Almost Dead Part 17

'What have I done to deserve this? How did I bring such a monster up?'

'Father, stop! You promised. It's not helping anybody, standing here and crying. Let him listen to the music. I know he likes it. I can tell.'

Yes I do, Lulu. Yes I do...

Murair had hardly changed since I was a child. There were no new buildings because there was no money. The village was getting drier, there was no work locally and any outside jobs were too far away for people to commute daily, at least in the current conditions. The few who worked in agriculture became fewer because of the lack of water and restrictions on movement. Anyone who could moved to the big cities, as I had. The others were waiting. So the frozen village was like a museum of my childhood, like travelling to the past. Lulu was like a mirror into the past too. When she talked to me I saw that her new experiencesher discoveries of hidden corners at the edge of the village, her need to be alone with her thoughts and the hillswere simply my old ones...After we'd drunk tea with Father and Aunt Lily, Lulu and I went for a walk in the village. I said h.e.l.lo to familiar faces and noticed how they'd aged. We visited Mother's grave in the rocky, sandy cemetery where Sabres cacti grew and that plant with the meaty triangular leaves which I always loved to make crescent-shaped cuts in with my fingernails.

After weeks of planning operations or sprawling in front of TV, it was pleasant to hear about the real world. There isn't really a normal life in Palestine, but there are places where private life is a little less distorted by history, where friends, family, work, school predominate. Lulu talked to me about her friends from the neighbouring villages, about walks to caves near by, about a guy from Duma who rode around on a horse and took her for rides along the ridges. 'How old is this kid?' 'Sixteen.' I tried to look at her through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old boy, but managed to see only my little sister with her straight brown hair and little girl's smile.

'Lulu, I don't know if you should ride around on a horse with a sixteen-year-old guy.'

She laughed. 'Nothing happens. My friends ride with him too.'

It sounded slightly weird coming from her. I said, 'What do you mean, "nothing happens"? How do you know something could could happen at all?' happen at all?'

'You think I'm still ten? All my friends have already been kissed.'

'What? Lulu, stop meeting the cheeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d. What's his name? I'm going to talk to him.'

'Relax. It wasn't with him.'

'It? What's "it"?'

She led us on an expedition to the place she went to to be alone. 'You should feel special,' she said. 'I don't bring anyone down here.' I told her I always felt special with her. It was true. If I ever turned into a teacher, or the imam, or her horse, she was always on the same wavelength. She was talking about her friends; I said, 'But why didn't you do your homework today, Miss Sab.i.+.c.h?'

'I did in all my other cla.s.ses, master teacher. Fahmi?'

'G.o.ddammit, soldier! What did you call me?'

'I mean Lieutenant, sir!'

'G.o.ddam right, soldier!'

'Sir, yes, sir!' It was idiotic, but it made us laugh.

'I was visiting Mother's grave once,' she said, 'and I sneezed on it, and I just couldn't stop laughing.' She started again with her contagious laughter, like a water sprinkler, like a machine gun. She couldn't breathe. I laughed too, like a horse; huge, liberating laughter which set her off againwe couldn't stop. We laughed, in fits and starts, not knowing why, all the way to her secret place.

'Now I know that you're my sister,' I said.

'Why?'

'Because this is my place.'

'Yours? It's mine!'

'Are you sure it wasn't me who showed it to you?' She was sure. It was mine and Rana's place: a little plateau behind the Sneina family's house, halfway down the slope descending from the edge of the village. There's kind of a small clearing, and smooth rocks you can sit on or lie on in complete solitude. If you're not a member of the Sneina family, it takes almost ten minutes to get there from the road, which makes it even more private. I hadn't been there for years. I might even have found a pack of my old condoms if I'd looked for it, but I wasn't going to with Lulu around. We sat next to each other, brother and sister, and we didn't say a word for a long time. Rana was in my head and in my ears, our conversation that morning, our latest meeting. 'What are you thinking about?' my sister asked. 'Nothing.' She gave me an inquisitive look. 'This place reminds me...Do you know how long it is since I was here?' 'Was it really your spot?' 'Really.' She smiled. 'I'm glad. It's a good place, right?' 'The best,' I replied. 'I wish I had a place like this to run away to where I live now.'

When we returned Father was in a state. Someone had called and hung up, and then called again and said nothing. My mobile had rung too, he said, several times. I ran to the holdall and fished it out. I had voice messages. Two of them said nothing. The third was a short message: 'Bilahl has been arrested. They're calling all the numbers on his phone. Turn off your phone and get rid of it. Call in a few days if you can. Be careful.'

I turned off the phone. Lulu saw the fear in my eyes. I steered her out on to the terrace, trying to appear calm in front of her and Father.

'Take the phone,' I said. 'Hide it in our hiding place, and don't turn it on. You mustn't turn it on, OK?' She nodded.

'What's happened?'

I looked at her, my little sister. How much I loved the little girl in front of me! 'Nothing,' I said, ignoring her sceptical look: I had to leave immediately. How long had I been here? Two hours? Three? The soldiers might already be on their way. If they had Bilahl's phone, it would only be logical to send troops to Murair. I didn't know anythingnot how or where Bilahl had been caught nor what he'd told them, nor whether they realised who he was, what he'd done, what he was planning, who was connected to himand when you don't know you have to a.s.sume the worst. Bilahl had been arrested and I was in real danger. I had to disappear. I didn't have a clue where to go.

Lulu was standing watching me as I was thinking all this. I took her face in my hands and said, 'I have to go. I'm sorry, I was planning on staying a few days. But I have to go now.' 'Because nothing has happened?' 'That's right.' 'Can I come with you?' I actually laughed. 'What do you think?' She shrugged, disappointed. 'Soon I'll come for longer, I promise,' I said and kissed both her cheeks. 'You be a good girl, OK? And watch out for that guy from Duma with the horse.'

Lucky, I was thinking as I left, with the holdall slung over my shoulder, no phone, no way of contacting the world, not knowing where I was heading or where I would sleep, you're so very, very lucky you're so very, very lucky. Why had I made the decision, on the spur of the moment, on this day of all days, to call Lulu? Someone up above had taken me out of Al-Amari today. Grandfather Fahmi was protecting me, I was sure of it. And he would keep watching over me. And then I told myself in Bilahl's voice, for the second time that day: stop looking at the full half of the gla.s.s, little brother. Pull yourself together. Be careful.

31

Shuli died on a Wednesday, thirteen weeks after the attack. I'd come to Jerusalem for my thirteenth and last group therapy meeting. The doctors were unsurprised. The machines, they said, could maintain a certain amount of body function, but they couldn't make the brain live. 'What about the ones who stay in comas for years?' I asked. I was in shock. I seemed to be sitting on the floor. 'The ones who wake up after seventeen years and ask for a Pepsi?' 'That's a different story,' they said, and didn't elaborate.

The night before I hadn't been able to sleep and the morning had pa.s.sed slowly and foggily. When I stepped on to the Little No. 5 I felt a hideous breaking wave of nausea and stumbled off and threw up on the pavement. For a long time I sat on a bench and sipped water with a head full of noise and then I took a taxi to Jerusalem. The air was heavy and not easy to breathe. The machine didn't have Twixes. On the top floor, Shuli's bed was not in its place. I asked the nurse what had happened, but I already knew that she was going to say what I'd been imagining for months. The nurse said, 'Shuli? I'm sorry. She pa.s.sed away.' I went down on my knees and cried without stopping, until doctors came, and then I felt hands on my shoulders. They were the hands of Alon, the chef from the King David Hotel. He walked me to a bench outside the hospital and we sat there for a long time, silent, smelling the pine trees, looking at the Jerusalem hills. I didn't say a word in group therapy either, and no one tried to make me. The next Wednesday I didn't bother to come at all. I only came back to Jerusalem for the funeral. The Mountain of Rest cemetery, where we'd first met on a stormy day three months earlier. I felt as alone as I'd ever felt in my life. It was a bright spring day, and between her grave and Guetta's there were two rows of fresh graves, marking the weeks that had pa.s.sed, the unostentatious, steady labour of death. I didn't make it more than halfway through the ceremony before running out of the cemetery, carrying in my ribcage a leaden ma.s.s of grief which would make breathing an effort for weeks afterwards.

In the mirror: a man aged thirty-three and a third, beginning to recede. Some grey hairs. A small paunch, scarcely there, really, actually not a paunch but a temporary bulging of the stomach. Hairs in the ears and nose. Red eyes with heavy lids.

'What are you looking at?' Duchi's voice from behind me. I s.h.i.+fted my eyeline to an angle where I could see her in the mirror. She was standing in the doorway in a white robe, her wet hair darkened almost to black. Her eyes were smirking. 'At this handsome man?' She came and hugged me from behind. 'Not so handsome,' I said. 'You're still cute,' she said, and nuzzled her soft cheek against my back. 'You think so?' I frowned my eyebrows down and gave myself a glance in three-quarter profile. It looked a bit better that way. 'Obviously unbearable sometimes,' she said, 'but I still remember the cute Croc, and I know he'll be back.'

Duchi tried so hard to be good to me. She was patient and solicitous and accepted the sleepless nights and the jumpiness and lack of concentration they left in their wake. We hardly argued. It was so strange, so unsettling, that I had this weird feeling something was missing. I asked her whether she'd taken anything out of the flat, changed the furniture around or something. But it was the arguments. In bed one night, when I asked her why it hadn't been like this before, why she was suddenly so nice, she gave me her profound look and let out a brief bark of hollow laughter.

'Dimwit. You really think I've changed?'

'You haven't?'

'Of course not. It's you.'

'Me?'

'You've stopped arguing about every petty thing, and looking for reasons to fight because you're under pressure all the time...'

'OK, OK, I get it.'

'Like, now there are other things.' She didn't conceal the expression on her face. 'You're...difficult. You can be cruel and self-centred and you don't sleep, and I still don't see how the cigarettes can be helping.' I looked at her. 'OK, not cruel,' she said. Some seconds elapsed. 'Maybe a little,' she said.

Since September 11th the word 'wedding' had resurfaced only once. Duchi's brother Voovi had mentioned it during a dinner at ours. It sort of fell out of his mouth like a fledgling falling out of a nest, just toppled off his tongue on to the floor, where it collapsed.

But I couldn't bring myself to abandon the Guetta investigation. I recruited Bar to help. I call it an investigation because I have no other word for it, but it was hardly thatInspector Almaz had in fact cla.s.sified it as 'a case not worth investigating'.

The first thing you notice when you meet Bar is his loose posture. He's a loose guy: thin, not so tall, always wearing a shabby baseball cap, a size too big, on his shaven head. He has small ears and these incredibly bright blue eyes. He wears a permanent five o'clock shadow to compensate for the premature baldness. The timing was good for him. Work bored him and even the numerology was starting to pall. He'd served in military intelligence, I don't know in exactly what capacity, but I trusted him. And besides (I discovered later) he's a big Hercule Poirot fan.

He transferred the contents of Guetta's Palm to his computer and started scanning it. After about an hour he sent me an email with these details: On the morning of his death Guetta had a meeting at eight: BMW. Coffee Bean, Yehuda Maccabi Street. A mobile phone number.

In Guetta's address book under B, Binyamin Warshawski is listed next to the same mobile phone number listed for the meeting above. Almost certainly, the 'BMW' mentioned in the note about the meeting is Warshawski's name.

That number is disconnected. The phone company says the number is not in use. Under pressure from this investigator, the customer service representative told me it was a withheld number, but admitted that it was cancelled by the customer. The date of cancellation was a few days after the meeting.

The phone book lists three Binyamin Warshawskis. One on his own, two with a partner. One lives in Tel Mond, two in Tel Aviv.

Giora Guetta's nickname was 'Gigu'.

Two days after his death, Guetta was supposed to collect a new credit card from his bank in Jerusalem.

In numerology, Giora Guetta from Jerusalem = a very dark and complicated affair = a meeting in Tel Aviv. I swear this is true: the sum is 845 for all three sentences.

The guy's a genius, I thought. All this after an hour's work. I made an investigation team appointment in ten minutes' time at the falafel stall downstairs.

'Not bad for an hour,' I said in admiration.

'Yeah, but it's easy. When you're scanning soft material, you find ninety per cent of the good stuff quickly. The problem is finding the remaining ten per cent.'

'Soft material?'

'Soft material's the stuff you don't expect to be searched or examined. Normal citizens, like you and me, acc.u.mulate stuff and lists and diaries without worrying about security. The opposite of coded or cla.s.sified material you get in organisations.'

We bought falafels and fruit shakes from the next stand, and sat on wicker chairs on the pavement. Hamelacha Street in the Rosh Haayin Business Park is not one of Israel's most glamorous locations. 'OK,' I said, going over a print-out of Bar's email, 'Binyamin is is the guy's name. Shuli called the number, and he answered and said he was Binyamin. She asked him about Guetta and he hung up.' the guy's name. Shuli called the number, and he answered and said he was Binyamin. She asked him about Guetta and he hung up.'

'You remember the date?' asked Bar.

I certainly did. 'A couple of days after Shaar Hagai.'

'That fits. Maybe he got scared of Shuli's call. But it's only a guess.'

'What about these B. Warshawskis?'

'Well, it would make sense if it was one of the Tel Avivis,' said Bar. 'But it could be the Tel Mond one. Or maybe our Binyamin's unlisted. Better do it carefully, if he cancelled his number. I'll finish scanning the PalmPilot first. There's a lot more in there.'

I took a bite from my falafel. Not too bad. Bar sounded as if he knew what he was doing. 'Carry on, then,' I said. 'Send me a message, when you've got something to send.'

The spring and early summer had already begun to hammer the coast of Israel with heat. Those little gauntlet-runs from the air-con in the car to the air-con in the office to the air-con at home got more and more debilitating as the days pa.s.sed, especially since one of the air-conditioners was in a ten-year-old car. Cold showers extended in length. We were all attached to our water bottles like drips. Hummus was off the menu. And public interest in the Croc waned. The phone rang infrequently now: a charity night here, a tribute there, a local newspaper from Rosh Haayin which'd discovered the thrilling fact that I was now earning my corn in their beautiful munic.i.p.ality, a local newspaper from Jerusalem (the local newspapers are blind to their subjects' lack of civic affection) and, very occasionally, someone from the past, someone whose existence I'd forgotten, a voice that took me way back into the long ago.

It was shortly after Shuli's death, during those exhausted, surreal, stifling days when looking for Guetta was apparently the only thing holding me together. I was still waking up well before dawn. I'd leave the flat and wander through parks and streets to meet my comrades in insomnia, sit on a bench and exchange a few words with them. So I was half asleep and driving to Tel Aviv in the c.r.a.ppy Peugeot at the end of the working day, with the sea in front of me and the Ramat Hasharon Tennis Centre on my left, when the phone rang. 'Crocos?' said a voice, and the c.r.a.ppy Peugeot suddenly metamorphosed itself into a time machine, taking me back, east, up to the hills above Rosh Haayin and farther, up to the cliff above the valley, up to the village. I could taste something bilious in my mouth, felt a burning in my throat and eyes. Gadi. Lieutenant Gadi Gidon. In short, Gadgid. How many years since I'd heard this voice? 'Gadi.' 'Who else?' 'Years,' I said. The time machine landed in the watchtower at the entrance to the village, opened its doors and turfed me out.

Gadgid is leading a platoon of soldiers on a routine patrol inside the village. A wide road winds from the entrance of the village to the top of the hill. Along its sides a few houses cl.u.s.ter spa.r.s.ely, but the heart of the village is higher up, at the end of the road. There the alleys are narrower, and the houses crowded together. I'm in the watchtower at the entrance to the village. I watch the file of soldiers getting smaller as they make their way up the road, then disappearing at the top of the hill. Gadgid is walking pointtall, confident, tight black curls on his head, an impressive nose. When all the soldiers have disappeared from sight, I look around at the arid winter landscape. I sit down with my back to the wall and drink from my water bottle. 1988: curfew; intifada; morning; silence.

We met at Bar BaraBush. 'Crocos! My G.o.d, you're a star!' Gadgid still held himself very straight and tall, but his formerly distinctive nose had disappeared somewhat into a fatter face, and the curls had gone. He had gla.s.ses. 'You've become an intellectual, Gadi?' I ordered my Cannibal and he got the beers in. I always liked Gadgid in the army because, like me, he didn't take it too seriously. We became friends in Balata, where we watched Israel v. Colombia on a tiny black-and-white TV hooked up to a generator. Valderrama's free kick through our joke of a wall, Yoram Arbel's now-cla.s.sic commentary, 10and once again we weren't going to the World Cup. Gadgid made me laugh the whole game, and I swear on my life that he said, 'That's no way to build a wall' ten seconds before Arbel did.

'You know,' I said, 'when you called, the moment I heard your voice saying "Crocos", it was like I was there. Like I was touching the dirt, smelling the smell.'

'The tear-gas smell, huh?' He smiled. 'That son of a b.i.t.c.h would have got what he deserved even without your contribution.'

I sit down and drink, and fall asleep. And the next thing I know is...I don't know...shouts? My backside inexplicably getting warm? The whispering sound of flames? A stone landing next to me? A shot? I don't know. I remember watching the soldiers disappearing over the top of the hill. I sit, I drink, and then...I look down and see that the tower is on fire. And twenty-five feet below there are...I don't know how many, five, ten, a dozen of them. They see me and shout and start to throw stones. I whip my head back in. I can hear flames, shouts, the stones. .h.i.tting. There's a terrible smell of burning plastic and wood. I glance down againa stone flies past my head. And they start to climb. It is utterly terrifying. I scramble over to the radio and call Gadgid with no code words, no military terminology or radio lingo. I scream, 'Gadgid, come and save me!' and he replies, 'We see. On our way.' I curl up in the corner, my head buried in my hands. I'm starting to hyperventilate, and I don't want this, no, no, no, no, no, and there's a shot and another and the shots are coming thick and fast now and yelling and the sound of blows. And my head deep, deep, deep between my knees in the corner.

I was drinking vodka and pa.s.sion fruit, trying to get a grip of the elusive seeds with my tongue and keeping an eye on the big t.i.ts of the girl on the other side of the bar. A ring of smoke sidled out of Gadgid's mouth.

'So tell me again. How did you manage to let them burn the tower like that?'

'I don't have a clue.'