The Hilltop (47 page)

Jujhar Rawandeep, Dalit's husband, was a Punjabi. He was also a Muslim. And a senior executive at a hedge fund that belonged to a small
investment bank, Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments. Juj, as his wife affectionately addressed him, admired kibbutzniks, particularly kibbutzniks from the Galilee, and soon became an admirer of the Galilee kibbutznik whom Dalit recalled as a talented basketball player and brave soldier, and who offered a wealth of amusing stories about childhood on a kibbutz and the nightlife in Tel Aviv. Jujhar promised at the end of the evening to look into job placements at the investment bank, and the following day Roni received an e-mail invitation to a Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss Investments recruitment cocktail reception.

One of the bank's headhunters at the cocktail reception was Alon Pilpeli, a hook-nosed and green-eyed Israeli. Biting down on small shrimp sandwiches and sipping cava at a trendy bar downtown, he and Roni Kupper got on, as the Americans say, like long-lost friends: Roni could tell that Pilpeli was less staid, was wilder and more of a go-getter than people like Idan Lowenhof, and Pilpeli was enamored of Roni, because, so he claimed, he chilled at Bar-BaraBush whenever he visited the Holy Land. The formal process of submitting an online application was completed a week later and then came personal interviews that the well-prepared Roni passed with flying colors. Shortly afterward Roni was offered a summer internship.

M
ickey arrived on a cold and clear day, sounded a brief wail of shock, and went quiet. While a nurse helped his mother wash herself in the adjacent shower, Gabi held him on his knees, bundled up in a sheet, looked at his tiny, moist chin, and said, “You're twelve minutes old,” and then “You're nineteen minutes old,” and then “Twenty-three minutes.” Those were the first things he told his son, because he didn't know what else to say.

Gabi was Mickey's nanny. He very quickly found his footing. He continued to tell his son his age, it became a habit. He'd say, “Mickey, today you're three months and two days old, and we're going to the park.” Anna
took a short maternity leave, and when she first returned to school she kept shorter days, especially when she was still breast-feeding, but she slowly began spending long hours on campus again, like before the birth. Gabi and Mickey continued to count the days and learn how to move arms and smile and roll over and crawl and sprout teeth and swing on swings and go for walks in the park and hear remarks about the Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish kid, which to begin with annoyed Gabi a little but slowly turned into a source of pride for him—as if the compliments about the beauty and distinctiveness of the baby mirrored a compliment about his own beauty and distinctiveness; as if the attention were intended for him, and the jokes (“Specially imported?” “Where can I buy one like that?” “Diplomat parents?”) were designed to impress and amuse him, and not the ones who made them. They shopped at the minimarket and greengrocer on the way home for the afternoon sleep, and while Mickey napped his two hours, Gabi prepared dinner like in the good old days before his studies.

He didn't have any free time, but he did have time to think. Was he missing the criminology degree? A little, but it certainly wasn't a burning passion. He planned to read the material from the first year that he hadn't gotten to, but the heap of papers didn't budge from the bedside table during the first year of his son's life. What he did read, while paging through a magazine one day in a pediatrician's waiting room, was an article about Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recounted that he went to university because it was expected of him, and decided after a year to leave because he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life and couldn't understand how studying would help him find the answer. In retrospect, Jobs said in the article, it was the smartest decision of his life. Gabi liked the article—Jobs even grew up with adoptive parents.

Anna would get back late—sometimes after Mickey's dinner and bath and sometimes after he had fallen asleep. It seemed a little strange to Gabi, but when he tried to raise the subject, Anna called the line of questioning chauvinistic, because when fathers work hard and get home late and don't see their children, no one says a word, but when a woman does it, then there's something wrong with her.

“I didn't say there's something wrong with you,” Gabi parried. “A
father who doesn't see his children is also something strange to me.” But she was angry. He understood that the demands and responsibilities of motherhood were hard on her. She asked for a little more freedom for herself, and he accepted it and gave it to her.

He said to Mickey, “You're five months, two weeks, and three days old,” and took him for a long walk by the sea. He offered to dress him in long-sleeved shirts in the fall and winter, but Mickey insisted on short sleeves all year round, and because he never got the flu and the confrontations were exhausting, Gabi gave in. He said, “You're six months and six days old,” and took Mickey on a rare visit to Uncle Roni, who was always busy and under pressure. “It's your eight-month birthday, mazel tov,” on the way to an activity class for babies that accomplished nothing other than to pass time for the mothers—they were all mothers aside from him.

“Today you're ten months and one week and one day old,” he said the day he found out that Anna had been lying to him. He was out walking with Mickey at Tel Aviv Port and a pretty young girl smiled at Mickey and made faces at him. It was nothing out of the ordinary, of course, Mickey attracted a lot of attention from strangers and loved it; Gabi frequently brought the stroller to a halt and allowed his son to babble with the nameless female admirer.

But this girl, after the obligatory coochie-coo, said, “Just a sec, is this Mickey?” She studied together with Anna. She recognized Mickey from a photograph Anna had shown her. She continued tickling and caressing and making sounds and eventually looked up and asked, “Where's Anna?”

“Anna?” Gabi questioned, like it was the first time in his life he had heard the name.

“I mean, what's she doing on the day off ?” Anna hadn't said anything about a day off school. Gabi shrugged disconcertedly. “Ah, hang on,” the girl continued, “didn't she go with Sami to Afula?” Sami? Afula? Gabi was about to open his mouth to respond, but Mickey shrieked in order to recapture her attention, and got it. And then her phone rang and the father and son continued their walk, and she waved good-bye while talking to some “darling.” Gabi didn't get her name.

When Anna returned late that evening, Gabi didn't ask, and she didn't say a thing. Years later he'd think, if he had asked, perhaps she would have explained. But that evening he looked at her as she slept and felt something unfamiliar, a new wind blowing. What do we say to ourselves and to the world? he thought. We think that love is good and life is good and all that, and still. He didn't confront Anna. Didn't investigate and didn't probe and didn't question. Didn't check her cell phone while she was sleeping. Didn't look through her notebooks for inadvertent doodling, telephone numbers, or reminders. He didn't want to hear about the anguish and the excuses, didn't want to play along with self-pity and give her a chance to blame him or to make him responsible for her actions, for denying her the warmth and passion that she went elsewhere to find. Perhaps he feared that if he allowed her to explain, he'd understand. And he didn't want to understand. So he told himself again that Anna was asking for time for herself, more freedom.

He took Mickey in the stroller to the swings and merry-go-round in the park and told him he was ten months and two and a half weeks old. Drove him to a swimming lesson for toddlers at the age of eleven months and nine days, and dressed Mickey after the pool in his short clothing despite its being the rainiest day of the year. As usual, the boy didn't catch a cold, but was suffering during that period with pain caused him by his sprouting teeth. When he cried, Gabi would lay him down on his chest and gently stroke his yellowish, soft hair, until he dropped off and slept like an angel.

On his first birthday, Mickey suddenly waved his arms like a butterfly: rapid movements, for several seconds. Anna looked at Gabi with a smile and shook her head in wonder. Her eyes shone with pride. The boy uttered a syllable and started walking. The first step merged into a fall, which merged into a wail and brief sob, and a gleeful crawl until his father picked him up and sat him on his knees, and everyone burst loudly into a melody of Israeli birthday songs for children and a Hebrew rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” to the traditional English tune. And then the boy got to taste chocolate cake for the first time in his life, and loved it with passion.

They were at Anna's kibbutz, at the grandmother's (the English grandfather
sent a greeting card, had yet to see his grandchild). The step-grandfather, Yossi, who now had a girlfriend, came from the kibbutz, and Uncle Yaron, the brother of Asher, Mickey's long-since-dead grandfather, was there, too, was very excited by the antics of the blond toddler. Uncle Roni didn't come.

Where Mickey got the blond from, no one could say. The grandmother thought it came from the English volunteer, she was certain he once told her he had Nordic roots, although he himself was ordinarily pink-cheeked and brown-haired—the entire area of northeast England was once a colony of Norwegians and Swedes who set sail westward in their Viking boats until they struck land. That's why the northeastern accent, the most difficult to understand in the English language, aside perhaps from certain variants of its Scottish neighbor, sounds similar in tone and emphasis to Nordic languages. There've been studies about it, you can check, the grandmother said, and Gabi made a note to himself to look it up on the Internet. The blond, whatever the case may have been, remained, and only Mickey's eyes were, without doubt, the almond-brown eyes of his father.

After the sugar high sparked the energy level of a Duracell bunny in the birthday boy, he crashed into a deep sleep on the hammock in the yard, brown crumbs and fresh drool encircling his mouth. The adults rounded things off with coffee and adult talk. Neighbors and childhood friends came over to wish Anna well and marvel at her son and her stories about the business management studies. Gabi sat mostly with Yossi and his new partner and Uncle Yaron. He thought about the possibility of making a quick visit to his kibbutz, but couldn't think of a good reason. He was pleased, however, that Uncle Yaron invited them to spend a day at the far edge of the Golan Heights.

Mickey was happy at Uncle Yaron's kibbutz, and when a one-year-old is happy, babbling syllables, crawling all over, trying to put excited wobbly steps together, his parents cannot help but smile. Anna agreed that the place was stunningly beautiful, that the cool wind and basalt landscape offered the pleasant sense of being in another country. They had planned to return home in the afternoon to beat the Saturday-evening traffic, but Mickey was having so much fun, and they felt so at ease, that
after lunch all three fell asleep on the large bed in the guest room, and decided when they woke to take advantage of the daylight hours and head home after darkness fell. The birthday boy would sleep on the way south well fed, bathed, and exhausted after two action-packed and exciting days.

When Uncle Yaron bade them farewell on the road outside his house, the tears fogged the lenses of his thick glasses. “Almost thirty years,” he sobbed, “but I remember it just like it was the day before yesterday. You were right there.” He pointed toward the car seat in which the little blondie nestled. “There weren't car seats, but you were sleeping, too, worn out from all the wild running around on the kibbutz. You were exactly a year old. And next to you, your brother the troublemaker, tired but fighting off sleep to show he's a big boy. And in the front, Dad and Mom . . .” Gabi rested a hand on Uncle Yaron's shoulder, and afterward Anna hugged him and told him how much she'd enjoyed herself, how much everyone had enjoyed themselves, and he hugged her back and continued to cry.

“Drive carefully, slowly-slowly,” Uncle Yaron said when they were sitting in the car, and Gabi replied, “For sure. We'll watch out for stray cows. Worse comes to worst, you'll know by now what to do with Mickey, you've been drilled.”

“Don't you dare,” the uncle responded, and patted the roof of the car as if it were a shoulder, to send it on its way. A lone IDF flare some forty minutes into the drive made their hearts skip a beat and raised goose bumps on their skin, but they reached their rented apartment in Tel Aviv safe and sound.

It ebbed and flowed like the tide, he noticed, like spring and fall. There were times he felt that Anna had time for him again. Returned earlier. A sense of warmth emanated from her then, and he felt close, too: when he heard her laughing at something on the television from the other room, saw her piecing together a puzzle with Mickey with a degree of patience he himself didn't have, stole a glance at her with her nightgown above her head, on its way to draping over her white skin.

He continued to tell Mickey his age, and Mickey continued to grow: a year and one month; and three months and two days; and seven months
and nineteen days. He grew and walked and talked and demanded, and Gabi was at his side all the time, and Anna was at the university, close to finishing her degree, looking into options, seminars, job fairs, a year and nine months and three days. Fall winds, and again Anna disappeared, and again she blamed the studies, and again turned her back, and again from within his sleep Gabi heard the door opening and closing gingerly and the water in the shower turned on and off discreetly, and he glanced at the clock and continued sleeping, and woke with the rustling of the comforter, conscious enough to notice that he didn't get a kiss or caress or embrace, and he didn't ask her in the morning, but she summed up the evening in two sentences and specified a return time different from the one he saw on the clock.