Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  “Maybe he’s right,” she said, her voice fainter as she pressed her mouth into the hollow of his neck. “Maybe it really is a waste of time.” But then, just as his pulse was beginning its gradual return to the rate recommended for a man his age, she stood up and began walking around the kitchen again.

  “I just don’t understand how a person can let someone die that way, like a dog.”

  “Maybe he got scared. Maybe the Eritrean died right away and there was nothing he could do.”

  “The Eritrean took almost two hours to die. That’s what the pathologist said.”

  Eitan almost replied that maybe the pathologist didn’t know everything, but he stopped himself. When Liat finished emptying the dishwasher, he went and stood beside her to cut vegetables into small, precise cubes. The first time he had made a salad for her, when she finally agreed to sleep over in his apartment on Gordon Street, she had been so thrilled that she clapped her hands. “It’s like you have a protractor in your fingers,” she’d said.

  “Not always, just when I’m stressed.”

  “Why are you stressed?”

  Then he told her that before her, he had always been the one to explain gently that he couldn’t fall asleep with someone else in bed, that it would be better if they spent the night in their own apartments. But ever since she’d come along two months ago, he hadn’t been able to sleep, not because she didn’t leave after sex, but because she didn’t stay, and the night before, she had finally agreed, and now he was afraid that if breakfast wasn’t perfect she wouldn’t come back. Liat had smiled then with her cinnamon eyes, and the next night she had arrived with her toothbrush. Now she stood beside him in the kitchen looking at the cucumber that had been carved into neat little squares and asked, “Did something happen at work?”

  “No,” he said, reaching for the tomatoes, “I just thought I’d devote some time to you.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and said that cubing vegetables was his true calling, that medicine was just a pastime, and he allowed himself to hope that she’d finally left the Eritrean to die on the side of the road –

  “But you know what Marciano’s mistake is? He thinks it’s a one-time thing. He doesn’t understand that a person who can run over an Eritrean like that and drive away will run over a little girl someday and drive away.”

  Eitan put down the knife abruptly, leaving a slaughtered tomato on the cutting board.

  “That’s it?” Liat said smiling at him, “Half a job?”

  “I’m on duty tonight. I want time to run before that.”

  Liat nodded, taking his place at the cutting board. “If this continues, you’ll have to talk to Prof. Shakedi. He can’t keep piling all this work on you. It’s not right.”

  Wearing running shoes, his ear buds in place, Eitan walked out the front door. Though the desert night was chilly, his entire body was sweating. He wanted to run. Wanted to move from one point to another with the maximum speed his body could tolerate. Not because another point was so important, but because of the pituitary gland’s blessed tendency to respond to that sort of effort by secreting endorphins, the only legal instant fix available to him. The faster he ran, the faster the hormone would flood his brain and mask his thoughts. And the faster he ran, the faster the oxygen in his brain would grow thinner. Emotions need oxygen. Guilt, for example, or self-loathing – it wasn’t enough for them to stir; they required a certain amount of o2 to reach the brain and be preserved. A poorly oxygenated brain is less efficient. A less efficient brain feels less. Therefore, Eitan increased his running speed, increased it and increased it and didn’t stop, until a sharp pain pierced his stomach, telling him it was enough. Then he stopped abruptly, saw TV lights dancing like embers in the windows of the private homes, and walked back. A quick shower. A cup of coffee. A forty-minute drive to the abandoned garage at Tlalim, which wasn’t really abandoned at all.

  At the front door, Liat kissed him goodbye on the lips. A fleeting, routine kiss. A kiss that said nothing of sex, nothing of love, but merely: goodnight. And perhaps also: goodnight. I trust you to return so we can continue what we began, that is, our lives together. He kissed her back. Similarly, without sex or love, but merely: goodnight. I’m lying to you. In the narrow gap between our lips lies an entire world.

  Later in the SUV, he asked himself why he was lying. Asked but didn’t answer. Didn’t answer because he knew.

  He lied because he was unable to admit to her that he wasn’t as good as she thought he was. He was unable to admit to her his fear that if she knew he wasn’t as good as she thought, she would leave. Or worse than that – she’d stay and despise him. (The way his mother had despised him when he was in elementary school and she discovered that he hadn’t told her about a math test he’d failed. She didn’t shout at him, but her look killed him. A look that said: I thought you were better than that.) He himself knew, of course, that he was worse than that. But he was the only one who knew, and when you’re the only one who knows something, that something has less of an existence. You look into people’s eyes, into your wife’s eyes, and see yourself reflected back at you, and there you are, clean and attractive. Almost beautiful. You can’t destroy something like that.

  Liat’s eyes changed constantly. Sometimes they were cinnamon. Sometimes honey. The brown was always a different mixture, depending on the weather. And for almost fifteen years he had been judging himself by the scales of justice in those eyes. A measure of right and wrong unmatched in its precision. Only once had those scales erred, but even then, they had a reason. When he wanted to blow the business with Zakai wide open by filing a complaint against him with the Commission and she stopped him. He was so shocked that it didn’t even occur to him to argue with her. The calm with which she accepted the fact of the bribery was no less, and perhaps even more staggering than the bribery itself. (It wasn’t that she was a saint. She stole nuts from the supermarket display like everyone else did and called it “noshing” like everyone else did. Once she even agreed to sneak into a show when they arrived late at the club and there was no guard at the entrance. But she was one of those people who never, ever cheated on their income tax reports, even if they were sure they’d never be caught. The sort that finds a 100-shekel bill in the street and goes over to the nearby kiosk to ask the owners to call them if anyone comes asking about money they’ve lost on the street.)

  The ease with which she’d been willing to let Zakai evade punishment had stunned him. But apparently, existential fears sometimes overcome moral imperatives, and their mortgage was undoubtedly an existential fear. Mainly for Liat, who knew very well what it meant to live on the minus side of your bank balance. “Settle for knowing that you at least did the right thing. The world might be corrupt, but it hasn’t succeeded in corrupting you.” She told him that with such trust after the business with Zakai, with such loving eyes. At the time he was flattered, but now he was angry at her. When she sanctified the good in him that way, she also unwittingly condemned the bad. She buried in unhallowed ground everything that didn’t meet her moral criteria, that wasn’t compatible with the man she thought he was. She censured entire pieces of him, and he, at that moment, had been happy to rid himself of them. To pretend to her, to himself, that he was the good man she saw. But he wasn’t. Not only. The Eritrean knew.

  But he still didn’t understand how it was possible that at exactly the moment he had decided to shake the dust of that city off of him, exactly when he had tried to cleanse himself of an ugly layer of bitterness and boredom, when he had finally driven to the desert and raced his SUV, when he had even sung (how absurd to think of that now, singing with Janis Joplin with what had seemed at the time to be pure truth and now felt like a bad joke) – how could that have been the moment when it happened to him. The moment he killed a man. Then he quickly corrected himself: it wasn’t you who killed him, the SUV did. Steel and iron, which have no anger or intention. Neutral, not personal force, a certain mass traveling at a certain speed which at
a certain moment hit a person. Then he confirmed once again that it was absolutely not his anger that had gone amok there, that had erupted suddenly, uncontrollably. He always kept his anger firmly in check, placed on a shelf at room temperature: “To Eitan, Good Luck.”

  But if that was true, why did he lie? The answer was clear. As clear as the carcinogenic sun. As clear as the desert moon hanging in the sky, blazing long after night has passed: he lied for his sake and for hers. He lied so that she would never know how far he was from the man she thought he was. But when he lied, he merely distanced himself further and further away from that man, until in the end he saw him only as a caricature.

  Filling his mind now was the she-devil waiting for him in the garage. Those two black eyes. And he was almost angry at himself for remembering, apart from the eyes, apart from the extortion, also the contours of the body beneath the loose cotton dress. Like someone about to fall into an abyss who takes the time to consider the flowers blossoming in the bottom of the wadi.

  *

  She always tried to guess what they were fighting about. A man and a woman at the gas pumps. An older woman and a young girl in line at the restaurant cash register. Two soldiers coming out of the bathroom. Sometimes the fights ignited suddenly and everyone looked to see who was shouting like that. And sometimes the fights were more subdued. A man and a woman speaking quietly, but the woman’s eyes glistened with tears and the man checked the gas receipt as if it were the most interesting thing in the world. Two soldiers came out of the bathroom and although they walked to the same bus, they didn’t speak. One of them said, “Cool,” but didn’t look at all pleased, and neither did his buddy. Sometimes the fights began in the gas station, and sometimes they brought them with them. You could already tell that something was wrong from the way they slammed the door when they got out of the car. And after that, they sat at the restaurant table without speaking. They read and reread the menu or looked at their cell phones, and were angry because the coffee wasn’t hot enough.

  She didn’t pay much attention to it. She had a floor to wash and tables to clear. But sometimes, when there were a few moments of quiet, she looked at people’s faces to see whether anyone was fighting and about what. It was much more complicated than guessing what they were laughing about. When a man and a woman roared with laughter over their chocolate cake and looked at each other as if they were about to do it right then and there on the table where their trays still lay, you didn’t really have to make an effort to figure out what was going on between them. But when the man suddenly overturned the tray angrily, or the woman got up to take the tray away and her hands clutched the plastic as if she were about to fall and it was the only thing holding her up, then you could try to guess what was happening there. Then it became interesting.

  Once she tried to talk about it with Asum. He washed dishes and she cleared tables, and in the middle of the day a woman came in and screamed into her phone so loudly that all the people waiting in line in front of her turned around and looked. Later, during their break behind the restaurant, Asum imitated the woman’s screams in a shrill funny voice, and when she finished laughing, she asked him what he thought it was about. All at once his expression turned serious. “Who cares what she was screaming about.”

  “It’s not a question of caring,” she said. “It’s like a game. It could be interesting.” He smoked his cigarette and didn’t reply, and she saw that she had annoyed him. Asum never looked at them unless he really had to. The others were like that too. It was a sort of unspoken rule: no one talked to you about it, it was simply clear. A few moments later, Asum finished his cigarette and they went inside. After that, she never spoke to him about it again, but she continued to look. Several days later the doctor ran him over and she noticed that now she looked even more than she had before, and maybe even enjoyed it more.

  When darkness fell, she left quietly. Walked quickly. He would be here any minute. Deep inside the night dogs barked as if they were mad. Sirkit listened to the sound. If they kept on barking like that, people would be afraid to come. And maybe not. The fact was that she wasn’t afraid. She had finished washing the restaurant floor, folded the rag neatly and walked into the darkness. For the first kilometer, the gas station lights lit her way. Then there was only the darkness and the dogs, and a tiny sliver of gray moon, a rag hanging in the middle of the sky.

  She stopped a short distance from the garage. And opened her mouth.

  Aaahhh.

  The sound emerged from her mouth hesitantly. Unevenly. After hours of working in silence, her throat was a bit rusty. If she had washed dishes in the kitchen, she would have chatted with the others all day. But you wash floors in silence. It was only you and the ceramic tiles. Boring at first, but later your thoughts raced and it was nice. Then they stopped racing, leaving room for the silence of the detergent, and you float on the soap bubbles, becoming heavier and heavier, sinking. Like the chips they drop into the oil in the kitchen, like the roaches that float in dirty water in the corners of the restaurant and are swept away with the squeegee, like the clumps of hair caught in the broom, blond and black, long and short, the hair of women who came in and ate and drove onward.

  Aaahhh.

  He would be there any minute and she needed her throat. Needed to break through the silence of the detergent so she could once again command him.

  *

  After Eitan left, Liat sat down alone to eat a salad that was half cubed vegetables and half torn ones, a salad she thought was delicious. Sometimes, during exhausting interrogations, she asked herself what the first thing was that the people sitting across from her took off when they got home. With most people, it was their shoes. Eitan took off his shirt first. Itamar, unable to wait until he came into the house, tossed his schoolbag down in the yard, the way her grandmother used to unhook her bra the minute she came into the stairwell, saying that if the neighbors wanted to talk, let them talk, she didn’t care. Liat opened the front door and first of all focused her eyes on the coat hooks.

  Then she could take off her shoes, air out her breasts, which had been entrapped by steel wires and hooks, and slip from zippered trousers into sweatpants. But first her eyes. She made sure they didn’t enter the house with all the mud and dirt from outside. There were bad people and terrible criminals out there. But inside, you didn’t need those eyes, just as you didn’t need your gun, and you’d better lock them both in a drawer. The house was familiar. There was no place in it for a gun or those looks. In the house, you pounded schnitzels on the table, put children to bed and folded laundry, all according to procedures known in advance. Known so well that there was no need to write them down; they came as easily to her as prayer came to the religious. And even if they sometimes didn’t come easily and were done tiredly and reluctantly, even with a tiny bit of bitterness, she would still prevail like a lion the next morning. It wasn’t that she loved housework. But she loved the house itself, loved returning to it, clinging to the memory of its existence when her work day was at its busiest. And when she loaded the dishwasher in the middle of the night, it wasn’t much different from shampooing her hair well in the shower: here I am, stopping everything so I will be clean. So everything in this entire kingdom – the hallway and living room and kitchen and bedrooms – will be clean and peaceful. Because you must have one place that is free of questions and doubts. Otherwise it is really sad.

  The flow did not stop. If Eitan had harbored the hope that it was only a temporary job, several days of volunteer work and nothing more, then after two weeks it became clear to him that he had been mistaken. Most of the people he saw had never been to a doctor in their lives. They all had something. A specific trauma or chronic disease, a small injury that had developed complications or a serious problem that had been neglected, or both. The sterile operating room in Soroka was exchanged for an abandoned garage in the middle of the desert and a rusty table that creaked whenever he sat a patient on it. Despite the scandalous conditions, they thanked
him with emotional speeches that were cut short when Sirkit hurried to bring over the next patient. He didn’t ask her to translate for him again. He had learned that hanza meant pain and harai meant okay, and after a few days he had already tasted a few words on his own tongue, for the first time replying batsha when someone thanked him with the words shukran or iknanilie, ignoring the surprised expression of his taskmaster.

  At work, he said he was sick. He spent his cancelled shifts in the garage. Whenever the phone rang at home, he leaped to answer it, frightened that someone from the department was calling to ask how he was, knowing that these days no one called home on a landline instead of a cell phone. He felt frightened, upset and guilty when he was home, and he tensed at every vibration of his phone from the moment he entered the garage. Every evening he made sure to call Liat, to let her hear the chatter of patients behind him. A plague of Eritreans, he told her, tons of work, and asked her to say goodnight to the kids for him.