Assaf Gavron - CrocAttack!

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?’

Duchi disengaged herself from the embrace. ‘You’re saying I didn’t need to worry? I’m just hysterical? And paranoid?’ Her tone had changed: the tears weren’t there any more.

‘I didn’t say…’

‘How could you be so insensitive? Not to call just once more? You did it on purpose, didn’t you? To show me I’m just hysterical.’ Now there was anger, maturing like a good wine. ‘What do you expect me to think? It’s the bus you take every morning at that time! And I’m supposed to look at the little flame-thing on TV? What fucking flame-thing?’

‘You know, the, you know, the graphic of the map showing the bomb…Duchi, I didn’t do anything on purpose, I swear, I just…You know it was the same minibus that I was on? I actually talked to…’

‘Oh, you son of a bitch !’ She was whining now and wiped her big brown eyes with her forearm. She sat down next to the table and absent-mindedly grabbed a handful of chips.

‘Hey, go easy on the chips!’ I told her. ‘How was your day?’

‘What do you fucking think?’

We sat in silence for a few moments. I took a bite of the Cannibal and she stole chips and stared at the corner of the table and eventually lifted her eyes to me.

‘Tell me what I’m going to do with you, Croc?’ she said.

And then suddenly a thought struck me – until that morning I hadn’t known anyone who even knew anyone who’d been in a terrorist attack. A few weeks earlier the water-heater guy had come to do some work, and he said a cousin of a friend of his had been injured in a bomb in Petach Tikvah the week before. He was the closest, until Giora Guetta. But I didn’t really know Giora Guetta either. What does ‘knowing’ someone mean? Knowing the name? Saying hello when you meet? The person knowing you? The number of words you exchanged? I was still trying to puzzle it out when she got into bed.

‘Duchi?’

‘What?’

‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight,’ I said.

‘Idiot,’ she said, and I climbed on top of her. She was satisfied. Then she climbed on top of me in return.

In the morning she made me swear to take a taxi, though I’ve yet to hear of two bomb attacks happening in exactly the same place on following days. Somehow, despite this clear and logical statistical data, people are convinced that the terrorists tell themselves: ‘Ahmed, hey, it worked, let’s try again tomorrow in exactly the same place since there are bound to be loads of people there and no security.’ In practice, the army and police upgrade their security to maximum in the place that was hit, people avoid going to that area and family members become hysterical. I told Duchi all of this and she said, ‘But what about the No. 18 bus on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in ’96?’

‘Those were a week apart,’ I said. But it was a pretty feeble point. So I ended up taking a taxi. A Little No. 5 didn’t blow up that morning. But so what? A real No. 5 didn’t blow up either, the whole time I worked for Time’s Arrow, miraculously. On none of the days I took Little No. 5s to the Dizengoff Centre did a real No. 5 get bombed. So: what? I mean: so what , exactly, Duchki?

Amr Diab is singing ‘ Amarein ’. It’s about two moons. He means the girl’s two eyes or her two…

Someone’s playing this music for me, the two moons of Amr Diab, and I want to move my head but my head doesn’t move. If I’m dreaming, the dream is never-ending. But I’m not dreaming, I’m hearing the song; I can smell this smell, I can feel the fingers tearing into my muscles, the heels of the hands kneading my flesh. But my body doesn’t move and my eyes don’t open.

After the two moons Amr Diab sings ‘ Nour el Ein ’– The Light in Your Eyes – and ‘Always with You’ and then Nawal Zuabi starts singing. It reminds me of the show Ya Leil Ya Ein on Future TV, the Lebanese TV station, with the dancing and the girls. Who’s playing this music for me? I can smell this good smell. Not Svetlana – Svetlana would never have been able to keep her mouth shut. Is the good smell you, Rana? Why are you quiet? Why is nobody talking? I listen, but all I can hear is the music…

Where am I? If I’m in heaven, then where is Mother? Where is Grandfather Fahmi?

If they’re not here, then I’m not in heaven.

So where am I exactly?

My grandfather, Fahmi Sabich, arrived in Al-Amari in 1949. Most of the inhabitants of Beit Machsir who were driven out that year settled in the East Bank. But Grandfather wanted to stay close to his village. Close to the house he built. He was sure he would return to live in his home. He never did. Never saw his home or his friends or his cousins again. In Al-Amari there wasn’t room enough even to raise chickens, but he met Grandmother Samira there. She came from Dir Ayub, a village that doesn’t exist any more. The Jews didn’t even build a settlement where it had been. They just destroyed it and built a road.

‘ Bidak turkusi birasi… ’ Inside my head I want to dance…

I can feel how loose my muscles are now and the oil on my skin and the cool air from the ventilator drying it off. I piss…oh, that’s good.

‘Wow,’ the idiot bitch of a nurse says, ‘look how much you’ve made!’

One tube for piss, another for air; one tube for piss, another for air; one tube for piss, another for air…