Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Nir sat down with his guitar one evening and tried to compose a song inspired by what had happened. He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct the feeling inside the storeroom: the pungent smell, the heat, the stuffiness. What he had heard.

In a small wooden square

The smell of paint and glue filling the air

Standing alone and…

His daughters were crying inside the house, but he had to focus. His hand felt under the hammock for the box of grass. He thought he had a joint already rolled in there, but there wasn’t. Tchelet screamed from inside. Shaulit yelled, “Nir! Nir!” He strummed on the guitar and tried to come up with a rhyme for the third line. Hair? Dare? Wear? He gave up and launched into a rendition of Kaveret’s “Natati La Chayai.”

The yelling stopped, and with it the crying. A good time to go inside and ask if everything was okay. He put down the guitar and went in. The look he got from Shaulit — red-eyed, despairing, accusing — told him what he already knew. He had already asked for another chance, had already promised to be more attentive, more helpful, more supportive. But it wasn’t working. Her stare drove him away, forced him to say, “I’m popping over to Othniel, something important,” and to turn around and purposefully walk the few meters to the trailer on the other side of the street, knock on the door, and say, “Othniel, I need to tell you something.”

The sense of urgency was clearly visible in Nir’s eyes. Othniel took him by the arm and led him outside, to a bench in the yard. He didn’t offer tea, didn’t open with small talk, just sat Nir down and turned to face him and waited. Nir opened his mouth and closed it and closed his eyes and opened them and looked at his bearded neighbor and pictured Gitit and Yoni the Ethiopian soldier in a small wooden square, with the smell of paint and glue filling the air, standing alone and stripped bare. He recalled the sounds, and nausea rose in his throat, how could he tell a father something like that about his daughter, why had he come, what a mistake, it was simply an excuse to escape the house and Shaulit’s look, which again appeared in his thoughts and bore into him mercilessly…

“What’s up, Nir? You look worked up. Is everything okay?” Othniel placed a hand on Nir’s freckled, suntanned arm, and Nir almost cried but bit his lip and held back. “What’s up?” Othniel repeated, his voice soft.

“No… It’s… Okay, look. A little while ago, in the evening, on guard duty, I passed by the playground, and suddenly I heard something…” He went quiet again for long enough to get Othniel to prompt him with a “Yes, and…?”

“I don’t know. You know what? Leave it, I’m just… It’s nothing, I’m probably…” Nir placed the palms of his hands on his knees, like someone about to stand up, but Othniel again placed a hand on his arm to calm him.

“Say what you came here to say. It’s good you came. Sometimes we hear and see things we don’t want to, that we aren’t sure of what they are, but it’s important to share, you probably know you heard something important, even if now it suddenly seems trivial.”

The stuffiness in the closed shed, the smell of the paint, the animal-like noises of the stooped nigger, the soft whispers, or maybe the distress sounds of the victim? And also — the confusion in his life, the tension at home, Shaulit’s rebuking…

“Jenia Freud,” he finally said, and looked up at Othniel.

“What about her?”

“I don’t know. It was weird. She was speaking on the phone all quietlike, or the playground, like she was hiding from someone. About Roni Kupper. About Arabs. I don’t know. It was weird. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.” He placed his palms on his knees again and stood this time.

Othniel didn’t stop him but looked at him in earnest. “Do you think she’s the Shin Bet informer?”

“What?” The idea hadn’t crossed Nir’s mind. He was still thinking about Gitit. “Umm… I don’t know… Do you think so?”

Othniel screwed up his mouth in thought. “Listen. Elazar Freud may have been an officer in the army and may have grown up on a settlement, but big idealogues they are not. He does something in computers, he explained it to me once, Google something, searches, advertisements, truth is, I didn’t understand a thing. Do you have any idea what he does?”

“I only recall that he told me once he was sick of being a teacher and traveling every day to Jerusalem. And Jenia is a math teacher, right?”

“I have no problem,” Othniel said, “with residents who came here for the landscape and the quiet and rent — every Jewish settler is welcome. But to say I’m in shock that the evil stems from there?”

“Well, we’re not sure, I don’t want to…”

“Thanks, Nir.” Othniel placed a hand on his shoulder. “You did good. Are you willing to help me check it out? I simply want as few people as possible to know about it right now, so let’s keep it between us.”

* * *

Hilik Yisraeli struck up a conversation with Jenia the following afternoon, on the Sheldon Mamelstein playground, while the children ran wild around them. He approached her after a seemingly coincidental clash of heads between his Boaz and her Nefesh (Hilik had lightly pushed his son into Nefesh) and joint pacifying on the part of the parents and the initiation of small talk about this and that.

Hilik glanced over his shoulder and said to Jenia, “Did you hear about the Japanese who were here yesterday?”

“ Da , I hear Japanese here,” Jenia said. “They wanted something olive oil.”

Hilik lowered his voice. “Olive oil is just the cover story. There’s talk that they’re collaborating with radical elements. They spoke to Jehu. That kid could get us all into trouble. Do you know what he is up to? That guy sometimes disappears for entire days.”

Jenia appeared very interested. “Moment, Jehu… You think that… But what Japanese have to do with it? The Japanese no have olive oil?”

“There’s no shortage of crazies in Japan, right? They have underground movements, lunatics of all stripes, I don’t know. I understand they may be passing weapons on to Jehu.” He stroked his mustache and leaned in closer to her. “Not that it’s any of my business, but we’ve had enough drama in the settlement. We’ve been under the spotlight ever since the defense minister was here. We don’t need any more trouble.” He tapped his finger twice under his right eye and whispered, “An eye that sees and an ear that hears.”

When Hilik returned to Othniel’s place from the playground, he apologized for his bad acting and said he was sure Jenia had seen through him and that there was no chance that she, or any self-respecting Shin Bet agent, for that matter, would fall for it. Less than twenty-four hours later, however, the sector’s company commander, Omer Levkovich, turned up to visit his friends at C.

“Well, well”—Othniel smiled at him—“who do we have to thank for this visit of yours? Something happened?”

“Just a routine visit,” the pink-cheeked captain said, and glanced around. They both knew the visit wasn’t routine. Ever since the newspaper article, Omer was a rare visitor at the outpost. The settlers hadn’t appreciated the hostile quotes of the “high-ranking officer.”

“Anything happen here of late? Have you come across anything suspicious?” Omer asked.

“Suspicious?” Othniel played dumb.

“An unexpected visit, anyone unfamiliar hanging around?”

“Unfamiliar?” the veteran settler wondered out loud.

Following Omer’s departure, Othniel ran into Yoni outside his home. Yoni appeared anxious, and Othniel seized the opportunity to press him. It turned out that Omer had questioned Yoni at length about the Japanese, and ordered him to report in immediately if he saw them in the area again. He also told him to keep an eye on Jehu, because there was talk that he was involved with a group of right-wing extremists. To finally tighten the screw, Othniel made a call to his friend Giora, the head of Central Command, to sniff around. The Shin Bet’s Jewish Division, he knew, was as slippery and elusive as an eel. His fellow settlers had tried for years to plant countermoles and find a way inside, but Othniel had learned that Giora was the go-to man when it came to matters of urgency.