Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘Avi.’

‘Nice to meet you, Avi, I’m Seelvia. Do you remember what happened?’ He looked at her. ‘Do you want to tell me?’ He continued looking at her, his T-shirt outlining his sizeable paunch — he looked to me like the football manager Shlomo Scharf.

‘Avi, we’re still in the event occurrence phase. If you open up now and share what happened, it will help later on.’

He continued looking at her for several more seconds.

‘What do you mean, what happened?’ he said eventually. ‘Don’t you see what happened?’

‘Well, of course…’

‘You’re asking me what happened? You haven’t noticed that some fucking stinking son of a bitch Arab with dread-locks in his ass blew this whole fucking place sky high?’

‘Yes, Avi. I just want you to try and share…’

‘Share!’ Now he was properly screaming, like Shlomo Scharf used to, and Sylvia retreated a step. ‘Are you fucking joking? No, tell me seriously, are you all right or what? These fucking Arabs…fuck it! Fuck them all, now! What happened? She asks me if I remember what happened!’ He was waving his hands around and you could see the deep cut above his cheekbone, and someone approached him and embraced or restrained him, and led him away from the psychologist. She didn’t move for several seconds.

I came across Sylvia in hospital a few weeks later, when I came in for my group therapy meeting and my weekly visit to Shuli. It turned out that initially at least she’d had a little more success with her next patient, a teenage girl. But when Sylvia put her hand on the girl’s shoulder to console her, she felt a sticky spatter of skin and flesh on the girl’s shirt and she broke down. When I met her again she was still in recovery.

I remember the hospital clearly. My injury was superficial, but since it was a head wound they didn’t want to take any risks. I had an ugly cut on my forehead and an uglier bump underneath it, and there was someone else’s blood on my clothes. They stitched me up, gave me a blood transfusion (donated by someone who’d found the time to do so — unlike me) and sent me to the ward upstairs, where I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I sensed bodies in white moving near me, shadows in the light more than clear pictures. Cotton wool wiped my forehead and my mouth. I heard ringing from afar. My pillow was changed and I felt how heavy my head was, how full of pain. Very slowly the blurred image cleared up; the white body became a nurse, the colours around me became flowers and chocolates, sent by I don’t know who. My phone chirruped its A-Team ringtone and the nurse told me it was prohibited to talk on a mobile in hospital. So I switched it off and as I put it back in my trousers, folded on the table beside the bed, my hand touched a shard of glass. I pulled it out: it was all that remained of the PalmPilot. Another victim of hostilities. Gone, and with it Giora Guetta’s story.

‘Where’s Shuli?’ I asked. My voice sounded crushed — what came out of my mouth was different from what I’d tried to say — but the nurse understood and promised to find out. Later she told me that Shuli was still in the emergency room, in what condition she didn’t know. There were no visits to ER, she said, and in any case I wasn’t allowed to get up yet.

Mom and Dad, Leah and Yochanan Enoch. Tears in Mom’s eyes, horror and helplessness in Dad’s. More chocolates and flowers. My brother in Maryland sent his regards: he’d tried to call, but the time difference made it difficult. He wanted to get on a plane and come. I said there was no need, no way. Grandmother had called too, asking whether I needed anything. My sister Dafdaf arrived, and then Duchi. It was strange to see her, but she looked so beautiful I couldn’t help but shed a tear when I saw her. I rolled the tear around my tongue and returned her hug, smelling the old familiar smell, kissing the familiar soft neck. I kidded her: ‘Duchki! What are you doing here?’

‘Would you like me to leave?’ She embraced my parents and my sister, went downstairs to bring coffee for everyone and returned with a nurse rolling a TV she’d sorted out for us, followed by Muku.

‘It’s bizarre, Croc. I was about to call you when I heard the explosion.’

‘You heard the blast?’

‘We heard it at home,’ my father said.

‘It sounded like somebody’d thrown a frog from the top of a building,’ said Muku.

‘A frog?’ asked Dafdaf.

‘A garbage frog,’ said Muku. ‘How’re you doing, Dafna?’ He kissed her on her cheek. Dafdaf is two years younger than me and Muku, but she’s been in love with him since she was a kid. When she turned sixteen she lost her virginity to him. He told her he wouldn’t do it before. I knew all the details, though she’d made him swear not to tell me a thing.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s a garbage frog?’

‘I don’t know if you have them in Hadera — these enormous green skip things.’

‘Not Hadera, Muku. Pardes Hana.’

All of us were watching Dafdaf and Muku during this exchange: I suppose we were all thinking about their childhood love and imagining what might have happened if she’d stayed. Duchi caressed my face and hair with one hand, and held my hand with the other. It was pleasant. There was no need to talk, and no chance to anyway — my father shushed us as the news came on and we fell obediently silent.

‘A few minutes before noon today,’ Osnat Dekel said, her eyes shining with tears, ‘a massive explosion shook the peaceful German Colony in Jerusalem. A suicide bomber entered the Café Europa in Emek Refaim Street during the busy lunch hour and blew himself up. Eighteen are reported killed and fifty-three injured. Danny Ronen brings us the details.’

When the number of victims was announced, you could hear a kind of rustle or murmur ripple through the ward. There were other TVs on, and all of them were tuned to Channel 2. Someone shouted, ‘What?’ Mom’s quiet tears turned into outright crying and Dad enfolded her in a clumsy, confounded hug. Duchi pressed my hand and I could feel her trembling. Muku placed his hand on Dafdaf’s shoulder. Danny Ronen started coming at us from all directions.

‘Earlier today,’ said Ronen, ‘the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, a military wing of Hamas, took responsibility for the devastating attack in Jerusalem. The bomber, they claim, was Mahmoud Salam al-Mahmuzi from the Al-Amari refugee camp. This afternoon a video of Mahmuzi was broadcast on Palestinian TV in which he claimed the attack was in revenge for the assassination of Halil Abu-Zeid in Al-Birah yesterday morning.’ We heard a ragged chorus of protest or complaint from around the ward, as if everyone were watching an incompetently refereed football match. ‘But military intelligence doubts Hamas’s ability to organise a response so quickly. A senior source told me that it is possible Mahmuzi was not the bomber at all, or alternatively, that someone else appeared on the tape. The real bomber, it is thought, is likely to have been hiding out in Jerusalem for several days. An investigation is proceeding. Halil Abu-Zeid, you may remember, was the subject of a targeted assassination carried out by the air force in retaliation for the shooting at Shaar Hagai earlier this week.’

‘Oh, what liars these Arabs are. It’s just unbelievable,’ Dad said, and at that moment the curtain separating us from the next bed was drawn back, and a woman’s face appeared.

‘Did you see that? Have they no shame? They’re not human beings, they’re animals! They shoot a video like that and expect us to buy it? I’ve said it a million times: get rid of them all, every last one of them! I don’t want to see them and I don’t want to hear them.’