Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

‘Near you, though, wasn’t it? Central Tel Aviv?’

‘Nooo, not really. Didn’t even hear it, actually.’ (That’s right: I was in the elevator.) ‘And you? Anything blown up in Zurich lately?’

He roared. The Swiss are important customers. The system’s enjoying great success there. But Ivan is continually asking for changes and new features. He has good ideas, but who has the time? Making changes to the software is like trying to storm the Great Wall of China with the Chinese army ranged along it with machine guns: you have to talk to the people from Product, Marketing, R&D, Quality Assurance (QA), Installations…every one of whom is working full time on something else. Jimmy says that, as a small company, we can provide solutions and services with ‘a speed and flexibility that bigger companies can only dream of’. This is complete bullshit, of course: we’re infinitely less agile or flexible than some giant mega-corporation like Koor.

Ivan made lots of suggestions. I told him they were all excellent. My head was aching.

A few minutes after noon, the inboxes of the thirty or so employees of Time’s Arrow all receive a message from Talia Tenne that says, ‘Food?’ Today she’d ordered from Salsalat but I didn’t fancy a salad and went for a schnitzel from the Coffee Bar along with Bar, Ron, Shoko from IT Support and Yoash Green, who works with me in Sales and whose wife left him. Our food arrived with the salads, and we sat with Talia Tenne and the girls in the dining area, where Bar browsed through Yediot Achronot , the main paper out here. ‘Shulamit Penigstein, seventy-two,’ read Bar, ‘who disembarked only a few stops before the explosion, had serious doubts about the suicide bomber: “I tried to draw the attention of my fellow passengers to him,” she said, “but they just sneered at me.”’

‘So, Croc,’ Talia Tenne said, ‘what’s this about you being in the attack yesterday?’

‘That’s right, I’m dead.’

‘No, like…weren’t you near it or something?’

‘Pretty damn close. Dizengoff Centre. Big building, not far from the attack?’

‘Stop being a pain.’

I like Talia Tenne. She’s naive and funny and cares for the nutrition of most of the company’s workers, which is nice. And pretty, very pretty. Her skin is as white and smooth as silk.

‘Unbelievable how this intifada’s getting closer…it’s going to be here soon.’

Occasionally I looked eastwards out of the dining area’s windows, waiting for a plane to appear and crash into our tower.

‘If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad,’ said Shoko, chewing chicken, ‘Muhammad will come to the mountain.’

The week the intifada broke out, Time’s Arrow had a day of massages organised in the Sea View Hotel in the north. But there were riots on the way north and the roads were blocked. So we went to Sde Dov, the little airstrip in North Tel Aviv, and flew to Mahanayim and took a taxi from there to the Sea View. From the plane we thought we saw smoke from tyres burning on the roads. We sat at the Sea View in white towelling robes, sipped herbal tea and submitted to our oily Swedish massages.

‘Don’t laugh — they’ll take this tower down one day.’

‘A booby-trapped car goes to the upper car park, drives straight through that laughable little stick that calls itself a barrier and sits itself directly underneath the building: boom!’

‘Shoko, I’m eating, stop it already!’

Twenty-seven minutes is the average time I spend on lunch — I worked it out once.

I didn’t feel at all like working. A report on Ynet said the last body from the Little No. 5 had finally been identified. Giora Guetta, 23 years old, from Jerusalem. My man. I can’t stay here any longer, I thought, I’ve got to find his girlfriend. I stood up and said, as I said every day, ‘One small step for a man, and an even smaller step for mankind.’

‘A half-day, then?’ asked Ron. It was a running joke: I always said the same thing and he always gave the same answer even if it was eight in the evening, which it usually was. But today it really was going to be a half-day.

‘Yeah. A half-day.’

Grandfather Fahmi got angry whenever people talked about the war of 1948 as the Nakba ; the Disaster. People didn’t like talking about it at all, but he did. Because he and his friends did things. They resisted. He told me how they used to hit convoys of Jews going up to Jerusalem. They’d descend from the village to the ridges above the road to Jerusalem and shoot at the buses. The road would close and the Jews wouldn’t be able to go through to Jerusalem — they managed to cut Jerusalem off for weeks like this. The Jews themselves admit it. They’ve left the wrecks of some of the buses there as memorials. That was Grandfather Fahmi. He hit the convoys. His name is written on those buses in bullet holes. Later they put armour on the buses and trucks, but Grandfather and his friends still found ways to attack, still managed to stop them getting through. The road was littered with the skeletons of cars — what the Jews have preserved there is no more than a souvenir. Grandfather would make his way down the slope from the ridge to shoot at a bus, and then come back up home to the village. Eight months their heroics went on. And this is why he felt hurt when people talked about a defeat: because they fought like lions. One time a plane crashed near Beit Machsir and six Jewish soldiers were killed in it and Grandfather Fahmi took a souvenir of his own: one of the clocks from the dashboard of the cockpit.

‘ Your father seems like a good man, Fahmi. A very sad man. He really doesn’t deserve all this trouble. And your girlfriend’s very cute, isn’t she? How she comes and plays the tapes? I used to hate the songs but, you know, I’m really starting to like them. Amarein, amarein…amarehehehein…’

Oh no, please! Don’t start with the singing now…

‘ Now don’t get all upset, Fahmi. What are these noises? No need to get cross. I’m here to take care of you. You like the deep massages, right? ’

Svetlana, can’t you please just shut up…? Grandfather Fahmi…I’m…

‘ We’ll get your senses back, don’t you worry. The taste and the smell and the sight and the touch and the hearing and the movement…Now let’s have a peek at how these pipes and tubes are doing! A tube for your piss, another for your air… ’

‘What are you doing, Fahmi?’

The Croc’s talking; he’s suspicious.

He looks sideways. ‘What’ve you got there?’

Where was I? The Croc? Grandfather Fahmi?

‘ Dr Hartom’s coming in a minute, so we want you on your best behaviour, don’t we? ’

Dr Hartom’s a bitch and you’re a stupid little Jewish whore and I’m cold. Can’t you stop talking for a second? Can’t you see that I’m cold…?

The flat was cold. An old spiral heater giving a little orange heat. Tea in glasses. Bilahl with Halil Abu-Zeid: a large, impressive man with huge arms and chest, a shaved head and a beard. A silver ring on his fat middle finger. Intelligent pale brown eyes. Older. In 1990 they deported him to southern Lebanon, and when he came back they stuck him in jail in Ramallah…

‘My dream,’ said Bilahl, ‘is to see, on the slope beside the remains of the old buses that my grandfather shot in ’48, a Mitsubishi and a Peugeot and a Toyota made in 2000. You understand what I’m talking about?’

Abu-Zeid looked at Bilahl and my brother looked back.

‘How were you thinking of doing it?’

Bilahl drew a map on a page from a notebook, with a number of arrows on it. He explained. Abu-Zeid smoked a whole cigarette before he said anything. The smoke coming out of his mouth mingled with the breath coming out of Bilahl’s. Bilahl knelt on the floor and warmed his hands by the electric bars. He said, ‘It’s about time. What did Ramallah do apart from a handful of attacks by Fatah on Route 443 and a couple more on the Settlements? What did Al-Amari contribute? Wafa Idris?’