CrocAttack!. Assaf Gavron
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hundred British soldiers set out to catch Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. After a bloody battle which lasted all night, Sheikh al-Qassam was killed and became one of the first of the great martyrs, the shuhada, in the long struggle. He planted the seeds of revolution against Zionism and imperialism and inspired a generation to follow him.
The policeman who ran to report the incident was Duchi’s grandfather. Her mother was born nine months later. My father was born in the same year, 1935, in Maryland, USA.
I took a Little No. 5 home. As far as I was concerned, the cooling-off period was over after one morning. The journey was quieter than usual; the drivers swore less over the radio and committed fewer traffic violations. Even the Jumbos seemed to drive with respect for the sorrow of the minibus drivers.
‘How did you get home?’ asked Duchi.
‘Taxi,’ I said offhandedly.
‘Liar,’ she said.
‘Liar? What reason do I have to lie?’ I said, and really, what reason did I have?
‘Honestly in a taxi?’ She came and gave me a kiss. I opened the refrigerator, looking for something quick. No, not really in a taxi, Duchi, in a Little No. 5. But do you think I’m going to tell you the truth? You think I fancy an argument now?
‘Word of honour.’
Nothing is as it was before September 11th. Everything changed that day, and yet, life went on. The summary: Duchi and I live together for four years, we decide to get married, the date we set is 11 September 2001. Duchi’s mother gets a heart attack and snuffs it a day before the wedding, the wedding is cancelled, and since then this word – ‘wedding’ – is never heard in our vicinity. It’s as if there are blockades and checkpoints that this word can’t penetrate, as if there’s a lock-and-siege on it. As if they’d sent a whole army to hunt it down and it had vanished and holed up in some abysmal cave, not even bothering to send us a ‘what’s up’ from time to time. It seems that we’re treating the whole thing as if it were a sign from God – or worse, from Duchi’s mother – that we shouldn’t have decided to marry. She sacrificed her life on the altar of this message. The medium was her message. I guess that’s the reason we don’t talk about it. I’m only guessing, though, because we haven’t talked about it. She keeled over and it was as if a valve holding back an immense pressure had blown and all the attention leaked away from the wedding to the funeral. And it’s not as if any of that other stuff helped.
Duchi’s first reaction was to laugh. ‘No way,’ she told the phone. ‘Come on, Dad, you’re putting me on.’ And then she said, ‘OK…OK…OK,’ and hung up and said, ‘My mother died of a heart attack,’ and only then did her eyes well up with tears.
Duchi’s younger brother, Voovi, didn’t look too broken up about it. Her dad certainly wasn’t sorry. Before all of this happened Duchi once made me swear that whatever occurred between us – even if it didn’t work out eventually – we would never end up with the hate-hate relationship her parents had.
Duchi’s father is called Noam Neeman. That’s ‘Pleasant Loyal’ in Hebrew, by the way: two gags for the price of one. He left Duchi’s mother after two kids and six years of marriage and went to Nicaragua with his second wife, whom he dumped after a few more years, kids and arms deals. He returned to Israel at the age of forty-six and married a girl half his age. Duchi was three years younger than her when they got married. She and her brother didn’t make it to the wedding. But I like Noam Neeman. A man with balls. Does what he feels like doing. Half the time he succeeds, half the time he tanks completely. Recently, for instance, he failed miserably with a start-up in which he invested a million dollars. He asked me, ‘If you had a million bucks in the bank, what sort of investment would you put it in?’ I said, ‘I’d put it in the bank.’ His seen-it-all eyes looked me over with bottomless disdain and he drew on his cigar till it crackled.
‘Duchi!’ he shouted. ‘Couldn’t you have found yourself someone a bit more serious than this?’ He punched my shoulder with his large suntanned hand. In the end he stuck his million into a new mobile phone company called Wa-Wa. A year later his million was in the sewer.
In truth, Duchi’s parents did not share a hate-hate relationship. Ever since Noam Neeman left her, Duchi’s mother had been lost. She loved him in secret until the day she died. Loved? She worshipped the ground he walked on. She was completely obsessed with him, but she didn’t have him: all she had instead were his two children. And whatever move they made, whatever direction they set off in, they could be sure that Leah Neeman would be standing there, feet planted, wagging a warning index finger. Because Leah was a fountain of bitterness. She just didn’t like life. There was nothing she wasn’t suspicious of; there wasn’t a decision Duchi or Voovi could make, or even think about making, that Leah wouldn’t respond to with gloomy prophecy, biblical wrath, stricken horror; not a step they ever took without having to hurdle the leg she would stretch out to trip them up.
I thought – and I believe many others thought the same – that there was something fitting in her pulling a heart attack on the eve of her daughter’s marriage. She deployed the ultimate weapon in her arsenal, her Judgement Day weapon. And it worked, God knows how or why. The ring I bought (‘Diamonds are for ever,’ said Duchi, ‘so don’t buy me one’) is still hunkered down at the back of some drawer, waiting.
Anyway, I was standing there with my head in the refrigerator, lying it off. I tried to move the conversation on.
‘So how was your day, Duchki?’
Her gesture said, leave it, don’t even go there. Another crazy day. In the last few months she’d been coming back home whacked from a case of insider dealing and fraud that was dragging on and on. She would curse the other lawyer, the fool Gvirzman, and the ill-tempered and exhausted judge and her salary and her boss Boaz, who after years of her working her soul out for him was still ignoring her hints about being made a partner.
I ate cold pasta salad for a few minutes without speaking while she watched TV from the sofa. ‘Well?’ I pressed. She made a face and muttered, ‘That son of a bitch.’ ‘Who, Boaz? Gvirzman? The judge? Who now?’ She shrugged. ‘Yes. No. All three of them are huge sons of bitches, for sure. I don’t know; I don’t know what I’m doing. Why am I killing myself like this? Gvirzman asked to postpone again without consulting me and when I tell him out of court that it’s out of order, the son of a bitch tells me I’m an overgrown baby.’
‘Oh, come on.’ Sometimes I think Gvirzman’s right, but I don’t say so.
‘What does that mean, “oh, come on”?’ She was sharpening her claws for combat. I like her instincts.
‘You’re in a good company, on a good salary, you work with prestigious clients, handle big cases…’
‘That’s not the point, Croc. I’ve been stuck in the same place for a year. Even if you think it’s a good place – and it isn’t – I still haven’t made any progress for a year. This case…’
I shook my head. How much can you moan? How much can you be unhappy with what you have when you have so much?
‘Don’t make that face. You’re not going to convince me I’m having a wonderful time at work – though you’re making this great effort to convince yourself. You could just be a tiny bit understanding and supportive, couldn’t you? I deserve a little support from my boyfriend after a day like this.’
A day like this. Wow. They asked to postpone without consulting her and called her an overgrown baby. Dear oh dear oh dear. She deserves support. She always deserves it. She’s so pitiable sometimes her tone can really flip my switch.
‘You know, I did take the Little No. 5, not a taxi.’
Why did I say that? Maybe I needed to have a row.
‘Liar.’
‘Liar? What reason do I have to lie?’ Apart from the obvious.
‘Croc.’
‘What?’