The Hilltop (25 page)

Nehama Yisraeli prepared omelets for her husband, Hilik, and her sons, four-year-old Boaz and two-year-old Shneor. Hilik had promised to help out more with the children ahead of the birth of their new baby, particularly at dinnertime. She had hatched the idea of organizing a biweekly Torah study for the women of the hilltop, and he had urged her on, declaring he'd take care of the boys. But Hilik was caught up with the evacuation threat and the absorption of the Gotlieb family and everything, and feeling sudden inspiration to make some headway with his research, he made several trips to the university. He had started to read an excellent book, Arthur Koestler's
Thieves in the Night
, which beautifully captured the mood of communal settlement and land redemption that swept the Galilee in the 1930s.

And so, in a state of advanced pregnancy, after a day at the kindergarten watching over seven small children, Nehama found herself on her feet beating eggs for an omelet. Everything's in God's hands, she thought, and smiled wearily, recalling how the children that morning, led by her Boaz and Emunah Assis, had tried to sing “Lecha Dodi.”

“Just give me two minutes,” Hilik said on returning from the prayer service. He lay back in the armchair and the boys jumped on him.

“Take your time, rest easy,” she said. “Boys, tell Dad what you did at kindergarten today.” They told him. He was suitably amazed. After dinner and with the boys put to bed, she tidied the mess in the kitchen and living room, washed the dishes, and was on her back in bed by nine. “I'm dead,” she said to her husband just seconds before sleep took her. He folded his glasses and placed them on the bookcase, then removed his skullcap and placed it folded alongside them, and lay down beside her, and caressed her ball-like stomach, and while deciding whether to read the op-ed page in
Yedioth Ahronoth
or a couple of pages of Koestler's book, he succumbed to his deep breaths and slipped into the abyss of sleep.

*  *  *

The chaos in the Assis family had reached new heights. Shuv-el was sitting on Gitit's lap and they recited the customary blessing over produce from the land and she tried to feed him salad that he didn't want. All he wanted was “orange juith,” and he sipped from it after it was poured. Othniel was eating salad with a spoon and speaking on the phone with his distributor, Moran. “Yakir!” he yelled. “How much
labaneh
is on order for tomorrow? Oops, no, Yakir, I mean cherry tomatoes. How much for tomorrow? What? Both together? Can you all keep it down a little? Hananiya!”

“Just a sec,” Yakir shouted back. He was on the Internet, in Second Life, the multiplayer game in which everyone designs a personal avatar that roams through a virtual world, accumulates items—from shoelaces to a home—and interacts and forms bonds with other characters. Yakir's avatar on Second Life was a settler who looked a little like him with the addition of a beard, and he had found a number of friends, like-minded, religious Zionist Jews, and together they'd settled on an island they'd named Revival, and they'd erected a synagogue and prayed and spoke and roamed the world keeping the flame alive.

“Why's Yakir on the computer?” his mother, Rachel, asked his father. “He needs to eat dinner. Yakir! Come eat, get off the computer!”

“Just a minute,” Othniel responded. “Moran's on the line. It's important!”

Yakir's friends were about to visit Islam-Online, one of the Muslim sectors on Second Life, to mess with the Arabs a little. He excused himself, logged out, quickly scanned the farm's orders, and made it to the table just as Hananiya pushed Emunah off her chair and her head slammed into the table leg, causing her to burst into tears, openmouthed and exposing a missing tooth. Shuv-el, in a gesture of kindness, then asked to get down from Gitit's knees, and Dvora suggested Yakir try “the excellent salad,” to which he replied, “What else is there?” and Gitit said, “Yogurt,” and Rachel said, “Hananiya, apologize right now!”

*  *  *

“I don't know what we're going to do this Sabbath about my sister,” Neta Hirschson said to Jean-Marc. “She eats only strictly kosher food,
mehadrin
. Do you think I should ask her about it? Perhaps we should ask the rabbi what to do?”

“Or maybe we should simply buy mehadrin,” he replied hesitantly. Jean-Marc, in fact, had been born into a completely secular family, in Yamit. His father, a vintner who emigrated from France, and his mother, the daughter of a World War II partisan and a kibbutznik father, were among the founders of Ma'aleh Hermesh A. in the 1970s.

“And what about the dishes?” Neta asked, complicating matters.

“Ask the rabbi.”

After dinner Neta made coffee and cut some slices of cake. “Do you think we should introduce her to Gavriel?” she asked.

“Which Gavriel?”

“Nehushtan.”

“Gabi? Are you crazy? He's a reborn.”

“You're a reborn, too,” said Neta, the daughter of the rabbi of Ofra and a mother who helped establish Sebastia, the very first West Bank settlement.

“Exactly, your poor parents. Do you want to burden them with another one? Besides, your parents knew mine, and me. It's not like I was a reborn after a mysterious past.”

“I think he's quite sweet, actually. A little quiet. He has faith. How bad could his past be? The story with his son is awfully sad. He looks like a really good guy.”

“Divorced,” Jean-Marc said, continuing to play the devil's advocate.

“That's life. What's done is done. Look at him now, the way he's taken in that strange brother of his. So tolerant.”

“He's a good guy, I'm not disagreeing. But not for your sister. He's too old. She still has time, doesn't she?”

“She'll be twenty-four soon.”

“Oh,” Jean-Marc said, clutching his coffee mug as he contemplated. “I see. Okay, let me think if I know anyone.”

“Never mind. Let's first see what we're going to do about this mehadrin business,” Neta said, and then flashed an inviting smile. “I was at the
mikveh
today,” she continued. “Instead of a new son-in-law, what do you say to giving my parents a grandchild?” Jean-Marc smiled. But his smile
soon faded after Neta turned around and walked into the bedroom. They had been trying since their wedding, for more than a year, and not only had the act itself turned mechanical, businesslike, devoid of any tenderness and intimacy, Neta had begun coming apart at the seams. She so desperately wanted children, and in time her want had become an obsession, consumed her entirely and sometimes boiled over—in the form of complaints against Jean-Marc, angry online exchanges with leftists, verbal abuse hurled at soldiers or other annoying government officials who came to the hilltop. Sometimes—it usually happened the day her period insisted on showing up, an unwanted guest whom no one had invited—silence, a turning in on herself, to the point even of canceling beauty treatments she had set up with clients, closing the shutters, and sliding quietly between the sheets. And now, to the task at hand.

*  *  *

Raya Gotlieb sat on a plastic chair in the corner of the room, unable to hold back the tears. “Is this what we left our home for, Nachi?” she asked her husband. They had just put the children down to sleep. Nachum was half lying, half sitting on the mattress in their bare living room. He wanted to be positive, but he didn't have a good answer. The list of problems with their “new” trailer was endless: the missing shower door caused a mini-flood in the bathroom, not to mention the lack of privacy, and there was no showerhead, which made for an erratic stream of water and yet more flooding. The kitchen sink was missing its hot water tap, and Raya washed the dishes in cold water only. There were no shutters in the children's room, so Nachum transferred the ones from the main bedroom, which was then filled with light every morning at six. Perhaps the most humiliating was the square piece missing from the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Who would think of stealing a piece of linoleum? Nachi Gotlieb stared at the vacant square, the sticky edges of which had already collected bits of dirt. The nerve.

Their possessions were brought in little by little in Nachum's car because Othniel had asked them not to use a large truck so as not to attract unwanted attention at a sensitive time such as this. They had to watch out for the sector's brigade commander and the company commander, who were frequently in the area, the soldiers at the guard post
who would report the arrival of a moving van, and then, of course, you had the left-wing groups and Civil Administration inspectors, and—Othniel paused, looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice—we may have an informant in our midst who's monitoring and reporting our activities, and the truth, too, is that the neighbors from Givat Yeshua won't be too pleased to hear that a family has moved into the trailer that was intended for their community and is awaiting a transportation permit from the Defense Ministry. It's therefore best, Othniel explained, to keep a low profile. So Nachi drove back and forth, to and from Shiloh, taking days off work, packing the car to the brim. But some things simply wouldn't fit in the Nissan Winner—the washing machine, for instance. So Raya had been doing the washing in the sink, without hot water, or at friends' houses in Ma'aleh Hermesh B., but she no longer felt comfortable doing so. They were still without a refrigerator and an oven, so they tried to get by with a small icebox and an electric hot plate, which blew the generator every evening.

“But the people are really nice, they brought cakes and toys for the kids, and there was a request in the newsletter to all those who took things to return them,” Nachum said in an effort to lift his wife's spirits. “And Shimi and Tili love the playground.” Raya responded with another bout of sobbing, and he knew why. Back in Shiloh, their former home stood opposite an amazing playground where the children would play unsupervised for hours every day.

“I just hope and pray this god-awful wind doesn't keep them up tonight, too,” she lamented.

Nachum was an optician. He loved the fashion part of the job—an aspect of the business that Raya helped with by choosing the frame catalogs and suiting frames to faces when she was in the store—but he also loved the medical element, helping to mend the body, allowing people to see the world as it is.

“The nature here is stunning,” he said, peering into the black night through the torn netting in the window. “You can't enjoy the view but complain about the wind. You have to see the big picture,” he added, his voice filled with tenderness.

*  *  *

Roni went out for a walk and stopped to listen to the radio for a few minutes with Yoni at the sentry post. “Don't you ever go home?” he asked the soldier. “You seem to be here all the time.”

Yoni, paging through an issue of the men's magazine
Blazer
, smiled. “I'm home this Sabbath at last.”

“Where's home?”

“Netanya.”

Roni had nothing to say about Netanya. Two minutes later, he stood up, smiled, and bade Yoni a good night. Outside again, he gritted his teeth against the wind and thought, Poor guy, he got the worst of both worlds. An Israeli and an African. God! At least he's still able to smile.

He stopped on the way home at Gabi's cabin-in-the-making and turned on the pale light. He saw that Gabi was almost done assembling a wooden bed frame and remembered his brother telling him that once the bed was in place, he would begin sleeping in the cabin. And though he had yet to hook up a water pipe, and there was no furniture, and the roof wasn't finished (Gabi was waiting for tiles promised him by a friend from a hilltop near Itamar, beautiful green tiles; the friend simply needed to complete construction of a roof on his hilltop and would then give Gabi his leftovers), he wasn't concerned at all. On the contrary, he loved roughing it, he sought that pioneering spirit. Ma'aleh Hermesh C. sometimes felt to him too staid and bourgeois, he used to say, with the stone cladding on the homes and all. Roni asked him what would happen with his trailer after he moved. “I don't know,” Gabi said. “You'll have to ask the Absorption Committee.” Roni's face dropped. He and the Absorption Committee weren't on the best terms.

*  *  *

Nir rocked baby Zvuli while Shaulit finished bathing Tchelet and dressed her in a diaper and pajamas. A disaster: Shoshana, the doll without which Tchelet refused to go to bed, had disappeared. The entire house was turned upside down, mattresses were lifted, furniture was moved, dark corners were inspected, a flashlight was employed to illuminate the yard—even the search for unleavened food products before Passover wasn't as thorough. Shaulit finally called Nehama, and after around ten minutes of idle gossip, the fateful question was posed.
Nehama thought for a moment and then said, “Shoshana may be at the kindergarten.”

Nir put on his shoes and exited into the night. He went over to the synagogue, ran into Jehu and Josh in the throes of evening prayer inside, located Shoshana in the day-care area, and returned her to the loving arms of Tchelet, who closed her eyes and dropped off to sleep seconds later. Shaulit raised her red eyes to look at Nir and whispered “Thanks,” and he embraced her and caressed her shoulders. She had been feeling down since the birth. Zvuli, she'd say, reminded her of her father, who was murdered by terrorists on the road to Beit El eight years earlier.

“Nehama baked a cake for the Gotliebs,” she said, wiping away her tears. “We haven't even been over to welcome them.”

Nir made a face. “Get the mixer back from Neta and I'll make something,” he said.

*  *  *

Yakir logged on to Second Life again. Because he handled the farm's Internet orders, no one, including Othniel, who knew nothing about computers, dared depose him from his seat at the computer desk. He returned to his virtual character and gazed at the figure on the screen. The avatar pleased him. In addition to a thick black beard, he wore a white skullcap and had a horse called Killer, which King Meir had crowned “supercool.” King Meir was—or so he thought, because you can never be sure in Second Life who's behind the virtual characters you encounter—a thirty-six-year-old lawyer from Dallas, Texas, which explained how he was able to lease the virtual island, Revival, for two hundred real dollars a month. The remaining members of the group were, they said, young Jews just like him, mostly Americans, and they all prayed at the Flame of the Revival synagogue that King Meir erected on the island, and they spoke among themselves primarily about Arabs. After all, that's what people do in Second Life, for the most part, talk. You type and your character delivers the words in a cartoon-style speech bubble, and your friends release their words in their speech bubbles. King Meir was the undisputed leader of the group, and Yakir, in all likelihood the only true settler among them, was his favorite.