Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘With a list like that, is it any wonder you don’t have any time?’ asked Jimmy Rafael. No, Jimmy, it wasn’t. ‘No. You can’t manage everything. That’s crystal clear. Croc, I’m not going to tell you what to do with your life. But I’m going to be frank. The company is not in such brilliant shape right now. In a month or two — and I’m asking you to keep this between the two of us — we’re going to have another round of dismissals, and I want you to be part of it. Your recent contribution has been pretty average. We’ve talked about it already, and I was hoping that after two, three, four months you’d get over it. I don’t have much patience in general, but for you I had.’ I nodded, deeply embarrassed. ‘But you are not getting over it . It’s not just forgetting flights, although that was the straw that broke my back. If I could, I’d fire you today. But, as you know, it’s a problem. You’re a national fucking hero. Wouldn’t be very good for the company’s profile. The heartless bastards. They went and fired a victim of terror, the CrocAttack himself. Now, I’ve talked to the investors. Most of our clients are foreign and couldn’t give a damn about your arse but our investors are Israelis. So they’ve approved a special budget to keep you, for now. But I can’t leave you in your position. You’re moving to QA. Talia Tenne will be moved up the ladder and replace you in Sales. Guy will replace Talia as QA manager, and you’ll…

Two shots. A blow. I don’t dare raise my eyes. I tense myself to receive a bullet. In Lebanon, Danny’s jeep moves very slowly forward into the puddle and detonates a roadside explosive device. Danny is killed instantly, as are his commander and the two other soldiers in the jeep. The driver is somersaulted through the air and slammed into some scrub — the impact breaks his pelvis. But he makes it…And meanwhile me, in the tower, lifting my head only when I finally understand that the shouts I’m hearing are ‘Crocos! Crocos! Are you there?’

…Croc, are you with me?’

I started. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Guy will manage the QA and I’m going to be working with him.’ Some fraction of my brain had been processing Jimmy’s words. ‘Right,’ he said, with severity. He didn’t like me as he used to when I was his twin, when we used to sit together in departure lounges, working our phones and making appointments until the very last call before boarding, waiting until our names, variously accented, would echo over the state-of-the-art public address systems of European airports.

‘I do understand,’ I told Jimmy. ‘I…I’m sorry I disappointed you. But I couldn’t have behaved any differently.’ Jimmy extended his hand. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘what I just said, that I would have fired you…’ ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘No, no, listen. You know me. It was in the heat of the moment. I’m happy you’re staying. And if you return to form, you can go back to what you were, yeah?’ I nodded. ‘Your salary will go down from twenty-five a month to fifteen.’

I nodded and went without fuss.

It was my fault that Danny Lam died. We were together in basic training, which was a stroke of luck: we were mobilised on the same day. (Muku was younger than us and joined up three months later.) We volunteered for the same unit, were sent to the same base, ended up in the same platoon, two childhood friends from Jerusalem. It was crappy at basic training, but at least we had each other. At the end of it they asked who wanted to volunteer for the reconnaissance unit. I raised my hand. Danny didn’t. I persuaded him to accompany me to the tests. I pleaded with him: I said that as a friend it was his duty to support me in the tests. So he came. And passed. I failed. I stayed in the regular unit and was posted to the West Bank. He was in the reconnaissance unit and got sent to Lebanon. He died. I didn’t. But I am convinced God meant to select my button. There was some mistake there.

And it was also because of me that Gadgid killed a seventeen-year-old Palestinian. When they saw the flames climbing up the watchtower the patrol came running back down the hill. Gadgid saw the kids climbing on the tower and stopped, drew a bead and fired. Plastic bullets. One shot cracked the knee of a sixteen-year-old, who also broke his collarbone when he fell. A second shot hit another guy in the neck. The son of a bitch deserved it, said my comrades. For several hours afterwards we all stood around the tower, unable to sit down, the adrenalin burning in everyone’s blood, telling stories that over time would become legends to be repeated hundreds of times, for decades — like the ones Gadgid told me in Bar BaraBush. And Danny Lam was blown to pieces and since then, perhaps, he’s been watching over me.

I went back to Bar BaraBush the next evening, on my own. It has a long bar and walls the colour of claret wine. The bar is designed in an L shape, with a long wing and a short one (try the excellent chicken wings, by the way: Bar calls them ‘Vings’). The short wing is where I usually sit. Why am I telling you all this? Because Bar BaraBush isn’t one of those bars with the plasma screen permanently showing MTV or some fashion channel, just a small TV which they put on the short wing after terrorist attacks — with the volume off, since there are always subtitles giving the important information and no one wants to stop listening to music in a bar. There’s a limit to everything.

That evening someone said that there’d been an attack and Noam the barman brought the TV out: an attack on some steakhouse in Tel Aviv. I was sitting in my usual spot and the two barmen and a few others who’d come in from the tables on the street crowded round the little screen. Cigarette smoke, Underworld hammering over the speakers, Danny Ronen mutely manipulating his eyebrows. The subtitle ‘Attack in Tel Aviv restaurant’ was replaced by: ‘Two killed, eight injured’. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief of millions all round the country, and alongside it a faint scintilla of disappointment. ‘What a half-arsed attack,’ I sneered in a voice loud enough to be heard above the music. As the leading authority in the room in matters of terrorist attacks — as the CrocAttack — my verdict was final. Everybody returned to their private conversations, the little TV made its way back to where it lived beneath the bar, and my phone went.

‘Tel Aviv, Croc, Tel Aviv! Nice work.’

It was Itzik, the Attack Pool guy.

‘You going anywhere soon, Croc? We’d be very grateful for…’

I hung up.

I’d been anxious about coming to Kafr Qasim but within a few weeks it was as if I’d never known any other life. Al-Amari faded into memory. Bilahl and Rana and Lulu and Father seemed to me almost like characters in another play. Of course I missed them and worried about them, and thought a lot about Mother and Grandfather — when you’re alone, you live with the people close to you inside your head — but they seemed to belong to the past.

My room was almost as big as the whole of our flat in the camp. The floor tiles were level, the walls white, the bed was more comfortable and much, much bigger. I was addicted to the reliably hot and muscular jet of the shower. I loved the big kitchen, the new kettle, the fridge (a whole shelf of which was mine), the colossal TV with its perfect picture and sound, the stereo, on which Amr Diab sounded better than ever. And I liked the family. The father, Razal, owned a pharmacy in the centre of the village, on the main road. His wife Wasime was an English teacher in a local school. She was pregnant. Their first son was a six-year-old boy called Atta who gave me a poster of Zidane when I told him that he was my favourite player. But after a month I was too busy with my worries and my work to pay much attention to the comfort and the kindness around me.