Almost Dead Page 11

  ‘But how well do you know this guy? How long?’

  ‘I trust God. I try to sense the person. But I never know. How can one know what anyone’s got on the inside? Naji looks good to me. A relaxed type. Strong nerves. But I might be wrong. I’m trying to find out about him and his family.’

  ‘And if you’re wrong?’

  ‘If I’m wrong, that is the will of God.’ Bilahl spoke with a businesslike assurance. He had taken Abu-Zeid’s responsibilities upon himself. I didn’t know whether or not he’d been given the role officially, or who he knew higher up in the organisation. ‘In any case, he doesn’t know my phone number or my real name. You’ll show him how the explosive works. Apart from the two of us he won’t see anyone or be allowed to call anyone. He’ll come to the operations apartment, and from that moment on he’ll be cut off from the world. On the last night he’ll sleep here.’

  I made tea. The flat was so cold I could see my breath steaming. Bilahl’s mobile rang: the theme from The A-Team. ‘Yes, Father…’ I heard him say, and I imagined Father with his silver mane at home in Murair and heard in Bilahl’s voice a reluctance to show disrespect. But Father and him…I remembered Father telling me, ‘I have no authority over him–I haven’t had for a while now. I’ve given up on him. But you…my heart aches for you, I know you’re not a murderer. I know you, Fahmi, no one knows you as I do.’ ‘Of course I’m not a murderer,’ I’d told him.

  I put sugar in the tea and realised that Bilahl was now talking to someone else. The guy who’d checked Naji wasn’t sure about him. There was some sort of criminal mess in his past. Bilahl called Naji. How can anybody know what anyone has inside them?

  In the operations apartment, I removed the belt from its hiding place in a wall closet, unwrapped the blankets and old newspapers, and laid it on the table. Lifted it up and felt it. The tubes with the explosives were in order: nothing had evaporated. I took the ball-bearings and nails from one of the pockets, where they surrounded a sausage of RDX, and then pulled out the sausage to show Bilahl. ‘We’ve got seven kilos of explosives and about ten kilos of iron here. This could create some damage.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Do you want to try it?’ I said.

  I didn’t mean that he should think of himself as a candidate to be Istishadi himself. But I saw that that was what he thought. He shut up for a moment and looked up from the explosive, focusing on nothing.

  ‘Let’s see how Naji gets on with it,’ he finally said.

  Ali Jaafar Hussein’s café, the only one in Al-Amari, was around the corner. I asked for a Coke and drank it slowly, sitting on one of the small stools outside. We were the only ones out there. A drizzly wind lashed our faces and the puddles soaked our shoes. After a few minutes Naji arrived and Bilahl and I exchanged a look. He was so young his cheeks were still plump and smooth and when he spoke he lowered his eyes like a young bride.

  ‘You’re sweating again. What are you thinking about there?’

  I’m thinking: when will you stop jabbering at me?

  ‘Oh, Fahmi, did I tell you what a horrible night I had last night at home?’

  Did soldiers come and break your furniture, arrest your family, murder your mother? That kind of night, Svetlana?

  The moment I put the belt on Naji I felt his body straining and his muscles tensing up. He bit his lips but didn’t say anything. ‘We’ve got to adjust the straps to your size. We need them tight so you can wear it under your shirt.’ Naji was chubby and fair skinned. I tightened the straps. He touched my hand, a soft touch, to indicate that the straps were tight enough. I was close to him. I could smell him–the raindrops on his neck, the fear.

  ‘This is the battery. You take it separately and connect it at the last minute. OK?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Because from the moment you connect it, there’s an increased chance of an accident.’ To demonstrate, I disconnected the explosive from the electric circuit and connected a light bulb instead. I showed him how to connect the battery and he managed it after a few attempts. There was sweat on his brow. Bilahl went out to smoke, and when he returned I gave him a doubtful look. You have to be cooler than a cucumber in order to do something like this: you need frozen blood. You need to be a little crazy. I couldn’t understand why Naji had volunteered.

  ‘After the battery, the safety catch. This nail prevents you from pushing the button. You pull it out like this.’

  He did it.

  ‘Now the button is free to push. Not too hard. It happens in the twinkling of an eye–the moment you push, you leave this life. You won’t feel anything. Not the explosion, no pain, nothing except the certainty that you are with God at last.’ Naji’s breathing got heavier. He laid a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You will leave the life of suffering, the problems and the misery,’ Bilahl said. ‘A push of the button will send your soul to heaven, to God and to all the shuhada. You are going to God.’ Naji pressed his forehead to my shoulder. I extended a hand and hugged him. I gave Bilahl a look and nodded my head slightly. The boy breathed into my neck. ‘Push now,’ I whispered. He pushed. The bulb lit up for half a second and then there was a loud fizz-crack and it went out. Naji jumped in panic.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said casually. ‘The bulb went, that’s all.’

  I went to get a new bulb. My hands were shaking so much I had to wait until they stopped. By the time I returned Naji had recovered. I changed the bulb and he tried again. This time he managed without my help. He took the belt off and laid it on the table. I went to the corner of the room and whispered in Bilahl’s ear.

  17

  After I dropped Shuli off at the King David my headache started. Like needles stabbing my brain. I stopped and bought a bottle of water. Looking over the stallholder’s shoulder, I asked for a Ta’ami chocolate bar, cigarettes and watermelon-flavoured chewing gum. I lit up a cigarette, though I don’t smoke. (I did once, in the army, but it would take up too much of my time now.) It didn’t stop the needles and made me feel nauseous. Two more puffs and I dumped the cigarette and the rest of the pack in a nearby bin. And the Ta’ami bar too, after a single bite. As I drove to my parents’ house I sipped the water and chewed the gum so fiercely that I almost dislocated my jaw.

  My mother brought me some pills and made us a schnitzel. We tend to eat in silence, my parents and I. The English teacher of thirty years, the former peanut butter importer and the directory assistance integrated-solutions provider.

  ‘Shaar Hagai. That’s a real escalation,’ my father said after a while.

  I nodded. Mother’s eyes were aching. She asked whether Duchi was all right. Good question. I was thinking about Shuli, wondering how she was coping in the kitchen. I wanted to drive there and ask her.

  ‘Duchi? She’s OK.’

  I ought to have called her, but I couldn’t face the recriminations. The inevitable row. What for? Mother asked whether I’d had good meetings. Meetings? In Jerusalem, she meant. I told her they’d gone fine.

  After the schnitzel, Danny Ronen’s eyebrows on Channel 2. Mother discovered a stain on the sofa and began obsessively trying to clean it up while grousing in the general direction of her husband, though no one but herself was listening.

  ‘The security forces,’ Ronen told us, ‘have conflicting evidence regarding the source of the terrorist cell that carried out the attack on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, near Shaar Hagai. Initial evidence pointed to the village of Husan in the Bethlehem area, as reported yesterday. But today’s findings contradict this. In a communication accepting responsibility by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, “sons” are mentioned, as opposed to the single marksman that had previously been assumed. Furthermore, posters in memory of the suicide bomber nineteen-year-old Shafiq Omar throughout the West Bank refer to Ramallah as the source of the No. 5 bus attack, and not Nablus as was initially assumed. The security forces are unsure whether the posters and the messages are reliable or intended to confuse.’

  ‘Whatever t
he truth,’ said Danny Ronen, ‘the IDF Air Force carried out a “targeted assassination” this afternoon in the offices of the Islamic Charity Society in Al-Birah. As a result Halil Mahmoud Abu-Zeid, a senior Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades member in Ramallah, thought to be responsible for the string of recent terrorist attacks–including Shaar Hagai, the Tel Aviv bus bombing, and the Sbarro restaurant on the Jaffa road in Jerusalem–was killed.’

  ‘Yochanan?’ I asked my father. ‘Wasn’t Sbarro the attack that the guy from the last targeted assassination was responsible for?’

  ‘Yes. Him too. And the one from the targeted assassination before that.’

  Judging by the targeted assassinations, the Sbarro attack was planned by five dozen different people, in Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Hamas. Everyone had a hand in it, and now they’ve all got a hand missing. If they’re lucky, that is.

  And on the TV the funerals processed. The sounds of bereavement. Funerals, eulogies. A race of red-eyed people.

  ‘Finding whoever is responsible for this atrocity…’

  ‘I don’t understand, don’t understand, don’t understand.’

  ‘He was a warm, kind person…’

  ‘When I heard the news on TV, my heart stopped beating, as if something had hit me…’

  ‘He will always be with me, as he always was. He was the biggest influence on my life.’

  We cut and zoomed in to the prettily crying eyes of an attractive female soldier, and the reporter summed it all up and returned us to the Jerusalem studio. Danny Ronen raised his eyebrows. Father asked whether he could change to a documentary he’d read about.

  Duchi sounded businesslike. She asked me whether this was it. Whether I’d left home for good. If so, she would like to know why, and when I intended to take my stuff.

  ‘Is that what you want to happen?’

  ‘Am I the one who left and didn’t make contact for twenty-four hours?’

  ‘No, I am. But I’m still asking: is this what you want to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But whether I do or not, I think it would be more sensible if we talked about it like grown-ups, no? After four years.’

  ‘I’m sorry…I have a headache. Yes, you’re right. What are you up to?’

  ‘Watching Channel Two. Where are you?’

  ‘Jerusalem. Mom and Dad.’

  Silence. I felt she was trying to assess the import of this. At least, she probably thought, I was in a familiar place and not evading the question or making excuses. But I knew her: that wouldn’t be much comfort to her. The reflex towards catastrophic scenarios is intrinsic to the way Duchi’s brain works–her mother’s legacy. It came with a lifetime warranty–customer service and periodic software upgrades guaranteed even from beyond the grave.

  ‘Send my regards.’

  ‘They send theirs too.’

  I imagined her on the other end, formulating her apocalyptic scenarios, holding back the tears. But instead I heard a chuckle.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing. Bibi’s here.’

  Bibi hates me; she told Duchi ages ago to get rid of me. Duchi told me that herself.

  ‘Ah. I guess you’re gossiping about me.’

  ‘You’d be surprised, your name hasn’t actually come up yet.’

  I could picture Bibi, both thumbs up and suppressing her laughter at this.

  ‘I’m sure that when it does, my ears’ll be burning with the flattery.’ ‘OK.’ ‘What OK? That’s it?’ ‘Do you have anything else to say? When you’re coming back, perhaps, or when you’re going away?’ I was taken aback by her confidence. She wasn’t formulating disaster scenarios. She’d caught me on the back foot.

  ‘I was in the Shaar Hagai attack yesterday. The back windscreen was shattered. And my mobile.’

  ‘Croc. Call me when you have something serious to say and when you make up your mind what you want to do with yourself. You know where I am. I need to hang up now. When you decide, come back home and we’ll talk about everything like adults.’

  ‘OK.’ I hung up and imagined the awful Bibi bursting into applause.

  Had I imagined it all? Duchi hadn’t even registered what I’d said. I ran my thumb over the unscratched phone display, then stepped outside and touched the Polo’s gleaming rear windscreen, feeling momentarily insane. But I hadn’t imagined the newspapers, had I? Or Humi, once a chubby soldier, into Zohar Argov. I started to walk, my legs unconsciously leading me down the old familiar route towards the kiosk by the park. It was closed, but nothing had changed in the twenty years since we were kids. The wooden kiosk was plastered with a new generation of Likud or Settler stickers. A Jew Never Expels A Jew. Hebron For Ever! Bibi: Strong Leader For A Strong People. And behind it, the little park of climbing frames and slides, where I smoked my first cigarette and coughed through my first joint, had my first kiss, touched my first breast. I crossed it and walked out on to the street on the other side and stood opposite Muku’s house. He still lives in the flat he grew up in. When his father died he bought his mother a smaller flat and stayed on with his own family. I could see light inside, hear the kids. And then there Muku was, momentarily, moving through the frame of the window, gesturing to someone out of view. I called him. I moved my phone a little distance from my ear and heard the mobile ringing in the flat, the kids becoming quiet. After half a dozen rings an answering machine came on. I hung up without leaving a message.

  The last time we talked was September 11th. The day of the catastrophe; the day of the embarrassment. How many phone calls had I made that day to explain to people why they shouldn’t bother? What a mess Duchi’s mother arranged for us, both in her life and after! If they’d asked me to do the inscription on her tomb it would have gone:

  Leah Neeman

  A Total Mess

  Do I remember the conversation with Muku on that day? It’s hard to unpick it from the rest. There were so many conversations that day it now seems like one long hallucination, like one endless red fog of humiliation. Mind you, we did have a world-class excuse. I suppose more embarrassing things have happened in the history of weddings. But never tell an embarrassed man it could have been more embarrassing. And with Muku, who’s been married for years and already has three children and an apartment in Rehavia and a job in the Supreme Court, there was a different dimension to the humiliation. I felt that he’d been waiting for me to join the real, bourgeois world and, on the very brink of it, I had failed again. Thirty-two years old, and I couldn’t manage to get married. That was the unspoken accusation behind our talk, and one of the worst memories of that day in general. After the phone calls I went to the place where the wedding was supposed to happen, to wait for the guests I hadn’t got through to. Duchi refused to come with me.

  I sat on our bench. How many hours had Muku and Danny Lam and I spent in this park, playing marbles, tag, football, cards, puffs? Coming of age in a park. They did it before us and they’re already doing it after us. Danny Lam was killed the same day I almost died. I always felt it was a game of chance, either him or me, that I won in the end. Or lost, depending on how you look at life. I wondered how his parents were doing, and his sister, pretty Rachel Lam. His girlfriend Orit, who flew to New York a month after he died, in the middle of her national service, never to be heard of again.

  An unfamiliar beeping in my pocket: Giora Guetta’s PalmPilot. Its blue internal light illuminated my hands in the dark.

  A diary reminder, entered by Giora: S.–end of shift.

  So I got up from the bench and drove to the hotel.

  Why did I do it? I’d already fulfilled my mission. I’d delivered the message that Guetta had asked me to, or almost. Anyone would have done that. Anyone would have gone to the funeral. And OK, I stayed with the bereaved girl a couple of hours and listened to her when she needed to get a few things off her chest in a café. Up to that point it all sounds pretty reasonable. So why did I do it? You know why I did it. But it
wasn’t planned. It wasn’t predatory. It just happened. And that moment in my childhood park in Rehavia when the PalmPilot beeped and I got up and drove to the hotel was the moment it happened. At the same time, it couldn’t have been more natural. The Palm beeped. I got up from the bench, I got into the car, I drove, and I arrived at the entrance to the hotel just as she was coming out.

  They were surprised to see her in the kitchen–so she told me, because I asked her to tell me everything in detail–but she said she’d rather work. The head chef, Alon, had taken her aside and asked her whether she was sure. It was going to be a busy night. She wept briefly in his arms and said she was sure. For the first hour she worked in silence, and her silence infected Alon and the other three chefs working with her, Issam, Osama and Alex, and the waiters coming in and out with the orders, and the head waiter Yatzpan (real name Mahmoud, but he looked just like a fatter version of Yatzpan, the comedian), who came on to her on a daily basis, and the drinks guy, Natzer, though he never said anything anyway. The orders, fed into the restaurant tills by the waiters, flowed relentlessly from the two printers in the kitchen, and Alon read the print-outs and divided the salads, the roasts, the fish and the desserts between the chefs and took the orders coming in from room service, and Shuli, in her round-buttoned tunic and tall toque, concentrated on her work and thought about nothing whatsoever.

  Garrulous Issam–curly haired, balding, ever smiling–began talking to Osama in Arabic, which was usually Shuli’s cue to call over and ask what they were muttering about so secretly, or have a go at Osama for his maddeningly squeaky voice–‘like listening to a whistle’. But tonight she just cut the bagel, stuck it in the toaster, laid out the salmon, took the sheet of lasagna, red sauce on top, Parmesan, ten minutes in the top oven, checked the heat with a knife, pizza bases from the tall stack, tomato sauce, handful of mozzarella, handful of Parmesan, onion and green pepper, seven minutes on high and on to the wooden trays ready to go…she sank into the sensations and the smells. The slippery mozzarella, the translucent flesh of the fish, the dough’s comforting elasticity; the salmon’s fresh scent, the basil’s sharpness, the onion coaxing the tears out of you. ‘Alex: fruit salad and apple pie! Issam: ravioli, fries! Shuli: Artichoke Carpaccio!’ Artichoke slices on a plate, olive oil and lemon from the big jugs filled by Alon, crushed peppercorns, salty Bulgarian cheese, dried plum tomatoes and rocket to decorate, and down on the aluminium surface for Alon, who was doing the announcing today. ‘Artichoke, who asked for it?’ She pointed to the bowl of rocket. ‘More rocket!’ She knows the menu by heart, has done for six months, and here comes another order from Alon and she’s on it automatically, hand here, fingers there, grabbing, spreading, crumbling, kneading, chopping, deep-frying…