Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  Within a few days, the skin on his hands literally began to peel off. He washed them with soap after every patient, regardless of the fact that he wore gloves. Who knew what those people had brought with them from their hellholes? The constant rubbing with soap and water quickly led to stinging and itching. The redness of his fingers drove him mad. As did his muscle pain, which grew stronger with every sleepless night. But it was mainly the woman who drove him mad, parting from him every day at dawn with a commanding smile: Thank you Doctor. We’ll meet again tomorrow.

  After two weeks, he told her, “Enough. I have to get some rest.”

  You don’t work on the Sabbath. She spoke the word “Sabbath” with a special intonation, and despite the darkness he knew she was smiling.

  “They’re asking questions in the department. Soon my wife will start. I need a few normal days.”

  Sirkit repeated his words slowly, contemplatively. Normal days.

  And Eitan saw how his request, repeated by her, lost its simplicity and became immeasurably strange, astonishing, actually. He needed a few normal days. The man whose finger had been cut off by a lathe needed normal days. As did the cleaner who had fainted last night in the central bus station. But Eitan, he needed them more than anyone else. And so he would get them.

  Monday, she finally said, and don’t forget to bring more medicine.

  He almost thanked her, but stopped himself. Instead, he went and put his head under the faucet in the corner of the garage. The water pounded his eyes, his cheeks, his eyelids. A wet, arousing kiss of coldness. It was enough to keep him awake until he reached home. He turned off the faucet and headed for the SUV, accompanied by the emotional wave of a young man from whose foot he had just removed a two-centimeter rusty nail. He started the SUV and drove toward the main road. On the way home, in the pale dawn light, he counted three dead animals on the side of the road.

  Even after he turned off the engine, Eitan was in no hurry to get out of the SUV. He studied the whitewashed house through the windshield. The walls inhaled and exhaled serenely behind the bougainvillaea. A small light curled through the furthest window on the right, silent proof of Yaheli’s battle with his terror of the dark. The sun rose. The darkness retreated. Yaheli was victorious. The roses in the yard were beginning to stretch toward the morning. A gust of wind defeated the dew drops that had accumulated on the rosemary. They fell all at once. Rain in miniature. Only the SUV stank of forgotten coffee cups, of cardboard cartons with a line of dry grease marking the place where the pizza had been, of a tired, unbathed man. Eitan sat in the SUV, unable to bring himself to get out. Why should he defile the purity of the house with his presence?

  He finally stepped out of the SUV, locked it, walked to the front door and opened it quietly. A quick look was enough to confirm what he already knew so well – that the house was tidy, clean, ready to begin the new day. And mainly, that the house knew nothing about the other houses, which also had four walls but no beds or hot water, twenty mattresses spread on the floor and tuberculosis covering the distance between them with small steps.

  Now, standing in the entryway of the house in Omer, he asked himself how many mattresses he could fit into his parquet-floored living room. Twenty Eritreans could undoubtedly crowd into the space in relative comfort. Thirty, no. It was precisely because of such thoughts that he had preferred to stay in the SUV. He had allowed himself a moment to feel sorry for them and already his empathy had become uncontrollable, a monster of malignant guilt pursuing him relentlessly. When he entered the house, that herd of wolves entered with him. The ailing men and women he had seen that week devoured the house with their voracious looks. The stainless-steel kitchen, the huge TV. Saliva drooled from their mouths onto the rug Liat had bought in Ikea, onto Yaheli’s giant Lego house. Out, Eitan roared, out! But they refused to go. Twenty Eritrean witches danced around the dining-room table. The man from whose foot he had removed a two-centimeter nail jumped onto the white couch along with the one whose finger had been cut off. And standing in the midst of all that clamor was Sirkit, relaxed and serene, smiling seductively at him over a cup of espresso from the machine.

  In despair, Eitan hurried to the bathroom. He’d brush his teeth and go to sleep. Brush his teeth and go to sleep and tomorrow he’d make inquiries about a move to the States. There were enough hospitals there that would be happy to take in a dedicated physician with minimal salary demands. But Sirkit asked him to give her the towel, and Eitan suddenly realized that the herd of wolves had not stopped in the living room and kitchen, but had invaded the bathroom as well.

  She stood with her back to him, washing her hair, a black mane transformed by the water into a black snake that writhed down to her buttocks. Now she rubbed her armpits with Liat’s organic soap and asked if he had a razor.

  He fled to the bedroom.

  And there – quiet. The tranquility of drawn curtains. Liat’s breath through the blanket. Grateful, Eitan embraced his wife. A pleasant languor settled in his body. He was home.

  5

  “BUT I DON’T UNDERSTAND why you don’t tell him!”

  They were sitting in the yard having what was supposed to be a leisurely Saturday breakfast. Except that it had stopped being a leisurely breakfast quite a while ago. It was a fight. The muted voices could not hide it. Somehow, Eitan thought, the muted voices were what gave it away. Witness the fact that Yaheli and Itamar, who had been chasing each other throughout breakfast, stopped their game shortly after he and Liat began speaking quietly. “Mommy, Daddy, why are you whispering?” To which Liat promptly gave her usual reply, “We don’t want to bother you, sweetie. So you can play in peace.”

  He hated that answer. Not only because he hated to see Liat lie – after all, it had been her irresistible honesty that had drawn him to her in the first place – but because of what that answer said about Yaheli and Itamar. It assumed that his children were stupid. That they couldn’t recognize the moment when ordinary quiet became fraught with tension. But they knew. It had absolutely nothing to do with age. Dogs feel it as well. And that was exactly what happened to the peace and quiet of their leisurely breakfast when Liat asked what his shift schedule was for the next week. “I’m off till Monday, and then two and a half night shifts, one on-call and a few after-hours surgeries.”

  “Tanni, it’s insane! You have to talk to Prof. Shakedi!”

  “Tul, I just started in the department. I’m not exactly in a position to make demands on my bosses. Amsalem is out on reserve duty, Beitan just had twins a month ago. Someone has to pick up the slack.”

  “But it’s way too much, last week, then this week, it’s—”

  “That’s the situation.”

  Instead of praising him for his sensible acceptance of reality – the same sensible position she loved to wave in his face when they talked about Zakai’s envelopes of money – she now chose to hurt him.

  “You know, you’re taking this so calmly that I’m starting to think it isn’t such a big deal for you to see us only on Saturdays.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Don’t call me an idiot around the kids,” she said in English. “You know what, don’t ever call me that.”

  Her brown eyes flashed. After twelve years of marriage, Eitan still couldn’t distinguish between the flash of tears and the flash of anger. He sincerely hoped it was tears. He was much better at coping with her crying than with her anger.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it kills me that you can’t see how much I’m pushing myself for you and the kids, that you really think it doesn’t bother me.”

  As he spoke, he thought about how trite that conversation was. How trite were the spoken words, the cooling cups of coffee, the half-eaten cake on the plate. The only fresh thing here was the lie, pink and virginal. And when Liat repeated, “But why don’t you tell him?” he leaned back and let the lie speak for him – “It’ll be over soon, honey. It’s just a busy time in the department, that’s all. In a week or two
we’ll go back to the usual routine, and then they’ll remember who lent a hand and who didn’t.” As the lie spoke, Liat listened, weighed the words carefully. For a moment, Eitan was afraid she was on to him; her eyes might have been chestnuts, but her brain was as sharp as a knife – no one knew that better than he did. But then she stood up and went to sit in his lap, her nose tickling the lower edge of his cheek. “Sorry… It’s just… I miss you.”

  “Me too, honey, me too.” And then he did something highly uncharacteristic: he suddenly kissed her on the mouth in front of the children, in the middle of the yard, surprising himself, as if without his noticing the lie had lured him to a place where guilt and pleasure intermingled.

  “Mom, Dad, are you kissing with your tongues?”

  “No, sweetie, we’re just pretending.”

  *

  Behind the gas station and restaurant was an unpaved area for unloading trucks. Beyond it, the soil was sandier and the desert took on the shape of a sort of small stream. No water, only the shape. It was hard to imagine that water had once flowed here, though she had already heard people say that water once covered everything. Even if that was true, the desert had forgotten it. The soil of the stream bed was so dry and hot that even thorns couldn’t take hold in it. Only plastic bags sometimes came to it from nowhere. Flew out of the restaurant, from the side of the road or more distant places. Who knows, maybe they flew across the whole desert before landing here, got tangled in the sand and the junk in the dry stream bed and stopped. It wasn’t a beautiful place, what with all the pieces of junk and plastic bags caught on them, but it was a quiet place. Sometimes, when the noise of the restaurant, the music and shouting made her head ache, she came out here for a few minutes. And of course, she would rather move her bowels here, in the sand, than in the filthy toilet inside. You just had to walk a little further into dry stream, or else you could be seen. Further into it, past the place where the shit was pretty smelly, the stream became wider. There was no more junk there because anyone who wanted to throw something away didn’t bother to walk that far. There was only a plastic chair that Asum once stole from the restaurant and used to sit on to smoke. She sat on the chair and thought, you know he can’t see you. But a moment later, she got up. Then sat down again.

  His cigarette butts lay on the sand beside the chair. She picked one up. Rolled it around in her fingers. Put it in her mouth, even though she knew that the smell of tobacco made her nauseous, but not very. Not as nauseous as she became when Asum talked to her with his face very close and the tobacco grabbed her by the throat and squeezed. And somehow, the nausea passed after a few minutes and she enjoyed sitting on his chair, chewing on his cigarette butt and looking at the dry stream.

  She pulled her feet out of her flip-flops and stuck them in the sand, which was dry and hot. Asum’s big toes were normal, but the toe next to them was unusually large, longer than the others. There was no particular reason to remember that; it was just one of the things a woman knows about her husband. She might forget it someday. Or not. Maybe she’d remember that especially large toe next to his big toe until the day she died. A person dies, but things remain. A chair. Cigarette butts. The memory of a foot. And maybe the song he used to whistle, which she couldn’t remember now. It was unbelievable that she couldn’t remember it. But maybe his whistling was like the plastic bags, still roaming over the desert. A person dies, but his whistling still runs on the wind, crossing roads and ravines, getting tangled in the sand and junk.

  Three viral infections. Two intestinal infections. One broken bone. A suspected sprain. Nine infected lesions, one serious. He worked quickly. Skipped the “this might hurt a little” and the “it’ll be over in a minute”. Gave short replies to long questions. The exhaustion was killing him, and killing him even more was the duress. He didn’t want to be there, he had to be there. He shouldn’t be thinking about that. He should be thinking about the man he killed. About a life cut short because of him. The fact that he wasn’t thinking about that merely intensified his guilt. Perhaps people might forgive him if he confessed to them that he had run over the Eritrean and driven away, that he had been consumed by remorse ever since. But the truth was that he had hit and run, and since then all he could think about was how to get out of it. You couldn’t confess to something like that. People would be horrified. And at the same time, he was filled with disgust for those horrified people. They would look at him with moral contempt, their conscience clear, because they happened not to have been there at that moment. As if they weren’t killing Eritreans left and right. After all, each one of them could save the life of a starving African if they contributed only a fraction of their monthly earnings. A bank balance of 30,000 shekels would lose nothing if a mere thousand were taken from it. Many people could be saved with 1,000 shekels. Food for babies, purified water. Nevertheless, the money remained in the bank. That was where it belonged, and the moral discussion remained around the living-room coffee table, where it belonged. They were no different from him. He had abandoned an injured Eritrean on the side of Route 40, while they left their Africans in the savannah. It was a clear option: 1,000 shekels for a person’s life. Any takers? No. Of course not. The issue wasn’t what you were running from, only whether you got caught. And everyone was running from the same thing. Unable to look their role as masters in the eye. Everyone hits and runs. But he’d been seen. He’d been caught.

  When he finished up and finally left the garage, several Eritreans who were talking outside hurried over to him. They wanted to thank him again. A thin man reached out for a handshake, and Eitan shook his hand, thinking that somewhere along the way his empathy button had stopped functioning. He should have felt something. Kindness. Compassion. The responsibility of one human being for another. Not only toward this man standing here and shaking his hand emotionally while he himself was only waiting for him to stop. He hadn’t felt anything for the man who had lain on the ground with his head split open either. Or perhaps he had felt something, but not the right something. Not what he should have felt.

  He thought about him now: an Eritrean lying on the side of the road. Sometimes he felt it was a bit strange that he still called him the Eritrean, although he knew his name was Asum. It was even stranger that he didn’t know whether he had a surname or not. Well, of course he had one, but Eitan didn’t know what it was. And when you think about it, perhaps he didn’t actually have one, maybe that wasn’t how it worked with them. Maybe they had tribal names, or dynastic names. He had no idea and he didn’t try to find out. Yes, he could ask Sirkit. She might even answer. And if he were already asking, why stop with the surname. Why not ask about the nicknames his pals had for him, if he had any pals. His favorite color. His hobbies. If he wanted, he could ask many questions about what the dead man was like. Grab him by the hand (soft? calloused?) and pull him out of the sea of identical, faceless people. He could have made an effort and granted him something apart from the cracked skull, the wetness of his blood on the desert rocks. He could have tried to persuade himself that that man had some value while he was alive, not only at the moment of his death. Thin body. Old clothes. Blood trickling from his black head. Less than a month had passed, and he already seemed so distant, as did that stomach pain he’d felt a moment after, the terrible need to move his bowels. Something that had happened to someone else. But he recalled the details precisely: the dull sound of the SUV hitting a man. The wonderful, hoarse voice of Janis Joplin in full howl. The horror of the body slamming onto the ground. He remembered the sound of the gravel path under his feet when he’d got out of the SUV. The contrast between the warm seat and the cold air outside. Remembered that as he hurried over to him, he still had a fleeting hope that maybe it was okay, maybe in another second that man would get up and shout at him to watch where he was driving. He remembered all that from a distance, as if it had happened to someone else.

  But it happened to you. Not to someone else.

  To you.

  And yet it st
ill did not feel real to him. As if the thing itself, the actual thing, could not truly penetrate his mind. Could not persuade his mind to take it in, internalize it. The run-over Eritrean stood outside the walls of his consciousness and pounded on the door, screaming to be let in. But inside, only a faint noise could be heard. Like the muted sound he’d made when the SUV had hit him.

  Perhaps that was good. Perhaps that was how it should be. What was so urgent about having the refugee take up residence in his mind? He extricated his hand from his grateful patient’s prolonged handshake and headed for the SUV. The sight that greeted him hit him like a punch in the stomach. It left him breathless. The body of a black man lay against the right front tire. His arms were stretched to the sides. His legs were spread on the ground. Eitan tried to tell himself that it wasn’t real. An optical illusion summoned up by long hours of wakefulness, fabricated by the night. But the man was really lying there beside his SUV, and when Eitan realized that, his legs began to shake.

  It made no difference at all that a moment later, someone called the name of the sleeping refugee and the man lying beside the SUV stood up and went somewhere else. It made no difference because when Eitan had first looked at the body sprawled on the ground, it was the Eritrean’s body that he saw. But this time he really saw him, suddenly felt the switch that had cut his mind off from his body since the accident flip in the other direction, and an enormous wave of nausea rose inside him. He’d killed someone. He’d killed someone. His split skull lying among the rocks. The blood oozing from his ears. He’d killed someone! Killed! Someone! And to the Eritreans’ surprise, he knelt down beside them and vomited up his guts, a burning yellow torrent. Someone ran to the garage and came back with water. Eitan sat on the ground, his legs trembling. The Eritrean’s legs had been stiff and shriveled. He hadn’t been able to move his hands either. But his eyes had fluttered a bit. His eyes had looked at him.