Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘Yes. What about her?’ asked the deep voice.

‘Uh. I don’t know. She’s in the emergency room. No one tells me anything. At three a.m. someone told me she was stable.’

‘Stable?’

‘Yes.’

He went quiet for a few seconds. ‘It must be very hard for you.’

‘Yeah, well. It’s just…When Shuli came back from the toilet she wanted to switch places. To sit where she always used to sit. We made the switch, and right after that it happened. I mean, if we hadn’t traded places, maybe I’d be in a stable condition right now and she’d be talking to you. I don’t know.’ Why had I agreed to this interview? ‘On the other hand, the guy in the Bab al-Wad attack…he was sitting next to me and he died too, so…I dunno.’

‘Eitan Enoch. One of those injured in the bombing in Emek Refaim Street yesterday. And I think that with these two simple words — I dunno — he expresses better than any politician the feelings of all of us this week. And it’s interesting you mentioned Bab al-Wad, because it’s our next song. Eitan Enoch, in hospital in Jerusalem, we wish you a quick recovery. And may we only hear good news!’

At least he hadn’t signed off with ‘May everything pass on the other side’, like that guy in the eighties used to. Whatever the hell that meant.

I hung up and the phone rang immediately, so I rejected the call and it rang again. I turned it off and lifted my gaze to the counsellor’s beauty spot.

‘How was it?’ he asked. He was writing something in his notebook.

‘I don’t know. Pretty terrible, right?’

‘Yeah…no! No, not at all. Not at all. Tell me, what you told him about Bab al-Wad…you were there too?’

‘Yeah. Why? I was on the Little No. 5 in Tel Aviv too. Giora Guetta, Shuli’s boyfriend, was there.’

At last the counsellor looked me straight in the eye. It was the same look of stunned disbelief that I’d seen on a number of faces outside the Café Europa.

‘I’ll go and check on her condition for you,’ he said.

During the morning I gazed at the clouds outside. Around noon the air seemed to grow sourer and the counsellor returned. He said that Shuli was in a coma. She had been moved to intensive care on the eighth floor. It wasn’t clear how long it would last, or even whether she would come out of it at all — a coma could last from two to four weeks, and after it the patient might wake up or deteriorate into a vegetative state or die. Mom and Dad arrived with good food in plastic containers and messages from all kinds of people. They’d been getting phone calls from abroad. Why hadn’t I told them I was going to be on Rafi Reshef? Why hadn’t I told them I was in Shaar Hagai? So I told them everything, and their faces were astonished, but I just wanted to go to sleep.

Experts came and tested me. My head seemed fine but you can never tell with a serious blow, especially if you’ve been unconscious. I would have to remain under supervision for several weeks, if not months. ‘Unconscious?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you lose consciousness?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Do you remember everything that happened from the moment of the explosion until you arrived at hospital?’ I tried to remember but I couldn’t. Fingers explored my body, and then I was outside. ‘No,’ I said. ‘So you lost consciousness.’ I would receive follow-up tests every Wednesday, before my therapy.

‘What therapy?’

‘The talking group. Wednesdays at seven-thirty.’

They were like a hallucination, my two days in hospital. Visits and doctors. Phone calls and troubled sleep. Walking in corridors and devouring Twixes from a machine. Journalists sitting next to my bed and scribbling quickly in notebooks. Dear, kind Duchi. Jimmy, for ten minutes, running to the airport to catch the flight to Brussels. And I took the lift up to the top floor and saw Shuli. I couldn’t stop the tears. I broke down and they had to take me back to my bed in a wheelchair. And of course, embarrassingly almost, there was adrenalin and a weird exultation and euphoria. I was alive. I felt tremendously alive. I had looked death in the eye and evaded it.

Only sometimes, especially at nights, a feeling seeped through my elation — the feeling that death was getting closer, that death’s interest had been roused and it was looking for me, and that it would eventually, inevitably, find me.

The day after I was discharged I appeared on Noah’s Ark . My memory of it is much fresher for the simple reason that I’ve watched the tape of the show a dozen times. Like a wound you’re dying to scratch, from time to time I can’t stop myself and I stick it on — and then regret it. It swamps me with memories.

The morning I came out, a girl who described herself as a researcher called me, then put me through to Tommy Musari himself. I haven’t had much time to watch TV in recent years but even I know who Tommy Musari is. Even I couldn’t avoid his all-conquering smile and triumphantly gleaming glass eye after Friday night dinners at my parents’ or Duchi’s father’s or (before September 11th) her mother’s. Not one of the three living rooms that hosted family meals on Friday nights (when we couldn’t duck them altogether) managed to avoid one or the other of Musari’s shows over the years— A Little Bit of Musari, Most Musari, The Nation’s Musari . Musari, I should say, happens to mean ‘moral’ in Hebrew: hence the endless terrible puns. But even I knew that the jewel in the crown was Noah’s Ark . It seemed that everyone in Israel except me watched Noah’s Ark , the show that brought together a left-wing widow and a right-wing widow, or a settler and a Tel Aviv resident, or an army dissenter and a general, a cynic and a patriot, a celebrity and a destitute woman. Everyone watched it, left and right, east and west, rich and poor, just like their adverts said they did. Duchi watched it. In Time’s Arrow people discussed it over lunch. Talia Tenne said that the show was even popular in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. So when Tommy Musari himself invited me on to his show, I appreciated the importance of it. And I said no.

‘Good evening and welcome to Noah’s Ark with your host…Tommy Musari!!’ I watched the intro on a monitor in the green room, as I waited to be called up to the stage. The audience was applauding almost hysterically. ‘Good evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Enough…Enough!’ Tommy quietened the cheering with tamping gestures. ‘Tonight is a very special night on Noah’s Ark . Tonight we have…a croc with us.’ A murmur went through the audience — a croc ? Tommy broke into a smile and his non-glass eye broke into a twinkle. ‘No, not a real crocodile, but a young guy called Croc.’ He switched his gaze to a different camera. ‘We Israelis have had a pretty rough week. Three major, savage attacks.’ He paused to raise the tension, and continued in a low voice. ‘Are we going to break?’ ‘No,’ chanted the audience. ‘Are we going to give in?’ ‘No!’ ‘Or are we going to link hands until we’re stronger than ever? Are we going to stay here because this is, simply, our land , and we have no other?’ ‘Yes!!’ roared the audience, prompted by the cue cards somewhat superfluously held up by technicians.

‘Hello, Eitan? Am I speaking to Eitan Enoch?’ Tommy Musari had said when he called that morning, and for some reason I’d said, ‘You can call me Croc. That’s what everyone calls me.’ ‘Then that’s what I’ll call you too. Croc, I heard you on Rafi Reshef and I was moved to tears…’ It was him all right: you couldn’t mistake the famous Musari intonations. ‘I understand you were an eyewitness to the attack in Shaar Hagai, and then you were in Café Europa at the time of the bombing?’ ‘Eyewitness? Well, the soldier I’d given a lift to got shot in the neck.’ ‘Two attacks in the same week — an amazing coincidence…’ ‘Three, as a matter of fact,’ I told him. After all, it was Tommy Musari. He said it was simply unbelievable, supernatural. He said that someone was protecting me, that I’d been chosen to show we can stand up to them, that I was a symbol. I told him I didn’t want to appear on TV. But then he hit me with all of his famous ‘Moshe Dayan charm’, as they called it. An intense bombardment. I resisted until I could no longer bear the headache he was giving me. I gave in.