CrocAttack!. Assaf Gavron
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office. Hanging from the façade of the Tel Aviv Museum for the Arts was a banner which read ‘Of Life and Death – A Retrospective of the Artist Oli Shauli-Negbi’. The word ‘Retrospective’ reeled my gaze in. I left. I walked. I walked through the drifts of sodden dead leaves and tried to think whether there was anything I could have done to prevent it. Should I have told the passengers that the dark guy was a suspect? Should I have said something to the driver? Would she have listened to me? The truth is that those drivers aren’t scared of anything. Ziona would have pulled over and started interrogating him.
But if she’d done that, he would have pressed the button, or pulled the string, or…
Why had he waited until I got off? What kept me alive? Why had God stretched out one of his long fingers and miraculously tapped my forehead? When I got off at the Dizengoff Centre, some people got on and I heard Ziona tell one of them, ‘I’m sorry, honey, I’m full. There’s another one behind me.’ The terrorist had waited until the cab filled up and only then…
If I’d told Ziona and she’d talked to him, he would have blown himself up. If I’d shouted to everybody to be careful, he would have blown himself up. If I’d phoned the police, or told the security guards at the mall, nobody would have had time to do anything. All in all, I told myself, walking through the slow grey drops of rain that had started to fall, I was clean. I couldn’t have done anything, because the dark guy had come here to blow himself up and he would have gone ahead and done it whatever the hell I’d done. All I could have done was what I did – save myself. And even that I’d done unintentionally.
But then I thought some more and saw I was letting myself off too lightly. There was another thing I could have done. I could have been less certain that the dark guy wasn’t a terrorist. I could have saved the guy I talked to. The guy who I know now as Giora Guetta. I could have saved him because he spoke to me after the old lady got off and before I did. I remembered every word – his voice and the way he said it, the look in his eyes, the half-smile of his perfect white teeth, the way he’d swivelled his head towards the terrorist and said, ‘He looks OK to you, right?’ And how I’d said: ‘Yeah, no problem with him.’
Why had I said that?
Because I’d had enough of paranoid and hysterical people like Duchi.
And that’s why I go to the opposite extreme: no problem, everything’s fine, stop worrying and crying and moaning about everything! It was Duchi’s fault. Her responsibility. She’d damaged my sense of judgement. Without her destructive influence, without years of living in the shadow of her hysteria, without those years of her continuous premonitions of imminent catastrophe, perhaps I’d have thought more clearly and said, ‘You know what? I’m not sure. Perhaps he is a terrorist.’ And then maybe Giora would have got off with me. Who knows? If it hadn’t been for my girlfriend maybe I’d have saved a man’s life.
I found I was hungry for meat. I stopped at Bar BaraBush and ordered a hamburger called ‘The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight’. I waited at the bar and watched the small TV on it showing Channel 2: Danny Ronen talking with his usual serious face, utilising his thick eyebrows, shooting them up and down as he always does. I didn’t hear what he said but it doesn’t really matter. He always says the same thing: enforce, ease off, close, encircle, shoot the eyebrows, go out on a mission, attack, lock and siege, and the cabinet convened and the cabinet decided and these guys took responsibility and those guys showed courage…
I went to wash my hands – I think perhaps I thought I had blood on them – and on my way back I took a postcard on which GET OUT! was written in large black lettering. GET OUT? I didn’t have a clue who wanted me out or why. Outside, through the big window, the skies were opening and closing their wet mouths. I went out into them with The Cannibal Is Hungry Tonight in a bag in my hand and GET OUT! in my pocket.
I put the Cannibal and the chips I found next to it on a plate and prepared to have my way with them. Whatever was happening to my mind, my body still seemed to be functioning with amazing efficiency. My eyes sent a snapshot of the hamburger to my brain, which gave out its directives to flood my mouth with saliva and release stomach acids to welcome our new guest – and then the door buzzed.
I looked at the wall and at the Cannibal and decided not to answer. I started eating. A minute later: a key in the front door, the handle turning, somebody entering.
‘Why didn’t you open up?’
‘Hey, Dooch, sorry,’ I said. My mouth, which I’d filled with Cannibal a moment before, spoke for itself. I gestured with my shoulders towards the plate. She looked at it and her eyes immediately went into her ‘rage mode’.
‘Why don’t you answer the mobile? And what are you doing at home in the middle of the afternoon? You know there was a bomb?’
‘Yes.’ I was searching for the mobile in my bag – I must have left it at work.
‘You realise how worried I was? You couldn’t call?’
‘I’m sorry, Dooch, I was sure you were busy and…hang on a second, I did call! Didn’t you get my message?’
‘I got one message saying you were alive two hours after the bomb! Thanks very much indeed.’ I looked at her, surprised. I didn’t know what to say. ‘It was in a Little No. 5, Croc. At nine-fifteen! Did you think I wasn’t going to worry?’
‘You know I get off at the Dizengoff Centre! It was after that, near the theatre. Didn’t you see the little flame-thing on TV? Here, look.’ I found the remote and pushed the button. Danny Ronen and his eyebrows were still talking. ‘I left you a message saying I was alive. I don’t get it…’
‘I heard the message, but…’ Here tears intervened. ‘But how could I be sure?’ She wiped them away and stood there, fragile and unhappy. ‘I wasn’t sure if everything was all right. You could have called again. I was so scared! You don’t know how scared I was. I spent the whole day waiting for an adjournment, trying to get away to see you…’
I swallowed another mouthful – damn, the Cannibal was good! – and went over to hug her. ‘It’s all right, honey. I’m sorry. Come on. Stop it. I just thought you saw where it happened, you got the message so obviously I was alive, and…whatever…what do I know?’
Duchi disengaged herself from the embrace. ‘You’re saying I didn’t need to worry? I’m just hysterical? And paranoid?’ Her tone had changed: the tears weren’t there any more.
‘I didn’t say…’
‘How could you be so insensitive? Not to call just once more? You did it on purpose, didn’t you? To show me I’m just hysterical.’ Now there was anger, maturing like a good wine. ‘What do you expect me to think? It’s the bus you take every morning at that time! And I’m supposed to look at the little flame-thing on TV? What fucking flame-thing?’
‘You know, the, you know, the graphic of the map showing the bomb…Duchi, I didn’t do anything on purpose, I swear, I just…You know it was the same minibus that I was on? I actually talked to…’
‘Oh, you son of a bitch!’ She was whining now and wiped her big brown eyes with her forearm. She sat down next to the table and absent-mindedly grabbed a handful of chips.
‘Hey, go easy on the chips!’ I told her. ‘How was your day?’
‘What do you fucking think?’
We sat in silence for a few moments. I took a bite of the Cannibal and she stole chips and stared at the corner of the table and eventually lifted her eyes to me.
‘Tell me what I’m going to do with you, Croc?’ she said.
And then suddenly a thought struck me – until that morning I hadn’t known anyone who even knew anyone who’d been in a terrorist attack. A few weeks earlier the water-heater guy had come to do some work, and he said a cousin of a friend of his had been injured in a bomb in Petach Tikvah the week before. He was the closest, until Giora Guetta. But I didn’t really know Giora