Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

Every week for two hours I immersed myself in this world. I listened to intimate confessions and cried along with my fellow therapees, and they cried along with me. Memories came back to me with force and clarity, though somewhat mixed up with each other. Ilan said that I was ‘concurrently experiencing three different phases of post-trauma’: the Event Phase for the Café Europa attack, the Immediate Reaction Phase for Shaar Hagai and the Early Reaction Phase for the Little No. 5. He said there weren’t many cases like mine. Like everyone else, Ilan had seen me on Noah’s Ark , something which I felt bothered him, though he never said anything. Maybe my status as a famous survivor didn’t sit well with my being a newcomer to the group. But all the others were fascinated. I felt that they were proud of me, that I somehow represented them. They liked to walk with me in the hospital corridors, where strangers would recognise me and shake my hand and offer condolences. Once I was walking with Dani when a member of the Knesset visiting the injured stopped us and shook our hands. He stank of aftershave and told a lousy joke about a member of Hamas arriving at the gates of heaven and getting the good news and the bad news.

The way the group therapy worked was you had to repeat your story every session to try to bring a little more to the surface. You’d keep telling it and you’d reach a new perspective, that was the idea. We heard the same stories again and again, and we were happy to. From time to time Ilan would interrupt us and ask a question which everyone would answer briefly.

‘What does an explosion sound like?’

‘A little “puck”,’ said Noa.

‘A big “boom”,’ said Dani.

‘“Vooomm”, like in Lebanon, like a mine,’ said bearded Uri, or Roy — I always mixed them up.

‘Nothing,’ Roy said, or Uri. ‘Just pain in the ears. And the air moving. I felt it and I lifted my head.’

‘The sound of blood hitting a wall.’

‘Handclaps, or fireworks,’ said Yulia of the Café Europa.

I said: ‘Shattering glass, and a humming silence like you get in an elevator…’

‘What are we talking about?’ said Uzi Bracha. ‘Why do we need to sit here and tell each other what an explosion sounds like?’

No one answered. Ilan said, ‘Did I tell you about the mice?’ Without waiting for a reply, since he knew he already had, he went on:

‘They were testing the reactions of laboratory mice to electric shocks. One mouse which had been given an electric shock was released from its cage into a safer environment. It learned its lesson and never returned to the place where it was hurt. A second mouse was given the same shock but in a closed environment. It became ill, lost its hair and developed an ulcer. Now, two mice in a closed cage were given shocks but did not become sick. Because they had each other. They were stuck, like the second mouse, in a dangerous place without an escape route but they were not alone. This is what we are doing here. Every one of us is stuck in a place he can’t escape from at this stage. But we have each other.’

‘And we’re not losing our hair,’ I said. Ilan gave me a sour look and didn’t respond. We all sat quietly, listening to Yulia’s crying.

‘A trouble shared is a trouble halved?’ said Dani.

‘Well, sort of,’ he replied, stroking his goatee.

Every Wednesday I also took the lift up to the ward on the eighth floor to sit with Shuli. I came to know her for longer, and better, in a coma than I’d known her awake. Her face was unchanged and still beautiful, except that her eyes had lost all their depth. There were tubes connected to her mouth and arm, tubes disappearing under the sheet into the heart of her. The machines fed her, made her blood flow, breathed for her. The one thing they couldn’t give her was sleep.

As the weeks passed I learned to recognise Shuli’s mood by subtle changes to the air in the room. One time, when I was sitting alone next to her telling her something, she blinked, and I felt it was for me.

On her birthday I brought her flowers. ‘Happy birthday,’ I said. There were other flowers and presents beside the bed. ‘In this country, every birthday you celebrate is an achievement,’ I said. ‘And a marriage? Something to be proud of even if it didn’t last. And a kid — you’ve really got it made. You’ve created a dynasty. I read in the paper that we’re making a lot of babies here. You know, relatively.’ She didn’t blink. I would describe the view to her, the best view in the hospital, looking down over wooded hills and valleys, and when I was there on my own, I would raise the bottom of the sheet and touch the crocodile on her ankle. It was my secret sign to her — our sign. One warmer evening I arrived to find the windows open and a battered-looking pigeon fluttering around the room, like a synapse firing in a brain. It saw me and took off. Maybe that’s a sign, I thought. Or maybe it’s just a pigeon.

Her boss came often — Alon, the chef from the King David, sometimes accompanied by other chefs from the hotel. He told me she had talent. He’d known Guetta too: ‘a lovely guy’. Shuli’s father and sister came every day, always depressed, crying, and praying for a miracle. I heard Shuli’s father tell Alon that it was insensitive to bring Arabs along, and rather than reply Alon and Osama left the room. ‘I should have said something. I got plenty of things I could’ve said,’ he told me in the corridor. ‘I’m not a fucking lefty but come on. A little respect for human beings.’ Shuli’s bed became a meeting point. I followed the soap opera of her aunt’s health, advised the aunt’s partner on the telecoms market and recommended a travel agent to him, and, in return, was recommended an accountant. Guetta’s father always asked me about what Giora had been up to in Tel Aviv on the morning of his death, and I always replied that I was sorry but I didn’t know. He asked me to write something for a commemorative booklet and I promised to think about it. I even brought Duchi once, after our ‘Who the hell is this Shuli?’ argument.

And all the time the thing that connected us lay there above us all, silent, lonely, machine-bound, lifeless yet alive, waiting for something to change. And then something did change.

The thing I enjoyed most about those Wednesdays was the journey home. An intercity bus ride at night has a charm of its own. It’s uninterrupted thinking time. The whole day seems to sink through you and dissolve in the blood. People talk, but not so much and not so loudly — out of deference to the darkness, perhaps; the steady hum of the engine and the rhythm of the passing lights, the lights of the villages off in the night, the bluish light of the bus’s interior. On my night rides I laid my forehead against the window and let myself breathe deeply and relax. It was on the bus, quietly, that I really examined myself. That was where the memories returned. It was on the night buses that carried me back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv that I began to accept myself as I was, and began to think about who I was going to be.

‘ You know something, Fahmi? I think you may be the perfect man. You never shout at me, never disappear, never turn up smelling of vodka and cigarettes and other women. Even Mama would like you. Let’s see…physiotherapy in an hour, then a wash. Massage first. You had a busy day yesterday. Both Lulu and Rana. Very cute, Fahmi. Still not talking to you, but I saw her kissing your forehead .’

Bilahl believed that he could carry out what everybody else only talked about: the mother of all operations. After his visit to Gaza his confidence had gone through the roof. It was power he was feeling.