Читать книгу CrocAttack! - Assaf Gavron - Страница 17

People always wonder what the last thing going through a person’s mind before he died was. Who did they think about – their kids, their parents, their partner, their first love? Did they ever think about love in general? Did their whole life replay itself like a movie? In the case of the soldier who rode with me that night from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I’m pretty sure I know the answer. The last thought running through his mind before dying, which he expressed with great conviction, was: ‘My finger! Fucking cunt, I can’t feel it!’

The Polo was one of the three or four cars in front of the bus which were hit. There were several cars behind it that also got shot up and others damaged in the subsequent crashes, but the bus, the No. 480, was the main target and took most of the bullets. The next day I saw the diagram in the papers. They got the colour of the Polo wrong, of course. And the direction it was facing when it stopped. And the location of the gunmen. But never mind. This is what happened: since we were ahead of the snipers, they were shooting at us from behind. The first bullet shattered the rear windscreen and hit my mobile phone, which was resting in its holder. The second bullet came through the empty frame and hit the middle finger of the left hand of the soldier, Menachem something, nicknamed Humi by his family and friends. That was when I stamped on the brake and Humi screamed. Apparently a smashed finger is immensely painful. I couldn’t see much. He was holding his left hand with his right and there was a lot of blood. He screamed with a powerful voice, a huge voice I’d never have guessed he possessed during the previous half an hour: ‘Aaaiii!! Fucking CUNT! AAAIII!! MY FINGER!!’ In great pain, he said, ‘I’ve got a field dressing in the small pocket of my combat trousers. Get it out.’ Field dressing – the kind of hateful phrase you forget exists until you give a soldier a lift. I fished the bandage out but I was too late: he had got out of the car. In retrospect it was a mistake, but he couldn’t have been thinking clearly. The snipers kept firing. I don’t think they were aiming. Humi was standing on the road beside the Polo. I didn’t get out. Call it instinct. I stayed in the car and kept my head down. Humi kept screaming, ‘HELP ME! HELP ME! MY FINGER!! FUCKING CUNT, I CAN’T FEEL IT!’ and then he was whimpering and then there was a little ‘ai’ and no more. I didn’t hear the shot or hear him fall: what I did hear was a sudden silence. That was the surprising thing. I crawled out of my side of the car and round the front until I got to him. He didn’t look too good. His left hand held a palmful of blood and as far as I could see the middle finger – the finger that gestures ‘fuck you’ – wasn’t there. No wonder he couldn’t feel it. His throat was a bloody pool.

It was the first body I had ever seen. Until that moment, in the thirty-three and a third years I’d spent on Planet Earth, I had never encountered a body, not in the army nor on the roads nor in hospitals; not Grandma or Grandpa. Humi was my first, and though you might have hoped he was only unconscious, even I could tell he was indisputably dead. The next day I read that the bullet had hit the third vertebra of the spine. He would have died within a couple of minutes. It is an injury you cannot survive.

I crouched next to him. I didn’t touch him or look at him again: I shut my eyes and breathed in deeply. The shooting had ceased when I was crawling around the car and hadn’t been renewed. There were shouts from the direction of the bus behind me, and the wounded moaning, begging for help which I couldn’t give: I only wanted to get the hell away from there. I ran to the side of the road and blundered into the forest. I didn’t know what I was doing: I might have been running towards the terrorists. Maybe I’d have run straight into them and…but I didn’t think. I had to get into the cool and dark forest and breathe some real air. Not perhaps because it was the first body I had ever seen, or because this body belonged to a guy who’d spent the last half-hour of his life beside me. Nor even because of the responsibility I bore for his death – because it was me who had brought him to the point in time and space where it happened, and the speed at which I drove, the cars I overtook or didn’t, the lane I chose, the moment I hit the brake were all my decisions.

But I wasn’t thinking of anything when I ran from the road to the forest. I fell on to the damp thorns and breathed the air, smelling the moist earth, and then I opened my eyes and saw patches of cloudy sky between the branches and saw myself flying up, above the trees, above the clouds and the sky, looking down and seeing Earth quickly diminishing, zooming out from Shaar Hagai, from Israel, from the Middle East, from Africa, Europe, Asia, zooming out from Planet Earth, from the halo of light surrounding it, from the darkness surrounding the light, past the sun and other stars… and I was in space. I saw aliens fighting among themselves, creatures from different galaxies, and then I stopped. And looked down.

Why does it matter who is where, and which people, on which piece of land?

Zoom in to Planet Earth. Continents fighting continents – black against white against brown against yellow. World wars. Zoom in towards the countries, the neighbours hunkered down in their hatreds; zoom in towards the related nations, the brother- or the cousin-nations of the old Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, the subcontinent, the Middle East.

Zoom in – Palestinians and Israelis.

Zoom in – Orientals and Ashkenazis, right and left. Keep zooming in, to the cities, the quarters, the neighbourhoods, street against street, house against house, flat against flat, husband against wife, brother against brother. Now zoom out, flying fast, with the cacophony speeded up into twittering gibberish, and do it all over again.

I opened my eyes. Another thought fluttered down from the trees and settled in my head. Here is where Tel Aviv ends and Jerusalem begins. This is what I thought. I told myself, again and again. Here is where Tel Aviv ends and Jerusalem begins.

I don’t know how long it took before I returned to the car. Humi still lay on the ground. I heard ambulances arriving. I didn’t know what I should do. Part of me wanted to get into the car and drive away. It was over, and there was nothing I could do to help anyone. The road ahead was clear, except for squad cars and ambulances arriving against the direction of the traffic. Either my ears or phone were ringing. But as I approached the driver’s side, somebody blocked me.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘What “yes, sir?” My phone’s ringing.’

‘You just came from the forest out there, didn’t you?’

I looked back to where I’d come from.

‘What were you doing there?’

I lay on my back and flew out of the atmosphere. What did he want from me? Who was he?

‘Who the hell are you? What…’

‘The question is who are you and what were you doing there?’

I hadn’t even registered that he was a cop. I had to fish out my ID card. He went to his car and confirmed that the car was mine and only then did he let me enter it. I stretched my hand out to the phone and then I saw that its display had been shattered: perhaps I’d heard its final dying cry. Could a telephone be considered a victim of hostilities?

Hostilities – what a word. Did the snipers feel any hostility? I guess they did.

I stood around for several minutes, near more people who were standing around for several minutes. The paramedics did their jobs, and we stood around them and looked bewildered. Many people were on the phone, in the talking-on-the-mobile-after-a-terrorist-attack posture: the phone is pressed against the ear more tightly than usual, than necessary, as if the words coming in are more important on such an occasion, and mustn’t be allowed to escape. A slight bending of the back and the neck thrust forward as if setting oneself to attack an enemy or climb a mountain. The eyebrows frown, the forehead is creased, and the other hand – this is strange – the other hand is always held to the other temple, thumb to ear, fingers over the forehead. Perhaps it’s to listen better, or perhaps it’s a way to cover the eyes in a gesture of ‘Oy vey’. A whole roadful of people gesturing ‘Oy vey’.

The policeman wrote down my details. The ID card was fished out again. I was told I would be invited to give evidence. I signed something. I checked the car. Apart from the shattered rear window and the shards of glass in the back, nothing had happened. Not a bullet, not a scratch, nor even a bloodstain. Even the phone holder hadn’t got a scratch. Only the smell of Humi the soldier, sour sweat mixed with gun oil, lingered in the car. And his gun was still there, too.

I took it out and laid it gently next to Humi’s body. I was beginning to feel the adrenalin of the survivor, the euphoria of the saved. Everybody there was, I think. We were alive! The bodies spread around us, the groans of the wounded, the medics working, the smell of cordite, the ringing in our ears – and we were alive! More alive than we’d ever been. Our bodies were trembling with life, our hearts greedily beating, the blood pumping double speed in our veins. My body was working and warmed up and craving motion. I had to get out of there. I got into the car and drove away at a speed I could scarcely contain, and the radio came on with the engine and took me straight back to the moment before it all started. When was it, an hour ago? The sound of the radio, the way the reception faded and the soldier had said something and then started screaming. I changed to a station from Jerusalem and there it was, of course, the old song of mourning: Bab al-Wad, remember our names for ever, Bab al-Wad, on the way to town