking to people — I don’t recall a thing, but that’s what they say I did — then it must have happened for a reason. That’s what guided me. You guided me. And you are more important to me than anything else.”

“I’m sorry,” Gabi said to him, placing a hand on Roni’s, feeling a tug on one of his heartstrings.

“You have nothing to be sorry about. The main thing is that you returned safe and sound. That’s what’s important.”

Besides, as Roni subsequently realized, the intelligence base in Safed is great fun, way more fun than working your butt off in remote geographical locations in the Negev or Golan simply to reach some point or other that someone had marked on a map. The work was easy and quick, the evenings were free, and he came down to the kibbutz whenever he felt like it, and the girls — holy shit, the girls!

Gabi, in all likelihood, could have secured an exemption from combat duty, or even army service in general, if he had informed the military authorities of his runaway episode and the incidents of violence, or if he had undergone professional counseling. People around him, Dad Yossi included, encouraged him to do so. But he wanted to volunteer for a combat unit, and said nothing. He listed the Golani commando unit as his first preference and the regular Golani Brigade as his second, didn’t list a third, and ended up in the Combat Engineering Corps. While still in boot camp, he was dispatched to Gaza and entrusted with a tear-gas grenade launcher. His unit was sent out on patrol in the Jabalya refugee camp, which the officer who briefed them defined as “not hostile” and hence suitable for a company of new recruits. And so, just halfway through boot camp training, he and his fellow soldiers found themselves heading down a long dirt road in two lines. Smoke from a burning tire drifted through the air, searing their nostrils. They moved deeper into the refugee camp, walking among children blackened with dirt, loud, self-assured, playing with rags, and women in long dresses, full-bodied, pug-faced, their eyes dull and unfriendly. Here and there, Gabi spotted a pair of pretty green eyes of a young girl or two. For the most part, however, he focused on the tracks of the soldier ahead of him.

The patrols for the first four days were slow and boring, accompanied by unpleasant odors, and they didn’t get to use the tear-gas grenade launcher. But on the fifth day, they encountered a group of stone-throwing youths. The company commander stopped and crouched, and the other soldiers followed his example. He then stood tall again, took cover behind the wall of a house, and instructed his soldiers to get behind him. There wasn’t enough room for them all, however, and some remained in range of the stone-throwers.

“Gas!” yelled the commander. Gabi failed to register that he was the intended recipient of the order. “Gas!” the commander bellowed again, and only after someone elbowed his arm did Gabi spring to attention and rush over. The commander instructed him to fire the grenades in an arc in the direction of the stone-throwers. Taking the launcher off his shoulder, Gabi then remembered that he hadn’t yet learned how to use it. On their first patrol, he was told there wasn’t sufficient time and that he’d be taught afterward. But the individual who had promised him forgot, and Gabi didn’t ask, and the launcher remained hanging from his shoulder like an empty bag through the quiet, boring patrols of the previous days. Now he was being asked to fire it, and he didn’t know how. Enraged, the commander ripped the launcher from Gabi’s hands and showed him how to open it. “Grenades,” he ordered. Grenades? Apparently, someone had filled Gabi’s flak jacket with tear-gas grenades. The commander found them, showed Gabi how to load the launcher, closed it, aimed the weapon skyward, muttered, “Next time I won’t do it for you, snap out of it,” and pulled the trigger.

The weapon was defective. Instead of being launched into the distance and exploding on the target, the grenade detonated in the barrel itself. The commander immediately threw down the launcher, but the cloud of gray smoke rose and enveloped them nevertheless, in particular the commander and Gabi and the unfortunate soldier at whose feet the weapon had landed. The three writhed in pain, seared by the smoke that ate away at their eyes and noses and mouths and lungs, grasping blindly for water, searching blindly for cover, struggling for breath. Perplexed, the remaining soldiers, their eyes streaming with tears and coughing, stood around them, and the stone-throwers in the distance bared their teeth, laughed gleefully, and continued to throw their stones, and even plucked up the courage to move in closer. Had it not been for Dudi, a slightly built and thus far quiet soldier, who opened fire with his weapon into the air and began screaming like a man possessed, which he might have been, the incident could have resulted in consequences far more serious than three victims of smoke inhalation who were rushed to the army clinic at the Gaza command base and subsequently released toward evening.

Following the incident, the company of new recruits returned to boot camp, but by then, Gabi felt detached, no longer really there. Not only had he lost the desire to ingest gas from defective gas-grenade launchers, to force-feed others with gas from functioning launchers, to walk through alleyways with free-running sewage and through the bedrooms of families living in abject poverty, or to restrain stone-throwers; he also had no appetite for operating heavy engineering machinery or clearing explosive devices or building bridges over rivers. The enthusiasm of his fellow trainees and the words they spewed when discussing mechanization and bombs and weapons — words they had heard from friends or brothers or uncles who had served as combat engineers — meant nothing to him. In fact, he had no inclination at all to roam the country in that green uniform. He had done it once before, and it had almost cost him his life — truth be told, his life was spared only because he wasn’t a genuine soldier at the time. And boot camp, with the contrived and inane hard-nosed attitude of the commanders, the middle-of-the-night scrambles, the mistreatment and shitty food, the stupid guard duty, and the assholes, oh, the assholes. He got on with a few of the guys, but as a kibbutznik, he was immediately relegated to a status that alienated him from most of the soldiers in his company. And the incident in Jabalya did nothing to boost his position.