The Hilltop (16 page)

“We only have each other, that's all,” Roni said to Gabi. “So fuck the army, and fuck the commando unit. If I thought I saw you in the middle of the orienteering drill and went into that kibbutz and started talking to people—I don't recall a thing, but that's what they say I did—then it must have happened for a reason. That's what guided me. You guided me. And you are more important to me than anything else.”

“I'm sorry,” Gabi said to him, placing a hand on Roni's, feeling a tug on one of his heartstrings.

“You have nothing to be sorry about. The main thing is that you returned safe and sound. That's what's important.”

Besides, as Roni subsequently realized, the intelligence base in Safed is great fun, way more fun than working your butt off in remote geographical locations in the Negev or Golan simply to reach some point or other that someone had marked on a map. The work was easy and quick, the evenings were free, and he came down to the kibbutz whenever he felt like it, and the girls—holy shit, the girls!

G
abi, in all likelihood, could have secured an exemption from combat duty, or even army service in general, if he had informed the military authorities of his runaway episode and the incidents of violence, or if he had undergone professional counseling. People around him, Dad Yossi included, encouraged him to do so. But he wanted to volunteer for a combat unit, and said nothing. He listed the Golani commando unit as his first preference and the regular Golani Brigade as his second, didn't list a third, and ended up in the Combat Engineering Corps. While still in boot camp, he was dispatched to Gaza and entrusted with a tear-gas grenade launcher. His unit was sent out on patrol in the Jabalya refugee camp, which the officer who briefed them defined as “not hostile” and hence suitable for a company of new recruits. And so, just halfway through boot camp training, he and his fellow soldiers found themselves heading down a long dirt road in two lines. Smoke from a burning tire drifted through the air, searing their nostrils. They moved deeper into the refugee camp, walking among children blackened with dirt, loud, self-assured, playing with rags, and women in long dresses, full-bodied, pug-faced, their eyes dull and unfriendly. Here and there, Gabi spotted a pair of pretty green eyes of a young girl or two. For the most part, however, he focused on the tracks of the soldier ahead of him.

The patrols for the first four days were slow and boring, accompanied by unpleasant odors, and they didn't get to use the tear-gas grenade launcher. But on the fifth day, they encountered a group of stone-throwing youths. The company commander stopped and crouched, and the other
soldiers followed his example. He then stood tall again, took cover behind the wall of a house, and instructed his soldiers to get behind him. There wasn't enough room for them all, however, and some remained in range of the stone-throwers.

“Gas!” yelled the commander. Gabi failed to register that he was the intended recipient of the order. “Gas!” the commander bellowed again, and only after someone elbowed his arm did Gabi spring to attention and rush over. The commander instructed him to fire the grenades in an arc in the direction of the stone-throwers. Taking the launcher off his shoulder, Gabi then remembered that he hadn't yet learned how to use it. On their first patrol, he was told there wasn't sufficient time and that he'd be taught afterward. But the individual who had promised him forgot, and Gabi didn't ask, and the launcher remained hanging from his shoulder like an empty bag through the quiet, boring patrols of the previous days. Now he was being asked to fire it, and he didn't know how. Enraged, the commander ripped the launcher from Gabi's hands and showed him how to open it. “Grenades,” he ordered. Grenades? Apparently, someone had filled Gabi's flak jacket with tear-gas grenades. The commander found them, showed Gabi how to load the launcher, closed it, aimed the weapon skyward, muttered, “Next time I won't do it for you, snap out of it,” and pulled the trigger.

The weapon was defective. Instead of being launched into the distance and exploding on the target, the grenade detonated in the barrel itself. The commander immediately threw down the launcher, but the cloud of gray smoke rose and enveloped them nevertheless, in particular the commander and Gabi and the unfortunate soldier at whose feet the weapon had landed. The three writhed in pain, seared by the smoke that ate away at their eyes and noses and mouths and lungs, grasping blindly for water, searching blindly for cover, struggling for breath. Perplexed, the remaining soldiers, their eyes streaming with tears and coughing, stood around them, and the stone-throwers in the distance bared their teeth, laughed gleefully, and continued to throw their stones, and even plucked up the courage to move in closer. Had it not been for Dudi, a slightly built and thus far quiet soldier, who opened fire with his weapon into the air and began screaming like a man possessed, which he might have been, the
incident could have resulted in consequences far more serious than three victims of smoke inhalation who were rushed to the army clinic at the Gaza command base and subsequently released toward evening.

Following the incident, the company of new recruits returned to boot camp, but by then, Gabi felt detached, no longer really there. Not only had he lost the desire to ingest gas from defective gas-grenade launchers, to force-feed others with gas from functioning launchers, to walk through alleyways with free-running sewage and through the bedrooms of families living in abject poverty, or to restrain stone-throwers; he also had no appetite for operating heavy engineering machinery or clearing explosive devices or building bridges over rivers. The enthusiasm of his fellow trainees and the words they spewed when discussing mechanization and bombs and weapons—words they had heard from friends or brothers or uncles who had served as combat engineers—meant nothing to him. In fact, he had no inclination at all to roam the country in that green uniform. He had done it once before, and it had almost cost him his life—truth be told, his life was spared only because he wasn't a genuine soldier at the time. And boot camp, with the contrived and inane hard-nosed attitude of the commanders, the middle-of-the-night scrambles, the mistreatment and shitty food, the stupid guard duty, and the assholes, oh, the assholes. He got on with a few of the guys, but as a kibbutznik, he was immediately relegated to a status that alienated him from most of the soldiers in his company. And the incident in Jabalya did nothing to boost his position.

*  *  *

Early one morning they were mustered, loaded onto personnel carriers, and transported to the middle of the desert. There they were divided into teams and sent out on orienteering exercises. An entire day under the desert sun, without sufficient water, with food from unattractive field rations. The day would have been bad enough had everything gone according to plan, but there were mishaps, too. Two of the teams went walkabout and failed to reach the endpoint on time. Darkness fell. Flares were fired to light up the night sky, the other teams, under the impression they had already completed the drill, were returned to the field to conduct searches, and one of the search teams went walkabout, too, and
also went missing. The soldiers and commanders were tired, hungry, and on edge. After much shouting, scrambling, and punishing, they finally returned to base at around 11 p.m. The company commander and two soldiers—one of them Gabi—went to the kitchen to tell the cooks to prepare a meal. The cooks, however, weren't in the kitchen, which was locked. The commander and the two soldiers walked over to the cooks' barracks, knocked on doors, shouted, and pleaded for food. The cooks, engrossed in a game of backgammon and smoking cigarettes, laughed.

“It's too late,” they said. “No one goes to the kitchen at this time of night. You didn't make it on time, tough shit.”

They weren't willing even to hand over the key. Their commander, a staff sergeant major, wasn't on base, he was out on the town in Beersheba.

“Forget about it,” one of them said.

“Learn not to go walkabout,” said another.

“That's the way it is in boot camp,” the first added, and all the others laughed and went back to their backgammon.

Impatient and hungry, the company commander confronted the head cook and tried to drag him out by the collar of his shirt. The other cooks responded by jumping the company commander and laying in to him with their fists. They threw him to the floor, kicked him in his ribs, and one even got in a boot to the head. Gabi and the other soldier remained on the sidelines, not daring to intervene. Gabi was hungry and tired. All he had eaten the entire day was a single field ration, which he had shared with another two soldiers.

Barely able to stand, the company commander assured the cooks that they'd soon be eating shit for their actions, but they didn't appear concerned. With a suspected cracked rib and bearing bad news, he and the two soldiers then returned to the company. They divided the remaining field rations among the soldiers and then released them to shower and sleep, with a promise of good food the following day.

*  *  *

After the shower, after the disgusting Spam, after my stomach had finished churning, my heart continued to replay the kicking the company commander had suffered, not that I was particularly fond of him, but the cooks were animals, and they were wrong, they weren't human, not human at all. The
events of the whole fucking day swirled in my mind in the shower, the field rations and the sun and dumb walking around with the fucking maps and then after we were done and already in the personnel carrier, having to go out again and search for the assholes who went walkabout and wait some more and walk some more like animals. Inhuman. I couldn't sleep. It was 2 a.m. by then. I opened Mishali's footlocker and removed a number of stun grenades I knew he had kept from Gaza in order to take home, large, smooth grenades, purplish-brown, like eggplants. Mishali had more but I took just two, and returned to the cooks' living quarters. I knew where the head cook slept because I had seen it before. Inhuman. The silence around me was broken only by rhythmic snoring coming from one of the rooms. I identified the room and quietly dragged over a large, heavy wooden bench to serve as a barrier against the door. I walked around and found the window, which I managed to budge and open. I pulled the pins out of both grenades and blocked the firing mechanism with my hands. Then I reached in with both hands, released the grenades, closed the window, and fled from there to my warm bed, hearing on the way the huge booms that shook the entire precast structure. With a smile on my face, I fell soundly asleep.

*  *  *

This time, at least, the enemies were the ones who took the hit, not him, as in the case of the tear gas. The massive blast sprang the cooks out of bed, deafened them, and literally scared the shit and piss out of them, with one of them losing control of his bowels and the other, his bladder. Consumed by panic, they were unable to escape the room until their somewhat less alarmed neighbors moved aside the bench blocking the door.

They were sent to Soroka Medical Center's ER to be treated for shock and the ringing in their ears and, beyond their physical ailments, returned humiliated. Gabi took pride in that; he had righted a wrong. All said and done, his fellow soldiers—the investigation and subsequent naming of the guilty party lasted no more than a few hours—adopted a different view of the nerdy Ashkenazi kibbutznik who didn't know how to operate a gas-grenade launcher. And as for the company commander, although he couldn't admit it, and although to some extent the incident only deepened his own humiliation—a run-of-the-mill trainee had exacted
a price and restored respect for a beating that he, the commander, had suffered—he fixed Gabi with looks of appreciation and spoke to him in a sympathetic tone while supposedly slamming him with harsh words about putting lives at risk and human and military collegiality.

After that Gabi was unable to remain in boot camp or the army. After two weeks in detention, an experience in and of itself, his military service, which had lasted a total of five months, came to an end. He saw no future for himself there, and securing a discharge wasn't difficult after he told the military psychologists about the violent incidents in his past. After returning to base from the army jail, he hurriedly packed his kit bag and left for the IDF's induction base before the foursome of cooks learned he was there.

H
e returned to the kibbutz, where he found a brother. They were both men by then, at peace with themselves, with each other, with the kibbutz, and with Dad Yossi and Mom Gila, too. And they had yet to cast their gazes beyond the brown Galilee mountains that surrounded the kibbutz. They were fully fledged members of the community, rank-and-file residents—workers, active participants in the farming and social life of the kibbutz, living in the simple and adequate rooms. Following his discharge from the army, Roni went back to working with the cattle, again with Baruch Shani, the overseer of the department. Gabi, meanwhile, gave up on working in the fields because he couldn't stand the sharp smell of tomatoes. The four walls and floor of the food store suited him better, and he began working there under Daliah, who was in charge of ordering the kibbutz's food supplies. But he didn't get on with her, and remained in the department for just a few months. He found her patronizing and sensed she was trying to keep him on a short leash, as if she were afraid of him—once she even mentioned the incident of the diving board and Eyal's jaw. He moved to the kibbutz factory, the country's largest producer of ready-made lawn, and a big exporter, thanks to
a unique patented solution for preserving the grass for the duration of the shipment. Gabi worked in the office, and happily so, and he got on well with the factory manager, an immigrant from South Africa and a founding member of the kibbutz, a happy-go-lucky man and a joker, with a huge nose. Gabi, however, turned out to be allergic to the species of grass used for the ready-made lawns, and following incessant bouts of coughing that led to a series of rigorous medical tests, he was forced to relinquish that career, too.