The Hilltop (60 page)

Naturally, most of the things Moran told him sounded way out of his reach, a world beyond an abyss, a world where not only did he believe he couldn't get by, but one that also appeared to him unreal, odd, in many ways. By and large he loved his life, his family, the synagogue and the prayer services. But he also loved to ask questions. One evening, Yakir went into a forum for formerly religious people, and when he raised his head from the screen, it was two in the morning and his brain was fizzing. Afterward he started playing a game with himself in which he would find small, insignificant ways of desecrating the Sabbath: writing in a notebook, turning on a heater for a couple of minutes, listening to a song through earphones . . . Gitit continued to return from the school energized with belief, new confidence. Sometimes, from within the agonies of his doubts, he envied her. Thought that maybe he, too, should seek a self-assured education, which would take care of any doubts.

Yakir read an official report on the Antiquities Authority's website about two valuable coins from the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt that were found in a cave in the Hermesh Stream riverbed. He informed his father, and Othniel quickly called Duvid. “Yes, that's right,” the antiquities expert confirmed, “those are your coins. Those last two.”

“Well,” Othniel said excitedly, “so we can sell?”

“Sell what?”

“The coins, what do you think I mean?”

“Where are they, with you?”

“No, the guy from the Antiquities Authority said they wanted to conduct their own tests, but according to this report, I understand they've done so. So now I get the coins?”

Othniel heard a slow chuckle on the other end of the line. “Yes, I believe you'll get the coins. Let me try to speak to someone there.”

Othniel closed his eyes tight. He was furious with everyone—with the
Antiquities Authority, with Duvid, with himself for approaching Duvid at all. “So when will they return them to me?”

“How am I supposed to know? Wait. You've waited this long, no?”

Othniel opened his eyes and looked at Yakir. He spoke into the device in a soft voice, but under it a tense tone clearly lurked. “I don't understand why you let those idiots find out about our coins. First you hold on to them for months. Now they take them, and are telling us what we already knew.”

“I didn't let them, I told you, it was a mistake . . .”

Othniel hung up, retrieved the suited gentleman's business card from the drawer, and dialed. There was no answer. He tried again and reached the secretary. She put him through to another secretary who didn't know what he was talking about and passed him on to another one, who knew what he was talking about but said the gentleman wasn't in his office at the moment and no one else could assist him. “Try tomorrow,” she suggested, “or better still, next week.”

Othniel hung up and fixed his son with a long stare. Eventually he stood up and said, “Come, son, we're going to Jerusalem.”

They searched in windswept Jerusalem for the offices of the Antiquities Authority on Sokolov Street, just off Keren Hayesod, because Othniel remembered the building from his youth. They went from building to building—no sign of it.

“Dad, why didn't you tell me you don't know where it is, I would have found it on the Internet in one second.”

“But I do know where it is. It's here. Somewhere.”

They made inquiries at the adjacent street and then returned to Sokolov and asked passersby, until they found a resident of the neighborhood who told them that the Israel Coins and Medals Corp. was once located there, many years ago.

“See?” Othniel said.

“What exactly am I supposed to see?” his son replied.

The neighborhood resident didn't know the current address, not of the Medals Corp. and not of the Antiquities Authority. Following several phone calls, they drove to the new Mamilla complex. They sat outside the office for close to twenty minutes, until Othniel created a scene. It
helped. They were told they needed to take the matter up with the unit for the prevention of antiquities theft, which was dealing with the coins from the Hermesh Cave. But the unit doesn't have an office, there's the Antiquities Museum, which has offices, but it's not clear . . . Othniel created another scene.

If there's a plus side to the look of the settler with the broad skullcap and beard and tzitzit and muddy work shoes, it's that when he creates a scene, he's taken seriously.

Eventually they got to the gentleman who'd visited the settlement. He was dressed again in a suit, remained bespectacled, and courteous, and graying. “Ah, hello, gentlemen,” he said, “Ma'aleh Hermesh C., right?”

Othniel nodded. His expression showed no congeniality, only expectation. He said, “I need my coins.”

“The coins aren't here,” the man said.

“What do you mean they aren't here?”

“We don't have them. They were at the Antiquities Authority. They conducted the final tests, and were supposed to pass them over to us, and we in turn back to Mr. . . .” He paged through the papers on his desk. “To Duvid . . . to you. But we have yet to receive them from the Authority.”

“What do you mean, yet to receive them from the Authority? Where's the Authority? Tell me and I'll go get them. What's this foot-dragging all about? They're my coins. You said you completed the tests, you confirmed authenticity and age, you published an announcement on the website. Now return them to their owners. What's all this bullshit?”

It didn't help.

*  *  *

On the way home, at the exit from Jerusalem, they spotted Roni Kupper with his thumb out and took him along with them.

“Thanks, righteous men,” he said, biting into a bagel with hyssop.

“Honored, honored, good man. Hallowed be His name.”

From the junction they began the descent toward the desert and the yellowing hills, passed by a new neighborhood under construction that resembled a huge octopus, and then beyond to more yellowing hills dotted with olive trees and the homes of a nonhostile, or formerly hostile, Arab village, and several kilometers later the military checkpoint that
declared territories from here on, and there the air was colored grayish, and the taxis were colored yellowish, and the license plates of the trucks were colored whitish, and the landscape started moving into the distance, and Othniel asked Roni, “So tell me, dude, what was the story in the end with the olive oil?” And Roni, like always, provided, almost subconsciously, the answer that best suited the time and place and, primarily, the listener. Information is modeling clay: the material is the material, but the way in which it is presented can alter it, knead it, flatten it, or inflate it.

“What could the story be?” Roni replied. “The story is that the Arabs can't be trusted, that's what.”

Othniel glanced cautiously in the rearview mirror. Was he making fun?

Roni continued. “The story is that I had a great proposal for the Arab, I took his oil press that hadn't been in use for years, and said to him come let's start producing here again, bring your olives, your neighbors' olives, we'll make real, old, traditional oil with the dust and the hookah smoke like in the past, the Tel Avivians love it, we'll make a little money together. Initially he kissed my feet, said his grandfather would be spinning in his grave with joy, that I'm a saint. Everything was arranged, stores in Tel Aviv, an investment, marketing, the design of labels for the bottles with the symbol of the millstones like in Italy, so that people would know how pure and tasty the oil they're buying is . . .”

“Nice idea,” Othniel said. “I'm not crazy about the fact that you do business with Arabs and help them to support themselves, yes? But the idea's nice.”

“And then those Japanese showed up, we have signed agreements and all . . .”

Othniel blew out air through his teeth and pressed his tongue to his palate: “Tssssss . . .”

“And the son of a bitch pissed all over me and went with them. Without batting an eye. Why, because they're Japanese? They've got money? But what do they know about olive oil, tell me, the Japanese? What do they know about how to market and sell? I had all those pretentious Tel Aviv yuppies in my hands, they used to come to drink my beer when they
were in their twenties-thirties and they would have come to drink my olive oil in their forties-fifties. But no, the Japanese came along with big machines, and his head was turned, how could it not have been turned, an Arab . . .”

Roni's thoughts meandered. The third night at Rina's closed kindergarten, how he had felt almost at home, and in the morning tidied the mattresses and sheets and ducked out at six, as she had requested, onto Shlomo HaMelech Street, and even the sun peeked between the branches and led him to a café along the avenue; how surprised he was by the speed at which he had readjusted to Tel Aviv, but went to the Central Bus Station and boarded a bus to Jerusalem, his head filled with thoughts about Rina and the nights in her closed kindergarten; how the idea took root in his mind.

“Pshhhh . . .” said Othniel. And Yakir thought, What would
you
do if a global Japanese company were to build an oil press and offer to buy olives from you—would you stick with some crackpot who is promising you the yuppies of Tel Aviv?

“Couldn't you sue him?” Othniel asked. “Find other growers? Listen, I want to plant olives at some point. It'll take them a few years to yield fruit, with the grace of God, but . . .”

“With the grace of God,” Roni echoed. “I don't know. I've had the wind knocked out of my sails.”

“Tsssss . . .” Othniel concluded, and thought, Just look how the gentiles and Arabs take everything that the Holy One, blessed be He, promised us, and the world remains silent. He said, “With the grace of God, it'll be okay. Don't worry. Like you said, what do the Japanese know about olive oil?” And in the silence that ensued, Yakir recalled the article about Matsumata that he had read on the financial website, he couldn't remember all the details, but recalled that the Japanese know pretty well what they do.

T
he sun came out after long days of heavy rain, and like a sunflower, the hilltop folk turned toward it and basked in its light and in its warmth, but the days were still the days of winter and chill, and Purim would soon be on the doorstep. Yoni stretched that morning at the entrance to his trailer, and his army shirt fastened up to two buttons from his neck exposed a slim, tan chest, as smooth as the surface of a fish pond, and the rows of white teeth moved apart in a wide morning yawn. The last week of his service at Ma'aleh Hermesh C. had begun, though the anger of the residents had yet to subside following the events of the previous week, and he longed for one more look at his girl before he left. Today he'd start packing his meager belongings, he thought, and reminded himself to retrieve from the settlers the flak jacket he'd promised to his good friend Ababa Cohen, who was facing a court-martial for equipment he lost.

The kindergarten kids came out for their first walk outside after the rain. The older kids Amalia and Boaz helped Nehama, the kindergarten teacher, push the crib on wheels containing the toddlers Yemima-Me'ara and Zvuli, and the others trailed along around them. The children have grown so much, Yoni thought, I remember Shuv-el Assis, that little one with the ponytail on the push car, bald in his baby carriage, as if it were yesterday; and Nefesh Freud pressed tight in a baby carrier to his mother's voluptuous chest, not too long ago, too. The older children were at school, the fathers and mothers at work, and Herzl Weizmann was finishing up something small on the porch of Hilik Yisraeli, who was drinking his mug of coffee in the glimmering sun at the window and thinking, Maybe I'll go to the Hebrew University, I finally have to write the chapter on the indulgent attitude toward the kibbutzim on the part of the pre-state leadership, and then perhaps I'll manage by then to get to the movement's break from its ideological and concrete assets. Beyond the large window, Sasson's
camel cow was grazing on the soft shoots of a common desert plant, and a little farther below, Gabi Nehushtan was amassing from somewhere new wooden planks and sacks of mortar and gravel and all the other materials required to rebuild the cabin that the Israel Defense Forces had demolished the week before.

Condi and Beilin wagged their tails as a car drove by along the road, and Elazar Freud was speaking on the telephone in his modest yard, into which sneaked the sounds of Radio Breslov from inside the trailer. The water tanker arrived almost surreptitiously and hooked up to the white tank with the sloppily scribbled Star of David at the entrance to the settlement, practically opposite Yoni's front door, where he stood with hand on forehead and looked into the sun at the experienced driver and thought, Without the clear liquid that is now flowing to the top of the tower, there'd be no life here. The children reached the Sheldon Mamelstein playground and dispersed joyfully. The desert hills yellowed on the horizon, and the settlement of Yeshua rose up beyond the riverbed, and the olive trees of Kharmish stood silent in the saddle between the settlements. And then a scream rose and burst forth from one of the trailers, seeped in alarm and surprise and urgency and compassion and love and gratitude to the Creator of the world and all-encompassing faith: the scream of Neta Hirschson, who had squatted to pass water onto a Super-Pharm test stick, which now voicelessly said to her freckled face: Yes!

And to Othniel they said no. After the fuss he kicked up in Jerusalem, the matter was reviewed and the official response arrived: The coins that were found were the property of the State of Israel and would remain in its possession until further notice. As stipulated in the documents Othniel signed, the land, along with its natural resources and archaeological finds—both fixed and portable—were owned by the state. Responsibility for any verbal declaration made concerning alleged private ownership of the cache of coins rested solely with the declarer and did not constitute an official or valid obligation on the part of the state. The Authority thanked the citizen for his discovery and would do all it could to provide him with a few coins as a souvenir, and to help him obtain digging permits in the future.