Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

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.

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.