Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

Safi Bari was the bomb expert. Bilahl wanted me to work with him. Because I’d studied and worked a little in electricity with Uncle Jalahl — and still intended, somewhere, some time, to study electrical engineering — it wasn’t difficult. I had the basics: a light touch, steady hands, cautiousness and patience. Safi has a degree in chemistry from a Bulgarian university. No one would have guessed he was the number-one bomb guy in the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. He was short and thin, with a beard as sparse as a sixteen-year-old’s and small mousy almond eyes. He spoke in a clear quiet voice and wore a little black cap and a rather elegant jacket which made him look like a French painter in a cartoon or a movie.

The essential component in most bombs is a molecule named triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, or the ‘mother of the devil’. It’s easy to manufacture, but unstable and evaporates easily. Dozens have been killed while preparing it. You can prepare it from hydrogen peroxide — the stuff used to lighten hair, which you can pick up in the pharmacy. Or from acetone — the paint thinner you can get in a hardware store, with a small addition of hydrochloric acid. RDX is an explosive based on the same triacetone triperoxide molecule, but its force is greater. It’s also more dangerous, both to prepare and to carry. The ingredients of RDX are ammonia, from the packs of dry ice stocked by large supermarkets or from agricultural fertiliser, concentrated nitric acid, which can be produced by melting and filtering black gunpowder from bullets, distilled sulphuric acid from a car’s battery and distilled water, from the pharmacy in Ramall…

‘ Habibi, habibi, habibi, ya nur el-ein, Habibi, Habibi… ’

Oh, Svetlana, please don’t try to sing. I’m in the middle of something, I’m…where was I?

‘ I’m really getting into these tapes, Fahmi. She always comes and she never talks. She just plays you the music. Always on her own, never with the family. She’s cute. Is she your girlfriend, Fahmi? ’

I don’t know who…Rana? Rana comes? I haven’t talked to her since she…she comes here? Svetlana, why can’t you shut your mouth? I was doing something important. I was…

Sixty-eight milliletres of concentrated sulphuric acid in a flask. Thirty-two grams of potassium nitrate. With a stirring rod help the components blend into each other. Very gently, warm the flask on the cooker. Fill a bucket with ice and a thermometer. Lay a glass in the bucket and pour in the concentrated nitric acid. When the temperature in the bucket goes below 30 degrees, add hexamine — crushed fuel tablets from the Home Centre. Mix. Add ice and salt to the bucket until the temperature goes down to zero. Add ammonia. Mix and keep the temperature below zero for five minutes. Pour the mixture on to a litre of crushed ice and let it melt. Filter the crystals and pour away excess liquid. Lay the crystals in half a litre of distilled water that has been boiled. Filter them and test with litmus paper. Continue mixing in crushed ice and filtering until the litmus paper turns blue and the crystals are stable and safe.

‘ Habibi, habibi, habibi, ya nur el-ein… ’

God help you, Svetlana. Are you a demon? Have you been sent here to torture me?

‘ And what’s he singing anyway? I’ll ask your sister. Maybe she’ll teach me a little Arabic so I could talk to you? ’

God forbid.

Safi is from Bani Naim, near Hebron. His grandfather made explosives from old ammunition shipped by Haj Amin Al-Husseini from Cairo to Hebron at the end of the Second World War. Husseini spent most of the war sitting in Berlin, and after the German surrender he turned up in Cairo, from where he would send over weapons and ammunition that had survived the war. The weapons were rusty or broken or ruined by sand — Italian or Czech or Russian, not as good as the British or German weapons, left lying in the desert for months. But Ali Bari had golden hands. He dismantled the bullets, grenades and rifles and reassembled them. Sometimes he reassembled them differently from the way they were originally made, and occasionally he assembled something completely new. Safi’s grandfather lost two fingers and an eye over the years, but the British and the Jews lost much more than that. He was eventually killed in ’49 while preparing explosives to be used in Jerusalem. His wife was eight months pregnant and she called the baby Ali, after his father. At the age of sixteen Ali Junior started working in the Hebron quarries as an explosives expert. He had eight sons. ‘My father started teaching me at the age of four,’ Safi told me. ‘My brothers moved into other fields of chemistry. One of them is a professor in Boston. Two work in pharmaceutical factories in Jordan. But Father always continued manufacturing bombs, even after he retired from the quarry. He loved the profession.’

‘ Lulu! How are you? ’

‘ Me, I’m fine. But how is he? Is he smiling? Or am I just imagining it? ’

‘ He’s good. We had a successful check-up. Didn’t we, Fahmi? Lulu, I wanted to ask you, because he can’t tell me— ’

‘ What? The people outside? ’

‘ No, no, I’m just curious: what is “yanur aline”?’

‘Ya nur el-ein. The light in your eyes. It’s Amr Diab. You like it? ’

‘ Very much. The light in your eyes. It’s Fahmi’s song. Every morning I put a light to his eyes with the torch… ’

‘ I don’t know this tape. Who brought it? ’

‘ Ah. The girl who comes and sits next to him and never says a word and goes after an hour. A pretty girl. Who is she? ’

‘ Don’t know. Maybe Rana? Rana, I think .’

Rana? Truly? Then why doesn’t she speak?

Dad called. The calls with him were difficult. He asked about my studies. And about life, what I was doing with my days. About Rana. And I couldn’t…I hated lying to him. So I tried not talking to him, not answering when I saw where the call was coming from. But it could have been Lulu calling so sometimes I did answer. And sometimes he would call his brother in the flat and then ask to talk to me. I knew he sensed something. I felt he had made the connection. He knew how proud Grandfather Fahmi was of the shooting at Beit-Machsir in ’48 and I was sure he didn’t want to believe it, but part of him suspected…

Sweat on Safi’s forehead. From time to time he laid the material to rest and retreated into the corner to breathe air, opened the window, breathed in, and then shut it and went back to work. The blue crystals were drying on kitchen paper.

C-1 compound — the bomb you make from RDX — is made of a mixture of 54.6 per cent RDX crystals, 28.4 per cent mineral oil from the supermarket, and 17 per cent lecithin, from the vitamin section in the pharmacy. Mix the three in a plastic bag. Pour the mixture into plastic tubes and place the tubes into an explosive belt sewn specially with straps for the shoulders and pockets around the body for the tubes and the pieces of metal — the nails, ball-bearings and shrapnel that will fly from the force of the explosion and cause more damage than the explosive itself.

What? What’s funny? I love your laughter, Lulu.

‘ Was it him, Svetlana? Are you sure? ’

‘ Ha ha…! Of course! He does it all the time… ’

Oh, merciful God. Take this whore away from me…

Electricity. Two precautions prevent the explosive from blowing up prematurely. The battery — usually from a mobile phone — should be connected at the last minute. Keep it apart. Besides the battery you need to prepare the actual detonator, which can be found in many places, like missile games from toy shops or military flares. Connect the detonator to some of the RDX tubes, make a safety catch — a nail held across the activation button of the detonator — and then close the electric circuit with the battery. Don’t connect it all the way. Now the bomb is ready.