41
‘Nailed it!’ said Bar.
Whether he’d suddenly figured something out, or heard something I hadn’t caught, was difficult to tell. Two days earlier Fahmi had called to say that he’d got something for us. He wanted to meet in Bar BaraBush, where you could watch beautiful women ordering up Orgasms. I told him Thursday was the best night and picked him up at the entrance to his village. But they were having a South American night and the noise was unbelievable. The place was packed and the acoustics were terrible. A killer combination. You had to stick your ear into someone’s mouth in order to hear anything, and Bar was closer to Fahmi, who talked so very gently, with such a soft accent. He’d found out that Tamer was f*cking some woman here in Tel Aviv. ‘Fifty-four years old!’ he’d said, and laughed, and Bar and I raised our eyebrows. And then he must have said something I hadn’t caught, because Bar spread his hands wide and said, ‘Nailed it!’
I’d been in such a fug, so preoccupied with Guetta, so out of it, that I hadn’t noticed what was going on in Time’s Arrow. That Thursday morning I finished the Belgian project and passed everything on to Guy. We went over it together and I asked him what was up next.
‘Next? I don’t know,’ Guy said. ‘There aren’t that many projects on at the moment.’
‘Really?’
‘Is this news to you?’
It was news to me. At lunch I ordered Thai (TukTuk) and ate with Talia Tenne, who had dyed her hair as red as her finger-and toenails.
‘Well! To what do I owe this honour?’ she said.
‘Today you’re going to explain to me what is going on in this company.’
‘Happy to,’ she said, but there wasn’t that much to tell. They just weren’t selling the system any more. The Indians were killing the market. The downsizing and the move to Rosh Haayin had stabilised things for a few months, but the investors were feeling the pressure again.
‘Jimmy’s really stressed recently,’ said Talia. ‘He screamed at Yoni Bronco yesterday because Yoni might have lost us the Scandinavian thing. And the Belgians aren’t happy any more. They might even ditch the system. It’s going round that they got an offer from another Israeli company. Check your emails, Croc–there’s a company meeting this afternoon.’ In the striplights of the dining nook I could see the first wrinkles in Talia Tenne’s palely freckled white skin. ‘It’s not like the good old days, Croc. Haven’t you noticed?’
But I hadn’t. I hadn’t been aware of the shouting or the failures or Jimmy’s moods. I didn’t even have the faintest clue who the hell Yoni Bronco was. All I’d actually noticed was that the Thai food wasn’t bad at all.
At the company meeting I saw a Jimmy stripped of his old enthusiasm, his customary sharpness. He talked about the usual things, but he didn’t seem to believe in what he was saying. The great Rafraf–the brains behind the air force’s Time Management Unit, Time’s Arrow’s King of Time, Mr Every Second Counts–looked like a man who’d been stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Do you know the Hofstadter law?’ he asked us, but there was no answer, because nobody did. ‘The Hofstadter law says: everything takes longer than you expect it to take, even if you take into account the Hofstadter law!’ He looked around the room. No one’s expression changed. ‘And what does that mean? It means things take longer than we planned. It means we need patience. And that includes somebody like me, who memorises the Hofstadter law every morning while doing my press-ups and simultaneously watching the morning news on Channel Two–even I lose my patience!’ Jimmy’s voice climbed alarmingly in volume and assertiveness, as if someone had accidentally turned his amp up to the max.
‘Look,’ he resumed in a calmer voice. ‘No one has any time any more. Sixty per cent of Europeans said in a recent poll that they didn’t have enough time. And the Venture Capital Fund investing in us–Venture Capital Fund, ridiculously long name, by the way, must take at least a second and a half to say it, way too much–they don’t have enough time either. They’re losing patience. They gave us money for twelve months and after twelve months they want to see results. They want to see what I promised them–the twenty-first-century Fed-Ex.’
Jimmy sipped from a glass of water. Talia Tenne’s eyes asked See what I meant? and my eyes replied Yes, I do.
‘Why are we forever running from one place to another? Because we exist in a state of terror: the terror of time, the terror of time ending, the terror of death. Because we’re afraid of time, we look for solace in the patterns we create in it, in the circle of an hour, in days, in the illusory beginnings and endings of events without any. We try to escape it–in sleep, in dreams, in drink, in meditation, in mystical beliefs–or we work like crazy to try and create the illusion that we are in fact in control of it.’
I can’t remember everything he said. Only fragments of ideas and occasional sentences. He talked about Chronos, the Greek god of time. About Native American tribes that don’t have words for ‘late’ or ‘wait’ or even ‘time’ about time’s arrow, a river flowing in one direction only, from past to future, a series of events that cannot be reconstructed; about Stephen Hawking and the ten dimensions. We sat there in a state of shock. We were asking ourselves: what does he want, this man? What is he going through?
After the meeting we crowded into the kitchenette to drink coffee.
‘To think we used to swallow all his bullshit about time,’ Bar said. ‘We actually used to get motivated by some of that crap!’
I didn’t say anything. But I wanted to say: don’t you see that it’s not Jimmy who’s changed, it’s us? It’s us. We’ve changed.
At the end of the day I called Fahmi and picked him up on the way to Tel Aviv. He had one of those little leather pouches on a belt that backpackers like to strap round their waists, which he dangled over his thigh. We didn’t talk much on the way: he seemed a little stressed. It was nothing, he said. He just wanted to get to the bar.
The place was heaving, but I managed to find us some seats at the corner of the bar. Fahmi was happy with the spot. Bar arrived and started telling us about the Maccabi game and explaining the finer points of basketball to Fahmi and then Dafdaf called and wouldn’t get off the phone. She’d had a major row with her husband and wanted to know what I would do–as if I had a clue! Me, who hadn’t managed to get married; who hadn’t even managed to not get married. It felt as if she was trying to tell me something but I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, and they turned up the volume of the salsa music so I had to hang up. It was nearing midnight by the time we finally broached the subject of Tamer Sarsur, and Bar spread his hands and shouted out. I leaned over and yelled in his ear.
‘What do you mean, “Nailed it”?’
‘What?’
‘You said, “Nailed it”!’
‘Didn’t you hear what he said?’
I shook my head. ‘Let’s get out of here! I can’t stand this! Can’t hear!’
‘What?’ shouted Bar.
I pointed outside. ‘Out of here!’
Fahmi looked taken aback. ‘Out? Why?’
I put my mouth to his ear. ‘I can’t hear anything! Let’s get out of here!’
‘No! Stay longer! I want to look at the girls!’
‘Come back later! Talk outside! Then come back!’
I struggled through the crush towards the exit. At the doorway I turned around and saw Fahmi reluctantly trailing after Bar, his pouch slung over his shoulder, as if he were a child dragging its heels. I walked out: it was like getting out of a vacuum cleaner. It felt like the first air I’d breathed in two hours.
‘Goddam, that was noisy!’
We decided to walk down to the beach in front of the Hilton, where we found three sunloungers. We lay on them and listened to the sound of the waves whispering. There was no one else around on the beach; from time to time a pleasant shiver ran through me to remind me that summer was finally loosening its grip. I eased my lounger back, as if I were moon-bathing, and lit a cigarette.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘can someone tell me what is going on?’
‘It’s very simple,’ said Bar. ‘Tamer f*cked the professor’s wife.’
‘What? How do you know?’
‘It’s what Tamer’s friends told Fahmi. That he was f*cking “some doctor’s wife” in Tel Aviv.’
‘But he’s a hundred years old. You saw how old he is. She’s…what?’
‘Fifty-four, according to them,’ said Fahmi.
‘So Tamer was screwing Warshawski’s wife. What’s the link to Guetta? How exactly does this mean “nailed it”?’
‘You’ll have to ask Warshawski,’ Bar said.
‘Me? Why me?’
‘Who else? This is all to do with you, Croc. Not me.’
‘You don’t have to ask him at all. It’s obvious.’ This was Fahmi. He was lying on the middle lounger, and both of us turned our heads towards him. ‘Warshawski paid Guetta to kill Tamer.’
‘What?’
‘You said there was money involved. You said there was a secret meeting. You said nobody was talking. I’ll bet you that’s what it is.’
‘But Guetta was just a kid, just out of the army.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, where did he meet Guetta? How did he come across him?’
‘How do I know?’
We didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. Eventually I said, ‘I don’t think so, Fahmi. Things don’t work like that in this country. To murder a cheating wife–it doesn’t make sense. We’re not some…not some African…’
‘Don’t forget, he’s only an Arab.’
‘So what?’
‘An Arab’s life isn’t worth anything. The doctor would have killed plenty of Arabs in 1948, so what would one more be to him? Not a problem. He was f*cking his Jewish wife. A good enough reason to kill an Arab.’
We fell silent again. Now I didn’t know what to say. Fahmi was fiddling in his leather pouch again: he’d been doing it all night.
‘What you got in there, Fahmi?’
He pulled his hand back out. ‘Nothing. It’s, uh…’
‘You want to know what I’m thinking?’ Bar said. Even at midnight under a nearly full moon, he was still wearing his shabby baseball cap. Now he shifted it slightly to one side. I waited, staring up at the stars, listening to the unhurried waves.
‘I’m thinking that what Fahmi said sounds pretty reasonable.’
I stared at the stars some more, absorbing this.
‘So what does that mean? What should we do?’
‘Not “we”, Croc. This is all about you. I’m done now. If you ask me, you should go to Ichilov and have a little chat with the professor.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then you’ll see.’
We stayed on the beach a while longer, saying little. I was thinking about Jimmy, trying to remember exactly what he’d said in his surreal speech and feeling a little sorry for him, when Fahmi broke into my daydreams. Didn’t we want to get back to the bar? I said I didn’t feel like it: the noise there was killing me. Bar didn’t fancy it either, so I asked Fahmi if he wanted a lift home.
He was silent all the way to Kafr Qasim. I had thought that over the course of the day we’d spent together we’d become, if not close, then kind of friends. Yet there were no signs of it that evening. It was as if he’d come because he was obliged to, as if it were a continuation of the work he’d done for Time’s Arrow. But it wasn’t work: we hadn’t paid for the information he’d dug up, and he hadn’t asked for payment. I mean, until that evening, the whole Guetta thing had seemed like something between friends. I couldn’t understand what had happened. It was difficult to understand why he’d bothered coming to Tel Aviv at all, if he was going to be so withdrawn and distant, if he wasn’t, in fact, our friend. Whatever, I thought: I’m not going to bring it up. We rolled in silence up to the entrance to Kafr Qasim and I slowed to a halt to let him out, and Fahmi dug his hand once again into his little leather pouch–and that’s the last thing I remember.