13
I immediately knew who she was. She was on her own.
The broken mother, the shocked father, sisters or friends crying bitterly, the minister the government had felt obliged to send, and whose name I forget, bespectacled, too European for this crowd, chubby, a Likudnik’s look in his soft eyes–and there she was on her own, in the corner of the congregation, with her straight black hair and her black eyes, her black coat, her black bag.
The close-packed crowd raised the temperature around the grave by a degree or two. Breath, body heat, traces of hot air blown through plastic car heaters still clinging to the mourners. You could see the steam rising up from them into a rain that fell without pause. I hadn’t brought a coat because it’s not cold in Tel Aviv. She looked up into the rain, stared straight into the drops while they landed on her face and eyes and mixed with her own tears and dissolving make-up.
‘Shuli?’
She looked at me, didn’t recognise me, and lowered her eyes. ‘Not now,’ she murmured, and I stepped back. The father’s voice had been crushed into gravel. And then the rabbi, with his clear loud voice, sang songs that he was convinced with all his heart reached the ears of God, whom he was convinced with all his heart existed, and whom he was convinced with all his heart belonged to him alone, who had chosen his people from all other nations, who had chosen from everything only him. ‘Ya, right’, as Duchi would have said.
Earlier, breakfast with my parents in Rehavia: toast and peanut butter and jam. Unsatisfactory filter coffee. Or maybe I was the unsatisfactory one. At home I drink decaffeinated filter. I went off caffeine as part of the time management and relaxation workshop I attended. I don’t remember how it’s related but it’s the only thing I took home from that workshop, apart from the group leader and time management expert Miriam’s mantra: ‘Each and every day we all get the same number of minutes’–and, Duchi of course, whom I met there.
Freshly squeezed orange juice and curious parental stares. Yochanan (Jonny) and Leah (Lili) Enoch. The peanut butter importer and the English teacher. She’s been teaching English in the same high school for thirty years, and I never stop asking myself, how can you do the same thing for thirty years–and will I need to as well? Mind you, maybe a permanent and secure job is better than convincing yourself that you’re going to introduce peanut butter to the natives of the Levant and monopolise the market. But, what can you do, the natives decided to do it on their own, and they even called it ‘Egozan’, which just means ‘nut spread’, a linguistic error which almost broke his heart. He turned to exporting, and then back to importing when it looked as if the market was opening up to American products at the end of the seventies. Eventually, when Dafdaf was born and it dawned on him that he had three children to provide for, and his mother in America had threatened to fly over and physically drag him back to Maryland if he didn’t get a proper job, Yochanan Enoch compromised and found work as a sales agent for the food giant Elite and thus found himself selling, among the other products he was responsible for getting on to the shelves of the supermarkets and groceries around Jerusalem, thousands upon thousands of jars of Egozan, the paste that broke his heart.
They read about the attack in Haaretz. The headline was: ‘On The Way To The City’. Twelve dead. It was thought that the terrorists, probably from Bethlehem or Hebron, had walked all night to escape. The radio was on, turned up very loud, voices talking about the victims and their funerals and about the funerals of the victims of the previous attacks.
‘Hold on.’ I stopped Dad, who was halfway through saying something. ‘Giora Guetta’s funeral will leave the cemetery in Givat Shaul at ten.’ I looked at my watch and apologised: ‘I’ve got to make a move.’ Their curious and worried looks followed me. Some other time, I thought; some other time I’ll tell them about being there last night and about the attack in Tel Aviv. And why I suddenly turned up out of the blue. And of course, I owed them an explanation for why Duchi and I hadn’t set a new date for a wedding. But I couldn’t deal with it now. There was no point, and it was hard enough for them anyway. They’d come to this hole in the desert to give themselves and their children an identity and a good life, and in return all they’d got was destruction.
At funerals you have the prayers, and then the silence, and then the sniffs. At first you don’t notice them; your ears filter them out. But once you become aware of them you realise they’re almost as loud as the rain. Hundreds of sniffs from all around you. It’s infectious. I sniffed too, though I scarcely knew Giora Guetta.
The minister spoke. He said something about the long arm (of the IDF) and the extended hand (of forgiveness). Outreach. That was the word. He said something about wretched creatures. He said something about forces beyond our understanding, and the sniffs said: Come on, shut up.
Giora’s younger brother talked about the light in his eyes, about innocence and kindness. About his modesty. I thought about the Giora I had met, with the showy honey-coloured hair and shades. I hadn’t seen any modesty there, but who knew, people have their untypical moments. Giora Guetta and I had known each other for about eight minutes and he’d said about thirty words to me. He’d said ‘He looks OK to you, right?’ and ‘Listen, if something happens to me, I want you to tell my girlfriend in Jerusalem, Shuli, I want you to tell her…’ and ‘I know nothing’s going to happen, but if it does…’ I hadn’t taken any of it seriously. It was an uncorrectable mistake.
The crowd started to disperse, though some remained for long minutes by the graveside. I stood a good way apart from everyone and watched Shuli out of the corner of my eye. She stood in the corner, separate, on her own. I decided I liked the high arches of her cheekbones. At last she turned and began to walk away. She had long legs and an upright way of walking. Self-assured, but not at the expense of tenderness, I thought. As she passed the fresh dirt of the grave, on which a wreath and a small sign with an image of a candelabrum and Giora’s name handwritten on it were laid, she halted for a few seconds and then went on, nodding to one or two friends but not speaking to the parents. At the heart of the little group that was left by the grave there was a girl who couldn’t stop crying. Guetta’s mother had her enfolded in a long hug. I assumed the sobbing girl was Guetta’s long-time girlfriend, possibly an ex, but still loved by his parents, thought of as a family member and recognised by friends as Giora’s girl. Shuli, I continued with my theory, was a recent addition. Hardly knew his parents, if at all. Giora had been too nervous to introduce her, because of the sobbing girl. But my script turned out to be wrong: so completely and utterly wrong it ended up breaking the ice with Shuli, because when she heard it she laughed for the first time in two days.
I caught up with her as she was walking from the grave to the car park, measuring her steps carefully on the steep gradient, her eyes on the path.
‘Are you Shuli?’
I fell into step beside her and she looked at me. Pretty eyes.
‘Who are you?’
‘I saw Giora just before…’
‘He’s dead.’
‘I know.’
Silence. A pretty voice, too. She kept her eyes lowered. I was panting a little with the incline. The Mountain of Rest, they call the cemetery in Jerusalem, and it really is a mountain: a whole hill of the dead.
‘What was he doing in Tel Aviv?’
‘What? I don’t know.’
‘He never went to Tel Aviv. Why on earth Tel Aviv? Wherever he went, he always told me. I never even had to ask. Was he visiting you?’
‘No. I was on the bus. The taxi. The minibus. I got off before the…’
It didn’t seem to be of any interest to her. She kept walking, silently.
‘You don’t want to know what he told me?’
‘Will it change anything?’
‘Maybe.’
She didn’t answer.
‘I found his PalmPilot. Afterwards.’
She stopped and turned and looked towards the mountains, towards Bet Zayit, up at the sodden sky.
‘I don’t need the PalmPilot. Give it to the police.’
‘No, they don’t nee…’
‘So give it to his mother. Or keep it. I don’t know. What do you want?’
‘I want to know who he was.’
‘Why?’
Good question. I passed my hand through my wet hair. ‘I don’t know, I was the last person who talked to him.’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t move!’ She froze. A single step in front of us, on the slippery path, a not-so-big scorpion was watching her. She hadn’t seen it yet, and it hadn’t seen me yet. Moving carefully, I picked up a fist-sized stone from the top of a gravestone and approached it very slowly, lifted my hand back and crashed it down on the scorpion’s head. Shuli jumped and let out a shout. ‘What’s that?’
‘A scorpion. Sometimes they come out in the rain, when it floods their holes. And that’s when they’re angry, too. I don’t know if he would have done anything, but it’s best to be safe.’
She didn’t move, looking at the crushed scorpion, trembling a little, perhaps from the cold.
‘Listen. All I wanted to say is that I talked to him a little. And he said, “If something happens to me, tell Shuli…”’
She looked as if she were debating whether to believe me or not.
‘Tell Shuli what?’
‘He didn’t say what. He said it like that. “Tell Shuli…” and then he never finished the sentence.’
‘Then came the explosion?’
‘No. He just stopped, and thought. A moment later we reached my stop and I got off.’
She thought about that for a moment and looked at me. ‘That was what he said?’
‘I think it was the last thing he said in his life.’
She started to cry.
She needed a lift to the Guetta family home on Hapalmach Street where they were sitting shiva, and I asked her whether she minded joining me for a couple of errands on the way. I showed her my mobile in its holder, with its shattered display, and gestured behind us, and she turned and saw the missing rear window and the glass on the back seat.
‘Oh. What happened?’
‘You heard about the shooting last night?’
‘Bab al-Wad?’
I turned on the radio. Forever remember our names. Humi. That was his name.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Eitan. Actually, it’s Croc.’
She lifted her trouser leg. On the inside of her right ankle, just above the bone, there was a tattoo of a small green crocodile. It was giving me a little red sharp-toothed grin. I stared back at it, blinked, and looked up at Shuli, who smiled at me too, a warm and beautiful smile. Her deep black eyes, enchanting eyes that held mountains and valleys and seas of mist, smiled too.
We drove to the Orange service centre in Givat Shaul, a short trip from the cemetery. We took a number and sat next to a guy reading Yediot Achronot. The headline was ‘Like Sitting Ducks In A Shooting Gallery’. ‘Bit of a tongue-twister, that,’ Shuli said. The guy shifted his paper and flicked his gaze from us back to the headline.
‘These dogs. When are we going to get it? How long are they going to let them make mincemeat out of us?’
‘Get what?’
‘What “get what”?’ Another voice joined in: an older man. ‘Get that you can never trust these dogs.’ He had a copy of Maariv in his hand. The headline was ‘Like Sitting Ducks In A Shooting Gallery’.
‘And if someone gets that, what’s he going to do?’
‘Go in there and raise hell. Scare the shit out of their mothers and grandmothers. So they’ll get it once and for all.’
‘They’re turning us into a circus,’ said the first guy. ‘They’re doing “Bab al-Wad” again. What is this? A history lesson they’re giving us?’
The service centre’s queue-routing system gave its demure little modern ping, and the woman at the desk called, ‘Avi!’ She was brandishing my phone.
‘Come and have a look at something. The insurance includes hostile actions, right?’
‘What’s that?’ Avi said.
‘Hostile actions?’
She explained to him and he lifted his eyes to mine with respect. ‘Really, you were there?’ ‘Me and him both,’ I replied, pointing at my phone. He extended his hand for a handshake and I shook it limply.
‘Don’t worry, brother, we’ll sort you out.’
‘The interesting thing,’ I told Shuli on our way to Talpiot, ‘is that in a shooting gallery you don’t have ducks, as far as I know. The last time I was in a shooting gallery was maybe thirteen years ago. But if there weren’t ducks then, I find it hard to believe they’ve got them now. There are cardboard figures of Arabs with keffiyehs. But they could hardly write “Like Cardboard Figures Of Arabs With Keffiyehs In A Shooting Gallery”.’
I could kind of hear her smiling.
The third time “Bab al-Wad” came on I switched the radio off. Shuli said she’d heard about the bomb but hadn’t thought she’d know any of the victims. When there was a bomb in Jerusalem, she got worried and checked the names but there was no reason to with Tel Aviv. And that was just the way we reacted to bombs at Time’s Arrow. A bomb in Haifa would have our two and a half ex-Haifa residents making the phone calls and waiting for the names to make the TV. With the Jerusalem bombs it fell to me and Ron to take on the role of those in the know. We knew the street names with the little flame-things on the TV that made us the potentially bereaved.
Giora hadn’t told her he was going to Tel Aviv. No one knew what he was doing there. He never went there. When she got home from work in the evening she’d called him, but after two hours he still hadn’t called back. It wasn’t like him. She cracked and called his father, who told her, ‘Be strong.’ That night they drove to Abu-Kabir in Jaffa to identify the body. They didn’t recognise what they were shown. Only in the morning, after Giora’s father obtained X-rays of his son’s teeth from the dentist in Metudela Street, did they have a definite identification.
The Talpiot Glass and Window Co. was our next stop. After the experience at Orange I had prepared rather a moving speech about hostile actions, but they couldn’t have been less interested. They just told me where to park and an Arab guy wrote down my details and told me to come back in half an hour.
‘There’s a stall that does a great omelette in pita round the corner. You want some?’
‘Sure.’ She was all right. How many girls these days agree to join a stranger for an omelette in pita less than an hour after their boyfriend’s funeral? Later on I learned that she was a chef and may have had a professional interest in the omelette, which doesn’t mean she wasn’t all right, of course. She was much more than that. She agreed with me about the omelettes: tahini, parsley, tomatoes, omelette, pita, salt, pepper, perfect. ‘Waste of time,’ she said, and I suddenly realised I hadn’t told anyone at work that I wasn’t going to be in that day.
The rear windowpane was gleaming. All the fragments and dust of glass on the back seat and the shelf behind it had been vacuumed away. Who would have believed that this beautiful clean Polo had been a victim of hostilities yesterday? Only the smell of the rifle still bothered me. So I bought a cardboard air-freshener to hang on the mirror–it smelled of coconut and called itself Hawaii!
‘Where to now?’
‘Hapalmach Street,’ Shuli said.
I connected the new handset to the speaker and it came alive with a sequence of bleeps and chirps that lasted a whole minute: the little device was bursting with eagerness. I would listen to the messages later (Duchi twice, Mom, Jimmy, Jimmy’s secretary Gili about a flight to Brussels, something ready to pick up), but with Shuli beside me in the car I merely turned it off and drove where the girl told me to drive.