Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

Roni let out a chuckle. He hated the smell of the sponge and its worn-out feel. He hated the fact that he had learned from his brother and his sheep to quibble over nonsense. Enough. He had to get out of here. He’d go to Tel Aviv the next morning, that was final. He had been avoiding it for a full year. Initially he feared the Israelis whose money he lost in New York. After that he was deterred by the thought of running into former colleagues and schoolmates. After a while he began toying with the idea, but always found excuses not to go. At some stage he grew so accustomed to the hilltop that he stopped thinking about it.

After Gabi sent him packing from his home, and Musa politely declined his request to sleep in the oil press, not to mention to earn a living with him by marketing Palestinian olive oil to the yuppies in Tel Aviv, he was so crippled, at such a dead end and so out of options, that he simply stayed. He couldn’t begin to imagine returning to one of the former stations in his life, let alone beginning a new life elsewhere. The quiet, the negligible living expenses, the opportunity to remain cut off overcame the sense of being unwanted. Moreover, he understood later, it wasn’t a matter of being unwanted. Musa did the right thing, from his perspective. Gabi, too, was right — living together was intolerable. Gabi had changed since then. Started showing concern for Roni. Come to visit. Already a reason to stay. After months of viewing his little brother only as a sanctuary and questioning his way of life, his choices, beliefs, Roni realized just how hypocritical he had been. Now he wanted to remain close and try to understand and give something back to his brother, who accepted him despite the patronizing and scorn, who gave up his trip to Uman for the failed venture. He wanted to make it up to him.

He moved into the Gotliebs’ abandoned trailer. They had returned to Shilo, more balanced, more bourgeois, more suited to their level of tolerance. At first Roni simply squatted, without asking, without requesting, without paying. It proved effective — establishing facts on the ground, and later, acquiring the official stamp of approval. The Absorption Committee, which sought to redeem itself for its failure to select a suitable family the last time, agreed he could remain there temporarily until a family was selected from the waiting list — something that could happen only after Herzl Weizmann renovated and made the place livable for use by a family, and that would happen only after he completed the renovation of the synagogue and set up the prefab day-care structure.

To make a long story short, Roni remained on temporary-resident status that stretched on and on, and in the meantime paid the modest rent from money he scrounged up here and there, and did his share of guard duty and kept a low profile. He didn’t bother anyone, and from the point of view of the outpost, any settler was a blessing — Roni even agreed from time to time to make up a minyan when he was asked.

But he withdrew into himself. The solitude weighed heavy on him. In Gabi’s trailer there were arguments, tension, the feeling of claustrophobia, but at least there was interaction. Now Roni went days without going out, without saying a word, filling the small space with the stifling cigarette smoke and the rancid air of his guts, listening to the winds whistling and the muezzins wailing and Beilin and Condi performing their duet, and the current affairs programs on the transistor he got from Gabi. The money started running out, to the point where he found himself subsisting on slices of bread, or resorting to the tactic of calling and hanging up so that people would call back at their expense, which caused his conversations with Ariel and Musa to trickle down to just a single drop here and there, and brought an end to the activity he could still term “work”: his futile efforts to salvage something from the venture or at least repay Ariel and Gabi a portion of their investment.

Something wonderful, meanwhile, happened to Gavriel, practically a miracle: following a number of delays — the heavy rains of the start of winter, a cash-flow crisis that held up delivery of the roof tiles — he finally completed construction of his cabin, and with a single-coil electric heater and a single mattress moved into his new home on the edge of the cliff above the Hermesh Stream riverbed. The house was tiny, and the bathroom, sink, and refrigerator were outside, and the winter winds in the afternoons and evenings shook and rattled, and the power and water sometimes failed to materialize, and he slept curled up under a comforter and in four layers of clothing, and so on and so on — but all that was nothing. The place was his corner of the world, the humble abode he had built from scratch with his own two hands. It was his pride and joy, his great achievement, and he thanked God for it every day.

He didn’t make an effort to conceal his disappointment and anger over giving up on the trip to Uman at Rosh Hashanah because he lent Roni thousands of shekels to purchase an electric motor for Musa’s oil press, which in the end was never used. But after Roni left his trailer, Gabi was filled with compassion. He felt a little guilty for preferring to be alone. And from a distance it was easier for him to see the true extent of his brother’s precarious situation, and to come to realize that this was the life of the Kupper-Nehushtan brothers. They were bound to each other, they protected each other, they were each other’s family — every attempt by anyone else to join them was a resounding failure. So Gabi went to visit almost every day, dragged Roni out for a walk along the ring road, spoke to him, forcibly yanked him from total isolation.

Rain slammed down on the exposed hilltop. When they arrived home, Othniel and his two eldest children ran toward the house, trying unsuccessfully to fend off the rain with their hands. Gitit made tea for the three of them after Othniel said he wouldn’t be going out to work in the fields in such weather, and tried to get hold of Moran the distributor on the phone.

“Look!” Gitit suddenly called from the kitchen. “Come, Yakir, come see how your friends from the army are protecting us.”

Othniel and Yakir moved closer and peered out the kitchen window at Omer’s soldiers posting notices on the trailers.

“Buffoons,” Gitit said.

“How do you know what it is?” Yakir countered angrily. Othniel chuckled into his beard. He could no longer recall how many times he had seen soldiers posting orders and notices on the settlement’s homes. He turned around and went to the bathroom.

Gitit and Yakir, shoulder to shoulder, continued to watch the soldiers. They saw Neta Hirschson come outside in a colorful head scarf and a long denim skirt and yell at them.

Yakir smiled. “So predictable.”

“What do you want her to do? She’s right. A righteous woman,” his sister responded.

They couldn’t hear her but didn’t need to. The motioning of her hands and head and the occasional sounds that penetrated the weather and the window told of Hirschson’s rage. The pair’s attention then shifted together to the roar of Herzl Weizmann’s engine, as he skidded to a halt on the gravel outside the synagogue.

“It’s like watching a movie,” Yakir said, “one incident after another, one character appearing on screen after another, until the arrival of the man who will change the course of the plot.”

“Herzl Weizmann?” Gitit questioned, and her voice expressed just what she thought about the possibility that the energetic handyman would play such an important role. She was right: a second vehicle moved slowly down the road and passed the military jeep and Herzl Weizmann’s four-by-four. A clean car, dark, cautiously driven, like the cars of visiting dignitaries who showed up from time to time. The car drove by the playground and approached in their direction. Now it had their undivided attention. The vehicle stopped outside their trailer, the door opened, and a hand appeared, and the hand opened a broad black umbrella. Following the hand out of the car was a suit. A tall silver-haired man was wrapped in it, he walked through the gate and up the path. Gitit said, “Dad?” And Othniel joined his children, who looked at him in silence, and then opened the door even before the man had a chance to knock, and a moment after the man uttered the words, “Everything okay, Mr. Assis?” Othniel realized who he was, and the purpose of his visit, and in a few charged seconds he was overcome with feelings of relief, excitement, and apprehension, feelings that intensified the longer he studied the eyes of the visitor, as he reached out his hand to meet his hand, as the visitor smiled and folded his umbrella, apprehension that meant No, everything was not okay, sir.