Almost Dead Part 18

Fifteen years later, I still don't have a clue and I never will have. But I do know this: the same day my close friend from Jerusalem, Danny Lam, was driving a jeep on a patrol in the central section of Lebanon's security zone. At 11 a.m., when I was sitting in the burning tower waiting for my end, his jeep arrived at a puddle that may possibly have been deeper than it looked, and stopped in front of it. I've relived this moment many times: me, on my own, in a burning watchtower in a West Bank village. Danny Lam and his friends, in a jeep in Lebanon, on the edge of a big puddle. And up above, G.o.d choosing which b.u.t.ton to hit.

'G.o.d, Crocos, what a f.u.c.k-up! A whole regiment had to come in after us to restore order, no?'

'Yeah...I'd almost blanked it out, and suddenly you turn up from the past. Where did you come from?' I said.

It was late and he'd already drunk several pints. He told me his war stories and the history of his life since, his marriage, his success as a chemistry student at the Haifa Technion, his divorce, and his work at the Weizmann Inst.i.tute in Rehovot alongside attractive twenty-something researchers from the former Soviet Union.

After we said goodbye I got into the car and started driving, but I didn't go home, I drove just to drive, to think. I drove slowly in no particular direction, down near the beach, around squares and roundabouts, slowly, directionless, drowned in memories. I drove like that for a long time, thought about what I'd done and not done and tried to put work and Duchi and home and all that on the other side of the balance. What could I have done? Who could have guessed that Gadgid would call all of a sudden?

32

I met Dayek after about an hour of fast walking. He stood in the middle of the path, looked at me with his big brown eyes, and batted his long grey eyelashes. His grey hair was soft to the touch, although he was so thin his ribcage was visible. We had a donkey when we were children, and it was thanks to him I'd come to know all the paths around Murair, which, give or take a few dirt ramps, haven't changed since the days of the prophets. I knew what it was like, riding on the back of a donkey, the pain that grows in your back, and in your spread legs, until you have to move both of them to one side for a while. I remembered the feeling of the boy discovering the big world outside of his village, with the a.s.sistance of his first mode of transport. There were a few bicycles around, and now there are more, but a donkey was a luxury when we were kids.

When I left the village, I could have turned in any directioneast, down the cliffs, to the Jordan Valley. North, to the villages on the ridge and farther on to Nablus. Back south, towards Ramallah. All of these options I knew well, but I had no idea which to choose. I turned north, on the a.s.sumption that if Bilahl had been caught in Ramallah, it was best to get as far away from there as possible. The donkey accepted my choice humbly. We called the donkey we had in my childhood Nasech, because he was fat. This one had thin legs, and his backbone was protruding and quite painful to my backside. So I called him Dayek, meaning narrow.

In the first village we went through, we stopped in the grocery store and I bought water, pita bread and cheese, and a kilo of carrots for Dayek, who devoured them hungrily. I don't know why I went for carrotsdonkeys are happy with gra.s.s or hay, or can even make a meal of bushes and the bark of trees. But I decided to give him a treat. I ended up staying with Dayek a whole week, and I'm convinced that by the end of the week his weight had gone up by several kilos. At any rate, the bones on his back and ribs weren't sticking out so much. His fur had thickened and looked healthier. I was proud of myselfat least I had made one Palestinian donkey happy.

Dayek had a crooked tooth in the front of his mouth, which gave him character: when he exposed his teeth, the crooked one gave the impression that he was smiling. I smiled back at him and patted his nose, between the ears and eyes. We headed up to the hills. For hours we didn't see a living thing besides a few birds and a couple of wandering goats; we heard only the sound of the cicadas. We stopped near a cave with a flat area of dirt in front of it. It was starting to get dark and I decided to sleep there. I took out the food and water I had left. 'The hills of Palestine,' I told Dayek, 'are the most beautiful place on Earth. You should realise how lucky you are to be able to spend your life here.' I put another carrot in his mouth and he chewed it loudly.

Though the days were getting warmer, the nights in the hills were still very cold. Without a blanket I was facing a hard night. But I was also exhausted after a day of travelling, riding a donkey, the excitement of meeting my sister and anxiety about my brother's and my own destinies. I fell deeply asleep on the cave floor for several hours. The chill woke me long before dawn, even before I heard the muezzins calling from the mosques. Dayek was up and ready for another day on the paths. I descended to a village and, still with help of the dark, took a blanket and a long s.h.i.+rt from a clothes line in a backyard. 'Support the struggle,' I whispered in the direction of the house, 'I'm sure you'll understand.' By luck there was a small cafe there that served hummus and ful ful to the labourers on their way to work. I ate well and took pita bread and to the labourers on their way to work. I ate well and took pita bread and labbaneh labbaneh with me for the rest of the day. In the grocery I stocked up on water and food for Dayek. with me for the rest of the day. In the grocery I stocked up on water and food for Dayek.

We went on like that during the day, through villages, between the hills, eating, talking. In the middle of the day I heard a muezzin calling for the second prayer, and felt he was talking to me: 'Come to pray, come to success, Allah is the greatest.' I went to the mosque and prayed, and at the end of the prayer, I added a personal prayer for Bilahl and Lulu. Although I wasn't a believer like Bilahl, I liked being in the mosque.

The second night I slept much longer and more comfortably under the blanket. I discovered an old coffee kettle, built a fire and made myself tea with sage and other plants that I collected from the hill around me. I started to feel like Izz ad-Din al-Qa.s.sam himself. True, I lit the fire with a lighter rather than sticks or flints, and true, we had the villages for our food, but the feeling of being alone in nature was very powerful. It took hold of me, and got stronger every day, and especially every night that I spent outside, on my own, with only a donkey for company, and a half-moon for light.

But worry about what had happened was gnawing away at me. The next morning I met a shepherd who didn't have a mobile phone himself but directed me to a grocery in the next village. There I called Halil's cousin, the driver. She was the only person I could think of. She was surprised to hear from me, asked whether I was OK, told me not to say anything. She was afraid. She asked whether she could call me back in an hour. I got the number from the guy in the store after I'd promised to pay him for receiving a call.

We ate. I didn't ask where I was. It wasn't important. A beard was beginning to sketch itself in and my hair was wild. While it was still dark that morning I'd supplied myself with a T-s.h.i.+rt and underwear from the clothes line of some sleeping villagers. On an old tractor I found a baseball cap, with a green plastic net and an adjustable plastic strap at the back. On the front there was white padding and a drawing of a cement mixer with 'Israbright Cement Factories Ltd' in Hebrew lettering around it. The shade was green and made from the same padded material. I fell in love with the hat immediately. G.o.d knew how much I needed it, how merciless the sun could be.

An hour later she told me what she knew. They'd caught Omar Sharif, she said, who had Bilahl's number. Bilahl was picked up that same day, she didn't know where or how. I told her where I was, more or less. I needed to hide well away from the expected placesAl-Amari, Murair, friends, family. She managed a quiet laugh. 'Like a cowboy,' she said. 'Let me try to arrange something. I'll call this number the same time tomorrow.'

Oh, your fingers, Svetlana...so deep in my back, in my muscles...mmm...Where was I? In the mountains...

What they managed to arrange for me was: a flat in Kafr Qasim. With the blue-card Palestinians, the Israeli citizens. There was a free room in a flat that belonged to one of the supporters of the movement in Gaza. He was renting the flat to a family from the village, just a normal family from Kafr Qasim, who didn't even know about the Gazan landlord. One room in the flat was rented separately, which saved money for the family. I could stay there for a while, until things cleared up, or the situation eased. 'How long?' 'For the time being you will be there.' 'What sort of family is it? I have to live with a family? An Israeli family? To eat with them?' 'I don't have the exact details, but you don't have many choices, if you don't want to keep wandering the hills of Nablus on your donkey.' I was silent. 'What will I tell them? Where am I supposed to have come from?' She laughed. 'You think you're the only one there? That they wouldn't recognise the look, the accent? There are plenty of people from the West Bank living in those places.' 'How will I get there?' She was a little impatient. 'Try to get there on your own. It's safer. Get there, and start getting organised. Slowly.' She gave me the address. 'What about work?' 'We'll see...I'll ask. But look for work by yourself. The room will be free, by the way. It's a pretty good deal, Fahmi.'

'I know.'

My real journey began there: a week on the road on donkey-back, without a map. Navigating according to hunches and from rough directions given by people, picked up from the roads I crossed, the villages I entered. My beard thickened. My body got thinner and stronger from the effort of riding on a donkey's back for a week.

We didn't come across one soldier during the whole time. I realised this when at last we saw a lone soldier from a distance, on a road, waiting to hitch a ride, and suddenly appreciated what a nice week it had been. I got used to eating little. Every morning I bought a few pitas, some cheese, a little olive oil and zaatar zaatar, and a bag of carrots, two or three of which I would eat myself, feeding Dayek the rest over the course of the day. When we pa.s.sed a heap of hay or a field, I stopped and got off Dayek.

I looked into his big brown eyes and couldn't say no to them. I let him enjoy the plenty, and he ate unstoppably, with huge circular motions of the jaw that showed his smiling tooth and the pinkish insides of his grey lips.

We rode in the hills and the valleys and on paths through terraces of olive trees. Every day I prayed the morning prayer and the night prayer: I might enter a mosque if I heard a muezzin call at a convenient time. I washed only when I came across a tap. We crossed black roads that led to settlements perched on ridges, the neat red-tile roofs s.h.i.+ning over the green lawns, and dirt roads or worn-out asphalt bleached almost white leading to hillsides cluttered with dense construction, a mosque tower above and always the field below with its single haggard cow. We spent one night near Asira al-Qibliya, and the next in an arid valley, not having encountered a living soul the whole day. Near Deir Istiya we picked up another blanket and a pair of trousers from a clothes line. I wanted to take things from the settlements we pa.s.sed on our way, Itamar and then Yitzhar, the industrial zone of Barkan, but I didn't want to risk getting too close and being shot by a settler.

I was alone with my thoughtsI could talk to Dayek up to a point but there wasn't much else to do but think, about daily survival issuesfood, path-finding, physical pain, places to sleep. I imagined Mother drinking tea with me near the fire, praising it, saying she was happy to see me make something other than bombs. I was sorry that I'd had to flee the village after only a couple of hours with Lulu, and barely having seen Father at all. And I hadn't even seen Rana. Couldn't I have just stopped by to explain, to say goodbye, to kiss her? She would have been wondering, perhaps offended. Who knew when I would see her again? And I was worried about a future in a room in Kafr Qasim, with an unknown family who would have to be told some story or other. What would I talk to them about? How would I make a living? What about papers? What would happen to Dayek?

As Dayek and I started to descend from the hills of Samaria towards the lowlands, I knew we were getting closer. Roads crossed our path more frequently and more of the cars on them bore yellow number plates. Villages were becoming small towns; the land was becoming harder worked. Tall copses of eucalyptus trees replaced olives and scrub and I grew more cautious, making diversions through obscure valleys and asking goatherds or workers we met for directions to Arab villages. So we travelled from Deir Istiya to Karawat Bani Hasan, from there to Biddya, then to Mascha and from there to Az-Zawiya, where we arrived around noon. There we waited out a long afternoon. I wanted to leave after dark because I had to bypa.s.s a Jewish town on the way, Rosh Haayin. According to workers I asked, I had two hours of riding left to Kafr Qasim.

While we waited, Dayek and I prepared ourselves for the next stage of our lives. I found a field on the outskirts of the village, tethered Dayek to a fence with a long rope, and left him to gorge himself on the gra.s.s and alfalfa. I walked into the barber's in the village and asked for a shave and a very short cut. It was the first time I'd seen myself for over a week, and I couldn't help but laugh at the beard, the dusty tangle of hair. After an hour I came out of the barber's a new man, wearing a b.u.t.toned s.h.i.+rt I'd stolen early that morning in Biddya. I wondered whether Dayek would recognise this neat young man in the fresh s.h.i.+rt with the smooth face and cropped hair, smelling of aftershave, but the moment I climbed on his back he knew it was me. At dusk we set off on the last leg of our journey, making a wide semicircle around the industrial park of Rosh Haayin: and a couple of hours later I was standing under street lights, on a paved street of well-maintained houses, in front of my new home in the village of Kafr Qasim.

33

In the nights, memories and theories and Guetta and Shuli ricocheted around the walls of my skull, cras.h.i.+ng into each other. In the mornings I'd spend long minutes under the shower trying to chase the fog from my brain. I was slow to see it, but I think now that Bar was trying to keep me going with the Guetta investigation. First thing I did on the drive to work was call him; he would also be driving to work from Tel Aviv. Sometimes I'd see him mid-conversation, revving impatiently at a zebra crossing with an Every Second Counts sticker above his petrol cap, or pelting down the fast lane to Rosh Haayin, both of us talking into our hands-frees about Guetta, about Binyamin Warshawski and his wife Dvora, or Tamer Sarsur and his brother Amin. But I'm getting ahead of myself. At work we kept up a steady back and forth of emails on the subject: Internet search results, falafel lunch meetings...Shuli's death had almost stopped me. But Bar had such energy he drew me along in his slipstream.

When I wasn't working on Guetta, I contributed to Time's Arrow by putting some serious hours into computer gaming. I engaged Ron, who'd announced he was leaving the company, in various forms of combat. When Ron wasn't available, I fought myself. Bar and I often went straight from work to Bar BaraBush, where we'd continue discussing the case and other stuff. It was easy for Bar, who had a huge network of friends but lived on his own, and who could get away with not working at Time's Arrow because his manager, Ron, didn't care any more. For me it was a little harder. Duchi thought I was having an affair, and when she realised I was with Bar, accused me of having an affair with him (Talia Tenne also asked more than once whether something was going on between us). Plus I had the problem that I was working closely with the managing director of our company.

I had to fly to Croatia, to a company named Connect, which wanted an ultra-fast search engine for their databases. The trip's goal was ostensibly to get a dialogue under way between our technical people and theirs. But Jimmy wanted me there to sell them our voice recognition system: 'To flog them something under the table, Croc, without them even noticing, OK?'

I don't know how I managed to forget. Maybe because my partner for the trip was Amit from R&D, who I'd never travelled with before. When I went with Jimmy or on my own, he used to drive me crazy for a whole week beforehand. When I travelled with Yoash Green, we prepared for our meetings together. But with Croatia it sort of slipped through the net: a small, uninteresting customer, lots of technical stuff and Amit, with whom I had no regular contact. When Amit rolled his little suitcase into my room and asked whether I was ready, I lifted my eyes from the carnage on my screen and said: 'What for? Where are you off to?'

The morning after my meeting with Gadgid, after my sleepless night of driving in circles, thinking in circles, Jimmy called me into his office. He stood by the window, as if gazing out at the Mediterranean and the Tel Aviv skyline as he used to, though all he could see through this window was the rest of the business park, a field or two with a skinny donkey cropping brown gra.s.s and the sun-beaten hills vanis.h.i.+ng into a grey heat haze over Samaria. 'Franklin Roosevelt once said,' Jimmy declared, '"Lost ground can be reclaimedlost time never."' Oh, right, I thought, it's one of those those speeches. He turned and stared at me. I wilted into a chair. 'These days, we expect a lot from life. We want to work in an interesting, fulfilling, well-rewarded job; to be in a meaningful intimate relations.h.i.+p; to keep abreast of politics, to read books, listen to music, watch movies, visit exhibitions, watch sport, speeches. He turned and stared at me. I wilted into a chair. 'These days, we expect a lot from life. We want to work in an interesting, fulfilling, well-rewarded job; to be in a meaningful intimate relations.h.i.+p; to keep abreast of politics, to read books, listen to music, watch movies, visit exhibitions, watch sport, play play sport, explore our spirituality, our s.e.xuality; to have a wide and various circle of acquaintance, to dance, cultivate a garden, cook, keep fit, raise our families.' He walked around his desk and sat in front of me, then bent towards me and, to my amazement, took both my hands in his. 'To travel, at least once a year, to somewhere you've never been, to stay in touch with friends from all periods of your life, from all around the world, to continually make new ones. It's a h.e.l.l of a list, Croc. And when I ask myself "Which of these things am I trying to achieve?" the answer is "all of them". Are you?' I nodded distractedly. All night and all morning, the memories Gadgid had summoned had been jabbing and taunting me, refusing to let me alone. G.o.d's finger poised above his b.u.t.tons, me in the watchtower and Danny Lam in his jeep in Lebanon, inching forward into the puddle... sport, explore our spirituality, our s.e.xuality; to have a wide and various circle of acquaintance, to dance, cultivate a garden, cook, keep fit, raise our families.' He walked around his desk and sat in front of me, then bent towards me and, to my amazement, took both my hands in his. 'To travel, at least once a year, to somewhere you've never been, to stay in touch with friends from all periods of your life, from all around the world, to continually make new ones. It's a h.e.l.l of a list, Croc. And when I ask myself "Which of these things am I trying to achieve?" the answer is "all of them". Are you?' I nodded distractedly. All night and all morning, the memories Gadgid had summoned had been jabbing and taunting me, refusing to let me alone. G.o.d's finger poised above his b.u.t.tons, me in the watchtower and Danny Lam in his jeep in Lebanon, inching forward into the puddle...

'With a list like that, is it any wonder you don't have any time?' asked Jimmy Rafael. No, Jimmy, it wasn't. 'No. You can't manage everything. That's crystal clear. Croc, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life. But I'm going to be frank. The company is not in such brilliant shape right now. In a month or twoand I'm asking you to keep this between the two of uswe're going to have another round of dismissals, and I want you to be part of it. Your recent contribution has been pretty average. We've talked about it already, and I was hoping that after two, three, four months you'd get over it. I don't have much patience in general, but for you I had.' I nodded, deeply embarra.s.sed. 'But you are not getting over it you are not getting over it. It's not just forgetting flights, although that was the straw that broke my back. If I could, I'd fire you today. But, as you know, it's a problem. You're a national f.u.c.king hero. Wouldn't be very good for the company's profile. The heartless b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. They went and fired a victim of terror, the CrocAttack himself. Now, I've talked to the investors. Most of our clients are foreign and couldn't give a d.a.m.n about your a.r.s.e but our investors are Israelis. So they've approved a special budget to keep you, for now. But I can't leave you in your position. You're moving to QA. Talia Tenne will be moved up the ladder and replace you in Sales. Guy will replace Talia as QA manager, and you'll...

Two shots. A blow. I don't dare raise my eyes. I tense myself to receive a bullet. In Lebanon, Danny's jeep moves very slowly forward into the puddle and detonates a roadside explosive device. Danny is killed instantly, as are his commander and the two other soldiers in the jeep. The driver is somersaulted through the air and slammed into some scrubthe impact breaks his pelvis. But he makes it...And meanwhile me, in the tower, lifting my head only when I finally understand that the shouts I'm hearing are 'Crocos! Crocos! Are you there?'

...Croc, are you with me?'

I started. 'Sure,' I said. 'Guy will manage the QA and I'm going to be working with him.' Some fraction of my brain had been processing Jimmy's words. 'Right,' he said, with severity. He didn't like me as he used to when I was his twin, when we used to sit together in departure lounges, working our phones and making appointments until the very last call before boarding, waiting until our names, variously accented, would echo over the state-of-the-art public address systems of European airports.

'I do understand,' I told Jimmy. 'I...I'm sorry I disappointed you. But I couldn't have behaved any differently.' Jimmy extended his hand. 'Look,' he said, 'what I just said, that I would have fired you...' 'It's OK,' I said. 'No, no, listen. You know me. It was in the heat of the moment. I'm happy you're staying. And if you return to form, you can go back to what you were, yeah?' I nodded. 'Your salary will go down from twenty-five a month to fifteen.'

I nodded and went without fuss.

It was my fault that Danny Lam died. We were together in basic training, which was a stroke of luck: we were mobilised on the same day. (Muku was younger than us and joined up three months later.) We volunteered for the same unit, were sent to the same base, ended up in the same platoon, two childhood friends from Jerusalem. It was c.r.a.ppy at basic training, but at least we had each other. At the end of it they asked who wanted to volunteer for the reconnaissance unit. I raised my hand. Danny didn't. I persuaded him to accompany me to the tests. I pleaded with him: I said that as a friend it was his duty to support me in the tests. So he came. And pa.s.sed. I failed. I stayed in the regular unit and was posted to the West Bank. He was in the reconnaissance unit and got sent to Lebanon. He died. I didn't. But I am convinced G.o.d meant to select my b.u.t.ton. There was some mistake there.

And it was also because of me that Gadgid killed a seventeen-year-old Palestinian. When they saw the flames climbing up the watchtower the patrol came running back down the hill. Gadgid saw the kids climbing on the tower and stopped, drew a bead and fired. Plastic bullets. One shot cracked the knee of a sixteen-year-old, who also broke his collarbone when he fell. A second shot hit another guy in the neck. The son of a b.i.t.c.h deserved it, said my comrades. For several hours afterwards we all stood around the tower, unable to sit down, the adrenalin burning in everyone's blood, telling stories that over time would become legends to be repeated hundreds of times, for decadeslike the ones Gadgid told me in Bar BaraBush. And Danny Lam was blown to pieces and since then, perhaps, he's been watching over me.

I went back to Bar BaraBush the next evening, on my own. It has a long bar and walls the colour of claret wine. The bar is designed in an L shape, with a long wing and a short one (try the excellent chicken wings, by the way: Bar calls them 'Vings'). The short wing is where I usually sit. Why am I telling you all this? Because Bar BaraBush isn't one of those bars with the plasma screen permanently showing MTV or some fas.h.i.+on channel, just a small TV which they put on the short wing after terrorist attackswith the volume off, since there are always subt.i.tles giving the important information and no one wants to stop listening to music in a bar. There's a limit to everything.

That evening someone said that there'd been an attack and Noam the barman brought the TV out: an attack on some steakhouse in Tel Aviv. I was sitting in my usual spot and the two barmen and a few others who'd come in from the tables on the street crowded round the little screen. Cigarette smoke, Underworld hammering over the speakers, Danny Ronen mutely manipulating his eyebrows. The subt.i.tle 'Attack in Tel Aviv restaurant' was replaced by: 'Two killed, eight injured'. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief of millions all round the country, and alongside it a faint scintilla of disappointment. 'What a half-a.r.s.ed attack,' I sneered in a voice loud enough to be heard above the music. As the leading authority in the room in matters of terrorist attacksas the CrocAttackmy verdict was final. Everybody returned to their private conversations, the little TV made its way back to where it lived beneath the bar, and my phone went.

'Tel Aviv, Croc, Tel Aviv! Nice work.'

It was Itzik, the Attack Pool guy.

'You going anywhere soon, Croc? We'd be very grateful for...'

I hung up.

34

I'd been anxious about coming to Kafr Qasim but within a few weeks it was as if I'd never known any other life. Al-Amari faded into memory. Bilahl and Rana and Lulu and Father seemed to me almost like characters in another play. Of course I missed them and worried about them, and thought a lot about Mother and Grandfatherwhen you're alone, you live with the people close to you inside your headbut they seemed to belong to the past.

My room was almost as big as the whole of our flat in the camp. The floor tiles were level, the walls white, the bed was more comfortable and much, much bigger. I was addicted to the reliably hot and muscular jet of the shower. I loved the big kitchen, the new kettle, the fridge (a whole shelf of which was mine), the colossal TV with its perfect picture and sound, the stereo, on which Amr Diab sounded better than ever. And I liked the family. The father, Razal, owned a pharmacy in the centre of the village, on the main road. His wife Wasime was an English teacher in a local school. She was pregnant. Their first son was a six-year-old boy called Atta who gave me a poster of Zidane when I told him that he was my favourite player. But after a month I was too busy with my worries and my work to pay much attention to the comfort and the kindness around me.

I sold Dayek the day after we arrived. That first night I found a place for him in a building under construction, left him some gra.s.s and carrots and wished his smiling face goodnight. The next day I walked him by foot out of the village. I asked some of the workers I met whether they knew anyone who wanted a donkey, and they sent me to their bosses, who pa.s.sed me on to their friends, who made phone calls, and found a buyer in a packing-house a few kilometres away. I almost couldn't believe it when I received four new hundred-shekel notes: in the West Bank you wouldn't have got half of that for a donkey. But when I turned my back on Dayek, my fellow-traveller, my only friend during a long and lonely week, a wave of pain broke over me. Another separation.

It was late afternoon by the time I got back, but it had been the most profitable day of my life. When Razal opened the door to me, pretty much the first thing he said was, 'Have you heard about the attack?' My stomach, and probably my face, fell. Halil's cousin had told me that they wouldn't know anything about me. It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about a new attackand that was a surprise too. There hadn't been an operation for a while and I'd come to think that if we couldn't arrange one, no one else could.

'What?' I asked him eventually.

'An attack,' he said. 'In Tel Aviv.'

Danny Ronen's face looked fatter. Either it was the widescreen TV or he'd put on quite a bit of weight. A shooting attack. Two killed. Not serious. Who were these clowns who made it all the way to Tel Aviv and then only managed to kill two? In a restaurant? I almost asked Razal and Wasime, but stopped myself in time.

'Only two killed,' said Wasime.

'Lucky,' said Razal.

'Will there be a curfew now?' I asked.

They looked completely at a loss.

'I mean in the West Bank,' I said, in a sneeze of nervous laughter.

'Probably,' said Razal. He was going to say something else, but didn't. I'd told them I was from Ein Rafa near Abu-Gosh and that I'd come here on the bus. Maybe they knew I was lying. My looks and accent weren't things I could disguise and I'm a pretty unconvincing actor. But at least I was trying to pretend, and that in itself might have been good enough for them.

Next day it was Noah's Ark Noah's Ark, which I hadn't seen for a while, and I asked Razal and Wasime whether I could watch TV. 'Only if you're watching Noah's Ark Noah's Ark,' they said, 'because that's what's on in this house.'

But as we waited for Tommy Musari on the turquoise sofa that was so soft it threatened to engulf us whole, we were amazed to hear that the programme had been cancelled. Instead, said the presenter, with deep solemnity, Channel 2 would screen a special programme to commemorate last night's attack. Wasime emitted a scream. 'A special commemorative programme?' Razal growled. 'Attack? What attack?' said Wasime. 'That shooting? They call that an attack?' I looked from husband to wife. I was too surprised to speak. The programme started, and within a few seconds the mystery was solved. Max Caspi from the show Mad Max Mad Max had been in the restaurant at the time of the shooting. So they had to have him do something, didn't they? Even if only two people had been killed. Instead of had been in the restaurant at the time of the shooting. So they had to have him do something, didn't they? Even if only two people had been killed. Instead of Noah's Ark Noah's Ark, Max Caspi and friends in the restaurant. You could see why the shahid had only got twothe camera showed the broken window through which he'd fired. What an amateur! Why hadn't he taken a small shotgun, shot the security guard and then sprayed inside with an Uzi?

Max, with his thick black-framed gla.s.ses and thicker black hair, which everyone knows is a wig, was raging at the camera.

'This piece of s.h.i.+t came from Tulkarm to scare us. But we will not be scared!'

Max's friends clapped their hands.

'Not of him, not of any of the other pieces of s.h.i.+t sitting in their caves in Tulkarm and Jenin and Nablus and Hebron and Gaza planning their next outrage!'

Max stood there in his wig, jabbing his finger at all the pieces of s.h.i.+t who were planning operations against him. How utterly terrifying. I wanted to laugh. Then he and his singer friends started performing tragic ballads in the restaurant, and the camera pulled focus from the shattered window to the candles sitting on top of their piano and I just got too f.u.c.king angry to bear it a moment longer. If they'd just keep going a little longer, I thought, maybe I'd get a lift into Tel Aviv and finish the job off properly. I got up and went to my room.

During those first days I'd walk around the village, or down the main road to the football pitch, where I'd watch Hapoel Kafr Qasim train or play matches. I didn't see much of Razal or Wasime or Atta: I preferred to eat in my room, either something I'd brought or meals that I prepared in the kitchen when the family were finished there. Because I had so much time on my hands I usually responded to the muezzin's calls and went to pray in the mosque, which was where I befriended a couple of guys who taught me the rules of the game in Kafr Qasim. They explained to me that there were two main types of Palestinians in Kafr Qasim. The 'IRs'Illegal Residentswere ordinary people like them and me, who the Border Police were trying to catch and expel (they told me to watch out for checkpoints or random searches). And there were also the 'collaborators'drug dealers and mafiosi who lived in villas and did whatever they liked with impunity. The locals didn't think much of either type. There were plenty of Kafr Qasimis willing to inform the Israeli authorities about us, but also plenty who liked the Israelis even less than they liked us. I was told that forty years earlier the Jews had slaughtered fifty villagers for no reason at all and successfully covered it up.

My friends at the mosque introduced me to Sa'id, who came to the first and fourth prayers every day and managed a packing plant for s.h.i.+mshon, a company exporting fruit and vegetables. Every day his packing-houses received tons of tomatoes and watermelons from the south, mangoes, bananas and avocados from the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, citrus fruits from the Sharon, parsley and basil from the West Bank and much more. 'We sort everything out according to the orders, store what needs to be stored, deliver what needs to be delivered to the airport and ports. It's hard work,' he warned me. 'And the worst of it is that you'll never want to look at a fruit or a vegetable again.'

'I'll give it a go,' was my answeras if I had a choice.

The packing-houses were some way outside the village, in the fields spread out east towards the brown hills, but still in Israeli territory. It was where I'd sold Dayek (I met the buyer, and my old friend was doing fine). But Sa'id hadn't been kidding. My body was not prepared for the shock of the work. I'd done physical jobs before, but this was relentless. One after the other the trucks came in, packed with crates of carrots, cuc.u.mbers, potatoes, radishes, bananas and tomatoes, and the smell of it was terrible, especially the tomatoes. At home, a few fruits in a bowl give out a pleasant scent. In huge warehouses piled to the roof with it, the smell almost made you pa.s.s out. And besides, it was summer, and summer in Kafr Qasim was very different from summer up in the mountains. The heat was a nightmare, and carrying boxes of fruit in it was a double nightmare. It was my job to s.h.i.+ft the boxes from the trucks coming into the deck to the forklifts. Two handlers worked on each truck that came in, one on the truck, the other on the deck. Eight in the morning to five in the evening, sometimes longer, with almost no breaks.

I was just a single ant in a huge anthill. The forklift drivers ferried the boxes to the storage rooms; other teams loaded the produce from there into huge containers for the cargo s.h.i.+ps, or into smaller containers destined for the airport; others operated forklifts in the cold-storage roomsthey were sick most of the time because of the cold and therefore made better money. I made enough. In Al-Amari I could have lived very comfortably on my wages. But even in Kafr Qasim it was good enough. And if the work was hard, it gave me a reason to wake up in the morning at least, a daily routine. It developed my muscles and I made a few friends, like Majed Hashem from Kalkilya, a blond, bright-eyed guy with arms like a gorilla after years at the warehouse, and Ibrahim Hasuna from Bani Naim near Hebron. Ibrahim was short and skinny but also very strong. He had a black moustache and hair, sang Lior Narkis songs all dayJewish c.r.a.p: Oh, sweet soul, the only one who knows meWith you, I'm the whole world,With you, I'm the whole universe,Without you, I'm half a person...

Majed and Ibrahim weren't close friends. Unlike the guys from the mosque, they weren't religious and knew nothing about politics (girls and football: that was what they talked about) and I hardly saw them outside of work. But I enjoyed our days together in the packing-housethe condescension of the locals and our constant fear of the Border Police forged a bond between us.