Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘It’ll be an hour at least,’ said the driver. I got out of the car and strolled towards the pedestrian gate. A soldier blocked my way.

‘What do you think you’re doing? Get back in your car.’

‘I don’t have a car.’

‘You lying to me? Aren’t you ashamed? I just saw you get out of that car there.’ I could tell he enjoyed peering down at me through his sunglasses. ‘You think I’m an idiot?’

‘It’s not my car, I was hitching a lift.’

‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’

‘No, no,’ I said. He frisked me and went through my bag and let me past to the queue for the pedestrian gate. A friend of my aunt’s was there, carrying two chickens in a basket. I talked to her as we stood in line, and to an elegantly dressed bearded guy who turned out to be a good friend of Bilahl’s from the Al-Birah mosque. After we’d waited for almost an hour, the pedestrian gate was closed down. ‘That’s the instruction from command headquarters,’ a soldier told us, and you could see from his face that he hadn’t a clue why they’d closed it either. Only cars with special permits were being allowed through.

I went back to the queue of the cars and saw that the guy who’d given me a lift had given up and turned back. So I tried offering drivers money to let me go with them. One was apprehensive, a second looked suspiciously at my holdall, a third asked me what we would tell the soldiers. I showed him my permit: ‘We’ll say we work together.’ His name was Muhamed Mahmoud Zakat, on his way to Nablus to buy supplies for his stationery shop.

I sat on a rock beside Zakat’s rusty sky-blue Subaru and called Bilahl, who wasn’t happy. He wanted to work. But it had been weeks, and it was clear we weren’t going to be doing anything for a while. ‘Come on. How long is it since you saw Lulu?’ ‘How long are you going to be?’ he asked, as if I were headed to the other side of Earth. At this rate I was going to be six months. ‘A day or two, maybe longer. Oh, man, these soldiers. They’re driving me crazy already, and we’re not even past Beitin.’

I keyed in Rana’s number but didn’t dial it. I wasn’t sure I had the right to call her. In front of us were cars, chickens, people milling around or sitting on luggage. Behind us the same. You could hardly say the queue was moving at all. Zakat was chain-smoking behind the wheel. He offered me one, which I refused.

‘They won’t let you through,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, when was the last time they did something you wanted them to?’

‘Good question,’ I said, and pressed Dial. She didn’t pick up.

‘ Oh, you bad boy, Fahmi…what’s going on with you down there? Who are you thinking about? Here now… ’

Svet? I’m so hot…

If I’m dreaming, this dream is never-ending.

An ant zigzagged between my feet towards the checkpoint: but would they let it through without interrogating it? When it overtakes the Subaru, I decided, I’ll call again. The ant was the fastest thing on the road, and it was soon forging ahead of the Subaru.

Rana answered: ‘You weren’t supposed to call.’

I wanted to tell her how much I’d missed her, her voice. ‘I’m coming to Murair.’

She swallowed and said nothing for a while. ‘When?’

‘I’m at the Beitin checkpoint.’

‘Oh. So you might not make it at all.’

‘Did I say I was going to make it?’ I got a reluctant laugh from her.

After growing up together, after spending seemingly every minute in each other’s company, after all the times we used to sleep together in our secret hide below the village, after all the times we planned our wedding, I left the village without saying a single word. Bilahl said she wasn’t a good Muslim, was too advanced. Rana said he’d never had sex and was scared of women. Young as she was, she looked down on him, which was difficult for me. He was my older brother and deserved her respect. But he also deserved her contempt.

I left, I missed her, I dreamed of her, I never called her and then she appeared. She didn’t ask why I’d vanished or say how she had found me in the middle of a curfew. Was she there at all or was she an apparition in the night? She took her clothes off standing up while I lay on the sofa. We didn’t stop or sleep all night until I dozed off some time after dawn, and when I woke she was gone and there was only the numb sweetness in my body to remind me. Ever since, I’d been imagining her mouth — like hot ice cream…Another ant was hurrying to join its sister in front of the Subaru. Muhamed put the car in gear and rolled about a metre and then turned the engine off.

‘How long are you coming for?’

‘I don’t know. A couple of days, maybe more.’

‘I’m happy.’

I thought about our place, below the village. Quietly I had said, ‘I love you.’ When she finally replied, I could hear a twist in her mouth. ‘Yes, but not as much as the jihad.’

‘ Maybe I’m wrong, Dr Hartom, but I think he’s been responding more over the last couple of days. For instance… ’

‘ Oh…I see what you mean. Has this been happening a lot recently? Don’t laugh, Svetlana, it’s a natural bodily function .’

Oh, why did you have to do that, Svet? With that old bitch Hartom…

‘ Yes, Doctor. It’s happened several times. His girlfriend was here a few days ago… ’

‘ That’s not always the reason, you know. Sometimes just…anyway, good. Pupils, please .’

Aaaaiii!! The light in my eyes…the sun…the little green car…the Croc…

‘ Good. But in terms of movement and cognition he’s more or less in the same place, I understand .’

‘ More or less. Except for the… ’

‘ Yes, Svetlana .’

Muhamed gestured at me to get into the car. We had managed to reach the first checkpoint. The bag was peered through again, another body-search, X-ray machines, ID cards, permits…go to that caravan and wait for half an hour while we check something. Maybe the plan was to bore us to death. It used to take my grandfather an hour on horseback! I wanted to reach up to the soldier’s arrogant face and crush it between my hands. Brother, there was no need for sophisticated operations with a fool like this — just take his fool’s head between your hands and squeeze.

We made it through and Muhamed took the road east, through Beitin and Ein-Yabrud towards Nablus. I used to drive this road a lot, and it was in a worse state than ever.

There was a new barrier on the way — unmanned that day — three giant concrete cubes and barbed wire. ‘Fucking Arabs suk asses HOORAY the settlers!’ was written on one of the cubes in Hebrew. There was a constant traffic of jeeps on the road: one of them stopped us and checked the bag again and searched the car. They made me take off my trousers. Yet still, it was a beautiful road. I missed these hills. Grandfather Fahmi always talked about Beit-Machsir and the hills of Jerusalem but there’s nowhere like Murair. This is where I grew up, in the dirt and the scrub, surrounded by the bone-dry hills.

Muhamed dropped me off where the road was nearest to Murair and I started walking along the narrow road, its asphalt cracked and crushed by heavy military vehicles. In the middle of the way there was a dirt mound. I climbed up and pissed on it. But this was the best part of the journey — the seven kilometres between the road and Murair, the easternmost village on the ridge that overlooks the Jordan and, on clear days, the distant mountains of Edom and Amman. No cars moved in either direction. I was alone with the hills and the eastern landscape, which revealed itself slowly, bit by bit, the higher I rose and the more I strained my legs; the valley to my left, the valley ahead, the yellow glare of the desert, without even one Jewish settlement to ruin the landscape and the mood. At last I saw the small old ochre houses of Murair on the hill, the tall column of the mosque, the small blue tractors of the farmers. It had taken four hours. It seemed to me satisfying, exciting, to arrive like this, after a fatiguing journey. And then I answered myself in Bilahl’s voice: Don’t be so craven. So pathetically positive. A humiliating four-hour trip instead of half an hour, and you think it’s satisfying? You still think the glass is half full? ‘One of these days,’ my brother once said, ‘you’re actually going to tell me that the occupation was necessary and did us good.’