Almost Dead Part 16

Rana answered: 'You weren't supposed to call.'

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

She swallowed and said nothing for a while. 'When?'

'I'm at the Beitin checkpoint.'

'Oh. So you might not make it at all.'

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

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

I left, I missed her, I dreamed of her, I never called her and then she appeared. She didn't ask why I'd vanished or say how she had found me in the middle of a curfew. Was she there at all or was she an apparition in the night? She took her clothes off standing up while I lay on the sofa. We didn't stop or sleep all night until I dozed off some time after dawn, and when I woke she was gone and there was only the numb sweetness in my body to remind me. Ever since, I'd been imagining her mouthlike hot ice cream...Another ant was hurrying to join its sister in front of the Subaru. Muhamed put the car in gear and rolled about a metre and then turned the engine off.

'How long are you coming for?'

'I don't know. A couple of days, maybe more.'

'I'm happy.'

I thought about our place, below the village. Quietly I had said, 'I love you.' When she finally replied, I could hear a twist in her mouth. 'Yes, but not as much as the jihad.'

'Maybe I'm wrong, Dr Hartom, but I think he's been responding more over the last couple of days. For instance...'

'Oh...I see what you mean. Has this been happening a lot recently? Don't laugh, Svetlana, it's a natural bodily function.'

Oh, why did you have to do that, Svet? With that old b.i.t.c.h Hartom...

'Yes, Doctor. It's happened several times. His girlfriend was here a few days ago...'

'That's not always the reason, you know. Sometimes just...anyway, good. Pupils, please.'

Aaaaiii!! The light in my eyes...the sun...the little green car...the Croc...

'Good. But in terms of movement and cognition he's more or less in the same place, I understand.'

'More or less. Except for the...'

'Yes, Svetlana.'

Muhamed gestured at me to get into the car. We had managed to reach the first checkpoint. The bag was peered through again, another body-search, X-ray machines, ID cards, permits...go to that caravan and wait for half an hour while we check something. Maybe the plan was to bore us to death. It used to take my grandfather an hour on horseback! I wanted to reach up to the soldier's arrogant face and crush it between my hands. Brother, there was no need for sophisticated operations with a fool like thisjust take his fool's head between your hands and squeeze.

We made it through and Muhamed took the road east, through Beitin and Ein-Yabrud towards Nablus. I used to drive this road a lot, and it was in a worse state than ever.

There was a new barrier on the wayunmanned that daythree giant concrete cubes and barbed wire. 'f.u.c.king Arabs suk a.s.ses HOORAY the settlers!' was written on one of the cubes in Hebrew. There was a constant traffic of jeeps on the road: one of them stopped us and checked the bag again and searched the car. They made me take off my trousers. Yet still, it was a beautiful road. I missed these hills. Grandfather Fahmi always talked about Beit-Machsir and the hills of Jerusalem but there's nowhere like Murair. This is where I grew up, in the dirt and the scrub, surrounded by the bone-dry hills.

Muhamed dropped me off where the road was nearest to Murair and I started walking along the narrow road, its asphalt cracked and crushed by heavy military vehicles. In the middle of the way there was a dirt mound. I climbed up and p.i.s.sed on it. But this was the best part of the journeythe seven kilometres between the road and Murair, the easternmost village on the ridge that overlooks the Jordan and, on clear days, the distant mountains of Edom and Amman. No cars moved in either direction. I was alone with the hills and the eastern landscape, which revealed itself slowly, bit by bit, the higher I rose and the more I strained my legs; the valley to my left, the valley ahead, the yellow glare of the desert, without even one Jewish settlement to ruin the landscape and the mood. At last I saw the small old ochre houses of Murair on the hill, the tall column of the mosque, the small blue tractors of the farmers. It had taken four hours. It seemed to me satisfying, exciting, to arrive like this, after a fatiguing journey. And then I answered myself in Bilahl's voice: Don't be so craven. So pathetically positive. A humiliating four-hour trip instead of half an hour, and you think it's satisfying? You still think the gla.s.s is half full? 'One of these days,' my brother once said, 'you're actually going to tell me that the occupation was necessary and did us good.'

I was parched when I arrived, and there, in Murair of all places, I finally satisfied my thirst, drinking water and tea with my father and Aunt Lily. And there was my dear little sister Lulu, with her smile and the stories she'd saved up to tell her older brotherbut only when we were alone, near the big cave at the edge of the village, on the ledge of the cliff that fell to the valley below. By the time Lulu and I returned from our walk, Bilahl had already been arrested.

29

Time's ArrowEvery Second Counts. But when I returned to work it just somehow didn't any more. Jimmy called me into his office for a welcome-back pep-talk. 'How you doing, CrocAttack?' 'OK.' 'You look tired.' 'Yes, a little...it's OK.' A silence. 'So! Back with us again!' 'Yes.' 'Good. Get back into things at your own pace, but not a too-slow pace, if you know what I mean.' 'Yeah. How was the Brussels trip?' 'It didn't work out in the end. They put us back to next week when we were already in the departure lounge. Time-wasters. But you'll be joining us, right?'

'Sure I will,' I said, disappointed. There didn't seem to be much more to say, so I got up to go.

'Oh, and, uh, by the way, Croc...' I looked back at Jimmy, who was blinking and running his hand over his l.u.s.trous head. 'You will be happy to know that I contributed my part in removing the...problem that...uh...' He blinked again. As I said, Jimmy had started out in the Time Management Unit of the air force. He'd helped coordinate the bombing of the nuclear plant in Iraq and various air force raids on Lebanon, and he was still occasionally called up for one-day reserve duty. Then the day after, you'd read in the paper that the air force had carried out a targeted a.s.sa.s.sination. I think he was trying to tell me that he was on duty when they a.s.sa.s.sinated that guy in Ramallah, the commander of the terrorist group. But Hamas said that the Cafe Europa bombing had been carried out in revenge for the a.s.sa.s.sination. So thanks, Jimmy, for your contribution.

Work was no different from the rest of the country in that I was the object of plenty of attention. There were 463 emails in my inbox to deal with or delete, long chats in the corridors, longer phone calls, endless retellings of my synopsis of what had happened. I told Jimmy I was willing to go to Brussels only if I could be back home by Wednesday. We went to Belgium, then to France, with the desperate Yoash, but the nights in Europe were no better than those in Israel. I did my best to work. I wrote a presentation about an accelerating world, about pre-worn jeans and superfast toasters and about fast talk, blah blah blah. (People generally talk at 150 words per minute but the human ear can decipher 600 wpm. All Time's Arrow's answering messages run at around 450 wpm, which people likethey hate slow and option-infested messages.) I used to make a presentation in an hour; two tops. Now it took me a day and a halfincluding seven cigarette breaks, three cold-water face-washes, an hour's rest with closed eyes on the sofa in the fun room and quite a lot of directionless wandering between rooms. Bar sent me some new numerologies: Croc = attack yesterday. Croc = sole explosion in mall. And the one he shouldn't have sent me: Croc = huge attack coming.

One day Jimmy phoned me from the meeting room. 'Come over here a moment, Croc,' he boomed, his voice simultaneously audible in receiver and corridor, 'I want you to meet Roy.' When I entered, Jimmy gestured towards a guy wearing a skirt: 'Roy Abramov, a young talented designer, the new star from Bezalel College of Design. He did the poster for Israel's Jubilee, if you remember.' I didn't. 'Roy, this is Croc, from Sales. Croc...Attack!' He shot the word 'attack' out explosively, as he'd already done a couple of times since I'd come back. No one had ever been scared, or laughed. To be fair to Jimmy, you had to say he was persistent. Also present were a couple of guys from Marketing, Noga and Jeremiah (or 'The Prophet Jeremiah' to me).

'So we've been thinking about a new company logo. Roy, show the Croc the options.' The stare I gave Jimmy slipped over his oiled head like water: I hated these b.a.l.l.s-aching marketing discussions. There was this one time when the telecoms giant Bezeq had asked us to come up with a number for their new directory enquiries service. The number was supposed to somehow get across the message that the new service would be quicker and cheaper than the old 144. 'Let's do 77half the time, half the money,' said Jimmy. 'Brilliant,' said the product manager from Bezeq, and everyone agreed. But then someone pointed out that 77 was not not half of 144. 'Half of 144 is 73.5.' Foreheads were wrinkled, biros were chewed, low whistles were whistled. A problem. 735 now became the leading contender, but it somehow just didn't sound right. Jimmy called Talia Tenne to canva.s.s opinion. Talia said, 'Tell me, are you all out of your minds? Half of 144 is 72!' Eventually they decided on 122. The service still isn't operational. half of 144. 'Half of 144 is 73.5.' Foreheads were wrinkled, biros were chewed, low whistles were whistled. A problem. 735 now became the leading contender, but it somehow just didn't sound right. Jimmy called Talia Tenne to canva.s.s opinion. Talia said, 'Tell me, are you all out of your minds? Half of 144 is 72!' Eventually they decided on 122. The service still isn't operational.

The designer had a number of mock-ups of our new logo. 'The arrow is movement, movement of time, the arrow of time,' he said, glancing at Jimmy, who nodded with satisfaction. 'The circle,' which he made with his hands, 'is like harnessing the arrow, it is the company, the organisation, the order behind things. We have a conflict here, going forward...' 'Running forward!' thundered Jimmy. 'OK...running forward, together with order, discipline, responsibility. The circle is also identified with a clock, of course...That's the basic principle. You can play variations on the arrows, the colours, the shapes and the directions.' forward!' thundered Jimmy. 'OK...running forward, together with order, discipline, responsibility. The circle is also identified with a clock, of course...That's the basic principle. You can play variations on the arrows, the colours, the shapes and the directions.'

For this they pay thousands of dollars. For some star from Bezalel to waft in in a skirt and state the blindingly obvious. 'I want the logo to be a globally identifiable design meme,' said Jimmy, 'like the Nike Swoosh, like Intel, Microsoft, Apple.'

'Why?' I asked. 'Every human being on Earth is a sales target for them. We're not like that.'

'We're the twenty-first-century Fed-Ex,' Jimmy intoned.

'The arrow turns left,' said The Prophet Jeremiah. 'We might have a problem with the political connotations.'

'Well, it can always turn right,' said the designer, demonstrating. Noga pounced on a design with an arrow pointing upwards, but it was green on a red background.

'No. Too like the Delek logo...'

'If anything, the Palestinian flag.'

'So, blue and white?'

'Don't want to be identified with Israel too much.'

'Red and blue?'

'Not too American?'

'Red and white?'

'G.o.d, no, Hapoel Tel Aviv.'

'Red is hot,' said Roy. 'And green is young. Maybe stay with it after all?' His eyebrows went up and stayed up throughout the ensuing silence.

'Maybe we'll call Talia Tenne,' Jimmy said.

But Time's Arrow had bigger problems. The situation was to blame, and the business plan, and the management method, and the unplanned investments, and the Indians in the call centres. When problems start, it's easy to find reasons. We weren't selling the product to enough customers, and those who were buying weren't paying enough. When the representative of the Venture Capital Fund told us in a meeting that the Fund believed in the company, and would back it whatever happened, we knew for sure that the s.h.i.+t had hit the fan and the investors were losing patience.

The first round of dismissals came about two months after I returned. Jimmy called me into his office and stared at the sea through the window. 'You're staying, Croc, but I'll be frank. Since the attacks, your productivity has gone down the drain, your motivation is on the rocks. Every second doesn't count for you any more: you arrive later and leave earlier, and what you do in between...it's not the Croc I used to know three, four months ago, or even two years ago. But...' He turned from the window and sat down. 'I understand. You've been through a very difficult experience. Plus there's this fame stuff. Time's Arrow can't afford newspaper headlines saying that the CrocAttack was fired. But I'm asking you: pull yourself together, because nothing is safe any more.' You don't say, I thought. 'For a start,' he said, flapping a bitter hand at the view of the glittering Mediterranean, the beaches, the city, the three helicopters heading low above the sh.o.r.eline, south towards Gaza, 'say goodbye to all of this, because we're moving to Rosh Haayin.'

'What?'

'Don't tell anyone yet.'

Ron and Ronen were stunned. Three minutes later Talia Tenne burst through the cloudy gla.s.s door and asked with s.h.i.+ning eyes whether the rumour was true. 'We don't know anything about rumours,' said Ronen. She looked at him furiously, sat on an empty chair between the three of us, and stared us out using her pretty eyes until we cracked. 'I'll kill you if it leaves this room,' I said. 'Obviously.' She smiled her sweetest smile. Ten minutes later Bar sent the numerologies: 'Rosh Haayin = bad for Time's Arrow' or 'Rosh Haayin = international future for Time's Arrow', whatever we chose.

Jimmy was right. I wasn't doing my job very well. I couldn't care about another sales presentation, another meeting summary, another two-day trip to Europe with non-stop work on the plane: flying, landing, taxi, identical hotel room, identical meeting room, identical dinner, identical p.o.r.n, identical breakfast. Since the euro had come in I couldn't tell the difference between the countries: everybody spoke English with the same accent. After sleepless nights, it was a real effort to clear the fog and think logically. My work hours were still long but I worked much less. I frittered away time in the smoking corner, I fell asleep on the sofa, I found myself on Ynet, p.o.r.n sites, gunning down Danish drug dealers on gaming sites, I spent a third of my day making coffee on the espresso machine or compulsively scoffing pretzels and biscuits while chatting to whoever was in the kitchen. I wasn't really interested in the Austrian telecoms company that wanted to improve its directory enquiries service, or in saving half a second per call in Spain or in real-time solutions, server efficiency, long, wide and flat databases, probability-based algorithms, voice recognition upgrades, interfacing, sockets, schmockets, websphere voice response, killer apps, blah blah blah blah blahhhh blahhhh. Time's Arrow continued to streak into the future, but I wasn't on it any more.

We moved to a modern building in the business park in Rosh Haayin, an ugly little town twenty kilometres east of Tel Aviv. Duchi and I bought a clapped-out Peugeot 206 for twenty thousand shekelsDuchi continued driving the Time's Arrow Polo and I drove the Peugeot though she was only driving to Ramat Gan and I had to get to Rosh Haayin. She was a lawyer halfway through a lucrative trial and I was just a failing salesman in a start-up company. I drove every morning ('against the traffic, against the traffic!' crowed Jimmy with such delight that he almost sold us on the virtues of not working in the centre of Tel Aviv) to our offices on the second floor of a three-storey building populated by start-up companies in various degrees of trouble.

Lunch consisted of hummus, stuffed vegetables or pasta served 'a la mode Rosh Haayin', which, Talia Tenne a.s.sured us, would one day soon be nationally renowned. Instead of espres...o...b..rs and sus.h.i.+, street food, beans and rice and stews from Shabazi and s.h.i.+mson Absolino's; instead of the Mediterranean, the arid hills of Samaria. The guards at the entrance to the Dizengoff Centre were replaced by a razor-wire fence and the quasi-military park security; the sounds of the city with the calls of the muezzin, or, in the evenings, shooting from the direction of the territories. A single melancholy table-football table replaced the fun room and our designer kitchen became a nook with a microwave, a fridge and a kettle. Economy waffles stood in for organic brownies from the bakery. Cheap veneered MDF replaced clouded-gla.s.s doors and silvery steel tables. Colour disappeared from the walls and from people's faces. Ronen and others left. Eight workers were dismissed, including Shoko from IT Support and Noga from Marketing.

The last time I'd thought about Giora had been beside Shuli's bed, when his father had asked again what he'd been doing in Tel Aviv on the morning of his death. The PalmPilot, which I'd been going to start solving this mystery with, had perished in Cafe Europa. If the Palm doesn't exist, I thought, neither does Giora: there was nothing to be done. But when I tried to connect my computer to the network in Rosh Haayin there was a problem with Outlook. I reinstalled the program, and when I did that, it asked which user I would like to choose. Two options: Croc or Guetta.

And then it hit methe day after the first attack, before heading out to Jerusalem, I'd synchronised Giora's Palm to my computer. The aluminium and silicon bowels of my computer contained all the details of his life.

Croc or Guetta?

I sat in front of the screen with my mouse in my hand, and thought about the options. Choose my name and continue with my life or choose Guetta, the stranger with honey-coloured hair and mirrored shades who, by exchanging a couple of words with me, had sent me to Jerusalem, to Shaar Hagai and Cafe Europa, to a funeral, to the bedside of a girl I was half in love with. Deep inside, I felt that somehow this was a sign that Shuli would wake from her coma. Didn't this little coincidence compel compel me to try to find the answer for her as a present on her return to life? That was whyalong with nosiness, voyeurism, a sense of adventure, and other reasons which all helped to obscure the fact that perhaps it really didn't matter any moreI chose Guetta. Click. There he was. me to try to find the answer for her as a present on her return to life? That was whyalong with nosiness, voyeurism, a sense of adventure, and other reasons which all helped to obscure the fact that perhaps it really didn't matter any moreI chose Guetta. Click. There he was.

30

Omar Sharif came from the village of Beita al-Fauka near Nablus. Nineteen years old, with long-lashed eyes and a floppy fringe as dark and l.u.s.trous as Tom Cruise's. He volunteered, and Bilahl was impressed. The one time he came to our place, during the curfew, I remember him gazing through the bars on the window and showing us a dog in the street. 'Look,' he saidan Israeli soldier was trying his best to stroke it.

Bilahl recruited a handful of others along with him. He went to Qibya and Rantis, the two villages closest to Ben Gurion airport, and met people who wanted to help. He went to Gaza again. When he returned he was already beginning to think in terms of a combined attack: one unit would proceed on foot from either Qibya or Rantis and attack the hangars and planes on the ground with Qa.s.sam missiles; a second unit would drive a b.o.o.by-trapped car through the new terminal, which was under construction and (according to recently updated aerial photographs Bilahl had come across) not very well guarded; a third unit would consist of two Istishadin Istishadin travelling on two separate busesone from Jerusalem, the other from the Raanana Junction. The logistics were overwhelming, the number of people involved unprecedented, the risk very high. It's easy now to point out Bilahl's mistake, but it was understandable. For an operation of that scope you had to build hierarchies of command and responsibility, and so, when Omar Sharif made such a good impression and said he would recruit other people, Bilahl gave him his phone number. travelling on two separate busesone from Jerusalem, the other from the Raanana Junction. The logistics were overwhelming, the number of people involved unprecedented, the risk very high. It's easy now to point out Bilahl's mistake, but it was understandable. For an operation of that scope you had to build hierarchies of command and responsibility, and so, when Omar Sharif made such a good impression and said he would recruit other people, Bilahl gave him his phone number.

'...one of them in prison for the next four hundred years! And the other lying there like a cuc.u.mber!'

'Stop it, Father. We didn't come here to weep.'

Why didn't you come on your own, Lulu? You should have left him at home with his tears...

'Please try not to shout like that near him, sir. Try to say only positive things.'

'What did the nurse say to me, Lulu?'

'She said to say positive things.'

'How can I say positive things when my child is a murderer? He's going to kill mehe'll give me a heart attack! Two sons I had, and he was the good one. He promised to go to the-'

'He will go, Father, you'll see. Now, let's have some music.'

Yes, Lulu. 'Amarein'. The two moons...

On Channel 2 Danny Ronen referred to a warning the GSS had received concerning a major operation aimed at the heart of Israel. Every time he mentioned it, Bilahl became more convinced that we had a leak. We tried suspending all communications; we tried disinformation...but the reason Omar Sharif was picked up had nothing to do with the 'warning'. A routine patrol rounded up all the men from his village (in plastic handcuffs and cloth blindfolds) and he was one of the ones detained. No particular reason. Maybe the soldiers liked his long lashes, or maybe it was recorded somewhere that he'd been in Al-Amari. They have ways to retrieve information like that. They also have ways to locate a mobile phone. They found Bilahl's number in Omar Sharif's mobile, called it, located the mast the signal had been sent to and dispatched dozens of soldiers in jeeps, armoured personnel carriers and on foot to scour the area in circular sweeps, turning every stone, entering each home. After an hour, the soldiers disappeared as if nothing had happened, everyone returned home, and things went back to normal, except for Bilahl Naji al-Sab.i.+.c.h, apprehended on a mattress on the roof of his apartment.