Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  So most of the time she preferred to think that she lived in this world without skin color or a surname, without ethnic origin. Not Liat Smooha from the projects in Or Akiva. And not Liat Green from the private homes in Omer. Just plain Liat.

  As a child (with an unruly mane of hair that her mother insisted on gathering into a ponytail and her grandmother insisted on releasing), she had never dreamed of becoming a detective. Assuming that her Purim costumes were an indication of anything, she leaned strongly toward air travel professions. She was a butterfly at nine, a fairy at ten, and at eleven a pilot. When she was twelve, the limits of the atmosphere became too unimaginative and she made a failed attempt to be the first Or Akiva astronaut. Failed because the motorcycle helmet Uncle Nissim lent her was remarkably heavy, and the aluminum foil she was wrapped in tore almost completely even before the first break. She left the helmet in class and went out. When she went back to the classroom, the helmet was gone and she spent the rest of day searching for it. Consumed with guilt, she brought Uncle Nissim her Purim gift basket of sweets as compensation, and he ate a chocolate bar and said, never mind, angel, what’s gone is gone.

  But she wouldn’t settle for that and began her own private operation. In a week, she returned Uncle Nissim’s helmet to him, holding it reverently in two scratched hands. Her mother began whining that those scratches were tetanus for sure and wanted to take her right to the clinic, but her grandmother said, wait a minute Aviva, the child has a story to tell us, and she won’t die of tetanus in the next half an hour. Liat told them that when she went back to school after the Purim vacation she had looked really hard into the eyes of all the kids in her class and noticed that Aviram was the only one who didn’t look back at her. So today she’d gone over to him and said, I know you took it, and he said get out of my face you bitch, and when he saw that she wasn’t moving, he himself turned around to go, but she grabbed his hand, and then he gave her those scratches, which looked a lot worse than they felt. Finally he said okay, you nutcase, and together they walked to his grandfather’s house, where he’d been living since the court had decided that his parents were not fit. And there, under the couch, was the helmet and lots of other things that Liat recalled had disappeared from class since the beginning of the year. He scratched her hand again, saying take your fucking helmet and get out of my face, you nutcase.

  Her mother said, we have to call the police. Uncle Nissim said, we don’t need any police, I’ll talk to him myself. And her grandmother said, Liati, take really good care of your eyes because that’s your gift. Later, after Uncle Nissim left and her mother was washing dishes in the sink, she sneaked two chocolate bars and whispered, “One for Aviram.”

  They never spoke again, she and Aviram. When she gave him the chocolate bar, he threw it at her and walked off, and a year later she moved to a different school. Her home room teacher called her mother in and told her that because of her good grades and all sorts of other things, she’d be better off in the Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael school.

  On the first day of the seventh grade she wore a blouse with gold sequins and agreed, for the first time, to restrain her hair with a rubber band. Her grandmother walked her to the bus stop and said, you’re so beautiful, my angel, and your blouse is beautiful, and Liat believed her, even though she knew that she was complimenting her partly because she was her grandmother and partly because she herself had bought Liat the blouse. The bus arrived at Ma’agan Michael and Liat saw more grass than she had seen in her entire life. When she got off, thinking that it would probably be really fun going to school here, one of the kids shouted – take a look at that one with the sequins. When she came home, her grandmother asked her how it was, and she said okay. Then she asked her mother to go to the shopping center with her to buy a black blouse without sequins and without anything printed on it.

  Why black, my angel? Black is for funerals. It’s boring.

  I want black.

  In the end she was happy there, in Ma’agan Michael. She was pretty enough, smart enough and funny enough to be forgiven for coming from Or Akiva. Perhaps what helped her most was the fact that she was willing to forget that she came from there, and when she herself agreed to forget, they agreed as well.

  The boundaries were thin, hidden, but none the less carefully observed. Consider the surprised expressions of the people interviewing her for entrance into a Master’s degree program when they learned that behind “Liat Green” on her application forms stood someone who looked like Liat Smooha. The expression vanished instantly, but Liat was experienced enough to recognize it. Or the first evening spent with Eitan’s army friends, the first time they saw her skin color. Or at his parents’ house. Or the picnic with the department medical staff and their families. She ignored those surprised looks, just as she had ignored the shocked look of her advisor when she told her that she had decided not to go ahead with her doctorate in criminology and join the police instead.

  The advisor had asked why. Eitan had asked why. Her mother and Uncle Nissim had asked why. But her grandmother had made some really strong coffee, looked at the grounds and said, very good, my angel, your eyes are finally going to do what they know how to do: look at people.

  Different sorts of surprised expressions awaited her at her new job with the police force. For the first time in her life, her skin color was the right one, but that didn’t change the fact that she was a mega-pussy. Hot like you wouldn’t believe. And, come here honey, let’s introduce you to a few people. And a bitch. “A bunch of baboons,” Eitan had said when she came home crying after her first week, “nothing but a bunch of baboons.” She was happy for his sympathy, but she also knew that the expression, bunch of baboons, was reserved in his mind for the morons in the police cruiser, never for his army buddies from the elite rescue unit, who laughed their heads off when they talked about harassing the new girl in the reserve unit. He was on her side, of course. Listened at length to all the cases she solved. Opened a bottle of wine for every promotion she was given. But since they’d moved to the south, the color in his eyes had been fading. He no longer liked to hear about developments in her investigations. The only case he had the patience to listen to was the one about the Eritrean, but he listened even to that with a surprising restlessness, as if he weren’t really listening to the words she spoke, but searching for something she couldn’t name behind them.

  7

  IT’S DIFFICULT TO HATE for such a long, continuous period of time. Two people work in the same place for hours. Around them, people come and go. But it’s always the two of them. Always that place. The night outside is sometimes cloudy and sometimes clear, sometimes freezing and sometimes pleasant. The hours pass. The injuries pass. But it’s always the same two people in the same place. And since both of them arrive at the garage after a day of hard work, exhausted from their shifts, they begin to be too tired even to hate. They don’t have the strength for burning looks. For flagrant displays of disregard. The first few nights, the hate warmed them. Kept them awake. But gradually, the muscles of hatred grew tired. How long could you keep straining them without a break? Suddenly it seemed quite reasonable to stop, if only for a short time, let’s say an hour after the shift began until an hour before it ended. They came to the garage wrapped in their hatred, removed it for a few hours, and then re-wrapped themselves in it before they went out into the night air. The hours in between were silent, strange. Not thundering silence, but a silence of activity. Sometimes, for a few moments, even of tranquility. She sterilized and he bandaged; he palpated and she translated. And the entire time, outside, the night ripened. The dark became darker and darker, until it gave birth to a different, lighter blue, which gave birth to the sun. Sometimes they looked outside, each in turn. Sometimes their looks intersected, and they immediately averted their eyes so that the hatred would not awaken. You ran over my husband and drove away; you stole my nights from me. When the night changed from black to blue, those words had no purpose.

  Take, for exa
mple, the whistle. Sirkit whistled while she worked and Eitan listened. At first, he listened and hated. There is nothing more loathsome than the whistle of a person you hate. He hated the repetitive melody, the unfamiliarity of it, the way she pursed her lips. The whistle seemed to be nothing but a cry of contempt that had only one purpose: to rile him. But time passed. Two people in the same place, and gradually the whistle began to sound different. Or perhaps it fell on different ears. He began to understand that she wasn’t whistling against him, or for him, or even for herself. She was whistling the way people sometimes whistle while they work – distractedly. Unconsciously.

  And without his being aware of it, he began to wait for that whistle. One night, when the darkness had changed from black to blue and they were still working in silence, he was surprised to discover that he was waiting for something. A foreign, unfamiliar melody that added spice to the night silence. And if at first he hated the melody, the moment came when he whistled it to himself, waiting for a traffic light to change at the entrance to Beersheba. The melody was so much a part of him now that it required no effort to produce it. Not an iota of awareness. The light changed from red to green and he kept driving and kept whistling, until he reached another traffic light, where he stopped abruptly the moment he realized what he was whistling. He turned on the radio, filled the SUV with news and pop songs, and raised the volume. (To clean that melody out of the SUV. To drive it out. How had that whistling of hers entered his throat and infected him without his noticing?) He thought he’d succeeded, but several nights later he found himself whistling again. This time in the garage. He didn’t know how long he’d been whistling before he realized it. He promptly stopped and prayed that no one had noticed.

  Of course she’d noticed. He saw it in her eyes, which looked at him with great surprise, almost shock. He saw her eyes but not her heart fluttering inside her body (where had he found Asum’s whistle, how could this man be whistling her husband’s song to her?). One minute her entire body quivered, and the next it was completely still. Because if it were true, then maybe the whistle didn’t belong to Asum at all. Maybe every whistle belongs to the lips that whistle it. That thought was so liberating that for a moment she almost smiled at him, but controlled herself. And yet, stealing other people’s whistles is nothing to be proud of, even if it turns out to be something good.

  That night, Eitan continued doing his work and Sirkit continued doing hers. The awkwardness of the moment stole the whistle from both of them. But three nights later, the melody returned. Quietly, without announcing itself. Sometimes he whistled it, sometimes she did. It returned and flowed between them without their speaking of it, without their paying it the attention that would destroy it. Not by smiling, not by moving closer. Simply because it was difficult to hate for such a long, continuous period of time.

  “It was the sea in Eilat. Or in Greece. The sand was like the Red Sea sand, but I knew from the color that it was Greece. We wanted to get to the water, but it was a long way to walk, and in the middle we had to pass a kind of orange Japanese monastery. Then we walked on a lawn and I thought it was very strange that there was such soft grass near the sea, just like clover. And then you woke me up before we got there.”

  They were lying in bed. Their bodies were still heavy with sleep, and Liat was vaguely annoyed at him for waking her up. “There was a monk in the monastery, dark-skinned, a little like a caregiver from Thailand. I thought he wouldn’t let us pass, but he actually smiled and said okay.” She didn’t know why she was so determined to tell him that dream. Or what the dream meant. But she needed to tell it. As if there were something extraordinarily urgent about that beach, something vital. That was why it was very important to say everything as soon as you woke up, word for word, like pouring an expensive liquid from one container to another, careful not to spill a drop – that was how she was pouring what had filled her sleep into his ears. None the less something spilled, it wasn’t clear how. Somewhere on the way from her to him, it was lost. She saw it in his eyes, which were focused on her, but without true comprehension. And perhaps worse than that, she realized that it was happening to her as well. Right after she woke up, the dream was still part of her, an utter certainty. But from moment to moment, they were separating: part of what had seemed as clear as the sun became as partial as the moon, because what did it mean that the sea was in both Eilat and Greece, and how can you know from the color that it’s in Greece? What was so strange about soft grass along the beach, and why was it so urgent to reach the water?

  Five minutes after waking, the dream and Liat were already strangers. But she didn’t give up, because the feeling that had been so certain in her sleep still surged inside her: a blue sea she urgently had to reach. And they were so very close.

  Eitan ran his fingers through her hair. “Maybe it means you need a vacation.” He smiled. She did too, knowing how the conversation would continue: first they’d reminisce a bit about vacations at other beaches, and then they’d begin planning the next one. Maybe during the holidays. Thailand, perhaps. The words would carry them forward and the dream would remain behind. A person gets off a boat and begins to walk, and a few meters later he forgets the sea, forgets that the sea joins the ocean, forgets that the ocean surrounds everything. On land, there are paths and mountains and sometimes rivers, and the person drinks from the rivers and doesn’t remember the sea, doesn’t remember the salt, doesn’t remember the very real possibility of drowning. Liat and Eitan continued talking and every word was a step on solid ground, every word drove the water further from their minds.

  Perhaps that was how it should be. Because when, ten minutes later, Liat placed cups of coffee from the machine in front of them, the distance between her and her man was already quite small. That was why she told him her dreams every morning. Not so he would interpret them. But so he would know. And she also asked him: did you dream? What about? As if sleep were a common enemy that had to be defeated. An attempt to separate them from each other. For even if they lay in each other’s arms on the mattress, holding hands, legs intertwined – each of them still slept alone.

  As they drank their coffee, her eyes scanned his face. Stocktaking that he wasn’t aware of, but that none the less took place every morning. To anyone used to waking up every day in the same house, it sounds ridiculous. But someone who wakes up once in a house that has been broken into (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the jewelry or the father that has disappeared in the middle of the night), knows she must look for every sign of change. Wake up tensed and ready – what happened here while I was gone? Liat knew: sleep was dangerous. There was something almost offensive about the idea that for seven hours a day, you are forced to be apart from your loved ones. Each one goes his own way. No one knows anything. She had already understood that when she was a child. Even before her father moved in with Ronit, she had hated going to bed. None of the lullabies, the hair-stroking, the dolls lying beside her under the covers could lessen the humiliation of sleep. These days she fell asleep more easily, but still with a vague sense of defeat.

  And then – the waking up. Her man is lying beside her in bed. They immediately bring each other up to date – where they’ve been and what they’ve done. And even if she feels like lingering a while longer with the dream, she nevertheless gives herself over to the conversation. Eagerly, she tells him where she’s been so that they can get out of bed as they got into it: close to one another. Knowing one another. (Of course, she didn’t tell him everything. Not all the dreams and not all the details. But even when she cleaned the house, she didn’t always have the strength to clean the spare room. And that was fine. She knew what was inside it and it didn’t frighten her.) She wasn’t afraid of sex dreams. Neither hers nor Eitan’s. It was like dropping your stools into the toilet behind the closed door. Everyone knew what you were doing, even if they didn’t talk about it.

  With Eitan, she hadn’t locked the bathroom door for years. She peed with abandon in front of him. She hid
parts of herself from him and knew that he too hid parts of himself from her, but that didn’t worry her. It was clear to her that he had things he didn’t tell her. She had a vague suspicion about why he sometimes locked himself in the shower. Sometimes she even asked herself if it was one of her girlfriends he was fantasizing about, or a woman from the department. Those thoughts stung her slightly, but there was also something calming about them. Because she could look directly at the inner sanctum of coupledom, clean the dust off the darkest shelves without fear. But she never went beyond that. Just as you label a carton FRAGILE because of the rattling sound coming from inside, but you don’t open it, don’t try to find out what it contains.

  Sometimes the whistling stopped abruptly. For instance, when an embarrassed man showed him a sheet full of bloody, stinking faeces and he could barely keep himself from throwing up at the sight. Entamoeba histolytica. Sometimes trekkers come home from abroad with it. The wrong choice of drinking water and your intestines turn into a breeding ground for protozoa. Doctors in internal medicine departments were already used to seeing it, especially during the holidays when long-haired youngsters decide to take off from Nepal and spend Rosh Hashanah at home, and two days later end up in the emergency room accompanied by a concerned parent. But even then, the number of cases never approached even a tenth of what he saw here. It seemed as if every other patient was a carrier. They had drunk the water back in Africa, but the protozoa traveled all the way here with them, tiny cysts that adhere to the large intestine and slowly destroy it.

  He looked at those people in astonishment. It wasn’t the faeces that bothered him. It was the very existence, the very essence of the patients. He arrived at the garage in the evening after a full day spent in the light, looked at them and did not understand. Just as once, on a school trip, the guide had picked up an innocent-looking stone and from under it black, evil soil gaped out at them. A den of worms, dark and hidden life. A muddy, crumbling existence of which he’d had no inkling. It was beneath them all that time, and he hadn’t known. The guide then put the stone back and they continued on their way. But the doubt remained about every stone he saw after that, even more so if it was white and smooth. Now he looked at the snaking line in front of the garage. He looked and did not believe that it had been beneath them all this time and he hadn’t known. And why should he ever have known?