He bent to vomit again, only this time there was nothing to bring up. His stomach contracted with strong, uncontrollable spasms, and in the midst of all that, he suddenly knew that he wanted his mother. Wanted to curl up in her soft, comforting arms, which would push away the hair stuck to his sweaty forehead, wipe the remains of vomit from his lips, calm his trembling body and everything would be fine.
He’d killed someone.
He’d
killed
someone.
Again, he sat up. Again drank water. And again the face, the eyes, the cracked skull, the blood from the ears. But this time, instead of nausea, something else rose in him. The beginnings of a terrible anger. A thin thread of anger. He didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. He waited for his breath to come back, to return to normal, and then he hurried to the SUV, barely hearing the cries of his escorts, concerned Eritreans who walked beside him, offering him water, and followed him with their eyes as he drove away from them.
Liat makes the chicken schnitzels in the oven. It’s healthier and less of a headache. She puts four chicken breasts in a bowl. Marinates them in a mixture of date syrup, soy sauce and a spoonful of paprika. The alarm on her cell phone rings two hours later, reminding her of what she remembered anyway: beat an egg, add crushed garlic and olive oil. Dip the chicken in the egg mixture and then the breadcrumbs. Pat them well onto the meat. Place in a moderate oven, fifteen minutes on each side. Yaheli wants store-bought chicken nuggets shaped like animals, the kind that Tamir, his friend from nursery school, eats in his house. But they are full of preservatives and food coloring, and she won’t hear of it.
When Eitan comes home, he’ll set the table and make the mashed potatoes. That’s his specialty. Yaheli will ask if he can watch TV with his meal and she’ll say no, hoping she can stick to it. Instead, she’ll ask him how nursery school was, ask Itamar how school was, ask Eitan how work was. The question is a direct continuation of the mashed potatoes and schnitzel, the smell of the shampoo coming from the children’s heads and the cups of chocolate milk standing on the counter. But a family sitting at the table is actually made up of loose crumbs of moments. No one knows what the others were ashamed or proud of today. What they wanted, what they hated. They don’t talk about it. They eat schnitzel and mashed potatoes. Only Liat, vaguely restless, insists on getting answers from each one. Not just “it was okay,” but what actually happened, so she can pat the crumbs of those experiences into a single whole, the way she patted the breadcrumbs onto the pink, moist meat.
He was calm when he arrived at the garage for his next shift. Removed from the vomit and the trembling, from the run-over Eritrean, from the endless procession of bodies he examined close up for long hours. He thought he recognized the faces of those who had brought him water the day before, the people who had helped him stand up when his legs failed him. But they showed no sign that there had been a previous encounter, and Eitan concluded that he had once again mistaken one for another. Whether he was the one who had checked their temperature or they were the ones who had handed him a rag to wipe his forehead, they all still looked alike to him. (Not all. Sirkit stood in a corner of the garage, as distinct as always, a burning spot he made sure not to look at, making her even more conspicuous. He didn’t know if someone had told her what happened outside the garage the previous day. And even if they had, could she connect his gross, humiliating vomiting to the illegal immigrant napping beside the SUV? Probably not – how could she understand that he had confused the anonymous, live Eritrean with her dead husband? None the less, he avoided looking at her, embarrassed by his body, which had betrayed him that way in her territory.)
Six hours later, he sent his last patient on his way and left the garage. Once again, they were waiting outside for him, and this time, in greater numbers. “Shukran, Doctor, shukran.” He shook their hands reluctantly. He had already taken off his gloves and washed his hands in the garage sink, and now, after these handshakes, he’d have to be careful not to touch his face all the way back to Omer. Pull into the driveway and hurry over to the hose in the yard to wash away the potential coronavirus, the hypothetical dysentery, his built-in aversion to those foreign hands. He smiled politely to the crowd of devoted patients and tried to walk toward his SUV. But the Eritreans flanked him. What had begun as shy gratitude turned into an emotional outpouring, almost a competition: who would shake the doctor’s hand longer; who would thank him with lengthier, more incomprehensible words. Among the extended hands, he suddenly recognized his hands, the ones that had lain on the ground, and remembered: a run-over Eritrean on the side of the road. His black legs resting on the ground in an unnatural position. The hands as well, he recalled, had been in an unnatural position. Damn it, his whole body had been blatantly unnatural. Not only because he was a run-over Eritrean. He wasn’t even supposed to be there when Eitan was. Eitan’s life did not include Eritreans splattered on the bumper, or shaking his hand, or Eritreans altogether. And without his noticing it, yesterday’s nausea and guilt began to subside, replaced by growing anger. Why did that fucking illegal immigrant have to be there in the middle of the night? How did he expect someone to see him in the dark? So skinny, so pathetic. Eitan scanned the faces of the grateful patients and restrained himself from shouting at them. How can you be so pathetic! How can you bear this futile, groveling existence?! Why do you follow me like a pack of puppies? He nodded a goodbye and got into the SUV. But the Eritreans irritated him all the way home, like a grain of sand in his eye.
Near the exit for Omer he thought of David the Homo. David the Homo was David Zonnenshein from one of the fourth-grade classes in his school. David the Homo’s father was an important man. Head of the Haifa University Psychology Department. But that didn’t help David when the entire class bullied him. It might even have made it worse. Because while other children’s parents would have intervened if their child had been called a homo and the epithet had been scrawled on all the doors of the school bathrooms, David’s father took no concrete action. He might have thought it was something that children did and would pass. Maybe he was busy with the problems of other people, who paid him a great deal of money to solve them. Or maybe deep inside, like everyone else, he knew his son was a lousy little homo.
Eitan hadn’t been one of the kids who’d bullied David the Homo. Not because he was especially virtuous, but because he had other things to do. But when he saw him being beaten by some third-grade kids who were a head shorter than he was, Eitan almost went over to hit him himself. How can you let them do this to you? Why are you such a homo? David the Homo had the kind of face that invited you do anything to him, and so you did. Children like David the Homo turn other children into monsters. Even if you swore to yourself that you wouldn’t do anything to him, even if you wanted to feel sorry for him, the moment always came when you couldn’t hold back anymore. You began hating him for being such a nothing.
David the Homo didn’t move on to the same middle school. Eitan didn’t know whether it was his idea or his father’s to change schools, but it seemed like a good decision. In high school, he sometimes saw him on the bus and quickly averted his glance. They both knew things about each other that they didn’t want to know. For example: that David was a lousy little homo. And that Eitan was a lousy little asshole.
In their senior year, Eitan and his classmates went on the March of Life trip to Poland. He stood with them in the central yard of Auschwitz. The guide told them about life in the camp. This is where the guards were. These are the gates. Those are the showers, the gas chambers, the crematorium. Ohad Sagi raised his hand. “But why didn’t they try to run away?” The guide explained that it was impossible. Ohad Sagi persisted. “There were more prisoners than guards, and it wasn’t like they had anything to lose.” The guide looked a bit less patient. He said that anyone who didn’t know what it meant to be so terrified couldn’t judge. “Don’t start that lambs-to-the-slaughter business with me,” he added. In the hotel that night,
Ohad Sagi suggested that everyone jerk off to see who would come first. After that, he said, “I don’t understand it, why didn’t they try to fight back? They were just a bunch of homos.” Eitan thought about David the Homo, about how much he had hated him, and thought that deep down he had also hated them, all those emaciated Jews, walking skeletons, who seeped so deeply into your soul that you couldn’t even jerk off decently.
He parked the SUV and stepped out into the yard. Tried to understand why he couldn’t sustain compassion for them for any length of time. Why that anger always crept in behind the sympathy. Just as the smell of blood drove sharks mad, the smell of weakness freaked him out. Or maybe it was the opposite, and it wasn’t that he had the power to destroy them that made him angry at them, but the clever way they destroyed him. The way their wretchedness oppressed him, accused him.
He opened the door and went inside. Closed it behind him quickly, like a person fleeing.
*
He didn’t like to admit it, but he was becoming a more proficient liar. Liat continued to complain about his many night shifts, and he found himself joining Eckstein’s poker group. A brilliant, detestable arrangement that had repulsed Eitan the first time he heard about it, but later became a life saver. Eckstein’s poker group had been meeting every Wednesday for years, except that each of the members met in a different place: Eckstein in the bed of the current female intern; Berdugo in the car belonging to his ex, who herself had to join a group to get away from the house; Amos in the speech therapist’s office, on the couch where, in the afternoon, his son had sat and learned to pronounce “sh”. Eitan knew the arrangement and was repelled by it, but he knew how much Liat needed to see that he had indeed assimilated into his new place of work, and he knew that the weekly poker group played to exactly that need.
And then there were those half-night shifts when there were complications in a surgery and it went on until dawn. And there were one-third night shifts filled with crises and system breakdowns that required the surgeons to stay late. There were after-hours surgeries it would be a shame not to take because they needed the money, and medical conferences, the invitations to which were hung on the refrigerator door at home some time before they were due to take place. The conferences were real, as were the invitations, but if in the past they had ended up in the trash even before they’d been fully removed from their envelopes, now they were respectfully attached to the refrigerator door with a colored magnet. “THE FUTURE OF NEUROSURGERY.” At Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. The program ended at 9:30, which meant that there was no way he could get home before eleven. The department was another story. He’d used up his annual sick days a long time ago. He’d buried two grandmothers. Took the kids for a series of tests that showed nothing. He’d even told them that he was called up for emergency reserve duty in the Medical Corps, and hoped that by the end of the year no one would remember that he hadn’t brought any documents to verify it. He counted three small canker sores on the underside of his lips, but was too upset and busy to treat them.
6
THEY ARRESTED THE KID not far from Yeruham. He was driving a black Mercedes GLK-Class, and showed no surprise when three armed detectives jumped out in front of him at a traffic light. The owner of the Mercedes called the police two hours later, when he’d come back from a swim in the Ein Akev spring with his children to discover that someone had stolen his car. He was so surprised to learn that they’d already found the SUV that he repeated the license plate number twice and insisted that the operator confirm it. Esti said, “Sir, what’s so hard to believe? The Israeli police found your car for you,” then hung up and burst out laughing. Melamed and Samsonov had never been so lucky, not to mention Cheetah. If that kid hadn’t driven right into his ambush, this month’s paycheck would have been his last. And the thing was that the only person not excited about it was the kid, no, the young man, no, the young Bedouin who was arrested by Beersheba detectives driving a stolen car. The third item on the four o’clock news. It turned out that the kid’s name was Ali. Big deal. Every other Bedouin here was called Ali. Only Allah knew how they themselves didn’t get confused.
The weariness in the boy’s eyes surprised Liat. A sixteen-year-old just isn’t supposed to look at you like that. “I think he’s some kind of idiot,” Cheetah had told her earlier, “but if you can get him to tell you who he takes the cars to, that could help.” She studied the boy again. He didn’t look like an idiot. People confuse a glazed look with a vacant look. A vacant look belongs to a brain that has no thoughts in it. A glazed look belongs to a brain with thoughts in it that are located behind a dark, glassy surface. The boy’s look was glazed when he was alone and became weary when someone spoke to him.
“Our records show that you don’t have a driver’s license.” Was that a sarcastic smile she thought she saw flash on his lips? “You know how to drive?”
All at once, his chest expanded with pride, his eyes lit up. “I’m a great driver.”
Liat couldn’t hide her smile. “So this isn’t the first time you’ve driven without a license.”
He said nothing and looked at her. Man and boy still struggled in the features of his face – the black bristles of a beard on rounded, almost baby-like cheekbones. A determined mustache above a delicate chin with the hint of a cleft.
“Look Ali, you’re not sixteen yet. You don’t have a criminal record. And if you cooperate with us, you won’t have one.”
It took more than four hours, but in the end Liat had a list of vehicles that had been stolen over the last several weeks and the address of a chop shop not far from Tel Sheva. As the detectives were getting organized for the raid, she reread the list of places where the vehicles had been stolen. Ein Akev. Maleh Akrabim. Tlalim. Gevey Havah. Mashabei Sadeh.
Tlalim.
She stood up abruptly and hurried over to the interrogation room. The sudden opening of the door surprised the boy slightly, but his face instantly took on the same bored expression he was so careful to maintain.
“Ali, tell me again when you were at Tlalim.”
“Once with the Mazda and once it didn’t work out.”
“Yes, but when?”
“Hell, I don’t remember.”
“There’s no ‘I don’t remember,’ Ali. ‘I don’t remember’ is dead. Tell me when you were there the last time.”
“The last time… two weeks ago.”
Eureka.
She rushed out to the precinct commander’s office, opened the door without bothering to knock.
“I know who killed the Eritrean.”
He shouted. Even cried. Strange to see a sixteen-year-old boy cry. One minute he was standing there with his mustache, his bristles and that Arabic accent that always made them seem older and more frightening in your mind – and a minute later, he started to cry. Like a child. And it was so unexpected that for the first second you didn’t even realize that it was tears, not just something in his eye. And as he cried, it suddenly became terribly clear who had won the battle of his facial features, because his baby-like cheekbones were so prominent that the bristles looked pasted on, and the trembling of the lips beneath the mustache made it look like a mistake.
“It’s not true,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Yes, he’d been at that Kibbutz Tlalim. And yes, he’d gone there to steal cars. But he hadn’t hit anyone, may Allah strike him down if he was lying.
“Your Allah is a kind of problematic witness,” Marciano said. “Can you think of anyone besides him who was there with you?”
In an instant, the child vanished and the man appeared. The boy’s eyes once again showed nothing. The tears had not yet dried, but his pupils were already as hard as rocks. “No one. There was no one there with me.” Liat shifted uneasily in her chair. Several hours earlier, the boy had said that he would answer all her questions, as long as she didn’t ask who went with him on his night-time runs. He was willing to report on the vehicles that had been stolen, the scenes of the crime –
he even agreed to endanger himself and give them the location of the chop shop. But never, under any circumstances, would he reveal the name of the partner who was with him. At the time, she’d thought the arrangement was reasonable. She was ready to give up on the small car thief in order to find out where the big money-maker was. A chop shop was worth more than a car thief. But now, the anonymous thief had become much more important – he was the only person who could strengthen the boy’s claims.
“I swear I didn’t run him over, I swear.”
Liat leaned forward. “Ali, swearing isn’t enough. We have a man who was run over near Kibbutz Tlalim and we know that you were there with the SUV when it happened. If you insist it wasn’t you, give me someone to back up your story.”
As she spoke, she tried to catch the boy’s glance, but he entrenched himself in his silence and his eyes were glazed, dark, unfathomable. After a while, they realized that he wasn’t going to say anything else and left him in the interrogation room. When the door closed, Marciano, a blue-uniformed whale with a broad smile, turned to her and said, “I told you it would end up being some Bedouin.” And then he added generously, “But congratulations on cracking the case, sweetheart.”
She was no prude.
A blonde is crying on the side of the road. A guy stops his car, asks her what happened. She cries – I have a flat! And when I tried to call a tow truck, I saw that my phone was stolen! And I’m all alone here! So the guy unzips his pants and says – this really isn’t your day.
You could tell her jokes like that. She could go with the flow.
She didn’t play the “disadvantaged” card. She laughed even if, deep down, she hated herself for it. She’d rather hate herself than be considered a prude, defensive about her ethnic origin.
Waking Lions Page 8