The Hilltop (9 page)

Roni, for his part, remained a virgin throughout the summer. The girls were usually a step or two ahead of the boys when it came to that sort of thing, but working with the cattle, under Baruch's command, made a young man out of him nevertheless. His younger brother would listen in awe to the heroic stories he brought home—of mending fences, watering down the herd under the blistering sun, fertilizing and seeding, moving one of the cows that got stuck in the middle of the winding road that climbed north from Tiberias to the Galilee. He was up every day by 4:30 a.m., when he'd get a ride in one of the cattle unit's vehicles down to the kibbutz's grazing fields. At 7 a.m. everyone would go back up for breakfast in the dining hall, and then it would be out to the pastures again. Noon meant lunch back up in the dining hall; and at 3 p.m., Roni would go to sleep, except for the days on which he played basketball, when Baruch would release him early. The schoolkids, of course, worked in the various units of the kibbutz during the holidays, but sometimes, in very busy periods, like before slaughtering or when new calves would come in, Roni managed to convince Baruch to call for him during school time, too.

Gabi still had braces on his teeth that summer. He was in the final two years of his long-term orthodontic project, and the tough part was already behind him. Toward the end of the long holiday, with the summer camps over, adult supervision was at its most lax. The adults were hot, and they were busy, and all they wanted to do was to remain indoors with their new, recently installed air conditioners—how they had survived without them, none of them knew. The children swarmed outside without a care, taking full advantage of their final days of freedom, hanging out. Merciless months of accumulated heat had left teenage brains fried almost beyond repair. The tarred roads were scaldingly hot, and walking barefoot along the gray concrete pathways was out of the question, too. With large towels draped over their shoulders and blue-and-white-striped flip-flops on their feet, Gabi and his friends Yotam and Ofir headed for the pool, their slight, browned bodies in swimming trunks only. The heat stuck to their skin. Yotam focused his gaze on the path, trying to stamp on as many beetles as he possibly could. The beetles, too, were at the end of their summer, sluggish, spaced out,
their intolerable stench already beyond the point of troubling anyone, let alone being noticed at all, except by random visitors to the kibbutz. Yotam counted . . . eleven, twelve since they left the dining hall . . . thirteen.

“You should have given that jerk a piece of your mind,” Ofir said, and Gabi felt his face redden, the anger rising again.

“He'll get what's coming to him, don't you worry” was his only response.

“For sure,” Ofir said, “he was asking for it.”

“Fourteen and fifteen in one step,” Yotam said.

“You should have smeared the cottage cheese all over his face,” said Ofir.

Gabi thought, Why didn't you smear the cottage cheese in his face? But he didn't say a word. The large diving board, three meters of concrete, came into view, and there in the distance, someone was doing a back somersault off its edge.

“Who was that?” Gabi asked.

“I think it's that volunteer, what's-his-name,” Ofir replied.

“Orit's boyfriend,” said Yotam.

“He's not her boyfriend,” Ofir responded.

“How do you know?”

“Wanna bet?”

“Fifteen,” Yotam announced as they approached the pool.

“You've already said fifteen,” Ofir noted.

“Really? So sixteen, then.”

*  *  *

That boy, Eyal, was standing in front of the giant bowl of cottage cheese. What's up with him? Gabi wondered. Why isn't he moving along? Was he trying to decide how much to put on his plate or simply daydreaming? Whatever—he shouldn't be holding everyone up. What grade is he in?

Gabi was waiting for Eyal to move on from the cottage cheese, and then Ofir poked Gabi on his shoulder, a painful poke.

“What do you want from me?” Gabi barked, turning to Ofir.

“What's going on? Why aren't we moving? What's with the cottage cheese?”

Their faux wooden plastic trays were lined up one behind the other on the steel rails that ran alongside the food stations. The identical trays bore light blue plates containing scrambled eggs, which by then had cooled and hardened and acquired a bluish tint around the edges, one tomato and one cucumber, and a set of cutlery. All that remained to complete the perfect breakfast was the cottage cheese. “Get moving,” Ofir urged. Gabi nudged his shoulder into the kid, Eyal, the second-grader.

“Hey, what's your problem, Jaws?” Eyal said, looking Gabi squarely in the eyes. When all was said and done, Ofir acted the big hero, and wondered why Gabi hadn't smeared the cottage cheese in the kid's face, but truthfully, when it happened, Ofir and Yotam had chuckled at first, and waited to see how Gabi would react. As if they weren't his friends, as if the cheeky little kid hadn't shot his mouth off at all three of them, three years his senior. They chuckled, and Gabi said, “What did you say?” The kid replied, “Jaws,” without shifting his gaze, fearless. Gabi shoved him with his shoulder again, but not hard enough, because the kid managed to stand firm and say, “Hey, okay, just a moment, Jaws, I'm just taking some cottage cheese, show a little patience.” And Ofir and Yotam laughed again, and Gabi, more taken aback than anything else, waited, his face reddening. Eyal, his confidence boosted by the laughter, added, “Anyway, the cottage cheese will just get stuck in your braces. You don't need that, do you?” And then he added another “Jaws,” for good measure, and one or two of his friends nearby tried to stifle their laughter.

Eyal loaded his plate with cottage cheese, and Gabi followed suit, alongside the scrambled eggs, and went to sit down. Ofir and Yotam did the same and sat down next to him.

“Did you see that cheeky little shit?” Ofir said as he sat down, like he didn't know the answer, like he didn't know that everyone had seen, and heard, too, that cheeky little shit, like he and Yotam hadn't played a part in Gabi's humiliation.

“What grade is he in?” Gabi asked.

“He's going into second grade, he's with my sister.”

“These kids, they don't have an ounce of respect,” Yotam said, and Ofir responded, “You shouldn't have let it slide,” and Yotam said, “Jaws,” and giggled, and Ofir joined in, and Gabi, too, in the end, as if he had a
choice. When the giggle died down, Yotam peeled off the wrapping from a wedge of cheese, took a bite, threw the silver foil into the wastebasket, and added, “I haven't heard that before.” He upped a gear from a giggle to full-on laughter, and Ofir went along with him, and Gabi shifted down to a smile, which turned bitter at the edges. It wasn't, of course, the first time he had heard it. He had heard every name imaginable: Brace Face, Metal Mouth, Train Tracks, Magnet Mouth, Cheese Grater, Zipper Mouth, Tinsel Teeth, Tin Grin, and, yes, Jaws was certainly one of the popular ones. That said, he wasn't accustomed to hearing such impertinence from a second-grader. What had the world come to?

“Jeez, that jerk, how did he not get a good beating?” Ofir repeated.

Gabi's ears still burned red.

*  *  *

We reached the pool, entered through the black gate, and walked onto the lawn, passing by the lifeguard's shaded bench where Orit sat with her volunteer and Zahavi, the lifeguard, and with another volunteer who wore an earring in his right ear, which, Roni told me, meant he was a homo, but then they said he was the boyfriend of Dana the eleventh-grader, so I didn't get it. And we walked on, behind the diving boards—the small, springy one-meter board that the small children were jumping from, and the big three-meter concrete one that no one was on at the time—and rounded another corner of the pool until we came to our usual place, under one of the awnings on the lawn, and threw down our towels, and shed our flip-flops, and headed straight for the large diving board. From up there, you could see the back of the sports hall and hear the bouncing of the basketballs, boom-boom-boom, and the screeches of sports shoes changing direction on the PVC flooring, eek-eek-eek, perhaps it's Roni, no, Roni is with the cattle, someone else is doing the bouncing, the boom-boom is thumping in my head and I'm hot, the sun is beating down, I'm thirsty but haven't drunk, and there he is, there he is with all his friends—Eyal, who'll be going into second grade next week. I'm on the big diving board behind Yotam and Ofir (Yotam closed his tally at seventeen dead black beetles), I'm standing on the edge and looking at Eyal, his friends are looking at me and smiling, but I am looking directly at him, and he is no longer smiling. I don't look down at the green water but straight ahead, whoosh, an arc, an easy and simple dive into the water, and emerge from the
water with my hair dripping, Yotam and Ofir are lying down on their stomachs on the speckled tiles in the sunshine, but I want another go and head straight back to the steps of the diving board, reach the top, and walk slowly to the edge. He and his friends are now jumping off the small board nearby, I pretend not to look, but check out the scene out of the corner of my eye, and see him say something and look at me and laugh, and his friends laugh, too, he probably said “Jaws” or something else ingenious, I wait, watching from the corner of my eye, waiting for him to jump into the water, if you jump from the big board to the left, you can land in the area of the small one, there's the boom-boom-boom of the basketballs and the eek-eek-eek of the screeches, and I take a few steps back to gain some momentum, and, again out of the corner of my eye, I see Eyal take his jump, and while he is still in the air, I make my dash and jump down on top of him, right on him, take that, brave man. I hear nothing while I'm in the air, no boom and no eek. I hear only the air in my ears and feel only the sun on my back, and the water that is still dripping from my previous dive. I'm in the air, my body folded over, my legs stretched forward, and I land on his head. I'll show you what Jaws is all about, ha-ha, big hero, very funny. Jaws? Take that, take a bite from Jaws, here I come, you worthless prick, enjoy second grade.

G
abi took to walking more and more on his own to the mountain that lay beyond the perimeter road, beyond the fence, beyond the plum orchards. That was many years before his nighttime hours of solitude on distant hilltops, before he knew that solitude was a supreme virtue, and the greatest of them all. Back then, there were other reasons. Roni had finally reached the age at which the four-year gap between them could no longer be bridged. Gone were the years in which Roni was the big brother who watched out for his smaller self, who took him into his bed, who drew strength from his all-powerful abilities in relation to him—all-powerful in speech, all-powerful in comprehension, all-powerful in the strength of his muscles that allowed him to impose
his will unchallenged. And thus Gabi remained a boy, with Roni, in his own eyes at least, already a small man, slowly but surely falling hopelessly and deeply in love for the first time. Yifat, from a neighboring kibbutz, was in the same year at the regional school, and he'd known her since first grade, but in tenth grade, they suddenly hooked up and stayed that way. Yifat's roommate on the kibbutz spent most her time with her soldier boyfriend in Haifa, so Roni and Yifat would go back to her room after school, and after dinner they'd go to the pub and drink beer and play darts with the volunteers, and they went to a Tislam concert in kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar, and to a HaGashash HaHiver show at Kfar Blum, and a Shlomo Artzi concert at Tzemach, and one by the Bootleg Beatles at the kibbutz pub, and to the home games of the Galil Elyon basketball team with its deadly sharpshooter, Brad Leaf (Roni, meanwhile, was no longer an active player, much to the dismay of Baruch Shani and his other fans on the kibbutz). Yifat visited their kibbutz two or three times, but Roni didn't introduce her to his little brother, or to Mom Gila and Dad Yossi.

They, too, were another reason for his frequent hikes to the mountain. Mom Gila and Dad Yossi's room wasn't a home. They still lived there, shared a bed, went together to the dining hall, but Gabi knew they hardly spoke to one another; and when they did speak, they usually yelled; and when they were done with the yelling, Dad Yossi would go out on his rounds, which, based on Gila's screams, included visits to the rooms of volunteers and other female members of his groundskeeping team; and Mom Gila would stay at home and drink and smoke.

In all likelihood, even if their parents' room had been awash with harmony and love, Roni would still have spent most of his time on the neighboring kibbutz, and Gabi would have made his treks to the mountain; because at the age at which Gabi and Roni were now, the phrase
adoptive parents
took on a different meaning. Following a childhood in which those terms,
real
versus
adoptive
, are meaningless because Mom is Mom and Dad is Dad—they're simply there—the time had come when the thing that cut and hurt the deepest, that screamed out loud and clear, was: You are not my parents! At those ages, even birth children alienate and distance themselves and are left astounded when confronted with the slimmest chance of there being a link between themselves and the
pair of adults who purport to exercise authority over them, so it's easy for the adopted ones to justify to themselves their need to disengage—to the room of a neighboring kibbutznik, to a distant mountain, to wherever it may be.

Gabi, too, had had a girlfriend, Noga. He, too, had tasted his first kiss, behind the tractor at the Lag Ba-Omer bonfire, near the storehouse. A month later, however, Yotam asked if he minded becoming her boyfriend. He said okay, and never spoke to her again, which was a little weird because Yotam was his roommate, so he'd see her from time to time. Once, Yotam was showering while she waited for him on his bed and Gabi lay reading a book on his. The radio was tuned to Menachem Perry's
Hot Chocolate
show, which was playing a song by the Thompson Twins. Gabi knew she liked the song, yet still not a peep. Gabi didn't get all the fuss that was made out of girls, or how Roni could be so caught up and distant and alienated because of a girl. So Yotam was with Noga, and Ofir hung out with other friends, and the real truth of it was that Gabi liked being alone. To seclude himself. To slowly ascend the mountain. To see his shadow cast on the earth in the light of the sun or the moon or the streetlights. To think. To converse with himself. To discover and find things.