Almost Dead Part 14

From our window we saw two columns of soldiers in helmets and bulletproof vests creeping behind an armoured personnel carrier. On their backs military packs, on their shoulders straps to support the rifles they held in both hands. Right hand on the trigger guard, thumb caressing the safety catch, forefinger squeezing the trigger to its locking point. Left hand on the stock, under the plastic s.h.i.+eld. A brief command, a few movements of the fingers, and so much would cease to exist. When they took off their helmets, their facestheir eyes, their haircuts and goatee beardsfascinated me.

'Look at them all,' said Bilahl, 's.h.i.+vering with fear.'

Sometimes the window frames would begin to shudder, then the floor would start, then you'd feel it in your body, and only then would you hear it: a bulldozer approaching. They used one to destroy Mahmuzi's family's house and to widen a few roads that an armoured personnel carrier couldn't get through. I wondered what Grandfather Fahmi would have said. First they threw him out of his village. Then he lived for eight years in a tent. Then, very slowly, he built himself a temporary home out of nothing. Some sheets of tin and a little dried mud; later, breeze blocks, mortar, cement for floors. Building his temporary home very slowly as the years pa.s.s, and his neighbours building their temporary homes very slowly. A whole neighbourhood being built, very slowly. A refugee camp turning into a town. And then the makers of refugees come, the displacers themselves, and the width of the roads in the camp is not to their taste. They flatten fences and walls, flip cars over, knock down poles that took ingenuity and sweat to find and erectthe poles that carry the wires which bring us electricity and telephone callsso that an armoured personnel carrier can go where it pleases.

Air stale from the curfew, overturned cars like turtles on their backs, the clattering of rifle b.u.t.ts on iron doors...

Low-flying fighter jets scratched white trails in the sky. Helicopters rattled overhead. Soldiers broke into houses and slept on beds with mud-caked boots. They emptied closets, shattered windows, stank up toilets, tore posters from children's walls, hammered holes in dividing walls to scurry from house to house. They dropped clementine peels, sweet wrappers, chewed gum, used tissues behind them as they patrolled, like a wake of contempt. They destroyed all the equipment in the camp's clinic and looted the medicines. They shot a woman who was hanging up her was.h.i.+ng. They shot a kid who had painted his face green and was playing the fool in front of them. A yellowish cloud of dust raised by their boots hung over the camp. I thought: let the Croc come and see this cloud.

I wanted a soldier to come into the flat and overturn things, break our furniture, mock and threaten me. I imagined head-b.u.t.ting his nose, the sound the breaking bone would make, his scream, the smears of blood on my forehead. As I pictured him on the floor, crying in pain and pleading for his life, my jaw would tighten and I'd find my mouth full of saliva and realise I was actually drooling for vengeance.

They wouldn't let her have a gla.s.s of water. A dirt ramp went up one week and came down the next, and no one knows why it went up or why it came down or who gave the order.

Who's here? Who's touching my face? Stroking my hair? Talk to me. Please, say something.

I can smell that it's you...Say your name.

I'm sorry I left. I'm sorry I didn't come back. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Bilahl got away right under their noses and went to Gaza, and she came to me from Murair. I don't know how, through the cat's cradle of patrols and jeeps and bulldozers in the middle of the curfew, but she did. Bilahl never liked her. Bilahl thought she was...well, you can guess what Bilahl thought. I touched her hair, and she didn't stop me. My heart was jumping into my throat. I couldn't stop touching her hair. I smelled it. I was entranced by her hair; how it was separate from her, not quite her, but also her. Not her but hers. I stroked it for several minutes and we didn't look at each other or speak. She lowered her head, hugged her knees to her. Eventually she got up and looked at me.

'Why didn't you come?'

I thought, Why am I denying myself what I want? What she wants? Bilahl is in Gaza... Why am I denying myself what I want? What she wants? Bilahl is in Gaza... How easy it is to justify the things you really want! Rana stood in front of me and I leaned back on the sofa and looked back at her. How easy it is to justify the things you really want! Rana stood in front of me and I leaned back on the sofa and looked back at her.

It was as I dreamed it. Through that winter I liked to get really close to the electric heater. I'd let the glowing bars heat my trousers or my sweater to burning point and then I'd press my clothes against my skin to feel the almost unbearable heat die down into a pleasant afterglow. I moved closer to the heater and, when the trousers began to burn my skin, I peeled them off quickly and pulled her on to the sofa.

Who's here? Who's touching my face?

Say something, Rana!

Please, Rana!

The curfew was relaxed for a couple of hours for Halil Abu-Zeid's funeral in Ramallah. The walls on the way there were almost invisible beneath new posters and graffiti. A huge crowd was marching and milling around with yellow Fatah flags and green Hamas flags: 'To Jerusalem we march, a million shuhada shuhada,' they were chanting. I tried to get close enough to kiss the body, but the pus.h.i.+ng and shoving were too much to struggle against. Soldiers of the resistance covered their faces with keffiyehs to avoid being photographed by the army helicopter circling low above us. A fighter jet shot past, shaking the houses. Someone fired into the air, but the Jewish troops kept their distance. If only they'd dare, I heard people say.

On the brink of the grave, watching the earth and sand being shovelled on to the coffin, stood the driver, Halil's cousin, her lips moving unceasingly, unthinkingly, her head shaking from left to right, again and again, grief stricken, heartbroken, mad with rage.

Bilahl had returned from Gaza with money and approval for an operation, the 'mother of all operations', and we walked back from the funeral together. At the entrance to the camp we ran up against a new checkpoint and a young soldier stopped us. I saw the look in Bilahl's eyes and whispered, 'Don't be stupid,' but he wasn't listening. 'You know who I am? How dare you ask me for ID? You're You're telling telling me me whether or not I can go home. whether or not I can go home. You're You're telling telling me me when I'm allowed to walk around? You're doing me a favour by relaxing your curfew for two hours?' The soldier didn't have a clue what he was saying. ' when I'm allowed to walk around? You're doing me a favour by relaxing your curfew for two hours?' The soldier didn't have a clue what he was saying. 'Shu?' he said, his eyes giving away his fear. He glanced over his shoulder and shouted, probably to someone who could speak Arabic, but I explained in Hebrew that we just wanted to go through. I smiled, and Bilahl looked at me with a scorn I'd never seen before. The soldier returned our ID cards. 'Ahalan Wasahalan,' he said, which was probably all the Arabic he had. Be welcome. We walked on without talking and after a few paces I ducked down to pick up a wrapped sweet from the dustalmost certainly dropped by the soldiers. I unwrapped it, and put it in my mouth. Sour-sweet, tasty, soft centred. Bilahl watched me and spat furiously.

Maybe I should have said something to my brother, who hated even a Jewish sweet. Maybe if I'd stood up to my big brother and said something I could have knocked a little sense into his proud head.

25

I visited the support group every Wednesday for the next thirteen weeks. At 7.30 every Wednesday I would go to the room on the fourth floor of the Hada.s.sah Ein-Kerem Hospital, four floors below where Shuli lay in a coma.

Wednesday became the day that held me together. The other days of the week were like a rollercoaster that had skipped the rails, with no direction or control; time distended like stretched gum. Some days sank slowly into a swamp of zombified routine, brus.h.i.+ng teeth, sitting in front of the computer, Channel 2, takeaways, arguments with Duchi ('Who the h.e.l.l is this Shuli you were talking about on Rafi Reshef?') and wondering where the time had gone...The rest of the time, frankly, I was just a confused insomnia-dazed mess. Wednesdays were my bulwark against it all, something solid and stable at the week's midpoint. Wednesdays were a point of orientation, a reminder that something had changed, a focus for the rest of the week. They stopped me escaping to the past of Before, stopped my attempts to block out the present of After. They took me back to Jerusalem and nailed me to the cross of reality. They stilled time.

Every Wednesday at 2 p.m. I would drop everything else and take a Little No. 5 to Tel Aviv's central station. From there, a No. 405 to the central station in Jerusalem and then a No. 27 to Hada.s.sah Ein-Kerem. It was Ilan the group leader's suggestionDuchi wanted me to take the Poloand I was happy to give it a shot. But the first time I set foot on the minibus I threw up. People were very nice about it: some of them recognised me as the Croc. I threw up again. Duchi argued for the Polo again. But Ilan convinced her, and she convinced me, and after that first time I didn't throw up. More than that. As the nausea subsided, I began to enjoy it.

My days at the hospital began with a Twix from the machine on the ground level and a visit to Shuli. Then a check-up with the doctor, who measured the gradual reduction of the b.u.mp on my forehead, told bad jokes'I gotta take your head for a test, can you manage without it for a couple of hours?'and gave me my medication. After the group had finished, around 9.30, I'd take the No. 27 back to the station, have an egg sandwich in the Cafe Europa there (Ilan's ideato have what I'd had on the day of the bombing) or some falafel (my idea) and then No. 480 to the Tel Aviv North train station, where Duchi would be waiting to pick me up because, as she put it, 'Enough is enough!'

Ilan was losing his hair and wore it long at the back. Not quite long enough for a ponytail, thank G.o.d, just a balding man's compensatory mullet. He also had a goatee, and was rather short and chubby. There was no denying the fact that Ilan was extremely ugly, and I'm not just saying that because of what happened later. His impressive blue eyes stood out, but only in the way the Taj Mahal stands out from the squalor and cow s.h.i.+t of Agra.

Maybe the Taj Mahal's on my mind because of Naama, the prettiest girl in the group, who'd been to India a number of times. I found it hard to take my eyes off her at the first meeting. Fortunately she talked a lotshe talked all the timeand it got on my nerves after a while, but at first I just wanted her to keep talking, so I could keep looking at her. She'd been in an attack in Jerusalem five years earlier. Her two best friends had been killed right next to her. Since then she hadn't travelled on buses, didn't sit in cafes or restaurants and kept away from the city centre. When she walked down the street she avoided bus stops and other places which she'd marked down on a map. Every time there was an attack in Jerusalem she added its location to her map. She had a theory she repeated every week, which explained in almost credible scientific detail why it was her destiny to die in an attack. She'd become accustomed to living with the fear. Her radar was permanently on: every five minutes she was compulsively checking out what was behind her.

'But where's the logic?' I asked her in my first meeting. 'They never bomb the same place twice. They know the security will be tighter and so on.' It reminded me of the argument with Duchi the day after the Little No. 5 attack. But Naama wasn't Duchi and didn't yell back, only dropped her charming long lashes over her eyes and hung her head. 'Let's listen to our friends' stories, Croc, and not interrupt,' Ilan said. 'You should recognise that logic is not always what determines our lives. There are other forces in action.' I swallowed, pulled my head back into my sh.e.l.l and apologised.

'They bombed the No. 18 twice in two weeks,' said Naama.

'You've got a point,' I said.

Uzi Bracha was a welder who was called out to fix a broken traffic light one morning. He went up on the cherry picker to weld the pole. He hadn't been told that it had been broken in an attack. Or that there would be pieces of skin and what he was sure was an eye still on it. Uzi Bracha went home that day and called a locksmith who installed eight locks on his door. After that he went to a gun shop on the Jaffa Road and bought a pistol. He came home and sat with his pistol c.o.c.ked on the armrest of his chair opposite a door that was locked eight times over. I liked Uzi. He didn't speak much and looked genuinely frightened: I liked the sincerity of his fear.

I told them about Giora Guetta, Humi and Shuli, still lying in a coma above our heads. I described the shattered rear window, the boot hitting my head. I said, 'I don't think I'm a shock victim.' They asked me, 'Do you check over your shoulder sometimes?' Sometimes. 'Does your heart suddenly accelerate?' Nought to sixty in five seconds. 'Do you get nauseous?' All the time. 'Does the sound of an ambulance make you break out in a cold sweat?' So that's what a cold sweat is. 'Do you cry?' No, but my eyes can suddenly fill with tears. 'The theme tune to the news?' Yeah, that'll do it. 'Cla.s.sic shock victim,' Uzi concluded. 'Allow me to make the diagnoses, eh, Uzi?' said Ilan. 'Look, Croc, the danger of damage to the body is signalled by the body's own alarm systemfear. Fear is a crucial biological defence mechanism. It's healthy.'

Yulia cried constantly. At first I hated it but after a few meetings it became a background hum. She'd been in Cafe Europa. My sister-in-arms! Yulia remembered all the faces, including mine and Shuli's. She'd been brought to the emergency room in what Ilan called a dissociative state and suffering from severe sleep problems. Daniela, or Dani as she insisted we call her, was with her sister and her sister's two-year-old daughter at a wedding in Bet-Shemesh. Her sister and niece were both killed. Dani was severely injured but managed to drag herself out of the rubble. She was in hospital for three months, and it took her much longer than that to learn to walk again. But her physical condition didn't interest her. Dani couldn't stop trying to reconstruct what had happened to her sister and niece. Where exactly had they been when the bomber blew himself up? How exactly were they killed? The explosion itself or the collapsing building? She was tormented by guilt about surviving. Did she limp past her sister and the baby, ignoring their moans of pain? 'A little child, always talking, babbling away...' 'The worst thing,' pretty Naama added, 'is that a child doesn't know, can't understand. That's what's so unnatural. I mean, an adult knows the risks, knows there are terrorist attacks, that there's the possibility he'll be next, but what did she know? Though at least she went with her mother and not aloneI mean, imagine if...' She liked to talk, Naama. And there was the guy who'd had seventeen different operations; the girl who'd stopped eating; the guy with a huge burn on his forehead and hearing in only one ear; and an older woman who arrived every week with a different son, daughter, granddaughter or grandson and who never, we noticed, ran so low on relatives that she ever had to bring the same one twice.

Every week for two hours I immersed myself in this world. I listened to intimate confessions and cried along with my fellow therapees, and they cried along with me. Memories came back to me with force and clarity, though somewhat mixed up with each other. Ilan said that I was 'concurrently experiencing three different phases of post-trauma': the Event Phase Event Phase for the Cafe Europa attack, the for the Cafe Europa attack, the Immediate Reaction Phase Immediate Reaction Phase for Shaar Hagai and the for Shaar Hagai and the Early Reaction Phase Early Reaction Phase for the Little No. 5. He said there weren't many cases like mine. Like everyone else, Ilan had seen me on for the Little No. 5. He said there weren't many cases like mine. Like everyone else, Ilan had seen me on Noah's Ark Noah's Ark, something which I felt bothered him, though he never said anything. Maybe my status as a famous survivor didn't sit well with my being a newcomer to the group. But all the others were fascinated. I felt that they were proud of me, that I somehow represented them. They liked to walk with me in the hospital corridors, where strangers would recognise me and shake my hand and offer condolences. Once I was walking with Dani when a member of the Knesset visiting the injured stopped us and shook our hands. He stank of aftershave and told a lousy joke about a member of Hamas arriving at the gates of heaven and getting the good news and the bad news.

The way the group therapy worked was you had to repeat your story every session to try to bring a little more to the surface. You'd keep telling it and you'd reach a new perspective, that was the idea. We heard the same stories again and again, and we were happy to. From time to time Ilan would interrupt us and ask a question which everyone would answer briefly.

'What does an explosion sound like?'

'A little "puck",' said Noa.

'A big "boom",' said Dani.

'"Vooomm", like in Lebanon, like a mine,' said bearded Uri, or RoyI always mixed them up.

'Nothing,' Roy said, or Uri. 'Just pain in the ears. And the air moving. I felt it and I lifted my head.'

'The sound of blood hitting a wall.'

'Handclaps, or fireworks,' said Yulia of the Cafe Europa.

I said: 'Shattering gla.s.s, and a humming silence like you get in an elevator...'

'What are we talking about?' said Uzi Bracha. 'Why do we need to sit here and tell each other what an explosion sounds like?'

No one answered. Ilan said, 'Did I tell you about the mice?' Without waiting for a reply, since he knew he already had, he went on: 'They were testing the reactions of laboratory mice to electric shocks. One mouse which had been given an electric shock was released from its cage into a safer environment. It learned its lesson and never returned to the place where it was hurt. A second mouse was given the same shock but in a closed environment. It became ill, lost its hair and developed an ulcer. Now, two mice in a closed cage were given shocks but did not become sick. Because they had each other. They were stuck, like the second mouse, in a dangerous place without an escape route but they were not alone. This is what we are doing here. Every one of us is stuck in a place he can't escape from at this stage. But we have each other.'

'And we're not losing our hair,' I said. Ilan gave me a sour look and didn't respond. We all sat quietly, listening to Yulia's crying.

'A trouble shared is a trouble halved?' said Dani.

'Well, sort of,' he replied, stroking his goatee.

Every Wednesday I also took the lift up to the ward on the eighth floor to sit with Shuli. I came to know her for longer, and better, in a coma than I'd known her awake. Her face was unchanged and still beautiful, except that her eyes had lost all their depth. There were tubes connected to her mouth and arm, tubes disappearing under the sheet into the heart of her. The machines fed her, made her blood flow, breathed for her. The one thing they couldn't give her was sleep.

As the weeks pa.s.sed I learned to recognise Shuli's mood by subtle changes to the air in the room. One time, when I was sitting alone next to her telling her something, she blinked, and I felt it was for me.

On her birthday I brought her flowers. 'Happy birthday,' I said. There were other flowers and presents beside the bed. 'In this country, every birthday you celebrate is an achievement,' I said. 'And a marriage? Something to be proud of even if it didn't last. And a kidyou've really got it made. You've created a dynasty. I read in the paper that we're making a lot of babies here. You know, relatively.' She didn't blink. I would describe the view to her, the best view in the hospital, looking down over wooded hills and valleys, and when I was there on my own, I would raise the bottom of the sheet and touch the crocodile on her ankle. It was my secret sign to herour sign. One warmer evening I arrived to find the windows open and a battered-looking pigeon fluttering around the room, like a synapse firing in a brain. It saw me and took off. Maybe that's that's a sign, I thought. Or maybe it's just a pigeon. a sign, I thought. Or maybe it's just a pigeon.

Her boss came oftenAlon, the chef from the King David, sometimes accompanied by other chefs from the hotel. He told me she had talent. He'd known Guetta too: 'a lovely guy'. Shuli's father and sister came every day, always depressed, crying, and praying for a miracle. I heard Shuli's father tell Alon that it was insensitive to bring Arabs along, and rather than reply Alon and Osama left the room. 'I should have said something. I got plenty of things I could've said,' he told me in the corridor. 'I'm not a f.u.c.king lefty but come on. A little respect for human beings.' Shuli's bed became a meeting point. I followed the soap opera of her aunt's health, advised the aunt's partner on the telecoms market and recommended a travel agent to him, and, in return, was recommended an accountant. Guetta's father always asked me about what Giora had been up to in Tel Aviv on the morning of his death, and I always replied that I was sorry but I didn't know. He asked me to write something for a commemorative booklet and I promised to think about it. I even brought Duchi once, after our 'Who the h.e.l.l is this Shuli?' argument.

And all the time the thing that connected us lay there above us all, silent, lonely, machine-bound, lifeless yet alive, waiting for something to change. And then something did change.

The thing I enjoyed most about those Wednesdays was the journey home. An intercity bus ride at night has a charm of its own. It's uninterrupted thinking time. The whole day seems to sink through you and dissolve in the blood. People talk, but not so much and not so loudlyout of deference to the darkness, perhaps; the steady hum of the engine and the rhythm of the pa.s.sing lights, the lights of the villages off in the night, the bluish light of the bus's interior. On my night rides I laid my forehead against the window and let myself breathe deeply and relax. It was on the bus, quietly, that I really examined myself. That was where the memories returned. It was on the night buses that carried me back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv that I began to accept myself as I was, and began to think about who I was going to be.

26

'You know something, Fahmi? I think you may be the perfect man. You never shout at me, never disappear, never turn up smelling of vodka and cigarettes and other women. Even Mama would like you. Let's see...physiotherapy in an hour, then a wash. Ma.s.sage first. You had a busy day yesterday. Both Lulu and Rana. Very cute, Fahmi. Still not talking to you, but I saw her kissing your forehead.'

Bilahl believed that he could carry out what everybody else only talked about: the mother of all operations. After his visit to Gaza his confidence had gone through the roof. It was power power he was feeling. he was feeling.

He wanted to talk to me about his ideas.

Ben-Gurion International Airport. Since the Fatah operation in the seventies no one had managed to get near it. The pa.s.senger lounge was a good target. An aircraft was a possibility, either in the air or on the ground. Huge impact. Great damage to the economy. The feeling that their escape routes had been blocked off, that running to Mummy in America was not so easy. The feeling that they were locked up in here with us.

Second option, Eilat airport. A little far but the impact would still be considerable. A small airport but relatively light security. Near the city centre and the hotels. Less guarded. Several options to get there: from the southern part of the West Bank; from the Gaza strip via Egypt, along the border or from Sinai; through Saudi Arabia or Aqaba, in a commando boat. Eilat was vulnerable.

I said, 'It's not a coincidence that Eilat's hardly been targeted yet: it's not Palestine.'

'New York and Munich aren't Palestine either.'

'Right. But you're talking about the mother of all...'

Third option, a big hotel in Jerusalem. 'Like the Jewish operation against the British in the King David. They drove a car in with two hundred and fifty kilos of explosives. This is what I'm talking about. Something that will go down in the history books.'

Fourth option: a symbol. David's Tower.

'Oh, come on: David's Tower?'

Fifth option: the Knesset. 'Get people with weapons inside with the caterers or cleaners, in trucks through the back gate. You get someone to work there for a few months.'