Almost Dead

by Assaf Gavron

  ‘That fits. Maybe he got scared of Shuli’s call. But it’s only a guess.’

  ‘What about these B. Warshawskis?’

  ‘Well, it would make sense if it was one of the Tel Avivis,’ said Bar. ‘But it could be the Tel Mond one. Or maybe our Binyamin’s unlisted. Better do it carefully, if he cancelled his number. I’ll finish scanning the PalmPilot first. There’s a lot more in there.’

  I took a bite from my falafel. Not too bad. Bar sounded as if he knew what he was doing. ‘Carry on, then,’ I said. ‘Send me a message, when you’ve got something to send.’

  The spring and early summer had already begun to hammer the coast of Israel with heat. Those little gauntlet-runs from the air-con in the car to the air-con in the office to the air-con at home got more and more debilitating as the days passed, especially since one of the air-conditioners was in a ten-year-old car. Cold showers extended in length. We were all attached to our water bottles like drips. Hummus was off the menu. And public interest in the Croc waned. The phone rang infrequently now: a charity night here, a tribute there, a local newspaper from Rosh Haayin which’d discovered the thrilling fact that I was now earning my corn in their beautiful municipality, a local newspaper from Jerusalem (the local newspapers are blind to their subjects’ lack of civic affection) and, very occasionally, someone from the past, someone whose existence I’d forgotten, a voice that took me way back into the long ago.

  It was shortly after Shuli’s death, during those exhausted, surreal, stifling days when looking for Guetta was apparently the only thing holding me together. I was still waking up well before dawn. I’d leave the flat and wander through parks and streets to meet my comrades in insomnia, sit on a bench and exchange a few words with them. So I was half asleep and driving to Tel Aviv in the crappy Peugeot at the end of the working day, with the sea in front of me and the Ramat Hasharon Tennis Centre on my left, when the phone rang. ‘Crocos?’ said a voice, and the crappy Peugeot suddenly metamorphosed itself into a time machine, taking me back, east, up to the hills above Rosh Haayin and farther, up to the cliff above the valley, up to the village. I could taste something bilious in my mouth, felt a burning in my throat and eyes. Gadi. Lieutenant Gadi Gidon. In short, Gadgid. How many years since I’d heard this voice? ‘Gadi.’ ‘Who else?’ ‘Years,’ I said. The time machine landed in the watchtower at the entrance to the village, opened its doors and turfed me out.

  Gadgid is leading a platoon of soldiers on a routine patrol inside the village. A wide road winds from the entrance of the village to the top of the hill. Along its sides a few houses cluster sparsely, but the heart of the village is higher up, at the end of the road. There the alleys are narrower, and the houses crowded together. I’m in the watchtower at the entrance to the village. I watch the file of soldiers getting smaller as they make their way up the road, then disappearing at the top of the hill. Gadgid is walking point–tall, confident, tight black curls on his head, an impressive nose. When all the soldiers have disappeared from sight, I look around at the arid winter landscape. I sit down with my back to the wall and drink from my water bottle. 1988: curfew; intifada; morning; silence.

  We met at Bar BaraBush. ‘Crocos! My God, you’re a star!’ Gadgid still held himself very straight and tall, but his formerly distinctive nose had disappeared somewhat into a fatter face, and the curls had gone. He had glasses. ‘You’ve become an intellectual, Gadi?’ I ordered my Cannibal and he got the beers in. I always liked Gadgid in the army because, like me, he didn’t take it too seriously. We became friends in Balata, where we watched Israel v. Colombia on a tiny black-and-white TV hooked up to a generator. Valderrama’s free kick through our joke of a wall, Yoram Arbel’s now-classic commentary, 1–0–and once again we weren’t going to the World Cup. Gadgid made me laugh the whole game, and I swear on my life that he said, ‘That’s no way to build a wall’ ten seconds before Arbel did.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘when you called, the moment I heard your voice saying “Crocos”, it was like I was there. Like I was touching the dirt, smelling the smell.’

  ‘The tear-gas smell, huh?’ He smiled. ‘That son of a bitch would have got what he deserved even without your contribution.’

  I sit down and drink, and fall asleep. And the next thing I know is…I don’t know…shouts? My backside inexplicably getting warm? The whispering sound of flames? A stone landing next to me? A shot? I don’t know. I remember watching the soldiers disappearing over the top of the hill. I sit, I drink, and then…I look down and see that the tower is on fire. And twenty-five feet below there are…I don’t know how many, five, ten, a dozen of them. They see me and shout and start to throw stones. I whip my head back in. I can hear flames, shouts, the stones hitting. There’s a terrible smell of burning plastic and wood. I glance down again–a stone flies past my head. And they start to climb. It is utterly terrifying. I scramble over to the radio and call Gadgid with no code words, no military terminology or radio lingo. I scream, ‘Gadgid, come and save me!’ and he replies, ‘We see. On our way.’ I curl up in the corner, my head buried in my hands. I’m starting to hyperventilate, and I don’t want this, no, no, no, no, no, and there’s a shot and another and the shots are coming thick and fast now and yelling and the sound of blows. And my head deep, deep, deep between my knees in the corner.

  I was drinking vodka and passion fruit, trying to get a grip of the elusive seeds with my tongue and keeping an eye on the big tits of the girl on the other side of the bar. A ring of smoke sidled out of Gadgid’s mouth.

  ‘So tell me again. How did you manage to let them burn the tower like that?’

  ‘I don’t have a clue.’

  Fifteen years later, I still don’t have a clue and I never will have. But I do know this: the same day my close friend from Jerusalem, Danny Lam, was driving a jeep on a patrol in the central section of Lebanon’s security zone. At 11 a.m., when I was sitting in the burning tower waiting for my end, his jeep arrived at a puddle that may possibly have been deeper than it looked, and stopped in front of it. I’ve relived this moment many times: me, on my own, in a burning watchtower in a West Bank village. Danny Lam and his friends, in a jeep in Lebanon, on the edge of a big puddle. And up above, God choosing which button to hit.

  ‘God, Crocos, what a fuck-up! A whole regiment had to come in after us to restore order, no?’

  ‘Yeah…I’d almost blanked it out, and suddenly you turn up from the past. Where did you come from?’ I said.

  It was late and he’d already drunk several pints. He told me his war stories and the history of his life since, his marriage, his success as a chemistry student at the Haifa Technion, his divorce, and his work at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot alongside attractive twenty-something researchers from the former Soviet Union.

  After we said goodbye I got into the car and started driving, but I didn’t go home, I drove just to drive, to think. I drove slowly in no particular direction, down near the beach, around squares and roundabouts, slowly, directionless, drowned in memories. I drove like that for a long time, thought about what I’d done and not done and tried to put work and Duchi and home and all that on the other side of the balance. What could I have done? Who could have guessed that Gadgid would call all of a sudden?

  32

  I met Dayek after about an hour of fast walking. He stood in the middle of the path, looked at me with his big brown eyes, and batted his long grey eyelashes. His grey hair was soft to the touch, although he was so thin his ribcage was visible. We had a donkey when we were children, and it was thanks to him I’d come to know all the paths around Murair, which, give or take a few dirt ramps, haven’t changed since the days of the prophets. I knew what it was like, riding on the back of a donkey, the pain that grows in your back, and in your spread legs, until you have to move both of them to one side for a while. I remembered the feeling of the boy discovering the big world outside of his village, with the assistance of his first mode of transport. There were a few bicycles around, and n
ow there are more, but a donkey was a luxury when we were kids.

  When I left the village, I could have turned in any direction–east, down the cliffs, to the Jordan Valley. North, to the villages on the ridge and farther on to Nablus. Back south, towards Ramallah. All of these options I knew well, but I had no idea which to choose. I turned north, on the assumption that if Bilahl had been caught in Ramallah, it was best to get as far away from there as possible. The donkey accepted my choice humbly. We called the donkey we had in my childhood Nasech, because he was fat. This one had thin legs, and his backbone was protruding and quite painful to my backside. So I called him Dayek, meaning narrow.

  In the first village we went through, we stopped in the grocery store and I bought water, pita bread and cheese, and a kilo of carrots for Dayek, who devoured them hungrily. I don’t know why I went for carrots–donkeys are happy with grass or hay, or can even make a meal of bushes and the bark of trees. But I decided to give him a treat. I ended up staying with Dayek a whole week, and I’m convinced that by the end of the week his weight had gone up by several kilos. At any rate, the bones on his back and ribs weren’t sticking out so much. His fur had thickened and looked healthier. I was proud of myself–at least I had made one Palestinian donkey happy.

  Dayek had a crooked tooth in the front of his mouth, which gave him character: when he exposed his teeth, the crooked one gave the impression that he was smiling. I smiled back at him and patted his nose, between the ears and eyes. We headed up to the hills. For hours we didn’t see a living thing besides a few birds and a couple of wandering goats; we heard only the sound of the cicadas. We stopped near a cave with a flat area of dirt in front of it. It was starting to get dark and I decided to sleep there. I took out the food and water I had left. ‘The hills of Palestine,’ I told Dayek, ‘are the most beautiful place on Earth. You should realise how lucky you are to be able to spend your life here.’ I put another carrot in his mouth and he chewed it loudly.

  Though the days were getting warmer, the nights in the hills were still very cold. Without a blanket I was facing a hard night. But I was also exhausted after a day of travelling, riding a donkey, the excitement of meeting my sister and anxiety about my brother’s and my own destinies. I fell deeply asleep on the cave floor for several hours. The chill woke me long before dawn, even before I heard the muezzins calling from the mosques. Dayek was up and ready for another day on the paths. I descended to a village and, still with help of the dark, took a blanket and a long shirt from a clothes line in a backyard. ‘Support the struggle,’ I whispered in the direction of the house, ‘I’m sure you’ll understand.’ By luck there was a small café there that served hummus and ful to the labourers on their way to work. I ate well and took pita bread and labbaneh with me for the rest of the day. In the grocery I stocked up on water and food for Dayek.

  We went on like that during the day, through villages, between the hills, eating, talking. In the middle of the day I heard a muezzin calling for the second prayer, and felt he was talking to me: ‘Come to pray, come to success, Allah is the greatest.’ I went to the mosque and prayed, and at the end of the prayer, I added a personal prayer for Bilahl and Lulu. Although I wasn’t a believer like Bilahl, I liked being in the mosque.

  The second night I slept much longer and more comfortably under the blanket. I discovered an old coffee kettle, built a fire and made myself tea with sage and other plants that I collected from the hill around me. I started to feel like Izz ad-Din al-Qassam himself. True, I lit the fire with a lighter rather than sticks or flints, and true, we had the villages for our food, but the feeling of being alone in nature was very powerful. It took hold of me, and got stronger every day, and especially every night that I spent outside, on my own, with only a donkey for company, and a half-moon for light.

  But worry about what had happened was gnawing away at me. The next morning I met a shepherd who didn’t have a mobile phone himself but directed me to a grocery in the next village. There I called Halil’s cousin, the driver. She was the only person I could think of. She was surprised to hear from me, asked whether I was OK, told me not to say anything. She was afraid. She asked whether she could call me back in an hour. I got the number from the guy in the store after I’d promised to pay him for receiving a call.

  We ate. I didn’t ask where I was. It wasn’t important. A beard was beginning to sketch itself in and my hair was wild. While it was still dark that morning I’d supplied myself with a T-shirt and underwear from the clothes line of some sleeping villagers. On an old tractor I found a baseball cap, with a green plastic net and an adjustable plastic strap at the back. On the front there was white padding and a drawing of a cement mixer with ‘Israbright Cement Factories Ltd’ in Hebrew lettering around it. The shade was green and made from the same padded material. I fell in love with the hat immediately. God knew how much I needed it, how merciless the sun could be.

  An hour later she told me what she knew. They’d caught Omar Sharif, she said, who had Bilahl’s number. Bilahl was picked up that same day, she didn’t know where or how. I told her where I was, more or less. I needed to hide well away from the expected places–Al-Amari, Murair, friends, family. She managed a quiet laugh. ‘Like a cowboy,’ she said. ‘Let me try to arrange something. I’ll call this number the same time tomorrow.’

  Oh, your fingers, Svetlana…so deep in my back, in my muscles…mmm…Where was I? In the mountains…

  What they managed to arrange for me was: a flat in Kafr Qasim. With the blue-card Palestinians, the Israeli citizens. There was a free room in a flat that belonged to one of the supporters of the movement in Gaza. He was renting the flat to a family from the village, just a normal family from Kafr Qasim, who didn’t even know about the Gazan landlord. One room in the flat was rented separately, which saved money for the family. I could stay there for a while, until things cleared up, or the situation eased. ‘How long?’ ‘For the time being you will be there.’ ‘What sort of family is it? I have to live with a family? An Israeli family? To eat with them?’ ‘I don’t have the exact details, but you don’t have many choices, if you don’t want to keep wandering the hills of Nablus on your donkey.’ I was silent. ‘What will I tell them? Where am I supposed to have come from?’ She laughed. ‘You think you’re the only one there? That they wouldn’t recognise the look, the accent? There are plenty of people from the West Bank living in those places.’ ‘How will I get there?’ She was a little impatient. ‘Try to get there on your own. It’s safer. Get there, and start getting organised. Slowly.’ She gave me the address. ‘What about work?’ ‘We’ll see…I’ll ask. But look for work by yourself. The room will be free, by the way. It’s a pretty good deal, Fahmi.’

  ‘I know.’

  My real journey began there: a week on the road on donkey-back, without a map. Navigating according to hunches and from rough directions given by people, picked up from the roads I crossed, the villages I entered. My beard thickened. My body got thinner and stronger from the effort of riding on a donkey’s back for a week.

  We didn’t come across one soldier during the whole time. I realised this when at last we saw a lone soldier from a distance, on a road, waiting to hitch a ride, and suddenly appreciated what a nice week it had been. I got used to eating little. Every morning I bought a few pitas, some cheese, a little olive oil and zaatar, and a bag of carrots, two or three of which I would eat myself, feeding Dayek the rest over the course of the day. When we passed a heap of hay or a field, I stopped and got off Dayek.

  I looked into his big brown eyes and couldn’t say no to them. I let him enjoy the plenty, and he ate unstoppably, with huge circular motions of the jaw that showed his smiling tooth and the pinkish insides of his grey lips.

  We rode in the hills and the valleys and on paths through terraces of olive trees. Every day I prayed the morning prayer and the night prayer: I might enter a mosque if I heard a muezzin call at a convenient time. I washed only when I came across a tap. We crossed black roads th
at led to settlements perched on ridges, the neat red-tile roofs shining over the green lawns, and dirt roads or worn-out asphalt bleached almost white leading to hillsides cluttered with dense construction, a mosque tower above and always the field below with its single haggard cow. We spent one night near Asira al-Qibliya, and the next in an arid valley, not having encountered a living soul the whole day. Near Deir Istiya we picked up another blanket and a pair of trousers from a clothes line. I wanted to take things from the settlements we passed on our way, Itamar and then Yitzhar, the industrial zone of Barkan, but I didn’t want to risk getting too close and being shot by a settler.

  I was alone with my thoughts–I could talk to Dayek up to a point but there wasn’t much else to do but think, about daily survival issues–food, path-finding, physical pain, places to sleep. I imagined Mother drinking tea with me near the fire, praising it, saying she was happy to see me make something other than bombs. I was sorry that I’d had to flee the village after only a couple of hours with Lulu, and barely having seen Father at all. And I hadn’t even seen Rana. Couldn’t I have just stopped by to explain, to say goodbye, to kiss her? She would have been wondering, perhaps offended. Who knew when I would see her again? And I was worried about a future in a room in Kafr Qasim, with an unknown family who would have to be told some story or other. What would I talk to them about? How would I make a living? What about papers? What would happen to Dayek?

  As Dayek and I started to descend from the hills of Samaria towards the lowlands, I knew we were getting closer. Roads crossed our path more frequently and more of the cars on them bore yellow number plates. Villages were becoming small towns; the land was becoming harder worked. Tall copses of eucalyptus trees replaced olives and scrub and I grew more cautious, making diversions through obscure valleys and asking goatherds or workers we met for directions to Arab villages. So we travelled from Deir Istiya to Karawat Bani Hasan, from there to Biddya, then to Mascha and from there to Az-Zawiya, where we arrived around noon. There we waited out a long afternoon. I wanted to leave after dark because I had to bypass a Jewish town on the way, Rosh Haayin. According to workers I asked, I had two hours of riding left to Kafr Qasim.