Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

He told her about the short-circuits in his brain, the fits of rage, the solace he found in Sinai. Anna apologized for ruining the solace and just then a train thundered onto the platform and he said, “Want to take a ride a little, a different vibe?”

They boarded the train and sat on the orange seats.

“So what’s with Luther, is he still in the picture?” he asked.

She frowned for a moment and then laughed out loud. “Idiot,” she said, and he liked the way she called him that.

He told her about the ride with the three Arabs in the Peugeot, about the darkness he felt the moment he got in. How they tore his shirt and frisked him and touched him between his legs and spewed their dirty breath all over him, realized he was just a kid dressed as a soldier and didn’t have a weapon, and threw him out into a ditch at the side of the road. He was with them for mere minutes, but the chilling terror, the sense that this was the end, that this was how someone who’s about to be murdered feels. He remembered every second, remembered thinking about Anna, too, and the blue-eyed man from the settlement. And how he lay stunned in the ditch with his life restored to him, and in his mind the sentence he still recalled — the eye sees, the ear hears, through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil — the tides had shifted and he began viewing the strange day he had experienced not as a mistake but as a blessing, a sign of good things to come.

And then the news of the poor soldier who got into the Peugeot after him. Gabi cried when he told her, and she cried with him, two near-strangers in the middle of the night on an empty train, and she rested a hand on him and said, “It wasn’t your fault, they would have found him without you, they were looking for a soldier to kill,” and Gabi held her hand and between his sobs tried to say “Sorry” and “I don’t know what’s come over me,” and she caressed his hand and soothed him.

They emerged aboveground and walked in silence. It started raining. They stopped, looked up, and at each other, and walked on. The rain came down harder. She giggled and he smiled in response and she snuggled up to him and he held her, shielded her, and she said, “I think any second we’re going to have to run and find a place to hide,” and he answered, “Don’t worry, it’ll soon pass.” And the period at the end of his sentence was the loudest and closest clap of thunder they had ever heard and a deluge washed over them, and they stood like that, rooted to the spot, hugging, helpless, breathing in the smell of a wet sweater, fading perfume, faint alcohol, washed avenue leaves, until Anna said, “We need to do something,” and Gabi responded, “Why? It’s fun…” And she, hidden in his arms, bit her lip and smiled and admitted that, yes, it really was fun, but he didn’t hear, so he asked, “Isn’t it?” And she simply nodded into his armpit and that was enough to make him happier than he had been for years.

The rain eventually eased off. They looked around. They were the only ones on the street, aside from two homeless people under an awning at the entrance of a tall building and a man smoking in a car with squeaky wipers. They returned to the subway and rode two more stations to Gabi’s hotel. Showered and dried and got into one bed — Anna in the only clean pair of underpants and T-shirt left in Gabi’s suitcase, tomorrow’s clothes; Gabi in dirty ones, but dry at least, yesterday’s — and fell asleep before even having a chance to think about what happens next, because they were so tired, so dizzy, too much had happened to the two of them in one night, all energy depleted.

But in the morning, as nature would have it, the energy was restored.

* * *

Anna left Luther, the German volunteer, after a few months in Sinai and a few more days on the kibbutz. Maybe she feared replicating the life of her mother, who married a volunteer who returned to his country of birth two days after Anna’s fourth birthday. She continued to see her father every two years on vacations, and decided at eighteen to forgo the army and go stay with him for a year in Hartlepool, a small town in northeast of England. It was a nightmarish, freezing-cold year, in which she figured out the vast distance between genetics and environment. She learned most of all that love doesn’t conquer all, and certainly when it cannot form a bridge between two such different worlds — that of a kibbutz girl born to two frightened Russian Jews who were thrown in their teens into a foreign and hot land and began growing tomatoes, and that of a roughneck from northeast England with parents who had never in their lives left the area and at the age of seventy still spent evenings at the pub drinking beer and talking about horses.

“Sex can bridge everything,” Anna said, “and I’m the proof. But love? No way.” Gabi thought about that magical night and continued to think about it often over the days to come and over the years come. What determines a good match, how can you tell? Does love win out? That night they both thought it did. Anna clearly spoke about her parents who were foreign to each other precisely because she and Gabi were the very opposite. They grew up in the same environment, were made of the same stuff, saw the world through the same prism. Anna spoke about her unfortunate parents as if to say to Gabi in nonexplicit terms: We’re not like them.

Roni felt he already knew all he needed to know: about girls, about drinkers, about former fellow kibbutzniks, about the big city. And about business, or at least about running a business like that. The sour smell of beer, which he’d once inhaled with gusto, made him sick to the stomach after two years. Sometimes he’d observe the patrons and wonder, Why do people go to bars? What is it that they find in the mix of noise, alcohol, and strangers in a single room? The evenings on the deck with sweet smoke spiraling up into the sky as the sun sets into the sea — still pleasant, still “the good life,” as everyone he invited there gushed — but no longer new. Fewer people were invited. The urge to impress lessened. A touch of distaste crept into his nights, and boredom, and the feeling that he was destined for bigger things. He continued his studies and was close to completing a second year, endeavoring to stimulate the soul and the mind, but the business was demanding, required that he keep working long hours to maintain their success: seven days a week, practically around the clock, seizing opportunities, big loans on improved terms, reinvesting revenue into the development of the business. And thus it grew and expanded — he opened a second Bar-BaraBush with Oren, this time as equal fifty-fifty partners, and then he sold a franchise for a third Bar-BaraBush. Roni had a successful chain of bars, but he wasn’t content. He wanted out of the partnership with Oren Azulai, who turned out to be lazy and arrogant. He thought about opening new places, his alone. But the Tel Aviv night scene now appeared stifling and stained with the smell of dried beer. From his place behind the bar at Bar-BaraBush, he caught glimpses and heard mentions of more distant worlds, bigger opportunities. In time, his distaste was directed toward new challenges, processed and metabolized into a new type of drive.

Ariel was one of his bar’s regular customers, one of the after-midnight people with whom Roni enjoyed talking. Ariel didn’t hit on girls, earned a living from accounting, and spoke about business ventures that mostly sounded to Roni flighty and impractical: importing soup-vending machines from Japan, a factory for personal portable air conditioners, a bar-club that would be called Kindergarten After Hours and would function at night out of a real kindergarten, when it was closed. Roni listened, somewhat amused, semi-convinced that a good idea would emerge at some point.