Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

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When Gabi and Mickey returned from a turn on the slide to the bench where Anna was sitting and speaking on the phone, she looked up and asked, “What happened there?” Gabi simply mumbled, “Nothing,” but was surprised by the short-circuit in his brain.

In time, Gabi stopped telling Mickey his age almost entirely. The relationship between the father and the son cooled. Anna added another night in Afula and now slept there two nights a week, said she was under a lot of pressure at work, but she told him practically nothing about the work. He sensed that on weekends she simply waited for the time to pass and for Sunday to come around, and she’d go back to her Afula, with her Sami or whoever she had there. There was someone there, of that he was sure. He persisted nevertheless in not investigating, not prying, not asking. He simply knew. And Mickey perhaps recognized the weakness in his father, and sank his teeth into it — don’t wanna dress, don’t wanna go to day care, don’t wanna eat, don’t wanna wash hands after pee-pee. Gabi’s patience wore progressively thinner, his frustration increased. No longer could he boast of quality time with the boy, because there was no quality to the time with him. No longer could he offer an excuse for the absolute sacrifice of his advancement, of whatever kind — a career, studies, self-fulfillment. He was chained to the little shit, lived for him, while she managed to live for herself. When Mickey began resisting Gabi’s cajoling with his silences, his improving intellect, his increased physical strength, too, Gabi responded in kind. A shove was rewarded with a shove back. A kick was rewarded with a counterkick. The rationale was — this way Mickey would learn that violence is not an effective means of achieving goals, and also, that his father would not allow him to twist him around his little finger. Gabi was swept into a dangerous cycle.

Roni sometimes saw the Moishe’s trucks driving around Manhattan, the Israeli salesgirls in the shoe stores, his basketball teammates from the Sunday pickup games, and snorted to himself with an air of self-satisfaction. He looked at all those Israelis, who came to get into America through the back door, to crawl slowly upward from the lowest rung of the ladder, and felt pride. He’d entered through the front door. He’d gone straight to the top. And he didn’t even have to take the money from his own pocket to get there — the bank financed it, and the bank would get the money back within…? five years, Idan Lowenhof said? So Roni decided — four years at the most.

He allowed himself to take his foot off the gas a little in his second year of studies. The summer internship at the Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss boutique investment bank was a success, insofar as “a success” was the correct epithet for two months in which he wrote up the minutes of meetings, prepared Excel tables and PowerPoint presentations for analysts and managers, collected suits from the dry cleaners, and made a particularly good impression with his extraordinary ability to repair printers that malfunctioned. One way or another, his people inside the company, Alon Pilpeli and Jujhar Rawandeep, with whom he made a concerted effort to nurture a relationship, promised him that a formal job offer for the following August would soon land on his desk.

An offer was indeed extended, and a contract was signed, and the first $45,000 was transferred into his account, a signing bonus, and close to $3,000 of it was promptly spent on a shopping spree at Hugo Boss and Brooks Brothers and Barneys, during which the tune of the “Who Knows One?” Passover song played over and over in Roni’s head: Ten are the socks, eight are the shirts, five are the ties, four are the pants, three are the shoes, two are the suits, one is the belt, the belt, the belt, the belt, the belt, in heaven… although he did in fact buy two belts.

So, by the start of year two he was already guaranteed a job, like most of his fellow students—2005 was a good year for job seekers on the pendulum of crisis and growth of the financial world since the ’90s — but Roni continued to attend lectures, especially the math ones, which delved into the obscure particulars of bond derivatives, for example, where he sat next to quiet geeky Asians, because he had the chance to learn from the finest lecturers, to get tips for a rookie financier who was just starting out in a very competitive and sometimes cruel world. From time to time he was invited to dinners with the Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss team, and even received handsome gifts from the company for his birthday and for Christmas.

One summery Monday, neatly wrapped in a light, casual Hugo Boss suit, Roni spilled out of the 3 train onto the platform of the Chambers Street subway station in lower Manhattan, and from the station onto the street. He stopped for a moment among the chaos, flexed his broad chest, and held his head up high. He inhaled the salty air from the Hudson River into his nostrils, and started walking, initially west along Chambers Street, and then south down West Street, passing by the Battery Park sporting facilities, until he reached a tall office building. He stopped again for a moment to survey the entrance and then looked up — somewhere there, on the thirty-first floor, lay the offices of Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments. He stopped because he knew that from then on he wouldn’t notice those details, would simply walk in for another day at work. Look where Roni Kupper is now, he thought, and look where Oren Azulai and the rest of the small fries are. He spat on the sidewalk, and then walked into the building.

Roni crowded into the 3 train every day in the company of hundreds and thousands of suited-and-tied financiers just like him, who, from a few blocks in lower Manhattan, managed global deals worth billions of dollars. While he continued to prepare Excels and PowerPoints and write up the minutes of rather dull meetings, he didn’t really feel a part of that nerve center, but Alon and Juj and others said that in a small and diverse institution such as theirs, the opportunity would come quickly. So he waited, continued to weave more strands into the expanding network, kept his eyes open, efficiently carried out whatever was asked of him, and tried to be charming.

At the start of 2006 the opportunity arose. Two traders — stockbrokers — retired from the hedge fund’s trading desk, and one day when Roni walked into the office of one of the senior partners, Eliot Lieberman, to deliver a pitch book he had requested — a presentation on a potential client — he said to Lieberman at the end of the meeting, “Let me sit on the desk. You won’t regret it.”

Lieberman stared at him with watery blue eyes and remained silent for a moment. And then he asked, “Do you have experience in sales and trading?”

“No,” Roni responded, “but I have common sense and the ability to focus. I’m an Israeli, I have a tough mentality and know how to make quick and sharp decisions.” He smiled and added, “I’ve read many books about trading.” He didn’t add that he had also learned a lot from the characters of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street and Jack Bauer in the TV series 24 .

Lieberman asked his secretary to summon Jujhar Rawandeep, and in the meantime asked Roni, “Are you aware of the implications? You won’t get much sleep, you’ll wake up in the small hours of the morning with the markets in Asia, spend the morning with the ones in Europe, and then you’ll start working. You won’t go to the toilet during trading hours between nine-thirty and four, and then you’ll meet with teams to analyze the day gone by and prepare for the one to come. In the evenings you’ll go out with fellow workers from the desk and meet colleagues and drink a lot and go to sleep late and get up at five for a new day with Asia. Relationships, family, a life — you’ll have none of those, only colleagues who aren’t friends but predators, and you’ll love and hate every minute with them and you’ll feel constantly sick to the stomach from shitty nutrition.”