Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

Warshawski took off his glasses and cleaned them with his shirt cuffs, coughing. I took a sip from my second hot chocolate. I felt pressure in my chest. I saw Guetta, beside me on the Little No. 5, showing me his Palm. I remembered Shuli’s hands clasped around her cup in the café near Montefiore’s wagon.

‘Are you all right, young man?’ said Warshawski. I ordered a glass of water while he waited for me.

‘Giora Guetta. He told me he had just left the army. The security-guard job was one of those Defence Ministry “preferred jobs”, where they give you a grant for six months. He was thinking what to do next, after he got the grant. He wanted to open a business, or be a computer programmer. I was interested in what he did in the army. Border Police. In Gaza. It sounded interesting. And then he told me they called him “The Killer”. That he’d engraved three Xs on his rifle barrel. He spent two years in Gaza. He saw a lot of disgusting stuff. He said, “If all those lefties could spend just one week in Gaza they’d change their minds by the third day.” It wasn’t only that the opportunity arose. It was more than that. I hadn’t come to Jerusalem and met this great kid by chance. You understand?’ I nodded weakly. ‘I said I had an offer for him that he would like a lot. A lot of money, but it would have to be a secret. We would meet to arrange it in Tel Aviv. “Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s not anything you haven’t done before.” Ha ha ha, et cetera. “But in return for your secrecy, and in return for this conversation, I am writing you a cheque for a thousand shekels. It doesn’t matter if you take the job or not. You can disappear if you want to. But you should know: there’s a lot more money.” Then I took his phone number and his email.’

I told Warshawski not to leave and went to the toilet. I stood and watched my stream flow down the smooth white wall and I thought about myself, how I was in a café on a weekday morning with a Hitler-reading Polish Jew who had hired a young guy to murder his wife’s lover, and I was here because the young guy’s girlfriend, with whom I’d fallen in love — a love that had somehow led to her death — had asked me to find out what her boyfriend was doing on the morning of his death by suicide bomber on the minibus on which I’d happened to be travelling. Adultery, murder, terrorist attacks: nothing surprising about it. It happened all the time. The surprising thing, I saw, was me. It was so strange that there should be somebody who linked these people. Even stranger that it should be me: that it was me at this moment in this café toilet.

‘We met,’ Warshawski continued with a certain relish when I returned, ‘in Tel Aviv at the Coffee Bean in Yehuda Maccabi Street — as you know very well, young man. I told him everything he needed to know about Tamer and offered him thirty thousand shekels, with ten thousand as down payment. He didn’t even ask for time to think. It was like that. I gave him Tamer’s details and he entered them into his little electronic notebook. We agreed on the time. We shook hands. I was scared. But Guetta was perfect. You know? Young but experienced. Enthusiastic but reliable. Not involved in the criminal world. He didn’t look like a killer should. He was really up for it. He had already killed and thirty thousand shekels was a fortune for him. He said there was no problem getting hold of a gun. An impressive kid. Confident. Handsome. Knew what he wanted. A real Jew.’

Now that I knew what Guetta had been doing, what did I feel? Nothing. I looked at the Polish professor, and felt nothing at all. How much time had Bar and I spent on this ‘investigation’? And now it was solved and so what? I asked for the bill and insisted on paying. They brought our coats and we went out into the chill. ‘In fact, I’d changed my mind even before I heard that Guetta had been killed,’ Warshawski insisted to me as we walked down the boulevard. ‘I tried to call him but the line was dead. I left a message. I wrote him an email. When I read in the newspaper that the Arabs had killed him, I felt responsible. I was ashamed. But my first thought was that I’d made a terrible mistake. Like in Jerusalem, when I thought I had to do it. Sometimes life gives you these clues. You think you see a pattern, you understand? Afterwards I thought about him. Another young life lost, because of this damned country. This defeatist country.’

I was thinking about what I was going to do now. Where did I take this from here? Warshawski was on automatic, letting everything out, and I didn’t stop him. ‘Dvora and I are still together, somehow. She confessed to it one evening. I pretended that I didn’t know. I’d already forgiven her in my heart. She hurt me. I hated her, but I’d had my revenge — without her knowing.’ It was as if a weight had been lifted from his heart. He couldn’t stop talking. ‘I didn’t tell her anything. A day or two after the bombing I got a phone call from Guetta’s girlfriend; wanting to know what he had been doing in Tel Aviv. I turned the phone off and put it out with the garbage. The next day I changed my number.’

‘Listen,’ I said, almost apologetically. ‘I’ve got to make a move.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I turned and walked away down King David Boulevard. I walked all the way home. A weekday afternoon. Guy had said he would call me if he needed help at Time’s Arrow. I didn’t get a call. I went into the bedroom at home and fetched my cheque out of the drawer: the way things were going I might have to cash it. I sat on the sofa and didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the energy to do anything about Warshawski. I thought about telling Almaz everything, but gave up on the idea. What was the difference? Guetta was dead. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer. What good would it do anyone if Warshawski lost his job or went to jail now? I honestly didn’t care any longer. I had done my bit. I looked around at the vacant white walls. I breathed deeply; closed my eyes. Unconsciously, I ran my finger over the scar on my forehead. I thought about Shuli. The moment we switched places and we touched, how she wanted to look out on to the street, her smile. Then I was thinking about Duchi and a dull general pain set in. The phone rang again and I answered it. It was my brother.

We picked Dafdaf up from work in his hire car and sped up to Jerusalem.

We met Mother at the entrance.

The doctors said it was a relatively minor heart attack.

Father lay in pyjamas on his hospital bed. He was pale, and there was a breathing tube in his nose. He looked at me. I held his cold hand and burst out crying. I couldn’t stop. I had to go out into the corridor. In the corridor I saw a nurse sitting on a bench crying too. A Russian girl. She looked up at me as if to ask me to stop, or as if to offer me consolation, or ask it for herself, but I couldn’t stop. We couldn’t stop crying.

ASSAF GAVRONis a writer and translator. He grew up in Jerusalem, studied in London and Vancouver, and now lives in Tel Aviv. In Israel, he has published four novels, a short story collection, and a collection of falafel reviews.

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