CrocAttack!. Assaf Gavron
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long could I sit watching the camp’s football team scuff around their dirt pitch? How long for? Even if they are the best team in the West Bank, how long can you do that for?
‘Hoo, what a day I’ve had! I’m dying to get my head on a pillow. Let’s just check everything’s in its place…one tube for your piss, another one for your air. Lovely. Good boy. Goodnight, now.’
Yeah, yeah, Svetlana, now go away, I’m busy…
‘And Dr Hartom says your scans were very good: your brain responded to the music. And tremendous responses to the photos of your brother and sister.’
Didn’t you already say goodnight?
‘OK, that’s it. I’m off. Goodnight, lyubimyi moi…’
On the left we saw the lights of Har-Adar, and on the right the lights of Katana. We skirted around Maale-Hachamisha and Neve-Ilan. We walked for almost four hours. Bilahl whispered prayers. For several minutes we heard the murmuring of traffic on the road like a constant distant rain. A sharp ascent.
‘After this hill I think we’ll see the road,’ said Bilahl.
I was tired, and soaking with sweat, and my heart was going like crazy, but I almost ran all the way to the top. We started descending through the pines. And then I saw the white and red snake of lights, the cars heading in opposite directions, and Bilahl came up to my shoulder and said, ‘Yes.’
We descended a little farther until we were at a point not too high above the road with a good view in both directions. The whole ravine was steep – a dangerous place, a place of ancient ambushes. Bab al-Wad: ‘The Gate of the Valley’. Not far below us, in a scrubby little central island which the two streams of cars flowed round, one of Grandpa’s metal skeletons was resting quietly.
‘This is the point,’ said Bilahl. He checked the time. ‘The getaway car will arrive right beneath this bus’s skeleton in a little over an hour. We will open fire together for a few minutes just before eleven and then go down to the ditch beside the road to wait. Let’s get the riflerests ready.’
We made comfortable rests for the rifles out of soil and stones, a few metres apart, with room enough to lie and aim across a wide field of fire. Bilahl gave me earplugs. I felt sick to the stomach. ‘We’ve got fifty minutes. We will pray. Remember, we are only shooting at the other side, at the white lights. Wait for my sign, and shoot at the windows. From the moment we start, shoot as much as you can. If your weapon is blocked, do the checks I showed you, change the magazine and cock the rifle again. If it doesn’t work we will exchange rifles and I will try. The whole operation will not take more than three minutes and then we’ll go down to the road with the rifles. Remember Silwad. Be quiet. Composed. Brave. Do as I do. Don’t think too much.’
A soldier was standing by the slip road on to the Ayalon highway with a hitchhiking finger out waiting for a bite. I stopped and lowered the window. ‘Jerusalem?’ ‘Jerusalem.’ ‘Thanks very much.’ ‘You’re welcome,’ I said, and he slung his huge bag into the back and got into the passenger seat still holding his rifle. ‘Just don’t point that thing in my direction.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘What does “Every Second Counts” mean?’
‘What?’
‘The sticker. On the car.’
It took me a moment to clear my head. We were in the green Polo I got from work. I mean, I say ‘got’, but I paid for it every month out of my salary. I hardly ever drove it because the Little No. 5 took me to work. Duchi was the one who took the Polo to work every day.
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Yeah what?’
‘Sorry, what did you ask?’
‘What does “Every Second Counts” mean?’
‘Uh, well, let’s see.’ We got on the highway. It was chilly but I opened the window a crack to feel the fresh night air. ‘You know when you buy some new gadget but you can’t be bothered to read the instructions?’
‘What?’
‘Or the bags of pre-washed salad you get in the supermarket? The jeans you buy already worn out and patched?’
‘Sure, I’ve got a pair, waste of time!’
‘Exactly! A waste of time. People don’t like wasting time. Every second counts. Get it?’
‘You make bagged salad and pre-worn jeans?’
I guess that people who don’t themselves physically embody the phrase ‘Every Second Counts’ might be slow to grasp it. When I went up for my job at Time’s Arrow, Jimmy Rafael asked me at the end of the interview whether I was a time victim. ‘A time victim?’ ‘Does the question of how to do things more quickly, or do as many things as possible in as little time as possible, ever cross your mind?’ ‘All the time.’ ‘Do you ever find yourself consciously accelerating your own thoughts, movements and speech and trying to accelerate them in those around you?’ I nodded. ‘Planes simply have to take off on time? Slow drivers make you want to murder them? Do queues in the bank or in the cinema drive you mad? Do you absolutely hate having to wait for your food in a restaurant?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Every second of wasted time, time in which you could have done something else, makes you furious?’ ‘Yes! Yes!’ ‘Welcome to Time’s Arrow.’ Jimmy smiled, and shook my hand. I felt at home. Later he told me that he tried to pick all his employees according to these criteria, and in fact I liked the way I was always surrounded by people of my own type at work. Some people look down at us or feel sorry for us, wonder why we rush around breathlessly from place to place; what do we get out of it, out of managing to do more things? You can always manage more, they say, but you can never manage everything. So why, they say, don’t you find the balance that will let you relax a little and enjoy life? What they don’t understand is that, ultimately, that is the way we relax a little and enjoy life. The beauty of this way of life is all in the word ‘complete’ – completing tasks, and feeling complete. I’m jealous of people like Jimmy Rafael who have done and are doing so much. Their lives fascinate me; I want to be like them: a busy week filled with completed tasks is a satisfying week, a hell of a lot more than lying on the beach and incompletely staring at the sun. My hitcher wasn’t the sort of guy who would get this. I tried to attack it from a different angle.
‘You know Federal Express or McDonald’s?’
‘Yeah. You work for them?’
‘Multinational empires built on the principle of saving time. Before Federal Express, an international delivery would take about a week. Fed-Ex takes a day. Same with McDonald’s and food. One-hour photo development. Twenty-minute pizza delivery.’
‘Last time I went to McDonald’s it took less than a day,’ he chortled.
The best test for a good salesman is a tough customer. If I could sell Time’s Arrow to this dunce I could sell it to anyone. I liked these challenges. ‘We shorten the length of phone calls to directory assistance,’ I said: if you can’t summarise what your product can do in one sentence, you won’t sell it.
‘Uh…’
‘People can’t stand to waste even a moment: they spend a lot of time on the phone and they need their numbers right away. We give them the numbers more quickly and therefore more cheaply.’
‘So you work for 144. Why didn’t you say so? News,’ he added, leaning towards the radio and nudging the volume up. Of course, news… News above everything, above basic good manners, above unimportant small talk about time, above life. Silenced by news, we listened to the headlines.
‘Fucking cunts. They ought to wipe out the whole of Nablus.’
‘Would