Almost Dead Read online

  ‘Really?’

  My first thought was: fuck, how will I get to work from now on? Those fuckers hit every possible means of transportation. Am I going to have to take cabs now? Buy another car? Too expensive…

  I entered Ynet again and read the update. Every passenger on the minibus killed. But still it didn’t seem like mine. Somehow it seemed it couldn’t be the right time or place. There were dozens of minibuses en route at any given time. ‘Yeah, I go on one every day,’ I was telling everyone nonchalantly. ‘Unbelievable. The bomber could have been on the same No. 5 I was on. Who knows?’

  Only then did I remember the dark guy and his suit bag, and the old lady who suspected him, whom I’d told not to worry. And the other guy who asked me to send some unspecified message to his girlfriend. This is crazy, I thought, I have to get hold of this guy, and then the phone rang.

  ‘Croc, I’m alive,’ I answered.

  ‘Uh huh,’ said Jimmy. ‘Why alive?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Listen, next week there’s a meeting in Brussels, it’s important, it’s with…’ Here he mentioned the name of a large Belgian telecoms company. His accent was terrible. ‘You coming with me?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘No. I’m telling Gili to book us flights and hotel rooms. Get ultra-prepared. Make sure you’re ready with all the presentations. And don’t forget tomorrow’s company meeting.’ Jimmy ended the conversation without waiting for an answer. He does it all the time. He explained once that he didn’t have the luxury of waiting for an answer. Jimmy’s real name, by the way, is Rafi. Rafi Rafael, or Rafraf, as he’s known in our room. When he was an officer in the air force he ran their time management unit. Now he’s the CEO of Time’s Arrow.

  I called Duchi and left her a message: ‘Hi. I wasn’t killed in the suicide attack in case you’re interested. I’m in Brussels next week. Bye.’

  And then they started talking about the female driver of the minibus involved in the bomb attack, and it was only then that I understood. Ziona was the only woman driver in the Little No. 5 fleet. I knew it because she was always bringing it up. She was proud of it. My heart stopped beating and my breath got stuck in my throat. And then they started up again, because that’s what the heart and lungs always do, when you’re alive.

  I jogged back to the kitchen. The TV was still on though everyone was back in their rooms. Danny Ronen, the military correspondent on Channel 2, mentioned the name Ziona Levi. A nervous little chuckle escaped my mouth. I went to the bathroom and put my hands, clenched tightly into fists, on the marble. I felt a wave of pain and nausea washing over me, tried to breathe deeply, looked at the mirror, and laughed again. This laughing face: whose was it? It didn’t look familiar. Didn’t look like mine. The blood was hammering in my temples. I felt very close to passing out. I had to get out, to breathe fresh air. I threw water on my face and made it down to the street and walked towards the site of the bombing, up Dizengoff Street, past the shoemaker’s and up the hill, under the tunnel formed by the canopy of branches, and turned right past the gallery. I stopped opposite the museum and concert hall, just before the Habima Theatre, on the side where the post office is. In the time that had passed they’d reopened the road to traffic. Everything had been cleaned up and the wreckage of the minibus had been towed away. The deceased had been removed: all that belonged to them, all that had been them. There weren’t even police barriers up any more.

  Miraculously–they always use that word, miraculously–not one of the passers-by or drivers near by had been injured. Only a single car parked on the side of the road was totalled (the owner was a guy named Amir who’d just popped into the post office to pay a parking fine–and it turned out he never got any insurance money or compensation: because he was parked in a no-parking zone). A bus passed, groaning and spitting black smoke like an old man hawking phlegm. I looked at the wet patches on the road where the blood had been washed away. The pale sun was gloomy and silent. The traffic was running normally. Two and a half hours since the bomb went off, and it was as if nothing had happened, or almost. Some drivers were slowing down to peer at the wet patches before driving on. On the pavement beside me kids were lighting candles and people were shouting or crying. They had their solutions. They announced their solutions. They said: kill, retaliate, blast them to bits, withdraw…

  I turned my head away from them towards a gap between two buildings. I wasn’t looking for anything. I’ve no idea why my eyes were drawn there. Maybe it was the tree standing there, an old olive tree that looked out of place among the palms, that didn’t seem to belong in the little alley. I looked at the olive tree and moved as if compelled towards it, and that’s when I saw, a little above where the trunk fissured, cradled in the crook of one of the bigger branches, the PalmPilot of the guy who’d been sitting next to me.

  2

  ‘Good morning, Fahmi.’

  If I am dreaming, this dream is never-ending…

  ‘How are we doing today? Let’s have a peek at those pupils…’

  Hate this light. Hate the wash. Why can’t she leave me alone?

  ‘Time for your wash, Fahmi. Your favourite part of the morning, ha ha…’

  Go away, Svetlana. Fuck you.

  ‘We are mad today, aren’t we? What a face you’re making! Let’s have a look at what you’ve got on later. Oh–you’ve got a deep massage this morning. What fun!’

  I’m floating in the sea. I can see the shore but I can’t reach it. The tide keeps me away. I see Bilahl on the beach.

  ‘Here. That’s better. Come on now.’

  I’m not here, I am…where was I before she came to disturb me?

  ‘And visitors in the afternoon! So who’s coming to visit you? Who’s he going to be? Or she?’

  Where was I? I’m floating in the sea. Where’s Mother? Lulu? Rana? Where was I before she disturbed me? With Bilahl…with Croc…somewhere…in the village? In the camp? In Tel Aviv?

  In Tel Aviv.

  Shafiq started everything, in Tel Aviv. He wanted to smoke a cigarette with the driver. That’s what the driver said afterwards. He took off the belt, locked it in the trunk, they smoked the cigarette and then he put on the belt in the back seat. That all happened when they were still in Jaffa. Then he took a cab to Tel Aviv…Bilahl had found someone who knew the Jews, knew Tel Aviv well. He told Shafiq to go to a crossroads near Rabin Square, where they have their demonstrations and crowds gather. Explained to him where he should stand, which corner and what time–a place where there was always a gridlock at rush hour. But then we saw the news, on Channel 2 and Al-Jazeera: he’d got on a bus. No square. No crossroads…

  What the hell are you–Svetlana…?

  ‘Good boy, Fahmi. Don’t make a face, it’s only water. Don’t you want to look pretty for your visitors today? So just let me get behind your ears…’

  Stop it, you fucking whore! What visitors? Where am I? Where was I? Floating among my fragments of memory…and you’re mixing them up. Getting my wires crossed. Crossroads. Shafiq…

  Shafiq. He didn’t do what the guy who knew Tel Aviv told him. Went with the shaved cheeks and the haircut and the clothes Bilahl gave him, and then got on a bus. Only a little bus, they explained on TV. Danny Ronen, the clown with the eyebrows. How did he get there? How had it been, getting on, paying, waiting? And how must he have felt, a moment before heaven? He must have felt whole. A moment away from heaven. The best feeling he’d ever had, better than anything he had imagined. The moment of his life. And me, with Croc and the green grenade in Tel Aviv, how did I feel?

  Shafiq would have been sure at the end. Not like me. The light turned green and the driver of the little bus would have pushed the pedal and turned the wheel. Shafiq, and everybody around him, had all lived their lives to get to this moment. Everything heading towards this moment. Every drag on a cigarette, every blink, every swallow of saliva, every emotion, every motion, every breath, every thought, every word anyone on the little bus had eve
r said had been headed towards the moment when Shafiq stood up and turned his back to the passengers and pushed the button, and his body blossomed with the fullness of his power; his clean, his warm, his Babylonian power…

  ‘That’s better. Nice and clean. You can hardly even see the scratch on your forehead. I’ve got patients here who are totally deformed. Damaged for ever. But you’re whole, Fahmi. Perfect for your visits. So, then. Who’s coming to see you today? Who would you like? Your dad? Your little sister? Your cute girlfriend?’

  Oh, shut up, you goddamned Jewish whore! Losing my thread…

  Father. A good man. A sad man, since Mother…

  ‘Fahmi, I will not put up with this. Not you.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything, Father.’ He was standing right in front of me, obscuring the TV, with his solid grey mane like a lion’s. His brown eyes were angry.

  ‘Father, please don’t stand there. Let me see, please.’

  ‘I know what you’re doing. I know about Bilahl. He’s a lost cause, but you? You promised me. You promised to go to Bir Zeit University–you’re going to give me a heart attack…’

  ‘I will go. I’ll fulfil my promise. Please don’t worry.’

  Later, Bilahl would attack me: Why do you apologise? Why do you grovel in front of him? He’s let them humiliate him and walk all over him his whole life. That’s what’s the matter with him…

  Oh no. No! Don’t touch me there! Oh, fuck you, you filthy Jewish whore!

  ‘Well done, Fahmi. Now try not to get excited, OK? I’m just going to wipe here. Slowly, very slowly, ever so softly…Just going to get you all clean and pretty and smelling good for your massage and your guests. You like that, don’t you?’

  3

  My name is Eitan Enoch but everyone calls me Croc. Because: Eitan Enoch = ‘Hey, Taninoch!’ That got shortened to ‘Hey, Tanin!’ And in Hebrew, Tanin means a crocodile. That’s the evolution of my name. Enoch itself, it turns out, evolved from Chanoch, the father of Methuselah, the oldest guy in the Bible. A settler told me that once.

  I grew up in Jerusalem but moved to Tel Aviv, where I work for Time’s Arrow, or Taimaro!, as our Japanese customers like to pronounce it. A year and a half ago my older brother left Israel with his wife and three boys because of the bombs. We’ve got a rich grandmother in Maryland who invited us all to come and live there. My younger sister Dafdaf wants to go too, with her husband. All of us have American citizenship because our parents are from there: my father grew up in Maryland–so green and pleasant, so relaxed and comfortable–and Mom’s from Denver. They came to Israel before I was born. God knows what they were thinking of. Every time I visit Maryland, I ask myself that question. Maybe they were excited by the young Jewish state. Maybe it seemed exotic. Or maybe it was that Dad had big ideas: he wanted to teach the young country how to spread peanut butter on its bread. Efraim Enoch from America: the capitalist, the entrepreneur, the great peanut butter importer. But the land of the Jews didn’t have time for peanut butter, or, at any rate, not for the one he imported.

  When I see them now, it’s as if every bomb blows another brick out of the wall of the decision to emigrate. Their mistake. They can’t blame us for running away, but their hearts are breaking. It’s difficult, what they did: leaving the comfortable life in America while they were still young, travelling to a new, hot, primitive country and trying to build something from nothing: a family, a business, a state. They called it Zionism. And then they had to watch everything get blown to smithereens, their children and grandchildren leaving, going back to America. I’m not going to leave. Or not yet. It’s not so simple. Because I’m not sure whether I want to, or where to go–and things with Duchi are uncertain enough…

  So, I stood there with the PalmPilot in my hand while people went in and out of the post office. Hanging from the façade of the Tel Aviv Museum for the Arts was a banner which read ‘Of Life and Death–A Retrospective of the Artist Oli Shauli-Negbi’. The word ‘Retrospective’ reeled my gaze in. I left. I walked. I walked through the drifts of sodden dead leaves and tried to think whether there was anything I could have done to prevent it. Should I have told the passengers that the dark guy was a suspect? Should I have said something to the driver? Would she have listened to me? The truth is that those drivers aren’t scared of anything. Ziona would have pulled over and started interrogating him.

  But if she’d done that, he would have pressed the button, or pulled the string, or…

  Why had he waited until I got off? What kept me alive? Why had God stretched out one of his long fingers and miraculously tapped my forehead? When I got off at the Dizengoff Centre, some people got on and I heard Ziona tell one of them, ‘I’m sorry, honey, I’m full. There’s another one behind me.’ The terrorist had waited until the cab filled up and only then…

  If I’d told Ziona and she’d talked to him, he would have blown himself up. If I’d shouted to everybody to be careful, he would have blown himself up. If I’d phoned the police, or told the security guards at the mall, nobody would have had time to do anything. All in all, I told myself, walking through the slow grey drops of rain that had started to fall, I was clean. I couldn’t have done anything, because the dark guy had come here to blow himself up and he would have gone ahead and done it whatever the hell I’d done. All I could have done was what I did–save myself. And even that I’d done unintentionally.

  But then I thought some more and saw I was letting myself off too lightly. There was another thing I could have done. I could have been less certain that the dark guy wasn’t a terrorist. I could have saved the guy I talked to. The guy who I know now as Giora Guetta. I could have saved him because he spoke to me after the old lady got off and before I did. I remembered every word–his voice and the way he said it, the look in his eyes, the half-smile of his perfect white teeth, the way he’d swivelled his head towards the terrorist and said, ‘He looks OK to you, right?’ And how I’d said: ‘Yeah, no problem with him.’

  Why had I said that?

  Because I’d had enough of paranoid and hysterical people like Duchi.

  And that’s why I go to the opposite extreme: no problem, everything’s fine, stop worrying and crying and moaning about everything! It was Duchi’s fault. Her responsibility. She’d damaged my sense of judgement. Without her destructive influence, without years of living in the shadow of her hysteria, without those years of her continuous premonitions of imminent catastrophe, perhaps I’d have thought more clearly and said, ‘You know what? I’m not sure. Perhaps he is a terrorist.’ And then maybe Giora would have got off with me. Who knows? If it hadn’t been for my girlfriend maybe I’d have saved a man’s life.

  I found I was hungry for meat. I stopped at Bar BaraBush and ordered a hamburger called ‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight’. I waited at the bar and watched the small TV on it showing Channel 2: Danny Ronen talking with his usual serious face, utilising his thick eyebrows, shooting them up and down as he always does. I didn’t hear what he said but it doesn’t really matter. He always says the same thing: enforce, ease off, close, encircle, shoot the eyebrows, go out on a mission, attack, lock and siege, and the cabinet convened and the cabinet decided and these guys took responsibility and those guys showed courage…

  I went to wash my hands–I think perhaps I thought I had blood on them–and on my way back I took a postcard on which GET OUT! was written in large black lettering. GET OUT? I didn’t have a clue who wanted me out or why. Outside, through the big window, the skies were opening and closing their wet mouths. I went out into them with The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight in a bag in my hand and GET OUT! in my pocket.

  I put the Cannibal and the chips I found next to it on a plate and prepared to have my way with them. Whatever was happening to my mind, my body still seemed to be functioning with amazing efficiency. My eyes sent a snapshot of the hamburger to my brain, which gave out its directives to flood my mouth with saliva and release stomach acids to welcome our new guest–and then the door buzzed. />
  I looked at the wall and at the Cannibal and decided not to answer. I started eating. A minute later: a key in the front door, the handle turning, somebody entering.

  ‘Why didn’t you open up?’

  ‘Hey, Dooch, sorry,’ I said. My mouth, which I’d filled with Cannibal a moment before, spoke for itself. I gestured with my shoulders towards the plate. She looked at it and her eyes immediately went into her ‘rage mode’.

  ‘Why don’t you answer the mobile? And what are you doing at home in the middle of the afternoon? You know there was a bomb?’

  ‘Yes.’ I was searching for the mobile in my bag–I must have left it at work.

  ‘You realise how worried I was? You couldn’t call?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dooch, I was sure you were busy and…hang on a second, I did call! Didn’t you get my message?’

  ‘I got one message saying you were alive two hours after the bomb! Thanks very much indeed.’ I looked at her, surprised. I didn’t know what to say. ‘It was in a Little No. 5, Croc. At nine-fifteen! Did you think I wasn’t going to worry?’

  ‘You know I get off at the Dizengoff Centre! It was after that, near the theatre. Didn’t you see the little flame-thing on TV? Here, look.’ I found the remote and pushed the button. Danny Ronen and his eyebrows were still talking. ‘I left you a message saying I was alive. I don’t get it…’

  ‘I heard the message, but…’ Here tears intervened. ‘But how could I be sure?’ She wiped them away and stood there, fragile and unhappy. ‘I wasn’t sure if everything was all right. You could have called again. I was so scared! You don’t know how scared I was. I spent the whole day waiting for an adjournment, trying to get away to see you…’

  I swallowed another mouthful–damn, the Cannibal was good!–and went over to hug her. ‘It’s all right, honey. I’m sorry. Come on. Stop it. I just thought you saw where it happened, you got the message so obviously I was alive, and…whatever…what do I know?’