Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘What?’

‘Don’t tell anyone yet.’

Ron and Ronen were stunned. Three minutes later Talia Tenne burst through the cloudy glass door and asked with shining eyes whether the rumour was true. ‘We don’t know anything about rumours,’ said Ronen. She looked at him furiously, sat on an empty chair between the three of us, and stared us out using her pretty eyes until we cracked. ‘I’ll kill you if it leaves this room,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’ She smiled her sweetest smile. Ten minutes later Bar sent the numerologies: ‘Rosh Haayin = bad for Time’s Arrow’ or ‘Rosh Haayin = international future for Time’s Arrow’, whatever we chose.

Jimmy was right. I wasn’t doing my job very well. I couldn’t care about another sales presentation, another meeting summary, another two-day trip to Europe with non-stop work on the plane: flying, landing, taxi, identical hotel room, identical meeting room, identical dinner, identical porn, identical breakfast. Since the euro had come in I couldn’t tell the difference between the countries: everybody spoke English with the same accent. After sleepless nights, it was a real effort to clear the fog and think logically. My work hours were still long but I worked much less. I frittered away time in the smoking corner, I fell asleep on the sofa, I found myself on Ynet, porn sites, gunning down Danish drug dealers on gaming sites, I spent a third of my day making coffee on the espresso machine or compulsively scoffing pretzels and biscuits while chatting to whoever was in the kitchen. I wasn’t really interested in the Austrian telecoms company that wanted to improve its directory enquiries service, or in saving half a second per call in Spain or in real-time solutions, server efficiency, long, wide and flat databases, probability-based algorithms, voice recognition upgrades, interfacing, sockets, schmockets, websphere voice response, killer apps, blah blah blah blah blahhhh . Time’s Arrow continued to streak into the future, but I wasn’t on it any more.

We moved to a modern building in the business park in Rosh Haayin, an ugly little town twenty kilometres east of Tel Aviv. Duchi and I bought a clapped-out Peugeot 206 for twenty thousand shekels — Duchi continued driving the Time’s Arrow Polo and I drove the Peugeot though she was only driving to Ramat Gan and I had to get to Rosh Haayin. She was a lawyer halfway through a lucrative trial and I was just a failing salesman in a start-up company. I drove every morning (‘against the traffic, against the traffic!’ crowed Jimmy with such delight that he almost sold us on the virtues of not working in the centre of Tel Aviv) to our offices on the second floor of a three-storey building populated by start-up companies in various degrees of trouble.

Lunch consisted of hummus, stuffed vegetables or pasta served ‘à la mode Rosh Haayin’, which, Talia Tenne assured us, would one day soon be nationally renowned. Instead of espresso bars and sushi, street food, beans and rice and stews from Shabazi and Shimson Absolino’s; instead of the Mediterranean, the arid hills of Samaria. The guards at the entrance to the Dizengoff Centre were replaced by a razor-wire fence and the quasi-military park security; the sounds of the city with the calls of the muezzin, or, in the evenings, shooting from the direction of the territories. A single melancholy table-football table replaced the fun room and our designer kitchen became a nook with a microwave, a fridge and a kettle. Economy waffles stood in for organic brownies from the bakery. Cheap veneered MDF replaced clouded-glass doors and silvery steel tables. Colour disappeared from the walls and from people’s faces. Ronen and others left. Eight workers were dismissed, including Shoko from IT Support and Noga from Marketing.

The last time I’d thought about Giora had been beside Shuli’s bed, when his father had asked again what he’d been doing in Tel Aviv on the morning of his death. The PalmPilot, which I’d been going to start solving this mystery with, had perished in Café Europa. If the Palm doesn’t exist, I thought, neither does Giora: there was nothing to be done. But when I tried to connect my computer to the network in Rosh Haayin there was a problem with Outlook. I reinstalled the program, and when I did that, it asked which user I would like to choose. Two options: Croc or Guetta.

And then it hit me — the day after the first attack, before heading out to Jerusalem, I’d synchronised Giora’s Palm to my computer. The aluminium and silicon bowels of my computer contained all the details of his life.

Croc or Guetta?

I sat in front of the screen with my mouse in my hand, and thought about the options. Choose my name and continue with my life or choose Guetta, the stranger with honey-coloured hair and mirrored shades who, by exchanging a couple of words with me, had sent me to Jerusalem, to Shaar Hagai and Café Europa, to a funeral, to the bedside of a girl I was half in love with. Deep inside, I felt that somehow this was a sign that Shuli would wake from her coma. Didn’t this little coincidence compel me to try to find the answer for her as a present on her return to life? That was why — along with nosiness, voyeurism, a sense of adventure, and other reasons which all helped to obscure the fact that perhaps it really didn’t matter any more — I chose Guetta. Click. There he was.

Omar Sharif came from the village of Beita al-Fauka near Nablus. Nineteen years old, with long-lashed eyes and a floppy fringe as dark and lustrous as Tom Cruise’s. He volunteered, and Bilahl was impressed. The one time he came to our place, during the curfew, I remember him gazing through the bars on the window and showing us a dog in the street. ‘Look,’ he said — an Israeli soldier was trying his best to stroke it.

Bilahl recruited a handful of others along with him. He went to Qibya and Rantis, the two villages closest to Ben Gurion airport, and met people who wanted to help. He went to Gaza again. When he returned he was already beginning to think in terms of a combined attack: one unit would proceed on foot from either Qibya or Rantis and attack the hangars and planes on the ground with Qassam missiles; a second unit would drive a booby-trapped car through the new terminal, which was under construction and (according to recently updated aerial photographs Bilahl had come across) not very well guarded; a third unit would consist of two Istishadin travelling on two separate buses — one from Jerusalem, the other from the Raanana Junction. The logistics were overwhelming, the number of people involved unprecedented, the risk very high. It’s easy now to point out Bilahl’s mistake, but it was understandable. For an operation of that scope you had to build hierarchies of command and responsibility, and so, when Omar Sharif made such a good impression and said he would recruit other people, Bilahl gave him his phone number.

‘ …one of them in prison for the next four hundred years! And the other lying there like a cucumber! ’

‘ Stop it, Father. We didn’t come here to weep .’

Why didn’t you come on your own, Lulu? You should have left him at home with his tears…

‘ Please try not to shout like that near him, sir. Try to say only positive things .’

‘ What did the nurse say to me, Lulu? ’

‘ She said to say positive things .’

‘ How can I say positive things when my child is a murderer? He’s going to kill me — he’ll give me a heart attack! Two sons I had, and he was the good one. He promised to go to the— ’

‘ He will go, Father, you’ll see. Now, let’s have some music .’

Yes, Lulu. ‘ Amarein ’. The two moons…