Almost Dead Read online

  We didn’t say anything. Eventually Bilahl said, ‘Why don’t you stick some music on?’ The driver switched stations.

  We got out in Bidu, sent the taxi on its way. Bilahl was angry because of Nablus getting the credit. I said that if the Jews thought the operation came from Nablus, at least they weren’t going to be coming after us. ‘You always see the glass half full, don’t you, kid?’ he snapped. We walked in the mountains, following the goat trails through the terraces, through the sweet scent of the sage and zaatar. The night was dry and cool. Clouds covered the moon.

  We hardly talked. I thought of Rana. And of Shirin Abu-Akla from Al-Jazeera. And the beautiful Osnat Dekel from Channel 2. I didn’t think it worth bothering Bilahl with these thoughts.

  When my brother was ten he threw stones in a demonstration in Murair. Because he was underage they just gave him a fine, and Dad had to pay it. Bilahl told Dad not to. Dad paid, and screamed at him: ‘The Jews have the power! The Jews have the power and they will keep hurting us…’ A couple of years later, he is stopped by three soldiers in one of the alleys in the village in the middle of a downpour. The rain is so hard it hurts; the drops are cold and as sharp as knives. The soldiers stand under a shaky corrugated tin shed and tell Bilahl to stand in front of them, outside the shed, and to take off his keffiyeh. They ask him questions in broken Arabic and laugh at him. The rain is so loud he has to shout. One of them, in the middle, is smoking a cigarette. He stands in front of them in the cloudburst, his hair stuck to his head like a mop, his face twisted from the cold and wet, and what is he thinking about? What is the kid in the rain thinking about…? They took him for a ride in their jeep, asked him to show them the Shabab, the kids who sprayed the walls and threw the stones, wanted to know who was sending them out, as if anyone needed to…At the end of the first intifada, when he was sixteen, they arrested him again for setting fire to the army watchtower at the entrance to the village: a month in ‘administrative detention’, a month during which he learned a lot about ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. He made a friend there who invited him to the faith school in A-Ram. He moved to Uncle Jalahl’s apartment in Al-Amari. Stopped shaving and always went to the mosque for prayers. He talked to me a lot, even before I moved to live in Al-Amari.

  ‘Dad told us not to get into trouble,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Dad lives in another time. In another world.’

  And Bilahl was right. The world had turned on its head. The peace our father had longed for had turned out to be a monstrous Israeli deception. But he kept insisting that to struggle against it was even worse. Me, I preferred to think about something else. Until the army erected a dirt ramp around Murair for a week and I moved to Al-Amari, where a quarter of the families managed to stay alive only thanks to the rations of rice, flour, powdered milk, sugar and oil from UNRWA. How long could I sit around on my arse watching TV, or boiling the same potatoes and eggs to mix with tuna in a pita, or walking the same streets and alleys between grey breeze blocks and open sewers, hoping that the wind would cover the stench with the smell of cooking or cumin? How long could I sit watching the camp’s football team scuff around their dirt pitch? How long for? Even if they are the best team in the West Bank, how long can you do that for?

  ‘Hoo, what a day I’ve had! I’m dying to get my head on a pillow. Let’s just check everything’s in its place…one tube for your piss, another one for your air. Lovely. Good boy. Goodnight, now.’

  Yeah, yeah, Svetlana, now go away, I’m busy…

  ‘And Dr Hartom says your scans were very good: your brain responded to the music. And tremendous responses to the photos of your brother and sister.’

  Didn’t you already say goodnight?

  ‘OK, that’s it. I’m off. Goodnight, lyubimyi moi…’

  On the left we saw the lights of Har-Adar, and on the right the lights of Katana. We skirted around Maale-Hachamisha and Neve-Ilan. We walked for almost four hours. Bilahl whispered prayers. For several minutes we heard the murmuring of traffic on the road like a constant distant rain. A sharp ascent.

  ‘After this hill I think we’ll see the road,’ said Bilahl.

  I was tired, and soaking with sweat, and my heart was going like crazy, but I almost ran all the way to the top. We started descending through the pines. And then I saw the white and red snake of lights, the cars heading in opposite directions, and Bilahl came up to my shoulder and said, ‘Yes.’

  We descended a little farther until we were at a point not too high above the road with a good view in both directions. The whole ravine was steep–a dangerous place, a place of ancient ambushes. Bab al-Wad: ‘The Gate of the Valley’. Not far below us, in a scrubby little central island which the two streams of cars flowed round, one of Grandpa’s metal skeletons was resting quietly.

  ‘This is the point,’ said Bilahl. He checked the time. ‘The getaway car will arrive right beneath this bus’s skeleton in a little over an hour. We will open fire together for a few minutes just before eleven and then go down to the ditch beside the road to wait. Let’s get the rifle-rests ready.’

  We made comfortable rests for the rifles out of soil and stones, a few metres apart, with room enough to lie and aim across a wide field of fire. Bilahl gave me earplugs. I felt sick to the stomach. ‘We’ve got fifty minutes. We will pray. Remember, we are only shooting at the other side, at the white lights. Wait for my sign, and shoot at the windows. From the moment we start, shoot as much as you can. If your weapon is blocked, do the checks I showed you, change the magazine and cock the rifle again. If it doesn’t work we will exchange rifles and I will try. The whole operation will not take more than three minutes and then we’ll go down to the road with the rifles. Remember Silwad. Be quiet. Composed. Brave. Do as I do. Don’t think too much.’

  9

  A soldier was standing by the slip road on to the Ayalon highway with a hitchhiking finger out waiting for a bite. I stopped and lowered the window. ‘Jerusalem?’ ‘Jerusalem.’ ‘Thanks very much.’ ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, and he slung his huge bag into the back and got into the passenger seat still holding his rifle. ‘Just don’t point that thing in my direction.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘What does “Every Second Counts” mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The sticker. On the car.’

  It took me a moment to clear my head. We were in the green Polo I got from work. I mean, I say ‘got’, but I paid for it every month out of my salary. I hardly ever drove it because the Little No. 5 took me to work. Duchi was the one who took the Polo to work every day.

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Yeah what?’

  ‘Sorry, what did you ask?’

  ‘What does “Every Second Counts” mean?’

  ‘Uh, well, let’s see.’ We got on the highway. It was chilly but I opened the window a crack to feel the fresh night air. ‘You know when you buy some new gadget but you can’t be bothered to read the instructions?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Or the bags of pre-washed salad you get in the supermarket? The jeans you buy already worn out and patched?’

  ‘Sure, I’ve got a pair, waste of time!’

  ‘Exactly! A waste of time. People don’t like wasting time. Every second counts. Get it?’

  ‘You make bagged salad and pre-worn jeans?’

  I guess that people who don’t themselves physically embody the phrase ‘Every Second Counts’ might be slow to grasp it. When I went up for my job at Time’s Arrow, Jimmy Rafael asked me at the end of the interview whether I was a time victim. ‘A time victim?’ ‘Does the question of how to do things more quickly, or do as many things as possible in as little time as possible, ever cross your mind?’ ‘All the time.’ ‘Do you ever find yourself consciously accelerating your own thoughts, movements and speech and trying to accelerate them in those around you?’ I nodded. ‘Planes simply have to take off on time? Slow drivers make you want to murder them? Do queues in the bank or in the cinema drive you mad? D
o you absolutely hate having to wait for your food in a restaurant?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Every second of wasted time, time in which you could have done something else, makes you furious?’ ‘Yes! Yes!’ ‘Welcome to Time’s Arrow.’ Jimmy smiled, and shook my hand. I felt at home. Later he told me that he tried to pick all his employees according to these criteria, and in fact I liked the way I was always surrounded by people of my own type at work. Some people look down at us or feel sorry for us, wonder why we rush around breathlessly from place to place; what do we get out of it, out of managing to do more things? You can always manage more, they say, but you can never manage everything. So why, they say, don’t you find the balance that will let you relax a little and enjoy life? What they don’t understand is that, ultimately, that is the way we relax a little and enjoy life. The beauty of this way of life is all in the word ‘complete’–completing tasks, and feeling complete. I’m jealous of people like Jimmy Rafael who have done and are doing so much. Their lives fascinate me; I want to be like them: a busy week filled with completed tasks is a satisfying week, a hell of a lot more than lying on the beach and incompletely staring at the sun. My hitcher wasn’t the sort of guy who would get this. I tried to attack it from a different angle.

  ‘You know Federal Express or McDonald’s?’

  ‘Yeah. You work for them?’

  ‘Multinational empires built on the principle of saving time. Before Federal Express, an international delivery would take about a week. Fed-Ex takes a day. Same with McDonald’s and food. One-hour photo development. Twenty-minute pizza delivery.’

  ‘Last time I went to McDonald’s it took less than a day,’ he chortled.

  The best test for a good salesman is a tough customer. If I could sell Time’s Arrow to this dunce I could sell it to anyone. I liked these challenges. ‘We shorten the length of phone calls to directory assistance,’ I said: if you can’t summarise what your product can do in one sentence, you won’t sell it.

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘People can’t stand to waste even a moment: they spend a lot of time on the phone and they need their numbers right away. We give them the numbers more quickly and therefore more cheaply.’

  ‘So you work for 144. Why didn’t you say so? News,’ he added, leaning towards the radio and nudging the volume up. Of course, news… News above everything, above basic good manners, above unimportant small talk about time, above life. Silenced by news, we listened to the headlines.

  ‘Fucking cunts. They ought to wipe out the whole of Nablus.’

  ‘Would that help?’

  ‘The only way to teach them. They came from Nablus? Tomorrow there’s no Nablus. Day after that the guy from Hebron will think twice before going on his mission, because he knows that if he goes on Monday, there won’t be any Hebron on Tuesday. Understand?’

  Another genius with his genius solutions. I wanted to say: and what happens if the guy from Hebron thinks twice and still goes? What have we accomplished then? Or if he doesn’t think at all and goes? But I didn’t rise to him. I didn’t have the energy for that stuff. The news-reader mentioned Giora Guetta’s name.

  ‘Know what I’m saying?’ the soldier was saying. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

  We drove for a few minutes in silence. The news ceded to a phone-in show. Callers sharing their problems with the world. I sighed and changed station. ‘It Must Be Love’. I turned up and dived into the song. I sang. How many times had I heard this song fifteen, sixteen years ago, when I was in love? Was I in love now? I didn’t know. Maybe not. Otherwise, why did I behave as I did with Duchi? Slapping her down, not supporting her when she asked me to, treating her requests with contempt. Running out of the house in the middle of an argument. If this song is a measure, I thought, I am not feeling now what I felt once. Nothing more, nothing less, love is the best. But maybe I can’t feel that any more. Maybe, at my age, a song can’t measure anything much. I know Duchi is dear to me. Very much so. I know I always regret fights, as now. Hell, what was so damn wrong with taking a taxi after work? She told me once that Uri claimed I lacked confidence, that all my behaviour was a demonstration of power to compensate for the inferiority I felt towards her, because she was so strong and successful. He said I behaved like this out of fear that I wasn’t good enough for her, out of fear of being dumped. When she told me this, I refuted this proposition with the following counterargument: ‘Pfahhhh…’ Once I asked Bar to do us a numerology to see whether Duchi and I were compatible. He fed the data into his software and got ‘Croc and Duchi = perfect match from heaven’. But after another huge row I asked him to check it again. He got ‘Croc and Duchi = scary future’.

  We passed the airport; another plane leaving the country. ‘It Must Be Love’ finished. The soldier said, ‘Hey, could you get me the number of Michal Yannay?’ I looked over at him. His face was big, round, pink, shiny. You could say he was chubby. His hair was strange; hair that hadn’t quite worked out its place in the world yet, in the taxonomy of hairdos. Whether or not there was a skullcap on top of it I don’t remember. Spots round the mouth and a smell of sour glands. I didn’t know his name until I heard it on the morning news later. He wanted a kids’ TV presenter’s phone number. I turned my gaze back to the road.

  When I was a soldier, hitchhiking was the thing I liked best. You hang your finger out at the angle you’d hold a fishing rod and you never know what you’re going to pull up. A businessman in a magisterial Merc which purrs you at 200 kph to the very gates of your base? Or a political science student from Jerusalem with a rusty Citroën and a smile worth 300 kph? And how far would you get–five, twenty, a hundred and twenty kilometres? I loved talking to the people, hearing about their worlds, their work, their kids, the countries they’d known–any place far away from the loathed routine of army life or the brief leaves at home. And I always loved this road, Highway No. 1. A short transition between two worlds. Between the mountains and the sea, between history and now, between sacred stones and sand. The first sign that you were crossing from one territory into another would always be the hissing and chirping of the radio, the strange music of the cross-purposed airwaves. To our right, the soldier and I saw the Ramle cement factory, a weary but unceasing behemoth exhaling huge plumes of smoke into the huge floodlights which marked its huge perimeter.

  He told me he was from Petach Tikva. His friends had dropped him off at the train station in Tel Aviv, where he knew he’d be able to hitch a ride to Jerusalem. He was serving in Bethlehem. What was going on there was a real shitstorm, but at least we were showing them who was in charge. Thank God his platoon commander didn’t have any time for all these rules, which anyway they were always changing every week–don’t open fire here, don’t open fire there, yes this, no that, those are the guys you can shoot, those are the guys you can’t…His platoon commander said that if a single hair fell from the head of one of his soldiers then the whole of Bethlehem would go up in flames, because you don’t mess with the Golani. Not the Golani. They don’t piss around, the Golani. One time their patrol came under fire from a sniper but no one was hurt. This other time someone chucked stones at them from a rooftop and a mate of his got this gash over his eyebrow and the platoon commander went wild and they went through all the houses in the street one by one, and pulled out all the men and covered their eyes with flannel blindfolds and tied their hands behind their backs with plastic cuffs.

  ‘But your friend got a stone in his eyebrow, didn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘Did any of his hair fall out while this was happening?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why punish all the men in the street? The platoon commander said he’d freak out if a hair fell from anyone’s head. By the way, what do you do if it falls out naturally? Cheap conditioner? Or one of those really tough combs? Or natural shedding?’

  ‘Pulling a few Arabs out of their homes with handcuffs isn’t burning Bethlehem, man.’

  Latrun now passing on the right. He didn’
t have a girlfriend. His parents were divorced. His conversation was peppered with religious expressions like ‘with God’s help’ and ‘God willing’, but that might have been the influence of religious friends in his unit, not necessarily his upbringing. When a Zohar Argov song came on the radio he wanted me to turn it up, which was kind of weird for such a white kid, liking a guy like Zohar–another late influence, maybe. Everything he mentioned that he liked or was cool was a ‘waste of time’. Oh yeah, waste of time, man. And true enough, I was wasting my time, in several respects, though there was no way on earth he’d know that. No, he hadn’t ever killed anyone, but his platoon commander, praise be to God, had: waste of time. There was this one time it had happened on a patrol he’d actually been on himself. A bullet in the head! The son of a bitch ordered it. Like you order up pizza, said the platoon commander. Only instead of picking up the phone and saying I want pepperoni, I want onion, I want olives and mushrooms, this son of a bitch held up his hand and made gestures and everybody saw he had a gun in his hand, though by the time they’d run and reached him, no more than, like, forty metres, maybe fifteen seconds, someone had made the gun disappear, which meant another night of blindfolds and plastic cuffs. Fun. That was how the soldier summed up his tour of duty in Bethlehem. Fun: waste of time.

  We passed Shaar Hagai with a bus in front of us, a No. 480. ‘How’s the Polo?’ the soldier asked.

  ‘A pleasure to drive.’