Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘Where do you know him from?’

‘From Tel Aviv. I don’t really…’

‘Did he send you here?’ asked someone else.

‘Not really. It’s just I met him a while ago in Tel Aviv…He told me about this restaurant so I thought I’d give it a try, that’s all.’ They didn’t answer. They were all looking at me now. I didn’t know where to take the conversation, exactly. ‘You all know him?’

Avi laughed. ‘Of course we know him. Since we were this high. You see him at the hospital in his nurse’s outfit?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And very nice he looks in it too.’ Everyone laughed.

‘And you saw Amin’s fruit-and-veg place?’

‘Sure. Everyone gets them mixed up. At the hospital they ask for vegetables, and at the grocery they ask for a massage.’ They laughed at this too and I was momentarily grateful to Croc for giving me the line. Avi sent the waiter over with the bottle of arrack and a glass. I could hear one of them say something like ‘I wonder if the old dear can tell the difference?’ Someone else said, ‘Or maybe they’re both doing her, and she doesn’t know!’ This caused a long outburst of laughter. I smiled, not quite getting it. It was the kind of laughter that feeds on itself, that goes on too long — the laughter of men in groups. Eventually Avi, with tears in his eyes, asked me whether I had seen the old lady.

‘The old lady? No, I didn’t see her. What old lady?’

‘The old Jew Tamer is fucking. Didn’t he tell you?’

The waiter said, ‘He never stopped talking about her, till we told him to go to the old people’s home and try it on there.’

A guy with shoulder-length hair and a moustache said: ‘We told him, “Always check afterwards to see she’s still alive.”’

Once they’d finally calmed down, Avi explained. Tamer had said he was fucking a Jewish woman in Tel Aviv. He was very proud of it. Avi impersonated Tamer’s boasting and the others pretended to be themselves being impressed. But then it turned out she was fifty-four to his twenty-five, and the restaurant had never let him live it down. He’d never mentioned her again. I laughed along with them. It was the laughter of arrack, of the brotherhood of men, of the end of the day, and it was also, for me, the laughter of relief and release, of knowing my future. Because there was one little detail in what they’d said that I realised was the thing the Croc and his bald friend were looking for; the thing that gave me a reason to meet them again in Bar BaraBush.

‘Nailed it!’ said Bar.

Whether he’d suddenly figured something out, or heard something I hadn’t caught, was difficult to tell. Two days earlier Fahmi had called to say that he’d got something for us. He wanted to meet in Bar BaraBush, where you could watch beautiful women ordering up Orgasms. I told him Thursday was the best night and picked him up at the entrance to his village. But they were having a South American night and the noise was unbelievable. The place was packed and the acoustics were terrible. A killer combination. You had to stick your ear into someone’s mouth in order to hear anything, and Bar was closer to Fahmi, who talked so very gently, with such a soft accent. He’d found out that Tamer was fucking some woman here in Tel Aviv. ‘Fifty-four years old!’ he’d said, and laughed, and Bar and I raised our eyebrows. And then he must have said something I hadn’t caught, because Bar spread his hands wide and said, ‘Nailed it!’

I’d been in such a fug, so preoccupied with Guetta, so out of it, that I hadn’t noticed what was going on in Time’s Arrow. That Thursday morning I finished the Belgian project and passed everything on to Guy. We went over it together and I asked him what was up next.

‘Next? I don’t know,’ Guy said. ‘There aren’t that many projects on at the moment.’

‘Really?’

‘Is this news to you?’

It was news to me. At lunch I ordered Thai (TukTuk) and ate with Talia Tenne, who had dyed her hair as red as her finger-and toenails.

‘Well! To what do I owe this honour?’ she said.

‘Today you’re going to explain to me what is going on in this company.’

‘Happy to,’ she said, but there wasn’t that much to tell. They just weren’t selling the system any more. The Indians were killing the market. The downsizing and the move to Rosh Haayin had stabilised things for a few months, but the investors were feeling the pressure again.

‘Jimmy’s really stressed recently,’ said Talia. ‘He screamed at Yoni Bronco yesterday because Yoni might have lost us the Scandinavian thing. And the Belgians aren’t happy any more. They might even ditch the system. It’s going round that they got an offer from another Israeli company. Check your emails, Croc — there’s a company meeting this afternoon.’ In the striplights of the dining nook I could see the first wrinkles in Talia Tenne’s palely freckled white skin. ‘It’s not like the good old days, Croc. Haven’t you noticed?’

But I hadn’t. I hadn’t been aware of the shouting or the failures or Jimmy’s moods. I didn’t even have the faintest clue who the hell Yoni Bronco was. All I’d actually noticed was that the Thai food wasn’t bad at all.

At the company meeting I saw a Jimmy stripped of his old enthusiasm, his customary sharpness. He talked about the usual things, but he didn’t seem to believe in what he was saying. The great Rafraf — the brains behind the air force’s Time Management Unit, Time’s Arrow’s King of Time, Mr Every Second Counts — looked like a man who’d been stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Do you know the Hofstadter law?’ he asked us, but there was no answer, because nobody did. ‘The Hofstadter law says: everything takes longer than you expect it to take, even if you take into account the Hofstadter law!’ He looked around the room. No one’s expression changed. ‘And what does that mean? It means things take longer than we planned. It means we need patience. And that includes somebody like me, who memorises the Hofstadter law every morning while doing my press-ups and simultaneously watching the morning news on Channel Two — even I lose my patience!’ Jimmy’s voice climbed alarmingly in volume and assertiveness, as if someone had accidentally turned his amp up to the max.

‘Look,’ he resumed in a calmer voice. ‘No one has any time any more. Sixty per cent of Europeans said in a recent poll that they didn’t have enough time. And the Venture Capital Fund investing in us — Venture Capital Fund, ridiculously long name, by the way, must take at least a second and a half to say it, way too much — they don’t have enough time either. They’re losing patience. They gave us money for twelve months and after twelve months they want to see results. They want to see what I promised them — the twenty-first-century Fed-Ex.’

Jimmy sipped from a glass of water. Talia Tenne’s eyes asked See what I meant? and my eyes replied Yes, I do .

‘Why are we forever running from one place to another? Because we exist in a state of terror: the terror of time, the terror of time ending, the terror of death. Because we’re afraid of time, we look for solace in the patterns we create in it, in the circle of an hour, in days, in the illusory beginnings and endings of events without any. We try to escape it — in sleep, in dreams, in drink, in meditation, in mystical beliefs — or we work like crazy to try and create the illusion that we are in fact in control of it.’

I can’t remember everything he said. Only fragments of ideas and occasional sentences. He talked about Chronos, the Greek god of time. About Native American tribes that don’t have words for ‘late’ or ‘wait’ or even ‘time’ about time’s arrow, a river flowing in one direction only, from past to future, a series of events that cannot be reconstructed; about Stephen Hawking and the ten dimensions. We sat there in a state of shock. We were asking ourselves: what does he want, this man? What is he going through?