Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

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.’

‘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.

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.