by Assaf Gavron
My friends at the mosque introduced me to Sa’id, who came to the first and fourth prayers every day and managed a packing plant for Shimshon, a company exporting fruit and vegetables. Every day his packing-houses received tons of tomatoes and watermelons from the south, mangoes, bananas and avocados from the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, citrus fruits from the Sharon, parsley and basil from the West Bank and much more. ‘We sort everything out according to the orders, store what needs to be stored, deliver what needs to be delivered to the airport and ports. It’s hard work,’ he warned me. ‘And the worst of it is that you’ll never want to look at a fruit or a vegetable again.’
‘I’ll give it a go,’ was my answer–as if I had a choice.
The packing-houses were some way outside the village, in the fields spread out east towards the brown hills, but still in Israeli territory. It was where I’d sold Dayek (I met the buyer, and my old friend was doing fine). But Sa’id hadn’t been kidding. My body was not prepared for the shock of the work. I’d done physical jobs before, but this was relentless. One after the other the trucks came in, packed with crates of carrots, cucumbers, potatoes, radishes, bananas and tomatoes, and the smell of it was terrible, especially the tomatoes. At home, a few fruits in a bowl give out a pleasant scent. In huge warehouses piled to the roof with it, the smell almost made you pass out. And besides, it was summer, and summer in Kafr Qasim was very different from summer up in the mountains. The heat was a nightmare, and carrying boxes of fruit in it was a double nightmare. It was my job to shift the boxes from the trucks coming into the deck to the forklifts. Two handlers worked on each truck that came in, one on the truck, the other on the deck. Eight in the morning to five in the evening, sometimes longer, with almost no breaks.
I was just a single ant in a huge anthill. The forklift drivers ferried the boxes to the storage rooms; other teams loaded the produce from there into huge containers for the cargo ships, or into smaller containers destined for the airport; others operated forklifts in the cold-storage rooms–they were sick most of the time because of the cold and therefore made better money. I made enough. In Al-Amari I could have lived very comfortably on my wages. But even in Kafr Qasim it was good enough. And if the work was hard, it gave me a reason to wake up in the morning at least, a daily routine. It developed my muscles and I made a few friends, like Majed Hashem from Kalkilya, a blond, bright-eyed guy with arms like a gorilla after years at the warehouse, and Ibrahim Hasuna from Bani Naim near Hebron. Ibrahim was short and skinny but also very strong. He had a black moustache and hair, sang Lior Narkis songs all day–Jewish crap:
Oh, sweet soul, the only one who knows me–
With you, I’m the whole world,
With you, I’m the whole universe,
Without you, I’m half a person…
Majed and Ibrahim weren’t close friends. Unlike the guys from the mosque, they weren’t religious and knew nothing about politics (girls and football: that was what they talked about) and I hardly saw them outside of work. But I enjoyed our days together in the packing-house–the condescension of the locals and our constant fear of the Border Police forged a bond between us.
Rana, I can smell that it’s you…I can feel your fingers on my face.
Say your name.
I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry I didn’t come back. I’m sorry. But please say something…
‘Sorry, Dr Hartom, I’ll be right there…!’
Svet? Is that you, or Rana?
If I’m dreaming, this dream is never-ending…
With the peak of the summer behind us, the air began to move and suddenly it hit you that air wasn’t just a suffocating blanket but something you could actually breathe. Of course, I was missing home, and Lulu and Rana, and even places like Ali’s café in Al-Amari. But after two months of working in the packing-house life had settled into a routine. I grew used to the village, the people, the job, and never saw any Jews. Maybe that was why everybody seemed so relaxed. Who knows how long I would have continued in this comfortable routine if my back hadn’t gone?
I’d had a few little warning twinges, but I’d just ascribed them to the new stresses on my muscles. And then one afternoon, it was like my whole body had suddenly seized up. I couldn’t move. Even sitting on a chair, doing nothing more than breathe, waves of pain were shooting through me. I couldn’t even answer the floor manager when he asked me what had happened. Was it my back? I nodded. He told me to lie down on the floor and raise my knees to my stomach. I wasn’t the first worker it had happened to, he said, and I wouldn’t be the last. I lay there for a few minutes with my back on the cool floor and sipped slowly from a glass of water he’d brought. Gradually I began to feel better. I managed to get up and walk slowly. Breathing became easier and the pain faded away. I signalled to the floor manager that I was able to carry on and slowly but successfully made it through to the end of the day. In the small hours of the night I was woken by an overwhelming pain.
I didn’t know what to do–who I could call, where I could go in the middle of the night. I lay there drowning in my suffering, waiting for the time to pass until dawn.
35
‘Are you completely crazy, Croc?’ She looked a little crazy herself–red eyed, mad haired. I was hardly looking my best myself. I’d had one too many, as they say. I’d had two too many. Even I could smell the stink of the cigarette smoke I’d been marinaded in for hours.
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear there was an attack?’
‘Oh, a half-arsed one, come on.’
‘Half-arsed? Two people have been killed, you fool! You call that half-arsed?’
‘You think that’s not half-arsed?’ I just wanted to sit down, drink a glass of water, get rid of my stinking wrinkled clothes and go to sleep.
‘Where were you? Don’t you understand I was worried about you? You don’t come home and you don’t call. Just like last night. You don’t even call to wish me good luck for the trial…’
‘Yeah, sorry, I…’
‘There’s an attack in a restaurant, people are killed and I…’ Duchi gave in to great high-pitched sobs, spasms of furious tears that shook her shoulders. I stood there, looking on. ‘Where were you?’
‘In Bar BaraBush. Where else? That’s where I always am. You don’t think I’m the kind of loser that goes to those steakhouses, do you? I actually find it a bit insulting that you think I’d be there.’ She ignored my attempt at humour.
‘What were you doing in Bar BaraBush? Why the hell do you go there every evening? With this Bar…’
‘Not every evening. And I wasn’t with Bar, I was on my own. And the night before I was with Gadgid, a guy who was in the army with me…Look, Duchki, I don’t understand. Haven’t you realised yet that the attacks can’t hurt me? They can’t touch me—’
‘You don’t understand. They’re following you! And eventually they’ll get you! I was just so completely sure you were there today.’ Her rage was diminishing to relief. ‘You’re always eating steak.’
Things will be all right, and if they aren’t, that’s all right too. Or things will not be all right, and if they are, that’s not all right either. Me v. Duchi.
‘OK,’ I said in a softer voice. ‘Let’s just go to sleep.’
‘No, I’m furious. Who is this “Gadgid” person? Why are you up until four in the morning with him? And the rest of the time with Bar. What do you talk about? What’s so…where are you going? Croc, Croc, don’t…oh, how brave! Turning your back. Too tough for you, is it, to have to listen to this?’
‘I need to piss, what do you want?’ I muttered, heading for the bathroom, but she was still talking and I don’t think she heard me. Lawyers, I consoled myself, make speeches as a form of keep-fit. ‘…blah blah blah, is that what you’re talking about in Bar BaraBush? You were supposed to be too old now for getting shit-faced in bars. What happened to that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, mid-piss. ‘I really did think I was getting ol
der.’
I was still drunk. I felt nauseous. I announced that I was going to sleep. She was angry but could hardly stop me. I got undressed and passed out, basically. Every three or four nights, the accumulated exhaustion would hit me and I would sleep like a dead man, and when I woke up she had already gone.
She called in the afternoon to say she was sorry. Well, me too. Bibi had invited her out, she said, so if I wasn’t planning to go home then she’d go over to her place. I told her not to go. I would come home.
‘Can we watch Noah’s Ark together?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’ I gave her a kiss down the receiver.
I left work early and went to the supermarket to buy stuff for a dinner of appeasement: wine, pasta, a few leeks, mascarpone cheese (for a recipe from the first Naked Chef book which I planned to cook), ingredients for a salad, strawberry-cheesecake Häagen-Dazs and Swiss chocolate with pistachio nuts. I was in a reasonably good frame of mind as I queued, full of good intentions and refreshed by a night’s sleep and an easy day at work. But the line wouldn’t move forward. The girl at the till was slow and the guy in front of me kept changing his mind and scuttling off to get new items. A quiet fury was rising within me like blood pressure. And then suddenly, out of the background noise of honks and engine noise, there came the unmistakable sound of an explosion.
What happened afterwards was relayed to me by Almaz. Apparently I shouted ‘Enough!!’ several times. I was instantly drenched in sweat (my underpants confirmed Almaz’s story). My eyes looked ‘distant and hazy’. I picked the bottle of wine up and shattered it on the floor then grabbed the guy in front of me by his shirt-front and shook him violently, babbling something about the dinner and crying uncontrollably. Then I seem to have started throwing my tomatoes, one after the other, at the wall. Not ripe enough to splat against the wall, they had bounced back like rubber balls. Then, according to various other witnesses, I ran out on to the street, pausing only to shove the security guard in the chest, still crying and yelling an unintelligible stream of something. I flopped down on a park bench, occasionally shouting, ‘Enough already!’ while my phone rang and rang until I took it out of my pocket, screamed, ‘ENOUGH!’, threw it on the pavement, stomped on it, found a rock and crushed it into fragments of plastic and glass. All this because of a misfiring exhaust.
It was lucky that the policemen took me to Almaz’s station, and luckier still that Almaz saw me there. Duchi picked me up. She took me home and helped me undress and shower. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t even tell her I’d been planning to cook her a meal. She nursed me quietly, with eyes newly red or still red from the night before. Then she talked on the phone and I understood that it was Voovi she was talking to, and that her father had left his third wife and moved into his son’s place.
We sat down in front of the television. Here’s something that’ll ease my mind, I thought. I was wrong. Noah’s Ark had been cancelled. Instead they showed a laughable programme with the laughable Max Caspi about last night’s half-arsed attack. Why? Because Caspi had been in the steakhouse at the time of the attack. He was a regular there. ‘What a clown,’ I said. ‘What a pathetic clown! There’s an attack on his favourite restaurant so he suddenly discovers we’re at war and it’s time to make a TV show about it?’
‘Come on. There were two people killed,’ Duchi said.
‘In Jerusalem there were nineteen killed. But they shot his fucking steak and now he’s had a revelation!’
‘Don’t shout,’ she said in a low voice.
‘I will shout! It’s a disgrace. What about Afula, Netanya, Hadera? Nahariya? Haifa? Nothing. Jerusalem? Nothing. You want some ice cream?’
I looked for the Häagen-Dazs, but of course it had never made it home, and all the freezer held was a strange grey icy residue of something or other. Max Caspi was sitting in his stupid steakhouse talking about getting on with our everyday lives and beating the terror. ‘Fuck that!’ I howled. ‘What everyday fucking life? We’ve already lost! We lost a long time ago. There isn’t anyone left in this place apart from security guards!’
‘Croc, can you calm down?’
I sat back on the sofa. Max Caspi threatened the terrorists, his wig shaking. ‘I’m sure they’re quaking in their fucking boots,’ I said. ‘They’re watching Max Caspi and saying, “Allah preserve us, we’d better stop with the bombs now that Mad Max Caspi’s on to us.”’
‘I called the Warshawski in Tel Mond,’ said Bar. We were outside the falafel stall. Bar’s black baseball cap hung loosely on his bald head. The straw from his juice waggled in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. ‘He claimed he hadn’t stepped on Tel Aviv soil for thirty-one years, and never would until the day he died. Though you should remember that he might have been lying.’
‘And what about the Tel Aviv Warshawskis?’
‘One’s a professor of “nuclear medicine” at Ichilov. He lives with his wife in the King David Tower. The second one lives in Ramat Aviv. Retired from the university. Published a book about Churchill.’
‘Churchill?’
‘Yes, don’t know why. He’s a widower, lives on his own.’
‘So what’s the link to Guetta?’
‘No idea. Unless Guetta was doing research on Churchill, or had an interest in “nuclear medicine”.’
‘“Nuclear medicine”? Maybe Guetta had some disease he didn’t want to tell anyone about…’
‘I doubt it. Why meet him in a café and not the hospital? As far as I can tell so far, no one knew about him having any disease.’
‘So it’s a dead end. Our case is dead.’
‘Not at all. Did I tell you I spoke to Guetta’s friend? Haim? He was in the army with him. He was listed in Guetta’s address book, and I had a hunch he might be interesting. He said Guetta was a killer, in Gaza.’
‘A murderer?’
‘In the army, Croc. He was in the Border Police. They called him “The Killer”. He scratched two “X”s on his barrel during the intifada, possibly three. There’s an argument about the third one, with some other killer in his company.’
‘I remember. There were quite a few Border Police at the funeral.’
‘Yeah. Haim and Guetta did their service together. They were in Gaza for a couple of years and saw some terrible stuff, he claims.’
‘So that helps us how, exactly?’
Bar adjusted his baseball hat so it shaded his eyes and stood up. ‘Come on, Croc. Stick with it. Poirot always knew that everything was a clue.’
When we returned to the office, he emailed me. ‘Binyamin Warshawski = suspect of investigation = the murder suspect = this is a suspicious historian.’
My new role in Time’s Arrow was to test the voice recognition system’s capacities. On older telephone switchboards, operators wasted an average of forty seconds on each call: the welcome greeting, the request for name and town, the computer search, reading the number, and then a farewell to the customer. The new system saved time by replacing the operators at the beginning (greeting, request for name and town) and end (reading the requested number, farewell) with the software. In this way the operator’s contribution to the call was shortened to twenty-something seconds.
But lots of companies do this, and Time’s Arrow needed to find an edge over them. Hence the voice recognition system we’d developed. Our goal: the whole call handled by the software. But voice recognition is extremely complex. People talk different languages, or dialects; they speak in different accents and make mistakes in their pronunciation; there’s the problem of background noise. So, in order to adapt the product to our various customers, we were ‘teaching’ the software to recognise the languages and the local accents. My role in QA was to conduct a long series of tests of the system’s success in recognising languages and accents. So for a French client I would get a Frenchman to try the system out, then test it with my own voice, then find a North African French speaker, a West African one, and so on. It was a pretty easy job. All I needed to
do was conduct some tests and fill in some forms. And, as Jimmy had mentioned, the company wasn’t doing too well, so I was hardly snowed under. I was working on software we’d developed for the Belgians: tests in French, Flemish and all the relevant accents.
One day, while drowsily scrolling around an Internet map of Africa to see where the Belgian Congo was, my phone rang.
‘I think I have found something of immense value.’
‘Who am I speaking to, if I may ask?’ I said, suddenly excited.
‘It’s Bar, you imbecile.’
A falafel-stall meeting was convened. Bar had indeed found something: in Guetta’s Palm’s Notes sub-folder he had discovered a single encrypted file. When he tried to open it, he was asked to enter a password. He tried ‘Shuli’. It worked. The note said:
Tamer Sarsur. America Fruit and Veg, Be’eri.
Physiotherapy. Don’t mix with the brother.