The Hilltop (20 page)

Ariel glanced at Roni. Not the most sterile operation in the world. Again Roni winked at him.

“It's the best oil,” Musa said. “But no one makes like this any longer because too slow, and gives too small oil, you need healthy donkey, or motor, and many people to work. With new machines, you push button and everything works by itself, clean, and press more oil from olives. You understand?”

Roni looked at Ariel and rubbed his chin. His eyes then drifted to Musa's white mustache. “How much do they cost, the machines?” he asked.

“Six thousand dollar for small Chinese compressor, six manpower. For one hundred thousand dollar, from Italy is best compressor in the world—six hundred horsepower. Extracts most oil from olives in short time.”

“But the taste isn't the same taste,” Roni said.

“No.”

“And that's what matters.”

“Yes, a little money we need to fix here because not work for a long time. Electric motor for turning, separator to separate instead of letting settle.”

“You said the donkey will do the turning,” Roni responded. “I saw your donkey. As for the separating, you said it was best to wait.”

“I didn't say best. Letting settle takes two weeks instead of few minutes. I think pity to wait. And donkey has heart problem, is weak.”

The eyes of the Israelis met again. Roni's eyes read, I don't have a cent to my name. Right now, I'd rather make a small profit on zero investment than a large profit after an investment—boutique oil. His mouth said, “For now, I say, let's keep things down to a minimum. Original olive oil. Handmade. Boutique. Try with the donkey.”

“Okay,” Musa replied, “but oil only a little.”

On the walk back, Ariel aired out the sweat and clinging odors from his shirt and again frisked his pockets to ensure his wallet and keys and mobile were still there. The fact that he was still alive lifted his spirits, and soon they'd be back on the hilltop, which might have been an outpost in the heart of the occupied territories, but at this point in time, even Ariel felt secure there, surrounded by armed and bearded Jews and soldiers to keep the peace.

“What can I tell you, Roni? I've made several inquiries since we started discussing things. The people at the Olive Boutique on Rothschild Boulevard sent me to see oil presses, the top of the line. The way they do things here, with sticks and stones and donkeys and containers that have been lying around for who knows how long—the world's moved on since then. The production lines from Italy are a different world.”

“Forget about it. Nothing beats the old way. The most natural, the purest. A production line means tons of oil a day. We're a boutique, man.
People want that. You tell them it's organic, tried and tested for hundreds of years, made by hand, unrivaled quality, extra-extra-virgin.”

“Actually, in Italy, if the oil comes from a press like that, the label shows an illustration of millstones.”

“Exactly. You see? We'll mark ours, too!”

“I don't know,” Ariel said, returning to his original standpoint. “Didn't Musa look a little tired to you? With machinery, it's more precise, cleaner. There's the washing . . .”

“A waste of water and a waste of space. Those Arab women are better than any machine when it comes to sorting out and discarding the leaves and shitty olives. That's the real flavor, with the dust, and the earth, and the cigarette smoke, and a leaf here and there.”

“There are automatic mills . . .”

“And I suppose you also have a hundred thousand dollars lying around somewhere? Leave it, nothing beats millstones. A two-thousand-year-old success story, like the Jews!”

They walked on to Ma'aleh Hermesh C.'s circular road. “Everything in life is relative, isn't it,” Ariel said. “When I first got in here, I almost passed out from fear. But after surviving the Palestinian village . . . Now I'm just trying not to think about the drive back.” His gaze lingered briefly on a group of children in push cars alongside a mother, and he felt a pang of longing for his own son and wife. His eyes then moved to fix on the damaged windshield of a car—a weblike formation of cracks around a small hole where the rock had struck.

“What's that?” Ariel asked, gesturing with his head.

“Ah, terrorists from one of the surrounding villages,” answered the mother, Nehama Yisraeli. “They threw stones at my husband on his way back from Jerusalem. Thank God for the armored windows.”

“Armored windows?” Ariel asked in a shaky voice.

“Enough of that now, Ariel,” Roni said. “What about our business?”

Ariel, his face now pale, turned to face Roni again. “In a modern oil press, everything is controlled and directed from a central control panel . . .”

“Musa's mind beats any control panel, hands down—just like no computer has beaten Kasparov at chess.”

Ariel smiled but remained silent.

Roni stopped. “Listen, Ariel,” he said. “While you were out doing the rounds at sophisticated oil presses, I was working on the figures. If there's anything I learned in America, it was to analyze figures, to construct business models, to maximize the dollars. Trust me, I've broken it down to cost versus output at the level of a single olive. You need a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars for a modern oil press, and that doesn't include finding premises, renovations, paying rent. And then you buy the olives and transport them, and what about marketing? Bottles? Labels? More production lines. And then there's dealing with the Olive Board to get a quality control label. Cold-pressed-shmold-pressed, extra-virgin-extra-shmirgin. You need insane loans, and then you have to sit tight for five to ten years until you start making a profit. Is that what you want now? The entire country is filled with them already. What's your advantage over them? Anyway, it's madness to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a production plant in the territories and then wait for five years. Who knows what things will be like here even next year?”

Ariel slid his sunglasses up to his head; the sun had set. “So what do you propose?” he asked.

“You already know what I propose. That Musa does everything, that we make a deal with him at a good price and commit to the entire season. We'll label the cans—organic and original, with an illustration of millstones, the mother of all extra-extra-virgin, from the very earth and heart of Palestine. And we'll sell it for twice the price at your Olive Boutique on Rothschild. It'll sell like hotcakes to their sweet Tel Avivians.”

“And who says the Palestinians will go for it? Roni Kupper has spoken and the entire village jumps to attention? They hate us, after all.”

Roni rubbed his thumb against his forefinger. “Money,” he said. “That's all. You pay them in advance, for the whole season. No one else is going to offer them something like that. I've spoken to Musa. Right now, those poor bastards have to cultivate and harvest, and then they go to an oil press that takes a twenty-percent cut, and then along comes some Palestinian merchant who screws them and pays them a ridiculous percentage only if he manages to sell anything. And how's a Palestinian merchant going to sell? Who's he going to sell to? As for the Israelis, they
shit themselves every time they need to go through a checkpoint. Musa and his mates know, too, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Honestly, Ariel, Musa told me so.”

Ariel bit down on the arm of his glasses. “Okay,” he finally said cautiously. “So let's think about our costs: You spoke about paying up front for the olives; a separator; and an electric motor to replace the sick donkey.”

“The donkey may be okay.”

“Forget about the donkey. Bottles and labels. And we're going to need something for marketing and distribution.”

“Minimal, minimal,” Roni responded, fully aware he was fighting a losing battle.

“Minimal, minimal, for sure, but we still get to tens of thousands of shekels to begin with. Thirty or forty. Let's play it safe and say fifty. Twenty-five thousand each.”

Roni hurriedly lit up a cigarette. He narrowed his eyes through the smoke. “How the hell did you get to twenty-five? You're not in Tel Aviv, you're in an Arab village in the territories. No one here talks in those numbers. Where am I going to get that kind of money?”

“I don't get it. What were you thinking—that it's not going to cost a cent? It's not a whole lot for starting a business with this kind of potential, and with the experience you've had, you know that all too well.”

Roni's face took on a look of anguish. “Ariel, I can't go in fifty-fifty with you right now,” he said. “Can't you invest the initial capital and we'll sort things out further down the line? I came with the idea. And I found Musa. But when it comes to liquid cash, I'm a little pressed at the moment.”

“I'm willing to put in more than you, but you have to come up with something, to show commitment. You can't just leave me in the lurch with this. Don't you have a little in the bank? Didn't you leave something in America?”

The pain etched across Roni's face appeared to intensify. “America's problematic,” he responded. He tossed the cigarette to the ground and paused for a long while before stamping it out with the tip of his shoe. “I'll check it out. I'll try to make a plan, okay?” he said. “There's a Fire in
Breslov” began playing on Gabi's phone and Roni fished it out his pocket with two fingers, happy for the interruption.

“Yes, Musa,” he said with a smile. “Yes, I hear you.” Ariel watched Roni as he listened to Musa, watched the smile fade from his lips, watched as Roni ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket, watched his morose friend as he said, “The donkey's dead. A heart attack. Just now.”

M
obile residential units, known in the vernacular as mobile homes, or transportable homes in government-speak, or precasts, trailers, prefabs, and so on, are more or less of uniform size and proportion—single-story, rectangular units measuring 4.25 meters in width, 11 meters in length, and 2.80 meters in height. The floor is fixed to a metal frame some eighty centimeters off the ground. The outer walls comprise some four to six centimeters of insulation between gray concrete and pale wooden boards with a PVC finish or unfinished drywall. The roof includes a protective layer of aluminum. Four metal steps lead up to an opening on one of the long sides, which also include French windows with sliding glass panes. For the most part, the trailers are positioned with their front doors facing inward, toward the settlement, while the windows open onto the view. The 54,900 shekels required to purchase one is usually donated to the Amana settlement organization by the Housing and Construction Ministry, and rent and property tax to the local council amounts to no more than a few hundred a month. There are, of course, variations on this standard. The chosen manufacturer, English, German, or Israeli, may sometimes change in keeping with the government ministry handling the order, or with the prevailing mood, and thus, over a period of several decades, a mixture of structures that were delivered or produced in various combinations could find their way to the settlements. The two trailers, one of which still served as the basis for the Assis family residence, that Uzi Shimoni brought up to Ma'aleh Hermesh C. in its very first days, for
example, measured twenty-two square meters. The
Bar-Onim
were taken from a work site set up by the Americans who built the airstrips in the Negev after the Sinai evacuation.

The trailer that arrived out of the blue in Ma'aleh Hermesh C. on that festive wintry day was still in the exact same spot in the spring and was about to be occupied for the first time. Following the structure's delivery in error to Ma'aleh Hermesh C. and the defense minister's refusal to authorize its relocation to its original destination, Othniel instructed the outpost's Absorption Committee—chaired by his wife, Rachel, with Hilik as her right-hand man—to convene and review the waiting list and invite a new family to move in.

Several weeks passed before the Absorption Committee managed to get together, and in the meantime, the new home remained as good as new, more or less. By the first Saturday night following the delivery of the home, some unknown individual had already managed to overcome the lock on the door, and one by one, solutions were found for faults and problems with numerous other residences throughout the settlement. A rickety shower door was replaced; window shutters; a sink faucet; a showerhead. Even a square, meter-by-meter piece of greenish linoleum from the kitchen floor was removed with a sharp Stanley knife and found its way, with the help of a strong adhesive, onto the floor of another home as a replacement for a piece of flooring already bulging and dirty and rotting from a water leak. Nevertheless, notwithstanding several essential built-in components that quickly became built out, the waiting list for the home had lengthened considerably; and before Rachel even produced the printed sheet of paper with the waiting list, various people, from within and without, began tugging at her sleeve, seeking her ear, whispering to her.

A number of the hilltop residents suggested converting the trailer into a day care for toddlers so that the synagogue could have its own structure and the women's section would no longer have to serve a dual function, with the partition in place during prayer times and otherwise down. The issue had been a contentious one and the subject of many a committee debate since the dawn of the settlement: Who is more important, who is more entitled to their own home—children or God? There weren't many
children in the early days, and the synagogue came first, but the number and ages of the children had increased, and a structure specifically dedicated to their education was now a necessity.

Others supported the idea of inviting a family of new immigrants, and some suggested young couples. And parents whose children were without like-aged peers at the outpost tended to look for families with such children. Roni Kupper, Gavriel Nehushtan's brother, who arrived at the outpost at the very same time the trailer was delivered, requested occupancy on a temporary basis, simply to lay down a mattress for a while until the selection of the new family. And then there were the friends of the Rivlins, a young, sweet family from Efrat. The relatives of Jenia Freud, new immigrants from the former Soviet Union who lived in Karnei Shomron and were looking for “a new challenge and a pioneering lifestyle” and certainly ticked all the right boxes for Ma'aleh Hermesh C. Several youths from Ma'aleh Hermesh A. called, as well as an American by the name of Sarah, who had wanted to establish an outpost herself but made do with a spa named after her husband, who, she claimed, was murdered on one of the nearby roads, despite the fact that everyone remembered the incident and recalled nothing more than a regular vehicular accident. And there were more friends and acquaintances and others who had visited the hilltop or were familiar with it—the modest abode, deemed a blessing on arrival, turned into an arena of confrontation among conflicting interests and rivalries, and Hilik Yisraeli, who knew all the families who had come and gone, beginning with Uzi Shimoni, served as the final litmus test to determine and approve the candidates' suitability for the hilltop and its inhabitants.