Almost Dead

by Assaf Gavron

  ‘Sue the National Insurance,’ I was told, ‘and you’ll get one hell of a pension.’ A lawyer volunteered himself on a no-win, no-fee basis. A special committee of the Defence Ministry–three legal experts who debate lawsuits from alleged victims of terrorist attacks–approve or deny your compensation. My lawyer told me that my fame would guarantee compensation because I was a media darling and they wouldn’t dare not pay. I went to meetings, discussed tactics, cut out articles from newspapers. They threw my claim out. My lawyer, head in his hands, said it was unbelievable how heartless they could be. ‘This country’s falling to bits!’ he said, and blamed my fame. Then he asked for a $2,000 fee. Duchi called me an idiot, having warned me early on not to get into it. Someone else had suggested that the Hostile Actions Casualties Organisation would be more sympathetic. So I tried. They weren’t.

  And what else? The General Security Services came to say hi, though it took me about half an hour to figure out what they wanted. I’d been in three consecutive attacks and got away without a scratch. Wasn’t that a little suspicious? Did I have, or had I ever had, Arab friends? Friends from the territories? Did I feel empathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people? Did I support their struggle? I told them that they were a national disgrace and that they should pick on the perpetrators not the victims and then burst out crying. Eventually they got off my back. Or I think so, anyway.

  A private association helping victims of terror called One Family asked me to come and speak to other victims once a week. They thought that after Noah’s Ark and all the articles and the radio I might lift a few spirits. So I went a couple of times but quite a few of the audience blamed me for shamelessly exploiting terrorist attacks which had killed and injured others. I’d escaped without a scratch and was now trying to cash in and promote myself. I showed them the bump on my forehead and said I wasn’t making any money: ‘I wish I was!’ I told the hecklers that I hadn’t asked anyone to write about me. It didn’t matter: I was arguing with people who’d been injured or lost their family and friends. They were looking for a target for their anger and I would do. So I removed the target from their sights, though I was criticised for that too. I was told that I’d only stopped going because the media weren’t there and I was only interested in the media. One of the things I learned during those months is that sometimes you can’t win. And you can’t even say that you can’t win, because then they say that you’ve a nerve to complain while others have lost limbs or are traumatised for life, so I ought to just shut up.

  I tried to shut up.

  But there I was on the cover of People: ‘Eitan Enoch–The Escape Artist’. Maariv published a profile of me. You could see me in another newspaper answering a questionnaire about things like my favourite colour and my favourite song of the year (grey; ‘Nine’ by the Nomad Saddlers). In The City I read that I had been ‘Spotted: the man who said “No, thanks!” to terror, Croc Attack, on his own in hip boho eatery Bar BaraBush, ordering a hamburger called “The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight”.’

  Of all my new friends, the real and the fake, the temporary and the permanent, the two I liked the most were policemen. Inspector Avi ‘Almaz’ Yahalom headed the investigation into the attack on the Little No. 5; Zion Ferrer investigated the Café Europa attack. Almaz’s team consisted of himself and a policewoman called Ricky. Zion’s team consisted of Zion. It’s not that they don’t investigate terror attacks, but as soon as it becomes clear that the motive was political most of the work reverts to the General Security Services. The police work on the criminal aspects of the attack: stolen vehicles, thefts that might tie in, life or property insurance swindles, victim identifications, and occasionally they turn up things the GSS can use.

  Almaz and Zion Ferrer contacted me as they did every eyewitness (the inspector who investigated Shaar Hagai contacted me too but I’m not going to waste precious seconds of our lives on him because he’s a stupid arrogant fatso who thought it a good idea to put the GSS on to me) and I made an appointment to see Zion in Jerusalem on one of my Wednesdays. It was one of the first warm days after the winter, with the sun very clear and unsoftened by the haze you get in the Tel Aviv sky. Ferrer had sunglasses on a cord around his neck and two sweat-circles darkening the armpits of his pale blue policeman’s shirt. He met me at the gate to the facility, as he called it, on the Bethlehem Road and led me to a trailer among the eucalyptus trees where he showed me the CCTV footage of the Café Europa, in which, it turned out, I was starring. I sat in the trailer smoking a cigarette and hating it, and watched a black-and-white silent film about me. There I was, on my own, drinking coffee, my eyes staring off at some random point in space, and then focused on something closer, something specific (‘I think you’re checking out the talent,’ said Ferrer), picking my nose, wiping it with a paper napkin, looking at my watch. Then Shuli arrived and we exchanged a couple of words, changed places. Now I’m sitting with my back to the camera and Shuli is properly visible. Shuli, in the last seconds before everything changes, smiling, flirting, stroking her Ice Europa cup with her index finger. She leans forward and starts talking to me. I could remember it, almost word for word, I could read certain words formed by her lips. She’d had a thought, maybe the nicest thought she’d had in a while. And then she gave her half-sad smile and the air trembled, only this time I could see it trembling. Zion stopped the tape there, rewound, froze the frame and showed me the terrorist. His name was Mahmuzi. Freeze-framed, his image shivered slightly, as if in anticipation of the blast. I felt none of the hatred I expected to. On-screen, paused, I was juddering too: horizontal spikes of pixels shooting in and out of me, as if I were shaking apart, and suddenly that was me again and I was shaking, I was falling apart and pouring with sweat, a pulse thudding in my temples so loudly I seemed to have gone deaf. A wave of nausea broke over me and I vomited noisily. I tried to get up, to walk, but I was too weak. ‘Get me out of here,’ I tried to say. ‘GET…OUT!’ A hand tried to support me and I passed out. They found me a bed in Hadassah, but after an hour or so I got up and went to my therapy group, and not only did I start pulling myself together again at that meeting but I felt stronger than ever before. Crazily invulnerable.

  Almaz, the investigator from Tel Aviv, invited me to a meeting in a café in Yehuda Maccabi Street. He wasn’t wearing a policeman’s uniform. He didn’t show films. It was a pleasant conversation. He was of Egyptian origin, lived in Bublik Street in the north of Tel Aviv, married to an Irish woman he’d met on a flight. After the small talk we discussed the attack. I told him everything I knew, about Guetta and his life in Jerusalem. I told him that Shuli and Guetta’s parents had no idea what he was doing in Tel Aviv that morning, and that Shuli and I had decided to find out about it. He said that being in a certain city without telling your parents or girlfriend was not a criminal offence. Maybe, I said, but it was still interesting, and I wanted to do it so that I would have an answer for Shuli when she woke up. He said, ‘Sure, go for it.’ I told him about the PalmPilot and he smiled and said he could arrest me for theft.

  ‘Come on. I’ll give what’s left of it back to the family. I’ve got the best intentions.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says,’ he said. ‘But the law says you don’t.’

  The gamblers saw me on Noah’s Ark too and they wanted a piece. The gamblers–or ‘Itzik’, to give my caller his name–lived in Netanya and operated an illegal casino on the second floor of a ‘normal pub’ (his description) in the city’s industrial zone. I refused his invitation to come and drink ‘whatever I fancied’ on the house. Among other activities in the casino he was operating a numbers racket, betting on football matches and terrorist attacks.

  I have to confess here that I had myself once placed a few shekels on an Attack Pool. Bar had organised one at work–where the next attack would be and how many would be killed. I said Jerusalem and four. It was three but I won the pot–thirty-five shekels. Then Bar told me he had friends in Holon who gambled professionally on attacks. I gave him a
hundred-shekel note to place on Jerusalem. Two weeks later I got two hundred back. So when Itzik called me, it wasn’t the idea of gambling on attacks which surprised me so much as his proposition to me.

  ‘I want to employ you as an expert,’ he explained. ‘Tell me where the next attack’s gonna be and I can rig the odds according to what you say.’

  ‘What?’ I was in the street. I had to stop and sit on a bench. ‘Why am I an expert?’

  ‘You think I didn’t see Noah’s Ark? I’ll give you a thousand dollars a month. Retainer. Whatever happens, attacks yes or no, whatever, you get a thousand a month. Just tell me where the next attack’s going to be.’

  ‘Tell me, Itzik, do you…’

  ‘OK, listen. Don’t tell me where the attack’s going to be, just tell me where you’re going to be.’

  ‘Itzik…I’m sorry. I can’t. I never leave Tel Aviv anyway.’

  ‘Two thousand dollars. Two grand a month for scratching your balls. How bad can that be?’

  ‘It’s not bad at all.’ It really wasn’t. ‘But I just happened to be in several attacks in a single week. It was just a coincidence. Doesn’t mean a thing. A few weeks have passed since then and nothing’s happened anywhere I’ve been to.’

  ‘There haven’t been any attacks since then,’ said Itzik.

  Invitations to movie premieres, a psychologist wanting to try out a radical new therapy, Shlomo Yarkoni’s widow, the army looking for an inspirational/motivational speech, flower shops wanting me to advertise them, Shlomo Yarkoni’s girlfriend, an offer to be a judge in a children’s talent show…

  And Humi’s parents came to visit. His mother had a tale of terrible woe to tell me. Humi’s brother had been killed at the age of ten by one of those exploding soft-drinks bottles they ended up having to recall. Tempo, the drink was called. The PLO should have used it. They were now divorced. Five months ago Humi’s grandfather on his father’s side had died of prostate cancer. Four months ago his grandmother on his mother’s side succumbed to Alzheimer’s. And now Humi.

  She said: ‘You think it’s a normal day and it just isn’t. It turns your life upside down. There are so many things I have to talk to him about. You, your life is nice and safe and warm and pleasant and you’ve got your family and friends. There are no tragedies in your life.’ I mumbled something about getting on with life and she didn’t like it. She said, ‘You’re wrong. You’re so wrong. You can’t get on with life. Not after losing a child. The grieving never ends.’

  ‘Etti, stop it, stop it, please. It’s not his fault.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was his fault, but how can he sit there and tell me about getting on with life?’ Etti replied, tears falling now. The ex-husband rolled his eyes at me. There was a radioactive tension between the two of them. Maybe they needed it. Because when she lowered her head, a look of complete despair overtook his face too.

  28

  Al-Amari was becoming unbearable. The curfew was lifted and then reimposed, and every night the Israelis staged raids, shouldering their way into houses, breaking furniture and confiscating property, yelling and hitting people. They would lead all the men outside and hold them in plastic cuffs and cloth blindfolds for several hours before detaining a random few. They were pushing money at anyone who might talk, and in Ramallah there were plenty of dogs who would. Twice they battered at our door in the middle of the night and marched me down to the mosque, where I was made to kneel for hours, blindfolded and in pain. Not wanting to risk getting picked up, Bilahl slept on the roof, which was a much greater risk in itself. Under these circumstances the mother of all operations wasn’t getting anywhere. The money from Gaza was trickling away and I tried to help Jalahl out with little electrical jobs, but he didn’t have enough work for himself. I sat at home and watched TV, but there’s a limit to the number of times you can watch The Weakest Link.

  One day, many weeks after the last attack, water ceased to flow from the taps. The hot days had come as hot days always do; too soon. Within an hour there were no bottles in the grocery stores. I was thirsty, and being thirsty made me think about Mother, and thinking about Mother made me think of Lulu. I missed her intensely. I hadn’t seen her for months. I called home and she answered. She was all right; Father was all right but sad. Everything was the same as ever. But her voice was different, I thought, more serious, the voice of a thirteen-year-old girl putting her childhood behind her. It made me frantic to see her.

  ‘Lulu, I’m coming to visit you.’

  ‘Really? Really really? When?’

  ‘Right now,’ I said.

  When I was a kid, Grandfather Fahmi would ride from Al-Amari to visit us in Murair. It would take him an hour. Today, in a car, it takes three hours if you’re lucky. Twenty kilometres as the crow flies. Where else in the world does it take longer to get from place to place as the years go by?

  I chucked a few clothes into a holdall and left. The camp glowed yellow in the bright morning light. Every building was still wallpapered with posters and graffiti about Mahmuzi and Halil; huge chunks of concrete lay scattered about the streets. At an army post on the way out of the camp a soldier in sunglasses waved me over. He checked my green ID card, opened the bag, took everything out, turned it inside out and then shook it. He frisked me roughly. ‘Where you going?’ he asked in Hebrew. ‘Murair.’ ‘Where is it?’

  I pointed in roughly the right direction. ‘Don’t point, say where it is.’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s over there, beyond Ramallah.’ I had to explain why I was travelling. He demanded I show him a Tasrich–a permit to move freely around the West Bank–and I showed him the permit Jalahl had managed to get hold of from the electricity company in Ramallah. Then I got detailed instructions, what I could do and what I couldn’t. I nodded. I turned left towards Ramallah and walked along the main road that cuts through the city north to Nablus, until the checkpoint was out of sight. Then I stopped and waited until I managed to get a lift. Five minutes later we were at the Beitin checkpoint.

  ‘It’ll be an hour at least,’ said the driver. I got out of the car and strolled towards the pedestrian gate. A soldier blocked my way.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get back in your car.’

  ‘I don’t have a car.’

  ‘You lying to me? Aren’t you ashamed? I just saw you get out of that car there.’ I could tell he enjoyed peering down at me through his sunglasses. ‘You think I’m an idiot?’

  ‘It’s not my car, I was hitching a lift.’

  ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. He frisked me and went through my bag and let me past to the queue for the pedestrian gate. A friend of my aunt’s was there, carrying two chickens in a basket. I talked to her as we stood in line, and to an elegantly dressed bearded guy who turned out to be a good friend of Bilahl’s from the Al-Birah mosque. After we’d waited for almost an hour, the pedestrian gate was closed down. ‘That’s the instruction from command headquarters,’ a soldier told us, and you could see from his face that he hadn’t a clue why they’d closed it either. Only cars with special permits were being allowed through.

  I went back to the queue of the cars and saw that the guy who’d given me a lift had given up and turned back. So I tried offering drivers money to let me go with them. One was apprehensive, a second looked suspiciously at my holdall, a third asked me what we would tell the soldiers. I showed him my permit: ‘We’ll say we work together.’ His name was Muhamed Mahmoud Zakat, on his way to Nablus to buy supplies for his stationery shop.

  I sat on a rock beside Zakat’s rusty sky-blue Subaru and called Bilahl, who wasn’t happy. He wanted to work. But it had been weeks, and it was clear we weren’t going to be doing anything for a while. ‘Come on. How long is it since you saw Lulu?’ ‘How long are you going to be?’ he asked, as if I were headed to the other side of Earth. At this rate I was going to be six months. ‘A day or two, maybe longer. Oh, man, these soldiers. They’re driving me crazy already, and we’r
e not even past Beitin.’

  I keyed in Rana’s number but didn’t dial it. I wasn’t sure I had the right to call her. In front of us were cars, chickens, people milling around or sitting on luggage. Behind us the same. You could hardly say the queue was moving at all. Zakat was chain-smoking behind the wheel. He offered me one, which I refused.

  ‘They won’t let you through,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, when was the last time they did something you wanted them to?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said, and pressed Dial. She didn’t pick up.

  ‘Oh, you bad boy, Fahmi…what’s going on with you down there? Who are you thinking about? Here now…’

  Svet? I’m so hot…

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

  An ant zigzagged between my feet towards the checkpoint: but would they let it through without interrogating it? When it overtakes the Subaru, I decided, I’ll call again. The ant was the fastest thing on the road, and it was soon forging ahead of the Subaru.

  Rana answered: ‘You weren’t supposed to call.’

  I wanted to tell her how much I’d missed her, her voice. ‘I’m coming to Murair.’

  She swallowed and said nothing for a while. ‘When?’

  ‘I’m at the Beitin checkpoint.’

  ‘Oh. So you might not make it at all.’

  ‘Did I say I was going to make it?’ I got a reluctant laugh from her.

  After growing up together, after spending seemingly every minute in each other’s company, after all the times we used to sleep together in our secret hide below the village, after all the times we planned our wedding, I left the village without saying a single word. Bilahl said she wasn’t a good Muslim, was too advanced. Rana said he’d never had sex and was scared of women. Young as she was, she looked down on him, which was difficult for me. He was my older brother and deserved her respect. But he also deserved her contempt.