Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  They called him twice from the department, but there wasn’t a single call from Liat, and that seemed strange to him. He was already beginning to wonder whether the girl who died on the table in the garage yesterday really was the same Mona his wife had talked about. The possibility that she was a different girl filled him with hope. The call from the precinct which had come at dawn could have been connected to some other case. Liat hadn’t said anything when she left and he was trying as hard as he could to stay asleep. All the way home, he played with the new possibility that had opened up. Mona and the boy were alive and well. He almost dared to picture their faces, amusing himself with thoughts of those two children’s forbidden love. It wasn’t the same Mona. Any doubts he had about it diminished from moment to moment. Liat would have called to tell him if that girl were dead. After all, she felt especially close to the case of the Eritrean and the Bedouin boy and girl who had recently become part of it.

  But when he went into the house he found her on the couch, her eyes red. He knew right away, and he was angry that he had allowed himself not to know. He had spent the drive home deceiving himself with illusions, telling himself lovely stories about a young boy and girl riding a camel into the sunset. He sat down beside Liat, waiting for the moment she would tell him what he already knew, preparing comforting words in advance, a hug, points in her favor in the argument that was most certainly taking place in her mind. It’s not your fault, that girl, it’s not your fault. So he didn’t understand at first when instead of telling him about the death of the girl, she looked at him with veiled eyes and asked, “Where were you?”

  “On duty.”

  “That’s not what they told me when I called the hospital today to tell you that the Bedouin girl died.” And before he could think of what to say, she was standing up and looking at him furiously. “They asked me how Yaheli’s asthma attacks were, the ones that were the reason you left the hospital early.”

  5

  EITAN AND LIAT HAD NOT been speaking for more than a week. Words were spoken. Words were spoken in response. There’s no more milk and where’s Yaheli’s backpack and I’ll take him to nursery school today. Sometimes their shoulders touched when they put the children to bed together or when they were drying them off in the bathroom. Liat set the table for dinner, Eitan put the dirty plates in the sink. Liat loaded the dishwasher, Eitan put the dishes back in the cabinet. Days came, days went, and Eitan and Liat did not speak. And during that time, their kitchen sink filled and waned, like the moon.

  Dishes were loaded. Dishes were taken out. Plastic bags filled up with garbage and were thrown into the bin in the yard. The bin in the yard filled up with plastic bags of garbage and was emptied into a garbage truck. The garbage in the truck was dumped at the landfill in the Negev, where it was buried in the depths of the earth. The earth filled up with garbage. Filled and filled and could not be emptied, and the dust rose from it like an affront, rose and enshrouded the city of Beersheba, rose and enshrouded it all the way to Omer. But Eitan and Liat’s kitchen sink gleamed in the cleanliness of its dazzling marble whiteness. Glittered in the darkness. Its light bursting through the dust. A marble moon filled and waned in the stainless steel sky.

  In the end, she forgave him. He swore to her again and again that the time he spent outside the hospital was spent alone. Air, he told her, he had needed air. He described his drives on the SUV tracks, back and forth on the dirt roads, night after night. But why lie, she asked, why not just say it. His answers were stammering, incomplete, but the scent of perfume did not rise from them. And in his eyes she saw loneliness, not unfaithfulness. As angry as she was at him, she began to be angry at herself as well. What did he have in this place? She had dragged him here almost by force. She could have let him pursue his case against Zakai, could have let him go to the media. He might have lost his job, but his pride, that invisible internal organ men need in order to exist, would have remained intact. So he got into his SUV and drove. For hours. Entire nights. And perhaps it was better that way, because in fact, what would she have done if he had come home with all the frustration, with his anger at the transfer, the missed opportunity? She didn’t even know how to handle Yaheli’s fits of anger, needed Eitan to calm him down, so how would she have handled the humiliation of a forty-one-year-old man who, for the first time in his life, found himself ousted, outranked, no longer Number One?

  She knew that any other woman would have started checking up on him long ago. And she knew that she, who checked up on and investigated others on a daily basis, she, of all people, would never do that. She wasn’t willing to look at him with those eyes of doubt. To look for signs, traces. She wasn’t willing because if she began doing that now, she wasn’t sure she would be able to stop later. On safari in Kenya, after their wedding, the guide had told them that once a lion tastes human flesh, it won’t ever want to hunt anything else. Perhaps it wasn’t true, just a story for tourists, but her lioness’s instincts knew there was no greater temptation, no hunt more tantalizing, than the ambush of your loved ones.

  That was why you should not do it. So that they wouldn’t lie there in front of you, split open, their secrets spilling out of their intestines. You had to remember – not everything should be examined. And stop. Before.

  As it was, she saw too much. Knew that when Itamar said the class trip was fine, he was actually saying he’d had no one to sit next to. Saw it in the corners of his eyes, the slight tilt of his head. But she didn’t say anything to him, to avoid embarrassing him, and she didn’t tell Eitan, to keep him from worrying. Perhaps she also hoped that one day she would manage not to tell even herself, manage to turn off the x-ray machine in her head that showed her what people had in their suitcases and in their hearts.

  It was a complicated business, seeing. Because she felt so big and strong when she rummaged around inside people without their noticing, without a search warrant. Because, when she was doing her bachelor’s degree, one look was enough for her to know who was pregnant, not from the girl’s body, which was still flat, but from the hand resting protectively on her stomach. And later, when she was doing her master’s degree, she had dinner with those same students and their husbands, determining what sort of marriage they had based on whether they held hands only when they walked in, a temporary display, or continued to hold hands later. She could recognize the difference between remoteness that grew out of a lack of confidence and remoteness that stemmed from condescension, between artificial restraint and true calm, healthy flirtatiousness and seductiveness. She knew and held back, always remembering her grandmother’s warning: be careful you don’t get mixed up with the looks. Don’t be too sure that you’re looking outside when all you’re actually seeing is what’s inside you.

  How could she really know about Itamar’s trip? The empty seat next to him on the bus might not have been empty at all. Maybe she’d confused it with a different seat, a different bus, years ago. An empty seat on the way to a getting-to-know-each-other day during her first week at Ma’agan Michael. She’d looked out of the window then, trying to be interested in the countryside, as if she couldn’t have cared less that no one was sitting next to her. But you could see it. In the angle of her eyes. In the slight tilt of her head. On the way back, she was already sitting next to Sharon. Seven hours of class activities had been enough for her to become part of the group. But she remembered the earlier ride very well, always remembered it. Trees and buildings passing by outside. She had looked at them to avoid looking at the gang of happy girls inside. She looked and said, there’s a tree. There’s a building. There’s an interchange. But she was actually saying: I’m alone, alone, alone.

  You could never really know what was happening inside someone else’s head. But you could try. Watch the windows of the house patiently until a momentary gust of wind pushed the curtain aside. Then peer inside. And fill in the missing pieces in your mind. The only thing you have to remember is that the missing pieces you’ve added have come from you, not fro
m there.

  She wouldn’t follow Eitan because she didn’t want to look through the window into her own house. There was no better way to desecrate a house. But she didn’t want to see Eitan like that, to catch him unawares. As if she were stealing something from him, and he had no idea. So she made a thorough check of his lies when he lied to her, and asked again about where he’d been. But she didn’t check up on him, didn’t track him. She scrupulously protected him from her hunter’s eyes. Protected herself as well.

  She started sleeping with him again. One night she removed the imaginary line that divided the bed in the middle and reached out to him, and they slept in each other’s arms again. But her sleep was sad and scanty, and the days were enveloped in a sort of yellow haze. There was something he wasn’t telling her. The investigator in her knew that even if the woman in her chose to ignore it. She lost it only once. Three days after they made up, he told her he had a half-shift. At 8:15, he called to say goodnight to Yaheli and Itamar. The kids talked to him briefly and went back to watching March of the Penguins. She sat on the couch in front of the sea lions and albatrosses and thought that she actually had no idea where he was now. The clear certainty she had felt throughout their twelve years of marriage – certainty that Eitan was where he said he was – collapsed now like a gigantic iceberg crumbling all at once. She sat in the living room and heard nothing but the roar of doubt. Endless possibilities swirled in her mind. He could have been calling from a hotel. A car. Another woman’s bedroom. He could have been calling from Tel Aviv. Jerusalem. A nearby apartment. Only one line can be drawn between two points, but an endless number of lies and deceptions can be drawn between two people. From moment to moment, the possibility that he was where he’d told her he was – doing a half-shift in the department – grew dimmer. She thought about calling there, but knew it wouldn’t be enough for her. A voice was too abstract. She needed a body. Needed to see Eitan in his white coat, with the stubble of his beard, in the place where he’d told her he was.

  The high-school girl who lived across the street said she’d be happy to watch the kids for an hour. Liat explained to her how Yaheli liked his cocoa, left her phone number and hurried to the car. The first call came even before she was out of Omer.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, E.T.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Driving. I had to go out for an hour.”

  “You’re coming back?”

  “Of course, sweetie.”

  Silence. He had nothing to say, but he still wasn’t ready to hang up. And perhaps she didn’t want him to hang up and leave her alone in the car, black thoughts hanging over her like bats.

  “Are you going to see Dad?”

  She almost slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road, suddenly realizing that Itamar could read her as well as she could read him. That thought upset her, but she quickly reassured herself, kids are like that, they don’t understand that Mom and Dad can exist apart from one another; for them, if Mom is driving somewhere, it’s to see Dad, and if Dad dials the phone, it’s always to Mom.

  “E.T., we’ll talk later. I’m driving.”

  She knew she hadn’t answered his question, but preferred not answering to lying. She’d rather raise him with questions that remained open than in a world filled with false answers. Or maybe she was using a well-reasoned educational argument to disguise what was in fact nothing but negligence. She didn’t have much time to think about it, because five minutes later, Yaheli’s call came.

  “Mommy, are you there?”

  Mommy was there; the question was, where was Liat? Once she thought that motherhood was another thing you added to yourself. Something large, binding, but none the less something that was added to you, to who you were. That was how she introduced herself to people: Hello. I’m Liat. Mother of two. But she apparently should have said it the other way round: Hello. I’m a mother of two. Liat. That mother of two had swallowed her up a long time ago. Liat was a leftover, what was spit up when the mother of two burped. But now, tonight, she had to be slightly less mother and much more Liat. Decisive. Impulsive. Listening intently to the voices inside her and not the ones outside.

  “Mommy’s here, Yaheli, but Mommy can’t talk now. Tell Netta to make you some cocoa.”

  She continued driving. Five minutes later, the call from Netta. Liat was already at the hospital, trying to find a parking spot, trying to explain to a frustrated sixteen-year-old girl how Yaheli wanted his cocoa.

  “Did you mix it well enough so there are no lumps?”

  “Yes, but he won’t drink it. Says it doesn’t taste good.”

  Liat was about to shout at her that there was no reason it shouldn’t taste good, it was the same cocoa powder, the same milk, but she knew Yaheli wouldn’t drink it until the last necessary ingredient, the secret spice, had been added – total maternal dedication to his every need and desire. He wouldn’t drink it until she was there with him, at home. But she wouldn’t get home until after she’d been in the hospital.

  So she ended the call. Took a deep breath. Put her lipstick on in front of the rearview mirror. It might be ludicrous to put on makeup before an appearance like this one, but she thought it was important to come prepared, not to discover his unfaithfulness without lipstick. Like her grandmother, who plucked her eyebrows carefully before every visit to the tax department. At one time, Liat had found that funny. Even a bit annoying. As if the clerk cared whether or not you were wearing blusher. But her grandmother had continued to cover herself in the armor of her makeup right before taking to the battlefield. Spread her blue powder over her eyelids, knowing that as a small woman facing something large, she had to stand as proudly as she could. Even the day before her last operation, she had asked Liat to dye her hair. Liat hadn’t understood why. She thought her grandmother’s white hair was the most beautiful thing there was. But her grandmother insisted. “So the doctors won’t think I’m old. They’ll see red hair and they’ll fight harder.” Even death was frightened away by red hair, but when it saw white hair, it snatched up what it came for. In the department’s disgusting bathroom, under the nurses’ noses, Liat had died her grandmother’s hair. Her hands shook slightly. Red drops of dye dripped onto the floor. Her grandmother said, “They’ll think somebody was slaughtered in here.” And they had laughed and laughed, almost until they cried, even though it wasn’t all that funny.

  Now she finished applying her lipstick and examined herself in the mirror. When all was said and done, she was a beautiful woman. She took out a tube of mascara and applied a heavy layer, blocking any possibility of tears. She wasn’t the sort of woman who sobbed, leaving her mascara to run down her face in blue-black streams. She’d get out of the car beautiful and carefully made up, and she’d get back inside it beautiful and carefully made up no matter what she discovered.

  The guard at the entrance gave her bag a cursory look. She walked to the elevators and knew she had no idea what she’d do when she got to the department. Look for him? That would be easy if he was there, but so humiliating if he wasn’t. On the other hand, there was a good chance she’d have to talk to someone. For example, if Eitan was in surgery.

  But how would she know if he really was in surgery? Maybe they’d just back him up. All of them. Maybe it was a woman from his department he had disappeared with, and the brotherhood of doctors and nurses would close ranks around them. Just as cars moved aside to make way for an ambulance with its siren blaring, other thoughts moved aside in her mind until there was nothing left to block the suspicions from racing forward.

  Then they stopped abruptly when, through the glass window of the department door, she saw the face of her man. He didn’t see her. Another doctor was standing in front of him, and both were reading through a pile of papers Eitan was holding. Observing him from a distance, she saw clearly how tired he was, how drained and tense. His left hand was on his waist, supporting his lower back after God knows how many hours of standing. His shoulders were slightl
y stooped. His smile stopped a long way before it reached his eyes. There was something heartbreaking about the man standing on the other side of the door. His innocence, the knowledge that he didn’t have the slightest idea that she was watching him at that moment, a witness to his mid-shift fatigue. He was sure she was at home with the children, when in fact she was here, ten meters and one half-glass door away from him. It made him so vulnerable it was almost unbearable.

  She turned around and left. On the way back to the car, she found herself crying. The mascara ran. The lipstick remained bleeding in the middle of her face. When she reached the house, she wiped away her tears in the driveway. Rubbed out the black stripes of makeup with drops of saliva. In another moment she’d walk into the living room, smiling. She’d send the apathetic babysitter home, give Yaheli his cocoa and remind Itamar to go to sleep early. She’d act as if she had never gone to check up on her husband. And everything would be fine, excellent even, because although Liat was dying to crawl under the blanket and cry her heart out for the pain of his lie and the shame of her drive to the hospital, for a mother of two there was no such thing as crying your heart out. For a mother of two, everything is fine. So she waited another minute. Even two. And promised herself she would never, ever again in her life check up on her man.