Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

And then one evening at work (I’d started staying longer again, because there was nothing to do at home and pretty much everyone else had already left for the day) Bar called in a state of high excitement and told me he had something I might like to look at.

A standard Hotmail screen. ‘Well — Hotmail. So what?’

‘Look whose it is,’ said Bar, and I followed his finger to the corner of the screen: gioraguetta@hotmail.com.

‘How the hell?’

Bar smiled with satisfaction. ‘Just luck. I had a bit of time, so I started messing about with it. Actually, I’m an idiot — I tried weeks ago, but with one “t” instead of two. I was trying a few combinations of his name and password today and…what do you think it was?’

‘Shuli?’

‘What else?’

‘How come we didn’t think of this earlier?’

‘That’s exactly what I said.’

I sat down next to him, shaking my head. We may have been a pair of idiots but Bar was also a bit of a genius. ‘Well?’ I asked eventually. My heart was racing. ‘Anything interesting there?’

‘Emails from Binyamin Warshawski. One before the attack, setting the details of the meeting. The other the morning after, asking Giora where he’s gone and why he’s not answering the phone. It says he’s beginning to worry and tells him to get in touch urgently. Says he hopes Giora’s not planning on disappearing with the money.’

‘Disappearing with the money?’ I stared at Bar.

‘That’s all. Nothing interesting in the other emails. Even these two don’t tell us that much…’ He removed his cap and scratched his dome. ‘But at least we know who Binyamin Warshawski is now.’ He showed me the details at the foot of the email: Prof. Binyamin-Moshe WarshawskiNuclear Medicine DepartmentTel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre

And below that, the address, phone number, fax number.

‘What’s the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre?’

‘Wake up, Croc,’ he said. ‘It’s Ichilov .’

I fixed his PalmPilot in half an hour. The contacts were a little flimsy, and the batteries dead. That was all. All he’d needed to do was pop into an electrician’s. But he was delighted when I gave it to him the next day. He played around with the buttons for a few seconds and said, ‘Hey, man, you’re a genius!’

I shrugged. ‘I just’ (I mimed the word I was missing in Hebrew. Fiddled around) ‘with the contacts a bit.’

‘The contacts? Really? I tried them myself and nothing happened.’

‘You should have just given it to an electrician. He’d fix it for you, no problem.’

I had to go back to work, so I left him to play with his new toy. But as I walked away I heard him calling me back: ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ I came back and he glanced up from his computer screen and handed over the Palm. ‘Take it, it’s yours.’

‘What do you mean? It’s working now.’

‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘I gave it to you. Well done for fixing it, but it’s still yours.’

On the one hand I thought, I don’t need favours from a Jew who treats me like I scarcely exist and if I manage to close an electric circuit suddenly thinks I’m a genius. That side of me wanted to chuck the thing at the wall. My calmer side knew that the wall was made of plywood and nothing was going to happen even if I did throw it. It was the second side that spoke.

‘You were on Noah’s Ark .’

‘What?’

‘You were on Noah’s Ark , right?’

He looked at me and frowned. ‘You watched it?’

‘Of course I watched it, what do you think? You had a strange name…You were on with that stupid soldier girl.’

‘How’d you remember that? It’s been six months!’

‘How could I forget? You were very much sweating.’

‘You know something? You’re the first person ever to mention that to me. Yeah, I was. But listen, how come…I mean: do you people actually watch Noah’s Ark ?’

Samir had said not to speak to anyone. Not to talk to the Jews. It was better like that.

‘Tell me what your name is.’

‘Croc,’ he said, somewhat surprised.

‘The Croc. Right. The Croc of the Attacks! How could I forget? Musari said it about a thousand times. CrocAttack. Timsach , in Arabic.’

He laughed. ‘I’m amazed. I didn’t know you people watched that stuff.’ I said I needed to work, took the Palm and said thank you. In the kitchenette I washed dishes, threw away the garbage and wiped the surfaces. Then I started vacuuming the carpets. The next time I passed Croc’s room, he called me in again.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Fahmi.’

‘Fahmi,’ he repeated. He kept staring at me from under his low lids. His eyes were red. ‘Do you happen to know French?’ I smiled. What was he on about? Of course I didn’t know French. He asked me a few questions about where I lived and what I did and so on. ‘OK, then: do you want to make five hundred shekels for one day’s work?’

‘What work?’

‘Here in the office. You just have to say a few things that I’ll tell you to say. To test our system. Sit down.’

I looked at my watch and saw the time was twelve minutes past seven. Time for a shit. I could feel the sweet pressure building in my bowels. You weren’t supposed to sit down, but I did, keeping a wary eye on the door.

‘The system we’re developing here is supposed to understand people’s voices on the phone. I’m testing to see if it can recognise different accents and I need an Arab. It’s for a Belgian client: they’ve got Arabs there, and Africans, and Chinese and Vietnamese, and I’ve done them already. I’ve only got the Arabic left to do.’

I was silent. It was a lot of money, but…

‘Come on, it’s nothing. You come here for a few hours, I tell you what to say, we record you, test the system, and that’s it: three to four hours, five hundred shekels.’ ‘When?’

‘Whenever you want.’

This was a Wednesday evening. Zahara had almost completely recovered from her operation and was supposed to return after the weekend, when I would be out of a job again. We decided on Sunday morning.

‘ We were at Bilahl’s trial, Fahmi. Me and Father… ’

Lulu? What about Bilahl?

‘ Just a little room. We sat on blue plastic chairs. Bilahl was in a brown prison uniform, but he couldn’t stop smiling. He looked very well. Clean. He was playing with a little length of black thread and reading a small Koran. He said that because Allah was protecting him, he was made of steel. He showed total contempt for the soldiers in court. I’d never seen him in such a good mood. Father’s mobile phone rang and the judge got really angry. But he said he was ashamed of you, Fahmi… ’

Ashamed of me?

‘ …because of what happened with the Croc. He said you were never really faithful to the cause… ’

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Grandfather Fahmi was somehow guiding my life from heaven. Bilahl hated it when I said that: he said that only Allah was guiding everything. But meeting the Croc made me wonder just who it was who was controlling my destiny. I remembered how Bilahl had said that we needed to kill the Croc because he’d been turned into a symbol for the Jews. He would have said that Allah had placed the Croc in my hands for just that reason. Our poor father would have said that Allah had introduced us so that I could see he was a human being like myself.

Thursday was my last day as a cleaner in the business park. On Friday, the day when everything converged, I woke with a powerful urge to pray. When the first call came I washed my face, hands and legs and went to the mosque, where I stayed longer than usual. I repeated the Surat al-Fatcha dozens or even hundreds of times, and the tears poured down my face. I missed Lulu, Father and Murair; I missed Rana; I missed Bilahl and Al-Amari; I missed Titi, Natzer and limping Rami; I missed Halil Abu-Zeid and I missed my mother…and yet I felt strong. When you live on your own for months, you learn to live within yourself.