Croc Attack!
Assaf Gavron

Translated from the Hebrew by the author

For Mum and Dad

‘Lost ground can be regained – lost time never.’

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

1

I climbed aboard the Little No. 5 as I did every morning on my way to work. ‘Little No. 5’ is what I call the minibussized cab which follows the route of the No. 5 bus. It’s actually a cross between a bus and a cab. You get the best of both worlds – the familiar route and the cheapness of the bus, but they’ve got the speed of a cab and you can hail them and get off where you like.

And since there were bombs all the time, I only ever took Little No. 5s to work and back. Even if a real No. 5 arrived at my stop before a Little No. 5 I let it pass. A bus was too easy a target for a terrorist – especially the No. 5, which was almost always full and had already been bombed. I wasn’t really all that sure about doing this, but Duchi made me swear never to take the bus. And they were never going to bomb a Little No. 5. For one thing, they can only take ten people, eleven with the driver. Plus there’s only the one door, at the front, so the driver can see exactly who gets on board.

That day I got on at the usual place. The time was around nine in the morning. A pale midwinter sun was hanging in a translucent sky; wet leaves covered the boulevard.

The driver was Ziona. She was the only woman driver in the Little No. 5 fleet but she was no pushover. She was always yelling down the radio at the dispatcher in the office, complaining about some guy who’d dared to overtake her or cut her up, or wondering how the hell that Jumbo had gotten so far ahead of her. A Jumbo’s a bus, in the Little No. 5 drivers’ dialect. The dispatcher was always telling her to shut up and stop hogging the frequency. Maybe she ought to chill out? Maybe she ought to stop drilling a hole in everybody’s head, including the heads of the passengers?

And Ziona would take a drag from the cigarette she liked to hang outside her window and whisper to herself as she exhaled, ‘Oh, ffffuuuckk your fucking hole in the head!’

We were heading down Dizengoff Street when an elderly lady turned to me. Quietly she said: ‘Doesn’t that man look suspicious?’

With her eyes she indicated a dark guy at the front. We were sitting at the back. He was wearing a grey wool hat and holding a suit in a suit bag.

‘Come on, don’t exaggerate,’ I said. ‘He looks fine to me.’

But I kept looking at him. I thought about the fact that explosive belts were the latest thing – the flavour of the month. Explosive belts must be pretty flat if you can strap them round your body. Just possibly there was one in his suit bag.

‘Don’t you worry about it,’ I told the old lady. ‘It’ll be fine.’

She gave me a sour look and tried another guy who was sitting at the back with us. She whispered something in the other guy’s ear, and he looked towards her suspect and a second later shook his head and flapped his hand. Now I was certain. Just paranoid. Why is everyone so paranoid in this country? Can’t dark guys get on buses with suit bags any more?

The old lady called over to Ziona.

‘Can I get off at the next corner?’

Ziona looked in the mirror with her big eyes. ‘Of course you can, honey,’ she said. Ziona was a nice woman. She had short hair and wide shoulders. She’s dead now, of course. ‘You talking to me, Yossi?’ she jabbered into the radio. ‘Hey, who’s that? You got a driver called Morris next to you? Morris, the driver of Seventy?’ Yossi didn’t answer. Another driver was saying, ‘Hey, what is this, the cemetery? We got no passengers today? Ten minutes and nobody gets on.’ Someone else was saying, ‘At least you get to see some of these chicks’ bellies…’ and Yossi cut across them: ‘Will you cut this crap out! Ziona, you’re doing it again, and everyone else piles in after you with their chatter.’ Ziona swore to herself. The radio was tuned to a news show. They were talking about a bomb in Wadi Ara. The passengers were listening quietly. Then there was a song.

The old lady got off at Jabotinsky Street. She didn’t trust our judgement. On her way out she gave the dark guy a long look. He looked back at her. I didn’t think at that moment that his look meant anything. If I did have a sneaking suspicion that she might have a point, that I ought to get off too, just to be on the safe side, I blotted it out immediately. I didn’t have time for the safe side. Who has?

‘Everyone’s under pressure, eh?’ the other guy at the back said. He had a little goatee and big aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses. His hair was the colour of honey, held back with plenty of gel, darkening into curls at the back. Cool, at least in his own eyes. Pleasant smile. Giora, I know now. Giora Guetta, from Jerusalem. I know plenty of things now.

‘This paranoia…’ I said. ‘People are completely crazy.’

‘He looks OK to you, right?’

I looked once more towards the dark guy. I wasn’t sure. Who could be sure?

‘Yeah, no problem with him,’ I said.

Each of us looked through his window. Winter, but the sun was out. I watched the tree-lined canyon of Dizengoff slide by, the parade of designer clothing shops, an ad for the movie Monsters Inc., a small Gad Dairy truck passing. A builder got on and started shouting at Ziona.

‘Why didn’t the last two stop for me?’ The builder was the father of two girls. I read it later on Ynet.

‘Don’t get mad, honey,’ Ziona said. ‘They were probably full.’

‘Come on, people, my time is precious,’ the builder said.

‘Everybody’s time is precious, honey.’

If there’s one thing I like about the Little No. 5s, it’s their efficiency with time. I know something about this: I work in the business of time. For example, all the handling of money and change is done during the ride, not like on the bus, where everyone’s got to finish paying while it’s still standing at the stop. You give someone sitting in front of you some money and they pass it down, from passenger to passenger to the driver, and your change comes back up, from hand to hand back into your palm. Money circulating efficiently from stranger to stranger, like the bus’s blood. Or the way the drivers change money with other drivers: they arrange it over the radio, and when they pass each other they’ll stop for a couple of seconds and, one-two, it’s done. Or their skill on the road – the way they improvise, overtaking cars and Jumbos by driving on the other side of the road, stealing valuable seconds at traffic lights, avoiding traffic jams by cutting through narrow streets off their usual routes: decisive actions. It’s a pleasure to watch them.

Somebody touched my shoulder. I looked up in alarm and saw it was only the guy in the mirrored shades, with a PalmPilot in his hand. I thought to myself: what are you showing off for? I’ve got a Palm too. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. My Palm had stopped working a couple of months before.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if something happens to me, I want you to tell my girlfriend in Jerusalem, Shuli – I want you to tell her…’ He was thinking, but he couldn’t seem to find the right words. I chuckled. What was he talking about, if something happened to him? Him too? The old lady, OK, she’d probably been paranoid since the Holocaust, but him?

‘If something happens,’ I said, ‘I’m hardly going to be the one left to pass on messages, am I? Don’t worry, man, nothing’s going to happen.’

‘I know nothing’s going to happen,’ he said, ‘but if it does…If you want, I can also send a message to someone, like, if I…you know.’

‘No,’ I said reflexively. Then I thought: maybe I should send a message to someone? Maybe I should get my will written? You never know. I thought that if there was anyone I would leave anything to, it would have to be Duchi. Despite everything.

And then I thought again. Damn – what the hell am I doing, on a bus, on the way to work, worrying about my will? How did I get here? On the back of the bus in front there was a picture of one of those red-jacketed guardsmen in London. It said: ‘Going abroad? Take your mobile!’ On the radio, a man who was driving behind the bus that was blown up in Wadi Ara told Rafi Reshef, ‘I’m optimistic, optimistic, optimistic, optimistic.’ We were getting to the busier part of Dizengoff Street, where the towers of the Centre loom and the city crush grows denser. A phone rang and someone answered. I got my little notebook out – since my Palm stopped working I’m back in the Middle Ages – and wrote: Check again how much rent house New Zealand. Talk w/ Duchi about it.

‘You from Jerusalem?’ I said to the guy. ‘Me too, originally.’ But I saw he was thinking about other things. His expression was serious. Later I’d think about how people sometimes have premonitions. How we found all kinds of clues and hints that Danny Lam left before he was killed, like the poem he wrote a month before, and how soldiers who die are always supposed to say goodbye in a special way in their last phone call. How people always said things in the final days; how they’d had a feeling that something was going to happen. On the other hand, everybody says these things all the time. You just pay attention to the ones who actually die. I myself had a sign that I was about to die. One time I saw these birds flying in the dark. I thought: birds flying in the dark, weird, it must be a sign…and yet I’m still alive. Even now. Even after the Little No. 5, after Shaar Hagai, after Emek Refa’im.

After Fahmi.

‘Stop being a fool,’ I said to Giora Guetta. ‘Don’t think about it.’

He smiled. I stood up, waved goodbye to him and got off the Little No. 5 without a word. On my way out I didn’t look at the dark guy, the suicide bomber, again. I think I didn’t look at him because I didn’t believe he was a terrorist, but maybe I didn’t look at him because I didn’t want to embarrass him.

I walked into the mall at the base of the Dizengoff Centre through Gate 3. With all the bombs and precautions, the entrance to the Centre looks like the gate to an army camp: barriers, guards and metal detectors that always, always beep. The guards never check the source of the beep so why do they run the detector over us? Just to send magnetic waves through our bones?

Every day I’m treated differently entering the mall. Sometimes they might ask me to show my wallet or phone, other times they just pass the detector over me, or let me through and only then stop me, as if I’d somehow gone through too quickly, or looked suspiciously relieved. One time, immediately after a big bomb, they started asking for ID cards and added another guard near the elevators to the offices. This checkpoint was about seven metres past the first one. Two days later they got rid of the second guard. Another day passed and the ID card wasn’t necessary. After the next big bomb you needed it again.

So even when they let me pass and then stopped and groped me seven metres after someone else had; even when I had to take my bag off my back, unzip it, take my wallet out, take the ID card out, open it in front of them and watch them not even glance at it – I might as well have stuck a picture of Arafat in there: they’d have waved me through anyway – I decided to let them get on with their job. Not because I think there’s no alternative, but because I no longer have the strength to object. What good would it do if I complained or refused to show my ID? I see people arguing and I can understand, but it never helps them. It just slows them down. It’s like footballers arguing with the referee after he gives a penalty – was there ever a player in the history of football who changed a ref’s mind?

That day, there was a blood donation unit at the gate. It’s important to donate. They say there’s not enough blood in the hospitals because of all the bombs. But I didn’t have time. I went up to the office. I didn’t hear the explosion. Everybody else did, people down at street level, people up in our office on the twenty-third floor. Bombs are something you hear. They’re loud. But I was in the elevator and didn’t hear it. Not that the boom made such an impression at first. There are booms all the time: sonic aircraft booms, building-site booms, all the accidents and bangs and crashes of a city. So everyone in the office was looking calm. I popped my head into all the rooms on the way to my own room and said hello, as I did every morning, and people smiled and said good morning, as they did every morning. In my room I said hello to Ron and Ronen, and Ron said, ‘You hear the boom?’

‘What boom?’

It took a few minutes until we realised that there had been a suicide bomb and that it had happened in the centre of Tel Aviv. We turned on the TV in the kitchen and saw the map with the little flame-thing that shows the location of the bomb, and saw it was up the road, at the south end of Dizengoff Street, near the Habima Theatre, and they were saying it was probably a bus.

Everyone in the office was watching the TV. Those who hadn’t arrived yet wouldn’t arrive for a while because the roads were blocked. According to Ynet there were ten Israelis killed and one suicide bomber. The result: 10–1. The Jews lose again, or at any rate it’s a scoreline that’s going to need quite a bit of a positive gloss.

Soon I was busy answering the phone and telling everyone I was alive. ‘No, they didn’t get me yet,’ I told the callers. After a few calls, I started answering the phone with, ‘This is Croc and I’m alive, who wants to know?’ I talked to people I hadn’t talked to for years.

‘Lucky there are bombs once in a while,’ I told them, ‘at least we get to talk.’

I started work: I had to talk to our Swiss client, Ivan, work out what he required; I made calls and wrote emails and documents, and at some point Ron said, ‘No. 5 minibus – you use that thing, don’t you?’ I lifted my eyes from the screen.

‘What?’

‘No. 5 minibus?’

‘I call it the Little No. 5. What about it?’

‘The bomb. It was a No. 5 minibus that was bombed. Your bus, isn’t it?’

‘Really?’

My first thought was: fuck, how will I get to work from now on? Those fuckers hit every possible means of transportation. Am I going to have to take cabs now? Buy another car? Too expensive…

I entered Ynet again and read the update. Every passenger on the minibus killed. But still it didn’t seem like mine. Somehow it seemed it couldn’t be the right time or place. There were dozens of minibuses en route at any given time. ‘Yeah, I go on one every day,’ I was telling everyone nonchalantly. ‘Unbelievable. The bomber could have been on the same No. 5 I was on. Who knows?’

Only then did I remember the dark guy and his suit bag, and the old lady who suspected him, whom I’d told not to worry. And the other guy who asked me to send some unspecified message to his girlfriend. This is crazy, I thought, I have to get hold of this guy, and then the phone rang.

‘Croc, I’m alive,’ I answered.

‘Uh huh,’ said Jimmy. ‘Why alive?’

‘Why not?’

‘Listen, next week there’s a meeting in Brussels, it’s important, it’s with…’ Here he mentioned the name of a large Belgian telecoms company. His accent was terrible. ‘You coming with me?’

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘No. I’m telling Gili to book us flights and hotel rooms. Get ultra-prepared. Make sure you’re ready with all the presentations. And don’t forget tomorrow’s company meeting.’ Jimmy ended the conversation without waiting for an answer. He does it all the time. He explained once that he didn’t have the luxury of waiting for an answer. Jimmy’s real name, by the way, is Rafi. Rafi Rafael, or Rafraf, as he’s known in our room. When he was an officer in the air force he ran their time management unit. Now he’s the CEO of Time’s Arrow.

I called Duchi and left her a message: ‘Hi. I wasn’t killed in the suicide attack in case you’re interested. I’m in Brussels next week. Bye.’

And then they started talking about the female driver of the minibus involved in the bomb attack, and it was only then that I understood. Ziona was the only woman driver in the Little No. 5 fleet. I knew it because she was always bringing it up. She was proud of it. My heart stopped beating and my breath got stuck in my throat. And then they started up again, because that’s what the heart and lungs always do, when you’re alive.

I jogged back to the kitchen. The TV was still on though everyone was back in their rooms. Danny Ronen, the military correspondent on Channel 2, mentioned the name Ziona Levi. A nervous little chuckle escaped my mouth. I went to the bathroom and put my hands, clenched tightly into fists, on the marble. I felt a wave of pain and nausea washing over me, tried to breathe deeply, looked at the mirror, and laughed again. This laughing face: whose was it? It didn’t look familiar. Didn’t look like mine. The blood was hammering in my temples. I felt very close to passing out. I had to get out, to breathe fresh air. I threw water on my face and made it down to the street and walked towards the site of the bombing, up Dizengoff Street, past the shoemaker’s and up the hill, under the tunnel formed by the canopy of branches, and turned right past the gallery. I stopped opposite the museum and concert hall, just before the Habima Theatre, on the side where the post office is. In the time that had passed they’d reopened the road to traffic. Everything had been cleaned up and the wreckage of the minibus had been towed away. The deceased had been removed: all that belonged to them, all that had been them. There weren’t even police barriers up any more.

Miraculously – they always use that word, miraculously – not one of the passers-by or drivers near by had been injured. Only a single car parked on the side of the road was totalled (the owner was a guy named Amir who’d just popped into the post office to pay a parking fine – and it turned out he never got any insurance money or compensation: because he was parked in a no-parking zone). A bus passed, groaning and spitting black smoke like an old man hawking phlegm. I looked at the wet patches on the road where the blood had been washed away. The pale sun was gloomy and silent. The traffic was running normally. Two and a half hours since the bomb went off, and it was as if nothing had happened, or almost. Some drivers were slowing down to peer at the wet patches before driving on. On the pavement beside me kids were lighting candles and people were shouting or crying. They had their solutions. They announced their solutions. They said: kill, retaliate, blast them to bits, withdraw…

I turned my head away from them towards a gap between two buildings. I wasn’t looking for anything. I’ve no idea why my eyes were drawn there. Maybe it was the tree standing there, an old olive tree that looked out of place among the palms, that didn’t seem to belong in the little alley. I looked at the olive tree and moved as if compelled towards it, and that’s when I saw, a little above where the trunk fissured, cradled in the crook of one of the bigger branches, the PalmPilot of the guy who’d been sitting next to me.

2

‘Good morning, Fahmi.’

If I am dreaming, this dream is never-ending…

‘How are we doing today? Let’s have a peek at those pupils…’

Hate this light. Hate the wash. Why can’t she leave me alone?

‘Time for your wash, Fahmi. Your favourite part of the morning, ha ha…’

Go away, Svetlana. Fuck you.

‘We are mad today, aren’t we? What a face you’re making! Let’s have a look at what you’ve got on later. Oh – you’ve got a deep massage this morning. What fun!’

I’m floating in the sea. I can see the shore but I can’t reach it. The tide keeps me away. I see Bilahl on the beach.

‘Here. That’s better. Come on now.’

I’m not here, I am…where was I before she came to disturb me?

‘And visitors in the afternoon! So who’s coming to visit you? Who’s he going to be? Or she?’

Where was I? I’m floating in the sea. Where’s Mother? Lulu? Rana? Where was I before she disturbed me? With Bilahl…with Croc…somewhere…in the village? In the camp? In Tel Aviv?

In Tel Aviv.

Shafiq started everything, in Tel Aviv. He wanted to smoke a cigarette with the driver. That’s what the driver said afterwards. He took off the belt, locked it in the trunk, they smoked the cigarette and then he put on the belt in the back seat. That all happened when they were still in Jaffa. Then he took a cab to Tel Aviv…Bilahl had found someone who knew the Jews, knew Tel Aviv well. He told Shafiq to go to a crossroads near Rabin Square, where they have their demonstrations and crowds gather. Explained to him where he should stand, which corner and what time – a place where there was always a gridlock at rush hour. But then we saw the news, on Channel 2 and Al-Jazeera: he’d got on a bus. No square. No crossroads…

What the hell are you – Svetlana…?

‘Good boy, Fahmi. Don’t make a face, it’s only water. Don’t you want to look pretty for your visitors today? So just let me get behind your ears…’

Stop it, you fucking whore! What visitors? Where am I? Where was I? Floating among my fragments of memory…and you’re mixing them up. Getting my wires crossed. Crossroads. Shafiq…

Shafiq. He didn’t do what the guy who knew Tel Aviv told him. Went with the shaved cheeks and the haircut and the clothes Bilahl gave him, and then got on a bus. Only a little bus, they explained on TV. Danny Ronen, the clown with the eyebrows. How did he get there? How had it been, getting on, paying, waiting? And how must he have felt, a moment before heaven? He must have felt whole. A moment away from heaven. The best feeling he’d ever had, better than anything he had imagined. The moment of his life. And me, with Croc and the green grenade in Tel Aviv, how did I feel?

Shafiq would have been sure at the end. Not like me. The light turned green and the driver of the little bus would have pushed the pedal and turned the wheel. Shafiq, and everybody around him, had all lived their lives to get to this moment. Everything heading towards this moment. Every drag on a cigarette, every blink, every swallow of saliva, every emotion, every motion, every breath, every thought, every word anyone on the little bus had ever said had been headed towards the moment when Shafiq stood up and turned his back to the passengers and pushed the button, and his body blossomed with the fullness of his power; his clean, his warm, his Babylonian power…

‘That’s better. Nice and clean. You can hardly even see the scratch on your forehead. I’ve got patients here who are totally deformed. Damaged for ever. But you’re whole, Fahmi. Perfect for your visits. So, then. Who’s coming to see you today? Who would you like? Your dad? Your little sister? Your cute girlfriend?’

Oh, shut up, you goddamned Jewish whore! Losing my thread…

Father. A good man. A sad man, since Mother…

‘Fahmi, I will not put up with this. Not you.’

‘I’m not doing anything, Father.’ He was standing right in front of me, obscuring the TV, with his solid grey mane like a lion’s. His brown eyes were angry.

‘Father, please don’t stand there. Let me see, please.’

‘I know what you’re doing. I know about Bilahl. He’s a lost cause, but you? You promised me. You promised to go to Bir Zeit University – you’re going to give me a heart attack…’

‘I will go. I’ll fulfil my promise. Please don’t worry.’

Later, Bilahl would attack me: Why do you apologise? Why do you grovel in front of him? He’s let them humiliate him and walk all over him his whole life. That’s what’s the matter with him…

Oh no. No! Don’t touch me there! Oh, fuck you, you filthy Jewish whore!

‘Well done, Fahmi. Now try not to get excited, OK? I’m just going to wipe here. Slowly, very slowly, ever so softly…Just going to get you all clean and pretty and smelling good for your massage and your guests. You like that, don’t you?’

3

My name is Eitan Enoch but everyone calls me Croc. Because: Eitan Enoch = ‘Hey, Taninoch!’ That got shortened to ‘Hey, Tanin!’ And in Hebrew, Tanin means a crocodile. That’s the evolution of my name. Enoch itself, it turns out, evolved from Chanoch, the father of Methuselah, the oldest guy in the Bible. A settler told me that once.

I grew up in Jerusalem but moved to Tel Aviv, where I work for Time’s Arrow, or Taimaro!, as our Japanese customers like to pronounce it. A year and a half ago my older brother left Israel with his wife and three boys because of the bombs. We’ve got a rich grandmother in Maryland who invited us all to come and live there. My younger sister Dafdaf wants to go too, with her husband. All of us have American citizenship because our parents are from there: my father grew up in Maryland – so green and pleasant, so relaxed and comfortable – and Mom’s from Denver. They came to Israel before I was born. God knows what they were thinking of. Every time I visit Maryland, I ask myself that question. Maybe they were excited by the young Jewish state. Maybe it seemed exotic. Or maybe it was that Dad had big ideas: he wanted to teach the young country how to spread peanut butter on its bread. Efraim Enoch from America: the capitalist, the entrepreneur, the great peanut butter importer. But the land of the Jews didn’t have time for peanut butter, or, at any rate, not for the one he imported.

When I see them now, it’s as if every bomb blows another brick out of the wall of the decision to emigrate. Their mistake. They can’t blame us for running away, but their hearts are breaking. It’s difficult, what they did: leaving the comfortable life in America while they were still young, travelling to a new, hot, primitive country and trying to build something from nothing: a family, a business, a state. They called it Zionism. And then they had to watch everything get blown to smithereens, their children and grandchildren leaving, going back to America. I’m not going to leave. Or not yet. It’s not so simple. Because I’m not sure whether I want to, or where to go – and things with Duchi are uncertain enough…

So, I stood there with the PalmPilot in my hand while people went in and out of the post office. Hanging from the façade of the Tel Aviv Museum for the Arts was a banner which read ‘Of Life and Death – A Retrospective of the Artist Oli Shauli-Negbi’. The word ‘Retrospective’ reeled my gaze in. I left. I walked. I walked through the drifts of sodden dead leaves and tried to think whether there was anything I could have done to prevent it. Should I have told the passengers that the dark guy was a suspect? Should I have said something to the driver? Would she have listened to me? The truth is that those drivers aren’t scared of anything. Ziona would have pulled over and started interrogating him.

But if she’d done that, he would have pressed the button, or pulled the string, or…

Why had he waited until I got off? What kept me alive? Why had God stretched out one of his long fingers and miraculously tapped my forehead? When I got off at the Dizengoff Centre, some people got on and I heard Ziona tell one of them, ‘I’m sorry, honey, I’m full. There’s another one behind me.’ The terrorist had waited until the cab filled up and only then…

If I’d told Ziona and she’d talked to him, he would have blown himself up. If I’d shouted to everybody to be careful, he would have blown himself up. If I’d phoned the police, or told the security guards at the mall, nobody would have had time to do anything. All in all, I told myself, walking through the slow grey drops of rain that had started to fall, I was clean. I couldn’t have done anything, because the dark guy had come here to blow himself up and he would have gone ahead and done it whatever the hell I’d done. All I could have done was what I did – save myself. And even that I’d done unintentionally.

But then I thought some more and saw I was letting myself off too lightly. There was another thing I could have done. I could have been less certain that the dark guy wasn’t a terrorist. I could have saved the guy I talked to. The guy who I know now as Giora Guetta. I could have saved him because he spoke to me after the old lady got off and before I did. I remembered every word – his voice and the way he said it, the look in his eyes, the half-smile of his perfect white teeth, the way he’d swivelled his head towards the terrorist and said, ‘He looks OK to you, right?’ And how I’d said: ‘Yeah, no problem with him.’

Why had I said that?

Because I’d had enough of paranoid and hysterical people like Duchi.

And that’s why I go to the opposite extreme: no problem, everything’s fine, stop worrying and crying and moaning about everything! It was Duchi’s fault. Her responsibility. She’d damaged my sense of judgement. Without her destructive influence, without years of living in the shadow of her hysteria, without those years of her continuous premonitions of imminent catastrophe, perhaps I’d have thought more clearly and said, ‘You know what? I’m not sure. Perhaps he is a terrorist.’ And then maybe Giora would have got off with me. Who knows? If it hadn’t been for my girlfriend maybe I’d have saved a man’s life.

I found I was hungry for meat. I stopped at Bar BaraBush and ordered a hamburger called ‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight’. I waited at the bar and watched the small TV on it showing Channel 2: Danny Ronen talking with his usual serious face, utilising his thick eyebrows, shooting them up and down as he always does. I didn’t hear what he said but it doesn’t really matter. He always says the same thing: enforce, ease off, close, encircle, shoot the eyebrows, go out on a mission, attack, lock and siege, and the cabinet convened and the cabinet decided and these guys took responsibility and those guys showed courage…

I went to wash my hands – I think perhaps I thought I had blood on them – and on my way back I took a postcard on which GET OUT! was written in large black lettering. GET OUT? I didn’t have a clue who wanted me out or why. Outside, through the big window, the skies were opening and closing their wet mouths. I went out into them with The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight in a bag in my hand and GET OUT! in my pocket.

I put the Cannibal and the chips I found next to it on a plate and prepared to have my way with them. Whatever was happening to my mind, my body still seemed to be functioning with amazing efficiency. My eyes sent a snapshot of the hamburger to my brain, which gave out its directives to flood my mouth with saliva and release stomach acids to welcome our new guest – and then the door buzzed.

I looked at the wall and at the Cannibal and decided not to answer. I started eating. A minute later: a key in the front door, the handle turning, somebody entering.

‘Why didn’t you open up?’

‘Hey, Dooch, sorry,’ I said. My mouth, which I’d filled with Cannibal a moment before, spoke for itself. I gestured with my shoulders towards the plate. She looked at it and her eyes immediately went into her ‘rage mode’.

‘Why don’t you answer the mobile? And what are you doing at home in the middle of the afternoon? You know there was a bomb?’

‘Yes.’ I was searching for the mobile in my bag – I must have left it at work.

‘You realise how worried I was? You couldn’t call?’

‘I’m sorry, Dooch, I was sure you were busy and…hang on a second, I did call! Didn’t you get my message?’

‘I got one message saying you were alive two hours after the bomb! Thanks very much indeed.’ I looked at her, surprised. I didn’t know what to say. ‘It was in a Little No. 5, Croc. At nine-fifteen! Did you think I wasn’t going to worry?’

‘You know I get off at the Dizengoff Centre! It was after that, near the theatre. Didn’t you see the little flame-thing on TV? Here, look.’ I found the remote and pushed the button. Danny Ronen and his eyebrows were still talking. ‘I left you a message saying I was alive. I don’t get it…’

‘I heard the message, but…’ Here tears intervened. ‘But how could I be sure?’ She wiped them away and stood there, fragile and unhappy. ‘I wasn’t sure if everything was all right. You could have called again. I was so scared! You don’t know how scared I was. I spent the whole day waiting for an adjournment, trying to get away to see you…’

I swallowed another mouthful – damn, the Cannibal was good! – and went over to hug her. ‘It’s all right, honey. I’m sorry. Come on. Stop it. I just thought you saw where it happened, you got the message so obviously I was alive, and…whatever…what do I know?’

Duchi disengaged herself from the embrace. ‘You’re saying I didn’t need to worry? I’m just hysterical? And paranoid?’ Her tone had changed: the tears weren’t there any more.

‘I didn’t say…’

‘How could you be so insensitive? Not to call just once more? You did it on purpose, didn’t you? To show me I’m just hysterical.’ Now there was anger, maturing like a good wine. ‘What do you expect me to think? It’s the bus you take every morning at that time! And I’m supposed to look at the little flame-thing on TV? What fucking flame-thing?’

‘You know, the, you know, the graphic of the map showing the bomb…Duchi, I didn’t do anything on purpose, I swear, I just…You know it was the same minibus that I was on? I actually talked to…’

‘Oh, you son of a bitch!’ She was whining now and wiped her big brown eyes with her forearm. She sat down next to the table and absent-mindedly grabbed a handful of chips.

‘Hey, go easy on the chips!’ I told her. ‘How was your day?’

‘What do you fucking think?’

We sat in silence for a few moments. I took a bite of the Cannibal and she stole chips and stared at the corner of the table and eventually lifted her eyes to me.

‘Tell me what I’m going to do with you, Croc?’ she said.

And then suddenly a thought struck me – until that morning I hadn’t known anyone who even knew anyone who’d been in a terrorist attack. A few weeks earlier the water-heater guy had come to do some work, and he said a cousin of a friend of his had been injured in a bomb in Petach Tikvah the week before. He was the closest, until Giora Guetta. But I didn’t really know Giora Guetta either. What does ‘knowing’ someone mean? Knowing the name? Saying hello when you meet? The person knowing you? The number of words you exchanged? I was still trying to puzzle it out when she got into bed.

‘Duchi?’

‘What?’

‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight,’ I said.

‘Idiot,’ she said, and I climbed on top of her. She was satisfied. Then she climbed on top of me in return.

In the morning she made me swear to take a taxi, though I’ve yet to hear of two bomb attacks happening in exactly the same place on following days. Somehow, despite this clear and logical statistical data, people are convinced that the terrorists tell themselves: ‘Ahmed, hey, it worked, let’s try again tomorrow in exactly the same place since there are bound to be loads of people there and no security.’ In practice, the army and police upgrade their security to maximum in the place that was hit, people avoid going to that area and family members become hysterical. I told Duchi all of this and she said, ‘But what about the No. 18 bus on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in ’96?’

‘Those were a week apart,’ I said. But it was a pretty feeble point. So I ended up taking a taxi. A Little No. 5 didn’t blow up that morning. But so what? A real No. 5 didn’t blow up either, the whole time I worked for Time’s Arrow, miraculously. On none of the days I took Little No. 5s to the Dizengoff Centre did a real No. 5 get bombed. So: what? I mean: so what, exactly, Duchki?

4

Amr Diab is singing ‘Amarein’. It’s about two moons. He means the girl’s two eyes or her two…

Someone’s playing this music for me, the two moons of Amr Diab, and I want to move my head but my head doesn’t move. If I’m dreaming, the dream is never-ending. But I’m not dreaming, I’m hearing the song; I can smell this smell, I can feel the fingers tearing into my muscles, the heels of the hands kneading my flesh. But my body doesn’t move and my eyes don’t open.

After the two moons Amr Diab sings ‘Nour el Ein’– The Light in Your Eyes – and ‘Always with You’ and then Nawal Zuabi starts singing. It reminds me of the show Ya Leil Ya Ein on Future TV, the Lebanese TV station, with the dancing and the girls. Who’s playing this music for me? I can smell this good smell. Not Svetlana – Svetlana would never have been able to keep her mouth shut. Is the good smell you, Rana? Why are you quiet? Why is nobody talking? I listen, but all I can hear is the music…

Where am I? If I’m in heaven, then where is Mother? Where is Grandfather Fahmi?

If they’re not here, then I’m not in heaven.

So where am I exactly?

My grandfather, Fahmi Sabich, arrived in Al-Amari in 1949. Most of the inhabitants of Beit Machsir who were driven out that year settled in the East Bank. But Grandfather wanted to stay close to his village. Close to the house he built. He was sure he would return to live in his home. He never did. Never saw his home or his friends or his cousins again. In Al-Amari there wasn’t room enough even to raise chickens, but he met Grandmother Samira there. She came from Dir Ayub, a village that doesn’t exist any more. The Jews didn’t even build a settlement where it had been. They just destroyed it and built a road.

‘Bidak turkusi birasi…’ Inside my head I want to dance…

I can feel how loose my muscles are now and the oil on my skin and the cool air from the ventilator drying it off. I piss…oh, that’s good.

‘Wow,’ the idiot bitch of a nurse says, ‘look how much you’ve made!’

One tube for piss, another for air; one tube for piss, another for air; one tube for piss, another for air…

Father was the third of six brothers and sisters. Mother was the third of six sisters and brothers. She was born in Murair, the most beautiful place in the world. Grandfather Fahmi said that Beit Machsir was more beautiful still. Looking west, you could see the Mediterranean from it and on a clear day the houses of Jaffa. When I was ten I told him that from Murair you could see the River Jordan and the valley and the Edom mountains, and on a clear day the houses of Amman, if you were looking east. He laughed at that.

Mother and Father met at Bir Zeit University, and after they got married they moved to Murair. Even in 1977 it wasn’t common for a village girl to marry a refugee with no property; or for the man to move into the house of the woman or for a father to leave land to his daughter. My mother and father didn’t care. Nor did my mother’s father. Dignity wasn’t all that important. Life was more important. But Grandfather Fahmi was more conservative. He believed refugees had to remain in the camps, even if they were crowded and uncomfortable, and he stayed in Al-Amari until he died. He said that leaving the camp would be giving up, would be accepting the situation. It would be an admission that we would never return to the homes which the Jews had stolen from us. My older brother Bilahl thinks like Grandfather Fahmi. My younger sister Lulu loves life more than an idea of dignity, like Father. I’m not quite sure whose genes I got.

Grandfather Fahmi had a horse. On Saturday afternoons I used to go to the entrance to the village and wait for him: a distant dot turning slowly into a white dust cloud moving along the horizon. Soon I’d hear the horseshoes clattering on the road, and suddenly he’d be next to me on the grey horse, extending the strongest arm I have ever known and picking me up, and we’d ride home together, me hugging his broad back and breathing in the dust and the sweet sweat, both his and the horse’s. Once we were home he’d wash his face and go out to the terrace to drink the coffee that Mother made for him. From inside the house I’d listen to his laughter and smile.

Grandfather Fahmi died ten years ago. Mother died last year. Bilahl moved from Murair to Ramallah five years ago. He was eighteen, and went to study at Kuliyat al-Iman, the faith school in A-Ram – Father and Mother weren’t too thrilled about it. He lived in the student dorms for a while and then he moved to Al-Amari, where there was a room in one of our uncles’ flats, because Bilahl believed, as his grandfather had, that refugees and the sons of refugees and the grandsons of refugees should always remain in the camps. Father and Mother did not agree…I was sixteen. They looked to me; they didn’t want to lose another son to the camp. But last year I moved in with Bilahl and Uncle Jalahl. I promised Father I would start studying in Bir Zeit University. I told him that I was just saving on the rent, that I wasn’t in the camp as my brother was, for ideological reasons. That’s not what I told my brother. I didn’t really know what I thought, in my heart of hearts.

Bir Zeit is still waiting for me…

Someone switches the music off.

‘How is he doing?’

Faint voices. It’s my father. I can smell his familiar old smoky smell. But why is he whispering?

‘Hello, son. How are you feeling today?’

Not now, come on, I’m trying to remember something. Maybe you could come back tomorrow? Because I’m not here anyway. I’m floating in the sea. The stars are out and I can see the beach, but I can’t…

The army erected a dirt ramp around Murair and blocked the entrance to the village. No explanations. The water tankers from Ramallah couldn’t get through to fill the main well, and cars couldn’t leave the village to go to the second well, on the other side of the ramp. The well dried up. Before it dried up, the water at its bottom got dirty. A virus developed in it. Many people from the village were infected by it, but they recovered. Mother did not. The doctor said she needed clean water to flush out her system and to compensate for all the liquid she was losing through sweat and diarrhoea.

Bilahl and I travelled to the village through the mountains, bypassing all the roadblocks, but it wasn’t enough. You could only get over the ramp on foot, and how much water could you carry on foot? Lulu was with her all the time, and Mother’s sisters, holding her hand and praying. But everybody was thirsty and the water we’d brought was finished immediately. I told the soldiers guarding the entrance to the village that my mother was dying and she needed water. They tried to contact their commanders. Time passed, and they got no response. They told us to stop nagging them and go home. An hour later they’d still not received an answer – ‘It’s Saturday, there’s nobody to talk to.’ ‘My mother’s dying, why do you need to talk to someone? She needs water.’ ‘It’s very complicated. There are roadblocks on the way. It’s not in our power to authorise a trip.’ ‘Who has the power?’ ‘We don’t know. We’re trying to get hold of our commander to ask.’ One of the soldiers gave me a bottle of water. The next morning I asked if we could take Mother to hospital. She was in a bad way. The soldiers were angry, told us we weren’t the only ones, everybody was thirsty. The soldiers were talking on their mobiles and shouting at villagers who were begging them for help. They shot out the tyres of a tractor and arrested the driver.

The soldier who had given me water the previous day did not remember me.

‘What d’you want from me? I’m on the phone to headquarters at my own personal expense! I’m trying to find out what happened to the tanker, OK? I know you’re thirsty. I know you want water. We’re trying to sort it out and whining at us isn’t going to help the situation. So go home and a tanker will come and fill up the…Hello!’ he shouted into his phone. But I wasn’t asking for water by that stage; I was asking for an ambulance.

‘All these troubles, my son. They’re all standing outside. Shouting. “The Croc, the Croc…” Something about the Croc. “Switch the machines off!” What have you done? Do you want me to have a heart attack?’

What are they saying about the Croc? I know him.

Where was I? You interrupted right in the middle of…I was right in the middle of something, Father. Come on…

An ambulance arrived to take Mother away. Lulu and I got into the ambulance but at the entrance to the village they told us to get out. Only the driver, the paramedics and the patient could stay. Mother said it would be all right. She was on a drip and feeling much better. We hugged her and she blessed us, but when the ambulance started moving I broke down and cried uncontrollably, unstoppably, for minutes, while Lulu tried to soothe me. She was only thirteen and I was over twenty, but it was me who was crying and her doing the comforting. The soldiers, still on their mobiles, stared at us. The ramp that encircled the village lay like a ligature of dirt across the yellow fields. Mother died in hospital. She was forty-two. A week later they got rid of the ramp.

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