Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

Mahmuzi was quiet all the way, only peeking from time to time at his Koran and mumbling, ‘Allah chose me.’ She knew the Café Europa because she’d been there on a previous visit to Jerusalem. There was good coffee and always plenty of people. An older, bald man in a green shabby coat had made a pass at her. He’d asked what such a pretty girl was doing on her own in a place like that. Then he asked whether he could pay for her. She’d turned her back on him.

‘Look to the right,’ she said. ‘That’s the place. Quite full.’

As they went past, Mahmuzi turned his head. ‘The security guard doesn’t look too serious.’

‘Good. If you’re not sure, there are more places along the road.’ Mahmuzi shook his head and she pulled up. Her stomach was aching with tension. She sighed. ‘All these Arab houses. The thieves took everything. Without shame.’ Later, when I learned about all of this, Bilahl told me that she was Halil’s cousin. Mahmuzi connected the battery to the explosive belt.

‘Take the bouquet. If you can, wait five minutes, until I’m far enough away. Good luck.’

He got out and she drove off, and in her mirror she saw him get closer to the target, a bouquet of yellow flowers in his hand, and it seemed to her as if he walked in without the security guard checking him. At one of the red lights on the way to Talpiot she looked in her mirror at the line of cars behind her and heard what could have been a faint explosion. She drove into the car park of a mall and went in to walk around. In the electronics shops there were radios and TV sets showing various channels. Although she couldn’t hear what was being said, she stopped outside one and watched — she would be able to tell. A live interruption at that time of day would be enough. The solemn angle of Danny Ronen’s eyebrows would be enough.

According to Channel 2’s report later that evening, the guard (only lightly injured) would probably just have glanced at the bouquet and indicated with his eyes to Mahmuzi that he could go in. Haaretz described what the shahid would have seen: a lot of glass everywhere, those round red-and-black tables, a long wooden bar with round bar stools. He would have smelled the coffee and tuna. Perhaps, Yediot Achronot speculated, somebody (now dead) had spoken to him, and he would have smiled back and whispered in his heart, Shut your fucking mouth, you’re going to die. He would have gone to the bar and waited in line and ordered something simple in pantomime, something easy to order, something fitting for his last drink on earth. Water, possibly, or a coffee. He would have sipped it and looked at his watch and pulled the safety-catch nail. And, perhaps, at the very end, he spat on the floor and looked up into the shocked face of the girl behind the bar (now dead) as she opened her mouth to protest. ‘Don’t…’ she may have said, who knows, and that’s when he would have pressed the button.

I don’t know where I’d be today, or who, if we’d played tennis or gone to the centre of town, or if the day hadn’t dawned so clear that Shuli had had the urge for an Ice Europa, or if such a thing as an Ice Europa had never been invented or if we’d left half an hour earlier or ten minutes later, or if — the biggest if of them all — she hadn’t asked to change places. An infinity of ifs. We stand at a crossroads a hundred times a day and we have to make our choices or we can never progress, and our choices determine who we are. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it was that cold, metallic morning. And yet I can’t get rid of the feeling that, for the third time, it wasn’t me but somebody else who was making the decisions.

Shuli returned from the toilet and said she had thought the nicest thought, and smiled her hopeful, closed-mouth smile, and then the air trembled.

It’s impossible to differentiate between what I think are my memories and what I’ve constructed from newspapers, photos, TV footage and the accounts of other people who were there and whose memories may themselves have been constructed from newspapers, photos and TV footage. Maybe nothing of what I am going to relate now is really mine, or maybe it all is. In any case, what I think I remember is that the air trembled and there was darkness. As if we’d been teleported to a different place: water dripping from the ceiling, chunks of concrete and clods of earth, black-and-red tables flipped and shattered; puddles on the floor. A building-site smell, a scorched-meat smell, a tear-gas smell, and the smells of coffee, blood, gunpowder and flowers. I couldn’t stop staring at a mobile phone, half spilled out of a woman’s handbag, and I realised that was because it was ringing. It reeled my gaze in among the chaos of the shouting. If there was shouting. Wasn’t there a sickening silence? Or both — first the silence, then the shouts, and then the crying. I didn’t see Shuli at all. I don’t remember anything of Shuli after what she said and her closed-mouth smile. I do remember a yellow flower — I don’t have a clue how it got there but other people also mentioned seeing these flowers. They said there were three separate explosions, stark white lightning, and an intolerable feeling above all of being trapped . All that I seemed to have missed, like the kick to my head that needed a couple of stitches and left me with a bump and a permanent scar. I don’t remember the kick but I do remember the foot that kicked me. I watched the foot fly towards me, wearing a heavy army boot. I didn’t get it for a moment, and then I got it and I wanted to scream and maybe I did.

Someone was asking me whether I was all right. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t seem to answer. I was hot, I felt as if my skin was speckled with little burning spots. A voice told the hand that was trying to lift me not to: ‘Check that nothing’s broken first.’ The hand disappeared and came back as fingers gently examining my body. I was turned over and investigated further and I must have passed the test, because at last I was lifted up. ‘Can you walk? We’d better get out of here.’ I leaned on a shoulder and walked. Something was sticking to the heel of my shoe. I tried to clean it off with a piece of metal while I sat on the pavement waiting for an ambulance. I tried to clean the soles of my shoes and looked about me.

A body in a blue Adidas shirt was lying at an unnatural angle in the shattered glass and ash, its face burned, mouth wide open, eyes staring upwards, a ring on one of his fingers. People were shouting, ‘Another piece over here,’ and a look passed between me and a guy with scalp-locks who was covering up body parts. We both swallowed smiles. Why? I guess it must have been ‘piece’, meaning ‘chick’ in Hebrew slang. Somebody ordered me to cry and put a chocolate cube in my mouth. A tall girl in a Café Europa T-shirt was dazedly wandering around; another girl was refusing to get in an ambulance. Volunteers from ZAKA, religious types in fluorescent plastic vests, were collecting limbs and viscera and fragments of flesh in plastic bags so that the proper rites could be given over the bodies.

‘Are you all right?’ There was a hand on my shoulder. A bespectacled woman with short brown hair and a pleasant pale face. ‘I’m Seelvia,’ she said in a South American kind of accent. ‘I’m from the mental health clinic in Emek Refaim. I heard the explosion and came down to help.’

‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, though I was shaking from fear. Sylvia moved off towards a fat and sweaty curly-haired man, one hand on his waist, the other touching a bleeding wound on his face. She laid a hesitant hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you all right? I’m from the mental health clinic in Emek Refaim. I heard the explosion and came down to help.’ The man looked at her in wonder. ‘What’s your name?’