He didn’t look at Eitan, merely lay there and stared at the sky, stared at it with such concentration that Eitan couldn’t help stealing an upward glance at the spot the Eritrean was focused on. Perhaps there might actually be something there. There was nothing there. Only the spectacular moon in a glittering indigo sky, as if someone had Photoshopped them. When he returned his gaze to the ground, the Eritrean’s eyes were closed, his breathing calm. Eitan’s breathing, however, was loud and rapid, and his entire body shook. How could he drive away if the man’s eyes were still open, still liable to open. On the other hand, open eyes meant nothing, while the cerebrospinal fluid now leaking not only from his ears, but from his nose too, foaming from his mouth, meant a great deal. The Eritrean’s limbs were stiff and shrunken, the decorticate posture. Even if he had wanted to, there was not even a sliver of life to fight for. Truly.
And truly, the Eritrean appeared to be reconciled to his situation with that well-known African complaisance, because the fact was that he was kind enough to keep his eyes shut and breathe quietly with a grimace on his face that wasn’t very different from a smile. Eitan looked at him again before going to the SUV. Now he was sure that the Eritrean was smiling at him, his closed eyes signaling his approval.
2
HE SLEPT WELL THAT NIGHT. More than well – he slept really well. A deep, solid sleep that continued even after the sun rose. After the children got out of bed. After Liat had shouted at them to get a move on. He slept when Yaheli screamed about a toy that frustrated him. He slept when Itamar turned on the TV at full volume. He slept when the front door closed and the car carrying his entire family drove away. He slept and slept and slept, and then he slept some more, until the moment came when he could absolutely sleep no more – and then he woke up.
The midday sun shone through the shutters and danced on the bedroom walls. A bird sang outside. A small, brave spider dared to defy Liat’s obsessive cleanliness and labored vigorously to spin a web in the corner above the bed. Eitan watched the spider for a while before the blessed fog of sleep faded, leaving one simple truth: last night he had run a man over and driven away. Every cell of his body woke to that clear, unalterable reality. He had run a man over. He had run a man over and driven away. He kept repeating the words to himself, trying to connect the vowels and the consonants into something that made sense. But the more he said them, the more they fell apart in his mind until they totally lost substance. Now he spoke the words aloud, allowing the sounds to take shape in the room. I ran a man over. I ran a man over and drove away. The more he repeated the words, first in a whisper and then more loudly, the more unreal, even stupid, they sounded, as if he were talking about something he’d read in the newspapers or seen in a bad TV show. Nor did the spider or the bird help him: you would expect birds to refrain from singing at the window of someone who had run a man over and driven away, and spiders to refuse to build their homes over the bed of such a person. Even the sun – instead of shifting its angle – persisted in shining through the shutters and painting truly breathtaking splashes of light on the wall.
Suddenly, Eitan simply had to study them carefully. Spots of light on a white wall at the same angle at the same time every morning. Because that which hath been is that which shall be, and today, like yesterday, the earth would carry on rotating on its axis with the same slow, sleepy movement that rocked Eitan as if he were a baby. If the earth suddenly rotated in the other direction, Eitan would stumble and fall.
Though he was already completely awake, he continued to lie in bed, unmoving. How could he dare to stand on his feet after running a man over and driving away? The ground would surely fall away beneath him.
Or would it, a cold, dark, smiling voice asked, would it fall away? After all, it continued to support Prof. Zakai’s feet quite nicely.
That thought caused Eitan to sit up in bed and place one bare foot on the marble floor. And then the other. He took three steps toward the kitchen before a quick flash of the dead man’s face stopped him in his tracks. It was one thing to tell yourself over and over again that you ran a man over and drove away, but something else to see that man’s face right in front of you. With great effort he pushed the image to the back of his mind and kept walking. In vain. Before he reached the door, the image, sharper than ever, struck him again: the Eritrean’s eyes opened to slits, the pupils frozen in an eternal expression of incredulity. This time he pushed the image away more forcefully. Get back there. Get back to the same dark room where all those other images are stored – the corpses they had dissected in their first year of medical school, the hideous photographs of amputated, scorched, acid-burned limbs that the trauma lecturer had shown them with such obvious pleasure in his third year, delighting in every groan of revulsion coming from the class. “You have weak stomachs,” she’d say when one of the students mumbled a pathetic excuse and ran out into the fresh air for a few minutes, “and people with weak stomachs don’t become doctors.” The memory of Prof. Reinhart’s stern face helped to ease his agitation somewhat.
Now he reached the kitchen. So clean. As if it had never been the scene of cornflakes wars, as if coffee had never been spilled in it. How did Liat manage to keep this house looking like a display in a furniture shop?
He looked through the large window at the SUV in the driveway. Not a scratch on it. Not for no reason had the car salesman called it “a Mercedes tank”. Nevertheless, he had examined it for a long time yesterday, kneeling in front of the bumper, straining his eyes in the pale glow of the flashlight of his cell phone. It wasn’t possible to hit a person that way without leaving a sign. A dent in the tin, a kink in the bumper, some indication that something had indeed occurred. Proof that it had not only driven through air, but had hit a body, a mass, a cause of friction. But the SUV stood in the driveway intact and unchanged, and Eitan turned away from the window and filled the kettle with a shaking hand.
Flashes of the dead man’s face assailed him again as he made himself coffee, but they were less intense. The smell of lemon-scented detergent that filled the air of the kitchen and the almost sterile gleam of the work counter pushed away images of the previous night the way doormen in Tel Aviv restaurants block the way of beggars trying to get inside. Eitan ran a grateful hand over the stainless-steel surface. Three months ago, when Liat had insisted on buying it, he’d objected to the extravagance. So much money for a kitchen he was hoping to leave behind in less than two years, when his forced exile to the heart of the desert would come to an end. But Liat had already made up her mind and he was forced to consent, though he reserved the right to look angrily at the needless expense every time he went into the kitchen. Now he looked at it gratefully because there was nothing like a shiny stainless-steel surface to obliterate dark images. He was convinced that nothing bad would happen to him between the ultra-modern dishwasher and the top-quality cooker hood. True, he almost dropped the coffee mug when he picked it up because the memory of the dead man’s hand attacked him mercilessly, but he managed to push it away and steady the mug before it could fall. And even if it did fall – that wasn’t a problem. He would take a rag and clean the marble floor. Because it had to be acknowledged – cups would fall in the days to come. There would be moments of distraction. Nightmares, perhaps. But he would pick up the pieces, clean the floor and get on with his life. He would have to get on with his life. Even if the coffee tasted stale and bitter in his mouth, even if his hands were sweating despite the desert chill, even if he had to restrain himself from falling to the floor weeping with guilt, he would keep walking, the mug of coffee in his hand, to the armchair in the living room. The pain would have to pass in the end. It would take two weeks or a month or five years, but would pass in the end. The new stimulus was causing the neurons in his brain to transmit electrical signals with enormous speed. But as time passed, the pace of the transmission would slow down until it stopped completely. Habituation. The gradual loss of sensitivity. “You walk into a room,” Prof. Zakai had told them, “an
d there’s a terrible smell of garbage. You think you’re going to vomit. The molecules of the smell stimulate the olfactory epithelium, which sends urgent signals to the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. Your neurons scream for help. But you know what happens after a few minutes? They stop. They get tired of screaming. And suddenly someone else comes into the room and says, ‘It stinks here,’ and you have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Sitting in the armchair, the mug of coffee in his hand almost empty, Eitan looked at the dark residue at the bottom of the mug. His first argument with Liat had taken place three weeks after they met when she told him that her grandmother read coffee grounds.
You mean, she thinks she reads coffee grounds.
No, Liat had insisted, she really reads coffee grounds. She looks at them and knows what’s going to happen.
Like the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow? That we’re all going to die eventually?
No, you idiot, things that not everyone knows. Let’s say – if the husband of the woman who drank the coffee is cheating on her. Or whether she’ll be able to get pregnant.
Liat, how the hell can coffee beans picked by an eight-year-old kid in Brazil and sold for an outrageous price in the supermarket predict whether some stupid woman in the godforsaken town of Or Akiva will get pregnant?
She told him he was being condescending, and that was true. She told him that there was nothing wrong with Or Akiva, and that too was apparently true. She told him that guys who put down the grandmothers of girls they were dating would quickly stoop to putting down the girls themselves, which sounded fine but wasn’t necessarily true. Finally she told him that they probably shouldn’t see each other again, and that frightened him so much that the next day he appeared at her house and suggested that they go immediately to visit her grandmother in Or Akiva so she could read his coffee grounds. Liat’s grandmother welcomed them warmly, made excellent, if somewhat tepid coffee, took a quick look at the grounds and said that they were going to get married.
That’s what you see in the grounds? he asked with all the awe he could muster.
No, Liat’s grandmother laughed, it’s what I see in your eyes. You never read people’s coffee grounds, you read their eyes, their body language, the way they ask the question. But if you tell them that, they’ll feel naked, which is not pleasant for anyone and also not polite, so instead, you read their coffee grounds. Do you understand, child?
Now he tilted the mug to the side and examined the coffee residue. Black and thick, like yesterday. It seemed that, like the birds, the spiders and the sunbeams, the coffee grounds saw no reason to deviate from their routine just because yesterday he’d run somebody over and driven away. Habituation. The Eritrean’s face grew dimmer in his mind, the way the images of a bad dream fade gradually as the day progresses, until all that remains is a general feeling of unease. Unease is not pain, he told himself. People live entire lives with some measure or another of unease. Those words felt so right that he repeated them in his mind several more times, so focused on the liberating new insight that at first he didn’t hear the knock on the door.
The woman at the door was tall, thin and very beautiful, but Eitan didn’t notice any of those details. Two others captured his full attention: she was Eritrean and she was holding his wallet in her hand.
(And once again, he felt as if he had to empty his bowels, even more than he had the previous day. His stomach plummeted suddenly, pulling all his internal organs with it, and he knew clearly that this time he would not be able to control it. He’d run to the bathroom or relieve himself right there, on the threshold of the front door, in front of this woman.)
But he remained where he was, barely breathing, and looked at her as she showed him the wallet.
This is yours, she said in Hebrew.
“Yes,” Eitan said. “It’s mine.”
And immediately regretted it because, who knew, perhaps he could persuade her that the wallet didn’t belong to him at all, but rather to someone else – a twin brother, let’s say – who had flown somewhere yesterday, Canada for example, or Japan, somewhere far away. Perhaps he could simply ignore her and close the door, or threaten to call the immigration police. Possible courses of action filled his head like colorful soap bubbles, bursting at the first touch of reality. To fall on his knees and beg her forgiveness. To pretend he had no idea what she was talking about. To accuse of her of being crazy. To claim that the man was already dead when he hit him. After all, he should know. He was a doctor.
The woman did not take her eyes off him. The hysterical voices in his head were replaced by a different, icy voice: she’d been there.
And as if to confirm those words, the woman looked at the whitewashed house in Omer and said, Your house is lovely.
“Thank you.”
The yard is lovely too.
The woman looked at the toy car he’d bought for Yaheli. On Saturday he’d raced it back and forth along the length of the lawn, shouting and cheering, until another toy caught his eye and the car was left upside-down on the pathway to the house. Now the red plastic wheels were turned to the sky like damning evidence.
“What do you want?”
I want to talk.
He could hear the Dor family’s Mazda sliding into its parking spot behind the stone wall. The slamming of the doors as Anat Dor and her children got out of the car. The tired reprimands as they walked toward the house. Thank God for the stone wall, for the wonderful suburban alienation that had managed to seep into communities like Omer. If not for that alienation, he’d be standing across from Anat Dor’s curious look now because she would certainly rather forget her own troubles for a brief moment to wonder why her doctor neighbor was standing in his yard with a black woman. But the consolation of the stone wall was dwarfed by the knowledge that Anat Dor was merely the first robin to herald not spring, but the arrival of an entire flock of cars making its way toward the street at that very moment. And in each one sat a tiny chick asking what there was for lunch. In another few minutes – two? three? – Liat and his chicks would arrive. This woman had to leave.
*
“Not now,” he told her, “I can’t talk now.”
So when?
“Tonight. Let’s talk tonight.”
Here?
Was that a glimmer of sarcasm he saw in her eyes as she pointed to the pine chairs on the porch?
“No,” he said, “not here.”
At the deserted garage outside of Tlalim. Turn right 200 meters after the turnoff to the access road. I’ll be there at ten.
And suddenly he knew for certain that she had planned this encounter down to the smallest detail. The arrival a moment before the children were picked up at nursery school. The nerve-wracking lingering at the front door. The cold emanating from her eyes. For the first time since he had opened the door and found her standing there, he actually looked at her: tall, thin and very beautiful. And she, as if she understood that only now was he actually seeing her, nodded and said:
I am Sirkit.
He didn’t bother to answer. She knew his name. If she hadn’t known it, she wouldn’t be standing on his lawn, an ecological marvel of reclaimed water irrigation, telling him where to be at ten that night.
“I’ll be there,” he said, then turned around and went inside. His mug of coffee was where he’d left it, on the table beside the armchair. The stainless-steel kitchen gleamed as usual. The sun continued to dance on the wall in truly breathtaking splashes of light.
3
LESS THAN TWENTY MINUTES after the woman left and he went back into the house, he felt he had never met her at all. He studied the yard through the half-open shutters: the rosemary bush, the manicured lawn, Yaheli’s upside-down toy car. It was difficult to believe that less than half an hour ago a woman named Sirkit had stood right there on the path. Her existence grew even fainter when Liat and the children came home. Itamar and Yaheli ran around the yard in what might have been either a game or a life-and-death struggle.
The clatter of their feet easily blotted out the memory of the Eritrean woman, and he gave her no more thought than someone sitting on a bus would give to the person who had occupied the seat before him. An hour and a half later, he could almost persuade himself that the visit had never taken place at all.
“The things our brain is prepared to do in order to protect us…” Prof. Zakai leaned on the lecturers’ podium as he spoke, his smile wavering between mockery and affection until it finally settled on mockery. “Denial, for example. Yes, that’s the psychologists’ word. But don’t be too quick to toss it into the garbage. Because what’s the first thing a person will say after you’ve told him he has a brain tumor?”
It can’t be.
“Right, ‘it can’t be’. But of course it absolutely can. In fact, it’s happening right now: anaplastic astrocytomas are reproducing themselves over and over again, spreading from one hemisphere of the brain to the other through the corpus callosum. In less than a year, that entire system will collapse. Already now there are headaches, vomiting, hemiplegia. And yet that sick brain, that non-functioning bundle of neurons, is still capable of doing one thing: denying reality. You show the patient the test results. You repeat the prognosis three times in the clearest manner you can, but the man sitting across from you, who will soon turn into a lump of chemotherapy and side effects, manages to push away everything you tell him. And it doesn’t matter how intelligent he is. Hell, he could be a doctor himself. But all those years of medical training become meaningless in the face of the brain’s persistent refusal to look at what’s staring it in the face.”
Prof. Zakai was right. As usual. Like a silver-haired prophet of wrath he would stand on the lecturer’s dais and roll out the future for them. In their fifth year of medical school it was easy to believe that his words were merely cynical anecdotes, but from the moment they were pushed out of the academic womb into the real world, his prophecies came true, one after the other. It can be, Eitan said to himself. It’s happening. And if you want it to stop, you need to pull your head out of the desert sand and drive straight over to the bank.
Waking Lions Page 3