The Hilltop (10 page)

The mountain was where he found the falcon. The bird's leg was injured, bitten by a snake, perhaps? Or maybe a larger animal had hurt it in a fight? Gabi spotted the falcon lying on the ground, moving its head, lightly flapping its wings. He approached and stared at it, and stared at it some more, and didn't know what to do, so he sat down on a rock and watched. When he saw that the falcon could do him no harm, he moved a little closer, kneeled down alongside it, and reached out to touch its head with his finger. The falcon flinched at his initial touches but was incapable of really moving. Gabi could see its leg was broken, and after a few attempts, he stroked the falcon's head and carefully lifted it. The bird flapped its wings in panic and tried to resist, but Gabi reassured the animal—“Shhhhh . . . Shhhhh”—and made his way back down to the kibbutz.

Gabi installed the falcon in an unused room, a small storeroom, in the children's house, and then went with Yotam to the dining hall. When he told him about the bird, Yotam got excited and asked to see it. Gabi said
he'd show him after they had eaten and asked Yotam how they could find out what to feed it. Yotam said there was an encyclopedia of birds in his parents' room, and if that didn't help them, he would ask his father.

“Okay,” Gabi said. “Maybe you should get the encyclopedia so we can see exactly what a falcon looks like. I think it's a falcon, but how would I know? We always see them from afar, in the sky.”

While descending the mountain with the falcon, Gabi thought at first that he wouldn't tell anyone about it, that it would be his secret, and that he'd send the falcon out on spying missions and use the bird to convey notes and messages to his allies. That evening, however, he felt fortunate to have told Yotam in particular. Not only was his father a bird enthusiast who owned an encyclopedia that confirmed the bird was indeed a falcon and offered other crucial information, Yotam also vaguely remembered his parents' storeroom containing a large cage that once served as home to two parrots, Pinches and Simches, which his father had raised when Yotam was a young child. Yotam located it, somewhat rusted and dirty, and not very big after all, but a perfectly suitable starter home, and brought it over to their room.

Apparently, they needed to find pigeons, the flesh of which, Yotam's father said while engrossed in Maccabi Tel Aviv's basketball game against Squib Cantù on TV, falcons loved to feed on. The encyclopedia offered other alternatives—millipedes, scorpions, lizards, snakes, frogs, bats, grasshoppers—but Yotam and Gabi believed pigeons to be tastier and easier to lay their hands on, and there were pigeons at the kibbutz, on the roofs and electricity poles. And thus, the two boys retrieved their biggest slingshots, of the many they had patiently fashioned from the electrical cable covered in colored plastic that was dumped on the kibbutz by workers from the electric or phone company, and went to the field adjacent to the children's dormitories. The pigeons perched at ease on the high-tension wires. The boys took up position, peeled a clementine, and began firing folded pieces of the rind—a fast-moving, accurate, and readily available projectile.

They kept missing. “This isn't working,” Yotam said, putting a segment of the fruit in his mouth. Gabi agreed, and helped himself to two segments. They ate in silence, and the pigeons cooed above.

“What else does a falcon like to eat?” Yotam asked.

“Nothing as simple as pigeons.”

“Let's try stones,” Yotam suggested, and picked one up.

The stones missed, too. Dejected, they returned to the dormitory.

At dinner that evening, Gabi spotted Roni, who was on his own, and went over to sit down next to his brother.

“What's happening?” Roni asked.

“Everything's okay,” Gabi responded bleakly.

“What do you mean, okay?”

Gabi told him about the pigeon-catching efforts.

“What do you need pigeons for?” Roni asked.

“We just need them,” Gabi said.

Roni smelled of cigarettes, and his hair was overgrown. He thought for a moment and then said, “Okay.” And then, after thinking a little more, he added, “I'll come by in the morning and we'll go find some pigeons.”

Roni showed up with an air rifle that his classmate Tsiki liked to use for shooting at birds—and cats, if the rumors were true. Gabi and Yotam followed him off the kibbutz to an abandoned Muslim inn where dozens of pigeons were perched on the roof, flying off from time to time, returning, landing on the electricity wires. Roni approached as close as he could without attracting their attention, took his position with the butt of the rifle pressed into his shoulder, closed one eye, placed a finger on the trigger, and began firing. By the time the pigeons realized they were caught in a battle zone and flew off, two unlucky ones had fallen to the ground.

The two boys were unaware that serving the body of the pigeon as is to the falcon wasn't the way to go. The falcon looked at the fat corpse and then at them. Had it been blessed with shoulders, it surely would have shrugged them—and if with lips, an incredulous smile would surely have followed. The boys revisited Yotam's father, who explained that the meat itself was the answer. They looked at each other. That makes sense. Who wants to eat feathers? On the other hand, isn't it the falcon's job to get to the meat? After all, it doesn't have cooks to prepare its food in the wild. When they returned an hour or so later, the pigeon's status was unchanged. The falcon hadn't gone near it. Gabi picked up the pigeon,
went into the field outside the children's dormitories, and, with the aid of the large penknife Roni received for his bar mitzvah and passed down to him, first cut off the dead bird's head, and then its legs, and finally the wings. He tried not to inhale through his nose, and also not to see what he was doing while cutting into the bird. Yotam stayed back. Gabi then sliced down the length of the pigeon's stomach, removed the internal organs, and did his best to cut away the breast meat and separate it from the small bones. “Bring a plate,” he said, continuing to hack at it. He heard footsteps leaving and returning, and a plate landed by his side. He transferred the pieces of butchered flesh to it, rose from his crouch, lifted the plate high in front of him with bloody hands, entered the building, and headed to the small storeroom. He placed the plate in the cage and went to wash his hands. The plate was clean when he returned. If the falcon used his tongue the way a human would, he thought, the pinkish puddle of blood on the plate would be gone, too.

Roni was a rare sight at the kibbutz; and when Gabi caught up with him one day during recess, in the smokers' den behind the high school building, Roni said he wouldn't be coming to the kibbutz anytime soon, and that he wouldn't be able to bring the air rifle again, or ask for it for Gabi, who was too young to shoot it. So, after the falcon had polished off the meat of the first two doves, Yotam and Gabi were forced to upgrade their hunting tactics.

They first lured the pigeons to the window of the small storeroom in the children's dormitory with the help of seeds and various pigeon delicacies they'd read about in the encyclopedia of birds, and after a sufficient number had gathered there, they frightened them inside and shut the window. It was pretty crafty, but pretty simple, too; pigeons, they discovered, are really dumb. They left the birds in the dark room for several days to blind them. Then Gabi went into the room and caught one—easy enough, given that the room was small and the bird was blind—and carried it out to the yellowish thorny field alongside the children's dormitories. He gripped the head of the bird between the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand, lifted his arm high above his head, and with four or five lassolike twirls of his wrist to gain speed and momentum, he threw his hand forward, leaving the bird's head between his fingers, while
the body, disengaged from the head, flew five or six meters forward from the impact and landed on the ground, the wings still fluttering.

Gabi looked down at the head still in his hand, kissed it lightly above the beak, and tossed it aside; then he walked over to the warm, shaking body and, using the penknife again, sliced it open and cut away the best pieces of flesh and served them to the falcon on a plate. All told, the entire process lasted mere minutes once he had mustered sufficient experience, cool-headedness, and skill. Yotam helped with laying the traps and chasing the pigeons into the room. The rest of the work was left to Gabi—the carrying, the swinging, the decapitating throw, the discarding of the head, handling the meat.

And thus things continued until the grade's head teacher got wind of the rumors spread by some of the girls who were grossed out by it all and turned up to confirm them. She told Yotam and Gabi that they weren't allowed to keep a falcon in their room. It was to be released into the wild right away, and they'd been wrong not to go to see the vet. Who knows what diseases it might be carrying, and where it actually came from, and the whole business of killing the pigeons had to end.

Following their scolding, Yotam told Gabi he was sick and tired of the falcon anyway. Gabi agreed; the head teacher's timing was good. They thought about releasing it on the mountain, but there was still a problem with the bird's leg, they thought, so they handed it over to someone at the kibbutz's livestock department. Then they returned to the small storeroom and issued pardons to the two blind pigeons that remained imprisoned there.

N
ot long after the falcon incident, Gabi was abducted while walking alone through the plum orchards toward the mountain. He didn't know who abducted him—a man, an adult, large-bodied, with hairy arms and big hands—that's what he had felt. Over the days that followed, he paid close attention to the arms of the kibbutz men. The
abductor covered Gabi's eyes and mouth with his hands and embraced him powerfully for several minutes with a force that far outweighed Gabi's ability to resist—until Gabi got used to the idea and realized he'd be better off simply accepting his fate. The abductor then released his one hand and immediately tied a bandanna in its place—first over the mouth and then the eyes. He pulled Gabi's arms back and tied them behind his back—Gabi could hear the flexing and clicking of the plastic—with a zip tie.

His abductor pushed him forward, into a walk. Because he had hiked through the area during nights of total darkness on many an occasion, he knew he was being led between the plum trees to the far end of the orchard, where there was a gravel road. Then he was loaded onto an open vehicle of sorts, a pickup truck or a jeep (over the days that followed, he paid close attention not only to hairy arms but also to the kibbutz's fleet of vehicles, in an effort to find clues), and driven south, to the edge of the orchards and the cattle fields beyond.

Not a word was spoken throughout the ordeal, nor was he beaten. All the abductor did was fill his mouth with black beetles and, perhaps, various other bits of flesh, insects, dirt, stones, fluids that smelled like the urine of certain animals, soft solids whose sharp and concentrated taste indicated they were possibly animal feces of some kind—and force him to swallow. There were black beetles for certain, because at the hospital the following day, they found pieces of legs stuck between the braces that still graced Gabi's teeth; and there was probably a frog, too, because something resembling the leg of one turned up after they flushed out his stomach.

He couldn't recall how long he was there. He lost his sense of time and place at some point, between the vomiting and the refilling of his mouth. They didn't hit him, but they didn't exactly caress him, either. He didn't know how many of them there were. The large man who grabbed him must have been there, as well as a driver, because the man remained alongside him during the drive. There may have been others. He tried not to think about the things that were being stuffed into his mouth, and to block out the stench of their odor and their sour taste.

Years later he realized that the blindfold had been his savior—because,
in general, being sickened by food wasn't related to its taste but rather to its appearance. Nevertheless, and despite his savior, he understood what they were doing, and he could feel ants crawling over his hands and on his tongue. He identified the beetles—a likely flashback of his tastebuds to his experience as an infant. The rest felt like things one doesn't usually put in one's mouth—too dry, too smooth, too abrasive—but he tried not to think, and ate and threw up, and ate and threw up. They left him, bound and blindfolded, outside the room of his adoptive parents.

The last time he'd been at Ziv Hospital was some two months previously, when his parents, teachers, and more or less the entire kibbutz insisted he visit Eyal. Dad Yossi went with him. They approached the bed and all Gabi could see were Eyal's eyes and the black rings around them. The remainder of his face was in a plaster cast, while the rest of his body lay hidden under a blanket in the small bed. The new school year had started a few weeks earlier, and Eyal had yet to begin second grade, but children and teachers from his class had been coming to his bedside to tutor him and fill him in on things. Eyal's eyes stared up at him, cold and dull. They looked nothing like the plucky and mischievous eyes that had looked at him alongside the cottage cheese, when he addressed Gabi as Jaws. The spectacle amused Gabi and filled him with a sense of satisfaction, but he tried not to let on. Eyal's mother and father—both named Yonah, an interesting coincidence in and of itself and the source of many a joke in the kibbutz newsletter and dining hall—were standing on the opposite side of the bed. Dad Yossi nudged his shoulder, and he looked at the parents and then at Eyal.

“I'm sorry,” Gabi said, and then could no longer hold back—and cracked up laughing.

“Gabi!” Dad Yossi commanded, and Eyal turned away, and his parents shook their heads in disbelief.