The Hilltop (46 page)

“Particularly because of that,” Anna continued before he answered, “like he didn't have a vested interest in saying it, it's more flattering, right?”

“Yes, it sounds good,” Gabi said. “If you think it suits you.” And after staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, he asked, “So we're going back to Tel Aviv?”

“You want to?” she asked.

He wanted anything that included her in the plans, and said it. She turned toward him in the darkness and held his face between her small hands. “I love you so much, Gabi. I'm so lucky you fell into my lap.” Her voice trembled a little. She kissed him on the lips, a brief kiss. “I fell into your lap? You're the one who fell into mine,” he responded. “So lucky,” she repeated, and now her voice squeaked, and the tears began to flow, and he sensed a huge wave was threatening to drown him, and he sniffed, too, and hugged her tight, and didn't say a word. He wondered sometimes what she found in him, what she loved about him. She could very easily attract the attention of many men, and did. The answer he gave himself was that they simply had good chemistry. They were happy together, and that was that, and there was no need to go searching for any other explanations. With her at his side, he felt complete.

L
iving in Tel Aviv is living among power lines and solar water-heating systems and peeling plaster and plentiful young people, trees and stores that are open sufficient hours of the day and night to allow you to feel that you're not at a way station to the real thing. Anna went every morning to university and returned in the evening. Gabi got up late, tidied the house, did the shopping, prepared lavish dinners, and thought about what he was going to do with himself. One of Roni's former classmates from the kibbutz had opened a flyer-distribution business, so three days a week Gabi shoved flyers into mail slots, or threw escort agency calling cards onto the windshields of cars, using a technique he believed he invented—ambling along the sidewalk alongside the parked cars and throwing the calling card, in an arc, so that it landed in the center of the windshield and slid down under the wiper. Before long he became an area manager—no longer did he shove flyers or throw calling cards himself, but instead handled five young guys who did it. The work brought in a bit of cash, and together with Sam Lax's support for Anna's studies and the remains of Uncle Yaron's savings plan, they lived comfortably.

Anna brought home the university catalog and they spent a few nights going over the list of courses, many of which appeared interesting: history, criminology, economics, film. But Gabi kept asking himself the same questions: Does it suit me? What would I do with a degree like that? Do we have enough money to be two full-time students? And mostly—is that what I really want to do with my life? The answer was always no.

Anna said he was making too big a deal of it. “You're not being asked to decide the rest of your life,” she said. “You're going on a journey, and even if you study something for a few years and go nowhere with it afterward, what's the problem? Few people our age know what they're going to do with their lives, but most of them go to university because a degree is a degree, because studying is an enriching experience, because—”

“Because that's what everyone does and they have no idea what else they could do and their parents push them,” Gabi said.

“No one pushed me,” said Anna.

“You were lucky. You realized what it is you want. I don't know what I want.”

He nevertheless registered as a criminology student, because it sounded exotic, and interesting, with potential employment opportunities in the future. But Tel Aviv University didn't offer an undergraduate degree in criminology, so he registered at the College of Management Academic Studies. He continued with the flyer work while he completed high-school courses for his matriculation certificate and took the university entrance exam, and began his first year as Anna started her second at business school. Because they were studying at different institutions, they saw less of each other than during the previous year, too rushed in the mornings, too on edge at night. On rare occasions Gabi managed to get to the university and meet Anna in the cafeteria.

Gabi's life, until then peaceful and laid-back—albeit filled with questions and fears concerning the future—now turned busy and stressful and cluttered, and still full of questions and fears. The quality of life dropped. The dinners were more simple, the home somewhat neglected. When he worked with the flyers, he felt guilty about not studying, and while he was studying, he stressed about not earning a decent living and not being able to focus on the reading or find it sufficiently interesting. The chapter in the catalog that outlined the criminology courses—social situations related to crime, detection, codes of ethics, conflict theories, analysis of topical crime incidents, tours of prisons and the courts—left him in no doubt that it was a fascinating field. But after getting down to the nitty-gritty, after spending long hours in the library reading endless sociology and anthropology and biology papers, all written in neoclassical, pompous, and boring academic language, he began asking himself what the hell was he doing and where his time was going.

And then Anna got pregnant. And all the stress until then—it was like someone twisted a knob and turned it up way higher.

They agreed to see the pregnancy through. Anna thought about her mother and her father, the volunteer who disappeared, but it wasn't the
same thing. Gabi was her man. And Anna was his woman. They had been through enough to know that, insofar as someone can ever really know something like that. True, they were students who were scraping by, but Anna had always thought she wouldn't wait until she was much older to have a child. They didn't believe the home pregnancy test, were convinced they were the lone percent against the 99-percent accuracy rate the test boasted on the box. By the time they walked out from the first scan, which showed a minute beating heart, they were both spooked and excited, and in the middle of the street Gabi stopped and gripped Anna's shoulders, and she looked into his eyes, and they both smiled in amazement, as if to say “Wow!”

Gabi completed his first year and announced he wouldn't be returning for the second. Not now, anyway, maybe in the future. One of them had to bring in money. Anna didn't argue. It was clear to both of them that her degree was more important than his. That, unlike him, her goals were clearer—a degree, then integration into business. That she owed it not only to herself and the faculty but also to Samuel Lax. And in some way, they both felt, to the baby too, to the livelihood of the family.

T
wo days after landing in New York, Roni found a wallet in the snow. It was a fat, bloated wallet, a woman's wallet. It contained almost two thousand dollars in cash. For Roni it was simply the natural progression of his life: the world smiled at him. He recalled something Baruch Shani once said to him at basketball many years back: Fortune favors the good. A few minutes earlier he'd seen an apartment on the Upper West Side that appealed to him, but it was a little expensive and he left without deciding. After finding the wallet, he returned and signed the lease. He felt worthy of the apartment and it of him. And just like success came easily to him on the basketball court, with the cattle, in the commando unit, in the bar business, and eventually with his undergraduate degree—there was no reason why it shouldn't continue to come easily in New York as well,
and as proof of that—a nice fat wallet in the snow two days after landing. When he fished through it, he found a driver's license bearing the pleasant face of a black woman. Her date of birth was close to that of his brother's, he noticed. Thoughts of his brother seeped into his mind, but he chose to focus on the wallet. He wondered about returning it without the money, so the sweet-looking black woman would at least get back her license, credit cards, various club cards, and the rest of the junk that filled the wallet. He found her address and decided he would mail her the cards. His kindheartedness pleased him. Yes, fortune favors the good.

The MBA was harder and more competitive. He got used to listening to the lectures in English pretty quickly, but in the first months he struggled for hours on end with the mountains of reading assignments. On the other hand, he didn't have to work at the same time, like he did in Tel Aviv. He had money, thanks to the loan he was automatically eligible for as an MBA student. He was shocked by how simple it was to take the letter from the university to a branch of Citibank and immediately open an account containing $120,000.

*  *  *

His last year in Tel Aviv had started out nightmarishly: university in the morning, Bar-BaraBush at night, tons of material to study and absorb for his research seminar paper, Oren Azulai, who showed no consideration for his partner's time constraints—he simply couldn't understand why Roni bothered with university—until, in the middle of the year, with New York appearing sufficiently close and alluring, with the smell of stale beer coming out of his every orifice by then, he sold his share in Bar-BaraBush and dove headfirst into completing his degree and applying to an MBA program in New York.

In Tel Aviv he'd met other Israelis who were going to business school in New York on the way to a career on Wall Street, and with most he didn't connect. Spoiled rich kids whose paths were padded by their parents' money, who didn't know what hard work was, who gave off an air of arrogance that rested on sharp intelligence, an indulgent mother, and an easy life. Two of them, Meir Foriner from Savyon and Tal Paritzky from Kfar Shmaryahu, were accepted along with Roni to the same university in New York. But in his cluster, in class, he befriended other foreign
students—a Japanese, an Italian, and Sasha the Bosnian in particular—and observed the efforts of Meir and Tal to ingratiate themselves with the American WASPs. Roni understood them, he wasn't there to seclude himself among foreigners, either, and realized that to fit in, he had to make connections and do some aggressive networking—the word that everyone mumbled dozens of times a day—the spinning of a spiderweb of contacts, primarily with Americans. But when he saw Meir and Tal partying and playing drinking games like beer pong, just like the Americans, talking music and football just like the Americans, copying them in dress and gestures and accent, he felt uncomfortable and returned to the warm embrace of his foreign gang.

Idan Lowenhof guided his progress and served as his mentor. Together they had put together the perfect admissions essay, spinning a narrative about his groundbreaking business initiative, which changed Tel Aviv nightlife and created the first chain of gastro-bars in the country; the success story that began in tragedy—the path of the boy who lost his parents in a horrific car accident, from a simple life on the kibbutz to the commercial success story, on his own steam, with hard work and persistence. Idan continued to help Roni in New York: advised him on what courses to choose based on the topics and the lecturers, led him through the degree's maze of politics, and hooked him up with several graduates and professors. Most important—he showed him the ropes when the cocktail season started during that first autumn.

The cocktails: dozens of financial firms hunted talent from the ranks of the leading business schools. Already within the first weeks of the first year, the companies staged cocktail receptions on school premises, and sometimes at bars around the city—up to three different cocktail receptions in an evening—and invited students to watch presentations about the firms, drink alcohol, and try to convince their representatives that they were the right fit for them. After the cocktail receptions, the students sent the representatives ingratiating e-mails, in the wake of which came one-on-one meetings, after which the candidates received invitations to formal interviews. At the end of the process came an offer of a summer internship in the break between the first and second year, and the internship generally led to a full-time job following graduation.

Roni didn't like it, but Idan insisted he play the game and coached him ahead of the meetings and interviews. Roni embarrassed himself at the initial receptions. When the small talk turned to sport, he didn't have a clue about the rules and names of baseball players. He tried to steer the conversation toward basketball, but didn't do too well with that, either. He mentioned Nadav “The Dove” Henefeld and Doron Sheffer “The Iceman,” names of the most successful Israeli players in the NCAA, who Roni was sure were well known in America because that was what the Israeli newspapers claimed, but no one knew what he was talking about.

Roni worked to improve his conversation skills, and at the same time pressed Idan Lowenhof to set him up with a personal interview at Goldman Sachs. Idan promised he was working on it, but the development came unexpectedly from elsewhere. He received an e-mail one day from Dalit Nahari. Dalit was in the same year as Gabi at school, four years younger than Roni. She was a friend of Anna, Gabi's partner, and Anna had told her that Roni was in New York. Dalit had been living in the New York area for many years, ever since the post-army trip with Anna. She invited Roni to dinner. Anna had told him in an e-mail that Dalit was married with three children, so Roni wrangled his way out of it. He saw no reason to go all the way to Plainsboro, New Jersey, to devote a precious evening to Dalit and her family at the expense of his studies. But she insisted until he consented. He recalled her as a small and pretty Yemenite girl, and in a moment of loneliness he imagined that she was bored, that her husband was away on a business trip or something, and that she was looking for an adventure with no strings attached.

The door was opened by her husband, a round-faced Indian man, potbellied and thick-lipped, with jet-black hair parted at the side. The fantasy crashed in on itself, and went on crashing when from behind his broad back appeared Dalit—small and pretty she was no more. As he walked into the huge home, he began formulating excuses to leave early. He never would have imagined that he'd be leaving the apartment after two in the morning, coming away with the most effective piece of networking he ever could have achieved.