CrocAttack!. Assaf Gavron
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walked into the mall at the base of the Dizengoff Centre through Gate 3. With all the bombs and precautions, the entrance to the Centre looks like the gate to an army camp: barriers, guards and metal detectors that always, always beep. The guards never check the source of the beep so why do they run the detector over us? Just to send magnetic waves through our bones?
Every day I’m treated differently entering the mall. Sometimes they might ask me to show my wallet or phone, other times they just pass the detector over me, or let me through and only then stop me, as if I’d somehow gone through too quickly, or looked suspiciously relieved. One time, immediately after a big bomb, they started asking for ID cards and added another guard near the elevators to the offices. This checkpoint was about seven metres past the first one. Two days later they got rid of the second guard. Another day passed and the ID card wasn’t necessary. After the next big bomb you needed it again.
So even when they let me pass and then stopped and groped me seven metres after someone else had; even when I had to take my bag off my back, unzip it, take my wallet out, take the ID card out, open it in front of them and watch them not even glance at it – I might as well have stuck a picture of Arafat in there: they’d have waved me through anyway – I decided to let them get on with their job. Not because I think there’s no alternative, but because I no longer have the strength to object. What good would it do if I complained or refused to show my ID? I see people arguing and I can understand, but it never helps them. It just slows them down. It’s like footballers arguing with the referee after he gives a penalty – was there ever a player in the history of football who changed a ref’s mind?
That day, there was a blood donation unit at the gate. It’s important to donate. They say there’s not enough blood in the hospitals because of all the bombs. But I didn’t have time. I went up to the office. I didn’t hear the explosion. Everybody else did, people down at street level, people up in our office on the twenty-third floor. Bombs are something you hear. They’re loud. But I was in the elevator and didn’t hear it. Not that the boom made such an impression at first. There are booms all the time: sonic aircraft booms, building-site booms, all the accidents and bangs and crashes of a city. So everyone in the office was looking calm. I popped my head into all the rooms on the way to my own room and said hello, as I did every morning, and people smiled and said good morning, as they did every morning. In my room I said hello to Ron and Ronen, and Ron said, ‘You hear the boom?’
‘What boom?’
It took a few minutes until we realised that there had been a suicide bomb and that it had happened in the centre of Tel Aviv. We turned on the TV in the kitchen and saw the map with the little flame-thing that shows the location of the bomb, and saw it was up the road, at the south end of Dizengoff Street, near the Habima Theatre, and they were saying it was probably a bus.
Everyone in the office was watching the TV. Those who hadn’t arrived yet wouldn’t arrive for a while because the roads were blocked. According to Ynet there were ten Israelis killed and one suicide bomber. The result: 10–1. The Jews lose again, or at any rate it’s a scoreline that’s going to need quite a bit of a positive gloss.
Soon I was busy answering the phone and telling everyone I was alive. ‘No, they didn’t get me yet,’ I told the callers. After a few calls, I started answering the phone with, ‘This is Croc and I’m alive, who wants to know?’ I talked to people I hadn’t talked to for years.
‘Lucky there are bombs once in a while,’ I told them, ‘at least we get to talk.’
I started work: I had to talk to our Swiss client, Ivan, work out what he required; I made calls and wrote emails and documents, and at some point Ron said, ‘No. 5 minibus – you use that thing, don’t you?’ I lifted my eyes from the screen.
‘What?’
‘No. 5 minibus?’
‘I call it the Little No. 5. What about it?’
‘The bomb. It was a No. 5 minibus that was bombed. Your bus, isn’t it?’
‘Really?’
My first thought was: fuck, how will I get to work from now on? Those fuckers hit every possible means of transportation. Am I going to have to take cabs now? Buy another car? Too expensive…
I entered Ynet again and read the update. Every passenger on the minibus killed. But still it didn’t seem like mine. Somehow it seemed it couldn’t be the right time or place. There were dozens of minibuses en route at any given time. ‘Yeah, I go on one every day,’ I was telling everyone nonchalantly. ‘Unbelievable. The bomber could have been on the same No. 5 I was on. Who knows?’
Only then did I remember the dark guy and his suit bag, and the old lady who suspected him, whom I’d told not to worry. And the other guy who asked me to send some unspecified message to his girlfriend. This is crazy, I thought, I have to get hold of this guy, and then the phone rang.
‘Croc, I’m alive,’ I answered.
‘Uh huh,’ said Jimmy. ‘Why alive?’
‘Why not?’
‘Listen, next week there’s a meeting in Brussels, it’s important, it’s with…’ Here he mentioned the name of a large Belgian telecoms company. His accent was terrible. ‘You coming with me?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘No. I’m telling Gili to book us flights and hotel rooms. Get ultra-prepared. Make sure you’re ready with all the presentations. And don’t forget tomorrow’s company meeting.’ Jimmy ended the conversation without waiting for an answer. He does it all the time. He explained once that he didn’t have the luxury of waiting for an answer. Jimmy’s real name, by the way, is Rafi. Rafi Rafael, or Rafraf, as he’s known in our room. When he was an officer in the air force he ran their time management unit. Now he’s the CEO of Time’s Arrow.
I called Duchi and left her a message: ‘Hi. I wasn’t killed in the suicide attack in case you’re interested. I’m in Brussels next week. Bye.’
And then they started talking about the female driver of the minibus involved in the bomb attack, and it was only then that I understood. Ziona was the only woman driver in the Little No. 5 fleet. I knew it because she was always bringing it up. She was proud of it. My heart stopped beating and my breath got stuck in my throat. And then they started up again, because that’s what the heart and lungs always do, when you’re alive.
I jogged back to the kitchen. The TV was still on though everyone was back in their rooms. Danny Ronen, the military correspondent on Channel 2, mentioned the name Ziona Levi. A nervous little chuckle escaped my mouth. I went to the bathroom and put my hands, clenched tightly into fists, on the marble. I felt a wave of pain and nausea washing over me, tried to breathe deeply, looked at the mirror, and laughed again. This laughing face: whose was it? It didn’t look familiar. Didn’t look like mine. The blood was hammering in my temples. I felt very close to passing out. I had to get out, to breathe fresh air. I threw water on my face and made it down to the street and walked towards the site of the bombing, up Dizengoff Street, past the shoemaker’s and up the hill, under the tunnel formed by the canopy of branches, and turned right past the gallery. I stopped opposite the museum and concert hall, just before the Habima Theatre, on the side where the post office is. In the time that had passed they’d reopened the road to traffic. Everything had been cleaned up and the wreckage of the minibus had been towed away. The deceased had been removed: all that belonged to them, all that had been them. There weren’t even police barriers up any more.
Miraculously – they always use that word, miraculously – not one of the passers-by or drivers near by had been injured. Only a single car parked on the side of the road was totalled (the owner was a guy named Amir who’d just popped into the post office to pay a parking fine – and it turned out he never got any insurance money or compensation: because he was parked in a no-parking zone). A bus passed, groaning and spitting black smoke like an old man hawking phlegm. I looked at the wet patches on the road where the blood had been washed away. The pale sun was gloomy and silent. The traffic was running normally.