The Hilltop (18 page)

As expected, the appeal filed with the defense minister was rejected. The council lawyers then filed a petition with the High Court of Justice, hoping for an actual court date far enough into the future to allow for the arrival of a few more families, for Othniel to expand his farming enterprise, and for the outpost residents to cover their prefabricated mobile homes with stone. Trucks laden with rocks, sacks of sand, mortar, and gravel turned up one day and unloaded their bounty, courtesy of the regional council, and almost all the residents eagerly set about the business of stoning over their homes. (“The stone enhances the aesthetics of the structures, blends with the surroundings, serves as thermal insulation, and gives added protection against stray bullets, God forbid” read the brochure.) They erected timber piles, mixed cement in a single mixer on wheels that was moved from place to place, or manually in tin basins. Othniel's home had had stonework done long before then. And, apart from the newly arrived trailer and the trailer that served the IDF (the outpost residents did indeed offer to give it the same treatment but were turned down by Captain Omer, who argued that the stone could create the impression of a fixed structure, and that the army wouldn't want to come under fire for erecting a fixed structure in the area of Judea and Samaria without the appropriate permits, and certainly not with a High
Court decision pending), not a single trailer on the hilltop remained bare. The walls of the trailers were thus turned into a mutation of geological layers that told of the passage of time: drywall, spray foam insulation, thin aluminum, cement, Jerusalem stone.

One day, with the bright sun beating down hard from a sparsely clouded sky, two officials from the Civil Administration's inspection unit arrived on the hilltop. They looked like brothers—thin, awkward, and sharp-nosed. Resting on the head of one was a crocheted skullcap. They spent some time wandering around the outpost and focused primarily on its northeastern corner, which, following the visit and findings of the previous land inspection team, turned out to be a part of the Hermesh Stream Nature Reserve. There stood a partially built wooden structure, known on the hilltop as Gabi's Cabin, where construction had progressed at an impressive pace and which now boasted half of a sloped wooden roof. The two visitors circled the structure and cast their eyes over the basin that had been installed outside the front door and the toilet that was fixed to the cabin at the back, and then, coming to the end of a small path, they suddenly halted.

“I've been around the territories for quite a while,” said awkward man number one, “but this is a first for me. What's with the bathtub here?” He approached the tub, which lay embedded in a large rock near the edge of the cliff.

“You're welcome to give it a try,” said Gabi, who had rushed over the moment the two began poking around his construction site. “Never again will you have the chance to take a bath in such beautiful surroundings.”

“I'm sure,” chuckled the Civil Administration official.

“But what the hell is this?” asked the second inspector, motioning with his chin in the direction of the unfinished cabin.

“It's the Hermesh Stream Nature Reserve visitors' center,” Othniel replied, and winked at Gabi, who smiled. The mood was a pleasant one. The rustic, pretty cabin on the edge of the cliff gleamed in the sunshine. Surprisingly, the inspectors refrained from issuing an order to suspend construction of the cabin. They said they would look into it and then went on their way.

Visitors continued to arrive from time to time, escorted for the most part by the sector's company commander, Captain Omer, but sometimes by the battalion or division commander, and once or twice by the head of the IDF Central Command himself. There were also officials from the Civil Administration, the Settlement Division, and the Defense Ministry, Knesset members from the left and the right, and, of course, officials from the Fence Administration, contractors armed with notebooks, land surveyors with their surveying instruments, levelers and their tools. A constant and somewhat slow trickle of professionals and concerned parties over a period of several weeks.

The pre-Passover High Sabbath came and went, and the High Court of Justice debate drew nearer. Leavened foodstuffs were burned, and Seder night passed by with the hilltop residents celebrating the transfer from Egypt, the wanderings, the transient nature of Jewish dwelling places through the ages, and their shared consciousness of an exiled people yearning for their homeland. The High Court hearing began, and the High Court hearing ended, and the council's petition was rejected, with the court ruling that the military demarcation order would take effect when the Defense Ministry deemed it appropriate.

“Now,” said Othniel at a meeting of the outpost's Absorption Committee, “we need to cross our fingers and pray to God that the appropriate time isn't found over the next two years—be it due to the heat, the cold, snow, rain, political sensitivity, a no-confidence motion in the Knesset, the toppling of the government, the days of grace of a new government, an economic crisis—until the order expires.”

*  *  *

The sector's company commander, Omer Levkovich, arrived to tell Othniel that he had paid a visit to Majdal Tur. The
mukhtar
had assured him that a small handful of children were responsible for the stone-throwing incident and that he would personally intervene to ensure things remained quiet.

Othniel protested. “It's always only children,” he said. “And the sheikh always promises to keep the peace. And then there's another stone, and another Molotov cocktail, and it'll end one day, God forbid, with more
than just a smashed windshield. And what will you have to say then?” Othniel's neighbor Hilik, the victim of the attack, who had spotted the company commander's jeep parked outside his neighbor's home and had come inside to join them, nodded and ran his fingers over his mustache.

Omer knew Othniel well. His gray-green eyes remained cool, facing the fiery stare of the settler. “It's best for everyone if the mukhtar is up to speed and assures quiet and good relations, instead of us going in and imposing a shutdown and mobilizing a battalion to maintain it,” the IDF captain said. “Anyway, they'd just get pelted with rocks from the rooftops, and they'd be forced to busy themselves with bullshit.”

“So hit them hard and put an end to the bullshit,” Othniel responded. “We shouldn't have to tolerate cars coming under attack by stone-throwers.”

“If you can't tolerate it, you don't have to. That's my decision, and it's final. We're not going to hit them hard or do anything of the sort.”

“Whatever,” Othniel said, his nostrils flaring. “Just don't be surprised afterward.”

“Hold your threats, and I'd like to see anyone dare to take action.”

“Okay, okay, let's all take it easy,” Hilik said in an effort to cool the mood. “Okay, Omer, thanks for coming. Another coffee, perhaps?” Standing off to the side, Othniel was still spitting fire. “No, thanks,” Omer said, and stood up to leave.

He returned just moments later. A flat tire. “Oy, my friend, you should have been more careful there in Majdal Tur,” Othniel said. “It's full of ninja road stars over there.” Omer wasn't amused. The clip-clop sound of Killer the horse walking nearby filtered through the air. The tire was changed and the jeep departed. Later that evening, the windshields of two vehicles in Majdal Tur were smashed, and a tire on one of the cars was set ablaze. Captain Omer's patrol was dispatched to the scene, and after surveying the damage in frustration, he relayed a report by radio to the command center.

W
hen Gabi-Gavriel-Kupper-Nehushtan first turned up at Ma'aleh Hermesh C. and offered his help with anything and everything, Othniel Assis took him on as a shepherd. All Gabi had to offer was good and pure Jewish manual labor, and that's exactly what Othniel believed in and was hoping to find for his developing farming enterprise. Gabi would take the goats out into the wilderness, sit with them on top of a hill, under a tree or alongside a spring, and then return them hours later to their pen, well fed and satisfied. He enjoyed reading religious literature, the writings of Rabbi Nachman, praying and conversing with the Almighty. After a while, however, boredom set in. How much more of it could he handle, of being alone with his thoughts, even in such beautiful surroundings? A shepherd is like a monk, secluding himself, hearing nothing but the sound of the wind and the bleating of the goats and the tinkling of the bells around their necks, seeing nothing but hilltops. At some point, he came to the conclusion that he'd be better off spending his work hours in a real job, doing physical work, using his muscles, talking to people. More important, he needed to give a rest to his wounded spirit, his intense yearnings and guilt-ridden thoughts about Mickey, his young son.

With Othniel's consent, Gabi went from being a shepherd to a worker of the land, and off he went to labor in the ever-expanding fields of the Assis farming enterprise, which provided much work sowing and weeding, harvesting, loading, and packing. Because he had some experience with field crops—he had worked on the kibbutz for a short while in the tomato fields, which he detested, and then in the banana groves, which he quite liked—he had a long talk with Othniel about his career change.

“Shepherds don't let the grass grow under their feet, they're a lot more spontaneous and free-flowing,” Othniel said, and Gabi agreed. A shepherd doesn't get tied down to one place, he forsakes a safe and familiar
location for the nobler purpose of a devout and spiritual existence. He sees the world and broadens his horizons, whereas the farmer is fixed, enslaved to his material possessions and assets. Gabi confessed that at this stage in his life, he appeared to have the need for something solid to hold on to.

“The worker of the land has a solid base,” Othniel said, clearly understanding Gabi's heart. “And he also creates something—he sows a seed and he reaps a fruit—and doesn't simply sit in the shade and allow the herd to do the work. Our people, from the very beginning, have always lived on these two opposite ends of the scale. Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, even Rabbi Eliezer started out as a worker of the land, while Rabbi Akiva was a shepherd. Othniel Assis alone is both!”

“Sitting around all day while the herd grazes is pretty damn boring, for the most part,” Gabi said, eliciting a toothy laugh and a slap on the shoulder from Othniel, who also promised that working with cherry tomatoes was very different from working with regular ones.

Gabi found his own special place during the long hours he spent in solitude when he first arrived on the hilltop—a stone ledge above the cliff that dropped down into the Hermesh Stream riverbed and overlooked the desert. Armed with a blanket one night, he went to sleep there under the stars, and the following day he came across a beautiful, smooth slab of rock that he pictured as a wonderful floor for a small cabin made of wood and stone. He laid out several rocks to mark the outline of the cabin's walls. If he were to add a few more every day, he thought, he'd eventually have a wall. After more than a year of lonely days and nights, the wall was completed.

At the same time, he built a number of small terraces in the area around the wall and floor and put in plants, which didn't survive Othniel's hungry goats and the dry conditions. From Othniel's fields, he borrowed several used and perforated pipes and set up a drip-irrigation system that with time allowed the plants to take hold in the soil. With the help of timber logs and beams, the original floor was turned into a beautiful wooden porch, which evolved into wooden walls and a roof.

At a certain stage in the process, Gabi realized he was building his future home, the home of his dreams. It may have been small and
modest—a single multipurpose room—but “Gabi's Cabin” more than provided for all of its owner's humble requirements, and more important, it was all his, constructed with patience and love and by his own two hands. He felt fortunate, and never tired of the landscape, the translucent brown desert hills and, farther away, the mountains of Edom: a place of breathtaking beauty, close enough to the homes of the settlement to feel a part of the community, yet far enough to maintain an element of privacy, to be at one with nature, to withdraw into prayer. Gabi did his best to ensure that the cabin he'd built blended in with its spectacular surroundings, flowed with them rather than defaced them. He had never had any formal training in design, planning, or building, but he was blessed with talent and intuition.

There was room inside the cabin for a bed, a coffee table, shelves for clothes and books and CDs. Power was drawn from a utility pole some fifty meters from the cabin and a light was installed in the ceiling. The toilet facilities were outside—number ones in nature, number twos in a sawdust-filled toilet bowl. The bath, which had so impressed the Civil Administration officials, was Gabi's pride and joy. He found the youth-sized stainless steel tub discarded in Ma'aleh Hermesh, brought it to the hilltop, placed it on a concealed crag of rock, and hooked it up to a water pipe in the center of the settlement. Around two of its sides, he erected a mud wall that he reinforced with empty wine bottles and fitted with a round, cracked mirror and a small niche for toiletries. There was no roof—bathing under the open sky! He laid another pipe from the tub to a basin fitted into a wooden table outside the door. A little below the cabin, down five stone steps, some natural and some finished off either with cement or segments of rock, Gabi erected a shaded patio, and around another nook in the rock he kept a small refrigerator and a hot plate—a kitchen, a dinette, and a place to kick back all in one.

Gabi worked slowly but poured his soul into the task at hand. He carried rocks, leveled sections of earth, gathered materials from here, there, and everywhere, adding layer upon layer. He tried to devote at least an hour or two each day to the cabin—he'd wake early sometimes and head there before the farm, and sometimes he'd spend his noontime
break at the cabin, and after hooking up the power cable and installing the light, he'd go there on occasion in the evenings and at night, too. He worked patiently, focusing on one task at a time, and felt a deep sense of satisfaction and gratitude after making even the smallest bit of progress. And because everyone at the settlement was fond of Gabi, they encouraged him and helped him in various ways—providing him with surplus building materials, or taking an hour off work and lending a hand, or assisting with specific tasks such as installing the power line or water pipe.