The Hilltop (15 page)

He found himself shivering, mumbling to himself, alongside the perimeter fence of some community or other, calling for Gabi, and then he thought he saw him. Where was he? There was the kibbutz, he was at the kibbutz, there were the lawns, the gardens that Dad Yossi and his groundskeeping team planted and tended so beautifully, there was the swimming pool and dining hall, the concrete paths. He felt drawn to the lights. There was Gabi. Gabi? Gabi fixed him with an odd stare. Gabi? Do you have a cigarette? He didn't respond, but simply looked—what does he want, why does he look like that? Who the hell is that?

*  *  *

It wasn't Gabi. At the time, Gabi was indeed down south, in the desert, but hundreds of kilometers from Roni's IDF orienteering training exercises. He was in the Sinai Peninsula, in Ras Burqa, meandering over sand dunes and down to the blue water. His journey there had been a surprising, intoxicating, hitchhiking quest that took him from Ofra to Be'er Tuvia, from Be'er Tuvia to Eilat, and from Eilat to Ras Burqa. The Gam-zu-Le-tova family's 600 shekels would provide for him comfortably for several weeks, he worked out, and certainly in Ras Burqa—what was there to buy there, anyway? He befriended a group from Haifa who were collectively buying food supplies and water and ice and beer, cooking together and sharing their meals, and he paid his part and shared in the cooking, dishwashing, and trips to get ice. They even gave him a blanket and he slept on it under the stars. They didn't ask questions, that's what he liked most about them, and thus he spent his days, lazing on the sand, occasionally putting on a mask and snorkel and exploring the reef a little, submerged in the silence, with snorkel-allotted breaths of air, with colors
that exploded into view and moved and dodged away. There, under the water, the embers of his mind, his spiraling rage, his scorched nerve endings found peace and cooled. On the blanket, under a star-studded desert sky, he managed to suppress his anger toward Dad Yossi and Mom Gila, his longing for Roni, his thoughts of Yotam and Ofir and the kibbutz dining hall. He managed to close his eyes and fall soundly asleep, before waking to the pre-dawn chill.

“Hey, I want a turn, too!” Nili, one of the girls, responded when he asked one day for the air mattress and diving mask and snorkel. “Come,” Gabi said, and they went out together, she on the air mattress, legs on the cushion and mask in the water, he dragging the air mattress, watching the fish together. It was afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind the mountains to the west, and the visibility under the water wasn't all that great, but it was the time when the fish usually emerged from the reef, and they got the chance to observe lionfish and puffers, spotted an octopus and saw sea horses and butterfly fish and clownfish. Gabi pointed and Nili followed with her eyes, then looked at him, and through the foggy glass of the mask, he saw her smiling back at him. From that afternoon on, Nili sat next to him at mealtimes, washed dishes by his side, moved closer and closer to his blanket, found it a few nights later and fell asleep on it, and they woke in the morning to find themselves cuddled together, shielding themselves from the dawn chill, and she smiled at him and lightly kissed his lips, and then pulled away and went over to her sleeping bag without saying a word.

Nili wasn't the prettiest girl in the group, but she was the most enchanting. They shared their first real kiss up at the lookout point after a grueling climb in the scorching sun, totally exhausted, with the entire blue sea spread out below them, a long, deep kiss, spattered with sand and silky. Both were in their bathing suits, touching only exposed parts, not daring to cross any lines or disturb the resting places of any bands of elastic, a sweet and delicious and wet kiss. A kiss that should have marked a new and exciting stage for both of them, but remained only a promise.

The following morning, while they lay side by side on the beach, the earth trembled. He looked at her and she looked at him, and they smiled, and she placed her hand on his and squeezed.

“Did you feel the earth move?” he asked.

“Yes, an earthquake,” she responded. The beach around them remained unfazed—the bodies sprawled, and the swimmers swam, and the fish were probably napping, and the tents stood firm. Nili squeezed his hand again. “It's okay,” she said. “It happens here a lot. The Great Rift Valley.”

Just then, a new group of guys and girls arrived in Ras Burqa. Gabi glanced over at them, and his body tensed. Among them, he recognized from afar, was Anna, a classmate from school, from a neighboring kibbutz, the same kibbutz as Roni's ex, Yifat. Anna, so named because her father was a volunteer from England or Sweden or wherever (Gabi couldn't quite recall that day in the Sinai, though in time he would become very familiar with her biography) who fell in love with her mother on the kibbutz. Gabi couldn't take his eyes off the new arrivals, who set up camp a few dozen meters from his Haifa group. All the layers he had shed during weeks of sand, sea, fish, and Nili returned to encase him.

“What's up?” Nili asked, glancing over at the new group. Gabi didn't answer, his gaze unwavering. He had recognized her in an instant, but wanted to be sure he wasn't imagining things. He wasn't. Anna, with the round face and the sad eyes and the lone dimple and the straight, dark hair, cut neck-length in a style he wasn't familiar with but liked nevertheless. Anna, with her kibbutz gait, her flip-flops and shabby jeans and gray-blue tank top with its kibbutz laundry tag clearly visible from afar. It was Anna for sure, and he needed to get the hell away from there. To go on the run again, hide. He couldn't risk her returning north and telling someone where he was; he didn't want anyone who knew him to learn where he was.

With the head of hair he had grown, he was going to have a hard time passing himself off as a soldier, and he was too young to be a reservist, but he donned the uniform again and it helped him nevertheless to land a ride just minutes after managing to slip away to the road with his bag, without a word of farewell to anyone, only a mumbled, incomprehensible explanation to the stunned Nili. Any regrets faded the moment he entered the car. The Ras Burqa chapter of his life was
behind him now. It was best not to stay, not to become attached. He had to move on.

“Where do you need to get to?” the driver asked.

“Where are you going?” Gabi replied.

“Me? To Faran,” the driver said.

“Great, it's on my way,” Gabi responded, completely in the dark.

“To Dimona,” the next driver said. “Great,” said Gabi.

“Me? To Beersheba.” “Ofakim.” “Beit Guvrin.”

“Excellent.”

And the accompanying questions and remarks, too, of course: “Do they allow you to grow your hair like that in the commando unit? What's that all about, have you been on leave? Be careful the MPs don't catch you, Kastina is full of them. What? Is there a Golani base there?” Gabi didn't respond.

He got out of the car at Guvrin Junction, just as darkness fell.

“Where do you need to go?” the driver asked, apparently sensing his hesitancy. “Are you sure here is good for you?”

“Sure, sure it is, thanks,” Gabi answered, not turning to look at the man.

“This area is a bit of a hole,” the driver continued. “There's nothing here. Who knows when another car may pass by. Where do you need to go? I don't mind going out of my way a little.”

“It's okay, thanks,” Gabi said, and the man let it go and drove into his community, the sound of the car's exhaust gradually fading until only the silence remained. And he didn't have to wait long after all, a Peugeot 404 pickup truck was approaching from the opposite direction of the one he had just come from. Moments before the vehicle reached him, Gabi Kupper's mind wandered to the earthquake from that morning, the feeling of sand moving beneath him, his helplessness in the face of nature's unbridled power. What if some subterranean plate had decided to move with a little more force? He'd have been buried under the sand in a flash. Inadvertently, Gabi held out his thumb at the two circular white lights that chugged toward him.

A seasoned hitchhiker by then, Gabi sensed the difference the moment he closed the car door and the driver released his foot from the
brake and stepped on the gas. It filled the air of the car like cement in a bucket, heavy and gray, solidifying gradually. Often, he had accepted a ride without exchanging a single word with the driver, not even “Where do you need to go?” or “Where are you going?” They'd come later, on the understanding that if he had held out his thumb and a car had stopped for him, they'd probably be on the road together for a while, the taker and the giver, the requestor and the facilitator. This time, however, the silence was different, steeped in tension, churning with rage. His body froze, and he felt his hair stand on end. He felt aggressive and ready, catlike, to strike back at the first scratch. There were three men in the car. The driver, a man next to him in the passenger seat, and another behind him, alongside Gabi.

“Where are you going?” Gabi finally asked.

“Right here, nearby,” answered the man next to the driver in an Arabic accent.

“You know what,” Gabi said, his voice steady but his throat trembling, “I'll get out here, I left something behind, I need to go back.”

“Want us to take you back?” asked the speaker.

“No, no, here is just fine,” Gabi said, the earthquake, the Great Rift Valley, images from the morning flashing through his mind. And suddenly, out of nowhere, he recalled his ride with the Gam-zu-Le-tova family, too. The speaker said something to the driver in Arabic and the driver signaled, slowed down, and pulled over to the side of the road. Turning on the light inside the car, the speaker turned to look at Gabi. The driver turned to face him, too. There was no need for the man sitting next to him to turn, Gabi had been feeling his stare from the moment he got into the car. An unpleasant odor filled the car, and Gabi, his heart pounding, looked back at the speaker.

“Is something wrong, something bothering you?” the speaker asked.

“No, everything's fine. I simply need to get back to Beit Guvrin, I forgot something in my last ride.”

The speaker said something to the driver. The man sitting next to Gabi added some words of his own. “You're a soldier where?” he asked, reaching out to take hold of the Golani pin. “What's this, a cat?”

Gabi didn't answer. Nor did he remove the man's hand from his shirt. Beads of sweat began trickling down his brow. I guess this is it, he thought, and through his mind flashed images of Nili and her kiss, and Anna with her newly styled and straightened hair on the backdrop of the yellow desert, and Gam-zu-Le-tova's blue eyes.

“What do you want from me?” Gabi eventually asked, looking directly at the speaker. The driver snickered.

“We want a soldier, a combat soldier,” the speaker said. “Where's your rifle?”

“I don't have a rifle. I'm not a soldier. I'm at school. The uniform belongs to my brother,” Gabi responded, now on the verge of tears. “I'm a kid. I'm not a soldier.”

“No rifle?” the speaker said. He added something in Arabic and the man next to Gabi began frisking him, ripped a button off his shirt, felt his chest, slipped a hand into his pants, gripped his penis, and caressed his testicles.

“You're a kid? Not a soldier?”

Gabi sat there paralyzed, waiting for the slashing knife. He closed his eyes, a cold sweat told him he had made a mistake, a really big mistake. Why did he take to the road again? Why did he leave, why today, why at all? The Arabs spoke among themselves in high tones. The man sitting next to him let him be. Gabi opened his eyes and saw a car drive by from the opposite direction in a flash of blue. The Peugeot raced ahead, the Arabs continued to argue, louder and louder. Then they went silent. Gabi didn't know what was happening.

Approaching the next intersection, the driver signaled again, pulled over, turned, and glared at Gabi, and the man next to him exited the car and walked around the vehicle. He opened Gabi's door, grabbed him by the ends of his army shirt, and dragged him out. This is it, Gabi thought, it's the end for me. A whimper escaped his lips. The man threw him to the ground and kicked him several times until he rolled into the ditch at the side of the road. Long seconds passed before Gabi dared to raise his head from the ditch. His heart thumping, soaked in sweat, panting, he watched the Peugeot's taillights disappear into the distance. As his tears started to fall, confusing words danced in his mind: An eye that sees, an
ear that hears, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

He heard on the radio the following day about a soldier who was abducted at Eila Junction during the night. His dead body was found a few days later, not far from there, with a bullet in the head, an IDF bullet, fired from an IDF weapon, most likely the soldier's.

Gabi returned to the kibbutz that same day. He walked through the kibbutz gates in the Palladium boots and Roni's uniform, with wild hair and the soft-skinned cheeks of a young boy, and went straight to his room to crash on his bed and sleep peacefully and soundly for a few hours. When Yotam returned to their room from the basketball hall, he cautiously approached the bed to make sure he wasn't hallucinating, and then turned and raced at top speed to Yossi and Gila's room.

*  *  *

Roni told Gabi that he didn't care at all. The commando unit meant nothing, he'd completed the course, he'd lived through the experience. Been there, done that, and he really wasn't bothered by the fact that he was now stationed in an office job at an Intelligence Corps base in Safed. He was in charge of a storeroom, meaning in essence that he did nothing, because no one ever needed anything from that particular storeroom, so all he did all week long was remove tins of leftover paint from the storeroom and paint the side wall of his living quarters in a myriad of colors, circling and spiraling, blending and mixing, a work of art measuring 4.25 by 2.80 meters, signed in the one corner with
Roni Kupper, a vanishing soldier
, along with the year—1989.