Almost Dead Read online

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, gesturing with my plate. ‘I don’t remember exactly. Not anything important. We were laughing about something on the radio maybe…The driver, the driver was saying something on her intercom and someone in the office shouted at her…I…’

  ‘The driver?’ Mr Guetta paused to receive a kiss on his cheek and someone said, ‘You see what these barbarians have done now? Bab al-Wad, as if nothing has changed! This government’s going to pay the price, Guetta, you wait and see.’ I saw an empty section of table to lay my plate on, took advantage of the window of opportunity, and a hand grasped my arm and a good smell engulfed me.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Croc.’

  There was a giant panda in front of me. I looked in her eyes and I felt as if I was beginning to drown. She said, ‘Stop staring at me.’ I said, ‘OK.’ She smiled.

  In the car–she gave directions and I drove–we passed roundabouts, large buildings, ascended a slope and descended again, went through a traffic light and down an alley where she told me to park. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘To Montefiore.’ ‘Moses Joel Montefiore?’ We walked down the alley. It was freezing. The wind in a few exposed spots in Jerusalem can be cruel. The only people visible on the streets were the security guards at the entrances to restaurants–the only reminders that there was anybody still living in the city at all. We made our way across the terraces, past the replica of the old Zionist’s famous carriage, to the viewpoints looking east over the valley. She vaulted up on to a low stone wall, her hair flying in the wind, and said, ‘Look at the desert! Have you got anything like that in Tel Aviv?’ I looked at the grey hills and the treeless ravines and shivered. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

  In the café she cleaned the streams of mascara from her eyes.

  Ordered hot chocolate.

  Clasped her hands around it.

  A security guard (an additional shekel on the bill), a barman, and what looked like a dog curled up at the foot of the bar. Outside the window, Jerusalem seemed to radiate an intense cold, as if it were the city itself that had mobilised the clouds and the winds to scour the humans from its streets.

  I found her crying when I returned from the toilet.

  I told her my theory about the Guetta family, the much-loved mythical ex and Shuli’s comparatively low status. She laughed. There was no ex. Shuli got along fine with his family and friends.

  ‘I’m still angry with him,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand what he was doing there.’

  I glanced at the paper on the table between us: ‘Like Sitting Ducks’, etc. Here too the drawing had my car’s colour, model and direction wrong. At least they had Humi the soldier lying in the right place.

  ‘Well, would you like to find out?’

  ‘How?’

  I got Giora’s PalmPilot out, opened the diary and moved to sit next to her. On the date of his death a meeting had been scheduled at 8 a.m. It said: B-MW. Coffee Bean, Yehuda Maccabi and gave a phone number. I called. No answer, so I left a message: please call back urgently, it’s to do with the meeting with Giora Guetta. ‘You see?’ I said. ‘We’re already a step ahead.’ ‘Ahead? We’re not ahead of anything. What does BMW mean?’ ‘Relax,’ I said in my most authoritative voice. ‘Maybe he was buying a car?’ ‘What did he need a car for?’ ‘You’ll see. The phone’s going to ring now.’

  It did, but it turned out to be Jimmy.

  ‘Where the hell are you, Croc? What’s going on, disappearing like this without any notice?’

  ‘I’m in Jerusalem, Jimmy. Long story. I couldn’t get in touch because my phone was involved in this shooting in Shaar Hagai…’

  ‘Your phone was involved?’

  ‘Jimmy, I’ll explain everything, promise. I’ll be in tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘You remember we’ve a meeting in Brussels next week to prepare for.’

  ‘I remember.’ He hung up. No time for a goodbye, of course.

  In my other hand I still held Giora’s PalmPilot. My arm was touching Shuli’s, enjoying the warmth of it, clinging to that warmth. I could scarcely believe this girl, who stood on walls marvelling at the desert on the day of her boyfriend’s funeral. I told myself not to take advantage. She laid her head on my shoulder and said, ‘I need a drink.’

  We stayed for three hours. She never stopped talking, and I never stopped listening. She drank wine. Finished a whole bottle by herself. I drank coffee and felt the caffeine boring a tunnel through my brain. The more the wine warmed her up, reddened her cheeks, opened her heart and soul to me, the more the caffeine made everything seem vaguely surreal. She talked, and cried. She said much more than I can remember, a raging river of words, overflowing and then subsiding, twisting here and there, but always flowing towards the ocean of her true self. One moment she’d lean forward with an elbow on the table, her cheek in her hand and her wet eyes lasering into mine, and the next she’d lean back, cross a crocodile ankle over a knee and stretch her arms wide. I was no more than her punctuation: a question mark here and there, an occasional comma or full stop or paragraph break. I was a wholly passive listener, just catching the rain falling from her wintry sky, and asking myself only: why me? It’s a question I asked myself many times. Both then and in the days and months to come.

  Sex wasn’t the only thing she talked about. She talked about her parents, her sisters, her friends, her ex-husband and her work. But the sex blots out the memory of everything else. I mean, how could it not? She’d grown up religious but had lapsed. A life-long Jerusalemite, married at twenty, divorced at twenty-four. After the divorce she started going around in low-cut jeans and T-shirts that showed off her midriff. She discovered the freedom of an exposed body, the breeze cool on her skin, the gazes and the compliments of men.

  In truth, she confessed, polishing off another glass of wine, she’d discovered sex when she was still married. When her husband was away on duty with the army reserve, she had picked up a porn film from an automatic DVD machine. It was only that she’d been bored, and curious. But she was hooked right away. Before the end of her husband’s reserve duty she’d rented ten movies and watched each of them a dozen times. She was addicted to masturbation. She never cheated on her husband except inside her head, where she cheated on him with everybody: the actors in the porn films, presenters on TV, footballers, ministers, waiters and chefs at work, passers-by she saw in the hotel or on the street. Every day, several times a day, whenever she could. If her husband was at home, then in the shower or another room. When he wasn’t there, anywhere she could think of. The fantasies remained locked deep in her head and her husband, who was, like her, from a traditional background, knew nothing about her new discoveries and how much they excited her.

  He’d been her first. She lost her virginity shortly before the wedding. When she discovered the orgasms and the fantasies, she tried to hint that she wanted more, but he wasn’t interested. He simply didn’t enjoy it as much as she did. The marriage died quickly, but not because of that. Because of unconnected things, some of which she told me about.

  After the divorce the number of her lovers swiftly rose from one to eight. The sex was mostly disappointing, of course. Life is not fantasy. It’s more complicated, it takes longer, the people are less attractive, less shameless. The other person doesn’t behave as they do in the imagination, and neither do you. But in the lobby of the hotel where she worked she met Giora Guetta. He was wearing mirrored shades and had hair the colour of dark honey. She noticed his good looks, but the sunglasses were what snagged her attention. What gave him the confidence to show off like that? she asked herself. He gestured for her to come closer and when she did he took off his glasses and asked her out for a drink. She laughed: how brazen could you get? He was a security guard at the hotel: her first serious boyfriend since the divorce. Maybe the first serious man in her life. There was no need to keep anything from him. He loved what she loved, the porn and the fantasies and the games. But the moment it stopped being a secret, it stopped exciting her. The sex wa
s wonderful, but it couldn’t include the excitement of perpetual discovery. ‘You’re never happy. The grass is always greener. But I really loved him. He was a crazy guy, always surprising, always doing unexpected things.’

  Shuli broke off–her voice had shrunk to a scarcely audible croak. Her lip trembled and her eyes filled once more with tears. She wiped them and her nose.

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was looking for a job. He didn’t know exactly what–some kind of business, I think. He had plenty of ideas. Computers, maybe. He loved computers. The security guard thing was just temporary. One of those Ministry of Welfare jobs you get leaving the army.’

  She fell silent. I stayed silent. I looked at her and I couldn’t see in her any of the things she’d just told me. Her beauty had a cleanness to it. Coal-black shoulder-length hair, straight and dense, light mocha skin, a mouth naturally disposed to smile, and those big, black, deep eyes.

  The place was filling up but everyone else there was quiet, wrapped up in themselves. Nobody bothered us. I wanted to stay and hear more, and not just because I was drowning in her eyes and gripped by her stories, but because the whole situation was so strange to me. For years I’d been continuously running, chasing time, fretting about lost seconds. The idea of a leisurely conversation lasting several hours in a café had never even crossed my mind. I’d forgotten that you could do such a thing. It just didn’t have any room in my daily schedule. And now I was just letting the time pass without giving it a second thought. Without feeling that I was missing anything. Or almost. And time, for its part, hardly moved. Almost stood still, as if waiting for me to decide what to do with it, where I should take it from there. If a stray thought regarding time, or work, or Duchi, did pass through my head, I banished it immediately. The main thing here was not to take advantage.

  ‘Tell me something else,’ I said.

  She was a chef in the King David Hotel, just up the road. It was hard work. An eight-hour shift on your feet, the only girl in a very masculine and physical environment. The other chefs in the hotel were mostly Arabs, with a sprinkling of Russians and two Israelis. She had no problem with that, but it wasn’t easy to be part of their world. During peak hours there were five chefs in the kitchen working flat out. Tourism might have been hit by the bombs, but (touch wood) Jerusalem hadn’t had a bomb for several weeks and the King David was pretty busy. She told me that she loved her work but wasn’t sure how long she could last there. She had an evening shift she hadn’t cancelled yet, though it wouldn’t be a problem–they knew Giora. And then suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Maybe it’s better,’ she said, ‘to submerge yourself in work after a day like this.’

  ‘With a bottle of wine in your head?’

  ‘Right. But that’s nothing new. Everyone drinks on shift.’

  ‘A whole bottle?’

  ‘Maybe not a whole bottle.’

  She smiled slowly. I suddenly remembered: ‘They never got back to us.’

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  I took Giora’s Palm out and showed her. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll try?’

  She got a reply. ‘Hello,’ she said, in a sexy voice. ‘This is Shuli.’ I could hear a man’s voice answering. She pulled a face which meant: what am I supposed to say now? I shrugged–just exactly what should she say?

  ‘Who am I speaking to? Oh, hello: Binyamin. Listen, I’m Giora Guetta’s girlfriend. You heard what happened to him?’

  She listened for a few seconds.

  ‘You don’t know him? But he’s got a meeting with you written in his diary. That’s how I got this phone number. Sorry…hello? Hello?’

  She took the phone from her ear and gave me a confused, rather drunken look.

  ‘He doesn’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about.’

  ‘We’ll go there. We’ve got an address…’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Whenever you say.’

  ‘Tel Aviv would be too much for me right now,’ Shuli said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Take me to work.’

  I very much wanted to kiss her. But all I said was, ‘Are you sure?’ and she was.

  16

  ‘Good morning, Svetlana, how is he? Keeping clean? Reactions?’

  ‘His father said he opened his eyes for a moment yesterday. Apart from that, nothing. There’s increased perspiration. And when you play him tapes of Amr Diab, his face looks calmer…’

  ‘When you play what? What about nutrition? Infections? Pupils?’

  Not the torch, not the torch! Don’t you dare, Svetlana…

  ‘The nutrition’s going fine, Doctor. Up one point three kilos since he arrived. Excretion is textbook. No infection of the wounds. The massages are working.’

  ‘Good. What day are we on? I think very soon we’ll have a good idea which direction this is all heading.’

  The tiny apartment in Al-Amari was part of Grandfather Fahmi’s and Grandmother Samira’s house, which had been crudely subdivided into four flats. Over the years different branches of my uncles’ and aunts’ families lived in the various sections. There was a shower into which I now crammed myself, and a toilet bowl. Apart from the shower, there was a small room with a small sink and a small refrigerator on one side and a small bed, a small round table and a small TV on the other. Whoever didn’t get the bed used the spare mattress that was propped up against the dirty yellow wall. The refrigerator contained milk, a few Al-Juneidi yogurts, a couple of eggs and some stale vegetables. Coffee, teabags, salt and a few pitas could be found on its top. A bare light bulb in the middle of the room supplied light during the day, since not enough sunlight came in through the crack in the wall above the sink or under the door.

  I showered quickly and started tidying up, emptying the overflowing ashtrays, getting rid of the empty bottles and the paper wrappings, the rotten cucumber in the fridge, the debris on top of the TV and the round table. I made the bed, folded my clothes and gulped down a yogurt and only then noticed how hungry I was. I filled a pot and boiled some water with a potato and an egg. When they were cooked, I peeled them and cut them into a bowl, found a half-full tin of tuna in the fridge and added it. What a delicacy! Only then did I turn on the TV: music videos from Lebanon–just what I fancied.

  ‘Dr Hartom says you’re getting better all the time. But they’re still out there with their signs. Did you really do what they think you did, to the Croc? I used to like him when he was on TV, but not as much as I like you, Fahmi. I just don’t believe them. I mean, they say your brother’s a real terrorist, but you, I see you and I just don’t believe you could have done that to the Croc.’

  The Croc? Where is he? We’re on the beach, in his green car. I’ve an apple and a pomegranate for us to share.

  Oh, man, I’m too hot. I’m burning up here…

  ‘Is the bomb ready?’

  ‘Almost.’

  Bilahl came and ate the tuna salad I’d left him, talking on the phone in a low voice. He switched over to Al-Jazeera: the bombed building in Al-Birah, where Halil Abu-Zeid had been killed. There were children searching for remains in the rubble. Bilahl watched it in silence, and left again. I rinsed my eyes with a dose of Shirin Abu-Akla, who was reporting, and when she finished I returned to the videos from Lebanon.

  Lulu called from Murair. Father was sick, was worried about us. I told her to forget about Father’s worrying and tell me how she was doing. What had she done today? How had school been? I hadn’t seen her for months. She said she’d seen Rana.

  I loved Rana. We grew up together. Because of her I was who I was. She was part of me. The only one. I missed her. But I had to leave her behind. Had to leave Murair behind. My sister, my father, my future. And now I was in a whole other place. Al-Amari. Bilahl, television.

  I watched the dancers on TV and closed my eyes.

  Bilahl wanted to carry out the attack as soon as possible, in revenge for Abu-Zeid’s murder. He wanted them to know we could respond immediately. The shahid would refer to Abu
-Zeid in the video to make it quite clear. To make them understand that their helicopters and missiles didn’t scare us and wouldn’t stop us. But Halil himself thought that it would be better to keep quiet for a few days, I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bilahl. ‘But it’s for him that it’s important to do it quickly.’

  I looked into his dark eyes and suddenly felt a strange surge of grief through my chest. I buried my face in my hands. I didn’t mean to. My brother laid a hand on my heaving shoulders.

  In the afternoon I went out into the camp to breathe some fresh air. Women with baskets on their heads. Green grass, yellow mustard and red poppies growing beside the dirt roads. I plucked a leaf from a big fig tree. Behind the mosque the camp’s football team were practising on a pitch with a huge puddle in its centre circle. I sat beside several other bored guys and watched, the sound of ping-pong games from the club next door clicking in my head like a metronome. Al-Amari’s football team had won the West Bank championship a few times but since I arrived at the camp, they hadn’t been up to much. Maybe I was bringing them bad luck. I found a shekel in my pocket and bought two bananas from one of the stands. How pleasant to sit and eat a banana on a cloudless winter’s day. Children were kicking a ball against the wall, as they did whenever I passed that spot. Life here doesn’t change, I thought: only the slogans on the walls, and even they stay essentially the same. Any time now, my brother would be sending the kids with the green, black and red spray-cans out to praise the shahid Halil Abu-Zeid and to demand his revenge.

  The Istishadi was a guy called Naji, whom Bilahl met in the mosque earlier that morning. Bilahl said his true intent was to go to God. He’d known Abu-Zeid in the mosque and wanted revenge immediately.