Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

Majed and Ibrahim weren’t close friends. Unlike the guys from the mosque, they weren’t religious and knew nothing about politics (girls and football: that was what they talked about) and I hardly saw them outside of work. But I enjoyed our days together in the packing-house — the condescension of the locals and our constant fear of the Border Police forged a bond between us.

Rana, I can smell that it’s you…I can feel your fingers on my face.

Say your name.

I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry I didn’t come back. I’m sorry. But please say something…

‘ Sorry, Dr Hartom, I’ll be right there…! ’

Svet? Is that you, or Rana?

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

With the peak of the summer behind us, the air began to move and suddenly it hit you that air wasn’t just a suffocating blanket but something you could actually breathe. Of course, I was missing home, and Lulu and Rana, and even places like Ali’s café in Al-Amari. But after two months of working in the packing-house life had settled into a routine. I grew used to the village, the people, the job, and never saw any Jews. Maybe that was why everybody seemed so relaxed. Who knows how long I would have continued in this comfortable routine if my back hadn’t gone?

I’d had a few little warning twinges, but I’d just ascribed them to the new stresses on my muscles. And then one afternoon, it was like my whole body had suddenly seized up. I couldn’t move. Even sitting on a chair, doing nothing more than breathe, waves of pain were shooting through me. I couldn’t even answer the floor manager when he asked me what had happened. Was it my back? I nodded. He told me to lie down on the floor and raise my knees to my stomach. I wasn’t the first worker it had happened to, he said, and I wouldn’t be the last. I lay there for a few minutes with my back on the cool floor and sipped slowly from a glass of water he’d brought. Gradually I began to feel better. I managed to get up and walk slowly. Breathing became easier and the pain faded away. I signalled to the floor manager that I was able to carry on and slowly but successfully made it through to the end of the day. In the small hours of the night I was woken by an overwhelming pain.

I didn’t know what to do — who I could call, where I could go in the middle of the night. I lay there drowning in my suffering, waiting for the time to pass until dawn.

‘Are you completely crazy, Croc?’ She looked a little crazy herself — red eyed, mad haired. I was hardly looking my best myself. I’d had one too many, as they say. I’d had two too many. Even I could smell the stink of the cigarette smoke I’d been marinaded in for hours.

‘What?’

‘Didn’t you hear there was an attack?’

‘Oh, a half-arsed one, come on.’

‘Half-arsed? Two people have been killed, you fool! You call that half-arsed?’

‘You think that’s not half-arsed?’ I just wanted to sit down, drink a glass of water, get rid of my stinking wrinkled clothes and go to sleep.

‘Where were you? Don’t you understand I was worried about you? You don’t come home and you don’t call. Just like last night. You don’t even call to wish me good luck for the trial…’

‘Yeah, sorry, I…’

‘There’s an attack in a restaurant, people are killed and I…’ Duchi gave in to great high-pitched sobs, spasms of furious tears that shook her shoulders. I stood there, looking on. ‘Where were you?’

‘In Bar BaraBush. Where else? That’s where I always am. You don’t think I’m the kind of loser that goes to those steakhouses, do you? I actually find it a bit insulting that you think I’d be there.’ She ignored my attempt at humour.

‘What were you doing in Bar BaraBush? Why the hell do you go there every evening? With this Bar… ’

‘Not every evening. And I wasn’t with Bar, I was on my own. And the night before I was with Gadgid, a guy who was in the army with me…Look, Duchki, I don’t understand. Haven’t you realised yet that the attacks can’t hurt me ? They can’t touch me—’

‘ You don’t understand. They’re following you! And eventually they’ll get you! I was just so completely sure you were there today.’ Her rage was diminishing to relief. ‘You’re always eating steak.’

Things will be all right, and if they aren’t, that’s all right too. Or things will not be all right, and if they are, that’s not all right either. Me v. Duchi.

‘OK,’ I said in a softer voice. ‘Let’s just go to sleep.’

‘No, I’m furious. Who is this “Gadgid” person? Why are you up until four in the morning with him? And the rest of the time with Bar. What do you talk about? What’s so…where are you going? Croc, Croc, don’t…oh, how brave! Turning your back. Too tough for you, is it, to have to listen to this?’

‘I need to piss, what do you want?’ I muttered, heading for the bathroom, but she was still talking and I don’t think she heard me. Lawyers, I consoled myself, make speeches as a form of keep-fit. ‘…blah blah blah, is that what you’re talking about in Bar BaraBush? You were supposed to be too old now for getting shit-faced in bars. What happened to that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, mid-piss. ‘I really did think I was getting older.’

I was still drunk. I felt nauseous. I announced that I was going to sleep. She was angry but could hardly stop me. I got undressed and passed out, basically. Every three or four nights, the accumulated exhaustion would hit me and I would sleep like a dead man, and when I woke up she had already gone.

She called in the afternoon to say she was sorry. Well, me too. Bibi had invited her out, she said, so if I wasn’t planning to go home then she’d go over to her place. I told her not to go. I would come home.

‘Can we watch Noah’s Ark together?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’ I gave her a kiss down the receiver.

I left work early and went to the supermarket to buy stuff for a dinner of appeasement: wine, pasta, a few leeks, mascarpone cheese (for a recipe from the first Naked Chef book which I planned to cook), ingredients for a salad, strawberry-cheesecake Häagen-Dazs and Swiss chocolate with pistachio nuts. I was in a reasonably good frame of mind as I queued, full of good intentions and refreshed by a night’s sleep and an easy day at work. But the line wouldn’t move forward. The girl at the till was slow and the guy in front of me kept changing his mind and scuttling off to get new items. A quiet fury was rising within me like blood pressure. And then suddenly, out of the background noise of honks and engine noise, there came the unmistakable sound of an explosion.

What happened afterwards was relayed to me by Almaz. Apparently I shouted ‘Enough!!’ several times. I was instantly drenched in sweat (my underpants confirmed Almaz’s story). My eyes looked ‘distant and hazy’. I picked the bottle of wine up and shattered it on the floor then grabbed the guy in front of me by his shirt-front and shook him violently, babbling something about the dinner and crying uncontrollably. Then I seem to have started throwing my tomatoes, one after the other, at the wall. Not ripe enough to splat against the wall, they had bounced back like rubber balls. Then, according to various other witnesses, I ran out on to the street, pausing only to shove the security guard in the chest, still crying and yelling an unintelligible stream of something. I flopped down on a park bench, occasionally shouting, ‘Enough already!’ while my phone rang and rang until I took it out of my pocket, screamed, ‘ENOUGH!’, threw it on the pavement, stomped on it, found a rock and crushed it into fragments of plastic and glass. All this because of a misfiring exhaust.