Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  He knew that radiance. The first time he had stitched a patient, his heart pounding and his fingers trembling. The first time he had cut through a patient’s dura mater. Sirkit’s eyes remained calm, but there was no mistaking the exhilaration on her face. She’s like me, he thought, she’s the way I was when I was just starting out.

  Sirkit moved aside, giving him room. “No,” he said, “finish what you started.” A small smile came to her lips, lingered a moment and vanished. Eitan directed her movements in a quiet voice. After endless hours of working together, this revelation of her abilities was enormously exciting to him, almost embarrassingly so. Because he had never thought for a moment that she could. It had never occurred to him that, with the proper training, this woman was capable of doing exactly what he himself did. Damn it, this woman had learned to suture by watching others, from oral instructions in a field clinic. She went over to the shelf of drugs to get some more antiseptic liquid and Eitan watched her with new eyes. (And perhaps it wasn’t her ability that suddenly drew him closer to her, but the discovery that they shared the same passion. They were both enthralled by the possibility of seeing people from the inside.)

  They worked in silence for a long time. Suturing, cleaning, sterilizing, washing their hands, arranging the new drugs on the garage shelves. When Sirkit picked up one of the packets and asked what Ciprofloxacin was, Eitan told her, and when she asked more questions, he explained and expanded, describing the various bacteria that attacked the intestines and how the antibiotic worked, quoting new research and attacking old assumptions. He had never noticed before how much he enjoyed teaching. He recognized in her the same curiosity he himself had, the same demanding, sometimes overbearing desire to know. That night, Eitan spoke with Sirkit for hours. Patients came and went. One pain was exchanged for another. Drugs were distributed. And when he finished setting an injured girl’s leg, he turned around and saw a cup of tea being held out to him.

  I made some for us.

  He took the tea and thanked her. They stood there awkwardly for a moment, and then Sirkit walked over to the tin door. The desert night was coming to an end, and the taste of the tea in Eitan’s mouth was hot and sweet. Standing beside him, as silent as a marble statue, the woman sipped her tea. Under cover of darkness, he studied her face. The straight, simple nose. The arched eyebrows. The curve of her lips. He knew that she was beautiful, and he knew that if he were to see her in the street, he would not give her a second glance.

  The laundry came out of the dryer warm and fragrant, and Liat put it in the large plastic tub and walked into the living room. It was late, and the radio was playing quiet, uninterrupted jazz, the way she liked it. Every now and then, the music stopped and the announcer read the news. His voice was quiet and clear, and he spoke the words as if he were reading poetry. She hummed the previous song to herself and sat down on the couch. She divided the laundry into four piles – this is Eitan’s, this is hers, here is Yaheli’s, these are Itamar’s. She folded them quickly, surely. She knew every pair of pants, every piece of underwear, every sock. The smell of the laundry was hot and sweet, and there was certainty in every shirt. Their lives were spread out in front of her so she could fold them, and she was deeply involved in every single item. The stain on Yaheli’s pants from the birthday cake he ate in nursery school. The torn shirt that Itamar refused to throw away because it had an elephant printed on it. She could identify their socks – black, simple – in any lineup. She had divided up her life like this so many times, in the middle of the night, stacking four folded towers of clothes on the couch. Eitan’s, Yaheli’s, Itamar’s, and hers. Though she was separating the clothes, sorting them, it was clear to her that she was actually joining them together. The towers of clothes piled on the couch were the absolute opposite of the Tower of Babel. One language, down-to-earth, no aspirations to reach the sky. One living room, one couch, the delicate fragrance of soap was enough. For example, Eitan’s shirts. Button-downs. Only she knew how much the labels drove him mad. How he had to remove them the minute they came home from the shop. There was no special meaning in that, but somehow it made Eitan’s shirts her shirts. Quiet ownership, unspoken, between the man who wore the shirt and the woman who folded it. Even when they were in a public place like the mall. Visible to one and all. Speaking about things that had no softness or special purpose, for instance, the shopping list they had split between them – you go to the stationery store and I’ll go to the supermarket because it’s more efficient that way – even then, she was the only one in the crowd who knew that this man, the impressive doctor, was wearing a button-down shirt that had no label. Because it caused a rash on the back of his neck. In the precipices of everyday life there was much comfort in that knowledge, even if it wasn’t always discernible.

  She wasn’t a religious person in any way. But she had sacred rituals of her own. The precise rituals of the house. Schnitzels had to soak in marinade or they had no taste. Laundry needed to be folded right after the dryer finished working so that the fabric didn’t have time to wrinkle. Cocoa powder had to be mixed well so it didn’t have lumps. They whispered their dreams to each other. Asked how it was in nursery school, at work, at school. Watered the garden. Dusted where the cleaner had been careless. Worked hard. Went on trips abroad. Kept a balanced account of guilt and desire, emotional economics that had no flare-ups and no overdrafts. Outside the front door was a crazy country. Not only Arabs and settlers and soldiers. Also the Russian boy who stabbed his friend at the high-school entrance. And the girls she heard in the mall bathroom, betting on who would be the first to vomit up her lunch. Or an Ethiopian security guard who shot at customers and then said he heard voices. And a foreign worker who raped the old lady he was here to look after. She drove 110 kilometers an hour on the toll highway, looking at passing cars, unsure of what she actually shared with those people beyond the road they were driving on. During wartime, it felt different. When sirens sounded announcing that rockets were on their way, everyone got out of their cars and ran toward a shelter, and for a moment it really did make a difference to you what the people around you were feeling, and when it was over you said we’re fine, not I’m fine. But the rest of the time, it was only the house. White walls and walnut parquet. She gave her full attention and constant devotion to running her life in this house. Even if not everything was clean, even if not everything was tidy – everything was in its place. The announcer finished speaking and a clarinet began to play. Liat straightened the hem of Yaheli’s tracksuit and tried to remember what the weather forecast was but couldn’t, and consoled herself with the knowledge that it didn’t matter. The house was heated in any event.

  *

  Long after he left the garage, she still felt his gaze on her. Men can fasten their eyes on you the way people put a collar on a dog. They didn’t have to tug it; just knowing that the collar was there was enough to make the dog behave. Men could also not look at you at all. Like you’re a beetle in the corner of the room they don’t even notice, or if they do, there’s no reason to talk to it. At most, they flip it on its back to see whether it can turn itself over again. Until she was fourteen, she was that beetle. People saw her without seeing her. Forgot her as soon as they walked past her. Sometimes while they were still walking past her. When she grew up, they looked at her differently. They no longer forgot her. Now they followed her with their eyes as she moved away, watched the intimations of her full, round ass through the folds of her dress. They stared at her when she walked and imagined her when she was gone, but at no point did they ever see her. They merely piled their desire on her, the way jugs of water are tied on a donkey’s back.

  She came out of the garage and headed toward the caravan, thinking about Asum and the way he used to look at her. The way he looked at her the first time, when she carried the boxes into that shack. At first, she thought it was the heat of the fire that burned her face and stung her eyes. But it wasn’t the fire. She knew that because that night, she stayed in the shac
k for a much longer time waiting for her mother to finally finish talking to the owners, and meanwhile the fire went out, but the heat on her face remained. Asum sat there, frying her with his glance, roasting her well on both sides. Even now, as she walked alone, completely alone but for the distant barking of dogs, she suddenly could feel his glance. As if someone had lit a match under her shirt. It was funny how she felt his glance on her even though he wasn’t here to glance at anything anymore, as if a person’s glance, like his whistle, could continue even when the person was no longer here.

  When she was cleaning off the tables in Davidson’s restaurant, she was a beetle again. Sometimes the patrons kept on speaking as she leaned over and picked up the plates, and sometimes they were silent. But they never looked at her, neither with a smile nor a scowl. Only the children, the youngest among them, occasionally made eye contact. Eyes that were curious or frightened, laughing or crying. And she actually wanted to look at them, but averted her gaze immediately. Because she didn’t know whether it was allowed.

  The first time she arrived at Eitan’s house the street was bustling with parents and children. It was morning. The doors opened one after the other. People got into their cars and drove the children to school and themselves to work. Sirkit looked at them, afraid that her presence here would be too conspicuous. She quickly realized that she was wrong. No one was aware of her. Just like when she worked as a cleaner in the Tel Aviv central bus station and her glance met that of the man handing out newspapers. He was a gray-haired Israeli wearing red overalls that had a logo printed on them. She swept the stairs and he handed out newspapers to the people going up and down the stairs. They were surrounded by a great many hurrying feet. Skirts, sandals, soldiers’ uniforms and high heels. She swept and he handed out, and for one moment their activities intersected. You might think that they smiled at each other, but that man’s eyes had no pupils. They were two dark stains that reflected stairs. And the feet going up and down and up and down. She looked away. Horrified. She didn’t need a mirror to know that her eyes were like his. Without pupils. Two dark stains, and stairs.

  And that was why the doctor’s glance threw her into such turmoil, remained with her long after he’d gone, when she left the garage alone and walked to the caravan. When he looked at her, she wasn’t a beetle, or a dog or a donkey. Not an Eritrean woman who cleaned the central bus station and washed dishes at the Tlalim junction. Something else. Not because he wanted to see her differently, but because she had the power to force him to.

  (But did he see her? At first, she had been the thing he was running away from. That he was guilty of. Now, when he looked at her, for a brief moment she was the thing he wanted. Always the thing. Never Sirkit.) And somehow, she was sure that even if he thought about her when he was there, in his private home in Omer, even if he carried her with him after he left the garage, he thought about her from the outside. Imagining her cleaning, suffering. It never occurred to him that behind the gas station there was a plastic chair facing a dry stream, and that she sat on it, dug her feet into the warm, pleasant sand and whistled Asum’s whistle. The whistle that came back to her one night after she had given up trying to remember it.

  She opened the caravan door and collapsed onto the mattress, dead tired. In the twilight of sleep, the doctor came to her. Had she been more awake, she would immediately have driven away that fantasy, so pointless and hopeless. But she was too tired to drive away the fantasy and too tired to tame the desire, and maybe that was good. Because when she allowed herself to want him that way, lying on the mattress in the caravan behind the gas station, she was actually saying – to him and to herself – yes. She was allowed to want.

  The guilt did not come until dawn. Why him, of all people? Why such a perverse choice? She didn’t understand that she had chosen him precisely because he was such a perverse choice. That her first desire would be defiant. Shameless. Because if she felt guilty, it wasn’t because of that desire, but because of all the things she hadn’t desired before. Guilty because of all the things she dared not do. And it was true, there was no reason to dare, and she had to be in the restaurant in another ten minutes. But she was allowed to want. At least to want.

  (But if they knew, those people on the mattresses beside her. If they only guessed what was under her blanket. What was there while she slept. They would tell her to be ashamed of herself. Or they would shun her completely. And they wouldn’t know that she shunned herself for the opposite reason. They would shun her because of her desire and she would shun herself because of its absence. She would shun the previous Sirkit, who let the world treat her that way for so long. She knew she was guilty, endlessly guilty, because she would have stayed. For her entire life, she would have stayed.)

  8

  THE NEXT DAY she suddenly came to him in the shower. One minute he was shampooing his hair and the next he had a huge erection, a high-school kid’s erection, thinking about her. Perhaps that should have made him happy. Caused him to feel strong and masculine, the kind of person who, after going a month without sleeping, is still able to think about sex. But somehow it upset him, even embarrassed him, because the soundtrack of March of the Penguins was coming from the living room and Liat was washing dishes and shouting at Yaheli to turn it down. He stood there, listening to the sounds coming from outside, shampoo running into his eyes, and his prick screamed Sirkit. It embarrassed him, even rattled him. Why was his desire for her sneaking in here like this? Sneaking through the bathroom window ever so quietly, attracting no notice? Emptying the house while Liat was in the kitchen and the children in front of the TV? He told himself it was only a fantasy, and where else but in his fantasies could he still do whatever he felt like. But that didn’t placate him. Just the opposite. The thought that he could fantasize about her – more than could, was compelled to fantasize about her almost against his will – that thought drove him mad.

  And she wasn’t even that beautiful. True, she had that imposing height. Those gigantic eyes. A perfect body he could only barely ignore. But damn it, he’d already seen more gorgeous breasts in his life. He knew more beautiful women. He was married to one. (And yet, something in those sphinx eyes. The feeling that if he simply reached out and touched her shoulder, he would drown in the velvet of her skin.)

  He rinsed the shampoo out of his hair and reminded himself that the world was full of women with velvety skin and enigmatic eyes. Such qualities definitely deserved to be admired, but there was no reason to get carried away about it. His prick, however, was not persuaded. It maintained its commanding pose. Eitan refused to submit. He usually felt comfortable enough about jerking off in the shower. It happened at least once a week, and except for a vague sense of guilt, a vestige of adolescence, he saw nothing wrong with it. But today there was something humiliating about the demand of his body. It angered him. As if he weren’t submitting to his body, but to her. And he had already submitted to her enough.

  But he didn’t think it was the submission that was so seductive to him. Because her velvety skin was nothing compared to the intoxicating feeling of being controlled by someone else. She was the only, secret witness to all the things that were never spoken: what a coward he was, how pathetic. He hated her because of that, and he did everything he could to get rid of her because of that, while at the same time, and against his will, she was the only one who knew him for what he was.

  The water streamed down his body and he stood in the shower and thought about her. Then he turned off the faucet and reached for a towel.

  Eitan went out of the bathroom and Liat went in. Wiped the steam of his shower off the mirror. Reminded herself to buy anti-dandruff shampoo because the bottle here was almost empty. She brushed her teeth with the toothpaste dentists recommended. Spit water, saliva and toothpaste foam into the sink, noticing some drops of blood that clouded the mixture. Her gums were giving her trouble again. She should see a hygienist. She opened her mouth wide and looked inside through the mirror, but not for too long. L
iat knew: if you stare long enough, everything begins to look strange. Even your face in the mirror. When she was a child, she’d spent hours in the bathroom examining her features. Trying to determine what came from Mom and what came from Dad, not always succeeding. She preferred to take as little as possible from him, but had to admit that the jaw was his. And the dimples. A man wakes up one morning and goes to live with his Ronit, leaving you with two dimples and a pointy chin. Every time you smile, you see your mother’s eyes moving to the dimples and wonder if she’s thinking about him.

  In the long hours spent in front of the mirror, she tried to remove the dimples from her cheeks, without much success. She also tried to make a final decision about the eyebrows – his or hers. And always, when she’d looked at herself for a really long, continuous period of time, the moment came when the face in front of her turned into a different face. Not a reflection, but a deflection. The same eyes, nose chin, forehead. But even so, a different girl. And the eyes – she wasn’t all that sure anymore that they were eyes. And the nose and chin began to unravel. Meaningless shapes. One moment of concentration was enough for the feeling to disappear, and she would once again be Liat in front of the mirror, nothing more. But sometimes she deliberately delayed that moment, staring in amazement at the accumulation of unfamiliar shapes that were, in fact, her face. Like that game when you keep repeating the same word until it dissolves on your tongue. The end touches the beginning touches the end. For example: bananabananabananabanana, until you can’t tell where it begins and where it ends, and even the familiar sound is suddenly different, alien. The words unravel into syllables and the syllables unravel into sounds, and where the sounds unravel, there is only deep water, a thousand streams of blue through which the light cannot pass. If you look long enough, everything begins to be strange. Your words. Your face. Your man. So it’s very important to know when to stop. To walk away from the bathroom mirror a moment before it gets really frightening. To brush your teeth and go to sleep in a room where you don’t have to turn on the light to find your way. Because everything is in its place.