Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  The Bedouin with the gun took a step forward. “No tricks, okay?”

  “No tricks,” her doctor replied, “I hid it here, inside the tank.” He took the oxygen tank out of the crate. Sirkit looked at it, astonished. Two punches must be all it took to make a white man lose his mind completely. Unless she hadn’t been updated and oxygen tanks could shoot.

  It turned out that they could. Because when Eitan said he was just going to open it, and aimed the pure oxygen straight at the face of the guy with the gun. The oxygen caught onto his cigarette like gunpowder. It was only for a moment, but that moment was enough to burn half his lip and the entire mustache above it, and maybe much more if he hadn’t dropped the gun to slap out the fire on his face. The kid with the switchblade ran over to help him put it out. In that sense, they really weren’t bad people. Mutual aid and all that. In another sense, it was very much in Eitan and Sirkit’s best interest to run.

  They ran. And they weren’t alone. The guy with the gun continued to writhe in pain on the floor, but the other two did a fast priority check and took off after them. The kid with the switchblade made a quick stop on the way out to pick up his pal’s gun. That held him up in the short term, but opened up many more possibilities in the long term. Because when they got outside, the two escapees were already in their SUV, halfway out of there. The kid with the switchblade and the gun knew how Sayyid would react if those two got away from him again without a trace of the shipment after all the efforts they’d made to catch them. He knew that Sayyid would have to vent his rage on someone and that without those two, he would most likely vent it on him. He knew that he had no real choice but to stand in front of the SUV, aim the gun straight at the asshole and his Eritrean whore and shoot.

  The bullet shattered the windshield of the SUV when it entered and the back window when it exited. It didn’t hit anything on the way, but it passed so close to Eitan’s ear that the whistle was truly unbearable. Sirkit screamed. Or perhaps he was the one who screamed. He wasn’t sure. Just as he hadn’t been sure about the business with the oxygen a few moments earlier. Because yes, he, along with everyone else in the chemistry classroom, had seen what happens when pure oxygen and a lit cigarette come close and he had memorized words like “explosive” and “combustible” for the exam. But there was a hell of a difference between the white pages of his exam booklet and that guy with the gun, mainly that the exam booklet didn’t shoot you if you made a mistake. On the other hand, there was a good chance that the guy with the gun would have shot him in any case, and if that was true, there had been no reason not to try. When he’d bent to pick up the oxygen tank, he felt Sirkit watching him and gave a silent prayer that if it worked, she’d be smart enough to run straight out of there. Obviously she was. In fact, she had begun to run even before he did. If it hadn’t been for her, he might still be standing there, as stunned by his success as a student who is surprised to discover that he’d earned a 90 on an exam he was convinced he’d failed. But she had started running, and a split second later he was running after her, and two moments later the kid who looked like his medic course commander was hot in pursuit, along with another guy who must have resembled someone, though not someone Eitan knew.

  He got into the SUV, planning to race forward, and he most certainly would have done so if the kid with the gun who was standing in front of them hadn’t started shooting. The first shot split the windshield and exited through the back window, leaving him with the vague question about the source of the scream that reverberated through the SUV. The second shot hit the baby seat in the back, leaving behind the smell of burnt plastic. The Bedouin shifted the gun in his hand in preparation for the third shot. Eitan looked him right in the eye and drove straight ahead.

  The blow shook the SUV slightly, but to Eitan’s ears the collision of body and bumper was as thunderous as an atomic bomb exploding. He knew that sound. He remembered it very well from that night, from the last time he’d driven the SUV into what a moment before had been a human creature. He knew what would happen if he stepped out of the SUV. And this time, it had been no accident.

  How had that night been different from all other nights? A huge moon was shining on both nights. Perhaps even the same moon. And on both nights, a sharp, guttural scream had filled the SUV. Then, it had been Janis Joplin, and this time, Sirkit, or him, or a combination of both of them – EitanSirkit. SirkitEitan. On that night, each of them had been alone, and on this night, they were together. And apparently they were about to die together, because after it hit the Bedouin, the SUV was heading straight for the concrete barricade at the entrance to the garage. Eitan braked. Sirkit screamed. The SUV veered sharply and stopped right in front of the two remaining Bedouins.

  At that moment, he wanted more than anything to take her hand in his. But that seemed desperate, sentimental. He was prepared to die without a hand to hold, without a finger to stroke just to avoid being considered desperate, or even worse, sentimental. He censored himself even then, at that last moment, because even at last moments he could not shake the fear that if he extended a hand to the world, it would remain empty.

  Through the shattered windshield of the SUV, Sirkit looked at the two remaining Bedouins. If she pulled out a shard of glass, she could at least try to cause damage. She had no idea how lethal a shard of glass could be, and she knew that the two furious men would pull it out of her hand very quickly. But she couldn’t just sit there waiting to see what they would decide to do to her. She had waited in the camps in the Sinai. She had waited in the desert, in the village. She had waited enough. The only thing she felt bad about was her doctor, who was sitting white-faced at the wheel, the whitest white she had ever seen in her life. He was looking at the Bedouins in silent shock. She sat beside him in his red SUV, enveloped in its pleasant air conditioning, its pleasant music, and its seats so comfortable you could call them beds. A red SUV that enabled you to go from point A to point B without thinking for even a moment about all the points along the way or the people on the sides of the road. And that SUV, that wonderful isolating machine, was broken. The windshield was gone. And the back window. The collision with the concrete barricade had finished off the hood and who knew what else. And worst of all – through the broken windshield, the real world was now terrifyingly real.

  The hatred in the eyes of the guy standing in front of them was real. He had just wiped the blood flowing from the head of his run-over pal on his pants. And also real was the rage of the guy whose lip had been scorched by the oxygen Eitan had sprayed at him. There was great pain on his face, but the rage was greater. It was the rage that had forced him to get up from the garage floor, stumble outside and see the SUV hit his friend, who had the gun. Now he had the weapon in his hand again. Trapped in the SUV in front of him were the man and woman he had been sent to kill. If he had been indifferent about the job earlier, he approached it now with a profound, almost religious commitment.

  From where he sat, Eitan saw the Bedouin advancing toward them. He wanted to think about Itamar, about Yaheli, about Liat, but the only image that came into his mind was that of his mother hanging laundry in the yard when someone opened the gate. “You’re not serious,” she’d tell him. She always responded that way to announcements that surprised her. “You’re not serious” to the spontaneous airplane tickets to Greece his father had bought for her birthday. “You’re not serious” to the soldiers who came to inform her about Yuval. As if a low wall of disbelief separated her from the spoken words, a you’re-not-serious wall which those speaking to her had to climb over in order to get inside and say yes, they were very serious.

  The Bedouin shouted something in Arabic, and aimed the gun at him. Eitan wondered whether he should close his eyes. Then he heard the siren, and at first he too wanted to say “You’re not serious,” because there was a limit to how many times a person could teeter between life and death in one night. The Bedouins shouted at each other in Arabic and began to run, and Eitan and Sirkit looked at each other with
out the slightest idea of what they would do now. Not that there was much they could do – the undercover police cars shot forward from the curve in the road and stopped in front of them, brakes squealing. The sirens were deafening. Three detectives jumped out and began pursuing the Bedouins. Three more detectives surrounded the SUV and shouted, “Hands in the air.”

  So they put their hands in the air.

  15

  HE DIDN’T KNOW how many hours he’d been in the cell. The clock at the far end of the corridor showed ten minutes to three, but the hands clutched the 3 and the 10 and didn’t let go, no matter how much time passed. Eitan wondered whether someone had deliberately sabotaged the clock. When your perception of time is broken, other things tend to break as well. Cover stories, for example. But none of the prisoners at the station looked important enough to warrant sabotaging the clock for. There were two pimply-faced young guys who reeked of alcohol, a rather amiable junkie who kept asking Eitan if he had a cigarette, and a Russian guy with a Mohawk who cursed constantly. He pictured them waiting for the nurse at the entrance to the department at Soroka. That made it all nicer, mainly because it blurred the fact that this time, he wasn’t watching a group of waiting people from the sidelines. He was one of them. In the hours that had passed since his arrival no one had asked him why he was there. No one had tried to start a conversation. In that sense, they were all as polite as if they were enjoying an evening at the theater.

  The patients at Soroka actually spoke to one another quite a bit. Perhaps it helped them ease the tension. They griped about the vending machine that swallowed coins and refused to respond with coffee. Complained to each other about the snooty doctor or the stuck-up nurse. They exchanged names of rabbis and kabbalists, holistic therapists and acupuncturists. In fact, they were willing to talk about anything from politics to Sudoku, as long as they didn’t have to sit on the waiting room bench and listen to the sound of the Death stepping across the linoleum floor. The corridors of Soroka Hospital were filled with astonishingly friendly people, friendlier than they had ever been. Like sheep crowding together on a cold night, one trembling body pressed up against another – that was how those patients clung to one another and to their small talk. But here, in the jail cell, the prisoners kept to themselves. Not even their glances met.

  Eitan sat in the jail cell and waited. Looked at the clock that showed ten to three and spoke to no one. The young guy with the Mohawk stopped cursing and began to sing a song in Russian. It was a nice song. Kind of gentle. It made Eitan wonder what the guy was doing there. Or maybe that was easier than asking what he himself was doing there. Alice had fallen into the rabbit hole. Ali Baba had sneaked into the cave. But he – he’d just been driving home after a day’s work. How had he suddenly entered this dark and twisted wonderland that already had three dead people and one blue baby in it? He himself had killed two of those people, one by accident, the other deliberately, and in between there had been cut, shot, bleeding Eritreans, guns and knives, and one shipment, whereabouts unknown. All of that in the light of an enormous white moon, which might not have been a moon at all but his home planet, the one he had been abducted from into this horror story, the place he was supposed to have driven to that night without hitting anyone. Where he was supposed to have gone to sleep and woken up as usual. As usual.

  The other possibility flowed through Eitan’s body in surging waves of “what if”. What if he had simply gone home that night? Finished work and driven straight home. Kissed Yaheli and Itamar, lain down in bed beside Liat. The picture was so clear, so vivid that it was almost impossible to believe it hadn’t happened. He hadn’t driven home. He had driven there. And now there was going to swallow him up, had already swallowed him up, in fact, and now all that remained was for it to finish chewing him up and spit out the bones.

  The guy with the Mohawk continued singing. The junkie fell asleep with his head against the wall. The two pimply-faced kids smelled less of alcohol now and more of fear. Sweat had a different smell in a jail cell. Eitan smelled it on both kids and knew that they smelled it on him as well. He tried to remember whether he’d sweated like that earlier, in front of the Bedouins, and couldn’t. But he did know that in that clash he’d been all adrenaline, and now the adrenaline had evaporated, leaving room for thoughts of what was to come. Earlier, he’d faced a tangible external threat, and now he was facing all the threats and scenarios he could imagine. His mother’s face. His father’s disappointment. Reproachful looks from Liat. Poignant prison visits from Itamar and Yaheli. And that didn’t even include the imagined faces of patients, nurses, fellow doctors, department heads. Prof. Zakai.

  Prof. Zakai. How horrified he had been to discover that the much admired professor was an aficionado of not only wine and Russian literature, but also of envelopes fat with money. How angry he had been when it became clear that Zakai collected them with the same devotion he collected antique dreidels. How he loved those spinning tops with a letter on each of their four sides. Arranged them neatly in his office at the university, reprimanded the Ethiopian cleaner for changing their positions even slightly. There they stood, on his monstrously large glass desk, and Zakai forced every student who came in to bet which letter a dreidel would fall on before he spun it. The students didn’t care about the dreidels; they were there to complain about an exam grade they’d received, but Zakai cared very much. “Bet on miracles. That’s what the Jews have done from the time of their exile to this very day. And that’s what every doctor does, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.” As far as Zakai was concerned, all doctors were gamblers. Perhaps that was why those envelopes of money seemed so logical to him. Or perhaps it was much simpler: he took better care of people who paid more. A basic economic principle that controlled everyone. Even Eitan would never have considered spending entire nights treating Eritreans without remuneration if Sirkit hadn’t paid for it with her silence.

  None of that made any difference now, but he thought about it anyway. It was ten minutes to three, eternally ten minutes to three, and Eitan’s brain had begun to tire. His thoughts sprang from one subject to another in an endless zapping of channels. The alternative was to think about where he was now, and that option was inconceivable. So he thought about Zakai, about Prof. Shakedi, about the song the kid with the Mohawk was humming, about a TV series that had been broadcast recently. He would think about anything, as long as he didn’t have to think about the moment when the time would stop being ten to three.

  In the end, someone came and opened the door. Eitan wondered whether the policeman was really looking at him curiously as he led him into the interview room, or it was only a trick of his imagination. The junkie was still sleeping when he walked out of the cell, but the guy with the Mohawk stopped singing for a minute in what might have been a goodbye. The two pimply-faced kids had been taken out a while ago, though the smell of their sweat still stood in the air. Three turns away along the corridor, Commander Marciano was waiting for him. He knew it was Commander Marciano from the tag on his shirt. But not only. Also because of Liat’s imitations of him, which had been spot on, as all her imitations were. And because he knew that the station commander would want to talk to him himself. It wasn’t every day that they had a murder suspect who was married to a senior detective.

  The clock in Marciano’s office didn’t think the time was ten to three. It showed 8:30 in the morning, and Eitan believed it. He was much less inclined to believe the friendly smile on Marciano’s face or the surprising, awkward handshake he gave him as he sat down.

  “Sorry you waited so long. I had one detective on the Eritrean, two on the Bedouins, and one female detective who bailed early yesterday because she didn’t feel well.” The smile waited at the corners of Marciano’s mouth like a fat cat, and Eitan understood that the fourth detective was none other than his wife. Marciano was really enjoying this whole business.

  “Which story should we start with, the Eritrean’s or the Bedouins’?”

  Eitan said
nothing. Marciano’s joviality annoyed him. For him, the disparity between Sirkit’s and the Bedouins’ stories was a minor detail – it might add another few months to his prison sentence or not. Among the ruins of his previous life, it really didn’t make much of a difference. In the end, there were two dead people here. And both had been struck by his SUV.

  “The Bedouins say you’re the drug lord of the southern district. You finished off the messenger, stole their shipment and wasted anyone who tried to get it back. Guy Davidson, who was the middleman for the shipments, has been missing for twenty-six hours. They figure that’s your doing. Sharaf abu Ayad died two hours ago at Soroka. In his case, they saw with their own eyes that it was your doing. What can I tell you? As far as those people are concerned, you’re more lethal than Saladin.”

  Marciano stopped speaking. He was hugely pleased with himself for that Saladin. Eitan would bet unhesitatingly on a master’s degree in Israeli history, a quick-track degree that required no thesis-writing and added a few hundred shekels a month to Marciano’s salary. Police commanders flocked to that program. He wasn’t quite sure why he was thinking about Marciano’s academic pretensions or his salary just then. Since he’d come into the room, his brain had been wandering in the most remote alleyways. Dead-end thoughts. Winding roads. And yet everything was really terribly simple: what had been secret was now exposed in the sunlight. Even if they hadn’t yet told Liat, his department or the media, from this point on it was only a matter of time.

  None the less, he found himself curious to hear exactly what Sirkit had told them. Because there was still a difference between the premeditated murder of one person or two. He had hit Asum by accident and had run, while he had hit the Bedouin intentionally (“But ladies and gentlemen, he had no choice!” shouted the defense attorney. “It was self-defense!” The jurors would nod because that was what jurors did in TV shows, but the judge of the Beersheba Magistrates Court would not nod at all. He would ask when Eitan had first learned about the drug shipment. Why he hadn’t reported it immediately. Why he hadn’t called the police when he saw Sirkit bending over the body of a man who apparently was Davidson. Why he had driven away that night after hitting the Eritrean. The judge would ask and Eitan would remain silent, because the replies that came to his mind were all false. As if all his life he had memorized a misleading, distorted multiplication table and all the multiplication he knew how to do was fundamentally biased. This was a different sort of mathematics: not the geometry of flat surfaces, but the geometry of gaping pits. Of sand dunes. Try explaining that to someone who has never seen an enormous moon over the desert).