CrocAttack!. Assaf Gavron
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on his mission, because he knows that if he goes on Monday, there won’t be any Hebron on Tuesday. Understand?’
Another genius with his genius solutions. I wanted to say: and what happens if the guy from Hebron thinks twice and still goes? What have we accomplished then? Or if he doesn’t think at all and goes? But I didn’t rise to him. I didn’t have the energy for that stuff. The newsreader mentioned Giora Guetta’s name.
‘Know what I’m saying?’ the soldier was saying. ‘It’s not rocket science.’
We drove for a few minutes in silence. The news ceded to a phone-in show. Callers sharing their problems with the world. I sighed and changed station. ‘It Must Be Love’. I turned up and dived into the song. I sang. How many times had I heard this song fifteen, sixteen years ago, when I was in love? Was I in love now? I didn’t know. Maybe not. Otherwise, why did I behave as I did with Duchi? Slapping her down, not supporting her when she asked me to, treating her requests with contempt. Running out of the house in the middle of an argument. If this song is a measure, I thought, I am not feeling now what I felt once. Nothing more, nothing less, love is the best. But maybe I can’t feel that any more. Maybe, at my age, a song can’t measure anything much. I know Duchi is dear to me. Very much so. I know I always regret fights, as now. Hell, what was so damn wrong with taking a taxi after work? She told me once that Uri claimed I lacked confidence, that all my behaviour was a demonstration of power to compensate for the inferiority I felt towards her, because she was so strong and successful. He said I behaved like this out of fear that I wasn’t good enough for her, out of fear of being dumped. When she told me this, I refuted this proposition with the following counterargument: ‘Pfahhhh…’ Once I asked Bar to do us a numerology to see whether Duchi and I were compatible. He fed the data into his software and got ‘Croc and Duchi = perfect match from heaven’. But after another huge row I asked him to check it again. He got ‘Croc and Duchi = scary future’.
We passed the airport; another plane leaving the country. ‘It Must Be Love’ finished. The soldier said, ‘Hey, could you get me the number of Michal Yannay?’ I looked over at him. His face was big, round, pink, shiny. You could say he was chubby. His hair was strange; hair that hadn’t quite worked out its place in the world yet, in the taxonomy of hairdos. Whether or not there was a skullcap on top of it I don’t remember. Spots round the mouth and a smell of sour glands. I didn’t know his name until I heard it on the morning news later. He wanted a kids’ TV presenter’s phone number. I turned my gaze back to the road.
When I was a soldier, hitchhiking was the thing I liked best. You hang your finger out at the angle you’d hold a fishing rod and you never know what you’re going to pull up. A businessman in a magisterial Merc which purrs you at 200 kph to the very gates of your base? Or a political science student from Jerusalem with a rusty Citroën and a smile worth 300 kph? And how far would you get – five, twenty, a hundred and twenty kilometres? I loved talking to the people, hearing about their worlds, their work, their kids, the countries they’d known – any place far away from the loathed routine of army life or the brief leaves at home. And I always loved this road, Highway No. 1. A short transition between two worlds. Between the mountains and the sea, between history and now, between sacred stones and sand. The first sign that you were crossing from one territory into another would always be the hissing and chirping of the radio, the strange music of the cross-purposed airwaves. To our right, the soldier and I saw the Ramle cement factory, a weary but unceasing behemoth exhaling huge plumes of smoke into the huge floodlights which marked its huge perimeter.
He told me he was from Petach Tikva. His friends had dropped him off at the train station in Tel Aviv, where he knew he’d be able to hitch a ride to Jerusalem. He was serving in Bethlehem. What was going on there was a real shitstorm, but at least we were showing them who was in charge. Thank God his platoon commander didn’t have any time for all these rules, which anyway they were always changing every week – don’t open fire here, don’t open fire there, yes this, no that, those are the guys you can shoot, those are the guys you can’t…His platoon commander said that if a single hair fell from the head of one of his soldiers then the whole of Bethlehem would go up in flames, because you don’t mess with the Golani. Not the Golani. They don’t piss around, the Golani. One time their patrol came under fire from a sniper but no one was hurt. This other time someone chucked stones at them from a rooftop and a mate of his got this gash over his eyebrow and the platoon commander went wild and they went through all the houses in the street one by one, and pulled out all the men and covered their eyes with flannel blindfolds and tied their hands behind their backs with plastic cuffs.
‘But your friend got a stone in his eyebrow, didn’t he?’ I said.
‘Yeah…’
‘Did any of his hair fall out while this was happening?’
‘No.’
‘So why punish all the men in the street? The platoon commander said he’d freak out if a hair fell from anyone’s head. By the way, what do you do if it falls out naturally? Cheap conditioner? Or one of those really tough combs? Or natural shedding?’
‘Pulling a few Arabs out of their homes with handcuffs isn’t burning Bethlehem, man.’
Latrun now passing on the right. He didn’t have a girlfriend. His parents were divorced. His conversation was peppered with religious expressions like ‘with God’s help’ and ‘God willing’, but that might have been the influence of religious friends in his unit, not necessarily his upbringing. When a Zohar Argov song came on the radio he wanted me to turn it up, which was kind of weird for such a white kid, liking a guy like Zohar – another late influence, maybe. Everything he mentioned that he liked or was cool was a ‘waste of time’. Oh yeah, waste of time, man. And true enough, I was wasting my time, in several respects, though there was no way on earth he’d know that. No, he hadn’t ever killed anyone, but his platoon commander, praise be to God, had: waste of time. There was this one time it had happened on a patrol he’d actually been on himself. A bullet in the head! The son of a bitch ordered it. Like you order up pizza, said the platoon commander. Only instead of picking up the phone and saying I want pepperoni, I want onion, I want olives and mushrooms, this son of a bitch held up his hand and made gestures and everybody saw he had a gun in his hand, though by the time they’d run and reached him, no more than, like, forty metres, maybe fifteen seconds, someone had made the gun disappear, which meant another night of blindfolds and plastic cuffs. Fun. That was how the soldier summed up his tour of duty in Bethlehem. Fun: waste of time.
We passed Shaar Hagai with a bus in front of us, a No. 480. ‘How’s the Polo?’ the soldier asked.
‘A pleasure to drive.’
‘What’s the engine size?’
‘Thirteen hundred, I think.’
‘Mm. And it’s an automatic. We’ll see how it does on the hill in a minute.’
Don’t count on it burning up the road with a fatty like you in it, I said to myself. The radio started crackling and whistling, meaning we were beginning the climb into the mountains. I stepped on the gas. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ said the soldier and then I saw the flashes, and heard the rear window shatter and something move very close to me and the soldier screamed ‘Aiiiiii!!! FUCKING CUNT!’ and I hit the brakes with everything I had.
Three minutes.
The skeleton of the bus below me. Grandfather Fahmi’s bus. My heart was beating very fast. Blood was surging through me: my fingertips were tingling. I was breathing as if I’d been sprinting, even though I’d been lying motionless for nearly an hour. A line ran dead straight from my eyes down the sight to the white lights below. The earplugs gave me the feeling that I was watching everything from somewhere to the side of myself. I waited for Bilahl to say the word.
The sniper who opened fire on the road at Wadi Haramiya had the advantage of daylight. No flashes of gunfire could be seen.