Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘What was he doing in Tel Aviv?’

‘What? I don’t know.’

‘He never went to Tel Aviv. Why on earth Tel Aviv? Wherever he went, he always told me. I never even had to ask. Was he visiting you?’

‘No. I was on the bus. The taxi. The minibus. I got off before the…’

It didn’t seem to be of any interest to her. She kept walking, silently.

‘You don’t want to know what he told me?’

‘Will it change anything?’

‘Maybe.’

She didn’t answer.

‘I found his PalmPilot. Afterwards.’

She stopped and turned and looked towards the mountains, towards Bet Zayit, up at the sodden sky.

‘I don’t need the PalmPilot. Give it to the police.’

‘No, they don’t nee…’

‘So give it to his mother. Or keep it. I don’t know. What do you want?’

‘I want to know who he was.’

‘Why?’

Good question. I passed my hand through my wet hair. ‘I don’t know, I was the last person who talked to him.’

‘So what?’

‘Don’t move!’ She froze. A single step in front of us, on the slippery path, a not-so-big scorpion was watching her. She hadn’t seen it yet, and it hadn’t seen me yet. Moving carefully, I picked up a fist-sized stone from the top of a gravestone and approached it very slowly, lifted my hand back and crashed it down on the scorpion’s head. Shuli jumped and let out a shout. ‘What’s that?’

‘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!