So it was every morning. The father moved the glass close to his son’s nose and the son was awakened by the smell of the hot coffee and cardamom. They both loved this wake-up ritual so much that even if the boy happened to wake up before his father, he continued to lie there in his bed, waiting with closed eyes for him, even if he needed desperately to pee.
On the way to school, he saw that the birds had already destroyed the body of the snake he’d killed the day before. He’d seen it on the way home from school, and had crushed its head with a stone. He’d wanted to call his father to come and see, but the snake had crossed his path three kilometers from the village, one and a half kilometers from the school, and there was no one he could impress with it. Walking past that rock now, he saw that nothing was left but the snake’s head, a dark mass with a barely recognizable forked tongue.
Twenty minutes later, he reached the road. A tour bus passed him with a roar. Looking at him through the windows were boys his age. The bus drove away and he was about to cross the road when beyond the curve another bus appeared, this time a public bus, and the driver deafened him with a long, admonishing blast of his horn. This time he waited before trying to cross, letting two cars pass before he broke into a run, his head filled with a picture of the crushed snake, the forked tongue.
He arrived at school late, and when Tamam, his still unmarried teacher, asked him why, he shrugged and said nothing, his eyes fixed on the flag hanging behind her desk, avoiding the disappointment in her eyes. If she had known how he thought about her at night, she wouldn’t have spoken to him about his lateness. She wouldn’t have spoken to him at all.
When the school day ended he was the first to leave, bursting out in a run and not stopping. He’d turned sixteen four days earlier, and today he’d go to work with his father for the first time. His mother claimed he could have done that a long time ago, but his father had refused. “First, let him go to school, then we’ll see.” So he went to school, memorized letters and the multiplication table, wrote sentences neither of his parents could read with a pencil that shook from the effort. And the entire time he waited for this day, when he could follow his father into the van and drive there.
He didn’t know what there was. His father never spoke about it, and he had already learned not to ask. At night, his father returned from there tired and pleased, the notes rolled up in his hand, warm like bread right out of the oven. Today he was going with him, and though his lungs burned from the running and he had a stitch in his side, he still ran without stopping.
Near the tin shack he met Sayyid, his father’s cousin. Sayyid’s car was clean and new, and his clothes were clean and new, but Sharaf didn’t speak to him. He knew that his father didn’t like him to. But Sayyid wanted to talk to him. He patted him on the shoulder and said, how are you man, and Sharaf smiled, but knew that Sayyid spoke to him as if he were a grown-up, not a boy, so that he would feel like a grown-up. Then Sayyid asked him when he was coming to work for him, and Sharaf shrugged and stared into space, which was the best answer he could find to questions he didn’t know how to answer. Sayyid asked again and Sharaf understood that this time he’d have to come up with a different answer, when his father walked out of the shack and told Sayyid that it was fine, the boy already had a job. Sharaf’s heart almost jumped out of his chest and began to pound because if that’s how it was, then today’s drive wasn’t just a visit. It was a beginning. He and his father would work there together all day after school and maybe, if he was lucky and a good worker, he might even go there with his father instead of going to school, because he was really getting sick and tired of the multiplication table.
His father told him to get the van, and he went quickly around to the back of the shack, turned on the engine with a practiced hand, shifted into third gear in front of the dirt hill and smiled at the goats darting out of his way in alarm. His father got in and they drove off. He hoped that this time his father wouldn’t tell him to switch places with him when they reached the road – after all, he was sixteen, and they’d once let Mohannad drive all the way to the Beersheba market. But as they were about to drive onto the road, his father told him to stop and switched places with him, and he didn’t argue.
The gate at the entrance to the kibbutz was locked, and until the guard came and pressed the button that opened it he had time to read the sign. “ENJOY THE HOSPITALITY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE DES—” The gate opened and his father drove, and he figured out himself that the HOSPITALITY was of the PEOPLE OF THE DESERT. A few dozen meters later they passed another sign like that, and now he had enough time to look at only the last word and see that he’d been right, it really was DESERT. They continued and passed the kibbutz houses. Because of the traffic bumps, the van moved slowly and he could look at the houses and the windows of the houses, and at the people who sometimes appeared at them. The van kept moving, faster now because there were no more traffic bumps, and suddenly he saw, sticking out like a sore thumb at the far edge of the kibbutz, a large black tent.
At first he was so shocked that he asked his father whether Bedouins lived there, and when his father laughed, he understood that he had spoken like a child again, because what were the chances that anyone would let a group of Bedouins live in the middle of a Jewish kibbutz. His father stopped the van near the tent, in front of another ENJOY THE HOSPITALITY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE DESERT, right next to a large poster showing a drawing of a Bedouin riding a camel. The camel in the drawing was smiling and the Bedouin in the drawing was smiling, and the man who came out of the tent and walked over to them was also smiling as he said, “Ahalan Mussa, you finally brought the boy.”
Sharaf knew that he was the boy and he didn’t like that. But when the man, whose name was Matti, reached out for a handshake, he shook his hand and even smiled. The man called Matti said, “Wow, what a handshake,” and Sharaf’s smile changed from a have-to smile to a genuine one. He’d worked a long time on that handshake, ever since Mohannad told him about that movie where the hero knew who was a man and who wasn’t by the way he shook hands. The man let go of Sharaf’s hand and pointed to the tent, saying, “Tfadalu” with a Hebrew accent. Sharaf went inside. It was definitely the weirdest thing he’d ever seen in his life. One side was like a regular tent, with cushions and mattresses and everything. The other side was nothing like a regular tent. It was like a kibbutz house dressed up like a tent. Dressed up really, really well.
Matti answered his phone, which rang, and said, “Great, turn right at the roundabout, then straight all the way,” and then ended the call and said, “Ya’allah, Mussa, let’s get to work.” Sharaf followed his father to a corner of the tent and watched him as he took off his jeans and shirt and put on a white galabiya and tied a white keffiyeh on his head. Then he took out another galabiya and told Sharaf to put it on. They began to hear voices outside. Lots of people. The bear-like laughter of men, the sharp, arrogant speech of teenage boys, the cat-like screeches of teenage girls, the twittering rebukes of women, and in the midst of all that, the rise and fall of a baby’s crying, and though there was no way of telling how many throats it was coming from, it was clearly more than one. Sharaf looked at his father, who was calm and quiet, and tried to look calm and quiet himself, because even if there was no way he could look like his father, kind of aristocratic and strong, at least he wouldn’t look like a scared baby on his first day of work.
He finished getting dressed at the precise moment the first man came in. His father put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Today you just watch, understand what the job is, and then walk around and say ahalan ve’sahalan” to everyone who comes in.” From a corner of the tent, Sharaf watched his father, who talked to the people gently and confidently, and he could see how much they respected him and even took pictures of him with their phones when he picked up the darbuka and began to play. He played really well. Better than anyone Sharaf knew. When he banged the darbuka, it let him in, and when he was in, he did whatever he wanted to it. And it was so c
lear, and so beautiful, that at first he just didn’t believe his ears when one of the boys shouted at his father, “Hey bro, why are you wearing a dress?”
He expected silence. The rude, insulting words would be met by a fortified wall of closed, grim mouths. His father would stop playing and tell the boy to get out in his quiet voice, the one they always obeyed because if they didn’t, a beating would follow. But his father kept playing as if he hadn’t heard, and the guests, instead of telling off the boy with the big mouth and teaching him a lesson, responded with happy cheers and laughing. “Wow, get a load of that embroidery,” the big mouth said, “just like a girl’s.” He’d already stood up and started walking toward his father, pointing to the embroidered sleeves of the galabiya, staggering slightly, drunk with the cheers of the crowd and the laughter he’d managed to squeeze out of them.
Then it happened: the boy’s hand took hold of the edge of Sharaf’s father’s sleeve and displayed it to everyone. And Sharaf’s father’s hand, instead of dropping the darbuka and grabbing the boy by the throat, instead of punching him in the diaphragm or slapping his pimply cheek, Sharaf’s father’s hand continued playing without missing a beat.
3
THREE DAYS AFTER the visit to the TV store, Eitan instructed Sirkit on how to remove the bandages from the stomach of the Sudanese they had operated on. The wound looked great. The redness and the swelling had gone down faster than he’d expected, and that made him proud. He knew that it was ridiculous to take credit for the rapid recovery of another organism – after all, it was the Sudanese’s immune system, not his, that was doing the work – but none the less, he was proud. As if that rapid recovery proved something about his abilities. He had never felt such pride about how patients healed in the neurosurgery department, although the excision of a growth from the corpus callosum was an infinitely more complex surgery than the one he had performed in the garage. But even Itamar, when he took him camping, had said that the pasta they cooked on the campfire was the best he’d ever eaten. Because they expected the pasta they cooked on the stainless-steel counter at home to be good, but the pasta they cooked that night at the campsite was a kind of miracle. When Eitan thought about Itamar, the miracle of his patient faded slightly. How long it had been since he’d spent an entire evening with that quiet child of his. Yaheli screamed and cried when he left the house for his shift, but Itamar merely looked at him with that quietness of his and said, “Call if you have time.” He was like that at school as well. He didn’t take back a pencil case that had been snatched from him, didn’t demand that he be allowed to participate in football, didn’t say that now it was his turn to use the computer. And Eitan wanted to say, “Shout, kid, slam your hands down on the desk and shout, because otherwise, the world will simply go on turning.” But Liat said, “That’s his way, Tani, and he’s okay with it. Just be careful that you don’t feel so bad for him that he starts to feel bad too.”
When he was born, they’d called him E.T. until they decided on a name. The first several days after his birth, with those huge eyes and wrinkled skin, he really did look like some creature from another planet. Even when he grew into a beautiful baby, they kept calling him that. It seemed to them like an abbreviation of Itamar, and also it had been Liat’s favorite movie, because there was always the possibility that if you pedaled your bike fast enough, it would take off from the ground and soar to the moon. But for the last several years, when Itamar wrapped himself in his quietness like an astronaut in his spacesuit and helmet, Eitan had stopped calling him that. He wanted to ask Liat to stop, but didn’t know how to explain why. When he saw Itamar remain standing where he was during the Lag B’Omer party in Omer while his classmates shoved each other to get at the ice-cream pops that were being handed out, he thought he was from another planet, that child of his. But he didn’t know how to bring him to this planet, and he didn’t know how to remain on the other planet long enough to keep that undertone of rebuke (but why, kid, why don’t you tell them) from his voice.
Eitan straightened up from the Sudanese’s wound. Sirkit stood beside him, waiting for him to speak. “It looks very good,” he said. “If it continues this way, he’ll be back on his feet in a couple of days.” She translated for the patient and his face lit up.
“Do you want to bandage him yourself?”
You bandage him, I’ll go get him some food.
When she turned to leave, he hesitated for a moment, and finally said that he’d go to the restaurant at the adjacent gas station himself and buy something to eat. The darkness of the garage suddenly seemed depressing. He wanted to call home; maybe the kids hadn’t gone to bed yet. “You know, Itamar, that’s an excellent question about dinosaurs and dragons. Maybe next Saturday we’ll drive to the Ramon Crater and sleep there, look for dinosaur footprints, or dragon tracks.” He was already planning how he’d slip out of the tent in the middle of the night to draw huge footprints in the sand for the boy when Sirkit said, Okay. You go. But not to the gas station, to the caravan behind it.
He was so glad to get out that it wasn’t until he’d taken a few steps that the realized he was walking to what was actually her home. He stopped thinking about dinosaurs and dragons and tried to guess what he’d see there, behind the door. A pot of rice on a portable burner, that’s what she told him when he left, but what would he find apart from the pot? And what, in fact, was that curiosity all about?
As a child, he had stared unashamedly at people’s houses. As soon as the door opened he was already surveying the interior, the owner’s possessions. Shoes tossed here, an unread book left there, and what was in the fridge and in the closets. Most of the time there were no particularly interesting items, because what could you keep in a fridge? And yet, when all the details joined together into a whole, he felt an odd sense of gratification, the same feeling of satisfaction he had when he succeeded in assembling a complicated puzzle, and it had nothing to do with the complete picture it showed when it was finished. A fridge filled with low-calorie cheeses, and deep inside it, hidden behind organic Quaker Oats, a half-eaten cake. A book abandoned on the cabinet, opened, of all the possible places, to the page where the heroine confessed to a despicable betrayal. And the other books – titles displayed on the shelf in all their majesty, with only the stiffness of the covers to indicate that they had never been opened. He loved to see the closets full to bursting with clothes, their doors hastily closed by the embarrassed owners. A sensual heap of shirts and dresses, underwear and socks, a chaos of wrinkled fabrics with the fragrance of laundry detergent and the musty smell of the closet fighting over them as if on a battlefield.
He tried to tell himself that Sirkit’s house was like those houses, that the excitement that gripped him when he opened the door was nothing but a distant echo of the excitement he had felt then. But there was something else. At his cousin’s house in Haifa, on the balcony overlooking the wadi, he had once seen a woman sleeping in an armchair on the balcony below. She was about thirty and he was only a teenager; she was wearing a housedress with an awful floral design, and lying at her feet was a mystery novel that looked idiotic. But her housedress blew gently in the wind that rose from the wadi and he was shocked to see that she wasn’t wearing panties. Far below, the tops of the pines and oaks swayed from side to side, from side to side, and so did his glance, from side to side, from side to side, because the woman’s thighs spread slightly in her sleep and from the balcony above he saw all that he had never dared to hope he would see (at least for as long as he had pimples on his face and his voice hadn’t changed). The whole world spread out beneath him that afternoon, naked and exposed to his glance. The green wadi flowed into an endless sea of possibilities, and that pinkness broke through that green and blue, throwing him into turmoil and hurting his eyes so much that several moments later he turned and went back into the living room, almost at a run.
When Eitan opened the door to Sirkit’s caravan, the heat of that glance above the wadi flowed through his veins. And t
hough this time he had been asked to go inside – it was Sirkit herself who had sent him – he still felt chills along his back when he opened the creaking door, and for a fraction of a second the smell of desert dust was replaced by the light scent of pine that rose from the wadi in Haifa on hot summer days.
When he turned on the light, the room spread out before him in all its defiant meagerness. (What did you think you’d find here, lace panties? A vast library? Children’s drawings on the fridge?) Eight mattresses and pillows made of rolled-up shirts and pants. On one side of the door was a portable burner with a pot of rice on it. Several tablespoons, a few plates, and a strong feeling that he had been here before. If not in body, then in thought, the same thought he’d had when he first heard “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. A little girl walks through a forest and reaches a house that isn’t hers. The chairs aren’t hers. Neither are the bowls of porridge or the beds. But she treats them as if they were: she sits, eats, lies down. The magic of an empty house is that you can walk around in it and ask if it could be yours. He was already asking himself, if he had to sleep here, which of the mattresses on the floor he would choose? And he knew immediately, the one near the door. Even if at night the cold air seeped in through the opening and froze him in his sleep, he’d still prefer it over the others. And if he had to eat here, then it would be from the tin bowl. The glass ones didn’t look clean enough. For a moment, he considered picking up the bowls one by one, and thought about lying on each of the mattresses. To close his eyes and see how it felt to sleep here in the symphony of inhaling and exhaling, what it would be like to wake up. Goldilocks hadn’t stayed long enough to know. The bears came home, large and black, and she escaped through the window before they managed to make up a bed for her.
Waking Lions Page 15
