Lavie Tidhar - The Tel Aviv Dossier

FIRST EDITION

The Tel Aviv Dossier 2009 by Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv

Jacket illustration 2009 by Erik Mohr

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

Toronto, Canada

www.chizinepub.com

savory@rogers.com

Edited by Brett Alexander Savory

Copyedited and proofread by Sandra Kasturi

Converted to Mobipocket and ePub by Christine http://cmbs.cnc.net

ISBN 978-0-9809410-5-0

Houses lie, bleached white, along the empty highways. Pylons jut at angles like bones, the soft black hair of power-lines obscures the stumps of the phone towers. There is a silence in the air. No radio, no phone, no television signal penetrate into that silence. The city lies entombed in sand and sun. The sea is black with tar. There are no cars. There are no children playing in the yard. Forgotten laundry flaps on lean-to balconies, in bathrooms taps run empty, burping air. We are not there. Where did we go? Beyond, beyond. On top a hill a man looks far and sees a promise he will not now reach. There are no songs. We who were there are here no more.

Im standing in the old bus station filming the refugees from Darfur when it happens. The sky turns almost imperceptibly darker, and where before the air was hot and still now a breeze picks up, running against my cheek like a wet tongue, and I taste salt. I am annoyed because I need to take another light reading now and the scene in front of me is shifting, but I have no choice. I am making a new documentary, my third. You might have seen my previous work A Closed House , about that orphanage in Beer Sheva, or The Painted Eyes , about the Russian immigrant prostitutes that I filmed right here in the old bus station of Tel Aviv. I take social issues seriously I think its important to bring them to the publics attention, even though it is hard to make a living this way and I still have to work as an usher at the cinema three days a week. I dont mind, at least its still working with films, and at least I dont have to be a waitress like all the wannabe actresses and singers and dancers in Tel Aviv.

I am here at the station to film the refugees that are smuggled into Israel across the Egyptian border. Theyre from Darfur, in Sudan, and they came here looking for a place where they wont be killed or tortured or raped. In response, the government locked them up. Our local human rights organizations petitioned the supreme court, which held that the imprisonment was unlawful. Following that, the refugees were abandoned in the streets of Beer Sheva and elsewhere in the country, and today a group of them was being dumped in Tel Aviv.

While I am filming I cant help notice that the sun seems to dim and the sky is no longer a bright blue but greying and there are streaks of colour running through it, red and black, and clouds are forming in crazy spiral shapes. It is all happening very rapidly. On the ground the refugees are just milling about, looking lost and hopeless, and the few civil rights people waiting for them are handing out sandwiches and trying to see if they can match people to the lists on their clipboards. I hope they can find everyone accommodation. Id offer too, but Im sharing a flat with two other people already. Anyway, now almost everyone is looking up too. The wind is picking up and the air feels strange, like theres a raw current of electricity in it. It makes the hairs on my arms stand and I feel sweaty. I point the camera at the sky. Points of light are prickling in the swirling vista of a storm. They look like stars, but

The wind picks up even more, pushing me, as if its trying to jerk the camera from my hands. I spin around and the camera pans across the old terminal and someone screams.

I dont know what is happening. The camera is showing the refugees running, though since they dont know where to go they are just shooting off in different directions. There is a low thrumming sound and the earth seems to vibrate. As I turn I see a shawarma stand and there is the sound of an explosion and I think terrorists. Its a terrorist attack. They always go for the old bus station. The front of the shawarma stand explodes outwards and bricks fly over my head. There are more screams and I am still filming the source of the explosion. The old walls seem to wobble, they move almost like jelly, and something is pushing out of them, vast and incomprehensible, something like glistening air and the smell of salt gets stronger and the wind pushes me and again I almost fall and all the angles suddenly become crazy.

Something, like a column of air, is moving through the bus station, tearing apart buildings, the road, lifting up people. I watch through the camera as a Darfur family gets sucked into the air and shredded their bits like blood oranges fly in all directions and splatter the ground. I try to run but the maelstrom of air is sucking me towards it, more people are torn apart and I watch an old Chasid in black as he rises in the air and then explodes. Theres a rain of blood over the old bus station and the sky darkens further above and the wind moans between the buildings. Another thing rises slowly from the ground and then another one and now cars are flying through the air and I see one bus crushed with people inside it, flattened on the road and blood is sipping out through the cracks that are all thats left of the windows. Im running, Im holding the camera but its not pointing anywhere, all I can think of is trying to get away. I weave a path between the things and the wind sucks me once here and once there but as long as I stay in a half-way point I manage not to get sucked in. Everywhere people are screaming and I realize I am screaming too. Something hits me in the face and I try not to look but as it falls I see it, someones hand, I even notice the wedding ring and the thick black hairs on the knuckles, a mans hand. Is this happening all over the city? Does Iran have a new type of weapon and theyve finally used it on us? Is it Hezbollah? Is it Hamas? The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades? I run as hard as I can, away from the station, without direction. I think the camera is still on.

It has been, all in all, a very good day, though it didnt start like one. We rescued a kid who got stuck in a locked bathroom somewhere in Dizengoff street right after beginning our shift, and then spent the rest of the morning sitting in the station, doing nothing except arguing about the proper usage of axes in general and my own axe in particular, a subject upon which Avi and Yekutiel were rather too willing to dwell.

Couldnt you have at least tried to open the door in some conventional way before chopping it up like that? Avi said.

You almost hit that kids head with it, you crazy bastard, Yekutiel said.

As letting anyone know that I dont give a yesterdays falafel about the life or death of children or anyone else is never a good idea, I didnt bother to reply at all, just applied the old trick of lowering my head and staring at the floor.