Almost Dead Part 6

G.o.ddam you, you Jewish b.i.t.c.hes. Can you not shut up for one second?

'Here! Exactly like this, Doctor!'

'I see. Mmm...impressive reactions to loud sounds. And these movements too? Bending the shoulders, converging?'

'Converg...what? Sorry, I don't understand...'

'Ice, please.'

f.u.c.k this ice. f.u.c.k this...aaaiiiiii!!

'Nice. Very nice. His EVM is up a bit. Maybe we're seeing a little improvement. Continue with the therapy as before. Deep ma.s.saging, muscle movements...'

'Yes, yes, of course.'

Oh, you gang of wh.o.r.es...

If this dream is never-ending then I'm in h.e.l.l. But I'm not here. I'm floating in the sea. I'm riding a white horse. I'm in a car with the Croc, holding an apple.

Bilahl wanted more. He wanted bigger. Halil Abu-Zeid, on the other hand, was careful. He was worried. He knew the Israelis were furious. The smallest error and they would attack with all their claws unsheathed. The night's events revolved endlessly through my mind, trapped in there perhaps because I couldn't share them: the walk, the smells, our eyrie on the ridge, the waiting, the bus climbing up the slope in the far lane, the three minutes when it seemed as if my body was one huge shuddering heartbeat. I thought of Grandfather Fahmi, and of Mother. Abu-Zeid told us to keep our heads down for a week. But Bilahl wanted to get going.

Safi Bari was the bomb expert. Bilahl wanted me to work with him. Because I'd studied and worked a little in electricity with Uncle Jalahland still intended, somewhere, some time, to study electrical engineeringit wasn't difficult. I had the basics: a light touch, steady hands, cautiousness and patience. Safi has a degree in chemistry from a Bulgarian university. No one would have guessed he was the number-one bomb guy in the Izz ad-Din al-Qa.s.sam Brigades. He was short and thin, with a beard as spa.r.s.e as a sixteen-year-old's and small mousy almond eyes. He spoke in a clear quiet voice and wore a little black cap and a rather elegant jacket which made him look like a French painter in a cartoon or a movie.

The essential component in most bombs is a molecule named triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, or the 'mother of the devil'. It's easy to manufacture, but unstable and evaporates easily. Dozens have been killed while preparing it. You can prepare it from hydrogen peroxidethe stuff used to lighten hair, which you can pick up in the pharmacy. Or from acetonethe paint thinner you can get in a hardware store, with a small addition of hydrochloric acid. RDX is an explosive based on the same triacetone triperoxide molecule, but its force is greater. It's also more dangerous, both to prepare and to carry. The ingredients of RDX are ammonia, from the packs of dry ice stocked by large supermarkets or from agricultural fertiliser, concentrated nitric acid, which can be produced by melting and filtering black gunpowder from bullets, distilled sulphuric acid from a car's battery and distilled water, from the pharmacy in Ramall...

'Habibi, habibi, habibi, ya nur el-ein, Habibi, Habibi...'

Oh, Svetlana, please don't try to sing. I'm in the middle of something, I'm...where was I?

'I'm really getting into these tapes, Fahmi. She always comes and she never talks. She just plays you the music. Always on her own, never with the family. She's cute. Is she your girlfriend, Fahmi?'

I don't know who...Rana? Rana comes? I haven't talked to her since she...she comes here? Svetlana, why can't you shut your mouth? I was doing something important. I was...

Sixty-eight milliletres of concentrated sulphuric acid in a flask. Thirty-two grams of pota.s.sium nitrate. With a stirring rod help the components blend into each other. Very gently, warm the flask on the cooker. Fill a bucket with ice and a thermometer. Lay a gla.s.s in the bucket and pour in the concentrated nitric acid. When the temperature in the bucket goes below 30 degrees, add hexaminecrushed fuel tablets from the Home Centre. Mix. Add ice and salt to the bucket until the temperature goes down to zero. Add ammonia. Mix and keep the temperature below zero for five minutes. Pour the mixture on to a litre of crushed ice and let it melt. Filter the crystals and pour away excess liquid. Lay the crystals in half a litre of distilled water that has been boiled. Filter them and test with litmus paper. Continue mixing in crushed ice and filtering until the litmus paper turns blue and the crystals are stable and safe.

'Habibi, habibi, habibi, ya nur el-ein...'

G.o.d help you, Svetlana. Are you a demon? Have you been sent here to torture me?

'And what's he singing anyway? I'll ask your sister. Maybe she'll teach me a little Arabic so I could talk to you?'

G.o.d forbid.

Safi is from Bani Naim, near Hebron. His grandfather made explosives from old ammunition s.h.i.+pped by Haj Amin Al-Husseini from Cairo to Hebron at the end of the Second World War. Husseini spent most of the war sitting in Berlin, and after the German surrender he turned up in Cairo, from where he would send over weapons and ammunition that had survived the war. The weapons were rusty or broken or ruined by sandItalian or Czech or Russian, not as good as the British or German weapons, left lying in the desert for months. But Ali Bari had golden hands. He dismantled the bullets, grenades and rifles and rea.s.sembled them. Sometimes he rea.s.sembled them differently from the way they were originally made, and occasionally he a.s.sembled something completely new. Safi's grandfather lost two fingers and an eye over the years, but the British and the Jews lost much more than that. He was eventually killed in '49 while preparing explosives to be used in Jerusalem. His wife was eight months pregnant and she called the baby Ali, after his father. At the age of sixteen Ali Junior started working in the Hebron quarries as an explosives expert. He had eight sons. 'My father started teaching me at the age of four,' Safi told me. 'My brothers moved into other fields of chemistry. One of them is a professor in Boston. Two work in pharmaceutical factories in Jordan. But Father always continued manufacturing bombs, even after he retired from the quarry. He loved the profession.'

'Lulu! How are you?'

'Me, I'm fine. But how is he? Is he smiling? Or am I just imagining it?'

'He's good. We had a successful check-up. Didn't we, Fahmi? Lulu, I wanted to ask you, because he can't tell me-'

'What? The people outside?'

'No, no, I'm just curious: what is "yanur aline" "yanur aline"?'

'Ya nur el-ein. The light in your eyes. It's Amr Diab. You like it? The light in your eyes. It's Amr Diab. You like it?'

'Very much. The light in your eyes. It's Fahmi's song. Every morning I put a light to his eyes with the torch...'

'I don't know this tape. Who brought it?'

'Ah. The girl who comes and sits next to him and never says a word and goes after an hour. A pretty girl. Who is she?'

'Don't know. Maybe Rana? Rana, I think.'

Rana? Truly? Then why doesn't she speak?

Dad called. The calls with him were difficult. He asked about my studies. And about life, what I was doing with my days. About Rana. And I couldn't...I hated lying to him. So I tried not talking to him, not answering when I saw where the call was coming from. But it could have been Lulu calling so sometimes I did answer. And sometimes he would call his brother in the flat and then ask to talk to me. I knew he sensed something. I felt he had made the connection. He knew how proud Grandfather Fahmi was of the shooting at Beit-Machsir in '48 and I was sure he didn't want to believe it, but part of him suspected...

Sweat on Safi's forehead. From time to time he laid the material to rest and retreated into the corner to breathe air, opened the window, breathed in, and then shut it and went back to work. The blue crystals were drying on kitchen paper.

C-1 compoundthe bomb you make from RDXis made of a mixture of 54.6 per cent RDX crystals, 28.4 per cent mineral oil from the supermarket, and 17 per cent lecithin, from the vitamin section in the pharmacy. Mix the three in a plastic bag. Pour the mixture into plastic tubes and place the tubes into an explosive belt sewn specially with straps for the shoulders and pockets around the body for the tubes and the pieces of metalthe nails, ball-bearings and shrapnel that will fly from the force of the explosion and cause more damage than the explosive itself.

What? What's funny? I love your laughter, Lulu.

'Was it him, Svetlana? Are you sure?'

'Ha ha...! Of course! He does it all the time...'

Oh, merciful G.o.d. Take this wh.o.r.e away from me...

Electricity. Two precautions prevent the explosive from blowing up prematurely. The batteryusually from a mobile phoneshould be connected at the last minute. Keep it apart. Besides the battery you need to prepare the actual detonator, which can be found in many places, like missile games from toy shops or military flares. Connect the detonator to some of the RDX tubes, make a safety catcha nail held across the activation b.u.t.ton of the detonatorand then close the electric circuit with the battery. Don't connect it all the way. Now the bomb is ready.

The bomb was ready. Safi said, 'Make another cup of tea,' in his quiet voice, pus.h.i.+ng the b.u.t.tons of his mobile phone.

13

I immediately knew who she was. She was on her own.

The broken mother, the shocked father, sisters or friends crying bitterly, the minister the government had felt obliged to send, and whose name I forget, bespectacled, too European for this crowd, chubby, a Likudnik's look in his soft eyesand there she was on her own, in the corner of the congregation, with her straight black hair and her black eyes, her black coat, her black bag.

The close-packed crowd raised the temperature around the grave by a degree or two. Breath, body heat, traces of hot air blown through plastic car heaters still clinging to the mourners. You could see the steam rising up from them into a rain that fell without pause. I hadn't brought a coat because it's not cold in Tel Aviv. She looked up into the rain, stared straight into the drops while they landed on her face and eyes and mixed with her own tears and dissolving make-up.

'Shuli?'

She looked at me, didn't recognise me, and lowered her eyes. 'Not now,' she murmured, and I stepped back. The father's voice had been crushed into gravel. And then the rabbi, with his clear loud voice, sang songs that he was convinced with all his heart reached the ears of G.o.d, whom he was convinced with all his heart existed, and whom he was convinced with all his heart belonged to him alone, who had chosen his people from all other nations, who had chosen from everything only him. 'Ya, right', as Duchi would have said.

Earlier, breakfast with my parents in Rehavia: toast and peanut b.u.t.ter and jam. Unsatisfactory filter coffee. Or maybe I was the unsatisfactory one. At home I drink decaffeinated filter. I went off caffeine as part of the time management and relaxation workshop I attended. I don't remember how it's related but it's the only thing I took home from that workshop, apart from the group leader and time management expert Miriam's mantra: 'Each and every day we all get the same number of minutes'and, Duchi of course, whom I met there.

Freshly squeezed orange juice and curious parental stares. Yochanan (Jonny) and Leah (Lili) Enoch. The peanut b.u.t.ter importer and the English teacher. She's been teaching English in the same high school for thirty years, and I never stop asking myself, how can you do the same thing for thirty yearsand will I need to as well? Mind you, maybe a permanent and secure job is better than convincing yourself that you're going to introduce peanut b.u.t.ter to the natives of the Levant and monopolise the market. But, what can you do, the natives decided to do it on their own, and they even called it 'Egozan', which just means 'nut spread', a linguistic error which almost broke his heart. He turned to exporting, and then back to importing when it looked as if the market was opening up to American products at the end of the seventies. Eventually, when Dafdaf was born and it dawned on him that he had three children to provide for, and his mother in America had threatened to fly over and physically drag him back to Maryland if he didn't get a proper job, Yochanan Enoch compromised and found work as a sales agent for the food giant Elite and thus found himself selling, among the other products he was responsible for getting on to the shelves of the supermarkets and groceries around Jerusalem, thousands upon thousands of jars of Egozan, the paste that broke his heart.

They read about the attack in Haaretz Haaretz. The headline was: 'On The Way To The City'. Twelve dead. It was thought that the terrorists, probably from Bethlehem or Hebron, had walked all night to escape. The radio was on, turned up very loud, voices talking about the victims and their funerals and about the funerals of the victims of the previous attacks.

'Hold on.' I stopped Dad, who was halfway through saying something. 'Giora Guetta's funeral will leave the cemetery in Givat Shaul at ten.' I looked at my watch and apologised: 'I've got to make a move.' Their curious and worried looks followed me. Some other time, I thought; some other time I'll tell them about being there last night and about the attack in Tel Aviv. And why I suddenly turned up out of the blue. And of course, I owed them an explanation for why Duchi and I hadn't set a new date for a wedding. But I couldn't deal with it now. There was no point, and it was hard enough for them anyway. They'd come to this hole in the desert to give themselves and their children an ident.i.ty and a good life, and in return all they'd got was destruction.

At funerals you have the prayers, and then the silence, and then the sniffs. At first you don't notice them; your ears filter them out. But once you become aware of them you realise they're almost as loud as the rain. Hundreds of sniffs from all around you. It's infectious. I sniffed too, though I scarcely knew Giora Guetta.

The minister spoke. He said something about the long arm (of the IDF) and the extended hand (of forgiveness). Outreach. That was the word. He said something about wretched creatures. He said something about forces beyond our understanding, and the sniffs said: Come on, shut up.

Giora's younger brother talked about the light in his eyes, about innocence and kindness. About his modesty. I thought about the Giora I had met, with the showy honey-coloured hair and shades. I hadn't seen any modesty there, but who knew, people have their untypical moments. Giora Guetta and I had known each other for about eight minutes and he'd said about thirty words to me. He'd said 'He looks OK to you, right?' and 'Listen, if something happens to me, I want you to tell my girlfriend in Jerusalem, Shuli, I want you to tell her...' and 'I know nothing's going to happen, but if it does...' I hadn't taken any of it seriously. It was an uncorrectable mistake.

The crowd started to disperse, though some remained for long minutes by the graveside. I stood a good way apart from everyone and watched Shuli out of the corner of my eye. She stood in the corner, separate, on her own. I decided I liked the high arches of her cheekbones. At last she turned and began to walk away. She had long legs and an upright way of walking. Self-a.s.sured, but not at the expense of tenderness, I thought. As she pa.s.sed the fresh dirt of the grave, on which a wreath and a small sign with an image of a candelabrum and Giora's name handwritten on it were laid, she halted for a few seconds and then went on, nodding to one or two friends but not speaking to the parents. At the heart of the little group that was left by the grave there was a girl who couldn't stop crying. Guetta's mother had her enfolded in a long hug. I a.s.sumed the sobbing girl was Guetta's long-time girlfriend, possibly an ex, but still loved by his parents, thought of as a family member and recognised by friends as Giora's girl. Shuli, I continued with my theory, was a recent addition. Hardly knew his parents, if at all. Giora had been too nervous to introduce her, because of the sobbing girl. But my script turned out to be wrong: so completely and utterly wrong it ended up breaking the ice with Shuli, because when she heard it she laughed for the first time in two days.

I caught up with her as she was walking from the grave to the car park, measuring her steps carefully on the steep gradient, her eyes on the path.

'Are you Shuli?'

I fell into step beside her and she looked at me. Pretty eyes.

'Who are you?'

'I saw Giora just before...'

'He's dead.'

'I know.'

Silence. A pretty voice, too. She kept her eyes lowered. I was panting a little with the incline. The Mountain of Rest, they call the cemetery in Jerusalem, and it really is a mountain: a whole hill of the dead.

'What was he doing in Tel Aviv?'

'What? I don't know.'

'He never went to Tel Aviv. Why on earth Tel Aviv? Wherever he went, he always told me. I never even had to ask. Was he visiting you?'

'No. I was on the bus. The taxi. The minibus. I got off before the...'

It didn't seem to be of any interest to her. She kept walking, silently.

'You don't want to know what he told me?'

'Will it change anything?'

'Maybe.'

She didn't answer.