Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

“Why haven’t you said anything until now?” Gabi asked.

“I was waiting for you to come to me when you’d need it. I knew the day would come. It was the same with Roni.”

“Roni?” Gabi raised his head at an angle from the hammock.

“Roni got his when he reached the appropriate age and needed money. How do you think he paid for his studies and went into a partnership in the pub? Only by virtue of hard work and drive?”

“He’s a partner in the pub?”

“We withdrew a tidy sum for him and he invested it in the business. Otherwise he wouldn’t have received the share he did.”

“But what will I say at the kibbutz, how come I suddenly have money to travel?”

“Say it’s a gift from your uncle Yaron,” the uncle said.

Gabi went quiet and rocked on the hammock. Overseas. Did he really want that? What would he do there? Was that what his parents would have wanted for him to do with the money? What about university? He had thought about that, too, recently, but had no idea what to study.

Uncle Yaron seemed to read his mind and said, “Come on, just go. Stop agonizing. It’s exactly what your parents would want you to do. And me, too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I can hear Asher telling me in my head to give you a good slap and put the money in your hand and give you a kick in the butt to get onto that plane. Asher talks to me in my head all the time.”

“Send him my regards,” Gabi said. He was on the plane a week later.

He was cold. He saw another passenger ask the flight attendant for a blanket and did the same, and he wrapped himself in the thin blanket but was still cold. He was filled with doubt. What did he need this for? Why had he been swallowed into this strange metal tube, what was he looking for? What was so bad about his peaceful life among the bananas, in his warm and familiar room? Perhaps going to university would be a better option after all, like Roni had? Perhaps he’d ask Roni with more resolve, more confidence, to join him and try living in Tel Aviv. Or at least ask to spend a few nights in the kibbutz’s apartment there, to check out the possibility, to see what the university had to offer. But Gabi knew what it had to offer, he had read through the almanac in the kibbutz library, list upon list of courses that didn’t mean a thing to him and didn’t explain what kind of future they would offer him and what he would do with himself afterward. He shivered under the blanket, glanced into the darkness outside, stroked with hesitant, alien fingers the smooth cheeks he had shaved in honor of the trip, after months of wild growth.

He got a nice send-off: Uncle Yaron, of course, who came to the kibbutz and drove him to Ben-Gurion; Roni, who met with them at a coffee bar in Tel Aviv for a quick meal, a little stressed out, because he wasn’t able to go with them to the airport; Dad Yossi, who appeared to have had a weight lifted off his shoulders; his friends from the bananas, who on his last day at work staged a festive lunch for him; and Yotam, who stopped by his room and hung out with him for an hour and smoked four cigarettes while Gabi packed and didn’t stop talking about Erez, his cousin from Kibbutz Manara, who worked as a mover in New York and whom Gabi was supposed to contact when he landed, and at the same time had tried to lay his hands on half the things Gabi left behind.

Wide-eyed, he stared at the human chaos of a large American airport. At the thousands of directions in which a million people were bustling. At the colorful whirlwind of suitcases, clothes, skin. Human forms he had seen in movies and on television and now for the first time face-to-face: Asian businessmen with polished glasses and smooth briefcases and pressed suits; a huge African lady in bright yellow that fell down around her like a veil; American cops with belts packed with a full array of goodies in the form of clubs, pistols, handcuffs, and notebooks, with precise mustaches, with menacing eyes; small Indians and large blacks and fragrant women and youths in reversed baseball caps and huge backpacks and small children, sweet like they always are.

He wasn’t offended or intimidated, because he barely sensed the threatening severity with which the customs officials examined his bag. He looked at the sheet of instructions in his hand and found the way to the subway. He swayed to the metallic rattling over bridges and underground, the colorful lines that Johnny the American had told him about at the kibbutz now jumbling before his eyes into a mass of spaghetti. One hand remained firmly attached to the bag, his eyes fixed constantly on a new target: huge billboards, stretches of tenement housing as far as the eye could see, two black men in baggy clothes, endless graffiti. Someone in a suit spoke to the person alongside him in that accent, Johnny’s, from the movies. A chubby and unattractive young girl with a blank expression, headphones from a music player wrapped around her head, which was wet at the top. Orange and yellow seats emptying and filling. Doors sliding to open and close. An intercom system that scrambled the words. A hot and stifling smell, and different, everything was so different.

When he emerged from the bowels of the earth, the sheer size stunned him. The city rose up above him, made him feel like a stinky black beetle on the kibbutz path in summer. He marveled at the steam billowing out from under the sewer covers and the masses of people and the height of the buildings.

He stopped outside McDonald’s. He had heard about it. He rummaged in his pocket and examined the green bills and went in. Standing in front of the picture-heavy menu, he remembered it was a place for hamburgers. He hadn’t touched meat in almost ten years, since the abduction at the kibbutz. But suddenly it no longer deterred him. He was too hungry, too tired, and didn’t know of anywhere else. He decided to try. The soft bun, the sour ketchup, the crispy fries, the meat patty, too — he loved them. His head spinning, he finally made it to the small apartment of Erez, Yotam’s cousin.

They didn’t click. Erez wasn’t pleasant. Didn’t take an interest. Gabi felt Erez didn’t really want to be hosting anyone in his apartment, which was small and home to another Israeli roommate, who didn’t say a word. Gabi slept on a futon in the living room, and on the first morning Erez and his roommate spoke next to him as if he didn’t exist and then left for work. Gabi went out and wandered the streets around the building for a while, ate at McDonald’s because it was actually nice, went into stores and looked around but wasn’t wanting for anything so he returned to the apartment. Johnny had recommended that he go see Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and several museums, but he didn’t really feel like it.

Erez asked him if he’d like to work the following day. They were looking for workers at his moving company. He woke Gabi at six the next morning and took him on the subway to the office. He told him on the way that he was leaving to do a three-day move. When they arrived, he referred Gabi to another guy, also by the name of Erez, and he got into a truck with his crew and left.

Like the city, the place was large and chaotic and crowded. Drivers and workers dressed in red shirts raced back and forth. Dozens of red trucks fired up noisily, pulled in, pulled out, people yelled in Hebrew. The second Erez was a little more pleasant than the first, but he, too, wasn’t much of a talker. He asked for Gabi’s signature on a contract, gave him a red shirt, and led him to a truck where a driver with a dark complexion was already waiting, tapping impatiently on the wheel with his right hand, and smoking with his left. His name was Victor.

Cardboard boxes. And more cardboard boxes. And more: sofas, tables, chairs, dressers, from upstairs to downstairs, from downstairs to upstairs. From outside the apartment and into the lift and out the lift and out onto the street through the back door and from the sidewalk into the belly of the truck. The boxes weighed less than a banana stem but were harder to grip and less pleasing to the touch, or more accurately, Gabi knew how to load and grip and carry banana stems, how to enjoy the feel of the fingers of fruit on his back. Probably, if he carried the boxes and furniture of Americans long enough, he’d come to feel a similar intimacy with them, too. But on that first day, all he asked himself was why he was overseas carrying boxes when he actually wanted to travel around, and see things, and who knows what, but not work like this, certainly not when he had the money he’d gotten from Uncle Yaron.