Almost Dead Page 12

  Despite the wine she’d drunk and the grief that weighed her hands down, she managed for a couple of hours. Then Alon told her to take a coffee and sit in the lobby for a few minutes: her silence was worrying him. She took a bottle of beer instead. As soon as she took her first swig she started crying uncontrollably. Deep sobs that hurt her ribs and shook her whole body. She felt hands on her shoulder and turned to see Marwan, a beautiful nineteen-year-old kid from Beit-Hanina with the eyes of a cartoon deer. Shuli was a quarter in love with Marwan but apart from a few meaningful glances (and her fantasies at home) there was nothing between them. Now his kindness made her feel nauseous and her weeping intensified. She shouted at him to get off her, and the alarmed Marwan recoiled and returned to work. Guests watched the sobbing cook. Alon was called from the kitchen. Did she want to go home? With her face in her hands, she said she didn’t. What did she want to do, then? She said she didn’t know. Did she want coffee? She responded with a long swig of the Heineken and another flurry of tears. And then she got up, washed her face in the bathroom and returned to work, back into her automatic mode. Her feet hurt, she hadn’t slept much the previous night, her back bothered her, but she went on. One of her friends among the waitresses told her to go home. The plates piled up. Alon roared for Yusuf to bring coasters. Giora is dead Giora is dead Giora is dead, she thought in a loop. Giora, Marwan, Croc, Giora, Marwan, Croc. The Arabs were quietly humming an Arab song. ‘Alex, bring lettuce!’ Alex was flashing his silver tooth…

  ‘Croc?’ I said. ‘You were thinking of me?’

  We were driving from King David Street down towards the German Colony.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I thought of the Croc. Among other things.’

  I didn’t say a word. We took a left at the train station towards Arnona and Armon Hanaziv, and headed on past the Ramat Rachel Kibbutz. She took us to a spot where we could sit and look over the Judaean desert, and when I said wasn’t it dangerous she just laughed.

  ‘What was the message he wanted you to give me?’

  A second passed before I realised what she was talking about.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He didn’t get to say it. He was thinking. But I’m pretty sure he wanted to let you know that he loved you. Something like that.’

  She looked at me.

  ‘His look had that kind of meaning. It wasn’t a “tell her to feed the cats” kind of look,’ I said, staring at the gearstick. ‘And I can understand him.’

  ‘He didn’t have any cats. He couldn’t stand them.’

  ‘I can understand him on that one too.’

  She smiled. So I wiped her smile with a kiss. Her lips were soft as feathers, as deep and salty as the sea.

  18

  ‘We’re human beings, not angels,’ Bilahl said brusquely. Surprisingly, he wasn’t angry with Naji. He had been in the room when the bulb blew too. ‘Anyone can change his mind. It’s natural. He said he didn’t feel ready. Maybe in the future…’

  ‘You think he’s an informer?’

  ‘Relax. He gave me the name of someone to stand in for him. Mahmoud Salam al-Mahmuzi: dedicated to the Holy Cause. Twenty-three years old and from Al-Amari. This camp needs a hero.’

  ‘He’s coming here?’

  ‘Later. First we need to take a look at him at the operations apartment. See if he’s got the right stuff. Then–your lesson, a video, a haircut, and, God willing, we could be on our way by noon tomorrow.’

  ‘…yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Yes. Tomorrow. Mama, I can’t talk in here…yes. Not now…’

  One tube for piss. Another for air.

  ‘No, I’m at work, Mama. It’s not dangerous, he’s not…no, that’s crazy, he’s fine. He can’t do anything at all… Stoi! Ostav’te menya v pokoe! Leave me alone!’

  Oh, play me a song, Svet. Give me a massage, Svet…

  ‘God, what a pain she is! So: how are we doing? My mother’s worried you’re going to do something to me ha h…oh, have we done a poo?’

  Oh, Svet, just please, please, shut up. And here comes your phone again, and I can’t do anything at all…

  We passed Ali’s café, where silver-haired men were playing backgammon or cards and drinking glasses of tea. Some younger, bored-looking guys. Bilahl nodded to them. As for me–in Al-Amari, all my friends are on TV. Rita Khouri off The Weakest Link on Lebanese TV, George Khourdahi off Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on MBC, Noah’s Ark’s Tommy Musari on Channel 2, Ihab Abu-Nasif, who hosts The Mission on Al-Manar–and beautiful Shirin Abu-Akla from the news on Al-Jazeera. Occasionally I might get a phone call from Rami, or from Natzer in Jerusalem, but Natzer just made me think how dead and gone my childhood was, and I’d let him go to voicemail…I grew up with him and Titi and limping Rami in Murair: marbles, donkeys, football, and later, messing about with girls, a little bit of school, football. A plastic bullet shattered Rami’s knee when he was eight, during the first intifada. Titi works at the Majdal Bani Fadel checkpoint: he’s got an old Peugeot van he sells cold drinks from. Every morning he fills a box with crushed ice and a few dozen cans from his Uncle Faez’s store, and drives a quarter of an hour down to the checkpoint. But Natzer left the village. He works in the King David in Jerusalem, and lives in Beit-Hanina. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but the money’s good. Pretty girls and so on. He once shaved his beard off because of a Jewish girl. Even when we were kids he’d make friends with the soldiers. Natzer likes the things that life on the other side has to offer him. He kept himself well away from Bilahl’s wars and when he calls I let him go to voicemail.

  ‘Mama, I told you, I can’t talk at work! I’m not shouting. I am not shouting. OK. OK, I’ll come with you tomorrow morning. How dare…listen, someone’s coming now, I can’t talk…’

  A crescent moon spilled a little silver over the yellow-lit camp, over the one-storey shacks, the jungle of antennae on the tin roofs, the narrow dirt alleys and the few asphalt roads, the scattering of battered old cars and tired tractors and the dome of the mosque. From time to time we passed people on their way home. Children were playing football in the yellow street light and I watched Bilahl, who was once a pretty good footballer, follow them instinctively with his gaze.

  Mahmuzi had grown up in Al-Amari. After high school he’d worked in Israel in agriculture and construction, until all his routes upwards were blocked. He came back and started studying at the Hebron Polytechnic but quit. In the past four years he had become completely dedicated to his prayer. He’d talked to Islamic Jihad members in Ramallah, but was told they weren’t recruiting. He had just happened to talk to Naji that morning.

  One sister. A traditional family, but the parents separated when he was seven or eight. They were angry kids, used to throw blocks at the mosque windows. He was still living with his mother, and still angry. His father had remarried and lived in Nablus. His sister was studying law in Amman.

  ‘What depresses you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not depressed by anything,’ he said.

  ‘Did you bid farewell to your loved ones?’

  ‘I didn’t bid farewell to anyone.’

  I explained about the belt, as I had with Naji. He had good hands and a cool head. Afterwards Bilahl talked to him quietly and at length. As we were leaving, Mahmuzi knelt down in the corner on the prayer mat Bilahl had given him and bowed his back. When he straightened up his eyes were closed and a rapid, low mumble was issuing from his mouth along with clouds of his breath, visible in the cold air.

  Bilahl told him not to leave the apartment and not to speak to anyone.

  ‘Tell me what am I going to do with this mother? She’s driving me nuts!’

  At last! Oh, Svet. I need your fingers…

  ‘What are you thinking about? You’re sweating again. There’s a storm outside and here you are sweating. This’ll make you feel better. Yes?’

  Yes…

  There are eleven gates to heaven and rivers of many colours flow through it–white rivers of milk, golden rivers of honey, a
nd crimson rivers of wines which never intoxicate. There are orchards of date palms and apple trees whose trunks and branches are made of gold. Jojoba and frankincense grow freely, and vines and flowers. Breath in heaven smells of ambergris. Light never fails. And there will be seventy-two beautiful virgins, dressed in white…

  All of us die and it doesn’t really matter how many years you’ve lived before death comes, ten or a hundred: you’ll either be with God or you won’t.

  Bilahl didn’t tell Mahmuzi but when we returned from the operations apartment to our own, I asked him where the next attack was going to be.

  Jerusalem.

  19

  After four days of rain and fog it dawned so crisp and clear you could feel the air tickling the back of your larynx when you breathed it in. The sky was a very pale blue–as cold and clear as the eye of a Siamese cat.

  Shuli lived in the German Colony, in a flat in one of the tall buildings at the end of Hazfira Street, where the tennis courts are. A nice neighbourhood: trees and little parks, the buildings clad in creepers, birds buzzing about. When I dropped her off that night I asked her whether she fancied a game, and she’d laughed and said, ‘One day.’

  ‘How about tomorrow morning? Are you working tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ve got a night shift,’ she said, touching my unshaven cheek with her palm and opening her door. It was her father’s flat: Davidi Vaknin had been delighted to have Shuli back home after her divorce. Not only to help her through it but also because his daughter and her ex-husband had drifted away from religion in their four years of marriage and he nursed hopes of coaxing her back to God. And also because he was lonely. Shuli’s mother had succumbed to a long disease a few months after the wedding, her sister was off backpacking round India.

  ‘Night shift–which means I’m not working in the morning.’

  So that morning I parked the Polo near her house and we walked along Hazfira Street towards Emek Refaim Street. I held her hand for a while, but she didn’t seem comfortable with it. Her hands were cold, she claimed. She needed to put her gloves on.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured me. ‘You’ll see. Tonight.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I said, and she lowered her eyes and smiled a smile that was half embarrassment and half a promise. I did know that she had just lost her boyfriend, that everything had just been thrown upside down, and everything like that, but it seemed to me somehow that she was the sort of person who would always be like this: heightened, impulsive, very alive. A wave of warmth broke from my heart and flooded upwards to my throat, and for a few seconds I actually seemed to be unable to breathe. I could feel my heart beating faster, desperately trying to get some oxygen into my blood.

  We went to the post office. In order to get her chef’s certificate she needed a year’s experience in a recognised restaurant, references from qualified chefs (Alon had been happy to oblige) and to pass exams in theory and practice at the Tadmor Hotel in Herzliya. She sent off the forms she had to send off. In a bakery she bought a loaf of bread for her dad; in a stationer’s she bought a notebook for herself. She had decided to write to Giora every day. I asked whether she was planning on telling him everything.

  ‘I never hid a thing from him in the four months we were together.’

  ‘And what about him?’

  ‘Well, who knows? Every night when we went to bed we’d tell each other everything that had happened to us that day. I’d say, “Tell me something else”, and I’d keep saying, “Something else” until he’d told me the lot. And then I’d tell him everything back.’ She fell silent for a moment. ‘Did you hear from the guy who met Giora in Tel Aviv?’

  ‘Binyamin? The guy from the PalmPilot? We said we were going to go and find him in Tel Aviv.’

  ‘Yeah, we said that, didn’t we? But maybe tomorrow?’

  I wasn’t in any hurry. Tonight I was going to see. ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Now I need an Ice Europa,’ she decided. There wasn’t any debate. She said it, we did it.

  The place was pretty full. The security guard searched us with his metal wand on the off-chance we were packing any landmines, his big steel lollipop emitting its somehow disappointed little cheeps. Shuli ordered a croissant and an Ice Europa. I went for an egg sandwich and a cappuccino. I overruled her attempts to pay (‘I owe you,’ she said) and steered us towards a round table for two not far from the entrance and sat down facing the street. She sat opposite and stared at me until I said, ‘What?’

  ‘Why did you choose this table?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was free.’

  She looked around and her gaze took in the other free tables.

  ‘You want to move?’

  ‘No. It’s just that this is our old table. How did you choose this table out of all of them? And you talked to him a minute before he died. It’s like…’ She blinked back the tears that were never far from her surface. ‘Don’t listen to me, I’m talking crap,’ she said. ‘It’s funny, I always sat facing the street, and he always sat opposite me. So now I can see what he used to see. All the people here.’

  I stared at her and said, ‘There’s one thing he could see that you can’t,’ and the memory of the night before flashed like a bullet train through my mind: the drive to the edge of the desert, her smile, our kiss, and what happened after; her long neck, her dark silky skin, the dark down on her forearms, and how, when I kissed my way down to her breasts, she’d held her breath for what seemed like a minute until my lips grazed her nipple and she breathed out. How she’d unbuttoned and pulled down her jeans and how I bent over to her ankle and bit the little crocodile crawling up it, and how I travelled with little butterfly kisses over her knee, her thigh, navel, ribcage, breasts, collarbone, throat, jaw, all the way to the mouth that was patiently waiting for me. How my finger found one of the cotton flowers embroidered on her underwear, began to circle it, wandered with the help of another finger under the stretched elastic where her wonderful skin was softest of all. I touched the soft fluff, the hollow in the tendons of her thigh, and then slipped inside her, and she was kissing my ear by now and whispering to go on and my other hand was everywhere, and she came with her head pressed deeply into the space between my jaw and shoulder, my left hand bracing her bucking shoulder. Then she was sucking in air, almost sobbing, and my wet fingers were resting on her silver thigh, and, mixed with the smells of sex and coconut air-freshener, a very faint tang of gun oil from Humi’s rifle–Humi, who only two days before had been sitting where Shuli was now catching her breath. She’d wanted to go home straight after. It was totally fine with me.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  The bullet train disappeared. I looked up, caught red handed, and saw that she knew what I was thinking about.

  ‘Don’t embarrass me,’ she said, but she was smiling.

  ‘Well. “We’ll see tonight”…’

  My phone intervened. Gili from work. I told her I was still in Jerusalem, and she told me that I was going to have some explaining to do to Jimmy. I said I’d explain everything. Shuli said, ‘Nike and Nokia. That’s who you are.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I cook for the Nikes and Nokias. Actually, I’m not sure. I never see them. I arrive when they’re still asleep, along with the vegetables from the market and the bread from the Angel bakery, in the dark in winter. I come in the rear entrance, with the tahini from Nablus and the pitas from the Old City.’

  The sandwich was as good as it always was. Sliced hardboiled egg with tomato and mayo on brown bread. I always add lots of salt and pepper. Waste of time.

  ‘D’you want anything else?’

  ‘I don’t know. I want to go to Giora’s grave. To be with him a little bit on my own. And then maybe we’ll go again to the shiva?’

  I reached over to touch her hand. I was prepared to do whatever she said. It wasn’t exactly because I’d fallen in love. I mean, something had happened, I’m not denying it. Something started growing there. But as muc
h as anything else I was amazed by what had happened to time. It seemed to have stopped. I wasn’t chasing after it, I wasn’t running. Jerusalem was somewhere else. I looked at the people eating in the Café Europa: who were they? How come they had all this time? Didn’t they need to work? A beautiful black-eyed girl smiled at me from the other side of the table and excused herself to go to the Ladies.

  Only when she’d gone did I hear the music: ‘Bab al-Wad’. First star’s light above Beit Mahsir. Some people were moving their lips to the lyrics. I turned away and looked outside at the electric pale blue. Jerusalem itself seemed to be sitting under the sky like a growth of mould. It looked coated in fear. ‘Gabi told the security guard to get the guy out of the restaurant. The security guard says, “My shift doesn’t start for ten minutes.”’ A group of guys on the next table. ‘So Gabi says, “OK. You leave it a minute, then,” leaves through the back door and runs a mile. So the guy pushes the button but he had a problem with the detonator…’ The listeners burst out laughing. I looked over the red bar stools, the red and black tables; I smelled the coffee and the tuna; I opened a newspaper and I read that Private Humi Glazer, aged nineteen, had been laid to rest yesterday in the military cemetery in Petach-Tikva. Maybe I ought to visit his family too…I ate the little chocolate cube you got with your coffee, and then I ate Shuli’s cube too. I wanted more coffee but didn’t have enough energy to go and get it. Though I shouldn’t overdo it with the caffeine: everything starts to feel as if it’s taking place at some weird distance away from me. I got so worried I looked into it once: the caffeine increases neuronal activity, which fools the pituitary gland into releasing hormones that tell the adrenal gland to get pumping. And then the pupils widen, the trachea dilates, blood vessels shrink, blood pressure rises, the liver releases sugar into your blood to boost energy, the muscles tighten and, oddly enough, your hands cool down.