Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  Victor Balulo ruminated about that flock of chicks as he washed the challah crumbs and yolk off his plate and then went to dress. The label on his shirt collar told him that it was made in China, that it was first-quality and that it should not be washed in water hotter than 20 degrees centigrade. Victor Balulo paid hardly any attention, if at all, to that information, despite the fact that China was a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, and a world power to boot.

  When he finished buttoning his shirt but still hadn’t put on his pants, Victor Balulo usually went to the bathroom. Gravely and with quite a lot of apprehension, he sat on the toilet and waited to see what the day would bring. He never thought about the fact that the toilet seat he was sitting on was made in India, which shared a border with China, along with a menu in which rice played a large role. When he finished his business on the toilet, Victor Balulo would press the small metal handle and dispatch his faeces from the familiar area in which they were created into the sewage pipes of the city of Beersheba, and from there along some unknown path to the sea. In fact, Beersheba faeces are never sent to the sea – which is many kilometers away from it – but rather are channeled by pipes and machines to a cesspit in the Soreq River area. Nevertheless, in some sense all rivers flow to the sea, even the ones that are only seasonal streams. This belief was particularly important to Victor Balulo, because despite the discomfort he felt when he thought about his faeces polluting the magnificent ocean depths, he none the less took some pleasure in the knowledge that he, Victor Balulo, a man few people gave a thought to – even he himself sometimes forgot the fact of his existence – had created something that was presently sailing around the vast ocean.

  After eating, putting on his shirt and moving his bowels, Victor Balulo would get organized quickly and leave his house, scolding himself for the late hour. When he had covered the streets that separated him from his destination, he would stop and wait. After a while, when a woman appeared on the street, he would take a deep breath and roar: Fucking cunt!

  Sometimes they froze. Sometimes they jumped in fear. Most of them walked more rapidly, some even breaking into a run. Others screamed at him or laughed at him or sprayed him with pepper spray. Some returned a short time later with a male friend or a husband who beat him for varying lengths of time. And through all of it the women looked at him, either in disgust or fear, with compassion or repugnance. But never, ever with indifference. Victor Balulo would stand for days at a time on the streets of Beersheba waiting for women to come. Short or tall, pretty or ugly, Ethiopian or Russian. All of them intended to walk past him without a second glance, to go on with their lives as if Victor Balulo wasn’t a man but a plant, a rock or a stray cat. But Victor Balulo fought their indifference courageously, Beersheba tiger that he was, took a deep breath and roared: Fucking cunt!

  On good days, when luck was with him as he stood on a corner that was busy enough, he would return home with a raw throat and a body tingling from having been looked at so much. He would make himself a cup of lemon tea, sit down on the armchair and recall the wonderful things that had happened to him: the shocked expression on the face of the girl soldier with the ponytail. The red-haired woman’s look of utter disgust. The marvelous cold contempt that wafted toward him from the face of an elderly woman in a striped blouse. On those rare good days, Victor Balulo would go to bed with a smile on his face.

  Every now and then, instead of going home and sipping lemon tea, Victor Balulo would be picked up and taken to the police station. There too the looks darkened his skin, but he would feel a bit anxious, afraid that they would make him spend the night in a cell. If that happened, he wouldn’t be able to eat his egg cooked in water for exactly two and a half minutes the next morning. So he did his best to behave well and be released quickly.

  But that morning, his luck turned bad and he was put in a chair across from a woman detective. Her acorn eyes were the color of the acorns he used to gather long ago in a distant city that people called Nazareth and he called home. He used to bring them from the grove to their tin shack to cheer his mother, who refused to be cheered, and when she died, the oak trees died, or at least they should have. When Victor Balulo saw the detective’s brown eyes he was filled with such anger that his mother had died and the acorns hadn’t that he roared, “Fucking cunt!” more loudly than ever before. And the detective, instead of being frightened by his shout, instead of getting irate, reprimanding him or calling one of her fellow cops, simply sat there and looked at him indifferently. So Victor Balulo raised the volume to the absolutely highest he could muster and screamed “Fucking cunt”, but to no avail. He screamed and screamed until he felt his strength begin to ebb, and he was terrified that the detective might succeed where three psychiatrists and five social workers had failed, where threats and beatings had not helped. With the indifference in her eyes, with her exhausting composure, the woman detective tore his scream right out of him.

  But then they called Liat and she hurried out with a sense of relief because though that Balulo guy really was good for a laugh, that screaming of his hurt her eardrums. The commander, who was standing in the corridor, said, “The body of an Eritrean, hit and run,” and Liat nodded. Then they got into the cruiser and headed south. The commander drove 150 kilometers an hour and turned on the siren, as if getting to the scene faster would make the Eritrean less dead. He looked at Liat every few minutes, checking to see that she was suitably impressed by his driving skills, and Liat was forced to be impressed, because what else could she do? They reached the scene faster and discovered that the Eritrean had been dead for more than a day and he smelled to high heaven. The commander took out a handkerchief and offered it to Liat, who said it was okay, she was fine. Flies drunk with joy swarmed around the Eritrean’s cracked skull and the commander told Liat that she could wait in the cruiser. Liat replied that it was okay, she was fine. Several of the flies grew tired of the Eritrean’s dried blood and moved house to the beads of sweat on the commander’s forehead. The commander slapped them away with a nervous hand and said, “Let’s go, I see you’re having a hard time here. We’ll drive over to see the guy who found him.”

  His name was Guy Davidson and he had the biggest feet Liat had ever seen. After nine years in the Israeli police, she’d had her fair share of experience with unnatural-looking bodies – cracked skulls, stab wounds, even a headless corpse that washed up onto the Ashdod beach and gave her her first promotion. But she had never seen anything as unnatural, as bizarre as Guy Davidson’s feet. They were beyond large, gigantic really, and the ankles they were connected to were thin, almost flimsy, as if the slightest pressure would cause those feet to rebel against the body that bore them and take off on a trip around the world without it. But at the moment they were in place, wrapped in a pair of enormous sandals that Liat assumed were made to order for him. Davidson definitely looked like a person who could demand that a shoe company make his sandals to order without raising the price. There was something determined and self-assured about him, a sort of bear-like quality some kibbutzniks have that caused the commander to tense slightly in his uniform and Liat to recoil slightly in hers.

  “He didn’t show up at the restaurant yesterday. I thought maybe he was sick. But this morning one of the tractor guys saw him.” He spoke decisively, sharply and Liat said to herself that he probably fucks that way too, decisively and sharply. But to Davidson she said, “Did you see any cars here?”

  Davidson’s lips opened, revealing teeth that the kibbutz’s cheap unfiltered cigarettes had devastated. “Cars? On these dirt roads? No, sweetheart, the only thing you’ll see here is either a camel – or an SUV.”

  Liat gave an embarrassed smile, even though she wasn’t really embarrassed at all, and certainly didn’t feel like smiling. She always smiled in embarrassment when she was called sweetheart, and after nine years in the Israeli police she’d been called sweetheart quite a few times. By bankers, farmers, lawyers, building contractors, CEOS, divorced men, married men. She
let them call her sweetheart, and later, when she placed their confessions in front of them to be signed for the final time after an interrogation they hadn’t foreseen, couldn’t have foreseen, she no longer seemed like a sweetheart to them at all.

  “Sorry. Did you see an SUV here?”

  Davidson shook his head. “On the weekends, all those little rich boys from Herzliya come down here with their new SUVS, raise dust and leave. But during the week, it’s dead here.”

  “And kibbutz SUVS?”

  A shadow crossed Davidson’s eyes. “None of our members would hit a man like that and take off.”

  “What was his name?

  “Asum.”

  “Asum what?”

  “I’ll be damned if I remember every Eritrean who passes through here.”

  “How long did he work for you?”

  “A year and a half, something like that.”

  “A year and a half and you don’t know his last name?”

  “Let me get this straight, you know the last name of every cleaning woman who ever worked for you? Do you know how many workers I have here in this restaurant? And that’s not counting the gas station.”

  A heavy silence filled the room and Liat noted that Davidson’s right foot was moving uneasily in its sandal, like an animal in a cage. The commander, who had been listening to the conversation without speaking until then, cleared his throat. “Let’s go back for a minute to the other Eritreans. Did you ask them if they saw anything?”

  Davidson shook his head. “I told you, no one saw anything.” And a moment later, “Maybe a Bedouin who came here to steal hit him and took off.”

  The commander stood up. So did Liat. Davidson was the last to rise, his enormous feet making the caravan floor shake slightly.

  At the door of the cruiser, Davidson extended a large, bear-like and surprisingly smooth hand to her. “You have to catch the shit who did this,” he said to both of them, but looked directly at Liat. “You don’t run a guy over and drive away like it’s just a fox.”

  Liat pressed his hand, somewhat surprised not only by the hand’s smoothness, but mainly by the man’s sensitivity.

  On the way back, the commander didn’t turn on the siren again. Nor did he hurry. The police report entitled “Hit and run. Illegal immigrant. Case closed due to lack of suspects” could definitely wait until tomorrow. The radio was playing a familiar pop song and Liat’s voice stopped the commander just as he was about to hum the chorus. “Maybe there’s a chance we can trace the SUV,” she said, “check the tire tracks on the ground.”

  The commander waited for the chorus to end – a truly great song – before saying that there was no point. A big hassle, a lot of manpower, and in the end they wouldn’t find anything on such dry desert ground anyway so many hours after the incident. The song ended and a new one began, not as good as the previous one, but definitely worth listening to quietly instead of asking smug, annoying questions. The commander managed to listen to two entire verses before the new detective with the lioness eyes asked him again, “If it was a girl from the kibbutz who was run over like that, would the investigation be pointless then?”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. Song after song after the news after the weather forecast of sandstorms in the Negev. Elderly people and asthmatics are advised to avoid physical activity.

  4

  THEY CAME EN MASSE. The rumor about secret, unrecorded medical treatment spread faster than any viral infection. They came from the deserts and wadis, the restaurants and construction sites, the half-paved roads in Arad and the central bus station where they worked as cleaners. Small cuts made life-threatening by dust and dirt. Genital fungi that didn’t threaten life but certainly made it miserable. Intestinal infections caused by poor nutrition. Stress fractures resulting from endless walking. Dr Eitan Green, up-and-coming neurologist, treated them all.

  And how much he hated them. Tried to stop, but couldn’t. Reminded himself that they weren’t the ones extorting him, she was. That in the end, they were people who had crowded together here awaiting the touch of his hand. But the smell did him in. The contamination. The rotting pus of cuts they still carried with them from the Sinai, the sour, foreign sweat of men who worked for days in the sun and women who went weeks without a shower. Despite himself, he loathed them, although the guilt of the hit and run was still growing. Even though, during his first year in medical school, he had sworn to treat all people and had meant it. But something as close, as intimate as a doctor’s contact with a patient becomes unbearable the moment you are coerced into it. Since he had been coerced into helping his patients, he hated them at least as much as he hated himself. Repulsed by the stench. The bodily fluids. The hair. The bits of peeling skin and scars on filthy fingers. One lifted his shirt and another took off his pants; one opened her mouth and another bent over to show him. One after the other, they exposed their bodies to him, filled the garage with that monstrous physicality, skin and limbs, wrath and enmity and messengers of evil. However much he wanted to feel compassion for them, he couldn’t help recoiling from them. Not only their smell and bodily fluids, but also their faces – alien, staring, filled with undying gratitude. He didn’t speak their language and they didn’t speak his, so they communicated with waving hands and facial expressions. Without language, without the ability to exchange a single sentence the way people do – one speaks, the other listens and vice versa – without words, only flesh remained. Stinking. Rotting. With ulcers, excretions, inflammations, scars. Perhaps this was how a veterinarian felt.

  Nausea seized him in the SUV long before he entered the garage, a feeling of repugnance that choked his throat from the moment he turned onto the dirt road, growing a hundred times more intense when he stood in front of her. He hated her stance. Her voice. The way she said “Hello, Doctor.” A profound loathing. Bottomless rancor. He should have felt guilty, but his guilt, like a flower that blooms for only one day, withered in the face of that blazing extortion. The ease with which she took possession of him, the undisputed authority she exercised over him left no room for anything but abhorrence. Sometimes he suspected that his patients sensed it. Perhaps that was why they looked at him with such fear. But immediately they smiled submissively once again, leaving him alone with his rancor.

  Clearly, there was guilt as well. Since that night, sleep had eluded him. In vain did he seek it with his tossing and turning, with the help of half a Lorivan. The dead man was coiled around his neck and would not release him. Squeezing him whenever he wanted to sleep. Only in the garage did he let go and leave room for the procession of pilgrims. Thin black faces that all looked the same to Eitan. Each patient resembled the previous one, and the one before that one in an endless backward movement to that patient, the first one. To the thin black face of the man he had killed.

  He couldn’t look at that face anymore. Couldn’t bear the stench of the infected, diarrhoetic, broken bodies. Arms legs armpits stomachs pelvises nails nostrils teeth tongues pus ulcers rashes inflammations cuts hernias defects, one after the other and sometimes together, black eyes grateful, gauging as they entered and exited, displaying their black bodies in acquiescence or arrogance to Dr Eitan Green, who could no longer bear it, could no longer bear those people’s limbs, who was drowning in a black sea of arms legs open your mouth let me touch does it hurt and when I press here what kind of pain is it, drowning in the horde that was engulfing him.

  *

  “Do you get it? He has no intention of investigating it!”

  She was standing in the kitchen, strikingly beautiful with that regal anger of hers, and Eitan was standing beside her doing his best to look normal.

  “And you know as clear as day that if it was a kid from the kibbutz or even just an air-conditioning technician from Yeruham, it wouldn’t have ended like that.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  He made a great effort to sound normal, managing to do a fairly decent job. “Think about it, Tuli, don’t a lot of hi
t and runs end that way? You said yourself that there was no evidence, no leads at all.”

  “We could have asked the Eritreans to come in for questioning. Should I get you a rag?”

  “No. I’ll manage.”

  And a moment later, when he finished wiping up the coffee he’d spilled when the cup in his hand shook, he said, “Do they even speak Hebrew, the Eritreans?’

  “We never even got to that stage. Marciano just said it would be a joke to bring thirty people to the precinct to ask them a question we already have the answer to. If I’d told him that we’d also have to pay an interpreter, he would have lost it completely.”

  Without his asking, without saying a word, she came and put a new cup of coffee in front of him in place of the one he’d spilled, and he thought about how much he loved her and ran his hand through her lovely brown hair when she turned back to the counter. Suddenly, without his even daring to hope she’d do it, she decided not to empty the dishwasher and sat in his lap instead, buried her head in his chest, and he buried his hand in her tangle of hair.

  He knew that she’d taken a shower not too long ago because the hair close to her scalp was still slightly damp and the shampoo fragrance was very fresh. The faint scent of perfume rose from the back of her neck although he had pleaded endlessly with her to let him smell her as she was. The smell of her body drove him wild and embarrassed her, and was the subject of countless battles of wits. She tried to disguise and he insisted on discovering. She bought perfumed body lotion and he hid it. She took off her shirt and he lay in wait to grab her arms just as she raised them, to sniff her armpits despite her protests. She told him he was a pervert and he told her that there was nothing more normal than getting turned on by your wife’s smell. And why would someone prefer the smell of soap to the smell of his wife. (He was prepared to accept a perfumed throat, but when she once came home with a jar of intimate gel wash, he exercised his right to veto. This was where he drew the line. She wouldn’t steal the smell of her pussy from him.) Now she sat herself down in his lap in the kitchen, and he thought that on any other evening, if she had sat in his lap in the kitchen like this, her hair half wet and her feet bare, he would have begun immediately planning his moves. But today, right now, he was barely aware of her thigh rubbing against his. He simply ran his hand mechanically through her hair and waited for the nausea to pass. Waited to smell something, even perfume, even intimate gel wash, that wasn’t overwhelmed by the stench in his mind.