The Hilltop (29 page)

“Maybe we can write some code?” Yakir typed.

“You can do that?” King Meir asked. Yakir explained to him that while it was impossible to damage the belongings or property of another user without his consent, you could make something yourself and then destroy it. For example, you could create a copy of a mosque, and then blow it up, or a Palestinian flag, and then burn it.

“Awesome,” King Meir enthused. “That's way better than wandering around with the Uzis and not doing anything with them—like aiming them and saying boom-boom . . . But do they have any rules regarding this kind of thing?”

Yakir did a search and showed him Second Life's Community Standards: “The use of derogatory or demeaning language or images in reference to another Resident's race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation is never allowed in Second Life . . . Physical assault in Second Life is forbidden.”

King Meir gestured with his hands. “What a load of crap. Isn't it supposed to be like real life? And what if the mosque offends me?”

Just then, the door to the trailer opened and Yakir heard the thunderous voice of his father, speaking on the telephone. He quickly switched tabs to open the farm's Web page. Othniel came up behind Yakir, gave him a friendly pat on the head, with its thick mop of hair that practically swallowed up his green skullcap, sat down next to him, placed the telephone on the armrest of the easy chair, and rubbed his eyes.

“Sorry, another call came through, can you hear me, Assis?” came a voice from the device.

“I hear you, Dov, I hear you,” Othniel said, his head tilted back, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. Yakir pretended to focus on the computer screen.

“So the education minister briefed me on this morning's cabinet meeting. They discussed the
Washington Post
article, too. The Foreign Ministry, and the embassy in Washington in particular, will keep tabs on any White House response to the report, prepared of course with
strenuous denials and threats to sue the newspaper for implying that any illegal actions have been or are being committed at Ma'aleh Hermesh C. or any other settlement in Israel, either within the Green Line or beyond it.”

“Good.” Othniel chuckled, his fingers rubbing his eyes.

“Furthermore,” the head of the regional council continued, “a decision has been made to send the defense minister to Washington within the next few days, for the stated purpose of attending a charity event organized by the Jewish lobby, but he'll actually be there to sniff around, drop in on the secretary of state, the defense secretary, and perhaps even the president himself, if and when the opportunity arises—” Just then, the telephone sounded several feeble beeps and died. Othniel gazed at the device, perplexed. Yakir took it from him and immediately understood the problem. He went into the kitchen, retrieved the charger from behind the refrigerator, plugged it into the Nokia, and placed the device on the refrigerator.

His father went to the bathroom, sprayed deodorant under his arms, and tried a little with his fingers to tidy his beard, which had grown hypericum flowers. “Yakir,” he instructed, “make a note in the calendar that Herzl Weizmann, the contractor, is coming tomorrow, and that I need to call Motke at the Housing Ministry to discuss a subsidy for the work he will be doing.”

Red-eyed, Othniel looked at Yakir, who was typing on the keyboard. “Okay, son?” he said abruptly and stepped outside again. Yakir peered cautiously through the window and watched his father get into the dusty Renault Express, the original color of which few at Ma'aleh Hermesh C. were able to recall—in an effort to conserve water, Othniel hadn't washed it in years.

Yakir promptly returned to Second Life and met up with the small, bearded, skullcap-wearing group outside the Flame of the Revival synagogue. “Ah, Yakir, you're back,” King Meir said. Hanging from his shoulder was the Uzi that had cost him next to nothing at an arms store in one of Second Life's commercial areas. “We were just trying to decide where we should go now, after yesterday's successful action at the mosque.” Yakir helped him to search for an Arab club. There was the Scheherazade
Club, a nightclub with belly dancers, and the Orient Bazaar, which sells jalabiyas and kaffiyehs, and also Taste of Arabia, an Arab city with palm trees, mosques, and horses. The problem was that not many people hung out there. King Meir finally opted for the large mosque in Taste of Arabia. They'd go in and do some “item spamming” and bombard the mosque with Stars of David.

“If physical violence is out, spam is good. We're smarter than them, let's take advantage of that,” King Meir said, and gave everyone the objective's coordinates. Yakir entered the details and appeared in the mosque with his friends. They were greeted with a hearty “Salaam alaikum!” from a woman who didn't appear Arab, and they responded with a barrage of Stars of David: Yakir had used Photoshop to create a Star of David that was compatible with the Second Life graphics, had colored it blue, and had found a simple duplication program. And now, with his mouse, he dragged the Star of David and placed it on the floor of the mosque, where the graphic then duplicated itself thousands of times. The mosque filled with floating blue Stars of David.

“Let's do the same at the Orient Bazaar!” yelled an exuberant King Meir, and he relayed new coordinates. Two minutes later, the bazaar, too, was filled with Stars of David. The bearded, Uzi-bearing bunch rejoiced. Not only had they filled those loathsome locations with some Jewish beauty, they had also messed with the computers of their owners and anyone who visited them. “You're the man, Yakir!” King Meir exclaimed as they returned to Revival. “And you know what the next stage is!”

Yakir laughed. He would try to work on creating a copy of a mosque to blow up and a Palestinian flag to burn. Perhaps he'd have some time that night. He heard his father pull up and park, and a minute later, the door opened and heavy-duty work shoes thumped across the floor.

“What are you doing there, son?” Othniel asked.

“Nothing,” replied the son.

“What do you mean, nothing? I heard you laughing . . . Okay, let's go, you coming to prayers?”

“Okay,” Yakir said, and clicked on the X in the corner of the screen.

A
riel woke half an hour before his alarm was set to go off. His mind remained clouded for a moment before he snapped to and remembered, and a slight tremor coursed through him, a shudder of anxiety that quickly took flight. He rose, rushed through his morning routine, woke his wife and young son, and prepared breakfast for them.

“What's up?” his wife asked, and he replied, “Nothing, I just woke up early.” But she had known him long enough to know better. “Do you really have to go there?” she asked, and he responded immediately with “Oy, don't get started. Yes, I really do have to go there. What's the problem? I've told you a thousand times, it's a safe road, which the army uses, on which—”

“On which no one has been killed in two years—I know, statistically, the chances of dying in a road accident in the center of the country are much higher.”

“Look, Daddy,” their son said. “Look, Daddy.” He pointed at his plate.

“I can see,” Ariel said. “That's lovely, a plum!”

“Pum,” his son responded.

Do I really have to do this? he asked himself in the car. Why did I take the day off work? He tuned in to Razi Barkai's radio talk show: settlements, the U.S. president, the prime minister. Boring. He switched over to 88FM, cold air streamed from the air conditioner, the sun was still rising in front of him as he headed east.

On Route 443, his confidence started to erode. Roni was right, it wasn't so scary the second time around. But on the 443, there was a real sense of having stepped it up a notch. Not due to the road's history so much, but more so the discernible changes. The outside temperature displayed on the dashboard dropped, the landscape morphed, the hilltops revealed themselves, Arab villages and villagers appeared on the sides of
the road. And then there was the checkpoint, and the fence that rose up along the side of the road on both sides, and he had no idea if he was beyond the barrier or inside it, in a narrow corridor between the sides of the barrier itself. The air, too, was different, and past Jerusalem came the sense of being sucked out of a vacuum into the pale yellowish brown, into the desert, with more villages and mosques, more yellow taxis and Palestinian trucks—green-and-white license plates caused a rise in blood pressure, yellow ones were somewhat soothing—and suddenly the radio switched of its own accord from 88FM to Arabic music. His hands squeezed the wheel, eyes darted back and forth between the hilltops and the road. These Arabs drive like lunatics, he thought, and pictured one of the trucks plowing mercilessly into him, not necessarily with deadly intent but as the result of reckless driving.

The telephone rang but he was too afraid to make small talk, his hands remained fixed on the wheel, his mind focused. The descents grew steeper, the ascents more arduous. Don't worry, hundreds of Israelis travel this road daily and no one has been killed here in years, even stone-throwing incidents are few and far between. And yet, unlike those of the settlers, his car wasn't equipped with armored glass. Could they know that, the Arabs? Despite the air-conditioning, he was sweating, and couldn't quite work out why he was there at all, it was just another business idea that would follow in the footsteps of all his previous business ideas. Why couldn't he be satisfied with the not so little he had—accountant, average-size firm, in the center of the country, married, with one kid? But to really make a killing required taking risk, doing things that not everyone would do.

The military pillboxes comforted him, the red-tiled roofs soothed him. He wouldn't have believed he would feel that way, but the turnoff for the settlement was a welcome sight, and outside the yellow steel gate, which opened for his Toyota and its yellow plates without any fuss, he could see the waiting cars of the Arabs and the Arabs themselves, and once inside, he felt secure, as unpleasant as it might have been to admit so. After all, he didn't have a problem with the Arabs, they deserved better, he didn't support the crazy settlers, but he did feel a lot more at ease and safer within their prohibitive boundaries.

“What's up, bro? You look green,” Roni said to him.

“Give me a glass of water,” Ariel responded, and entered the trailer.

“Okay,” he said after he recovered. “Good news. Three boutique stores in Tel Aviv who took samples from me want to place a substantial order for the olive oil. They all say this is the kind of oil that sells these days, heavily flavored, strong-tasting, spicy, with the true fragrance of olives, unlike those yellowish, lighter Italian or Spanish oils.”

“Well, of course, it's the real thing.” The words rolled gleefully off Roni's tongue. “Not only is it better than the pale, Ashkenazi, overrefined European oils, it's the best in the country, the purest, the tastiest. Better than from the Galilee, better than from Samaria. These are olives from the edge of the desert, it's Bab A-Zakak, the region with the oil of the highest quality! And it's costing us nine shekels a liter, instead of the sixteen shekels you'll pay for the cheapest Israeli oil.”

“You can find some for fifteen,” Ariel corrected him, but Roni didn't bother to respond.

They sat in Gabi's yard, which overlooked the olive groves of Kharmish.

“What's a substantial order?” Roni asked after a few moments of thought.

“A thousand liters and more.”

“A thousand and more . . .” Roni nodded, and released smoke from his nostrils. “Multiplied by three, you say. I hope Musa can handle that. We're a small enterprise, after all, not an industrial farm.”

“He has to cope. Anything less, and it's not worth my while to leave the comforts of my office. But now that we've bought him that wonderful electric motor to replace his dead donkey, I'm not worried. And just so you know, you can boutique me all you like, I still haven't given up on my dream of a sophisticated oil press and mass production. After we've established the brand, we can invest in an Italian production line, and then, within five years, we'll have made it.”

Roni laughed to himself. The words “God willing” were on the tip of his tongue, but he refrained at the last second from blurting them out. He waved to Othniel and Yakir, who were walking along the ring road toward the synagogue.

“Now take a look at this,” Ariel said, and glanced around for his black briefcase. He reached for it, couldn't get a hand on it, cursed, stood up, and went over to retrieve it, patting down the pockets of his pants to feel for his wallet and keys and mobile phone as he walked. He removed several printed pages from the briefcase, glanced at them, and handed them to Roni without a word. Roni took them, then took a final puff on his cigarette before stubbing it out in the ashtray. He browsed through the pages and a broad smile slowly appeared on his face. He nodded intently.

“Initial drafts for the ad campaign,” Ariel said with a sense of satisfaction. “I also want a draft with the headlines from the newspapers. People will be floored.”

“Or I'll be floored. What will people who know me think when they see me like that in an advertisement?”

“They probably won't see you. It's not going into national newspapers or anything like that. You know, local ads, signs at stores, that kind of thing.”

“Well, if they do, you can say it is ‘an Israeli man whose ties to the area remain unclear.' ”

“What's that?”

“Nothing,” Roni said, “just the
Washington Post
article. That's what the son of a bitch wrote about me. I was pleased actually that they had no clue who I was or what the hell I was doing jumping onto the blades of bulldozers.”