The Hilltop (40 page)

No. None of those factors were behind the sentence that came from his mouth, but rather the law, the plain and simple law. The law from the book of laws of the State of Israel, and the international law, which the minister felt himself entrusted to uphold.

He raised his eyes, cast his gaze over his three colleagues around the table, placed the fax sheet on the dark mahogany surface, positioned it so that its edges lay parallel and flush to the edge of the table, and said, “Giora, evacuate that outpost. I'm serious this time. No games. Remove that thorn from my ass. It's been digging into me for way too long. Way, way too long.” He handed the fax to Malka, stood up, and left the room.

T
he realization came on the eve of Shavuot. He was sitting in the dining hall in a white shirt and felt ridiculous. Some families sat together, but he didn't want to sit with Dad Yossi; he never sat with him in the dining hall. Children were singing about the first fruits and he knew neither the children nor the songs. Roni was in Tel Aviv, bumming around, living in the apartment of his girlfriend's father and raising goldfish. Working in some pub. It didn't sound very appealing to Gabi, and anyway, his brother never invited him to tag along when he came for his monthly visit. Here, too, no one invited him to tag along. He could see his childhood friends Yotam and Ofir, sitting with their girlfriends, joining in on the sing-along. He could see the soldiers with their drooping eyelids, the volunteer girls with their smooth skin and blue eyes.

He was no longer an outcast at the kibbutz. The years since he left the army had passed in relative peace. After wandering for a while from one kibbutz enterprise to another, he finally managed to settle down—in the bananas. The groves were on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, about a forty-minute drive from the kibbutz. The banana boys spent long days out in the open, on the shores of the large lake, under the broad leaves, meals in groups of four or six in the peaceful picnic corner, cruising along the lake in kayaks when they felt like taking a break. It wasn't light work—bananas are a pampered fruit with a short life cycle that requires digging new furrows every winter, uprooting the groves and planting new ones every spring, endless weeding. Even that morning, the eve of the holiday, with the banana fingers green in their palms and the palms clumped together in their bunches and the sun heralding the first days
of summer, he sweated like a pig while digging an irrigation canal with a hoe. But Gabi didn't shy away from hard work. After all, manual labor wasn't what broke him at his previous jobs—it was the overpowering smell of tomatoes in the field crops division, the allergic itching caused by the grass in the factory, the condescending treatment from Dalia, who was in charge of the food supply department. His ejection from the army, too, wasn't brought on by physical hardship, but rather because disrespectful cooks refused to feed him.

Suddenly, in the middle of the holiday dinner, he realized who he reminded himself of: Ezra Dudi. When they were children, Ezra Dudi, who was ten years older, would always sit alone in the dining hall and eat the same meal—yellow cheese, tomato, and a slice of bread. And he'd always shoot basketballs alone in the gym, for hours. And in the factory, Gabi recalled, he operated the forklift in silence and with precision, transporting the ready segments of lawn to the packing hall and the packed parcels to the delivery trucks. He showed up at the dining hall alone every day, in work clothes and with a somewhat dirty face, adorned with an ever-thickening beard.

Gabi thought about the fact that he never once saw Ezra Dudi exchange more than a word or two with anyone. He lived on the kibbutz with his mother, who arrived there from Europe after the war on her own and didn't speak much about her past, but from here and there—her accent, her pale skin, a passing reference—people pieced together a patchwork of stories and came to the conclusion that she was originally from Ostland, the eastern territories. She may have spent several years in a Siberian gulag; may have been released from there under a repatriation agreement. Whatever the case, she arrived at the kibbutz alone and destitute and ten years later her son, Ezra Dudi, was born. And in this case, too, there was more to the story than met the eye: she became pregnant and gave birth to a dark-skinned and cute baby boy, of that there was no doubt, but no one knew the identity of the father.

There was always something slightly off about Ezra Dudi. His hair was the wrong length, his beard too wild. His eyes were black and large with a soft, though somewhat dim, look in them. He looked a little like Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, only a kibbutz version, and
curly-haired. His clothes somehow didn't sit well on his large frame. And his name, too, which no one understood—why two names? Both first names? And if one's a surname, what kind of name is that?

From the looks he got from the kibbutz's young children, Gabi could see he risked becoming another Ezra Dudi—with his odd isolation in the dining hall, with his silence and aimless wanderings, and perhaps even in appearance, rarely shaving his beard or cutting his hair, and remaining for the most part in his work clothes and shoes. He was overcome with regret. With the festival of the first fruits in full swing he felt like an onlooker, disengaged, out of place, and he arrived at the realization: that's the problem. He knew, of course, that he wasn't really Ezra Dudi, who suffered in all likelihood from a mild mental disorder of sorts. His mind and soul were more or less intact; the short-circuits in his brain over the years were deviations from the norm—the psychiatric medical officers he met with during his military service confirmed that, and added that he was blessed with a high level of intelligence and judgment. But he didn't have money to leave the kibbutz, and Tel Aviv wasn't appealing. He didn't feel comfortable discussing things with Yossi, and when Roni came to visit, he felt his brother wasn't really interested.

As in the case of previous significant junctures in his life, Uncle Yaron helped to steer him. Gabi went to visit him at the kibbutz on the Golan Heights the weekend after the Shavuot holiday, enjoying as always the cool air and heavy smell of cow dung while lying on the large ragged hammock.

“It's like being in another country.” The nephew smiled at his uncle, and the uncle responded, “How would you know, you've never been overseas.”

“True,” the nephew said, “but it's the closest to overseas I can get, so let me say it's like being in another country.”

“You want to go overseas?” the uncle said. And the nephew stopped for a moment—not the hammock, because that moved by the force of inertia—but on the idea, because he had never before considered the option. Then he recalled why he had never considered the option. “How can I go overseas?” he said. “I don't have a cent to my name.”

Uncle Yaron, with his balding egg-shaped head and glassy eye and half-chopped-off ear, appeared older than ever. Gabi had never thought about it, but Uncle Yaron Kupper had never married, hadn't raised a family; he was hitched to the kibbutz, or more precisely, the Golan Heights. He paid homage to it with his eye and his ear, and it to him with earth and basalt and fresh air. He looked at his nephew and said to him, “Listen.” Gabi listened.

Uncle Yaron recounted that after taking care of all the matters related to the death of his brother Asher and sister-in-law Ricki—the funerals, the shiva, finding a kibbutz for the children, the sale of the house in Rehovot, locating the savings and closing the bank accounts—he was left with a significant amount of money in hand. With the blessing of Ricki's father and sister, he opened a savings account for Roni and Gabi, for when they each reached the age of twenty-one. He concealed its existence from their kibbutz. Anyway, the kibbutz received a handsome sum as part of the absorption package. They don't have to get it all, decided Yaron and the grandmother and the aunt. The savings grew and accrued interest and swelled over the years, and Uncle Yaron continued to monitor the account and keep it on the right investment tracks and top it off with his own money, because over and above his natural sense of responsibility, Uncle Yaron felt terrible guilt. He was the one who'd invited Asher and Ricki that week, he was the one who'd persuaded them to return home at night and not in the morning. And his sense of guilt manifested in his sweat and his money—insofar as he had any, as a member of a pioneering kibbutz on the Golan Heights—into the savings account. When the grandfather, Ricki's father, passed away, another good dose was injected into the savings plan.

“Why haven't you said anything until now?” Gabi asked.

“I was waiting for you to come to me when you'd need it. I knew the day would come. It was the same with Roni.”

“Roni?” Gabi raised his head at an angle from the hammock.

“Roni got his when he reached the appropriate age and needed money. How do you think he paid for his studies and went into a partnership in the pub? Only by virtue of hard work and drive?”

“He's a partner in the pub?”

“We withdrew a tidy sum for him and he invested it in the business. Otherwise he wouldn't have received the share he did.”

“But what will I say at the kibbutz, how come I suddenly have money to travel?”

“Say it's a gift from your uncle Yaron,” the uncle said.

Gabi went quiet and rocked on the hammock. Overseas. Did he really want that? What would he do there? Was that what his parents would have wanted for him to do with the money? What about university? He had thought about that, too, recently, but had no idea what to study.

Uncle Yaron seemed to read his mind and said, “Come on, just go. Stop agonizing. It's exactly what your parents would want you to do. And me, too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. I can hear Asher telling me in my head to give you a good slap and put the money in your hand and give you a kick in the butt to get onto that plane. Asher talks to me in my head all the time.”

“Send him my regards,” Gabi said. He was on the plane a week later.

H
e was cold. He saw another passenger ask the flight attendant for a blanket and did the same, and he wrapped himself in the thin blanket but was still cold. He was filled with doubt. What did he need this for? Why had he been swallowed into this strange metal tube, what was he looking for? What was so bad about his peaceful life among the bananas, in his warm and familiar room? Perhaps going to university would be a better option after all, like Roni had? Perhaps he'd ask Roni with more resolve, more confidence, to join him and try living in Tel Aviv. Or at least ask to spend a few nights in the kibbutz's apartment there, to check out the possibility, to see what the university had to offer. But Gabi knew what it had to offer, he had read through the almanac in the kibbutz library, list upon list of courses that didn't mean a thing
to him and didn't explain what kind of future they would offer him and what he would do with himself afterward. He shivered under the blanket, glanced into the darkness outside, stroked with hesitant, alien fingers the smooth cheeks he had shaved in honor of the trip, after months of wild growth.

He got a nice send-off: Uncle Yaron, of course, who came to the kibbutz and drove him to Ben-Gurion; Roni, who met with them at a coffee bar in Tel Aviv for a quick meal, a little stressed out, because he wasn't able to go with them to the airport; Dad Yossi, who appeared to have had a weight lifted off his shoulders; his friends from the bananas, who on his last day at work staged a festive lunch for him; and Yotam, who stopped by his room and hung out with him for an hour and smoked four cigarettes while Gabi packed and didn't stop talking about Erez, his cousin from Kibbutz Manara, who worked as a mover in New York and whom Gabi was supposed to contact when he landed, and at the same time had tried to lay his hands on half the things Gabi left behind.

Wide-eyed, he stared at the human chaos of a large American airport. At the thousands of directions in which a million people were bustling. At the colorful whirlwind of suitcases, clothes, skin. Human forms he had seen in movies and on television and now for the first time face-to-face: Asian businessmen with polished glasses and smooth briefcases and pressed suits; a huge African lady in bright yellow that fell down around her like a veil; American cops with belts packed with a full array of goodies in the form of clubs, pistols, handcuffs, and notebooks, with precise mustaches, with menacing eyes; small Indians and large blacks and fragrant women and youths in reversed baseball caps and huge backpacks and small children, sweet like they always are.

He wasn't offended or intimidated, because he barely sensed the threatening severity with which the customs officials examined his bag. He looked at the sheet of instructions in his hand and found the way to the subway. He swayed to the metallic rattling over bridges and underground, the colorful lines that Johnny the American had told him about at the kibbutz now jumbling before his eyes into a mass of spaghetti. One hand remained firmly attached to the bag, his eyes fixed constantly on a new target: huge billboards, stretches of tenement housing as far as the
eye could see, two black men in baggy clothes, endless graffiti. Someone in a suit spoke to the person alongside him in that accent, Johnny's, from the movies. A chubby and unattractive young girl with a blank expression, headphones from a music player wrapped around her head, which was wet at the top. Orange and yellow seats emptying and filling. Doors sliding to open and close. An intercom system that scrambled the words. A hot and stifling smell, and different, everything was so different.

When he emerged from the bowels of the earth, the sheer size stunned him. The city rose up above him, made him feel like a stinky black beetle on the kibbutz path in summer. He marveled at the steam billowing out from under the sewer covers and the masses of people and the height of the buildings.