Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

The Central Command’s major general was on a call. He nodded and handed back the phone to one of his officers. A soldier used a zip tie to cuff Musa, and more soldiers escorted his fellow blade-jumpers. The major general then approached his troops and asked Omer to gather everyone around. His briefing was a short one: “Guys, we’re out of here,” he said, and then turned toward his command car.

Jeff McKinley, the Washington Post’ s Jerusalem correspondent, stared in rapture at the television screen. Gripped between his thick, chubby fingers was a wonderfully flavorful Jerusalem mixed grill in a pita from the Chatzot grill bar, and he tried, as he did every evening, to follow the Hebrew news broadcast, his tired mind managing to catch perhaps one word in every five or ten. The initial images were pretty standard — bulldozers, soldiers, settlers, Palestinians. But then he began to recognize the faces sprouting from the screen: there was the settler who drove him to the wrong outpost, and the settler woman in the orange head scarf looked familiar, too, what was she so mad about now? And there was his fellow hitchhiker, who was dressed in a suit that day, and also the officer who gave him a ride out of the settlement and told him a few interesting things in the military jeep. Yes, he recalled, that’s Mamelstein’s outpost, and then, as the report reached its climax with the triple jump into the blade of the bulldozer, his eyes widened in astonishment, and the snort of laughter that escaped his lips sprayed bits of meat and fat onto his desk and the papers that lay scattered across it.

Ma’aleh Hermesh C. God, he had almost forgotten. And now that day months earlier was coming back to him. The editor of the newspaper’s foreign desk in Washington was angry about his failure to deliver on the promised interview with the minister. The alternative McKinley suggested — a story about Sheldon Mamelstein and his donation of a playground to the illegal outpost — piqued the editor’s interest for about half an hour, but was quickly overshadowed by an earthquake with thousands of fatalities in China and a downed plane carrying a load of Estonian parliamentarians, and the paper’s space for foreign news filled up. When McKinley succeeded in rescheduling the interview with the minister for two days later — they met at the Knesset — the story about Mamelstein and the outpost fell by the wayside. Another Jewish American millionaire giving money to another West Bank settlement, not exactly the scoop of the decade.

McKinley rested the uneaten quarter of his pita on the desk, open like a smiling mouth, filled not with teeth but bits of meat yellowed by oil and cumin, and rummaged through the papers until he found what he was looking for: the business card of one of Mamelstein’s assistants, on the back of which Jeff had scribbled in pencil the telephone number of Captain Omer Levkovich, whose pink, sweaty face just then faded from the screen in favor of the stern-looking Israeli anchorwoman.

Omer Levkovich was inundated with calls following his television appearance, and they served only to heighten his sense of frustration and disgust in view of what had happened that afternoon at Ma’aleh Hermesh C. — the prime minister’s intervention in a straightforward military action designed to enforce a High Court ruling. He sat in front of the television, his bare feet soaking in a bucket of warm water and apple vinegar to combat the foot fungus growing on them.

He would be delighted to speak to the American journalist.

“So what are you telling me, Jeff — that a settler woman and an Arab man conspired to jump onto the blade of a bulldozer to prevent the army from building the fence?” asked Jeff ’s editor at the foreign news desk in Washington when he called with the story.

This time McKinley was in luck, because not only was the outpost he had visited not too long ago making headlines in Israel in the wake of the bulldozer incident, and not only had he gotten his hands on some additional tantalizing material concerning Sheldon Mamelstein and his involvement in the outpost, and not only did the story tie in with a comprehensive investigative report the Washington Post was putting together on contributions made by Americans to shady overseas causes that were recognized by U.S. tax authorities as deductible expenses, but a good deal of space had opened up on the international pages after a big story was pulled.

McKinley spent the next two hours writing at his desk in the small office in Jaffa Street, following the mixed grill with some Oriental cookies he found in a cupboard in the kitchenette and a cup of instant coffee, and after he had submitted the story and surfed the Web for a few minutes in case the editor called with questions, he stepped out into the cool warmth of the Jerusalem night, entered a dimly lit bar in the Machane Yehuda Market, lifted his heavy body onto a barstool, and ordered a glass of Ballantine’s with lots of ice from the pretty, short-haired bartender, who ignored the oil stain and cookie crumbs on his shirt and smilingly placed the drink on a cardboard coaster in front of him.

Gabi’s morning symphony opened, generally, with the beeping of the alarm clock, and then came the squeaking of doors, the opening of windows, the boiling of water in the kettle, slow at first and then rising to the crescendo until the ping of the switch. The stream of urine, the flush of water to wash it away, a finer stream from the faucet over the basin, the brushing of teeth, gargling, phlegm dredged up from the depths of the throat and spat out, the early-morning fart, and the chirping of the goldfinches. Then the kiss of the vacuum-sealed refrigerator door, the rattle of a teaspoon in a cup, the groaning of a chair under weight. And when he dressed, the oil-starved hinges of the closet door squeaked open and shut, and the springs of his mattress groaned when he sat on the bed to put on his socks and shoes (first the right and then the left) and tie his laces (first the left and then the right). And the clomping steps of heavy-duty work shoes. And the slurping of tea. And the door, the rickety state of which required force to close it properly, slamming, really.

For the first few days following Roni’s arrival on the hilltop, Gabi was considerate; he was conscious of the volume of noise he generated upon waking. And then one morning, his toothbrush scraping in his mouth, his ears filled with the cries of ravens and the song of Arabian babblers, accompanied by the whistling of the winds and the intermittent banging of rain on the roof, he thought, That’s just nature, there’s no changing it. And that’s my nature, and I’m not going to tiptoe around any longer. Besides, Roni played an equally impressive nighttime symphony of rolls and groans and snores and farts. So Gabi began to perform all those morning deeds and actions at normal volume, beginning with the alarm clock, and through to the door behind which he disappeared, the sound of his footsteps fading, his tefillin bag in the one hand, on his way to synagogue for the morning prayer service.

Initially, Roni would hear the entire procedure, but his well-oiled sleep habit soaked up the noises and contained them, and he drifted on through the depths of slumber before eventually waking unaided several hours later.

There was a relatively large congregation that morning in synagogue, the first minyan in a long time. The traditionally late risers appeared to be there, too, the rushers, the ones who laid tefillin and recited the Shemoneh Esrei prayer at home. It was as if they all felt a need to congregate, to bolster themselves — they didn’t yet know why or what they were facing, but they sensed something in the air. And it would take almost a full day before the full picture emerged. The sun would have completed its journey from the arid hilltops to the east through to its disappearance behind the farthest homes of Kharmish to the west, carrying with it a full day of labor, prayer, and learning — a quiet day on the hilltop, another hot early-summer day in Ma’aleh Hermesh C.