Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘Jimmy, I’ll explain everything, promise. I’ll be in tomorrow, OK?’

‘You remember we’ve a meeting in Brussels next week to prepare for.’

‘I remember.’ He hung up. No time for a goodbye, of course.

In my other hand I still held Giora’s PalmPilot. My arm was touching Shuli’s, enjoying the warmth of it, clinging to that warmth. I could scarcely believe this girl, who stood on walls marvelling at the desert on the day of her boyfriend’s funeral. I told myself not to take advantage. She laid her head on my shoulder and said, ‘I need a drink.’

We stayed for three hours. She never stopped talking, and I never stopped listening. She drank wine. Finished a whole bottle by herself. I drank coffee and felt the caffeine boring a tunnel through my brain. The more the wine warmed her up, reddened her cheeks, opened her heart and soul to me, the more the caffeine made everything seem vaguely surreal. She talked, and cried. She said much more than I can remember, a raging river of words, overflowing and then subsiding, twisting here and there, but always flowing towards the ocean of her true self. One moment she’d lean forward with an elbow on the table, her cheek in her hand and her wet eyes lasering into mine, and the next she’d lean back, cross a crocodile ankle over a knee and stretch her arms wide. I was no more than her punctuation: a question mark here and there, an occasional comma or full stop or paragraph break. I was a wholly passive listener, just catching the rain falling from her wintry sky, and asking myself only: why me? It’s a question I asked myself many times. Both then and in the days and months to come.

Sex wasn’t the only thing she talked about. She talked about her parents, her sisters, her friends, her ex-husband and her work. But the sex blots out the memory of everything else. I mean, how could it not? She’d grown up religious but had lapsed. A life-long Jerusalemite, married at twenty, divorced at twenty-four. After the divorce she started going around in low-cut jeans and T-shirts that showed off her midriff. She discovered the freedom of an exposed body, the breeze cool on her skin, the gazes and the compliments of men.

In truth, she confessed, polishing off another glass of wine, she’d discovered sex when she was still married. When her husband was away on duty with the army reserve, she had picked up a porn film from an automatic DVD machine. It was only that she’d been bored, and curious. But she was hooked right away. Before the end of her husband’s reserve duty she’d rented ten movies and watched each of them a dozen times. She was addicted to masturbation. She never cheated on her husband except inside her head, where she cheated on him with everybody: the actors in the porn films, presenters on TV, footballers, ministers, waiters and chefs at work, passers-by she saw in the hotel or on the street. Every day, several times a day, whenever she could. If her husband was at home, then in the shower or another room. When he wasn’t there, anywhere she could think of. The fantasies remained locked deep in her head and her husband, who was, like her, from a traditional background, knew nothing about her new discoveries and how much they excited her.

He’d been her first. She lost her virginity shortly before the wedding. When she discovered the orgasms and the fantasies, she tried to hint that she wanted more, but he wasn’t interested. He simply didn’t enjoy it as much as she did. The marriage died quickly, but not because of that. Because of unconnected things, some of which she told me about.

After the divorce the number of her lovers swiftly rose from one to eight. The sex was mostly disappointing, of course. Life is not fantasy. It’s more complicated, it takes longer, the people are less attractive, less shameless. The other person doesn’t behave as they do in the imagination, and neither do you. But in the lobby of the hotel where she worked she met Giora Guetta. He was wearing mirrored shades and had hair the colour of dark honey. She noticed his good looks, but the sunglasses were what snagged her attention. What gave him the confidence to show off like that? she asked herself. He gestured for her to come closer and when she did he took off his glasses and asked her out for a drink. She laughed: how brazen could you get? He was a security guard at the hotel: her first serious boyfriend since the divorce. Maybe the first serious man in her life. There was no need to keep anything from him. He loved what she loved, the porn and the fantasies and the games. But the moment it stopped being a secret, it stopped exciting her. The sex was wonderful, but it couldn’t include the excitement of perpetual discovery. ‘You’re never happy. The grass is always greener. But I really loved him. He was a crazy guy, always surprising, always doing unexpected things.’

Shuli broke off — her voice had shrunk to a scarcely audible croak. Her lip trembled and her eyes filled once more with tears. She wiped them and her nose.

‘What did he do?’

‘He was looking for a job. He didn’t know exactly what — some kind of business, I think. He had plenty of ideas. Computers, maybe. He loved computers. The security guard thing was just temporary. One of those Ministry of Welfare jobs you get leaving the army.’

She fell silent. I stayed silent. I looked at her and I couldn’t see in her any of the things she’d just told me. Her beauty had a cleanness to it. Coal-black shoulder-length hair, straight and dense, light mocha skin, a mouth naturally disposed to smile, and those big, black, deep eyes.

The place was filling up but everyone else there was quiet, wrapped up in themselves. Nobody bothered us. I wanted to stay and hear more, and not just because I was drowning in her eyes and gripped by her stories, but because the whole situation was so strange to me. For years I’d been continuously running, chasing time, fretting about lost seconds. The idea of a leisurely conversation lasting several hours in a café had never even crossed my mind. I’d forgotten that you could do such a thing. It just didn’t have any room in my daily schedule. And now I was just letting the time pass without giving it a second thought. Without feeling that I was missing anything. Or almost. And time, for its part, hardly moved. Almost stood still, as if waiting for me to decide what to do with it, where I should take it from there. If a stray thought regarding time, or work, or Duchi, did pass through my head, I banished it immediately. The main thing here was not to take advantage.

‘Tell me something else,’ I said.

She was a chef in the King David Hotel, just up the road. It was hard work. An eight-hour shift on your feet, the only girl in a very masculine and physical environment. The other chefs in the hotel were mostly Arabs, with a sprinkling of Russians and two Israelis. She had no problem with that, but it wasn’t easy to be part of their world. During peak hours there were five chefs in the kitchen working flat out. Tourism might have been hit by the bombs, but (touch wood) Jerusalem hadn’t had a bomb for several weeks and the King David was pretty busy. She told me that she loved her work but wasn’t sure how long she could last there. She had an evening shift she hadn’t cancelled yet, though it wouldn’t be a problem — they knew Giora. And then suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

‘Maybe it’s better,’ she said, ‘to submerge yourself in work after a day like this.’

‘With a bottle of wine in your head?’

‘Right. But that’s nothing new. Everyone drinks on shift.’

‘A whole bottle?’

‘Maybe not a whole bottle.’

She smiled slowly. I suddenly remembered: ‘They never got back to us.’

‘Who didn’t?’

I took Giora’s Palm out and showed her. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll try?’