Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Jennifer Shulman-Zimmerman owned a large apartment with an enormous balcony. Every corner was filled with purple — cushions, picture frames, drapes, even the shirt she was wearing. They sat on the balcony and sipped cold lemonade. Her eyes were blue and large and her hair strawlike — a full-figured woman, nothing much to look at, but amiable and funny, too. She barely spoke about money, simply asked questions about Israel, the kibbutz, the army. Gabi did as Meshulam had instructed: responded to the point, joined in the small talk, asked about the apartment, about her fondness for the color purple, about her childhood and her father, about her children and grandchild. Gabi marked her down to himself as yet another lonely individual, like her father, with too much money and luxury and lacking the ability to enjoy it all, who for the most part wanted, like so many of the donors, to spend a few hours in the company of someone who’d fawn over her.

But then her partner arrived. She introduced him as “my young boyfriend,” a sprightly man by the name of Irving, three years her junior, the resident psychiatrist for the New Jersey Nets basketball team, short, with curly hair and beard and thick lips. The three of them went out for dinner to a wonderful Italian restaurant, and Gabi enjoyed himself so much that he didn’t know where the time went. He had been too quick to judge Jennifer, he realized. And New York, too. The city was different from the one he had encountered during his first days in the United States. It was light, thrilling, funny, and the more the wine flowed, the more Gabi developed a fondness for the two.

Gabi and Irving discussed the drug problems of the NBA players, and the latter promised to arrange tickets for Gabi when the Nets next visited Miami. They told Gabi about a tour they once went on in the Galilee, about wonderful olive oil made with age-old millstones, about the graves of departed righteous Jews in Safed, about a good restaurant in Rosh Pina — Gabi, a Galilee resident all his life, knew nothing of any of it, but told Irving that on his next trip he should come see the kibbutz’s basketball team. They asked him about the JNF and he told them what he knew, what he had learned from Meshulam, but the wine had loosened his tongue and he confessed at some stage that he was new to the job, that he didn’t know much, that he had always known they planted trees, not that they looked for rich donors in America. Jennifer said she wanted to donate a forest in her name, irrespective of her father’s gift, at a new settlement where friends of hers from Brooklyn who immigrated to Israel were living. She called someone from Irving’s cell phone — it was the first time Gabi had seen a device like that in real life, and although Jenny had to repeat sentences and turn up the volume, he was amazed by its very existence — and wrote down the name of the settlement on a paper napkin and, after she ended the call, tried to read it out — MAALE HERMESH?

“What?” Gabi leaned forward, narrowed his eyes, tried to sharpen his hearing amid the commotion of the New York sidewalk. In his hand was a teaspoon with the remains of a crème brûlée. Jennifer tried to pronounce the words. “Ma’aleh Hermesh?” Gabi repeated. “I think I’ve heard of it. I’ll look into it. No problem. Where is it?”

Jenny called again. “Judea and Samaria,” she said when she hung up. Gabi nodded with a surprised smile on his lips. His mind suddenly threw up the image of a settlement he had arrived at in a Susita years ago, on his escape journey from the kibbutz. The only time he had been in the territories.

“Oy, don’t tell me… It’s those crazy settlers from Brooklyn?” Irving said. Gabi liked Irving. He reminded him of the actor Elliott Gould, with his bushy eyebrows and conquering smile, only with a beard. He eyed Jenny cautiously. The boyfriend’s remark didn’t faze her.

“So you want to buy a forest and dedicate it in your name?” Gabi asked, giving her one last chance to opt out. She nodded and smiled. Her blue eyes flitted from the wine and Gabi couldn’t tell if they held a trace of flirtation — he was never good with that stuff — so he turned to Irving with a bemused look, and Irving rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“Sure, I’ll take care of it,” Gabi said, and downed the rest of his wine in a single gulp.

They invited him to sleep over in the guest room, but at that stage, he was feeling bewildered by Jennifer’s blue eyes and the boyfriend’s bushy eyebrows, and besides, Meshulam had told him not to cross any lines in relationships with the donors and he feared he had already crossed them. When they offered to drive him to a hotel, he said, “What are you talking about? You live here, go up home, I’ll manage.” They hugged and parted. They’d made him swear he’d take a cab and he swore, but only after walking the streets for a few minutes, soaking up the atmosphere, seeing the big city. Gabi walked for a long time, block after block, people and cars and yellow taxis and restaurants. He wanted to ease the buzzing in his head, but the buzzing intensified, the wine pumped in his temples, and his eyes and mind were left agape by the sheer quantity of stimuli to which he wasn’t accustomed. He eventually saw a subway station and went down the stairs and bought a ticket and went in and stood on the platform. He had nothing against taxis, he was simply enjoying the New York experience so much and wanted to round it off with a ride on the subway. He stood on the platform, and a loud thundering rolled in from the mouth of the tunnel and approached, and lights crashed onto the platform with a bang and a rattle and a roar, and an incomprehensible announcer bellowed from concealed loudspeakers, and the silver train slowed and the doors along its length parted, and out from the carriage in front of him, cautiously, stepped Anna.

It comes when you least expect it, when you aren’t paying attention. Behind the back, over the shoulder, stepping cautiously in front of you. It catches you unawares, startles you with the speed at which it comes, with its fortuity. It puts things in place, explains courses of action that seemed inconsequential, incidental, inadvertent. It offers a reason, looking back and looking forward. It mostly hits you smack between the eyes and blinds you for a few moments. In that instant you aren’t thinking. The thoughts will come later, years later, on a small hilltop in the heart of the mountains, before a barren desert and freezing winds. Only then will you be able to ask: If I had known what was going to happen, would I have forsaken love?

He saw Anna, and unlike back then, in Sinai, this time he approached her. They began talking on the platform of the nameless subway station, and didn’t stop. For two hours they sat on a bench, the thundering comings and goings, the small hours creeping in.

He told her about that day in Sinai. The day that started with the earthquake while he lay on the sand, and continued with him seeing her arrive with a group of teenagers. How he had panicked, and dressed, and hurriedly left the beach and started out for home. Escaped the escape. Was afraid she’d recognize him and expose his secret. Had always wondered if she’d seen him. She hadn’t. And hadn’t felt the earthquake, either. Even if she had seen him, she certainly wouldn’t have put him at any risk. She vaguely remembered him disappearing, a search for him. But at that time, in Sinai in particular, she was too caught up in herself to notice what was happening around her. She was in love with a German volunteer named Luther, quit school for a few months because of him, hung out with him, smoked with him, did everything with him that a sixteen-year-old girl discovering the world outside the kibbutz does. They stayed in Sinai for two months, she thought, and as far as she remembered, all she did was love Luther. Gabi laughed. He had been so panicked by her appearance, and she wasn’t the slightest bit interested. You’re so focused on yourself sometimes, he said to her, that you forget that for others you aren’t the center of the universe. He told her about running away. The Golani uniform. The crazy rides he hitched. The settlement — it hadn’t crossed his mind for years, and now for the second time that evening he could picture it in his thoughts: the small homes, the family who put him up in the crowded children’s room, the terraces and mountains. It happens like that sometimes, Anna said with a dreamy look, something comes out of nowhere, a memory, a thought, and there’s a reason for it. She shifted her gaze from the opposite platform, the wide steel girders, the rats wandering between the tracks, to Gabi. And then she smiled and her eyes remained fixed on him. He almost reached out a finger to touch the cute dimple on her cheek.