Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

A few weeks later, as the night was winding down, Baruch Shani came into the bar. Holy shit, what happened to him? was Roni’s first thought. Baruch from the cattle, from the commando unit, Roni’s mentor, who’d transformed a few young girls on the kibbutz into women. Now — balding, unkempt, a strange twitch at the corner of his mouth — he drank with an unhealthy disposition. Not an end-of-the day drink to air out the thoughts, but drinking for the sake of drinking. He appeared to have been through a rough time; however, Baruch didn’t want to talk about it but rather about days gone by, and Roni didn’t press him, he had learned not to press, whoever comes by is welcome, whoever wants to talk can talk, and whoever wants to can keep quiet.

After a few beers, Baruch recounted how he had slept with Orit from Roni’s class at school, when she was fourteen and Baruch twenty-three. It wasn’t news to Roni — he remembered seeing Orit slipping into Baruch’s sleeping bag at the summer camp — but he was curious now to hear all the details. Baruch told him that Orit was now happily married with two children in Kiryat Ono, and that efforts he’d made to renew the connection, including recently, were met with stubborn resistance. “She’s still beautiful,” he summed up, as if to explain the reason behind her refusal.

Baruch came to the bar from time to time, always looking the same, swallowing words and drinking and rambling on about the past. Roni wasn’t able to understand what he was doing with himself. He mumbled something about a job in insurance, but Roni couldn’t imagine him selling insurance to anyone in his state.

Kibbutz old-timers who were vacationing at the kibbutz’s apartment in the big city showed up on occasion, until financial problems forced the sale of the apartment. They always spoke about Tel Aviv in relation to the kibbutz: different worlds. Sometimes pretty young girls would turn up and tell him they were younger sisters of his former classmates. Ezra Dudi came in one day, with his thick beard and sullen Theodor Herzl — lookalike face. Roni enjoyed those encounters, so surprising and haphazard. But most of the nights were simply pleasant Tel Aviv nights, and most of the customers were anonymous until they started talking and went back to being anonymous the moment they left.

One night after midnight, a good-looking, well-built man in his twenties entered, walked in, and sat at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. The song “Tarzan Boy” with its “Oh ho oh ho oh ho oh ho, oh ho” Tarzan calls was playing in the background. Roni placed the glass on the bar. “You don’t recognize me, huh?” the customer said. Roni looked at him again. Focused his stare. The buzz cut, the gleaming eyes, the askew smile. Just a sec. The askew smile. No, not the askew smile, the askew jaw. Hang on a sec, no, yes, it has to be, those were the eyes, for sure, how had he not recognized him right away?

“Eyal?”

By then he was already smiling, his head rocking back and forth on the fulcrum of his neck. Eyal’s father, Yona, had been sent to Buenos Aires on behalf of the kibbutz’s instant-lawn enterprise when Eyal was fifteen, and they hadn’t been seen since. Eyal was now telling him about the two years in Buenos Aires, followed by two years in Paris, at the end of which his parents, Yona and Yona, got divorced, and he stayed with his mother and studied architecture in a small French town, and then the kibbutz factory decided to scale down its operations abroad, and his father went to live in a village in northern Spain with his secretary from the office. Dad was back in Israel now, alone, and trying to regain membership of the kibbutz and his job at the factory, and Eyal had come to help him.

In the background Haddaway was asking what is love and pleading for his baby not to hurt him no more, and Eyal asked if his was the craziest story Roni had ever heard here at the bar.

“No,” Roni replied, “but it’s not bad.” Eyal’s father came in the following day at the same time. This time Roni recognized him immediately, though Yona also no longer looked the same as he used to. Fatter, grayer.

“What can I get you, Yona?” Roni asked, and reached out for a handshake.

The evening was the antithesis of the previous one, at least one aspect of it. The evening before — as Roni had quickly picked up — Eyal grabbed the attention of almost every girl at Bar-BaraBush: those there alone, with friends or partners, waitresses or clients. When Roni pointed it out to Eyal, he smiled and gestured with his hand, as if he no longer noticed it. This evening, his father was the one who shot imploring looks at all of them — those there alone, with friends or partners, waitresses or clients. And they, of course, acted as if he didn’t exist, and he was used to it, but couldn’t stop.

“Did he tell you he’s a homo?” Yona asked Roni, and that explained a few things to Roni, but he wasn’t able to work out if the disappointment on the father’s face was related to the women’s disregard for him or his son’s tendency to disregard women. “Are you a homo, too?” Yona asked. “What’s that little beard?”

Yona drank more than Eyal. Roni got tired of the man’s ramblings about Argentina and the kibbutz and the bastards who had forgotten all he had done for them. When Yona began chatting in Spanish with a tourist girl, he seized the opportunity and slipped away to the storeroom. When he returned, Yona signaled to him with a finger.

“Yona,” Roni said, “haven’t you had enough to drink for one night? Should I call you a cab?”

“Just a moment,” Yona responded, his voice low and gravelly from exhaustion and alcohol.

“It’s just that we’re going to close soon. Would you like me to find Eyal, for him to come get you?”

“Did he tell you he’s a homo?”

“You told me,” said Roni, and cast his eyes over the clients still at the bar. It was nothing out of the ordinary, naturally, a drunk who needs help at the end of the night, but Roni felt a twinge of pity for the kibbutz member. Yona mumbled something in Spanish.

“What?” Roni asked.

“A homo is what I ended up with,” Yona concluded, and stood up on shaky legs.

Roni could have said good-bye and gone about his business, but he came out from behind the bar and said, “Come, Yona, I’ll call you a cab. Where do you need to go?” Yona didn’t respond. “Or should I call Eyal?”

“The homo?” the father asked, resting an arm on Roni’s shoulder and stumbling along beside him.

The acrid air of the bar was replaced by the heavy night air. And there they stood, the inebriated adult and the uncomfortable youngster, one arm on a shoulder, a second arm having no alternative but to be around a waist, waiting, in silence, and then Yona cleared his throat, and then spat out a curse in Spanish, and then asked, “How’s your loco brother doing? He’s okay? Recovered?”

Roni was thrown for a moment, and then said, “He’s fine. He’s in New York now.”

“New York? Very nice, very nice.”

Roni lifted an arm to signal a passing cab. It didn’t stop.

“I’ll never forget how we took him, Yona, Eyal’s mother, and I, how we stuffed those stinky beetles into his mouth.”

“You?” Roni stepped away from the embrace and stood facing Yona. He could fall, for all Roni cared. But his balance was better than it appeared to be. Another lesson Roni had learned — people who appear to need to lean on others, leave them be and you’ll be surprised by just how well they manage.

“Me and Yona, Eyal’s mother. That kid, your brother, the loco — he was a bad kid. Wait, what’s with him, he’s recovered?”

Thoughts flashed through Roni’s mind. “But how… What about the hairy arms?” Gabi’s only clue from that night. That, and the fact that there were at least two people, and lots of decomposed legs in his mouth.