The woman’s bleeding didn’t worry him. Given the situation, it was completely normal. What did bother him was her look. At the most difficult moments of the birth, even when she had almost passed out, there was still a distant sparkle in Semar’s eyes. Now the eyes were vacant. He looked into them and was shaken.
“Tell her she has to stay in bed for a while. At least two days.” Sirkit translated for Semar. The woman did not look at her as she spoke, but when she finished, she shook her head.
She must go back to the restaurant. She cannot stay away for so long.
“Then someone needs to go over there and explain to her boss that she just had a baby. He must have seen that she was pregnant.”
A rapid exchange of glances between Sirkit and the woman on the mattress. Silence. Eitan’s glance wandered to the pile of clothes on the floor. Skirts and shawls she had taken off when she first arrived, too much for any sort of weather. “Even so,” he said, “she’s staying here.”
Sirkit translated the doctor’s words and added some of her own, and Semar shook her head and thought, “I’m not listening to you anymore. I did it once and look what happened. For nine months his baby grew in my belly, laid down roots in my heart, spread branches in my chest. For five days, I have been dripping milk like a cracked jug. And now, who knows where that baby is, that dolphin that glowed in front of me for one moment and then vanished.”
Years ago, on that morning on the boat with her father, she had thought that the dolphin symbolized something. Some hidden message from the world. All her life she had believed that if she worked hard enough, if she continued to mend the holes in the net, amazing creatures like the dolphin would occasionally flash by. Appear for a moment outside the field of reach, but within the field of vision. Would let her be dazzled by them, if only at a distance. And then they’d dive back in, leaving behind only gray ocean and hard work. You could do that work if you knew that every now and then the sea would split in two for a second and in the middle would be something truly beautiful. But since that dolphin, there had been no other dolphins. The sea hadn’t split in two, and even the ordinary fish had also stopped coming. There was no longer any point in mending the net. It came out of the water empty in any case. And now her belly was empty too. Where the baby had been before, there was nothing now. Even the blood that flowed from her, insisting that yes, there had been something there, even that would stop soon. She’d be empty again, the way she had been before the baby came, but different. Only the sink in the restaurant was always full. Endlessly filling up. Leftovers of unfamiliar food that people had eaten a lot of, or a little of, or hadn’t eaten at all, then had stood up and walked away from, leaving the food on the plate. The baby’s father didn’t care whether people left food on their plates or not. He only wanted the restaurant to be full. And for that, he needed clean rest rooms, a kitchen that worked quickly and an organized storeroom. She’d spent a great deal of time in the rest rooms and the kitchen these last few months, but he hadn’t taken her to the storeroom again since that time. He took other girls, but not her. Sirkit told her that she had to hide the baby well when it was still in her belly, but the baby’s father never looked at her anyway, so that wasn’t too difficult. But she hadn’t been at work since yesterday, and that was something he’d notice. The other girls had promised to work hard in her place, but still.
Semar looked around the garage. She couldn’t stay here and she knew it. That was why she waited until Sirkit and her doctor had momentarily disappeared before she lowered a trembling foot, then the other foot, and stood barefoot on the cement floor. The cold flowed upward from the floor, climbed from her heels to the top of her head. The pain between her legs was still asleep, didn’t notice that she’d stood up, didn’t understand that she was sneaking outside. But the moment she took a step, it woke up all at once and enveloped her before she could escape, gripped her in a white-hot iron vise. The darkness of the garage was suddenly punctuated by darting colors, and Semar thought she was going to pass out. She didn’t pass out, but splashes of purple and blue continued to glow before her eyes, and between them the face of the baby’s father appeared suddenly. She told herself it was okay, the splashes would soon disappear along with that face, and a moment later the purple and the blue really did disappear, but the baby’s father was still there.
Davidson examined the garage with stunned eyes. He’d had his own thoughts about what he’d find when he entered, but none of them approached this. For the last several days he had been sniffing around the Eritreans, ever since Rachmanov had told him that there was movement there at night. At first, he’d thought the Bedouins who stole the shipment had come back to search for more, but only an idiot would do something like that. Then he thought it was Sayyid’s crew. He had even called Sayyid to say he should get the hell out of his territory, and that if he had had his shipment, he would have returned it already. Sayyid said that he hadn’t sent anybody to look for it. The person who had to look for the shipment was Davidson. He was the one who’d lost it. “Not to worry though,” Sayyid had told him, “I’m a patient man. But you should know that you need to start thinking about how to return the money, because it doesn’t look like you’re going to find the shipment.”
After that conversation, Davidson was so jumpy that he decided to close the restaurant early and send all the workers to the caravans. They went, but there was something in their glance that stayed with him even after he was left alone. A secret. There was a secret there. He wanted to follow them right then, but told himself that it would be better to wait. The next day, he checked them out carefully when they arrived and saw that two of them were missing. Semar, and the one with the big eyes. Now that he didn’t like. He looked for the two women in the caravans and didn’t find them, so he drove around in the van for a while, but saw nothing. Then he noticed the kibbutz’s abandoned garage and the red SUV parked at the entrance. It looked like whoever had stolen the shipment actually was stupid enough to come back.
He thought about calling Rachmanov, but he had his gun on him and he was more agitated than he had ever been in his life. The last thing he expected to see was shelves of medications, surgical gloves, and an iron table that had been converted into a treatment table. And Semar, who looked at him with gaping eyes, like a chicken in the kibbutz coop before it was shut down.
Someone like Davidson.
People generally assumed that someone like him had made a choice somewhere in the past.
For example – at a crossroads.
One road turned right. The other left. If he turned right, he’d choose evil. If left – good. The directions themselves weren’t important. What was important was the crossroads; that is, the existence of the moment when a person stands before two clear, opposing paths and chooses one over the other. Of course, at that moment he may not necessarily know that a turn to the right will end in a life of evil and a turn to the left will lead to a life of goodness. But he knows he’s at a crossroads. He knows he is choosing. And that when he reaches the place he finally reaches after many days and kilometers, he can look back and pinpoint the moment it all began. He can say there. It happened there.
If not a crossroads, if not two clear paths, if not devastation or salvation, children of light or children of darkness, if not any of those, then goat paths. Anyone who has walked in the desert knows. Elusive lines that have no beginning and no end, and walking along them is as random as the wind. They have no purpose and no direction; sometimes they lead to a hidden spring, sometimes to a steep cliff. Sometimes to both, and sometimes to neither. Clear intersections and paved roads are marked on maps. A person traveling them begins at point A and reaches point B. A person also knows that if he sets out from C instead, he will undoubtedly reach D. Because one ends where the other begins and one begins where the other ends. But a person who begins walking on a goat path doesn’t know where he will end up. Even after he reaches the end, he cannot know how he got there. That’s why those paths do not ap
pear on maps or in books, although they are infinitely greater in number than the clearly marked paths. The world is full of goat paths of which no one speaks.
A paved path should lead, for example, from Davidson the man back to Davidson the child. It is clear, after all, that a man who assaults a woman in the back of a storeroom assaulted something else when he was a boy. He abused kittens, or intimidated kids in his class. Bad adults were once bad youngsters, and even before that they were children who’d had something bad done to them. You can chart it. You can investigate it. You can walk heel-to-toe along the family tree, either on the father’s side or the mother’s, until you reach the roots of the evil. Davidson the toddler – you can look into his eyes and see it. A drop of blood in a glass of milk. Anyone tracing it will ultimately reach the drop of blood on the Eritrean woman’s underpants. To deny that would mean to toss out all the charts. Obliterate once and for all the assumption that roads lead and do not just happen. But that would be impossible, so a moment of choice is required. A crossroads is required, and a decision.
But the truth is that he had never abused kittens or hit other kids more than was normal. The truth is that he himself had never been hit, at least not an exceptional number of times. The urge to do evil did not arise in him, and so he could neither overcome it nor abandon himself to it. He lived his life totally asleep. In a state of slumber that became a way of life. When he could take something, he took it. When he couldn’t, he tried to take it anyway. Not out of greed, but out of habit. He began dealing drugs a short time after his discharge from the army. Everyone was using; someone had to deal. The guy who offered him the job was a kid himself, but he seemed terribly grown-up. He was from Beersheba, that guy, and the whole kibbutz gang called him BS. They made fun of him behind his back but were respectful to his face. When Davidson began dealing for him, they were also respectful to Davidson, and that was nice. But the real kick was the money. Buying what you wanted. Eating where you wanted. In a few years, he had enough for the restaurant. He loved to watch people eat. Even the biggest phonies, the ones who stopped at his place on their way to the jazz festival in Eilat – when they chewed, they were just like any other animal. He’d been to restaurants in Tel Aviv; he knew they ate differently there. With their mouths closed. Eyes averted. Intelligent thoughts in their minds. But they came to his restaurant after a two-and-a-half-hour drive. They were tired and hungry, and thought no one was looking at them. He saw them chew their chicken steaks, ripping them apart with their teeth, their mouths smeared with oil from their salads. He saw them wolf down chocolate cake warmed in the microwave and then leave no tip for the waitress they’d never see again anyway.
He loved his work, but when that guy from Beersheba came to him with an offer to send shipments through him, he didn’t need to consider it for long. The restaurant was still full and the Eritreans saved him a hell of a lot of money, but the truth was that he was beginning to feel bored. The bearlike slumber that had made him an easy baby to take care of, a quiet pupil and a definitely acceptable husband enveloped him like a fat tire. Only rarely was the fat penetrated by a flash of genuine desire, of true passion. Even when he was taking a woman in the darkness of the storeroom, he hardly felt anything but a slight ripple in the ocean of boredom. He could just as easily have been grabbing a bag of snacks as the naked ass in front of him. Everything was simply there, waiting for him to taste it.
He thought the shipments might arouse something in him, and in that sense he was quite right. Since the package he’d sent with the Eritrean had disappeared, his senses had become sharper. If he were to wake up several days later to discover that the restaurant had burned down, a scenario Sayyid had hinted at in their last few conversations, he would certainly have felt more alive than ever. But he felt alive enough as it was, more alive than he wanted to feel. They had played him for a fool – this entire time, they had clearly played him for a fool. The medications, the bandages, the antiseptics from the storeroom – those two Eritrean women had set up a clinic for refugees in his backyard. He, who had always been careful not to attract attention, and had succeeded, was now smack in the middle of an illegal route for illegal immigrants. God only knew how many had already passed through there, and who knew what they would say if the immigration police caught them. It infuriated him, and what infuriated him even more was the look in the eyes of that woman, the one he suddenly remembered was called Sirkit. An insolent look. A fuck-you look. She stood in front of him now, holding a crate she’d brought from outside. Looking at him as if he were someone who’d come into her house without permission. And it was his house, damn it, his territory.
Semar was standing closer, so she caught the first slap. He didn’t plan to do more than that, one slap for her, one for Sirkit, and a phone call to that babe from the police to show her what good citizenship was. But when the slap landed on her face, Semar grabbed his hand and bit it as hard as she could, bit it with a strength she never dreamed she had, despite all the hours she’d spent watching people chew. He tried to shake her off, but couldn’t. He grabbed her hair and pulled with all his might, but she only bit down harder, and with the last vestiges of clear thought he still had, he was shocked at how that puny woman was capable of such a thing. He let go of her hair – pulling it was leading nowhere – and began to punch her in the stomach instead. That worked. With the third punch, she let go of his hand and collapsed onto the floor. He bent over her, planning to keep punching her with his uninjured hand. He knew he’d have stop at some point – he couldn’t take her to the police with bruises that were too prominent – but at the moment, he simply couldn’t stop.
Let her go.
If he momentarily let go of Semar, it wasn’t because of the order the other one had given him, but because he was so astonished that she had dared to give him an order at all. And in Hebrew. Who would have believed that this quiet girl had managed to pick up the language? He punched Semar one more time, and was intending to teach the other one a lesson too, when he suddenly felt something cold tear through his stomach, through layer after layer of fat and slumber, all the way to his very core.
Eitan was closing the trunk when he heard the fall. He had taken a coat out of it for Semar. It was too cold for the thin blankets they had in the garage, and his down army jacket seemed like a good solution. Another piece of his previous life casually appropriated by his present, different life. Under the jacket, he’d found an old bottle of wine from the time he still believed he would surprise Liat with a spontaneous picnic. It had suited him to think he was the sort of person who always had a bottle of wine in the trunk, ready for a celebration. There were also some of Yaheli’s toys. Itamar’s books. Charcoal for the barbecue that would never come. Two months earlier, if anyone had asked him, he would have said that his trunk was full of junk. But now he understood that it wasn’t junk, but a treasure trove. A time capsule in the back of the car, and he hadn’t known.
He closed the trunk with one hand, the jacket in his other, and then heard the noise. Heavy and muted. He dropped the coat and ran inside, expecting to find Semar passed out on the floor. And there she was, on the garage floor, but she wasn’t the only one. A large man wearing jeans lay not far from her, a knife in his stomach. Semar held her own stomach as she stood up, shaking. The man remained lying there.
12
THE EARTH DID NOT WANT to take him back, that filthy man. It made itself as hard as rock. It had rained two weeks earlier and the earth had been soft and slippery, like a sheep’s intestines. But now the earth was hard, very hard, and Sirkit was angry at it for not helping, but she also understood why it wasn’t willing to have that filthy man pushed into it. Tesfa and Yasu dug like mad with large spoons that Semar had found. They had blood on their hands from the digging, and Sirkit thought that for men, they were really okay. They did what had to be done, didn’t speak much and didn’t hit anyone unless they were asked to do so. They might have looked surprised when she called them into the garage and showed
them that one lying there on the floor, but they’d said nothing. They hesitated for a moment when she asked them to lift him, as if they weren’t sure he might not suddenly stand up and shout at them because they were supposed to be cleaning the restaurant now. But in the end, he was a dead white man and they were alive black men, so a moment later they bent down and picked him up, not very gently. But there had been another moment, when they first saw his face and Sirkit saw them waver. His eyes had been open, and their blue pupils looked strangely off to the side. Tesfa and Yasu looked at the spot that the eyes were looking at and saw nothing, but it still seemed odd to them, seeing their boss wall-eyed like that. Before then, they had never looked directly into his eyes. And now they could look as much as they wanted, and that confused them a bit. But they quickly remembered that a dead man is a dead man, and open eyes that saw nothing was something they knew very well from the desert and the Bedouin camp.
They dug for almost three hours, until they finally cared nothing about the dead man’s eyes or his huge feet, which had fascinated them at first. They just wanted him to get into the hole so they could return the earth to where it belonged, cover him well and go to sleep. When they’d gone, she remained standing there. That filthy man was under the ground and she was above it, and that felt good. She was glad they had finally managed to get him in. She had begun to think they’d have to cut him up. That was a terrible thing to see. In the Bedouin camp, she saw how they cut a person’s ear off and took pictures of it so that their family could see it, be terrified and send money. It didn’t take much time, cutting off an ear, but with bones it had to be different. She wasn’t sure that Tesfa and Yasu would have been able to handle bones. About herself, she had no doubt. The doctor, on the other hand, was horrified when he saw the knife in the filthy man’s stomach. It was almost funny to see his face. He hadn’t believed she could do something like that. She hadn’t believed it either, until the second it happened. Then it seemed extremely logical, almost inevitable.
Waking Lions Page 24
