CrocAttack!. Assaf Gavron
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ratio, number of workers per shift, optimum shift lengths), ergonomic callcentre design, HR management, marketing strategies, pricing and distribution. All this, with periodic software upgrades thrown in, is yours for a million dollars on the table and a yearly licence costing half a million, more or less, in truth somewhat less than more – especially lately when everyone seems to be in crisis.
Interested?
I read the names of the dead on Ynet. Some of the photos I recognised. The manager of the minibus company said of the ‘driver, 36’: ‘Ziona was irreplaceable; everybody at the station loved her.’ There was Gabriel Algrably, 41, a widower builder who left behind two girls, ages 11 and 13. Two Hungarians, short-contract workers. Mali, a young woman, a student in the Vital College of Design: ‘a flower plucked in full bloom’. Shlomo Yarkoni, 29. ‘The most wonderful husband in the world,’ said his widow Yael, ‘four months pregnant and biting back her tears’. The suicide bomber, Shafiq Omar, 19 years old.
I met some of the families. After everything else happened, after they heard about me, they wanted to get in touch. Shlomo Yarkoni’s widow Yael called to ask whether I remembered him, but I didn’t. I hadn’t recognised the photo on Ynet. He probably got on at the Centre. A week after Yael, a woman named Smadar called me, also about Shlomo. He had visited her a few minutes before the bomb. He had left his phone in her flat. The phone rang endlessly all morning, and she didn’t answer. She didn’t turn it off either. She just stared at it and knew. She’d heard the boom. It was a beautiful winter morning. She sat and looked at the ringing phone all day, his sperm still warm inside her.
There was one unidentifiable body. It had to be him. I took out his Palm and stared at it. Should I hand it to the police? Or his family? But Giora had made me a request, the last request of his life. I turned the Palm on and watched the black letters flicker in the grey liquid crystal. Yesterday, the last day of his life, he’d had a meeting in Tel Aviv at eight in the morning and then nothing until the evening, where he’d written: ‘Shuli?’ The name he’d told me. The one I was going to look for.
I synchronised – I transferred all the information from Giora Guetta’s PalmPilot to my computer for back-up. I saved it just for the hell of it. Much later I thought: I did it instinctively, as if I knew there was information in there that I was going to need…
The offices of Time’s Arrow are located on the twenty-third floor of the Dizengoff Centre, with views over the Mediterranean and the dense houses of Tel Aviv, ugly when seen from above. I checked the Belgian company’s website and then called Switzerland.
‘Ivan!’
‘Eitan. How are you? I heard you’ve just had a bomb in Tel Aviv.’
‘Oh yeah, yeah: nothing to worry about.’ This is company policy – to play down any whiff of terrorist activity in the Middle East in general and the Tel Aviv area specifically. If anything should happen and, with the help of the negative and sensationalising global media, reach the ears of our overseas clients and potential investors, it should be treated with at most the interest an elephant might display at a fly landing on its forehead – not even a passing annoyance. ‘Near you, though, wasn’t it? Central Tel Aviv?’ ‘Nooo, not really. Didn’t even hear it, actually.’ (That’s right: I was in the elevator.) ‘And you? Anything blown up in Zurich lately?’
He roared. The Swiss are important customers. The system’s enjoying great success there. But Ivan is continually asking for changes and new features. He has good ideas, but who has the time? Making changes to the software is like trying to storm the Great Wall of China with the Chinese army ranged along it with machine guns: you have to talk to the people from Product, Marketing, R&D, Quality Assurance (QA), Installations…every one of whom is working full time on something else. Jimmy says that, as a small company, we can provide solutions and services with ‘a speed and flexibility that bigger companies can only dream of’. This is complete bullshit, of course: we’re infinitely less agile or flexible than some giant megacorporation like Koor.
Ivan made lots of suggestions. I told him they were all excellent. My head was aching.
A few minutes after noon, the inboxes of the thirty or so employees of Time’s Arrow all receive a message from Talia Tenne that says, ‘Food?’ Today she’d ordered from Salsalat but I didn’t fancy a salad and went for a schnitzel from the Coffee Bar along with Bar, Ron, Shoko from IT Support and Yoash Green, who works with me in Sales and whose wife left him. Our food arrived with the salads, and we sat with Talia Tenne and the girls in the dining area, where Bar browsed through Yediot Achronot, the main paper out here. ‘Shulamit Penigstein, seventy-two,’ read Bar, ‘who disembarked only a few stops before the explosion, had serious doubts about the suicide bomber: “I tried to draw the attention of my fellow passengers to him,” she said, ”but they just sneered at me.”’
‘So, Croc,’ Talia Tenne said, ‘what’s this about you being in the attack yesterday?’
‘That’s right, I’m dead.’
‘No, like…weren’t you near it or something?’
‘Pretty damn close. Dizengoff Centre. Big building, not far from the attack?’
‘Stop being a pain.’
I like Talia Tenne. She’s naive and funny and cares for the nutrition of most of the company’s workers, which is nice. And pretty, very pretty. Her skin is as white and smooth as silk.
‘Unbelievable how this intifada’s getting closer…it’s going to be here soon.’
Occasionally I looked eastwards out of the dining area’s windows, waiting for a plane to appear and crash into our tower.
‘If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad,’said Shoko, chewing chicken, ‘Muhammad will come to the mountain.’
The week the intifada broke out, Time’s Arrow had a day of massages organised in the Sea View Hotel in the north. But there were riots on the way north and the roads were blocked. So we went to Sde Dov, the little airstrip in North Tel Aviv, and flew to Mahanayim and took a taxi from there to the Sea View. From the plane we thought we saw smoke from tyres burning on the roads. We sat at the Sea View in white towelling robes, sipped herbal tea and submitted to our oily Swedish massages.
‘Don’t laugh – they’ll take this tower down one day.’
‘A booby-trapped car goes to the upper car park, drives straight through that laughable little stick that calls itself a barrier and sits itself directly underneath the building: boom!’
‘Shoko, I’m eating, stop it already!’
Twenty-seven minutes is the average time I spend on lunch – I worked it out once.
I didn’t feel at all like working. A report on Ynet said the last body from the Little No. 5 had finally been identified. Giora Guetta, 23 years old, from Jerusalem. My man. I can’t stay here any longer, I thought, I’ve got to find his girlfriend. I stood up and said, as I said every day, ‘One small step for a man, and an even smaller step for mankind.’
‘A half-day, then?’ asked Ron. It was a running joke: I always said the same thing and he always gave the same answer even if it was eight in the evening, which it usually was. But today it really was going to be a half-day.
‘Yeah. A half-day.’
Grandfather Fahmi got angry whenever people talked about the war of 1948 as the Nakba; the Disaster. People didn’t like talking about it at all, but he did. Because he and his friends did things. They resisted. He told me how they used to hit convoys of Jews going up to Jerusalem. They’d descend from the village to the ridges above the road to Jerusalem and shoot at the buses. The road would close and the Jews wouldn’t be able to go through to Jerusalem – they managed to cut Jerusalem off for weeks like this. The Jews themselves admit it. They’ve left the wrecks