Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Roni had heard about Eliot Lieberman’s elliptical speeches. He looked him straight in the eye throughout his address, and didn’t lower his gaze when he responded, “I’m aware of the implications, sir, and they don’t deter me. To the contrary.” Jujhar had entered in the meantime and Roni spoke of his passion for the stock market, told of an account he had managed for himself that produced handsome yields. He spoke about the stock of an Israeli company, not very well known, and analyzed its performance. Jujhar smiled with satisfaction. And then Roni repeated what he said at the start: “Give me a chance, you won’t regret it.” Jujhar and Lieberman looked at each other, and Jujhar said, “Dale Savage needs a trader.”

So Roni Kupper worked at an investment bank on Wall Street — a rung on the ladder. And soon achieved the position of trader — another rung. He knew by then that every rung of the ladder would appease him only for a time, until he would cast his eyes upward to the next one. That’s human nature, he thought.

The first decade of the century began with a crisis, then came a recovery. America went to war, the Dow Jones index reacted positively, the mood was good — the world was a playground filled with opportunities. Roni learned quickly. His seven computer screens — two for the stock prices, two for making deals, one for the Bloomberg channel, one for e-mails from brokers and the team, one for chatting — were burned into his retinas, the columns of financial commentators passed under his scrutiny, he sat in meetings with partners and analysts and traders and clients. Spoke with brokers, studied products, and compiled tables and presentations about them, deepened his understanding of the various aspects of the market, and in particular honed his expertise in the field of technology stocks.

The Israeli social club, or as Idan referred to it, “the Thursday Hummus Forum,” was Roni’s most important networking arena. There he not only met dozens of other Israelis who were scattered among key positions in the New York finance and corporate world, expanding the web exponentially, but also participated, when he had the time, in seminars the forum organized for its members: methods of establishing connections (“How to Be a Networking Ninja”), better dress sense (at Barneys’ menswear department), and a workshop on “Accent and Refinement,” to smooth over the Israeli coarseness of speech and style. It was a diamond- polishing plant, which Israelis on Wall Street went through and emerged from a little less Israeli and a little more American, on the exterior, at least.

Despite his aversion to some of the Israelis in New York, Roni enjoyed Thursday nights at the forum, and understood, too, that it was an inexhaustible source for connections and work. There he took off the jacket, loosened the knot in the tie, opened two buttons in the shirt, ate hummus and drank Goldstar beer that someone took the trouble to supply, and spoke in his mother tongue. Got a good dose of home, which was actually better than home itself — he realized that on a visit to Israel over Christmas, while he wandered the streets of Tel Aviv and didn’t know what to do with the direct and pure dose of Israeliness that struck him. He was there for a week and did nothing aside from soaking up the sun’s winter rays during the day, and going to Bar-BaraBush in the evening, as just another customer.

One evening he bumped into his friend Ariel. He looked the same, slightly balder, perhaps. Still an accountant, but had married in the interim.

“What about the soup-vending machines from Japan?” Roni asked.

“Ah,” Ariel responded, and waved his hand. “I’m working now on something new. A mousetrap that doesn’t poison and doesn’t kill. A humane solution, clean, effective. Look”—he retrieved some papers from a case—“it’s a tube of sorts, which opens here…” As he explained, Roni looked at him without hiding his sense of amusement. People don’t change, he thought, they carry on doing the same things over and over again. He was thinking the very same thing a few hours earlier, during his visit to Gabi. All that his brother had been through in the past years was pretty surprising, after all, when you thought about it. All the yuppie trappings — university, a wedding, a kid, an apartment in the Old North of Tel Aviv — who’d have believed it of his little brother? And then, just as you had grown accustomed to the new Gabi, more upheavals and dramatic changes. And still, with all those changes, Roni asked himself over another beer alone at the bar, after Ariel had gone on his way with his revolutionary mousetrap, had his brother really changed? Is the Gabi of today different from Gabi his little brother, the somewhat detached, somewhat impressionable, somewhat searching Gabi? The detachers, the impression-makers, and the search objectives change, the set changes, like in that English learning show on educational TV when they were children, with Sheriff Goodman, who would drink a glass of milk while the stagehands changed the backdrop — but was he a different person on the inside?

It was late at Bar-BaraBush. Roni looked around. Everyone here, he felt — at this bar, in this city, in this country — is pathetic, is swimming in the shallow waters of provincialism, doesn’t realize what world is out there. He diverted his attention to a girl left alone at the bar.

“What do you say, Ravit,” he said — he’d caught her name earlier, when she said good-bye to a friend—“can people change, or do they always remain the same?” And when she merely looked at him and didn’t respond, he added, “In your opinion?”

In the end, only a few persistent memories remain. They manage to achieve prominence and survive from among the infinite medley of life, from among the hundreds of daily events, the vast majority of which sink and remain forever in the depths.

One memory: Gabi, Anna, and Mickey, surely just a few months old because he’s lying in a baby carriage, and it’s winter, they’re out walking. Gabi and Anna are arguing. She’s wrapped the boy in layers and all-in-ones and blankets, and Gabi thinks he’s probably too warm — it was before Mickey put his foot down and stubbornly refused to wear warm clothing at any time of the year — because it’s not that cold, the rain’s stopped and wind’s died down and what’s all the fuss. And Anna, not only was she insisting on all the layers but she was now kneeling down and removing from the small basket under the baby carriage the plastic covering against rain and starting to attach it.

Memories usually come with footnotes of context, time, frame of mind, and the footnote accompanying this memory would explain that this was a time of tension between the couple. They fought a lot, almost every day, often yelling, Gabi in particular.

“Why are you putting that on?”

“Because it’s cold.”

“But he’s already got a million layers. That’s for the rain. It isn’t raining now. Look at the sky.”

She didn’t look at the sky. The sun breaking through the clouds could be felt without lifting one’s head.

“It’s for the wind. There’s a strong wind.”

“Strong wind? Where’s the strong wind?”

She didn’t respond, simply stretched the plastic cover over the carriage, packaging the well-bundled baby in a thick plastic wrapping.

“You’re going to suffocate him! No air will get in! For God’s sake, Anna!”

Memories usually come with a punch line, a line or thought or high point that offers meaning, and for Gabi in this instance it was the thought that settled in his mind at that moment and whispered, If only he would suffocate. If only he would die. And then she’d have nothing more to say. Then she would spend the rest of her life feeling sorry for all her wild exaggerations. She’d stop arguing about every little thing. She’d be eaten up inside. Gabi would return to that thought many times, the death wish on his son, simply to win an argument with his wife.