The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron

Author:Assaf Gavron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

The Shed

Nir Rivlin, with his red hair and beard, sat at the kitchen table and sipped from a large bottle of Goldstar beer. Tears flowed from his red eyes. Between sobs, he mumbled sentences like “I don’t understand. What have I done?”

“You haven’t done a thing,” Shaulit said while Zvuli suckled from her ravenously. “And that’s part of the problem.”

Nir had come into the kitchen from the porch a few minutes earlier to retrieve the bottle of beer from the refrigerator—his third that evening, and they hadn’t even sat down to dinner. He had been sitting on the porch for the past hour with his guitar, trying to compose a new song. But aside from coming up with the line “All pain is but another scale in the armor,” which he ended up repeating to himself over and over, and consuming two beers and a joint, he didn’t make much progress—until he finally gave up and began playing “Berta.”

Shaulit, at the same time, had bathed Amalia and Tchelet, had made them dinner and then fed them with Zvuli in her arms, and the infant, too, demanded attention and his own food. Amalia wanted to help but she was too small to hold him, too impatient to play with him or watch over him for more than two minutes. After dinner, Shaulit put the girls to bed, read them a story, and returned to the kitchen to wash their dishes and begin preparing dinner for herself and Nir. All the while, the flat chord had repeated itself, the pain and the scale in the armor. For her, every slap in the face—or simply every minute of the day—was a scale in the armor. But tough armor could sometimes crack, too. And then things were said. Threats were made. And Nir, whom she knew well enough, would immediately revert to acting like the small child within him, that was his defense mechanism, and the beers didn’t help things, weakening the walls of defense and self-awareness of the man he was meant to be, and then the tears would come, and she’d be expected to apologize, to take pity on him, but she had reached her limit that evening. She knew what was coming—an admission to the fact that he had been wrapped up in himself of late, that he didn’t know what had come over him, that he was struggling terribly with his culinary studies (What’s so hard? she wanted to scream. Inserting a piece of cucumber in a sushi roll? Peeling a yam?), and with all this uncertainty concerning the outpost, no one knew if their home would even be there for much longer, the evacuation was on one day and off the next—he wasn’t one for fighting battles, but just let them decide already, all this stress. Nir believed it would soon pass and he’d be able to be of more help to her. He felt that this phase he was going through would spark new creativity and that he’d be able to record these songs.

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