Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

“What’s that?” Ariel asked, gesturing with his head.

“Ah, terrorists from one of the surrounding villages,” answered the mother, Nehama Yisraeli. “They threw stones at my husband on his way back from Jerusalem. Thank God for the armored windows.”

“Armored windows?” Ariel asked in a shaky voice.

“Enough of that now, Ariel,” Roni said. “What about our business?”

Ariel, his face now pale, turned to face Roni again. “In a modern oil press, everything is controlled and directed from a central control panel…”

“Musa’s mind beats any control panel, hands down — just like no computer has beaten Kasparov at chess.”

Ariel smiled but remained silent.

Roni stopped. “Listen, Ariel,” he said. “While you were out doing the rounds at sophisticated oil presses, I was working on the figures. If there’s anything I learned in America, it was to analyze figures, to construct business models, to maximize the dollars. Trust me, I’ve broken it down to cost versus output at the level of a single olive. You need a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars for a modern oil press, and that doesn’t include finding premises, renovations, paying rent. And then you buy the olives and transport them, and what about marketing? Bottles? Labels? More production lines. And then there’s dealing with the Olive Board to get a quality control label. Cold-pressed-shmold-pressed, extra-virgin-extra-shmirgin. You need insane loans, and then you have to sit tight for five to ten years until you start making a profit. Is that what you want now? The entire country is filled with them already. What’s your advantage over them? Anyway, it’s madness to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a production plant in the territories and then wait for five years. Who knows what things will be like here even next year?”

Ariel slid his sunglasses up to his head; the sun had set. “So what do you propose?” he asked.

“You already know what I propose. That Musa does everything, that we make a deal with him at a good price and commit to the entire season. We’ll label the cans — organic and original, with an illustration of millstones, the mother of all extra-extra-virgin, from the very earth and heart of Palestine. And we’ll sell it for twice the price at your Olive Boutique on Rothschild. It’ll sell like hotcakes to their sweet Tel Avivians.”

“And who says the Palestinians will go for it? Roni Kupper has spoken and the entire village jumps to attention? They hate us, after all.”

Roni rubbed his thumb against his forefinger. “Money,” he said. “That’s all. You pay them in advance, for the whole season. No one else is going to offer them something like that. I’ve spoken to Musa. Right now, those poor bastards have to cultivate and harvest, and then they go to an oil press that takes a twenty-percent cut, and then along comes some Palestinian merchant who screws them and pays them a ridiculous percentage only if he manages to sell anything. And how’s a Palestinian merchant going to sell? Who’s he going to sell to? As for the Israelis, they shit themselves every time they need to go through a checkpoint. Musa and his mates know, too, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Honestly, Ariel, Musa told me so.”

Ariel bit down on the arm of his glasses. “Okay,” he finally said cautiously. “So let’s think about our costs: You spoke about paying up front for the olives; a separator; and an electric motor to replace the sick donkey.”

“The donkey may be okay.”

“Forget about the donkey. Bottles and labels. And we’re going to need something for marketing and distribution.”

“Minimal, minimal,” Roni responded, fully aware he was fighting a losing battle.

“Minimal, minimal, for sure, but we still get to tens of thousands of shekels to begin with. Thirty or forty. Let’s play it safe and say fifty. Twenty-five thousand each.”

Roni hurriedly lit up a cigarette. He narrowed his eyes through the smoke. “How the hell did you get to twenty-five? You’re not in Tel Aviv, you’re in an Arab village in the territories. No one here talks in those numbers. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”

“I don’t get it. What were you thinking — that it’s not going to cost a cent? It’s not a whole lot for starting a business with this kind of potential, and with the experience you’ve had, you know that all too well.”

Roni’s face took on a look of anguish. “Ariel, I can’t go in fifty-fifty with you right now,” he said. “Can’t you invest the initial capital and we’ll sort things out further down the line? I came with the idea. And I found Musa. But when it comes to liquid cash, I’m a little pressed at the moment.”

“I’m willing to put in more than you, but you have to come up with something, to show commitment. You can’t just leave me in the lurch with this. Don’t you have a little in the bank? Didn’t you leave something in America?”

The pain etched across Roni’s face appeared to intensify. “America’s problematic,” he responded. He tossed the cigarette to the ground and paused for a long while before stamping it out with the tip of his shoe. “I’ll check it out. I’ll try to make a plan, okay?” he said. “There’s a Fire in Breslov” began playing on Gabi’s phone and Roni fished it out his pocket with two fingers, happy for the interruption.

“Yes, Musa,” he said with a smile. “Yes, I hear you.” Ariel watched Roni as he listened to Musa, watched the smile fade from his lips, watched as Roni ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket, watched his morose friend as he said, “The donkey’s dead. A heart attack. Just now.”

Mobile residential units, known in the vernacular as mobile homes, or transportable homes in government-speak, or precasts, trailers, prefabs, and so on, are more or less of uniform size and proportion — single-story, rectangular units measuring 4.25 meters in width, 11 meters in length, and 2.80 meters in height. The floor is fixed to a metal frame some eighty centimeters off the ground. The outer walls comprise some four to six centimeters of insulation between gray concrete and pale wooden boards with a PVC finish or unfinished drywall. The roof includes a protective layer of aluminum. Four metal steps lead up to an opening on one of the long sides, which also include French windows with sliding glass panes. For the most part, the trailers are positioned with their front doors facing inward, toward the settlement, while the windows open onto the view. The 54,900 shekels required to purchase one is usually donated to the Amana settlement organization by the Housing and Construction Ministry, and rent and property tax to the local council amounts to no more than a few hundred a month. There are, of course, variations on this standard. The chosen manufacturer, English, German, or Israeli, may sometimes change in keeping with the government ministry handling the order, or with the prevailing mood, and thus, over a period of several decades, a mixture of structures that were delivered or produced in various combinations could find their way to the settlements. The two trailers, one of which still served as the basis for the Assis family residence, that Uzi Shimoni brought up to Ma’aleh Hermesh C. in its very first days, for example, measured twenty-two square meters. The Bar-Onim were taken from a work site set up by the Americans who built the airstrips in the Negev after the Sinai evacuation.

The trailer that arrived out of the blue in Ma’aleh Hermesh C. on that festive wintry day was still in the exact same spot in the spring and was about to be occupied for the first time. Following the structure’s delivery in error to Ma’aleh Hermesh C. and the defense minister’s refusal to authorize its relocation to its original destination, Othniel instructed the outpost’s Absorption Committee — chaired by his wife, Rachel, with Hilik as her right-hand man — to convene and review the waiting list and invite a new family to move in.