Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

“True,” Othniel said, rubbing his beard thoughtfully. “Interesting.” He took the flashlight from Yoni and directed the beam at the silent structure. “Very interesting,” he mumbled, and then walked around the trailer. “He simply off-loaded it here without a word to anyone. There’s no infrastructure here, no preparations for water or power or sewage. Hello there?” Othniel called out. “Anyone home?” He approached the door and knocked. There was no door handle.

Roni bade farewell to the group and continued walking. Minutes later, he noticed that he had left the confines of the outpost and that the darkness now weighed heavier around him, and he was overcome with a sense that civilization was a step too far away. He turned and walked back. The sound of the guitar grew louder, the same slow, sad melody. Roni thought for a moment that he recognized the song, but the playing suddenly ceased.

“Halt!” came a sudden instruction from the darkness. Roni turned to see a thin young man standing some ten meters away from him. It took him a second or two to recognize the glint of a weapon, pointed directly at him, and another few seconds to see the guitar beneath it. “Or I’ll shoot,” the young man added, trying to disguise the tremble in his voice.

“No need for shooting,” Roni responded, raising his arms. He was tired and unfocused, and couldn’t decide whether to be amused by the fact that a young man with a guitar was now pointing a gun at him, or to panic. Despite the cold, he could feel sweat oozing from the pores on various places over his body. He replied confidently nevertheless. “I’m just walking around, having a look,” he said.

“Why would you want to be walking around here? What’s there to look at, especially in the dark?” The young man approached him, still hesitantly.

“Perhaps you should get that thing out of my face.”

The young man’s hand remained motionless. “First you need to tell me who you are,” he said. “The generator goes down and a suspicious stranger suddenly appears. I have to follow procedures.”

“I’m simply visiting my brother here for a short while.”

“Who’s your brother?”

“Gabi. Gabi Kupper.”

“Gabi Kupper? There’s no one here by that name.” The barrel of the pistol moved a few centimeters closer to Roni’s forehead.

“Ah, yes, he changed his name. Gavriel… Umm, Gavriel… Shit, I don’t—”

“Gavriel Nehushtan? So why didn’t you just say so? Yes, I can see a resemblance,” the young man said, lowering the weapon. “It is subtle, but it’s there. Would you like a cookie?”

The cookies, the young man went on, were baked by Jenia Freud, a math teacher who lived in the trailer adjacent to the gate at the entrance to the outpost with her husband, Elazar, a lieutenant in the reserves who worked in computers and had grown up in a settlement on the other side of Jerusalem. Jenia, he continued, was in the habit of making cookies for the soldiers and leaving them out on a tray at the guard tower.

“Not that I’m a soldier,” said Nir Rivlin, armed with a guitar and pistol, as Roni enjoyed the coconut-chocolate cookies. Rivlin gave him the lay of the land. There were usually four to six soldiers stationed at the outpost; one of them, Yoni, was there permanently, while the others came and went. The soldiers did most of the guarding, but the residents helped out on occasion at night. Guard duty was divided equally among all the men, although there were some who paid others to take their shifts — men with families would usually pay the young single men, who had more time on their hands, to replace them. “Not that I’m single,” Rivlin stressed. He had a family but was happy to guard; besides, he didn’t have the money to pay someone to take his shift. He was studying to be a chef at the Kosher Culinary Arts School in Jerusalem, and he was being tested that week on his knife work, advanced dicing and slicing. The week before, there was a seminar on basic pastry making — quiches, crumble, yeast dough… Nir Rivlin rambled on until finally the exhausted Roni suggested, “Why don’t you play something?” Nir picked up the guitar and asked, “What would you like to hear?” Following a brief discussion, they agreed on Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

They sat on a tattered sofa that someone had discarded and gazed up at the stars twinkling above the dark desert. The generator hummed monotonously.

“Do the other guards pray and play music during their watch, too?” Roni asked.

“To each his own,” Nir responded. “You can spend two hours walking around and pondering, and sometimes studying and praying. I play the guitar. Some watch DVDs on the laptop, or merely sit here with a cigarette and coffee. Sometimes you get a chance to chat with someone walking or driving by.”

“And my brother?”

“Gavriel? He’s a true saint. He always asks for the midnight shift and then recites the Tikkun Chatzot prayer. Do you know what that is? Have you heard ‘To declare your loving kindness in the morning, and your faithfulness every night’? You’re a nonbeliever through and through, right? Nighttime is the principal time for solitude, when the world rests from its troubles; the time to muster up the good from within the evil. Sometimes he stands in the guard tower and memorizes the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. And sometimes you can see him walking to the edge of the hilltop, with not another soul around, only him and the stars and the desert. Speaks to the Almighty’s desert. ‘In solitude, turn sadness into joy.’ Want a hit?”

Nir reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a joint he had rolled before beginning his shift. He puffed on it noisily, exhaled a thin plume of smoke skyward, and passed it to Roni. “Grass. ‘How wonderful it would be if one could only be worthy of hearing the song of the grass. Each blade of grass sings out to God without any ulterior motive, and without expecting any reward. It is most wonderful to hear its song and worship God in its midst.’ Pretty good stuff, no?”

The darkness lay thick and heavy, as it is wont to do far from big, illuminated cities. The outpost had no streetlights. They could hear frogs croaking, grasshoppers gnawing, crickets chirping, the occasional whinny from a horse in its stable (“That’s Killer, Jehu’s horse”), dogs barking in their yard (“Othniel’s dogs, Beilin and Condoleezza”), the wind rustling, the wailing cry of a baby (“Nefesh, perhaps, or Shuv-el”). At night, at the height of winter, Nir told Roni, the rain came down with deafening force, and the wind threatened to carry the trailers off into the heavens. The summer nights, meanwhile, meant weddings and parties and festivities in the neighboring village, and then the music would blast out loud, along with the beating of the darbukas, and singers would entertain the revelers of ever-higher octaves that rose up into the night sky, and on occasion there’d be a good dose of fireworks, too — primitive insofar as visual spectacles go, but impressively loud, thereby frightening Condi and Beilin and Killer and the young children into a long and loud symphony of their own design, startling the men of the outpost from their slumber and causing them to reach frantically for their weapons, their hearts pounding.

And then, too, particularly in the small, deep hours of the morning, there was the silence. When all were in their homes, after putting the children to bed, and dinner, and showers; after they had watched the news, and read, and finished off some work and housework, and had gone to sleep under thin ceilings, above which the stars shone boldly. Sleep brings a departure of the mind, its purification, and makes way for inspiration. During sleep, the soul rises to the next world, and sleep serves as the mind’s pathway.