21
I don’t know where I’d be today, or who, if we’d played tennis or gone to the centre of town, or if the day hadn’t dawned so clear that Shuli had had the urge for an Ice Europa, or if such a thing as an Ice Europa had never been invented or if we’d left half an hour earlier or ten minutes later, or if–the biggest if of them all–she hadn’t asked to change places. An infinity of ifs. We stand at a crossroads a hundred times a day and we have to make our choices or we can never progress, and our choices determine who we are. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it was that cold, metallic morning. And yet I can’t get rid of the feeling that, for the third time, it wasn’t me but somebody else who was making the decisions.
Shuli returned from the toilet and said she had thought the nicest thought, and smiled her hopeful, closed-mouth smile, and then the air trembled.
It’s impossible to differentiate between what I think are my memories and what I’ve constructed from newspapers, photos, TV footage and the accounts of other people who were there and whose memories may themselves have been constructed from newspapers, photos and TV footage. Maybe nothing of what I am going to relate now is really mine, or maybe it all is. In any case, what I think I remember is that the air trembled and there was darkness. As if we’d been teleported to a different place: water dripping from the ceiling, chunks of concrete and clods of earth, black-and-red tables flipped and shattered; puddles on the floor. A building-site smell, a scorched-meat smell, a tear-gas smell, and the smells of coffee, blood, gunpowder and flowers. I couldn’t stop staring at a mobile phone, half spilled out of a woman’s handbag, and I realised that was because it was ringing. It reeled my gaze in among the chaos of the shouting. If there was shouting. Wasn’t there a sickening silence? Or both–first the silence, then the shouts, and then the crying. I didn’t see Shuli at all. I don’t remember anything of Shuli after what she said and her closed-mouth smile. I do remember a yellow flower–I don’t have a clue how it got there but other people also mentioned seeing these flowers. They said there were three separate explosions, stark white lightning, and an intolerable feeling above all of being trapped. All that I seemed to have missed, like the kick to my head that needed a couple of stitches and left me with a bump and a permanent scar. I don’t remember the kick but I do remember the foot that kicked me. I watched the foot fly towards me, wearing a heavy army boot. I didn’t get it for a moment, and then I got it and I wanted to scream and maybe I did.
Someone was asking me whether I was all right. I opened my eyes but I couldn’t seem to answer. I was hot, I felt as if my skin was speckled with little burning spots. A voice told the hand that was trying to lift me not to: ‘Check that nothing’s broken first.’ The hand disappeared and came back as fingers gently examining my body. I was turned over and investigated further and I must have passed the test, because at last I was lifted up. ‘Can you walk? We’d better get out of here.’ I leaned on a shoulder and walked. Something was sticking to the heel of my shoe. I tried to clean it off with a piece of metal while I sat on the pavement waiting for an ambulance. I tried to clean the soles of my shoes and looked about me.
A body in a blue Adidas shirt was lying at an unnatural angle in the shattered glass and ash, its face burned, mouth wide open, eyes staring upwards, a ring on one of his fingers. People were shouting, ‘Another piece over here,’ and a look passed between me and a guy with scalp-locks who was covering up body parts. We both swallowed smiles. Why? I guess it must have been ‘piece’, meaning ‘chick’ in Hebrew slang. Somebody ordered me to cry and put a chocolate cube in my mouth. A tall girl in a Café Europa T-shirt was dazedly wandering around; another girl was refusing to get in an ambulance. Volunteers from ZAKA, religious types in fluorescent plastic vests, were collecting limbs and viscera and fragments of flesh in plastic bags so that the proper rites could be given over the bodies.
‘Are you all right?’ There was a hand on my shoulder. A bespectacled woman with short brown hair and a pleasant pale face. ‘I’m Seelvia,’ she said in a South American kind of accent. ‘I’m from the mental health clinic in Emek Refaim. I heard the explosion and came down to help.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, though I was shaking from fear. Sylvia moved off towards a fat and sweaty curly-haired man, one hand on his waist, the other touching a bleeding wound on his face. She laid a hesitant hand on his shoulder. ‘Are you all right? I’m from the mental health clinic in Emek Refaim. I heard the explosion and came down to help.’ The man looked at her in wonder. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Avi.’
‘Nice to meet you, Avi, I’m Seelvia. Do you remember what happened?’ He looked at her. ‘Do you want to tell me?’ He continued looking at her, his T-shirt outlining his sizeable paunch–he looked to me like the football manager Shlomo Scharf.
‘Avi, we’re still in the event occurrence phase. If you open up now and share what happened, it will help later on.’
He continued looking at her for several more seconds.
‘What do you mean, what happened?’ he said eventually. ‘Don’t you see what happened?’
‘Well, of course…’
‘You’re asking me what happened? You haven’t noticed that some f*cking stinking son of a bitch Arab with dread-locks in his ass blew this whole f*cking place sky high?’
‘Yes, Avi. I just want you to try and share…’
‘Share!’ Now he was properly screaming, like Shlomo Scharf used to, and Sylvia retreated a step. ‘Are you f*cking joking? No, tell me seriously, are you all right or what? These f*cking Arabs…f*ck it! F*ck them all, now! What happened? She asks me if I remember what happened!’ He was waving his hands around and you could see the deep cut above his cheekbone, and someone approached him and embraced or restrained him, and led him away from the psychologist. She didn’t move for several seconds.
I came across Sylvia in hospital a few weeks later, when I came in for my group therapy meeting and my weekly visit to Shuli. It turned out that initially at least she’d had a little more success with her next patient, a teenage girl. But when Sylvia put her hand on the girl’s shoulder to console her, she felt a sticky spatter of skin and flesh on the girl’s shirt and she broke down. When I met her again she was still in recovery.
I remember the hospital clearly. My injury was superficial, but since it was a head wound they didn’t want to take any risks. I had an ugly cut on my forehead and an uglier bump underneath it, and there was someone else’s blood on my clothes. They stitched me up, gave me a blood transfusion (donated by someone who’d found the time to do so–unlike me) and sent me to the ward upstairs, where I fell asleep.
When I woke up, I sensed bodies in white moving near me, shadows in the light more than clear pictures. Cotton wool wiped my forehead and my mouth. I heard ringing from afar. My pillow was changed and I felt how heavy my head was, how full of pain. Very slowly the blurred image cleared up; the white body became a nurse, the colours around me became flowers and chocolates, sent by I don’t know who. My phone chirruped its A-Team ringtone and the nurse told me it was prohibited to talk on a mobile in hospital. So I switched it off and as I put it back in my trousers, folded on the table beside the bed, my hand touched a shard of glass. I pulled it out: it was all that remained of the PalmPilot. Another victim of hostilities. Gone, and with it Giora Guetta’s story.
‘Where’s Shuli?’ I asked. My voice sounded crushed–what came out of my mouth was different from what I’d tried to say–but the nurse understood and promised to find out. Later she told me that Shuli was still in the emergency room, in what condition she didn’t know. There were no visits to ER, she said, and in any case I wasn’t allowed to get up yet.
Mom and Dad, Leah and Yochanan Enoch. Tears in Mom’s eyes, horror and helplessness in Dad’s. More chocolates and flowers. My brother in Maryland sent his regards: he’d tried to call, but the time difference made it difficult. He wanted to get on a plane and come. I said there was no need, no way. Grandmother had called too, asking whether I needed anything. My sister Dafdaf arrived, and then Duchi. It was strange to see her, but she looked so beautiful I couldn’t help but shed a tear when I saw her. I rolled the tear around my tongue and returned her hug, smelling the old familiar smell, kissing the familiar soft neck. I kidded her: ‘Duchki! What are you doing here?’
‘Would you like me to leave?’ She embraced my parents and my sister, went downstairs to bring coffee for everyone and returned with a nurse rolling a TV she’d sorted out for us, followed by Muku.
‘It’s bizarre, Croc. I was about to call you when I heard the explosion.’
‘You heard the blast?’
‘We heard it at home,’ my father said.
‘It sounded like somebody’d thrown a frog from the top of a building,’ said Muku.
‘A frog?’ asked Dafdaf.
‘A garbage frog,’ said Muku. ‘How’re you doing, Dafna?’ He kissed her on her cheek. Dafdaf is two years younger than me and Muku, but she’s been in love with him since she was a kid. When she turned sixteen she lost her virginity to him. He told her he wouldn’t do it before. I knew all the details, though she’d made him swear not to tell me a thing.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s a garbage frog?’
‘I don’t know if you have them in Hadera–these enormous green skip things.’
‘Not Hadera, Muku. Pardes Hana.’
All of us were watching Dafdaf and Muku during this exchange: I suppose we were all thinking about their childhood love and imagining what might have happened if she’d stayed. Duchi caressed my face and hair with one hand, and held my hand with the other. It was pleasant. There was no need to talk, and no chance to anyway–my father shushed us as the news came on and we fell obediently silent.
‘A few minutes before noon today,’ Osnat Dekel said, her eyes shining with tears, ‘a massive explosion shook the peaceful German Colony in Jerusalem. A suicide bomber entered the Café Europa in Emek Refaim Street during the busy lunch hour and blew himself up. Eighteen are reported killed and fifty-three injured. Danny Ronen brings us the details.’
When the number of victims was announced, you could hear a kind of rustle or murmur ripple through the ward. There were other TVs on, and all of them were tuned to Channel 2. Someone shouted, ‘What?’ Mom’s quiet tears turned into outright crying and Dad enfolded her in a clumsy, confounded hug. Duchi pressed my hand and I could feel her trembling. Muku placed his hand on Dafdaf’s shoulder. Danny Ronen started coming at us from all directions.
‘Earlier today,’ said Ronen, ‘the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, a military wing of Hamas, took responsibility for the devastating attack in Jerusalem. The bomber, they claim, was Mahmoud Salam al-Mahmuzi from the Al-Amari refugee camp. This afternoon a video of Mahmuzi was broadcast on Palestinian TV in which he claimed the attack was in revenge for the assassination of Halil Abu-Zeid in Al-Birah yesterday morning.’ We heard a ragged chorus of protest or complaint from around the ward, as if everyone were watching an incompetently refereed football match. ‘But military intelligence doubts Hamas’s ability to organise a response so quickly. A senior source told me that it is possible Mahmuzi was not the bomber at all, or alternatively, that someone else appeared on the tape. The real bomber, it is thought, is likely to have been hiding out in Jerusalem for several days. An investigation is proceeding. Halil Abu-Zeid, you may remember, was the subject of a targeted assassination carried out by the air force in retaliation for the shooting at Shaar Hagai earlier this week.’
‘Oh, what liars these Arabs are. It’s just unbelievable,’ Dad said, and at that moment the curtain separating us from the next bed was drawn back, and a woman’s face appeared.
‘Did you see that? Have they no shame? They’re not human beings, they’re animals! They shoot a video like that and expect us to buy it? I’ve said it a million times: get rid of them all, every last one of them! I don’t want to see them and I don’t want to hear them.’
All of us looked at the woman in surprise. She had a chubby reddish face, and a wild kind of quiff. ‘Thanks,’ said Dad, and drew the curtains back together.
Muku and Dafdaf left, then Mom and Dad. Duchi and I talked (complaints about the sons of bitches at work, especially the slippery Gvirzman) and gawped at the TV and ate. When she went to the toilet, I asked the nurse about Shuli. Still in intensive care. She had no idea what her condition was. Duchi returned and closed the curtains around us and turned on her phone, apologising about it–she had a court appearance the next day and needed to make a few calls. I watched her in admiration. Usually she had nausea and couldn’t sleep the night before she was in court. While she listened to her messages she lifted her eyes to meet mine a couple of times. ‘People are looking for you,’ she said. ‘What people?’ ‘I don’t know. Different ones. Check your phone. Maybe there’s something important.’ ‘But it’s not allowed,’ I said. She talked to Boaz about the next day’s meeting. When she hung up, her phone rang. It was for me.
‘Eitan?’ A girl I didn’t recognise.
‘Yes.’
‘Hi. I’m Yaara from the Rafi Reshef morning show on IDF Radio? How are you feeling?’
‘All right.’
‘Eitan, would you be willing to talk on tomorrow’s show? To say a few words about the attack? You’ll just tell us what happened? Like, Rafi will ask you questions and you answer?’
‘Why?’
‘To hear it from someone who was there? A victim’s angle? People are fed up with politicians? It’ll be very short? Five or six minutes?’
‘Five or six?’
‘Something like that?’
‘Uh…OK.’ I stared at Duchi, who was scrutinising me. We arranged a time and Duchi made a face.
She stayed till late. It was very quiet in the ward. She peeked outside the curtains, and then closed them. When she turned to me, her eyes were smiling.
‘Did you ever play doctors and nurses?’
But when Duchi lowered her head beneath the sheet, I couldn’t stop thinking of Shuli. She’d told me it would happen tonight, and it was happening, but not with her. She might not be alive at all, and no one wanted to tell me. She’d had a nice thought and she had given me that sad closed-mouth smile. Duchi was good, and I could feel a tear make its way down my temple. I came in silence. She wiped me and herself, gently kissed the tear, and the bump on my forehead, touched my unshaven cheek with her palm, and left.