He looked at the mattress near the door again, and knew for certain: that was the one she slept on. It wasn’t a guess, but a firm conclusion: that was her place. Because she, like him, needed to be sure that she had air close by whenever she was with other people. A gentle breeze from outside blew through the room, and Eitan thought that perhaps this was what it felt like when she closed her eyes here, and why he was so sure that even when the wind was cold, she still lay with her face to the outside, to the desert, turning her back to the other people who lay inside, snoring, or tossing and turning, or talking in their sleep. Scratching as they dreamed, farting unknowingly, drooling threads of saliva on their pillow. Things that people should do when they’re alone are done here in the company of others, turning private shames into public ones. Or worse – into the absence of shame. But she maintained her boundaries, lying with her face to the outside and her back to the collection of thrashing, secreting bodies. He looked at the mattress near the door and saw her refusal to be absorbed into the human mass squeezed into the caravan. He saw and admired it.
(Nevertheless, he was wrong. Her mattress wasn’t the one near the door; it was in fact the mattress furthest from the door, next to the wall. She had hurried to put her belongings on it the day they had arrived there and hoped she wouldn’t have to move them again. Being close to the wall calmed her. She liked to fall asleep with her face right up against it, her nose almost rubbing it. She felt good lying like that. Curled up in the corner and not moving. She slept more soundly that way, was less exposed to the noise of the others.)
Sirkit’s things lay in a jumble on the bed. They might have held a great truth, a supremely important message for the man looking at them. But he wasn’t looking at them. His gaze was focused on a different mattress, the one near the door. What a shame. Because the pile of clothes on the mattress near the wall had been left there for him. A Rosetta Stone that he skipped over casually. After all, she had not sent him to the caravan for nothing. This is where I am when you’re not looking at me. Here I am when I haven’t prepared in advance for your glance. She had left her belongings in a jumble that morning because she could not have known he would come, although she might have contemplated the possibility. Imagined, even for a moment, that he was standing over her mattress and looking at her things. Much stranger thoughts than that can pass through the mind of a person when she is washing a floor. Water from the rag washing the floor, and washing other things along with it. For example, what would happen if. If he were to come into the caravan and look at her things. Without her actually paying attention to it, that possibility was washed away with all the others in the rhythmic sweeps of the squeegee. But something of that possibility must have stayed with her, because in the garage the circumstances suddenly changed, one thing led to another, and she sent him there. Not in her thoughts, but really. And now she was standing in the garage, realizing all at once that he was in her home, if it could be called a home. He was inside.
It was strange that she felt so defiled when it was she herself who had sent him there. And strange that the first time she called that place “home” in her thoughts was when someone else had entered it. She stood in the garage and pictured him there. Would he be able to pick out her mattress from all the others. What was he looking at now. What was he touching. But she knew it didn’t matter whether he touched anything or not, because for her, that place was defiled anyway. When she went back there tonight, the entire caravan would be covered with the imprints of his glance. Even if he’d only taken the pot of rice and left, she’d know he’d been there, his eyes scanning her most secret place, her bed.
It made no difference that she had also scanned. That the first time she went to his house, she had stood outside for a long time, looking. She’d seen the tangled topography of toys left on the lawn. She’d seen the umbrella that shaded the wooden table in the yard, and around it one, two, three, four chairs, one for each member of the family. And now her caravan had been broken into and spread out before him, and he was free to walk around in it to his heart’s content.
She knew: her sleep would be strange tonight. But even so, she would lie on her mattress. Wrap herself in her sheet. Press her nose up against the wall. That was the only way she knew how to sleep. But now she was in the garage and he was in the caravan, looking at the mattress next to the open door. And that entire time, on the mattress next to the wall, was a letter written in the ink of the careless way her shirt lay on her pillow, the unbearable sorrow of her hairbrush on the sheet. Because even if she hadn’t intended to leave him a message, it was hidden in the pile of things tossed on her bed. The hope of the new shirt she had bought herself. The shame of the old, torn one she hadn’t dared to throw away. All of that lay on the mattress right in front of him, but he didn’t look at them. He didn’t know. She didn’t know. A stranger to the letter she herself had written. Not understanding that from the moment she had first thought, while washing the floor, about the possibility of his glance on her bed – from that moment, the bed would never be free of his glance. There would always be the possibility of eyes. That morning, she had left her things there for those imagined eyes. But seen by his real eyes, the meaning of these things was lost, as if it didn’t exist.
Finally Eitan turned away from the mattress next to the door and looked again at the door itself. What unphotogenic poverty. Starring in a picture he’d taken on safari in Africa was a rickety mud hut about to fall and yellow savannahs covered with wave after wave of undulating thorns, like a lion’s mane. Naked children stared at the camera beneath an astonishingly blue sky. Bare-breasted mothers wore gorgeous jewelry made of lions’ teeth. The poverty in the pictures he took in Africa pierced the heart like a well-sharpened arrow. There was a splendid meagerness in the pictures he took in Africa. And here: eight mattresses. A portable burner. Several tablespoons. A few plates.
But there were roses here as well. Between the mattresses on the floor and the burner near the door stood an empty can of corn with roses in it. Three roses, as fresh as if they had been picked today. Suddenly, Eitan remembered a bush he had passed in the dark on the way here, and looked through the caravan door again. In the faint light of the lamp, he saw the outlines of more flowers. The Eritrean woman grew roses. For the first time since he’d met her, he imagined her at her job, cleaning the restaurant at the gas station. Scraping from plates the remains of desserts she had never tasted. Peeling vegetables. Sweeping. Hands covered in grease. Feet covered in dust. A dusty woman returning to a dusty caravan every day, but her roses were as clean as only roses can be.
They moved him, the roses. Truly moved him. He decided he’d say something about it to her. He took the pot of rice, closed the door and walked toward the garage, thinking the entire time of what he would say to her. But when he went inside, the nice words on the tip of his tongue, he found total chaos. Sirkit and the man he’d operated on were still there, but also present were two large Eritreans and a young Bedouin with a furious expression on his face. The Eritreans stood in front of the Bedouin, blocking his way. There was no mistaking their stance: arms folded, feet slightly spread. They wanted him to go and he didn’t want to go. But Eitan was sure he was missing something because the man in front of him didn’t look sick. Desperate, aggressive, but not sick.
Did you bring the rice?
Sirkit’s voice was as serene as always. She was standing beside the mattress on which the man he had recently operated on lay, speaking to Eitan as if they were the only ones in the room.
“What’s going on here?”
Sirkit pointed to the Bedouin without looking at him, as if she were pointing at a bit of dirt the wind had blown in. He wants to bring someone here. And I said no.
The Bedouin gave Eitan a quick glance, then turned around and left. The bodies of the Eritrean men relaxed abruptly, once again quiet, harmless people. Sirkit left the patient’s bedside and went to take the pot of rice. (And she swore to herself that she’d find out how that Bedou
in had learned of the illegal hospital, which of the stupid people around her had opened his mouth and what she would do to that tongue when she knew.) As she took the pot, Eitan thought about how far ahead of him she was, because he was still trying to formulate the question about that Bedouin who’d just been there and she, as usual, was already somewhere else. But a moment later, the garage door opened and the Bedouin hurried inside again. This time he had a young girl in his arms. Four large red roses bloomed on her blue galabiya, one in each place where a knife had stabbed her in the stomach. “You take care of her,” the Bedouin said. “My sister, you take care of her.”
As if to explain that he had no intention of backing down, the Bedouin went over to Eitan and handed the girl to him, almost threw her into his arms so that when the Eritreans grabbed him, his arms were already empty and Eitan’s very full. Eitan put the girl down on the rusty table and leaned over her. She was breathing, and that was great, but her pulse was very faint. Whoever had stabbed her had done a thorough job. Above his head, Eitan heard the whiplash of Sirkit and the Bedouin’s words. Short sentences in Arabic hurled in a clearly threatening tone. Sirkit repeated the word Soroka. The Bedouin shook his head wildly.
He wouldn’t go. Eitan would bet on it. Roses blooming that way on a galabiya meant either blood revenge or honor killing, two things that the clans would rather settle among themselves. He looked at the Bedouin. Who knew whether the fire in his eyes came from concern for his sister or guilt? He himself might have stabbed her four times, then regretted it. And the Bedouin, as if sensing the question in the doctor’s eyes, said to him, “My brothers did it. She was with a man.”
“And you?”
“Not me.”
He couldn’t really have expected a different answer. He cut the girl’s dress with a scissors and told Sirkit to get him an IV.
They are our IVs.
He promised he’d bring a new one tomorrow, he’d bring new everything, if only she’d get moving already, damn it. But she stayed where she was.
They don’t help us and we don’t help them.
Eitan looked at her. She was totally calm as she said it, despite the murderous look she gave the Bedouin. The Eritreans went and stood silently at the door, awaiting her instructions, but Eitan thought she would have been equally calm if she were facing the Bedouin alone. It drove him mad, that composure of hers, it made him so angry that his voice shook when he told her that if she threw that girl out of there, he’d go with her.
She didn’t say a word. He went back to the girl. The Eritreans left a few minutes later, but he didn’t notice. When the fight begins, the fighter in the ring doesn’t really pay attention to the spectators. (In the end, Zakai had said, death always wins by a knockout. The question is, how many rounds can you go?) He wanted to win this round. He wanted to see that girl behind a supermarket cash register in Beersheba, or pouring coffee in the Soroka cafeteria. Nodding hello to him on the street. But her body wasn’t really cooperating with his wishes. She hardly responded to the IV, and when he looked at the depth of the stab wounds again, he knew why. It was like pouring a glass of water into a bathtub that had no stopper. He still had to check what was happening to her other internal organs, but at the moment the most important thing was to stabilize her pulse, the rapid, hysterical contractions of a pump that couldn’t get what it needed. Behind him he could hear the older brother groan, his eyes fixed on the girl’s hands. They were already blue, almost purple, and the purpleness was spreading upward. She wasn’t dead, Eitan hurried to say, it was one of the symptoms of blood loss. Like the cold sweat on her forehead. Like the shallow breathing. Like the fact that, for a long moment, she hadn’t responded to the voices in the room with even a slight flicker of her eyelashes. Her feet also began to turn blue. He inserted another IV. And another. Minutes turned into hours turned into a mass of time that had no before or after, only the girl’s face, the cold sweat that covered it and the cold sweat that covered his.
He couldn’t recall with certainty the exact time the girl died. He only knew that at a certain moment he saw that her face was no longer sweating, was no longer moving at all. The pulse had stopped. The breathing had stopped. He tried to resuscitate her for another few minutes (maybe there was still a chance, damn it, maybe), and then he stopped. “When a doctor continues resuscitation efforts for five minutes after breathing and pulse have stopped, he’s not a doctor any longer,” Zakai had once told him. “Resuscitating the dead is the job of messiahs and prophets, not medical students.” He heard the Bedouin burst into tears behind him. He didn’t turn around. He was still afraid of that fire he’d had in his eyes earlier, not convinced that those hands, now hugging his sister, weren’t the ones that had held the knife. He went over to the sink and washed his hands. Dried them well. He had already turned to leave the garage when he recognized a familiar word in the jumble of the Bedouin’s words and sobs. A name the Bedouin kept repeating over and over again.
Mona.
Mona Mona Mona Mona.
4
AT 3:30 IN THE MORNING, in the bedroom of the private house in Omer, Liat was asleep in the double bed. Lying diagonally across it, with the total abandon of someone alone in bed. Before falling asleep, she had decided not to hug him tonight, or let him hug her. When he lifted the blanket and got into bed, she’d curl up on her side. No more stomach pressed to back, no more leg against leg. She couldn’t go on like this, not speaking during the day and embracing at night. Two separate kingdoms, the one of strained breakfasts and silent dinners, the other of intertwined bodies reveling in each other in the dark, with only the light from Yaheli’s room slipping in under the door as a reminder that it was actually the same house. Where the distant, daytime Eitan and Liat became the intimate, night-time Eitan and Liat. Fifteen years together, and only rarely had she been distant from him in her sleep. After especially nasty fights, to-the-death arguments. But even then, they would almost always feel their way back to each other in the dark so that the sun would not rise and find them apart.
He got into bed shortly after 3:30. Though she was sleeping, she felt him, and remembered the decision she had made. Normally, sleep would melt her anger, but tonight the hurt was part of her body. A limb she felt again when she turned over on the mattress, no different from the hand or foot we don’t think about when we’re dreaming, but the tiniest bit of awareness is enough to remind us of their existence. The hand, the foot, the hurt. All of them were totally present. Perhaps that was why several minutes passed before she felt the tremors. She’d been busy barricading herself among the pillows and blankets and didn’t feel the odd movement of the air on the other side of the bed. She finally noticed it, and didn’t understand.
“Eitan?”
He didn’t reply, and for a moment she was angry and decided that if that’s how he was going to be, then she wouldn’t say anything else. She could do silence as well as he could. But the tremors continued there, on the other side of the bed, and she slowly stopped being angry and began to worry.
“Tani, are you sick?” She put her hand on his forehead, which was fine, and then lowered her hands to his cheeks, which weren’t fine at all. Wet and hot. “Are you crying?”
Even before he replied, she said to herself, no, it can’t be, her man didn’t cry. He simply didn’t have those ducts in the corners of his eyes, it was something physiological. But when her fingers moved higher up on his cheeks, they touched moist, salty eyes, and when she hugged him, he uttered a sound that was undoubtedly a sob. So she hugged him, and hoped he couldn’t feel the slight suspicion in her hands, the slight awkwardness in the way she held his body, which had suddenly changed. A few moments later, when the tremors had died down a bit, she asked him what had happened. She asked tenderly, quietly, but when several moments passed without a response from him, she once again felt that familiar anger she had gone to sleep with, along with a new, darker question about another woman. Then finally, his voice. Weak, broken, but still – his voice. Th
e stranger of the last several weeks had vanished, and now she heard Eitan, really Eitan, tell her in a jumble of words about a young girl who had died that night on the operating table. “It’s my fault,” he said over and over, “it’s my fault.” Tears welled in his eyes again. “It’s my fault.” Just when she thought he was calming down, when he stopped mumbling and began breathing regularly, he looked at her with urgency, “I have to tell you what happened, Tul, tell you why she died.” He was about to continue speaking, she saw his lips shaping the next sentence, when she reached out and stopped him.
“Enough,” she said. “You’re making yourself miserable, and it’s not right.” He listened to her silently as she reminded him that he was a doctor, and doctors sometimes made mistakes, but their goal was the noblest one there is. “Patients die sometimes, Tani, that doesn’t mean it’s your fault. Think about all the night shifts you’ve had this last month. How can you lie here and tell me that you’re a bad person, or not a professional?!” She kissed his eyes, which were wet with tears again, kissed his cheeks and even his chin, kissed them and said, “You’re a good man, Tani, you’re the best man I know.”
Gradually, she felt him relax in her arms. He didn’t object anymore when she stroked his head. Didn’t try to speak again. She ran her fingers through his hair until his heavy breathing told her he had fallen asleep. Like Yaheli, she thought, like Yaheli who cries himself to sleep, the system closing itself down so it can start up again tomorrow. WINDOWS IS SHUTTING DOWN. But she continued to stroke his hair in a movement that grew slower as the minutes passed, until she too fell asleep.
At seven in the morning, she received the call from the precinct.
He clung to sleep as tightly as he could when Liat’s phone rang, clung to it when she cried loudly, “What?!” He kept his eyes closed when she got out of bed and dressed quickly and hurried Itamar and Yaheli in a clearly urgent voice. When he heard the door shut, he straightened the blanket around his body and even then he was careful to keep his eyes closed so that not a ray of sun could penetrate. But he knew that he was awake and that all the ruses in the world could not change that.
Waking Lions Page 16
