Almost Dead Read online

  ‘What’s the engine size?’

  ‘Thirteen hundred, I think.’

  ‘Mm. And it’s an automatic. We’ll see how it does on the hill in a minute.’

  Don’t count on it burning up the road with a fatty like you in it, I said to myself. The radio started crackling and whistling, meaning we were beginning the climb into the mountains. I stepped on the gas. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ said the soldier and then I saw the flashes, and heard the rear window shatter and something move very close to me and the soldier screamed ‘Aiiiiii!!! FUCKING CUNT!’ and I hit the brakes with everything I had.

  10

  Three minutes.

  The skeleton of the bus below me. Grandfather Fahmi’s bus. My heart was beating very fast. Blood was surging through me: my fingertips were tingling. I was breathing as if I’d been sprinting, even though I’d been lying motionless for nearly an hour. A line ran dead straight from my eyes down the sight to the white lights below. The earplugs gave me the feeling that I was watching everything from somewhere to the side of myself. I waited for Bilahl to say the word.

  The sniper who opened fire on the road at Wadi Haramiya had the advantage of daylight. No flashes of gunfire could be seen. Because of the light and the acoustics of the wadi nobody knew where he was shooting from and he kept it up for a long time. We didn’t have that luxury–we had to cause as much damage in as little time as possible. Three minutes.

  Bilahl checked his watch. When he saw a bus climbing up the road he said, ‘The bus is mine. You take the cars around it. Aim only at the white lights. Now fire.’

  Oh, Svetlana, what’s this now? Another wash already? You only did one five minutes ag…

  ‘You know, sweetie, you don’t look half as bad as those people make you out to be. Every time I go in or out of the hospital they’re there with their signs…here, let me just, slowly, let me soap, OK…But they can’t get in here, lyubimyi, don’t worry about that…’

  I’m floating at sea. I can see the shore but I can’t get to it.

  The bus immediately skewed round on its axis and skidded to a halt: it seemed that the driver had been hit and wrenched the wheel over. An eruption of horns and then quiet, except for our gunfire. Windscreens shattered in several cars behind the bus. To the left, in front of the bus, rear windscreens shattered. The rifles fired continuously without jamming. We changed magazines. The smoke and the gunpowder scent were choking me. Bilahl’s hand was on my shooting hand. ‘That’s it, let’s go.’ I started as if he had woken me from a deep dream. The road below us was illuminated by the mess of cars. The bus had blocked both lanes. Shattered glass and smoke. A few cars were stopped in front of the bus, more behind it. Mayhem.

  We climbed down to the roadside and crouched in the ditch. I noticed how I was sweating and panting and how strange it was that the time had passed: something you’d been anticipating so much, suddenly behind you. Squad cars and screams on the far side of the road. Some cars on the near side had also pulled up. People were jumping out of them and vaulting the central reservation to the other side, to help. Others stood and watched but most kept driving. One squad car even came over and kept the traffic on our side flowing. Funny, a squad car whose job was to help get us out of there. It had been Abu-Zeid’s idea to escape by car but, counter-intuitively, into the west. He knew it would be the last thing they would think of. There would be no police barriers in that direction, he’d said. And he was right.

  The car arrived. This was the most dangerous moment of all: getting into the car with the rifles in the middle of the road, among the cars that had pulled over and the crowd looking on at the chaos. But darkness helped. Clouds concealed the moon and stars, and the hysteria on the ground had no focus or direction. We climbed into the back seat and the car accelerated away.

  Nobody said a word. The car had yellow number plates, of course, and the driver had the blue ID card of a Jerusalem resident and an Israeli driving licence. I tried to look at her. I saw long black hair and, from time to time, her eyes in the mirror, examining me. You could see the eastbound traffic backed up for miles on the other side. We saw the last cars braking and joining the end of the tailback. She turned right off the highway and we drove for a few minutes in the dark with hardly any other traffic on the road. Blue lights flashed ahead of us, but it was only an old Civil Guard jeep. Those old boys just pottered around Latrun Park looking for cars with couples fucking in them to leer at. Or that’s what Murad, the guy we stayed with in Beit Likya, told me later.

  This was Grandmother Samira’s area. Murad said that the ruins of her village, Dir Ayub, still existed, and promised to take me there. We ate at his place, and only then did I realise how hungry I’d been. The pitas with zaatar, cheese and olive oil were wonderful, and so were the apples and coffee: after intense physical effort the taste buds grow sharper–you’ve become a predator and the body wants its due. We showered and put on the clean clothes Murad supplied us with. The female driver left with a nervous smile and we switched on Channel 2.

  There they were. The bus. The cars. Shattered windows. Ambulances. Police cars. Danny Ronen was talking over a map of the region. A military source had informed him that the sniper probably came out of the Bethlehem area. Or Hebron. ‘We can speculate,’ said Danny Ronen, ‘that probably the sniper made his way by foot from Bethlehem or from the area around Husan village, crossed the green line near the Israeli villages of Zur Hadasa and Mavo Betar, descending the steep and rocky paths from there to the slopes below the village of Beit Meir, above the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road.’

  ‘Beit Meir? Oh, you fucking cunt. Beit Meir?’ said Bilahl.

  According to information Danny Ronen had received, the sniper was still at large and the hunt for him was concentrating on the area between the attack and Bethlehem. ‘It is mountainous terrain and very difficult to search,’ Ronen said. ‘Helicopters are floodlighting the area and search teams with tracker dogs are already on the ground, but the hunt could well continue for days.’

  ‘Clowns,’ said Bilahl.

  Witnesses described how the gunfire had come from the right-hand side of the road; somebody said he’d seen flashes from the sniper’s rifle, and then watched him getting up and running up the hill. Danny Ronen sketched escape routes on his map and explained where the military forces thought the sniper was right now. Murad brought a couple of mattresses into his living room and went to sleep. Bilahl and I were full of energy. My heart was still pounding. We drank more coffee. And the shots kept ringing in my ears, and the streams of white continued to flow across the ceiling of the strange room like the lighted windows of an infinite train.

  It was only the following morning that the official statements admitted that it was uncertain where the gunfire had come from, and that the origin of the sniper, or snipers, was unknown.

  11

  People always wonder what the last thing going through a person’s mind before he died was. Who did they think about–their kids, their parents, their partner, their first love? Did they ever think about love in general? Did their whole life replay itself like a movie? In the case of the soldier who rode with me that night from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I’m pretty sure I know the answer. The last thought running through his mind before dying, which he expressed with great conviction, was: ‘My finger! Fucking cunt, I can’t feel it!’

  The Polo was one of the three or four cars in front of the bus which were hit. There were several cars behind it that also got shot up and others damaged in the subsequent crashes, but the bus, the No. 480, was the main target and took most of the bullets. The next day I saw the diagram in the papers. They got the colour of the Polo wrong, of course. And the direction it was facing when it stopped. And the location of the gunmen. But never mind. This is what happened: since we were ahead of the snipers, they were shooting at us from behind. The first bullet shattered the rear windscreen and hit my mobile phone, which was resting in its holder. The second bullet came through the empty frame and hit the middle finger
of the left hand of the soldier, Menachem something, nicknamed Humi by his family and friends. That was when I stamped on the brake and Humi screamed. Apparently a smashed finger is immensely painful. I couldn’t see much. He was holding his left hand with his right and there was a lot of blood. He screamed with a powerful voice, a huge voice I’d never have guessed he possessed during the previous half an hour: ‘Aaaiii!! Fucking CUNT! AAAIII!! MY FINGER!!’ In great pain, he said, ‘I’ve got a field dressing in the small pocket of my combat trousers. Get it out.’ Field dressing–the kind of hateful phrase you forget exists until you give a soldier a lift. I fished the bandage out but I was too late: he had got out of the car. In retrospect it was a mistake, but he couldn’t have been thinking clearly. The snipers kept firing. I don’t think they were aiming. Humi was standing on the road beside the Polo. I didn’t get out. Call it instinct. I stayed in the car and kept my head down. Humi kept screaming, ‘HELP ME! HELP ME! MY FINGER!! FUCKING CUNT, I CAN’T FEEL IT!’ and then he was whimpering and then there was a little ‘ai’ and no more. I didn’t hear the shot or hear him fall: what I did hear was a sudden silence. That was the surprising thing. I crawled out of my side of the car and round the front until I got to him. He didn’t look too good. His left hand held a palmful of blood and as far as I could see the middle finger–the finger that gestures ‘fuck you’–wasn’t there. No wonder he couldn’t feel it. His throat was a bloody pool.

  It was the first body I had ever seen. Until that moment, in the thirty-three and a third years I’d spent on Planet Earth, I had never encountered a body, not in the army nor on the roads nor in hospitals; not Grandma or Grandpa. Humi was my first, and though you might have hoped he was only unconscious, even I could tell he was indisputably dead. The next day I read that the bullet had hit the third vertebra of the spine. He would have died within a couple of minutes. It is an injury you cannot survive.

  I crouched next to him. I didn’t touch him or look at him again: I shut my eyes and breathed in deeply. The shooting had ceased when I was crawling around the car and hadn’t been renewed. There were shouts from the direction of the bus behind me, and the wounded moaning, begging for help which I couldn’t give: I only wanted to get the hell away from there. I ran to the side of the road and blundered into the forest. I didn’t know what I was doing: I might have been running towards the terrorists. Maybe I’d have run straight into them and…but I didn’t think. I had to get into the cool and dark forest and breathe some real air. Not perhaps because it was the first body I had ever seen, or because this body belonged to a guy who’d spent the last half-hour of his life beside me. Nor even because of the responsibility I bore for his death–because it was me who had brought him to the point in time and space where it happened, and the speed at which I drove, the cars I overtook or didn’t, the lane I chose, the moment I hit the brake were all my decisions.

  But I wasn’t thinking of anything when I ran from the road to the forest. I fell on to the damp thorns and breathed the air, smelling the moist earth, and then I opened my eyes and saw patches of cloudy sky between the branches and saw myself flying up, above the trees, above the clouds and the sky, looking down and seeing Earth quickly diminishing, zooming out from Shaar Hagai, from Israel, from the Middle East, from Africa, Europe, Asia, zooming out from Planet Earth, from the halo of light surrounding it, from the darkness surrounding the light, past the sun and other stars…and I was in space. I saw aliens fighting among themselves, creatures from different galaxies, and then I stopped. And looked down.

  Why does it matter who is where, and which people, on which piece of land?

  Zoom in to Planet Earth. Continents fighting continents–black against white against brown against yellow. World wars. Zoom in towards the countries, the neighbours hunkered down in their hatreds; zoom in towards the related nations, the brother-or the cousin-nations of the old Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, the subcontinent, the Middle East.

  Zoom in–Palestinians and Israelis.

  Zoom in–Orientals and Ashkenazis, right and left. Keep zooming in, to the cities, the quarters, the neighbourhoods, street against street, house against house, flat against flat, husband against wife, brother against brother. Now zoom out, flying fast, with the cacophony speeded up into twittering gibberish, and do it all over again.

  I opened my eyes. Another thought fluttered down from the trees and settled in my head. Here is where Tel Aviv ends and Jerusalem begins. This is what I thought. I told myself, again and again. Here is where Tel Aviv ends and Jerusalem begins.

  I don’t know how long it took before I returned to the car. Humi still lay on the ground. I heard ambulances arriving. I didn’t know what I should do. Part of me wanted to get into the car and drive away. It was over, and there was nothing I could do to help anyone. The road ahead was clear, except for squad cars and ambulances arriving against the direction of the traffic. Either my ears or phone were ringing. But as I approached the driver’s side, somebody blocked me.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘What “yes, sir?” My phone’s ringing.’

  ‘You just came from the forest out there, didn’t you?’

  I looked back to where I’d come from.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  I lay on my back and flew out of the atmosphere. What did he want from me? Who was he?

  ‘Who the hell are you? What…’

  ‘The question is who are you and what were you doing there?’

  I hadn’t even registered that he was a cop. I had to fish out my ID card. He went to his car and confirmed that the car was mine and only then did he let me enter it. I stretched my hand out to the phone and then I saw that its display had been shattered: perhaps I’d heard its final dying cry. Could a telephone be considered a victim of hostilities?

  Hostilities–what a word. Did the snipers feel any hostility? I guess they did.

  I stood around for several minutes, near more people who were standing around for several minutes. The paramedics did their jobs, and we stood around them and looked bewildered. Many people were on the phone, in the talking-on-the-mobile-after-a-terrorist-attack posture: the phone is pressed against the ear more tightly than usual, than necessary, as if the words coming in are more important on such an occasion, and mustn’t be allowed to escape. A slight bending of the back and the neck thrust forward as if setting oneself to attack an enemy or climb a mountain. The eyebrows frown, the forehead is creased, and the other hand–this is strange–the other hand is always held to the other temple, thumb to ear, fingers over the forehead. Perhaps it’s to listen better, or perhaps it’s a way to cover the eyes in a gesture of ‘Oy vey’. A whole roadful of people gesturing ‘Oy vey’.

  The policeman wrote down my details. The ID card was fished out again. I was told I would be invited to give evidence. I signed something. I checked the car. Apart from the shattered rear window and the shards of glass in the back, nothing had happened. Not a bullet, not a scratch, nor even a bloodstain. Even the phone holder hadn’t got a scratch. Only the smell of Humi the soldier, sour sweat mixed with gun oil, lingered in the car. And his gun was still there, too.

  I took it out and laid it gently next to Humi’s body. I was beginning to feel the adrenalin of the survivor, the euphoria of the saved. Everybody there was, I think. We were alive! The bodies spread around us, the groans of the wounded, the medics working, the smell of cordite, the ringing in our ears–and we were alive! More alive than we’d ever been. Our bodies were trembling with life, our hearts greedily beating, the blood pumping double speed in our veins. My body was working and warmed up and craving motion. I had to get out of there. I got into the car and drove away at a speed I could scarcely contain, and the radio came on with the engine and took me straight back to the moment before it all started. When was it, an hour ago? The sound of the radio, the way the reception faded and the soldier had said something and then started screaming. I changed to a station from Jerusalem and there it was, of course, the old song of mour
ning: Bab al-Wad, remember our names for ever, Bab al-Wad, on the way to town. How many times was I going to hear it in the coming days? It occurred to me that every time I heard it from now on, I’d remember Humi.

  Either Humi or Giora Guetta. And if them, why not me? If people shoot at each other, blow each other up? You feel your turn waiting for you round the next corner. Yours, or someone you love. It is embodied in the geography. It is encoded in the national genes. With every attack the feeling gets stronger: that the death of someone close to you is getting nearer by the moment: next week, the next street, tomorrow, today, and then suddenly it’s right there. You imagine the mourning, the funeral, the pain, the request to say a few words. What are you going to say? How much better than you with words the deceased always was, how eloquent and funny and unafraid of public speaking? Maybe just stick to that, and not too heavy on the clichés, please. And after the funeral–the rehabilitation, the getting-over-the-pain, the guilt after spending a whole day not thinking about them, the guilt after you laugh again without restraint; the guilt when you’re enjoying wild sex or daydreaming or just returning to life. But who was this person I was thinking of? I couldn’t make out their face. Bab al-Wad, on the way to town.

  I opened the door to my parents’ house and silently eased myself in. I ate everything in the refrigerator. I didn’t realise how hungry I was. Or how tired. In my childhood room, wrapped in sheets smelling of my childhood, my stomach filled with the food of my childhood, I finally slept, and the last thing I thought before I lost consciousness was: I’m still alive.

  12

  ‘Is the ice ready, Svetlana?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Hartom.’

  Ice?

  ‘We’re going to do an EVM test today. Torch, please.’