Almost Dead Part 2

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, bypa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Sat.u.r.day, there's n.o.body 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...h.e.l.lo!' 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.

5

Jimmy Rafael in the meeting room. Five foot four of solid muscle. His shaved dome gleaming as if it had been ma.s.saged with olive oil. Maybe he did did ma.s.sage it with olive oil. ma.s.sage it with olive oil.

'Morning, everyone! I don't need to tell you we have no extra time so let's get right to the point. I've known Dmitry for many years; we've shared a few important seconds in the Time Management Unit in the air force and in time engineering studies in the US. He's going to talk about what he's doing. About how saving a couple of seconds can change everything.' I glanced at Ron. His eyes were making no comment, but to me they were saying, 'Jimmy's time talks: what a waste of time...' I smiled to myself.

'I am a certified time engineer and a senior traffic-light technician,' Dmitry began. He was very tall and was wearing a cheesecloth s.h.i.+rt of the kind you never saw at Time's Arrow. 'I work for a private consulting firm in Hadera. My role is to find dead seconds. This story is about how I have found seven superfluous seconds in Rabin Square.

'I don't need to describe the spot: a square surrounded by four roads from two to four lanes wide. Between one and four thousand cars use the square pretty much every hour of the day. My goal was to leave it as empty as possible, and specifically to relieve a permanent congestion at the corner of Ibn-Gvirol and Zeitlin streets.'

He made a sketch of the intersection on the drawing board, wrote the street names, and marked the point of the jam. 'A traffic-light cycle, meaning the time between one green light and the next, is between twenty-four and a hundred and twenty seconds. The seconds are divided meticulously between pedestrians, traffic in all directions and the gaps between. But, as every driver knows, not every direction receives the same time. Traffic-light technicians divide the time at every location according to need. Short greens in city centres are ten seconds long. The longer ones, in less stressed locations, usually take around eighty seconds out of a cycle of a hundred and twenty. In Rabin Square I discovered that the south-eastern corner had traffic lights which were simply throwing time away.' Ron's eyes were keeping up a constant commentary. 'Must have been a programmer's mistake. One of the phases in the process took ten seconds when it needed only three!'

Jimmy tossed his smile around the table. 'Seven seconds!' He beamed delightedly.

'Yes. I had seven seconds available in various different locations around the square, meaning that if I could clear one side, I'd be able to unblock the rest. Perhaps you remember that until a few months ago the whole square was blocked during the morning rush hour? At this this zebra crossing,' he made some marks in one of the corners, 'scores of pedestrians would acc.u.mulate.' zebra crossing,' he made some marks in one of the corners, 'scores of pedestrians would acc.u.mulate.'

'Yes, I remember!' I said, into a tableful of surprised faces. Dmitry looked at me silently for two point five to three seconds.

'I retimed the whole daypressure periods, post-pressure periods, after an accident, after a demonstration. I made an appointment with a munic.i.p.al technician, we opened the control box and he logged in with his laptop and uploaded my new definitions. The traffic was pretty heavy at the time. Yet minutes after we'd run the program everything started flowing with perfect smoothness. The technician went back to his office and I celebrated on my own with a well-earned gla.s.s of wine at a bar.'

'Which bar?' asked Talia Tenne. Talia Tenne likes bars.

Dmitry didn't remember.

After the lecture, Bar sent his numerological reading of Dmitry. It said: 'Dmitry = kind b.o.l.l.o.c.ks scrambler'. It's an old Hebrew habit or superst.i.tion, doing numerologies, but Bar uses a piece of software he wrote while he was supposed to be working on programming for Time's Arrow to calculate his. Among his favourite numerologies are 'Rafi Rafael = bald for no reason', 'Rafi Rafael = tough midget manager' and 'Time's Arrow = a total waste of time'.

Our business in Time's Arrow is saving time. Not seven secondsfor us seven seconds are an eternity. We work for years in order to save a second or two. Not from traffic lights on a square but from the conversation time of each and every call made to directory enquiries: 144 in Israel, 411 in America, 118118 and so on in the UK, 104 in j.a.pan...And why do we need to save a second from conversations to a call centre? Take, for instance, these clients of ours who provide the service in Manhattan. They've got a couple of thousand operators in New York answering calls coming in non-stop5.5 million phone calls a day in search of telephone numbers. If we can save one second from each call we save 5.5 million seconds a day, which is 63 days, or almost three working months of an employee. Our software can save a company like that around $10,000 a day.

These numbers were my job. I was the Croc of Numbers! The Belgian company whose representatives Jimmy and I were going to meet takes 44 million calls a year, or more than 120,000 a day, with 300 operators working at any given time. I worked in sales, selling the product to national or private phone companies, landline or mobile, or companies providing directory a.s.sistance, DA for short. Recently phone companies have been springing up, or being privatised, all over the place. And every one of these companies needs DA. The market's worth $145 million this year: next year it's projected to be $200 million.

Pearls from Jimmy's tireless mind: 'Time's Arrow is the Fed-Ex of the twenty-first century. Fed-Ex saved days, we save seconds.' Or: 'We're not only living in a world where every second is worth money, but every hundredth hundredth of a second.' How do we save this time? Software and consulting. Our software replaces the operator for certain parts of the conversation: it replies, asks for name and location, auto-completes names, searches and finds results in optimal time, reads out the number and dials it. Theoretically, it's also got voice recognition, but that's not perfect (yet), and conversations are still shared between software and operators. of a second.' How do we save this time? Software and consulting. Our software replaces the operator for certain parts of the conversation: it replies, asks for name and location, auto-completes names, searches and finds results in optimal time, reads out the number and dials it. Theoretically, it's also got voice recognition, but that's not perfect (yet), and conversations are still shared between software and operators.

Besides the software we consult: we supply guidance to operators on the software, on how to decrease talk time, on posture and voice; solutions for companies relating to s.h.i.+ft construction (work/rest ratio, number of workers per s.h.i.+ft, optimum s.h.i.+ft lengths), ergonomic call-centre design, HR management, marketing strategies, pricing and distribution. All this, with periodic software upgrades thrown in, is yours for a million dollars on the table and a yearly licence costing half a million, more or less, in truth somewhat less than moreespecially lately when everyone seems to be in crisis.

Interested?

I read the names of the dead on Ynet. Some of the photos I recognised. The manager of the minibus company said of the 'driver, 36': 'Ziona was irreplaceable; everybody at the station loved her.' There was Gabriel Algrably, 41, a widower builder who left behind two girls, ages 11 and 13. Two Hungarians, short-contract workers. Mali, a young woman, a student in the Vital College of Design: 'a flower plucked in full bloom'. Shlomo Yarkoni, 29. 'The most wonderful husband in the world,' said his widow Yael, 'four months pregnant and biting back her tears'. The suicide bomber, Shafiq Omar, 19 years old.

I met some of the families. After everything else happened, after they heard about me, they wanted to get in touch. Shlomo Yarkoni's widow Yael called to ask whether I remembered him, but I didn't. I hadn't recognised the photo on Ynet. He probably got on at the Centre. A week after Yael, a woman named Smadar called me, also about Shlomo. He had visited her a few minutes before the bomb. He had left his phone in her flat. The phone rang endlessly all morning, and she didn't answer. She didn't turn it off either. She just stared at it and knew. She'd heard the boom. It was a beautiful winter morning. She sat and looked at the ringing phone all day, his sperm still warm inside her.

There was one unidentifiable body. It had to be him. I took out his Palm and stared at it. Should I hand it to the police? Or his family? But Giora had made me a request, the last request of his life. I turned the Palm on and watched the black letters flicker in the grey liquid crystal. Yesterday, the last day of his life, he'd had a meeting in Tel Aviv at eight in the morning and then nothing until the evening, where he'd written: 'Shuli?' The name he'd told me. The one I was going to look for.

I synchronisedI transferred all the information from Giora Guetta's PalmPilot to my computer for back-up. I saved it just for the h.e.l.l of it. Much later I thought: I did it instinctively, as if I knew there was information in there that I was going to need...

The offices of Time's Arrow are located on the twenty-third floor of the Dizengoff Centre, with views over the Mediterranean and the dense houses of Tel Aviv, ugly when seen from above. I checked the Belgian company's website and then called Switzerland.

'Ivan!'

'Eitan. How are you? I heard you've just had a bomb in Tel Aviv.'

'Oh yeah, yeah: nothing to worry about.' This is company policyto play down any whiff of terrorist activity in the Middle East in general and the Tel Aviv area specifically. If anything should happen and, with the help of the negative and sensationalising global media, reach the ears of our overseas clients and potential investors, it should be treated with at most the interest an elephant might display at a fly landing on its foreheadnot even a pa.s.sing annoyance.

'Near you, though, wasn't it? Central Tel Aviv?'

'Nooo, not really. Didn't even hear it, actually.' (That's right: I was in the elevator.) 'And you? Anything blown up in Zurich lately?'

He roared. The Swiss are important customers. The system's enjoying great success there. But Ivan is continually asking for changes and new features. He has good ideas, but who has the time? Making changes to the software is like trying to storm the Great Wall of China with the Chinese army ranged along it with machine guns: you have to talk to the people from Product, Marketing, R&D, Quality a.s.surance (QA), Installations...every one of whom is working full time on something else. Jimmy says that, as a small company, we can provide solutions and services with 'a speed and flexibility that bigger companies can only dream of'. This is complete bulls.h.i.+t, of course: we're infinitely less agile or flexible than some giant mega-corporation like Koor.

Ivan made lots of suggestions. I told him they were all excellent. My head was aching.

A few minutes after noon, the inboxes of the thirty or so employees of Time's Arrow all receive a message from Talia Tenne that says, 'Food?' Today she'd ordered from Salsalat but I didn't fancy a salad and went for a schnitzel from the Coffee Bar along with Bar, Ron, Shoko from IT Support and Yoash Green, who works with me in Sales and whose wife left him. Our food arrived with the salads, and we sat with Talia Tenne and the girls in the dining area, where Bar browsed through Yediot Achronot Yediot Achronot, the main paper out here. 'Shulamit Penigstein, seventy-two,' read Bar, 'who disembarked only a few stops before the explosion, had serious doubts about the suicide bomber: "I tried to draw the attention of my fellow pa.s.sengers to him," she said, "but they just sneered at me."'

'So, Croc,' Talia Tenne said, 'what's this about you being in the attack yesterday?'

'That's right, I'm dead.'

'No, like...weren't you near it or something?'

'Pretty d.a.m.n close. Dizengoff Centre. Big building, not far from the attack?'

'Stop being a pain.'

I like Talia Tenne. She's naive and funny and cares for the nutrition of most of the company's workers, which is nice. And pretty, very pretty. Her skin is as white and smooth as silk.

'Unbelievable how this intifada's getting closer...it's going to be here soon.'

Occasionally I looked eastwards out of the dining area's windows, waiting for a plane to appear and crash into our tower.

'If the mountain doesn't come to Muhammad,' said Shoko, chewing chicken, 'Muhammad will come to the mountain.'

The week the intifada broke out, Time's Arrow had a day of ma.s.sages organised in the Sea View Hotel in the north. But there were riots on the way north and the roads were blocked. So we went to Sde Dov, the little airstrip in North Tel Aviv, and flew to Mahanayim and took a taxi from there to the Sea View. From the plane we thought we saw smoke from tyres burning on the roads. We sat at the Sea View in white towelling robes, sipped herbal tea and submitted to our oily Swedish ma.s.sages.

'Don't laughthey'll take this tower down one day.'

'A b.o.o.by-trapped car goes to the upper car park, drives straight through that laughable little stick that calls itself a barrier and sits itself directly underneath the building: boom!'

'Shoko, I'm eating, stop it already!'

Twenty-seven minutes is the average time I spend on lunchI worked it out once.

I didn't feel at all like working. A report on Ynet said the last body from the Little No. 5 had finally been identified. Giora Guetta, 23 years old, from Jerusalem. My man. I can't stay here any longer, I thought, I've got to find his girlfriend. I stood up and said, as I said every day, 'One small step for a man, and an even smaller step for mankind.'

'A half-day, then?' asked Ron. It was a running joke: I always said the same thing and he always gave the same answer even if it was eight in the evening, which it usually was. But today it really was going to be a half-day.

'Yeah. A half-day.'

6

Grandfather Fahmi got angry whenever people talked about the war of 1948 as the Nakba Nakba; the Disaster. People didn't like talking about it at all, but he did. Because he and his friends did things. They resisted. He told me how they used to hit convoys of Jews going up to Jerusalem. They'd descend from the village to the ridges above the road to Jerusalem and shoot at the buses. The road would close and the Jews wouldn't be able to go through to Jerusalemthey managed to cut Jerusalem off for weeks like this. The Jews themselves admit it. They've left the wrecks of some of the buses there as memorials. That was Grandfather Fahmi. He hit the convoys. His name is written on those buses in bullet holes. Later they put armour on the buses and trucks, but Grandfather and his friends still found ways to attack, still managed to stop them getting through. The road was littered with the skeletons of carswhat the Jews have preserved there is no more than a souvenir. Grandfather would make his way down the slope from the ridge to shoot at a bus, and then come back up home to the village. Eight months their heroics went on. And this is why he felt hurt when people talked about a defeat: because they fought like lions. One time a plane crashed near Beit Machsir and six Jewish soldiers were killed in it and Grandfather Fahmi took a souvenir of his own: one of the clocks from the dashboard of the c.o.c.kpit.

'Your father seems like a good man, Fahmi. A very sad man. He really doesn't deserve all this trouble. And your girlfriend's very cute, isn't she? How she comes and plays the tapes? I used to hate the songs but, you know, I'm really starting to like them. Amarein, amarein...amarehehehein...' Amarein, amarein...amarehehehein...'

Oh no, please! Don't start with the singing now...

'Now don't get all upset, Fahmi. What are these noises? No need to get cross. I'm here to take care of you. You like the deep ma.s.sages, right?'

Svetlana, can't you please just shut up...? Grandfather Fahmi...I'm...

'We'll get your senses back, don't you worry. The taste and the smell and the sight and the touch and the hearing and the movement...Now let's have a peek at how these pipes and tubes are doing! A tube for your p.i.s.s, another for your air...'

'What are you doing, Fahmi?'

The Croc's talking; he's suspicious.

He looks sideways. 'What've you got there?'

Where was I? The Croc? Grandfather Fahmi?

'Dr Hartom's coming in a minute, so we want you on your best behaviour, don't we?'

Dr Hartom's a b.i.t.c.h and you're a stupid little Jewish wh.o.r.e and I'm cold. Can't you stop talking for a second? Can't you see that I'm cold...?

The flat was cold. An old spiral heater giving a little orange heat. Tea in gla.s.ses. Bilahl with Halil Abu-Zeid: a large, impressive man with huge arms and chest, a shaved head and a beard. A silver ring on his fat middle finger. Intelligent pale brown eyes. Older. In 1990 they deported him to southern Lebanon, and when he came back they stuck him in jail in Ramallah...

'My dream,' said Bilahl, 'is to see, on the slope beside the remains of the old buses that my grandfather shot in '48, a Mitsubis.h.i.+ and a Peugeot and a Toyota made in 2000. You understand what I'm talking about?'

Abu-Zeid looked at Bilahl and my brother looked back.

'How were you thinking of doing it?'

Bilahl drew a map on a page from a notebook, with a number of arrows on it. He explained. Abu-Zeid smoked a whole cigarette before he said anything. The smoke coming out of his mouth mingled with the breath coming out of Bilahl's. Bilahl knelt on the floor and warmed his hands by the electric bars. He said, 'It's about time. What did Ramallah do apart from a handful of attacks by Fatah on Route 443 and a couple more on the Settlements? What did Al-Amari contribute? Wafa Idris?'

'We did something big this week.'