CrocAttack!

‘That’s better. Nice and clean. You can hardly even see the scratch on your forehead. I’ve got patients here who are totally deformed. Damaged for ever. But you’re whole, Fahmi. Perfect for your visits. So, then. Who’s coming to see you today? Who would you like? Your dad? Your little sister? Your cute girlfriend?’

Oh, shut up, you goddamned Jewish whore! Losing my thread…

Father. A good man. A sad man, since Mother…

‘Fahmi, I will not put up with this. Not you.’

‘I’m not doing anything, Father.’ He was standing right in front of me, obscuring the TV, with his solid grey mane like a lion’s. His brown eyes were angry.

‘Father, please don’t stand there. Let me see, please.’

‘I know what you’re doing. I know about Bilahl. He’s a lost cause, but you? You promised me. You promised to go to Bir Zeit University – you’re going to give me a heart attack…’

‘I will go. I’ll fulfil my promise. Please don’t worry.’

Later, Bilahl would attack me: Why do you apologise? Why do you grovel in front of him? He’s let them humiliate him and walk all over him his whole life. That’s what’s the matter with him…

Oh no. No! Don’t touch me there! Oh, fuck you, you filthy Jewish whore!

‘Well done, Fahmi. Now try not to get excited, OK? I’m just going to wipe here. Slowly, very slowly, ever so softly…Just going to get you all clean and pretty and smelling good for your massage and your guests. You like that, don’t you?’

3

My name is Eitan Enoch but everyone calls me Croc. Because: Eitan Enoch = ‘Hey, Taninoch!’ That got shortened to ‘Hey, Tanin!’ And in Hebrew, Tanin means a crocodile. That’s the evolution of my name. Enoch itself, it turns out, evolved from Chanoch, the father of Methuselah, the oldest guy in the Bible. A settler told me that once.

I grew up in Jerusalem but moved to Tel Aviv, where I work for Time’s Arrow, or Taimaro!, as our Japanese customers like to pronounce it. A year and a half ago my older brother left Israel with his wife and three boys because of the bombs. We’ve got a rich grandmother in Maryland who invited us all to come and live there. My younger sister Dafdaf wants to go too, with her husband. All of us have American citizenship because our parents are from there: my father grew up in Maryland – so green and pleasant, so relaxed and comfortable – and Mom’s from Denver. They came to Israel before I was born. God knows what they were thinking of. Every time I visit Maryland, I ask myself that question. Maybe they were excited by the young Jewish state. Maybe it seemed exotic. Or maybe it was that Dad had big ideas: he wanted to teach the young country how to spread peanut butter on its bread. Efraim Enoch from America: the capitalist, the entrepreneur, the great peanut butter importer. But the land of the Jews didn’t have time for peanut butter, or, at any rate, not for the one he imported.

When I see them now, it’s as if every bomb blows another brick out of the wall of the decision to emigrate. Their mistake. They can’t blame us for running away, but their hearts are breaking. It’s difficult, what they did: leaving the comfortable life in America while they were still young, travelling to a new, hot, primitive country and trying to build something from nothing: a family, a business, a state. They called it Zionism. And then they had to watch everything get blown to smithereens, their children and grandchildren leaving, going back to America. I’m not going to leave. Or not yet. It’s not so simple. Because I’m not sure whether I want to, or where to go – and things with Duchi are uncertain enough…

So, I stood there with the PalmPilot in my hand while people went in and out of the post office. Hanging from the façade of the Tel Aviv Museum for the Arts was a banner which read ‘Of Life and Death – A Retrospective of the Artist Oli Shauli-Negbi’. The word ‘Retrospective’ reeled my gaze in. I left. I walked. I walked through the drifts of sodden dead leaves and tried to think whether there was anything I could have done to prevent it. Should I have told the passengers that the dark guy was a suspect? Should I have said something to the driver? Would she have listened to me? The truth is that those drivers aren’t scared of anything. Ziona would have pulled over and started interrogating him.

But if she’d done that, he would have pressed the button, or pulled the string, or…

Why had he waited until I got off? What kept me alive? Why had God stretched out one of his long fingers and miraculously tapped my forehead? When I got off at the Dizengoff Centre, some people got on and I heard Ziona tell one of them, ‘I’m sorry, honey, I’m full. There’s another one behind me.’ The terrorist had waited until the cab filled up and only then…

If I’d told Ziona and she’d talked to him, he would have blown himself up. If I’d shouted to everybody to be careful, he would have blown himself up. If I’d phoned the police, or told the security guards at the mall, nobody would have had time to do anything. All in all, I told myself, walking through the slow grey drops of rain that had started to fall, I was clean. I couldn’t have done anything, because the dark guy had come here to blow himself up and he would have gone ahead and done it whatever the hell I’d done. All I could have done was what I did – save myself. And even that I’d done unintentionally.

But then I thought some more and saw I was letting myself off too lightly. There was another thing I could have done. I could have been less certain that the dark guy wasn’t a terrorist. I could have saved the guy I talked to. The guy who I know now as Giora Guetta. I could have saved him because he spoke to me after the old lady got off and before I did. I remembered every word – his voice and the way he said it, the look in his eyes, the half-smile of his perfect white teeth, the way he’d swivelled his head towards the terrorist and said, ‘He looks OK to you, right?’ And how I’d said: ‘Yeah, no problem with him.’

Why had I said that?

Because I’d had enough of paranoid and hysterical people like Duchi.

And that’s why I go to the opposite extreme: no problem, everything’s fine, stop worrying and crying and moaning about everything! It was Duchi’s fault. Her responsibility. She’d damaged my sense of judgement. Without her destructive influence, without years of living in the shadow of her hysteria, without those years of her continuous premonitions of imminent catastrophe, perhaps I’d have thought more clearly and said, ‘You know what? I’m not sure. Perhaps he is a terrorist.’ And then maybe Giora would have got off with me. Who knows? If it hadn’t been for my girlfriend maybe I’d have saved a man’s life.

I found I was hungry for meat. I stopped at Bar BaraBush and ordered a hamburger called ‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight’. I waited at the bar and watched the small TV on it showing Channel 2: Danny Ronen talking with his usual serious face, utilising his thick eyebrows, shooting them up and down as he always does. I didn’t hear what he said but it doesn’t really matter. He always says the same thing: enforce, ease off, close, encircle, shoot the eyebrows, go out on a mission, attack, lock and siege, and the cabinet convened and the cabinet decided and these guys took responsibility and those guys showed courage…

I went to wash my hands – I think perhaps I thought I had blood on them – and on my way back I took a postcard on which GET OUT! was written in large black lettering. GET OUT? I didn’t have a clue who wanted me out or why. Outside, through the big window, the skies were opening and closing their wet mouths. I went out into them with The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight in a bag in my hand and GET OUT! in my pocket.

I put the Cannibal and the chips I found next to it on a plate and prepared to have my way with them. Whatever was happening to my mind, my body still seemed to be functioning with amazing efficiency. My eyes sent a snapshot of the hamburger to my brain, which gave out its directives to flood my mouth with saliva and release stomach acids to welcome our new guest – and then the door buzzed.

I looked at the wall and at the Cannibal and decided not to answer. I started eating. A minute later: a key in the front door, the handle turning, somebody entering.

‘Why didn’t you open up?’

‘Hey, Dooch, sorry,’ I said. My mouth, which I’d filled with Cannibal a moment before, spoke for itself. I gestured with my shoulders towards the plate. She looked at it and her eyes immediately went into her ‘rage mode’.

‘Why don’t you answer the mobile? And what are you doing at home in the middle of the afternoon? You know there was a bomb?’

‘Yes.’ I was searching for the mobile in my bag – I must have left it at work.

‘You realise how worried I was? You couldn’t call?’

‘I’m sorry, Dooch, I was sure you were busy and…hang on a second, I did call! Didn’t you get my message?’

‘I got one message saying you were alive two hours after the bomb! Thanks very much indeed.’ I looked at her, surprised. I didn’t know what to say. ‘It was in a Little No. 5, Croc. At nine-fifteen! Did you think I wasn’t going to worry?’

‘You know I get off at the Dizengoff Centre! It was after that, near the theatre. Didn’t you see the little flame-thing on TV? Here, look.’ I found the remote and pushed the button. Danny Ronen and his eyebrows were still talking. ‘I left you a message saying I was alive. I don’t get it…’

‘I heard the message, but…’ Here tears intervened. ‘But how could I be sure?’ She wiped them away and stood there, fragile and unhappy. ‘I wasn’t sure if everything was all right. You could have called again. I was so scared! You don’t know how scared I was. I spent the whole day waiting for an adjournment, trying to get away to see you…’

I swallowed another mouthful – damn, the Cannibal was good! – and went over to hug her. ‘It’s all right, honey. I’m sorry. Come on. Stop it. I just thought you saw where it happened, you got the message so obviously I was alive, and…whatever…what do I know?’

Duchi disengaged herself from the embrace. ‘You’re saying I didn’t need to worry? I’m just hysterical? And paranoid?’ Her tone had changed: the tears weren’t there any more.

‘I didn’t say…’

‘How could you be so insensitive? Not to call just once more? You did it on purpose, didn’t you? To show me I’m just hysterical.’ Now there was anger, maturing like a good wine. ‘What do you expect me to think? It’s the bus you take every morning at that time! And I’m supposed to look at the little flame-thing on TV? What fucking flame-thing?’

‘You know, the, you know, the graphic of the map showing the bomb…Duchi, I didn’t do anything on purpose, I swear, I just…You know it was the same minibus that I was on? I actually talked to…’

‘Oh, you son of a bitch!’ She was whining now and wiped her big brown eyes with her forearm. She sat down next to the table and absent-mindedly grabbed a handful of chips.

‘Hey, go easy on the chips!’ I told her. ‘How was your day?’

‘What do you fucking think?’

We sat in silence for a few moments. I took a bite of the Cannibal and she stole chips and stared at the corner of the table and eventually lifted her eyes to me.

‘Tell me what I’m going to do with you, Croc?’ she said.

And then suddenly a thought struck me – until that morning I hadn’t known anyone who even knew anyone who’d been in a terrorist attack. A few weeks earlier the water-heater guy had come to do some work, and he said a cousin of a friend of his had been injured in a bomb in Petach Tikvah the week before. He was the closest, until Giora Guetta. But I didn’t really know Giora Guetta either. What does ‘knowing’ someone mean? Knowing the name? Saying hello when you meet? The person knowing you? The number of words you exchanged? I was still trying to puzzle it out when she got into bed.

‘Duchi?’

‘What?’

‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight,’ I said.

‘Idiot,’ she said, and I climbed on top of her. She was satisfied. Then she climbed on top of me in return.

In the morning she made me swear to take a taxi, though I’ve yet to hear of two bomb attacks happening in exactly the same place on following days. Somehow, despite this clear and logical statistical data, people are convinced that the terrorists tell themselves: ‘Ahmed, hey, it worked, let’s try again tomorrow in exactly the same place since there are bound to be loads of people there and no security.’ In practice, the army and police upgrade their security to maximum in the place that was hit, people avoid going to that area and family members become hysterical. I told Duchi all of this and she said, ‘But what about the No. 18 bus on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in ’96?’

‘Those were a week apart,’ I said. But it was a pretty feeble point. So I ended up taking a taxi. A Little No. 5 didn’t blow up that morning. But so what? A real No. 5 didn’t blow up either, the whole time I worked for Time’s Arrow, miraculously. On none of the days I took Little No. 5s to the Dizengoff Centre did a real No. 5 get bombed. So: what? I mean: so what, exactly, Duchki?

4

Amr Diab is singing ‘Amarein’. It’s about two moons. He means the girl’s two eyes or her two…

Someone’s playing this music for me, the two moons of Amr Diab, and I want to move my head but my head doesn’t move. If I’m dreaming, the dream is never-ending. But I’m not dreaming, I’m hearing the song; I can smell this smell, I can feel the fingers tearing into my muscles, the heels of the hands kneading my flesh. But my body doesn’t move and my eyes don’t open.

After the two moons Amr Diab sings ‘Nour el Ein’– The Light in Your Eyes – and ‘Always with You’ and then Nawal Zuabi starts singing. It reminds me of the show Ya Leil Ya Ein on Future TV, the Lebanese TV station, with the dancing and the girls. Who’s playing this music for me? I can smell this good smell. Not Svetlana – Svetlana would never have been able to keep her mouth shut. Is the good smell you, Rana? Why are you quiet? Why is nobody talking? I listen, but all I can hear is the music…

Where am I? If I’m in heaven, then where is Mother? Where is Grandfather Fahmi?

If they’re not here, then I’m not in heaven.

So where am I exactly?

My grandfather, Fahmi Sabich, arrived in Al-Amari in 1949. Most of the inhabitants of Beit Machsir who were driven out that year settled in the East Bank. But Grandfather wanted to stay close to his village. Close to the house he built. He was sure he would return to live in his home. He never did. Never saw his home or his friends or his cousins again. In Al-Amari there wasn’t room enough even to raise chickens, but he met Grandmother Samira there. She came from Dir Ayub, a village that doesn’t exist any more. The Jews didn’t even build a settlement where it had been. They just destroyed it and built a road.

‘Bidak turkusi birasi…’ Inside my head I want to dance…

I can feel how loose my muscles are now and the oil on my skin and the cool air from the ventilator drying it off. I piss…oh, that’s good.

‘Wow,’ the idiot bitch of a nurse says, ‘look how much you’ve made!’

One tube for piss, another for air; one tube for piss, another for air; one tube for piss, another for air…

Father was the third of six brothers and sisters. Mother was the third of six sisters and brothers. She was born in Murair, the most beautiful place in the world. Grandfather Fahmi said that Beit Machsir was more beautiful still. Looking west, you could see the Mediterranean from it and on a clear day the houses of Jaffa. When I was ten I told him that from Murair you could see the River Jordan and the valley and the Edom mountains, and on a clear day the houses of Amman, if you were looking east. He laughed at that.

Mother and Father met at Bir Zeit University, and after they got married they moved to Murair. Even in 1977 it wasn’t common for a village girl to marry a refugee with no property; or for the man to move into the house of the woman or for a father to leave land to his daughter. My mother and father didn’t care. Nor did my mother’s father. Dignity wasn’t all that important. Life was more important. But Grandfather Fahmi was more conservative. He believed refugees had to remain in the camps, even if they were crowded and uncomfortable, and he stayed in Al-Amari until he died. He said that leaving the camp would be giving up, would be accepting the situation. It would be an admission that we would never return to the homes which the Jews had stolen from us. My older brother Bilahl thinks like Grandfather Fahmi. My younger sister Lulu loves life more than an idea of dignity, like Father. I’m not quite sure whose genes I got.

Grandfather Fahmi had a horse. On Saturday afternoons I used to go to the entrance to the village and wait for him: a distant dot turning slowly into a white dust cloud moving along the horizon. Soon I’d hear the horseshoes clattering on the road, and suddenly he’d be next to me on the grey horse, extending the strongest arm I have ever known and picking me up, and we’d ride home together, me hugging his broad back and breathing in the dust and the sweet sweat, both his and the horse’s. Once we were home he’d wash his face and go out to the terrace to drink the coffee that Mother made for him. From inside the house I’d listen to his laughter and smile.

Grandfather Fahmi died ten years ago. Mother died last year. Bilahl moved from Murair to Ramallah five years ago. He was eighteen, and went to study at Kuliyat al-Iman, the faith school in A-Ram – Father and Mother weren’t too thrilled about it. He lived in the student dorms for a while and then he moved to Al-Amari, where there was a room in one of our uncles’ flats, because Bilahl believed, as his grandfather had, that refugees and the sons of refugees and the grandsons of refugees should always remain in the camps. Father and Mother did not agree…I was sixteen. They looked to me; they didn’t want to lose another son to the camp. But last year I moved in with Bilahl and Uncle Jalahl. I promised Father I would start studying in Bir Zeit University. I told him that I was just saving on the rent, that I wasn’t in the camp as my brother was, for ideological reasons. That’s not what I told my brother. I didn’t really know what I thought, in my heart of hearts.

Bir Zeit is still waiting for me…

Someone switches the music off.

‘How is he doing?’

Faint voices. It’s my father. I can smell his familiar old smoky smell. But why is he whispering?

‘Hello, son. How are you feeling today?’

Not now, come on, I’m trying to remember something. Maybe you could come back tomorrow? Because I’m not here anyway. I’m floating in the sea. The stars are out and I can see the beach, but I can’t…

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, bypassing 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 passed, 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 Saturday, there’s nobody 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…Hello!’ 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.

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