Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Anna brought home the university catalog and they spent a few nights going over the list of courses, many of which appeared interesting: history, criminology, economics, film. But Gabi kept asking himself the same questions: Does it suit me? What would I do with a degree like that? Do we have enough money to be two full-time students? And mostly — is that what I really want to do with my life? The answer was always no.

Anna said he was making too big a deal of it. “You’re not being asked to decide the rest of your life,” she said. “You’re going on a journey, and even if you study something for a few years and go nowhere with it afterward, what’s the problem? Few people our age know what they’re going to do with their lives, but most of them go to university because a degree is a degree, because studying is an enriching experience, because—”

“Because that’s what everyone does and they have no idea what else they could do and their parents push them,” Gabi said.

“No one pushed me,” said Anna.

“You were lucky. You realized what it is you want. I don’t know what I want.”

He nevertheless registered as a criminology student, because it sounded exotic, and interesting, with potential employment opportunities in the future. But Tel Aviv University didn’t offer an undergraduate degree in criminology, so he registered at the College of Management Academic Studies. He continued with the flyer work while he completed high-school courses for his matriculation certificate and took the university entrance exam, and began his first year as Anna started her second at business school. Because they were studying at different institutions, they saw less of each other than during the previous year, too rushed in the mornings, too on edge at night. On rare occasions Gabi managed to get to the university and meet Anna in the cafeteria.

Gabi’s life, until then peaceful and laid-back — albeit filled with questions and fears concerning the future — now turned busy and stressful and cluttered, and still full of questions and fears. The quality of life dropped. The dinners were more simple, the home somewhat neglected. When he worked with the flyers, he felt guilty about not studying, and while he was studying, he stressed about not earning a decent living and not being able to focus on the reading or find it sufficiently interesting. The chapter in the catalog that outlined the criminology courses — social situations related to crime, detection, codes of ethics, conflict theories, analysis of topical crime incidents, tours of prisons and the courts — left him in no doubt that it was a fascinating field. But after getting down to the nitty-gritty, after spending long hours in the library reading endless sociology and anthropology and biology papers, all written in neoclassical, pompous, and boring academic language, he began asking himself what the hell was he doing and where his time was going.

And then Anna got pregnant. And all the stress until then — it was like someone twisted a knob and turned it up way higher.

They agreed to see the pregnancy through. Anna thought about her mother and her father, the volunteer who disappeared, but it wasn’t the same thing. Gabi was her man. And Anna was his woman. They had been through enough to know that, insofar as someone can ever really know something like that. True, they were students who were scraping by, but Anna had always thought she wouldn’t wait until she was much older to have a child. They didn’t believe the home pregnancy test, were convinced they were the lone percent against the 99-percent accuracy rate the test boasted on the box. By the time they walked out from the first scan, which showed a minute beating heart, they were both spooked and excited, and in the middle of the street Gabi stopped and gripped Anna’s shoulders, and she looked into his eyes, and they both smiled in amazement, as if to say “Wow!”

Gabi completed his first year and announced he wouldn’t be returning for the second. Not now, anyway, maybe in the future. One of them had to bring in money. Anna didn’t argue. It was clear to both of them that her degree was more important than his. That, unlike him, her goals were clearer — a degree, then integration into business. That she owed it not only to herself and the faculty but also to Samuel Lax. And in some way, they both felt, to the baby too, to the livelihood of the family.

Two days after landing in New York, Roni found a wallet in the snow. It was a fat, bloated wallet, a woman’s wallet. It contained almost two thousand dollars in cash. For Roni it was simply the natural progression of his life: the world smiled at him. He recalled something Baruch Shani once said to him at basketball many years back: Fortune favors the good. A few minutes earlier he’d seen an apartment on the Upper West Side that appealed to him, but it was a little expensive and he left without deciding. After finding the wallet, he returned and signed the lease. He felt worthy of the apartment and it of him. And just like success came easily to him on the basketball court, with the cattle, in the commando unit, in the bar business, and eventually with his undergraduate degree — there was no reason why it shouldn’t continue to come easily in New York as well, and as proof of that — a nice fat wallet in the snow two days after landing. When he fished through it, he found a driver’s license bearing the pleasant face of a black woman. Her date of birth was close to that of his brother’s, he noticed. Thoughts of his brother seeped into his mind, but he chose to focus on the wallet. He wondered about returning it without the money, so the sweet-looking black woman would at least get back her license, credit cards, various club cards, and the rest of the junk that filled the wallet. He found her address and decided he would mail her the cards. His kindheartedness pleased him. Yes, fortune favors the good.

The MBA was harder and more competitive. He got used to listening to the lectures in English pretty quickly, but in the first months he struggled for hours on end with the mountains of reading assignments. On the other hand, he didn’t have to work at the same time, like he did in Tel Aviv. He had money, thanks to the loan he was automatically eligible for as an MBA student. He was shocked by how simple it was to take the letter from the university to a branch of Citibank and immediately open an account containing $120,000.

* * *

His last year in Tel Aviv had started out nightmarishly: university in the morning, Bar-BaraBush at night, tons of material to study and absorb for his research seminar paper, Oren Azulai, who showed no consideration for his partner’s time constraints — he simply couldn’t understand why Roni bothered with university — until, in the middle of the year, with New York appearing sufficiently close and alluring, with the smell of stale beer coming out of his every orifice by then, he sold his share in Bar-BaraBush and dove headfirst into completing his degree and applying to an MBA program in New York.

In Tel Aviv he’d met other Israelis who were going to business school in New York on the way to a career on Wall Street, and with most he didn’t connect. Spoiled rich kids whose paths were padded by their parents’ money, who didn’t know what hard work was, who gave off an air of arrogance that rested on sharp intelligence, an indulgent mother, and an easy life. Two of them, Meir Foriner from Savyon and Tal Paritzky from Kfar Shmaryahu, were accepted along with Roni to the same university in New York. But in his cluster, in class, he befriended other foreign students — a Japanese, an Italian, and Sasha the Bosnian in particular — and observed the efforts of Meir and Tal to ingratiate themselves with the American WASPs. Roni understood them, he wasn’t there to seclude himself among foreigners, either, and realized that to fit in, he had to make connections and do some aggressive networking — the word that everyone mumbled dozens of times a day — the spinning of a spiderweb of contacts, primarily with Americans. But when he saw Meir and Tal partying and playing drinking games like beer pong, just like the Americans, talking music and football just like the Americans, copying them in dress and gestures and accent, he felt uncomfortable and returned to the warm embrace of his foreign gang.