Almost Dead Read online

  ‘A scorpion. Sometimes they come out in the rain, when it floods their holes. And that’s when they’re angry, too. I don’t know if he would have done anything, but it’s best to be safe.’

  She didn’t move, looking at the crushed scorpion, trembling a little, perhaps from the cold.

  ‘Listen. All I wanted to say is that I talked to him a little. And he said, “If something happens to me, tell Shuli…”’

  She looked as if she were debating whether to believe me or not.

  ‘Tell Shuli what?’

  ‘He didn’t say what. He said it like that. “Tell Shuli…” and then he never finished the sentence.’

  ‘Then came the explosion?’

  ‘No. He just stopped, and thought. A moment later we reached my stop and I got off.’

  She thought about that for a moment and looked at me. ‘That was what he said?’

  ‘I think it was the last thing he said in his life.’

  She started to cry.

  She needed a lift to the Guetta family home on Hapalmach Street where they were sitting shiva, and I asked her whether she minded joining me for a couple of errands on the way. I showed her my mobile in its holder, with its shattered display, and gestured behind us, and she turned and saw the missing rear window and the glass on the back seat.

  ‘Oh. What happened?’

  ‘You heard about the shooting last night?’

  ‘Bab al-Wad?’

  I turned on the radio. Forever remember our names. Humi. That was his name.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Eitan. Actually, it’s Croc.’

  She lifted her trouser leg. On the inside of her right ankle, just above the bone, there was a tattoo of a small green crocodile. It was giving me a little red sharp-toothed grin. I stared back at it, blinked, and looked up at Shuli, who smiled at me too, a warm and beautiful smile. Her deep black eyes, enchanting eyes that held mountains and valleys and seas of mist, smiled too.

  We drove to the Orange service centre in Givat Shaul, a short trip from the cemetery. We took a number and sat next to a guy reading Yediot Achronot. The headline was ‘Like Sitting Ducks In A Shooting Gallery’. ‘Bit of a tongue-twister, that,’ Shuli said. The guy shifted his paper and flicked his gaze from us back to the headline.

  ‘These dogs. When are we going to get it? How long are they going to let them make mincemeat out of us?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘What “get what”?’ Another voice joined in: an older man. ‘Get that you can never trust these dogs.’ He had a copy of Maariv in his hand. The headline was ‘Like Sitting Ducks In A Shooting Gallery’.

  ‘And if someone gets that, what’s he going to do?’

  ‘Go in there and raise hell. Scare the shit out of their mothers and grandmothers. So they’ll get it once and for all.’

  ‘They’re turning us into a circus,’ said the first guy. ‘They’re doing “Bab al-Wad” again. What is this? A history lesson they’re giving us?’

  The service centre’s queue-routing system gave its demure little modern ping, and the woman at the desk called, ‘Avi!’ She was brandishing my phone.

  ‘Come and have a look at something. The insurance includes hostile actions, right?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Avi said.

  ‘Hostile actions?’

  She explained to him and he lifted his eyes to mine with respect. ‘Really, you were there?’ ‘Me and him both,’ I replied, pointing at my phone. He extended his hand for a handshake and I shook it limply.

  ‘Don’t worry, brother, we’ll sort you out.’

  ‘The interesting thing,’ I told Shuli on our way to Talpiot, ‘is that in a shooting gallery you don’t have ducks, as far as I know. The last time I was in a shooting gallery was maybe thirteen years ago. But if there weren’t ducks then, I find it hard to believe they’ve got them now. There are cardboard figures of Arabs with keffiyehs. But they could hardly write “Like Cardboard Figures Of Arabs With Keffiyehs In A Shooting Gallery”.’

  I could kind of hear her smiling.

  The third time “Bab al-Wad” came on I switched the radio off. Shuli said she’d heard about the bomb but hadn’t thought she’d know any of the victims. When there was a bomb in Jerusalem, she got worried and checked the names but there was no reason to with Tel Aviv. And that was just the way we reacted to bombs at Time’s Arrow. A bomb in Haifa would have our two and a half ex-Haifa residents making the phone calls and waiting for the names to make the TV. With the Jerusalem bombs it fell to me and Ron to take on the role of those in the know. We knew the street names with the little flame-things on the TV that made us the potentially bereaved.

  Giora hadn’t told her he was going to Tel Aviv. No one knew what he was doing there. He never went there. When she got home from work in the evening she’d called him, but after two hours he still hadn’t called back. It wasn’t like him. She cracked and called his father, who told her, ‘Be strong.’ That night they drove to Abu-Kabir in Jaffa to identify the body. They didn’t recognise what they were shown. Only in the morning, after Giora’s father obtained X-rays of his son’s teeth from the dentist in Metudela Street, did they have a definite identification.

  The Talpiot Glass and Window Co. was our next stop. After the experience at Orange I had prepared rather a moving speech about hostile actions, but they couldn’t have been less interested. They just told me where to park and an Arab guy wrote down my details and told me to come back in half an hour.

  ‘There’s a stall that does a great omelette in pita round the corner. You want some?’

  ‘Sure.’ She was all right. How many girls these days agree to join a stranger for an omelette in pita less than an hour after their boyfriend’s funeral? Later on I learned that she was a chef and may have had a professional interest in the omelette, which doesn’t mean she wasn’t all right, of course. She was much more than that. She agreed with me about the omelettes: tahini, parsley, tomatoes, omelette, pita, salt, pepper, perfect. ‘Waste of time,’ she said, and I suddenly realised I hadn’t told anyone at work that I wasn’t going to be in that day.

  The rear windowpane was gleaming. All the fragments and dust of glass on the back seat and the shelf behind it had been vacuumed away. Who would have believed that this beautiful clean Polo had been a victim of hostilities yesterday? Only the smell of the rifle still bothered me. So I bought a cardboard air-freshener to hang on the mirror–it smelled of coconut and called itself Hawaii!

  ‘Where to now?’

  ‘Hapalmach Street,’ Shuli said.

  I connected the new handset to the speaker and it came alive with a sequence of bleeps and chirps that lasted a whole minute: the little device was bursting with eagerness. I would listen to the messages later (Duchi twice, Mom, Jimmy, Jimmy’s secretary Gili about a flight to Brussels, something ready to pick up), but with Shuli beside me in the car I merely turned it off and drove where the girl told me to drive.

  14

  The last time I saw Halil Abu-Zeid was when he came to Uncle Jalahl’s apartment. He and Bilahl talked while I watched Al-Jazeera. From the little I heard, I realised Bilahl was talking about the next attack. Abu-Zeid laughed and said something I didn’t understand. I also saw him taking a roll of notes out and giving some to Bilahl and Bilahl saying, ‘No. We need to hit now. We’re like a boxer in the ring. When a boxer’s got his opponent on the ropes, does he let him recover or does he finish him off?’

  ‘I knew you would say that.’ Abu-Zeid turned his big head to one side and shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘But we need to stay alive now.’

  ‘He goes in for the kill. He KO’s him,’ Bilahl was saying.

  Next day the shahid Halil Abu-Zeid died and went to heaven and to Allah by way of the offices of the Islamic Charity Society in Al-Birah. He sat and talked there with Dr Hillel, a Hebrew University researcher, and another shahid I hadn’t heard of. Dr Hillel said the subject of the conversation was ‘life’. He left the building a few m
inutes before a Jewish helicopter of American manufacture arrived at the scene, hovered in the air above the building, and destroyed it with a Hellfire missile.

  ‘Who put these things into the heads of my sons? And especially you…you promised me!’

  Father, please don’t start with the tears now. I had enough with Mother’s sisters coming in here and wailing…

  ‘Look at him! My good son lying here like a vegetable. The other one’s going to get four hundred years in jail…’

  ‘Stop talking like this, Father. Positive things, remember? That’s the way he stands more chance of getting better.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Getting better? Look at him! Two sons I had! Two sons!’

  ‘Stop it, Father. You promised you’d be positive with him.’

  ‘How could anyone be positive looking at this?’

  ‘The nurse says he had a good check-up.’

  The body won’t move, and the eyes won’t open. I’m floating at sea. I can see Bilahl on the beach, and Croc, but I can’t get there.

  ‘Look at his eyes! Fahmi? Fahmi! My son!’

  ‘Blood. That’s what they understand. They’re playing a game. They sign peace treaties but you know they’ve no intention of sticking to them. The Palestinian delegations go there and the Jews sit and laugh in their faces. I don’t want to see anyone’s children die, but when I see a child on my street killed by a tank shell, or a house with a child in it destroyed by a missile, I have to retaliate. Watch Al-Manar and see what they’re doing to us! Killing children is part of their policy. With us, if a child gets hurt, it’s a mistake.

  ‘I’m not a murderer. I kill whoever comes to kill me. I do God’s will. My organisation tell the Istishadin to go to places where there’s at least one soldier. But every Jew is a soldier. Every Jew voted Sharon. Every Jew was in the army, or will be, or their sons or their uncles. Doesn’t matter if the Jew works in a bank, a bus, a shop, for the council, they’re all soldiers. They came to settle in my country from Russia, from Ethiopia, from America, talking about the Nazis. But the Nazis ended in 1945. Where exactly is Hitler? Every year they get a hundred thousand immigrants from Russia. So please tell me where exactly Hitler is in Russia right now, and then maybe I’ll listen to the immigrant who comes here at my expense to drive me out of my land with the excuse that Adolf Hitler made him do it. They are teaching us what is right and wrong? They talk about the Muslims, but who dropped two bombs on Japan and killed three hundred thousand?

  ‘And we–we have two options. Death or death. Which one am I going to choose? I choose the less painful option. To die killing the soldiers who murder my children instead of dying from starvation.’

  This was one of the high points of my appearance on Noah’s Ark with Tommy Musari on Channel 2. I spent hours imagining myself giving this speech, over and over, improving it bit by bit, polishing it to perfection. The Tommy Musari in my head would nod away, fascinated, holding up his hand to stop the settler on the other side who’d be trying to interrupt. Eventually the settler would intervene to tell me that Moses had been here three thousand years ago. But we have nothing, I protested. Our life is worthless. It has no value. Curfew. No food. No work. No university. They kill us and all we do is try to stop them, and the settler said it was our fault and I said Israel bombed Gaza with an F-16 and killed the baby Iman Al-Hiju and what did she do, what was her crime, what was the crime of baby Fares Uda? The settler said that Moses was here three thousand years ago. Tommy Musari smiled and said, ‘Don’t you go away during these messages!’

  After the break he began: ‘What does your mother say?’

  I swivelled my chair to observe the audience, all of whom I had brought with me from the village. The whole of Murair was there. ‘My mother is dead, Tommy. But I know she’s proud of me and my brother. Of course she is: she’s like Alchnasa, the mother who sacrificed four sons in one day and then thanked God for giving her the honour of the shuhada.’

  It never ends…

  I’m hot, Svetlana. Where are you when I need you?

  Svetlana. Come to me. Is there anybody here?

  You could shine a torch in my eye, if you wanted to. Or give me a deep massage. Even do the ice. Come on and torment me.

  Where are you?

  I spent all morning soaking the sheets of the bed with my sweat. Bilahl told me about Abu-Zeid and ordered me to come to the mosque. But all my bones ached and I couldn’t stop shivering. The phone rang. ‘Fahmi? You OK?’ Rana: how I loved her voice. ‘I don’t know…a little sick, I think.’ ‘You’re not coming to Murair? You said you’d come back.’ ‘I said…I will come. Sometime. You know how tough it is to get through.’

  I could hear, just from the way she was breathing, that she wanted to say more. To tell me that these people who called themselves my brothers were only fools. That they wanted to take us all back to the dark ages. But she didn’t say it this time. And Bilahl really was my brother. I reflected her silence with one of my own. In the end I said, ‘I’m not feeling too well, Rana,’ and she said, ‘OK,’ and Tommy Musari asked me if I had anything to say to the Jews.

  ‘Let me say this, Tommy. Islam is the religion of mercy; the religion of peace, love, brotherhood and mercy. The root of its name is salam, meaning “peace”. Now, your religion also says “Thou shall not kill” but every day you do. Every hour! Everything in this country must be yours; nothing can be ours! All my people are looking for is peace and freedom, that’s all. But when you blow up my house and kill my children, when you take five hundred men from their homes and make them stand all night in the street, or arrest them without giving a reason, you leave me no choice but to defend myself! You terrorise us with fire and steel and we cannot allow it. We’re not fighting because of money, or even religion, or for the sake of committing a crime. We’re not the Mafia. We have a better cause to live for, and to die for–and to kill for.’ I finished my speech and the audience rose to their feet and cheered me at length, and my imaginary Tommy Musari said, ‘What does your father say?’

  My eyes filled with tears. My father would have killed me with his bare hands, but violence was never his way. My father is profoundly disappointed. I promised him I wouldn’t get into trouble. He only wanted to live peacefully. He thought Bilahl and his friends were throwbacks to the Middle Ages. He thought we were going to give him a heart attack. But I wanted my life to be worth something. I hadn’t done what he asked me. Tommy sat there waiting and I began to cry, and my head spun with thoughts of my disappointed father, my dead mother, my raging brother, and Rana’s soft, clear voice. I got up and shouted and threw the pillow at the wall, because all I saw, every day, all day long, was walls. Walls and the grey glass of the TV and blood: whole days went by without my seeing anything else.

  I looked around the filthy little apartment, went to the bathroom, put my head in the sink and turned on the cold water tap. I badly needed to wake up.

  15

  Despite breakfast and the omelette in pita, I headed straight to the dining table in the Guetta house. It felt like the natural place to gravitate to. I filled a blue plastic plate from the bowls of salad that I was told Giora’s aunts had worked all morning to make: tabouleh, tomatoes with hot chillies, goat’s cheese with sun-dried tomatoes.

  The house was thrumming with activity. Dozens of people were entering or leaving or milling about and talking. Outside, rain was pouring down the windows. It seemed as if the shiva was drawing life into the house, charging the building with life in order to compensate for its loss. Mr Guetta was holding Shuli’s hand and whispering in her ear, tears on his cheeks. Since the only person I knew in the room was occupied, I found myself a chair and concentrated on my salads.

  The next time I raised my eyes, Shuli was embracing Mrs Guetta and Mr Guetta was staring at me. I returned the look and he gave a sad smile. I realised I ought to go to him and stood up, in my hand a half-empty plastic plate. He encouraged me with his smile. I looked for a place to lay my plate but th
e flat was too crammed, so I just headed towards him, shifting my plate to my left hand and extending my right. ‘Mr Guetta, it’s a pleasure. I’m Eitan.’ He looked me up and down, eyes pausing momentarily on the plastic plate. Who knew what Shuli had told him?

  ‘You’re a friend of Giora’s from Tel Aviv?’ So that was what I was meant to be.

  ‘Ah…not exactly. I just saw him on the Little Number…on the bus. I got off before…I talked a little to Giora before I got off.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Shuli said. Have you any idea what he was doing in Tel Aviv?’

  ‘Uh…look, Mr Guetta, I…no. I haven’t. Not a clue.’ I looked in hope towards Shuli but she was still in the arms of Mrs Guetta, both of them in tears, Shuli’s mascara running for the second time that morning. I probed my plate with a fork and speared a cherry tomato, which I hurriedly shovelled into my mouth. Someone came over to hug Mr Guetta: my saviour, I thought. But as I turned to go he reached out to touch my shoulder.

  ‘Hold on, Eitan.’

  ‘Sure, Mr Guetta, I’m sorry. I thought you needed to talk to other…’

  ‘No, no. I just want to know why he came to you. Why he was in Tel Aviv. That’s all. Because he didn’t tell us he was going there. We didn’t think he had any reason to go there. I just need to understand.’

  ‘But I really can’t tell you anything, Mr Guetta. I just saw him on the bus. I exchanged a couple of words with him. He didn’t say what he was doing there.’

  ‘What did he say, exactly?’

  Should I tell him the truth? He only wanted to know what his son’s last words were. He was clinging to the last day of Giora’s life. The need to decipher his actions or his motives was holding him together. As if that would change or explain anything. Should I tell him that his son asked me what I thought about the terrorist? He looks OK to you, right?