Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  When he finished work, he washed his hands well, almost rubbing the skin off. She waited behind him until he finished, and when he left the sink, she washed her hands. He thought about giving her the towel, but decided not to.

  *

  She walked back quietly. The night was so cold that even the dogs had stopped barking. For a long while, there was only the sound of her steps, and then the roar of a truck pulling into the gas station. Soon after the truck had entered the gas station, the smell of it entered as well. The overwhelming stench of one and a half tons of garbage. Instead of quickening her steps, she stopped to inhale. She remembered that smell very well. When they had burned garbage at night to keep themselves warm, it had smelled exactly like that. Heavy, all-encompassing, enshrouding the village like a blanket. And as much as she had hated that smell then, she was unable to move away from it now. She stood behind the gas station and inhaled more and more of it, inhaled it hungrily, squeezing as much of it as she could into her lungs. Stupid cow, don’t tell me that you miss it.

  But what could she do? She did miss it. Missed it without knowing she missed it, because she had hoped never to smell the stench of burning garbage again. And yet, when she encountered it again, she clung to it with all her strength, refusing to let it go. As terrible as it was, it was still the smell of her nights. When you smelled it, you knew that night was falling, that you’d finished work. That you could finally sit down and look at the sky. She and Asum would go outside and sit with the others. Sometimes someone would sing and sometimes they would talk. But quietly. The sounds of the night were different from the sounds of the day.

  She looked around. Apart from the smell, everything was different. The air here had a different feel. It was hard to explain. The sunsets looked different. Something in the angle of the sun in relation to the sky. It affected everything, also the colors. And that was okay, because that was why she had come here, for things to be different. But it was also terrible. Faces, flavors, smells, songs she would never meet again. And if she came across an echo (like now, a truck stopping at the gas station and suddenly, if you close your eyes, you’re there), even then it wouldn’t be the same. It couldn’t be.

  You can’t miss the smell of garbage. You can’t. But it’s out of your control. Like the dreams. Though she was here, her dreams were still there, and sometimes they were both there and here, and sometimes in a completely different place. Every night many people squeezed onto the mattress next to the wall. They did and said strange things, but the strangest thing was that they were present here, with her, a presence that, in her dreams, seemed understandable, but right after them became truly amazing. How did they get here when they didn’t really get here? Hadn’t managed to make their way here? Hadn’t managed to survive the deserts, the countries, the people? Mainly the people. She had, she was here, but those night-time journeys exhausted her. Because though they were the ones who came to her, she went to them no less. Went to them and didn’t always know whether she would be able to return. She woke up tired in the morning, and in the afternoon she went to the dry stream bed and sat on Asum’s chair, which was her chair now. A man dies and seems to have left nothing behind, but he has in fact left his wife a chair and a river view, and when you think about it, that was no small thing at all. Her feet dug into the sand, and the sand was warm and smooth. The wind brought it here and the wind would take it away from here, and that was fine because the sand did not remember. The sand didn’t know where it had been yesterday and didn’t know where it would be tomorrow. If that weren’t so, if the sand remembered all the places it had been, it would become so heavy that no wind would be able to carry it off anywhere.

  When the truck drove off, she took a last breath, sniffing frantically, chastising herself for clinging to it so foolishly. How dare you miss that garbage, that village. You can’t possibly miss the smell of that garbage. But if we don’t miss something, what do we actually have? If we are defined by what we have, then your situation is very bad, but if we are defined by what we’ve lost, then congratulations, you’re at the top of the list. And if missing something is like a bite, like skin infected by a parasite that has penetrated it, why does she scratch it so passionately, the smell of garbage and the smell of food, the smell of the earth and the smell of Asum? She walked more quickly. Went into the caravan and lay down on the mattress. Stop it. Stop it. But they kept coming, the smells. And so did the tastes, the colors, the faces. But worst of all was when they stopped coming. When she suddenly realized that she no longer remembered the name of the boy who had lived three shacks away who used to cough all the time. That she could not recall the song men used to sing after all the other songs had ended. She lay in bed and remembered, then lay in bed and didn’t remember, and gradually felt the tastes, the colors, the faces leave her body, felt how every moment she was here, something from there faded, was wiped away. Then she heard the women on the mattresses next to her whisper: listen, Sirkit is finally crying.

  It’s difficult to hate so much for a continuous period of time, but it’s also difficult not to. Because he had already sneaked into the drug storeroom of the internal medicine department three times, and it was starting to become dangerous. As he quickly shoved the drugs into his backpack, Eitan recalled the stealing-sweets-from-the-grocery-store ritual, the test of manhood at the end of the fourth grade. Distraction. Rapid infiltration. Escape. But now he wasn’t clutching some toffee in his hands, but many packets of antibiotics, and the price of a mistake wasn’t a thorough cleaning of the store owner’s Subaru. In his attempt to manipulate his way to the drugs he wanted, he had renewed his relationship with a guy he’d known in medical school, now an internist in the hospital, a thin, balding man who looked surprised that Eitan remembered his name. Eitan didn’t remember his name. He found him on the doctors’ list, looked at his date of birth and where he went to school, and hoped that they had indeed bumped into each other at Tel Aviv University. When he found him beside a patient’s bed, he discovered that they really had known each other in the past – the internist immediately said, “You were Zakai’s boy” – and the path from there to lunch was short. Over the next few days, he dropped by to see his new friend at every opportunity, until his face became familiar in the department. The nurses no longer wondered what the neurosurgeon was doing in the internal medicine department. But he still had to figure out how the locked door to the drug storeroom could be opened. Finally, he began to tell his new friend about the overflowing drug storerooms in the hospitals further north. The internist’s balding head reddened with anger. “You’re drowning in drugs and we have a constant shortage,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you so you can see what an internist’s drug storeroom in Soroka Hospital looks like.”

  Eitan followed him, making his way between the patients’ beds, which blocked the corridor, an obstacle course of moans and groans. The internist finally stopped in front of a locked door, took out his magnetic card and passed it quickly in front of the lock. Open sesame. “Take a look at what we have here. Nothing, absolutely nothing.” Eitan scanned the shelves and thought, you have no idea what nothing is. Nothing is what there is in a garage near Tlalim, a twenty-minute ride from here. He immediately pushed the thought of the dark garage out of his mind. He didn’t want to think about them, about those people who stole his nights. Most of all, he didn’t want to think about her. So he turned to the internist and listened to his complaints with interest and took advantage of the moment he turned his back to grab whatever he could get his hands on.

  But it wasn’t enough. Several nights later, the supply was gone. As he drove the SUV on the dark dirt road, he had to be careful not to hit the dark figures making their way to the garage. Eritreans. Sudanese. Thin, almost skeletal bodies. Bodies crumbling from so much erosion. Stress fractures from hundreds of kilometers of walking. Exhaustion. Dehydration. Heat stroke. He didn’t say a word about it. What could he say? He merely asked Sirkit to keep the waiting patients apart. “The last t
hing I need here is a tuberculosis epidemic.”

  It was only a matter of time before it arrived, and when an embarrassed Eritrean woman removed her shirt and exposed a back covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma, he felt as if he had received a letter he’d been expecting for quite a long time. There was no reason to open the envelope; he knew what was inside: the ugly growths on the young woman’s back left no room for doubt. Of all the vicious diseases, AIDS was at least polite enough to announce its presence. The lesions on her back were a clear statement, with dozens of copies: I’m here. None the less, Eitan asked her to open her mouth, and inside it, he saw – as he knew he would – lesions covering her tongue and throat, continuing downward as far as the eye could see. He couldn’t know yet whether the metastasis had reached the digestive system and lungs, but at this stage that didn’t really change anything. He gestured for the young woman to get dressed and told her that she had to go to the hospital right away.

  But the young woman remained standing there. As did the man who had come with her. Eitan didn’t have to examine him to know. The lesions covered his face. The couple continued to stand there even after he repeated “hospital” over and over again. The expressions of refusal on their faces required no translation. Their skin was covered with lesions. They had difficulty breathing. Their legs could barely carry them. But their freedom was undisputed: they could still stand under the moon and the stars; they sat when they wanted to and stood up when they wanted to. If they went to the hospital now, that freedom might be taken from them. But not necessarily, Eitan told them, not necessarily. True, there were cases where patients were put in detention camps, but most of the time treatment was given without any problem. After all, it was in the national interest.

  The man and the woman stood in silence. Perhaps they understood what Sirkit had translated for them. Perhaps not. Either way, they remained where they were. As they stood there, Sirkit spoke in an expressionless tone. Eitan didn’t understand what she said, but he saw the arrival of two men who, until then, had been waiting outside the garage. Despite the severe intestinal infection they both suffered from, they were still more muscular and robust than all the others. Now they stood in front of the man and woman, studying them with veiled eyes.

  Sirkit spoke to the man and woman, and there was suddenly a softness in her voice that Eitan did not recognize. (He had heard her giving orders. He had heard her keeping the patients firmly in line. But he had never heard her speak this way before. And for a moment, he wondered what other tones existed in her throat that he hadn’t even guessed at. When she sang, for example, if she did sing. Then he quickly cut off that thought in disgust, because what did it matter whether she sang or not?) The man replied to what she said. Sirkit paused, then went on speaking. The sounds emerged from her mouth so gently that Eitan could barely hear the words spoken, although he knew their meaning very well.

  But the man and the woman remained where they were. The woman’s lashes fluttered so quickly that if eyelashes were wings, she would have flown off into the air a long time ago, fluttering her way to the moon. But then he noticed the tears that fell from the black woman’s eyes, the lashes pulling them down, large and heavy. She could never fly like that. Sirkit did not look into the woman’s eyes. Nor into the man’s eyes. Her gaze was fixed on the tin wall of the garage.

  Go.

  The man and the woman remained standing where they were. The two Eritrean men took another step inside. There was not a bit of aggressiveness in their eyes. Certain things would be done if they needed to be done. That was an established fact. There was no need for more than that step. The man and woman turned to go.

  There were others. There were always others. The supply of drugs ran out, and once again Eitan found himself plotting another way back into the drug storeroom of the internal medicine department. At lunch, he took advantage of the wonderful chaos of cups and napkins and plastic trays and switched his magnetic card with the internist’s. When they parted, Eitan said he was going back to work, but in fact he waited until he saw his friend leave the internal medicine department heading for the neurosurgery department, holding the magnetic card he needed to exchange with Eitan. Then he hurried toward internal medicine, calculating how much time it would take the internist to reach neurosurgery, learn that Dr Green had not yet returned from lunch, and go back to the internal medicine department. It would arouse no suspicion if he bumped into him in the department corridor, just a small mix-up. But if the internist saw him use the switched card to get into the drug storeroom, things would get a lot more complicated.

  He acted with a speed that surprised him. In only a few minutes, the backpack was filled with treasures of Western medicine. Ciprofloxacin for intestinal infections. Mebendazol for intestinal worms. Ventolin for patients who had breathing problems after weeks of cutting metal and painting walls. Synthomycine for infected, pus-filled wounds. Cephoral for bladder infections. Atophan for joint pain and stress fractures. Isoniazid, Rifampicin, Pyrazinamide and Ethambutol for the inevitable war against the growing number of TB cases. The illnesses that bored him. They were the reason he had chosen to become a neurosurgeon. Why be satisfied with the dreary system when you can get into the control room itself, the command center. How much he missed the beauty of brain cells, the axons as white as a ballerina’s dress. So precise. So clean. So different from the infections, the pus and the ulcers he saw every night in the garage. He quickly straightened up the place so it would look as if nothing was missing, and cracked open the door. When he saw that there was no one in the corridor but bleary-eyed patients in their beds, he slipped out. Near the entrance he met the internist, switched cards with him and apologized for the mix-up.

  The third time, he swore to himself, would be the last. On the way out he ran into the head nurse, and he didn’t like the way she looked at him. Two hours earlier, during a shared coffee break, the internist had told him about a suspicion of stolen drugs in the department. A mistake in the records, or one of the nurses who wanted to make some money on the side. Eitan listened attentively and said, “A mistake in the records. It happens all the time. Why would anyone put his job at risk like that?” The internist shrugged and said that people do all sorts of strange things.

  When he reached the garage that evening, he was upset and angry, and mostly late. Yaheli’s long bath, a lengthy and stormy discussion of pirates at Itamar’s bedside, a leisurely cup of coffee on the living-room couch. He hadn’t decided in advance to be late that night, but something inside him clearly rebelled against the need to arrive on time. It was almost eleven when Liat turned her gaze from the TV and asked, “You’re not on call tonight?” And he, instead of hurrying to stand up, ruffled her hair and said in a calm tone, “Nothing will happen if they wait a while.”

  But that calm faded as he drew closer to the garage. He could already picture Sirkit’s icy, penetrating glance. He tried to calculate the number of patients already gathered there, outside the tin door, waiting for him to arrive. When he turned off the main road onto the dirt road, he suddenly realized that the thing pressing against his temples was nothing but his guilt for being late, and that realization only made him angrier as he slammed the SUV door behind him and declared, “I’m here.” He expected Sirkit and the patients to come out to him, either hopeful or angry. But the garage remained silent. No one hurried out to greet him.

  For a moment, the faint hope flickered inside him that they’d all been caught. One raid of the immigration police and there he was, a free man. Every day, he imagined the anonymous phone call to the police. But he knew that with the police came an investigation, and with the investigation would come the revelation. It was complete idiocy to assume that Sirkit would keep his secret. He began walking more quickly now, hurrying toward the garage. That silence worried him.

  First he saw Sirkit, her black hair pulled onto the top of her head in a thick bun, a coiled, sleeping snake. After spending the entire drive thinking about the admonishing look he would g
et from her, Eitan was surprised to discover that she wasn’t even looking at him. A moment later, when his eyes had grown accustomed to the lighting in the garage, he understood why – lying on the rusty iron table was a young man staring vacantly into space. Sirkit was focused entirely on his left hand. She was stitching it up with quick, sure movements.

  “What are you doing?” Eitan’s voice shook with astonishment.

  She said he’d come at exactly the right time, because she wasn’t sure she knew how to finish it up.

  “You’re completely mad. Only a doctor can do that sort of work.”

  There was no doctor here.

  She watched him calmly as he went over to the faucet and washed his hands. When he approached the table, he had to admit that she’d done a good job. Amazingly good, in fact.

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  She told him that in Eritrea, she’d started sewing the minute she could hold a needle. In the end, a linen blouse isn’t so different from human skin. She told him about the medical delegation that came to the village, how she ran after them everywhere they went and watched, and one of the women doctors saw and explained to her. She told him that for three weeks she’d been carefully watching everything he did here and tried to remember. And Eitan, instead of noticing that for the first time she wasn’t speaking to him in sentences of one syllable, stared mesmerized at the light coming from her face. The woman before him was radiant.