Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  “You’re not listening to me,” she said. He looked up from his cup of tea, expecting to see her face blazing with anger. But instead he saw tired, sad eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m just tired.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then said, “But it’s not just today, Tani. You haven’t been listening to me for a long time now. Weeks.” He wanted to tell her that it was exactly thirty-four days that he hadn’t been listening to her, and not only her – he didn’t hear the words Yaheli made up when he sang in the bath, a mishmash of gibberish and real words that used to make them roar with laughter once. He didn’t hear Itamar’s questions about dragons and dinosaurs – if there are dinosaurs, why can’t there be dragons too? He didn’t hear what people said to him at work either, which was a problem because even if he didn’t screw up during surgery, they noticed that he wasn’t really there. He wanted to say all that, and instead he said, “I’m sorry, Tul, it’s just a bad time.”

  Liat looked at him for another moment, opened her mouth to say something, then stopped. She, of all people, who made him laugh so hard when she quoted her grandmother, who said she should always say what she thought “because words you don’t say give you constipation”. At the time, he told her that in his family it was just the opposite – when he was a kid, his father explained to him that if you talk too much, you use up all your words and have to be silent for the rest of your life.

  “And that scared you so much that you turned into a miser with your words?”

  “Me? A miser?”

  “Really, Eitan,” (she hadn’t started calling him Tani yet), “senior members of the Mossad give out more information than you.” She’d been right. He really didn’t talk very much. He preferred to keep himself to himself. But with her, it was different. Only with her did he really say what he thought (how much he hated Yuval because their parents loved him more. And how much he hated himself for hating him. How scared he was that he might not be able to make his dream of becoming a neurosurgeon come true. How much he loved her pussy). During their first year together, he said things he had never dared to say even to himself. And even if he had begun to censor himself more in the years that came after that, he was still always proud that he and Liat were almost completely open with each other (except for that conversation about fantasies of other people, which had really been unnecessary). Now he was silent, had been silent for an entire month, and from day to day that silence was becoming heavier, hungrier, devouring larger and larger pieces of what had once been his life.

  That morning, after a tense twenty-minute silence, Eitan was horrified to discover how relieved he was when his wife said, “Okay, I have to get to work.” And he was even more alarmed to realize, in the midst of their equally strained dinner, that he was anxiously awaiting the moment that the hands of the clock would send him to the garage.

  The truth was that he was always angry these days. Embraced Liat in the bedroom in Omer and was angry that her body wasn’t her body. Worked in the garage, centimeters away from Sirkit and was angry about her presence, which was insinuating itself inside him. Why? Who was she that he wanted her so much? In the middle of the night, he got into the SUV, left a woman staring and silent and returned to a woman sleeping and silent. The hands on the steering wheel belonged to someone else. Clipped nails. Marriage band. The hands of a stranger. But the desire that drove in the SUV with him, the attraction that wove its web inside him all night as he worked beside her in the garage – they too were alien to him. Something external that wrapped itself around him, something that happened to him without his having chosen it. And so he lived, cut off from himself by his own desire, like patients who came in with a urine sample they held as far away from their bodies as they could – this has nothing to do with me!

  Once again, she didn’t speak a word to him all night. She looked at him as she sterilized and cleaned and tended to patients. Handed him the instruments he asked for and was silent. Between patients, he glanced at her briefly. If she noticed, she showed no sign. Most of the time she stood with her back to him, gazing through the garage door at a night as dark and opaque as her eyes.

  What did she see there? What was she thinking about? He peered outside as well, as if that were enough for him to see through his eyes what she saw through hers. But outside the garage there was only darkness, and everyone placed their own treasures in that darkness. He was barred from her night.

  When the last patient had gone, he took off his gloves and went out to the SUV. She was sterilizing the rusty iron table and nodded goodbye to him. He’d been there six hours and they had not exchanged a single word. He couldn’t explain what was bothering him. Most of the time, he liked working in silence. Other doctors listened to music while they operated. Prof. Zakai was a big Stravinsky fan. Prof. Shakedi didn’t start cutting through a patient’s dura mater without the accompaniment of a Matti Caspi pop song. Anaesthetists preferred listening to the army radio station, or arguing politics. It took him a long time to get used to that noise, and as soon as he became a senior surgeon he informed his team that in his operating room, they worked in silence. Yet here, in the garage, the silence drove him mad. Perhaps because he had no idea what words were inside her. He knew quite well what the head nurse or the anaesthetist would talk about, given the chance. But he had no idea what Sirkit would talk about. So he filled the void, her silence, with images of what she might say. Every night he carried on a long conversation with her, all of it in his mind. Every night he filled the space with something else, put words and sentences in her mouth, and there was always room for more, so she expanded, grew larger in his mind.

  While he was being driven mad by the enigma of her silences, she looked at him without the slightest bit of surprise. There was nothing mysterious about him. When they lay down to sleep, he in his private house in Omer, she on her mattress in the caravan, they had fantasies about each other, alternately and together. And after he had explored every part of her, he finally came in a wild explosion (in his imagination, that is. In reality, he came in total humiliation, masturbating in the shower, quietly, guiltily in the shower, less than ten meters from his sleeping wife.) And after he came – calm. His body relaxed into its usual languor. But even then, a moment later, the feeling that he was once again absent began to grow.

  In her bedroom in Omer, Liat lay with her eyes open. She looked at the face of the man beside her for a long time. He’d come home long after she had fallen asleep. Now she was awake and his eyes were closed. Behind the screen of his closed lids, his eyes darted back and forth. Her man was dreaming. Had his dreams, like hers, become boring? Once her dreams had been an untiring source of fear and pleasure, desire and guilt. Appearing one after the other were people from work, past lovers awash in lust and vitality, enormous waves, fires, bodies, an embarrassing understanding of what stripping in public meant, attempts to fly that succeeded sometimes briefly, sometimes longer. But for the last few weeks, her dreams had become as arid as the hills outside Omer. Tonight, for example, she’d dreamed that she was standing in a line. That’s all. She woke up bored by herself. Really wanted to go to work, to fill that emptiness with reports and investigations and record-keeping. But a moment before she got out of bed, she saw him and was startled. She knew, of course, that he was there, beside her, but that knowledge was totally taken for granted, like the fact that her pillow was there, or the blanket. She certainly would have noticed if he hadn’t been there, but was that enough, knowing that something exists only by becoming aware of its absence? So she lay down again, facing him.

  He was handsome, her man. Still handsome. With that Roman nose and those thin lips, and that aggressive chin. But why even now, when he should have seemed as helpless as a child, did he still look proud, almost arrogant? How could a person look so arrogant in his sleep? Suddenly, as if by invitation, all the rats of doubt emerged from their holes and began to gnaw at the sleeping man – that hair sprouting from his nose repelled her. The small s
having cut on his cheek that had become infected and filled with pus. The anger line on his forehead. The mild whiff of morning mouth coming from his slightly open lips. The criticism she thought she saw in the corner of his eyes.

  The sun danced on the wall in splashes of color, and Liat lay on the cotton sheets, looking at her husband with merciless eyes. It was as if an evil hand had pushed aside the garment of light and tenderness with which people cloak their loved ones, revealing the beloved body as it was, naked and exposed, flesh and blood and bone. That moment was so cruel, so horrifying, that a few seconds later Liat looked away. Now she was frightened to the depths of her soul, and felt very, very guilty. There was nothing like fear and guilt to drive away the rats of doubt: Liat was so upset by what she had seen when she looked at Eitan with open eyes that she quickly closed them and curled into his arms. His large hands wrapped around her as he slept, no questions, no doubts. When Eitan Green woke up that morning, he and his wife were embracing each other as they hadn’t done for a long time.

  The next day, at four in the afternoon, he found himself in the mall with Itamar and Yaheli. Liat had remembered that they needed presents for a series of birthdays in Itamar’s pre-school, and said that because she was so loaded with work, there was no way she could buy them herself. The three of them wandered through the shops and stopped at the stands. At first they talked to each other, but slowly grew silent. The mall rocked them in a giant cradle of music and loudspeaker announcements as they moved from shop to shop. Yaheli had stopped shouting, “I want that!” and only stared with glazed eyes at the amazing number of toys, clothes, electric appliances. Itamar stopped in front of a TV store, his astonished eyes following the dozens of identical images of Barack Obama delivering the same speech behind dozens of identical lecterns. There was a 50-inch Obama and a 30-inch Obama, a Toshiba Obama and a Samsung Obama. Each of them gave the same muted speech. The President of the United States reproduced in massive numbers, but not even a single word of his speech could be heard. The TV store preferred playing the latest Shlomo Artzi disk. Obama gave a speech and Shlomo Artzi sang, and Itamar pulled Eitan’s hand and said, “Can we go?”

  Wait a minute. On the left corner of the display window, one of the TV sets suddenly went out of synch. The American president and his lectern weren’t there anymore, replaced by a cascade of black-and-white particles. Neat rows of Barack Obama that suddenly had a hole dug in them. And although it was just one TV set among dozens, some of that black-and-white dripped onto the entire display window. The malfunction was there, in the left corner, mocking Obama’s purposeful speech and Shlomo Artzi’s caressing voice. And it was to that corner that Eitan’s eyes were drawn, to that non-picture. As in museums, your glance goes immediately to the one rotten fruit that every still life painter puts into his lush bowl of fruit. Amid all that abundance, something embarrassing. The roundness of the pears. The roundness of Barack Obama’s cheeks. It could easily deceive you. How rapidly it could turn into meaningless flickering.

  It didn’t go on for long. Several seconds later the cascade of black-and-white particles vanished and the screen went completely dark. Eitan looked at the black screen through the display window. A man with two children standing in front of a TV store. A father. A married man. In the mall looking for birthday presents for seven-year-olds. If he simply turned his head around to the passers-by, he would see dozens of images of himself, replications. A father with a son and daughter. A mother with two daughters. A father and mother with twins. But this father, this married man, had something else. Not only two kids clutching his hands at either side. Also a dead black man whose blood had stained the running shoes he’d bought at the duty-free shop. And a living woman who stroked his neck with her tongue, her black snaky hair on his chest. Obama spoke and Shlomo Artzi sang, and Eitan was once again engulfed in a wave of desire and guilt. How he wanted to shake them off. To toss that horrible guilt away once and for all. That appalling desire. But, a small voice in his mind said, you were the one who brought them here with you. You buckled Itamar and Yaheli in the back seat, put Sirkit and Asum in the trunk and drove to the mall.

  Yaheli tugged his arm and demanded ice cream. Eitan picked him up and gave him a hug that surprised both of them. He devoured the soft curls, bit the sweet button nose. And in the midst of all that sweetness, he felt his heart clench, knowing what Yaheli, Itamar and Liat did not know. And that made his hug stronger, and Yaheli’s curls softer.

  *

  In a dreary Beersheba police department office, Liat Green leaned on her detective’s desk. She was tired, and the yellow cloud enshrouding the city, visible from the window, didn’t help. On her desk was a photo of the split skull of the Eritrean illegal immigrant. Not far from it, in a lovely wooden frame, was the photo of a man who had hit and run. Less than twenty centimeters between the picture of the victim and the picture of the driver who had hit him, and she didn’t see it.

  How could she miss it like that? She, of all people, who should have seen it. Liat Green, senior detective. Formerly Liat Smooha, chief observer. She, who sometimes worried that she looked at life so much she had forgotten how to actually live it – she didn’t see it.

  But it was really so simple. She didn’t see what was right in front of her because she wasn’t truly looking. She was searching for someone else. Always sure that she was missing something. But it wasn’t someone that was missing. Not “the hit and run driver” or “the car that hit the man”. She was so preoccupied by the mystery that she never saw the estrangement. And perhaps the estrangement was the true mystery, because how was it possible that such a gap had been created between a man and a woman who loved each other, so close they were almost a single body, and it was never mentioned. After fifteen years together, they listened in amazement when a story they hadn’t heard before suddenly surfaced, thinking that maybe that was it, the final story. Now everything had been spoken, everything had been told. She already knew about the black-tailed cat that lived under his building, and he knew about her purple bike and its tragic demise.

  And so Liat searched for the criminal who was hiding from her, never realizing that she was the one hiding him from herself. Unwilling to see that her man, so close to her, so known to her, had become distant. Especially because they weren’t the sort of couple who were distant from each other. They still had amazing conversations, the ones that began as they left Omer and didn’t end until they reached his parents’ house in Haifa, more than 150 kilometers away. They still made each other laugh and enjoyed fucking. She could say in total honesty that she still loved her man. And he loved her. All that was definitely true, but it didn’t cancel out the bit of estrangement that existed now in even the most familiar place. Estrangement that, by the very fact of its possibility, offended her, as if she had discovered that she’d gone an entire day with something stuck in her front teeth. Or something was hanging from her nostril. Embarrassing incidents might happen to other couples, but not to her and Eitan. She firmly believed that, and that was her mistake. No one ever knows another person completely. Not even herself. There is always a blind spot. An invisible line that crosses her desk. On the right – the photo of a cracked skull. An open case. A mystery. On the left – the photo of a beloved, familiar man, Eitan, hugging the boys. The lawn was in the background, and although the photo was cropped, she knew very well what was behind the image. She could recite the order of the trees in the garden in her sleep. She knew her yard by heart, and she knew her man by heart, and that was why she didn’t know the hit and run driver. She barely glanced at the familiar, framed picture of her husband. She stared only at the cracked skull on the right-hand side and wondered: who did that to you? And where is he now?

  2

  IT DIDN’T EVEN LOOK like a place people lived in.

  Nevertheless, it was a place people lived in.

  And for the people who lived in it, it was a supremely logical place for people to live in.

  So when, one day, other peopl
e came to that place and told the people who lived there that they weren’t supposed to live there and had to go and live somewhere else, the people who lived there were very surprised.

  And then they were angry.

  And then they waited.

  To see whether the people who told them to go and live somewhere else really meant it. And how much.

  The flame ignited all at once in the tin shack, as flames are wont to do. The man holding the lighter moved it closer to the sleeping boy, touched his shoulder lightly. The boy stayed asleep, as boys are wont to do. The man closed the lighter and left the boy. Stepped outside. Darkness returned to the shack, but a bluish light, first light, seeped in through the narrow space between the walls and the roof. The man went back into the tin shack. He was holding a glass in his right hand, and a smile had begun at the edge of his mustache. He moved the glass close to the boy’s nose. The aroma of the coffee filled the room, entering the boy’s nostrils. The boy inhaled in his sleep, and in a moment, was no longer sleeping. You could tell – not from his eyes, which were still closed, but from the smile at the corners of his lips. Now both father and son were smiling. A few moments later, they were already in the unpaved area outside the tin shack, drinking their first morning coffee in silence, looking at the village. The village was stuck in the middle of the desert. Not near anything. Equally distant from everything. Distant even from itself. There were ten tin shacks and two goat pens. A large container that held water, a generator for electricity, and shady, quiet corners like the one where the father and son were sitting now and drinking their coffee. The coffee was bitter and the air was cold, and at that particular moment both father and son were quiet and peaceful.