Almost Dead PDF
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Almost Dead A Novel Assaf Gavron For Mum and Dad ‘Lost ground can be regained–lost time never.’ Franklin Delano Roosevelt Contents Epigraph Map 1 I climbed aboard the Little No. 5 as I did… 2 ‘Good morning, Fahmi.’ 3 My name is Eitan Enoch but everyone calls me Croc. Because:… 4 Amr Diab is singing ‘Amarein’. It’s about two moons. He means… 5 Jimmy Rafael in the meeting room. Five foot four of solid… 6 Grandfather Fahmi got angry whenever people talked about the war… 7 In 1935, two weeks after British police had violently broken… 8 ‘Fahmi…’ 9 A soldier was standing by the slip road on to… 10 Three minutes. 11 People always wonder what the last thing going through a… 12 ‘Is the ice ready, Svetlana?’ 13 I immediately knew who she was. She was on her… 14 The last time I saw Halil Abu-Zeid was when he came… 15 Despite breakfast and the omelette in pita, I headed straight… 16 ‘Good morning, Svetlana, how is he? Keeping clean? Reactions?’ 17 After I dropped Shuli off at the King David my… 18 ‘We’re human beings, not angels,’ Bilahl said brusquely. Surprisingly, he… 19 After four days of rain and fog it dawned so… 20 ‘The last thing in the world I need is those… 21 I don’t know where I’d be today, or who, if… 22 ‘How did he behave? Very naturally, Tommy. More than you’d… 23 I woke to moans of pain–whose, I didn’t know because… 24 Why no music, Svet? Play me one of my tapes… 25 I visited the support group every Wednesday for the next… 26 ‘You know something, Fahmi? I think you may be the… 27 I tried to return to my previous life, and to… 28 Al-Amari was becoming unbearable. The curfew was lifted and then… 29 Time’s Arrow–Every Second Counts. But when I returned to work… 30 Omar Sharif came from the village of Beita al-Fauka near Nablus. 31 Shuli died on a Wednesday, thirteen weeks after the attack. 32 I met Dayek after about an hour of fast walking. 33 In the nights, memories and theories and Guetta and Shuli… 34 I’d been anxious about coming to Kafr Qasim but within a… 35 ‘Are you completely crazy, Croc?’ She looked a little crazy… 36 The doctor told me that if I didn’t want to… 37 ‘What day does Elvis come?’ 38 I fixed his PalmPilot in half an hour. The contacts… 39 Friday was the beginning of the end of the summer. 40 During the whole long day I spent with the Croc,… 41 ‘Nailed it!’ said Bar. 42 ‘Hello, sweetheart. Let’s see how you’re doing…oh, hardly anything. 43 Warshawski looked even older than he had the first time… About the Author Other Books by Assaf Gavron Credits Copyright About the Publisher Map 1 I climbed aboard the Little No. 5 as I did every morning on my way to work. ‘Little No. 5’ is what I call the minibus-sized cab which follows the route of the No. 5 bus. It’s actually a cross between a bus and a cab. You get the best of both worlds–the familiar route and the cheapness of the bus, but they’ve got the speed of a cab and you can hail them and get off where you like. And since there were bombs all the time, I only ever took Little No. 5s to work and back. Even if a real No. 5 arrived at my stop before a Little No. 5 I let it pass. A bus was too easy a target for a terrorist–especially the No. 5, which was almost always full and had already been bombed. I wasn’t really all that sure about doing this, but Duchi made me swear never to take the bus. And they were never going to bomb a Little No. 5. For one thing, they can only take ten people, eleven with the driver. Plus there’s only the one door, at the front, so the driver can see exactly who gets on board. That day I got on at the usual place. The time was around nine in the morning. A pale midwinter sun was hanging in a translucent sky; wet leaves covered the boulevard. The driver was Ziona. She was the only woman driver in the Little No. 5 fleet but she was no pushover. She was always yelling down the radio at the dispatcher in the office, complaining about some guy who’d dared to overtake her or cut her up, or wondering how the hell that Jumbo had gotten so far ahead of her. A Jumbo’s a bus, in the Little No. 5 drivers’ dialect. The dispatcher was always telling her to shut up and stop hogging the frequency. Maybe she ought to chill out? Maybe she ought to stop drilling a hole in everybody’s head, including the heads of the passengers? And Ziona would take a drag from the cigarette she liked to hang outside her window and whisper to herself as she exhaled, ‘Oh, ffffuuuckk your fucking hole in the head!’ We were heading down Dizengoff Street when an elderly lady turned to me. Quietly she said: ‘Doesn’t that man look suspicious?’ With her eyes she indicated a dark guy at the front. We were sitting at the back. He was wearing a grey wool hat and holding a suit in a suit bag.
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