Almost Dead Read online

  Besides the software we consult: we supply guidance to operators on the software, on how to decrease talk time, on posture and voice; solutions for companies relating to shift construction (work/rest ratio, number of workers per shift, optimum shift lengths), ergonomic call-centre design, HR management, marketing strategies, pricing and distribution. All this, with periodic software upgrades thrown in, is yours for a million dollars on the table and a yearly licence costing half a million, more or less, in truth somewhat less than more–especially lately when everyone seems to be in crisis.

  Interested?

  I read the names of the dead on Ynet. Some of the photos I recognised. The manager of the minibus company said of the ‘driver, 36’: ‘Ziona was irreplaceable; everybody at the station loved her.’ There was Gabriel Algrably, 41, a widower builder who left behind two girls, ages 11 and 13. Two Hungarians, short-contract workers. Mali, a young woman, a student in the Vital College of Design: ‘a flower plucked in full bloom’. Shlomo Yarkoni, 29. ‘The most wonderful husband in the world,’ said his widow Yael, ‘four months pregnant and biting back her tears’. The suicide bomber, Shafiq Omar, 19 years old.

  I met some of the families. After everything else happened, after they heard about me, they wanted to get in touch. Shlomo Yarkoni’s widow Yael called to ask whether I remembered him, but I didn’t. I hadn’t recognised the photo on Ynet. He probably got on at the Centre. A week after Yael, a woman named Smadar called me, also about Shlomo. He had visited her a few minutes before the bomb. He had left his phone in her flat. The phone rang endlessly all morning, and she didn’t answer. She didn’t turn it off either. She just stared at it and knew. She’d heard the boom. It was a beautiful winter morning. She sat and looked at the ringing phone all day, his sperm still warm inside her.

  There was one unidentifiable body. It had to be him. I took out his Palm and stared at it. Should I hand it to the police? Or his family? But Giora had made me a request, the last request of his life. I turned the Palm on and watched the black letters flicker in the grey liquid crystal. Yesterday, the last day of his life, he’d had a meeting in Tel Aviv at eight in the morning and then nothing until the evening, where he’d written: ‘Shuli?’ The name he’d told me. The one I was going to look for.

  I synchronised–I transferred all the information from Giora Guetta’s PalmPilot to my computer for back-up. I saved it just for the hell of it. Much later I thought: I did it instinctively, as if I knew there was information in there that I was going to need…

  The offices of Time’s Arrow are located on the twenty-third floor of the Dizengoff Centre, with views over the Mediterranean and the dense houses of Tel Aviv, ugly when seen from above. I checked the Belgian company’s website and then called Switzerland.

  ‘Ivan!’

  ‘Eitan. How are you? I heard you’ve just had a bomb in Tel Aviv.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah: nothing to worry about.’ This is company policy–to play down any whiff of terrorist activity in the Middle East in general and the Tel Aviv area specifically. If anything should happen and, with the help of the negative and sensationalising global media, reach the ears of our overseas clients and potential investors, it should be treated with at most the interest an elephant might display at a fly landing on its forehead–not even a passing annoyance.

  ‘Near you, though, wasn’t it? Central Tel Aviv?’

  ‘Nooo, not really. Didn’t even hear it, actually.’ (That’s right: I was in the elevator.) ‘And you? Anything blown up in Zurich lately?’

  He roared. The Swiss are important customers. The system’s enjoying great success there. But Ivan is continually asking for changes and new features. He has good ideas, but who has the time? Making changes to the software is like trying to storm the Great Wall of China with the Chinese army ranged along it with machine guns: you have to talk to the people from Product, Marketing, R&D, Quality Assurance (QA), Installations…every one of whom is working full time on something else. Jimmy says that, as a small company, we can provide solutions and services with ‘a speed and flexibility that bigger companies can only dream of’. This is complete bullshit, of course: we’re infinitely less agile or flexible than some giant mega-corporation like Koor.

  Ivan made lots of suggestions. I told him they were all excellent. My head was aching.

  A few minutes after noon, the inboxes of the thirty or so employees of Time’s Arrow all receive a message from Talia Tenne that says, ‘Food?’ Today she’d ordered from Salsalat but I didn’t fancy a salad and went for a schnitzel from the Coffee Bar along with Bar, Ron, Shoko from IT Support and Yoash Green, who works with me in Sales and whose wife left him. Our food arrived with the salads, and we sat with Talia Tenne and the girls in the dining area, where Bar browsed through Yediot Achronot, the main paper out here. ‘Shulamit Penigstein, seventy-two,’ read Bar, ‘who disembarked only a few stops before the explosion, had serious doubts about the suicide bomber: “I tried to draw the attention of my fellow passengers to him,” she said, “but they just sneered at me.”’

  ‘So, Croc,’ Talia Tenne said, ‘what’s this about you being in the attack yesterday?’

  ‘That’s right, I’m dead.’

  ‘No, like…weren’t you near it or something?’

  ‘Pretty damn close. Dizengoff Centre. Big building, not far from the attack?’

  ‘Stop being a pain.’

  I like Talia Tenne. She’s naive and funny and cares for the nutrition of most of the company’s workers, which is nice. And pretty, very pretty. Her skin is as white and smooth as silk.

  ‘Unbelievable how this intifada’s getting closer…it’s going to be here soon.’

  Occasionally I looked eastwards out of the dining area’s windows, waiting for a plane to appear and crash into our tower.

  ‘If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad,’ said Shoko, chewing chicken, ‘Muhammad will come to the mountain.’

  The week the intifada broke out, Time’s Arrow had a day of massages organised in the Sea View Hotel in the north. But there were riots on the way north and the roads were blocked. So we went to Sde Dov, the little airstrip in North Tel Aviv, and flew to Mahanayim and took a taxi from there to the Sea View. From the plane we thought we saw smoke from tyres burning on the roads. We sat at the Sea View in white towelling robes, sipped herbal tea and submitted to our oily Swedish massages.

  ‘Don’t laugh–they’ll take this tower down one day.’

  ‘A booby-trapped car goes to the upper car park, drives straight through that laughable little stick that calls itself a barrier and sits itself directly underneath the building: boom!’

  ‘Shoko, I’m eating, stop it already!’

  Twenty-seven minutes is the average time I spend on lunch–I worked it out once.

  I didn’t feel at all like working. A report on Ynet said the last body from the Little No. 5 had finally been identified. Giora Guetta, 23 years old, from Jerusalem. My man. I can’t stay here any longer, I thought, I’ve got to find his girlfriend. I stood up and said, as I said every day, ‘One small step for a man, and an even smaller step for mankind.’

  ‘A half-day, then?’ asked Ron. It was a running joke: I always said the same thing and he always gave the same answer even if it was eight in the evening, which it usually was. But today it really was going to be a half-day.

  ‘Yeah. A half-day.’

  6

  Grandfather Fahmi got angry whenever people talked about the war of 1948 as the Nakba; the Disaster. People didn’t like talking about it at all, but he did. Because he and his friends did things. They resisted. He told me how they used to hit convoys of Jews going up to Jerusalem. They’d descend from the village to the ridges above the road to Jerusalem and shoot at the buses. The road would close and the Jews wouldn’t be able to go through to Jerusalem–they managed to cut Jerusalem off for weeks like this. The Jews themselves admit it. They’ve left the wrecks of some of the buses there as memorials. That was Grandfather Fahmi. He hit the
convoys. His name is written on those buses in bullet holes. Later they put armour on the buses and trucks, but Grandfather and his friends still found ways to attack, still managed to stop them getting through. The road was littered with the skeletons of cars–what the Jews have preserved there is no more than a souvenir. Grandfather would make his way down the slope from the ridge to shoot at a bus, and then come back up home to the village. Eight months their heroics went on. And this is why he felt hurt when people talked about a defeat: because they fought like lions. One time a plane crashed near Beit Machsir and six Jewish soldiers were killed in it and Grandfather Fahmi took a souvenir of his own: one of the clocks from the dashboard of the cockpit.

  ‘Your father seems like a good man, Fahmi. A very sad man. He really doesn’t deserve all this trouble. And your girlfriend’s very cute, isn’t she? How she comes and plays the tapes? I used to hate the songs but, you know, I’m really starting to like them. Amarein, amarein…amarehehehein…’

  Oh no, please! Don’t start with the singing now…

  ‘Now don’t get all upset, Fahmi. What are these noises? No need to get cross. I’m here to take care of you. You like the deep massages, right?’

  Svetlana, can’t you please just shut up…? Grandfather Fahmi…I’m…

  ‘We’ll get your senses back, don’t you worry. The taste and the smell and the sight and the touch and the hearing and the movement…Now let’s have a peek at how these pipes and tubes are doing! A tube for your piss, another for your air…’

  ‘What are you doing, Fahmi?’

  The Croc’s talking; he’s suspicious.

  He looks sideways. ‘What’ve you got there?’

  Where was I? The Croc? Grandfather Fahmi?

  ‘Dr Hartom’s coming in a minute, so we want you on your best behaviour, don’t we?’

  Dr Hartom’s a bitch and you’re a stupid little Jewish whore and I’m cold. Can’t you stop talking for a second? Can’t you see that I’m cold…?

  The flat was cold. An old spiral heater giving a little orange heat. Tea in glasses. Bilahl with Halil Abu-Zeid: a large, impressive man with huge arms and chest, a shaved head and a beard. A silver ring on his fat middle finger. Intelligent pale brown eyes. Older. In 1990 they deported him to southern Lebanon, and when he came back they stuck him in jail in Ramallah…

  ‘My dream,’ said Bilahl, ‘is to see, on the slope beside the remains of the old buses that my grandfather shot in ’48, a Mitsubishi and a Peugeot and a Toyota made in 2000. You understand what I’m talking about?’

  Abu-Zeid looked at Bilahl and my brother looked back.

  ‘How were you thinking of doing it?’

  Bilahl drew a map on a page from a notebook, with a number of arrows on it. He explained. Abu-Zeid smoked a whole cigarette before he said anything. The smoke coming out of his mouth mingled with the breath coming out of Bilahl’s. Bilahl knelt on the floor and warmed his hands by the electric bars. He said, ‘It’s about time. What did Ramallah do apart from a handful of attacks by Fatah on Route 443 and a couple more on the Settlements? What did Al-Amari contribute? Wafa Idris?’

  ‘We did something big this week.’

  ‘Remember the village of Silwad. Wadi Haramiya. The guy found a spot on the ridge with a Karabin and took out ten soldiers one after the other, and got away without being caught. The road to Jerusalem–it’s the busiest road. It’s a symbol. It will shock them. They’ll think they’re back in ’48. And the conditions there…it’s no coincidence that my grandfather sniped at convoys from there. The wadi there’s just like the one in Silwad.’

  ‘It’s not Silwad,’ said Abu-Zeid. ‘In Silwad there’s a village. Fifteen minutes later the sniper was in safe hands.’

  Abu-Zeid took the drawing and touched it to the bare orange spirals of the heater. He stood up with the burning page in his hand, opened a window, looked out into the rain, and threw it out. He closed the window and sat back down in his plastic chair, rubbing the ash from his hands.

  ‘There are problems with this plan. It takes too much time. And the evacuation plan isn’t good. Again, there’ll be no time. In five minutes the area will be full of roadblocks and helicopters. It’s not ’48 any more.’

  Bilahl looked at him quizzically. ‘Is there another way?’

  Halil Abu-Zeid said, ‘Who will do it?’

  ‘Svetlana. How is he?’

  What…? What now?

  ‘Normal. A little irritated this morning.’

  ‘You checked his pupils today?’

  Oh no.

  ‘Not yet, Dr Hartom.’

  ‘Let’s have a look…’

  Yaagghh!! Fuck you! You’re killing me with that torch…!

  ‘Hmmm…fine. Did we have a bowel movement? How’s the urine?’

  ‘No B.M. Urine’s in order.’

  Go to hell, Hartom, I was in the middle of…oh, where was I?

  If this is a dream, then it’s never-ending and never-changing…If this is a dream then it’s a dream of hell.

  ‘OK, Fahmi, no reason to be distressed, Svetlana here’s taking good care of you. In the afternoon we’re going to do an MRI and show you some familiar images and play familiar sounds–test your reactions to stimuli. Svetlana, we have the photographs? Music?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Hartom. Everything’s ready.’

  Children were playing football in the rain. They shouted and kicked the ball against a wall covered in slogans and posters. Bilahl would send the kids out at night…There was a new poster up, of the shahid Shafiq. Shafiq the martyr with the Temple Mount in the background, and puddles, and mud from the dust that the tanks and bulldozers made the last time they were here, and other children playing marbles under a thatch. The rain didn’t let up. You could hear the sound of applause coming from TVs in the houses along the way. The wind was trying to blow the sheets of corrugated tin off the roofs, rattling the breeze blocks that held them down. My phone was ringing. Grandfather Fahmi lived in a tent for eight years before he built a house out of scavenged concrete, rocks and tin.

  ‘So you think you’re happy now, eh?’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘What will they accomplish, these virtuoso operations of yours?’

  ‘What operations?’

  ‘I’m not a fool, Fahmi.’

  ‘Don’t forget what Grandfather did in ’48,’ I said. ‘He scared them, he didn’t give up, and he brought pride to our people.’

  ‘Yes. And where exactly did it bring us? To Al-Amari?’

  I didn’t answer. I watched the kids in the rain: children born here.

  ‘Don’t ignore me. Fahmi. You promised me something. Don’t forget. You promised me you would not get into trouble. You promised your father. Fahmi. You gave your word of honour to me.’

  7

  In 1935, two weeks after British police had violently broken up Arab protests in Jerusalem, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam gathered his people and announced a jihad. He told them to prepare to leave that same evening, said goodbye to his wife and children and went with his followers to the mountains around Jenin.

  Every one of his men carried a small Koran in his pocket. During the days, they studied the Koran. At night they were soldiers. One of those nights, a guard named Mahmoud Salam al-Mahmuzi ran into a Jewish patrol. He shot the commander of the patrol and killed him. Another policeman in the patrol ran to report the incident and, having done so, he ran home, to his wife.

  The British retaliated fiercely. A large force was mobilised from all round Palestine and sent to Haifa. The next day five hundred British soldiers set out to catch Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. After a bloody battle which lasted all night, Sheikh al-Qassam was killed and became one of the first of the great martyrs, the shuhada, in the long struggle. He planted the seeds of revolution against Zionism and imperialism and inspired a generation to follow him.

  The policeman who ran to report the incident was Duchi’s grandfather. Her mother was born nine months later. My father was born in the same year, 1935, in Maryl
and, USA.

  I took a Little No. 5 home. As far as I was concerned, the cooling-off period was over after one morning. The journey was quieter than usual; the drivers swore less over the radio and committed fewer traffic violations. Even the Jumbos seemed to drive with respect for the sorrow of the minibus drivers.

  ‘How did you get home?’ asked Duchi.

  ‘Taxi,’ I said offhandedly.

  ‘Liar,’ she said.

  ‘Liar? What reason do I have to lie?’ I said, and really, what reason did I have?

  ‘Honestly in a taxi?’ She came and gave me a kiss. I opened the refrigerator, looking for something quick. No, not really in a taxi, Duchi, in a Little No. 5. But do you think I’m going to tell you the truth? You think I fancy an argument now?

  ‘Word of honour.’

  Nothing is as it was before September 11th. Everything changed that day, and yet, life went on. The summary: Duchi and I live together for four years, we decide to get married, the date we set is 11 September 2001. Duchi’s mother gets a heart attack and snuffs it a day before the wedding, the wedding is cancelled, and since then this word–‘wedding’–is never heard in our vicinity. It’s as if there are blockades and checkpoints that this word can’t penetrate, as if there’s a lock-and-siege on it. As if they’d sent a whole army to hunt it down and it had vanished and holed up in some abysmal cave, not even bothering to send us a ‘what’s up’ from time to time. It seems that we’re treating the whole thing as if it were a sign from God–or worse, from Duchi’s mother–that we shouldn’t have decided to marry. She sacrificed her life on the altar of this message. The medium was her message. I guess that’s the reason we don’t talk about it. I’m only guessing, though, because we haven’t talked about it. She keeled over and it was as if a valve holding back an immense pressure had blown and all the attention leaked away from the wedding to the funeral. And it’s not as if any of that other stuff helped.