Now she wanted to break a dish in that room. Deliberately. Turn on the radio to full volume. During the ads. Remove the sesame seeds, one by one, from the burekas, and drop them on the floor. And wait. If she didn’t come, if she really didn’t come, maybe then Liat would finally understand that it was true. That her grandmother truly wasn’t here. That Liat could fart loudly or announce that, in the next elections, she was voting for the left-wing party. That she could say, “Fuck it,” without her grandmother’s birdlike hand slapping her gently on the wrist and admonishing her, “What kind of way is that to talk!” That she could do whatever she wanted without criticism. Without praise. Without. She no longer needed to be a good granddaughter. Because if there was no grandmother, there was no granddaughter. There was just Liat. Alone.
The room was dark and warm, and Yaheli’s breathing was slow and quiet. The shadows wrapped Liat in black cotton wool and longing, which was painfully sharp at first, and then took on a sleepy quality. She moved her head close to Yaheli’s, inhaling deeply the scent of his shampoo. Why couldn’t he always smell like that, even when he grew up? She could cope with his voice changing, with the fact that one day he would be taller than she was, even that one day he’d love another woman more than her. She could accept all of it if at least they left her that scent, that childlike sweetness. But his scent would fade, just as the scent in this room had faded.
The last time she visited her in the hospital, Liat had put bright red polish on her grandmother’s nails. Her grandmother had lain on the mattress. Her wonderful hair spread around her head, her nails as red as strawberries. Now, in the dark bedroom, time was untethered from the chains of logic; everything was possible. The old grandfather clock still stood ticking away in a corner of the room, but its hands moved blindly in the dark. Perhaps forward, perhaps back. You know time only when you see it. You can’t see it in the dark, which means it doesn’t exist. In the dark, you can move things around, mix the future with the past and the present, shift years from side to side the way you shuffle cards in a card trick. Here’s Yaheli, three years old, with his child’s smell. Here’s Yaheli, thirteen years old, with his adolescent disdain. Here’s Liat, five years old, fifteen years old, thirty-five years old. Here’s her grandmother with black hair, white hair, red hair, with only her nails forever red.
When she woke up, Eitan was standing at the door. The hallway behind him glowed with the bluish light of the TV in the living room. In the darkness of the room, she could barely see his face. He didn’t speak, hardly moved, and he looked like another one of the illusory images that room could create so well. But she had known he’d come. So she wasn’t surprised when he actually appeared.
Since she had known he would come, it was reasonable to assume she’d know what to say to him when he arrived. The traffic jams on the way from Omer to Or Akiva had left her ample time to think. As had the long hours at the table in the living room. And yet, when she woke up and saw him, she couldn’t think of anything to say. All the things she had wanted to shout at him earlier had long since faded. And she wasn’t especially in the mood for a dramatic silence. She simply had nothing to say. “You lied to me.” “Where were you when you told the department you were sick?” “Who is she?” Ridiculous words. Superfluous. The words of women in terrible movies. From adjacent apartments.
She saw him lean forward, clear his throat. If so, he seemed to be planning to speak first. She looked at him with genuine curiosity. What rabbit could he possibly pull out of his hat now?
“Tuli—”
That infuriated her, really infuriated her, because how dare he call her Tuli. How dare he use that private, pet name, their name, at a time when everything that was theirs had fallen apart today at one in the afternoon, when she’d walked into the house and found it empty.
He saw her recoil. When she was asleep, her arms had been spread to the side, open and trusting, and now she drew them in close to her body. Her brown eyes assessed him in the dark, and then moved onward. That frightened him. Turning her gaze from him said far more than the hostile words, “I don’t want to talk.” She stopped looking at him the way people stop looking at an accident on the side of the road. At first they can’t take their eyes off it, and then the moment comes when it’s too much to bear, and they abruptly turn their heads, drive on and don’t look back even once. Because there’s nothing to be done anyway.
He should have told her that night. Should have walked into the house and told her. I ran someone over, Tul. An Eritrean. Widespread cortical damage. I left him there. The bright voices of a commercial came from Aviva’s living room. Someone was talking about the enormous benefits of whole-wheat grains. She would have listened to him that night. It was doubtful that she would listen now. (But would she really have listened to him then? And what sort of listening? Would she have been able to suspend for even a moment that clear distinction of hers between right and wrong? Let go, for a moment, of that eternal I-always-do-the-right-thing of hers, which was even greater than his? The thing that stood between them also had a mother, not only a father. A secret like that required two people. One who doesn’t want to tell and one who doesn’t really want to hear.) And there was another, not much more pleasant possibility. It hadn’t been his fear of her harsh criticism that had kept him from telling her that night. Or the admonishing speech she would give him and the self-righteous looks lurking in the corner of her eyes. It was because he knew that if she had hit the Eritrean, she would never have driven away and left him there. Not because of her I-always-do-the-right-thing, but because of who she was. She wasn’t a person who did such things. He, it turned out, was.
Eitan had no intention of telling Liat the truth. It was too complicated, too dirty, too covered in blood and brain matter. On the other hand, he definitely couldn’t leave things as they were without saying anything. That privilege was reserved for men who came home at normal hours. Men who didn’t stay out all night and weren’t caught in a series of embarrassing untruths and inaccuracies. Liat would not forgive him if he maintained his silence, but she certainly wouldn’t forgive him if he told her the truth. In a world of two terrible options, the lie shone like the sun. Filled everything with color.
Extortion for malpractice. That was the best he could come up with, and considering the circumstances, it wasn’t bad at all. The wife of a man he had operated on. He died, she threatened to sue. She still hadn’t filed the suit, but if she did, he would undoubtedly be ruined. He’d tried to meet with her over the last few weeks, convince her to drop the whole business. She was middle-aged, pretty crazy. Called him at weird hours. Demanded that he come. Gave wild, accusing speeches. But today she had summoned him urgently and said she was dropping the whole matter. Tore up the legal papers right in front of him. She was going back to her family in South Africa. “I haven’t told you until now because I didn’t want to worry you. Maybe I was also afraid that you’d be ashamed of me.”
There it was. The lie was out, smooth and glistening, like a hippopotamus emerging from a river. Huge. Almost monstrous. Born from him all at once, gigantic and perfect, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s brain. As he spoke, Eitan saw no difference between medical negligence during surgery and running over the Eritrean. In the end, both had occurred at work, both accidentally. And the extortion at the heart of the story was no different from the extortion that had actually taken place. And the happy ending was ultimately the same. As was the shame.
There were also differences, of course. Medical negligence was embarrassing, even disgraceful, and yet the consequences for a doctor who errs at work were not the same as those for a doctor who hits and runs. The first would probably be fired, that was all; the second would certainly be sent to prison. And if we’re already nitpicking, there was also quite a substantial disparity between the middle-aged crazy lady and the tall, slim woman whose velvet eyes still glowed in his memory. But Eitan ignored the differences. Had to ignore them, just as the pilot of a Boeing 747 steers the plane aw
ay from any obstacles on the runway during takeoff. The lie could not take off any other way. Liat, sitting there with her arms folded, looked at him as he pushed his hippopotamus along the runway, up into the sky. In some twisted way, it was very beautiful.
“Daddy? You’re here?”
Yaheli raised his sleepy head from the bed. Eitan stopped speaking. He didn’t yet know whether his hippopotamus would ultimately take off and remain in the air, or crash to the ground. Liat was looking at him again, and that was a good sign. She no longer looked like a passer-by who had just happened to meet up with him in an elevator. But he still couldn’t figure out the nature of her glance. The room was too dark and he was too anxious to grasp the subtleties. Usually, he could recognize the rapid blinking of impatience, her back tensing with disbelief. He had studied her face for fifteen years. But now he was entirely focused on the lie, and any distraction might end in disaster. Yaheli’s words were that sort of distraction, because even if he had managed to bring himself to tell such a despicable lie to his wife, he wasn’t willing for the lie to reach the ears of his small son. So he stopped speaking, and a moment later, when Yaheli repeated his question, he replied, “Yes, I came to put you to bed.” Now he felt completely comfortable because he knew for certain he wasn’t lying. He really had come to put him to bed. And in a moment, he would put Itamar, who had fallen asleep on the living-room couch, to bed as well. He’d tuck them in and tomorrow morning he’d take them all back home. To their lives. That crazy lady, middle-aged or not, would never appear again.
Yaheli waved him over with his hand. A small, commanding gesture that could not be denied. Liat moved aside, making room for Eitan. Even if she was thinking about telling him to leave, demanding that he go and come back tomorrow, the three-year-old’s demand was stronger. She couldn’t send the father away in front of the child.
Eitan hesitated for a moment before sitting down, examined Liat’s face and waited for her permission. She nodded and said nothing. He sat down beside her and ran his hand over Yaheli’s silken curls, which had been responsible for the surprising permission he had been granted to sit. Yaheli asked him to sing to him, and he whispered a song about two little girls and one umbrella, smiling when Yaheli demanded, “Mommy too! Sing together!” They sang together. It was funny and ridiculous and sad, depending on how things would end. If they went home together tomorrow, they would certainly laugh one day about the night they sang children’s songs in harmony, despite themselves. If Liat continued to be angry, that song would become a grotesque memorial: mother, father and child singing all the way to the divorce court. Eitan didn’t know which possibility was the right one. Neither did Liat. With his child’s wisdom, Yaheli held both their hands, held them tight and didn’t let go.
Six songs later, Eitan’s phone rang. He and Liat had just finished the la la la of the second chorus of “The Sixteenth Sheep”. Yaheli lay between them, overjoyed. They had never indulged his whims with such devotion. Both of them together, singing above his head, and no one said it was late, no one announced that it was enough. They sang to him so he would fall asleep and they sang to him to put their guilt to sleep, because they had told him that everything was fine when everything was not fine at all. Liat listened to Eitan, his bass voice slightly off-key, and thought that at some point our child will fall asleep and then our problems will begin. But she also thought that anyone who could sing to his child like that couldn’t be a liar. Which, by the way, was not accurate because people are definitely capable of singing charming songs to their children and telling terrible lies to other people, and sometimes to the children themselves. Liat knew that, though at that moment she clearly did not feel like knowing it. She felt like believing him. Like ignoring the strain she heard in his voice when he spoke, the strain she recognized from endless hours in the interrogation room. In the end, telling a story that differs from the reality is quite tiring. Unless you’re well practiced at it. You have to invent details, synchronize facts, fill holes. You never understand how complex reality is until you try to create a replacement for it. Nevertheless, there was something to the story, something that removed it from the typical territory of a lie. An alloy of a pure metal and another metal. A certain percentage of truth, a certain percentage of lie, melted together into a mixture. Who could tell?
She could. She had no doubt that she could. A brief phone call to the crazy widow. She wouldn’t settle for less than that. She’d verify that the woman was indeed a widow, indeed crazy, indeed middle-aged and on her way to South Africa. If all the answers were correct, they could begin to rebuild. Slowly, carefully – the sword would not be removed from the neck immediately. But if he opened his eyes in fright when she demanded to make that call, a short time after the curly-haired child in the bed fell asleep – if he refused her, then she would rid herself of him that very night.
The incoming call surprised them both. The ring cut through the lullaby they were singing to Yaheli. They were silent. Eitan was intensely aware of Liat’s glance. He would have loved to screen out that call. Let it sink into the well of forgetfulness. But he couldn’t. Wasn’t capable of it. Because there was a woman on the other end who needed to speak to him. He understood that from the urgent ringing, which went on for quite a while.
Yaheli turned over on the mattress, half-asleep. It was actually because of those soft curls, those clean cotton sheets that he had to check whether the world on the other end of the line actually existed, if it could possibly exist at the same time that his world existed.
He whispered to Liat that he had to take the call. Her reproachful look followed him out of the room. In the hallway, her heard Semar whisper in broken English. “Sirkit need doctor. Sirkit very very bad. Need doctor.” He didn’t say a word. What could he say? He hung up, and after a brief hesitation put the phone on mute. He went back into Yaheli’s room. Tried to sing “Lightning and Thunder”, but the thunder stuck in his throat and the lightning exploded inside his stomach. Sirkit need doctor. Very very bad.
14
WHY WAS HE GOING BACK THERE?
If there were an answer, the sort composed of ten words or 10,000, the sort that began with “because” and ended with “that’s why”, the sort in which things began at point A and therefore had to reach point B – if there were such an answer, Eitan Green didn’t know it.
Thursday night, and the road from Or Akiva to Beersheba was deserted. Occasionally the face of a Russian child selling flowers appeared at a dark intersection. Eitan didn’t slow down, but settled further into his jacket, though the temperature in the car remained the same. After twenty or thirty minutes, another intersection, another child, and again he pulled his jacket tighter around him without thinking about it, without remembering.
He asked himself why he was going back, and had no answer. From the sides of the road, gas stations glowed at him in shades of yellow and orange, like a controlled fire. Maybe he was going back now because he hadn’t stayed then, that night. Maybe he was going back because of her. And maybe he wasn’t going back at all and would take the next exit, turn around and drive straight back to Or Akiva.
But no. He continued driving. And when the lights of Kiryat Gat disappeared behind him, he thought this was the first time since that thing had happened that he was choosing to do something and wasn’t being forced to do it. In some strange way, that made him feel good.
But when he exited onto the road that bypassed Beersheba, he already felt different. He turned on the radio, and a short time later turned it off. After a few moments of driving he turned it on again, turned it off again, then angrily turned it on again, this time leaving it on even though he wanted to turn it off again. Possible flooding in the Negev hills, the news said. Then music came on, the bouncy sort they played on Thursday nights. Party music. Eitan wondered how many people were driving in their cars now, listening to a party they were not part of. Not that it bothered him very much; thinking about it was simply preferable to wondering why he was in fact
going back there. He had already passed the Shoket junction when it suddenly occurred to him that he was going back there to search for someone who had once been and was lost. He had lost him on the night he ran down the Eritrean. Actually, he might have lost him a long, long time before, but on that night he had discovered that he was lost. The child who had burst into tears the first time he saw a homeless person on the street – a story his grandmother, who had been there, reminded him about to this day. When had he stopped looking wonderingly at homeless people and begun to avert his gaze at any cost? When was the moment he had stopped being saddened at the sight of a person sprawled in the middle of the street and had begun to quicken his steps?
And yet he wasn’t going back only to find that child. No less importantly, it was to show him to her. To stand before her and say: I’ve come back. And not because she had commanded him to. She’d be shocked, he thought, utterly shocked, and was surprised to discover how much pleasure he derived from the image of that moment, the moment of his return. (He didn’t ask himself whether he would have returned if she hadn’t been beautiful, if she hadn’t possessed an icy calm that bordered on indifference. If she hadn’t had those unique aristocratic eyes, an African queen with a human bone stuck in her hair.)
As he approached Tlalim junction, his hands began to sweat, the way Itamar’s did the night before a dictation in class. He had already memorized the words, had practiced them, tested himself once with his mom and once with his dad. And yet when he climbed into bed, rivers of sweat flowed from his hands. Eitan told him it was fine, it was the way our bodies drained out pressure, but Itamar wasn’t persuaded. It drove him mad that his body did something like that without being told to do it, without taking him into consideration at all. As he wiped his hands on the steering wheel Eitan thought about his older son, about how justified the mind’s complaint against the body was, against that unruly child who trembled and sweated, paled and blushed, always at the wrong time, always when it should be doing something else.
Waking Lions Page 27
