Instead, she did what she always did when the house became an unsolvable puzzle, and focused totally on the puzzle outside. Since the Bedouin girl had been killed, two guys had managed to stab another guy to death at the entrance to the Forum club. Each of them insisted that the other had done the stabbing, which made the whole business complicated. One of them was a soldier on leave, which made the newspapers drool. Punks could stab each other as often as they wanted, but not soldiers. Marciano called her in for a talk and said he was counting on her, and she said, fine, as long as he didn’t take her off the case with the Eritrean. It took him a minute to remember what she was talking about. “That case is closed,” he said. “Why would you want to go digging up a hit and run that happened more than two months ago?”
The Eritrean’s employer, Davidson, kept calling her. He was sure some Bedouin had run him over.
Marciano said he was sick of hearing about that Eritrean, he had enough trouble with the Bedouins. But if that’s what she wanted to do in her free time after she found out which of the little shits had stabbed that guy at the entrance to the Forum, then good luck to her.
That made her feel good, his answer. The Eritrean’s case hadn’t been just a case for a while now; she needed it because of the Bedouin girl. Because she didn’t want the whole story to be for nothing. A tremor ran through her when she thought about her visit to the morgue. The girl had been lying there with dry blood covering her stomach and Liat suddenly realized that she had polish on her toenails. She must have bought it at one of the stalls in the Beersheba central bus station. Slipped into the bathroom to apply it, taken off her shoes, waited for it to dry. Then she went back to the village, all covered up. No one but she and Ali knew. Liat looked at her red toenails for another minute, and then knew that if she were to look at them for one more minute she might vomit, so she went out.
Sitting on a bench outside the morgue, she had told herself once again that it wasn’t her fault. After all, she’d been the one who’d insisted that they send her to a shelter for at-risk girls, knowing full well what the dangers were. But on the other hand, how difficult would it have been to locate that shelter for anyone who really wanted to? And what were the chances that Mona herself might have missed home, called her mother, given out details?
She decided not to be present at Ali’s interrogation. Marciano said that was a shame, maybe her being there would make him say something, but he didn’t insist. In the end, they both knew there was no way the boy would tell them who had stabbed his girlfriend. When they walked him to the interrogation room, she saw him through the glass wall of her office. He didn’t look at her. In retrospect, it might not have been him. Another Bedouin brought in on drug charges or theft or illegal peddling. A quick look through the glass wasn’t enough for a clear identification. And even if the look hadn’t been so quick, even if it had been quite long, she still would have felt a tiny bit of uncertainty. Embarrassing as it was, she had to admit that they all looked alike to her. The same. It was difficult to differentiate the boy’s face from all the other faces. There was a good chance that if she met him on the street in another two months, she wouldn’t recognize him and she’d pass him by without nodding hello. Or maybe she would nod, but at someone else. Someone she had never spent time with in a locked room, who hadn’t broken down, hadn’t cried in front of her. Someone whose only connection to that boy was the fact that they were both Arabs. Both were Arabs, so they were identical. Both aroused a combination of wariness and shame in her. First wariness, then shame. Their dark faces, which actually resembled the faces of the people she’d grown up with, and yet looked different. The restrained anger she saw in their eyes, whether they were laughing or crying or plastering the building across the street. The Western clothes, which always looked a bit strange on them, didn’t suit them. Oddly cut jeans. Arab-style jeans. Shirts that were always too tight or too brightly colored or too shoddy. Shoes that just didn’t match their clothes. That hateful signature mustache. The thick black hair. She didn’t like feeling that way, but it was how she felt. That they had less intelligence and more hatred. That they were pathetic because they’d lost, but more dangerous because of it, and even though that seemed contradictory, it actually wasn’t. Like a dog you’ve beaten that you now both ridicule and fear. An Arab dog. She would have given hell to any other detective in the precinct if he’d said anything like that, but why? He would only be saying out loud what she shouldn’t have been thinking. And that whole struggle with Marciano to let her continue investigating the Eritrean’s death was only to prove to herself that she wasn’t one of those people who thought all blacks were the same. Or one of those people who thought a good Arab was a dead Arab and a good Bedouin was a Bedouin in prison. She was different. But when it came right down to it, she wouldn’t go to a swimming pool full of Arabs even if she ranted and raved when there was a sign at the entrance saying NO ARABS ALLOWED. That was the whole point: to get angry when someone discriminated against Arabs or when there was a racially motivated clash at the Sachne spring, knowing that she herself would never go to the Sachne spring because she spent her vacation at the elegant Mitzpe Yamim spa. There were no Arabs or loud, low-class types there, only people in lovely white robes smelling of lavender.
She promised Marciano the Eritrean investigation wouldn’t be at the expense of that business with the soldiers and hurried out of his office. All she needed was for him to dump another case on her now. Back in her office, she closed the door and called Davidson. Asked him to tell her more about the Bedouins. He cooperated happily, said that since the accident, he’d noticed that guys from the Abu Ayad tribe had been driving in the area a lot at night. Maybe she should sniff around there. She said thanks, she’d check it out, and hung up. Two minutes later, she was in the cruiser. She was no longer thinking about small toenails with red polish or about the wasteland of her double bed. She only thanked God for the murders, thefts and investigations that allowed a person to become totally involved in other people’s secrets and not ponder her own.
6
AFTER THAT NIGHT in the “ENJOY THE HOSPITALITY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE DESERT” tent, Sharaf’s father didn’t take him to work anymore. It took him time to go back there himself. Matti offered the boy’s family free entrance for their entire lives, just as long as they didn’t post anything about what had happened on any of those Internet sites. He also swore to them that it hadn’t been a terrorist attack and there was no reason to call the police. True, the Bedouin’s kid had picked up the pestle generally used to demonstrate traditional coffee grinding and hit their son in the eye with it, giving him one hell of a shiner. But it wasn’t deliberate. Just a childish prank. Something meant to be just pretend that turned out to be for real.
That night, Mussa drove home in silence as Sharaf sat beside him, still wearing the galabiya, because with all the commotion he hadn’t had time to change back into his clothes. Shortly after they left the kibbutz, Mussa pulled the van over to the side of the road and said, “Now explain to me what the hell that was all about.” Sharaf said nothing. It was perfectly clear what it had been about and he didn’t see any reason to speak. Mussa banged the wheel with both hands in a gesture that was similar, and very different, from the way he’d banged the darbuka earlier. At the end of each night on the kibbutz, he’d return to the village with 150 shekels rolled up in his warm, clenched fist. Now his hands were empty. As was the look on the boy’s face.
“Sharaf, those people were our guests. You shamed yourself and hit our guests.”
“Our guests? That wasn’t even your tent, how can they be our guests?!”
Mussa’s hand rose from the wheel and landed on Sharaf’s cheek, and however bad that was, it was also good because it meant that his father wasn’t a total wimp. He didn’t say anything, nor did his father, and his cheek began to grow numb from the slap and heat spread over his entire face. Inside the silence neither of them noticed the cruiser, and so, suddenly hearing a megaphone behind
them, both jumped in such a way that on any other day would have been funny.
“Please step out of the vehicle.”
Sharaf and Mussa got out of the van and a policeman and policewoman got out of the cruiser. In the dark, Sharaf saw that the policewoman was fat and pretty. The policeman shone his flashlight on them and saw Sharaf’s red cheek and the impression of Mussa’s hand on it, five fingers right where the slap had landed, and asked, “You have a license and registration?”
Mussa nodded quickly. He went to the van and took out the papers, and all the while the policeman reprimanded him for stopping on the side of the road and not in a proper parking bay, because it was against the law to stop on the side of the road except for an emergency, and Mussa said, “Yes, sir, that’s clear, sir, I’m really sorry, sir.” A few minutes later the policeman returned Mussa’s license to him after checking it on the terminal, and said, “Okay, so who are you waiting for?”
“No one, sir.”
“Is that so?” the fat, pretty policewoman said. “No one? A delivery, a stolen car, something?”
Sharaf had already opened his mouth to reply when his father said, “Of course not, ma’am, we’re not waiting for anything,” and he continued to smile the same smile he’d had on his face when the kid had made fun of him in the tent. “Then ya’allah,” the policeman said, “get going before I give you a ticket for illegal parking on the side of the road.” Mussa hurried into the van and said, “Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” and Sharaf followed him inside and said, “Fuck you, sir,” but quietly.
7
ERITREA.
A country in north-east Africa on the coast of the Red Sea. Its sovereignty also includes the Dahlak Islands and several additional small islands.
Continent: Africa.
Official language: Tigrinya, Arabic.
Capital: Asmara.
Form of government: Presidential republic.
Head of state: Isaias Afwerki.
Independence: May 24, 1993.
Previous rulers: Ethiopia, Italy.
Territory: 117,600 kilometers.
Bodies of water: negligible.
Population: 6,233,682.
GNP per capita: $708.
Currency: Nakfa.
International rating: 170th in the world
International area code: +291.
There were pictures as well, both black-and-white and color. A detailed map showing climate zones. A historical summary that began in 2500 BCE. A description of relations with pharaonic Egypt under the rule of Hephaestus, and of the occupation of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. There was an extensive entry on the form of government and less extensive entries on economy, geography and human rights. Eitan read them all. Lingered on the photographs. Looked at each and every one. The ancient site in the south of the country. The Greek Orthodox church in the capital. The insurrectionists’ convoy of weapons. Villagers. Men. Women. Children. Some looking at the camera, some looking off to the side. He studied them at length. As if hoping to suddenly recognize her face in that sea of faces.
And if not her, then at least a door. A window. Even a crack. Something through which he could finally enter and understand. He read about the demographic composition. The main exports. He read without knowing exactly what he was searching for, but knew that if he were ever to find it, he’d find it there. Local currency. Average monthly income. Maximum temperatures in August. If a person is a reflection of the landscape of his homeland, then all those details should merge into something. A portrait. The face of a woman burned in 45-degrees-Celcius-in-the-shade and washed in the average precipitation of 11 millimeters per annum.
He had been avoiding her for twenty days. Keeping away from the garage. And now, looking at the enlarged map of the smuggling route pictured on the computer monitor, he tried to find her footprints on it. Eritrea in purple. Sudan and Egypt in orange. Israel in blue. Black lines separating them. And at some point, she had walked along those lines. Had raised a foot and moved from purple to orange. From the orange country to the blue country. The ground, in any case, had remained brown. It had been brown all through the journey. (But how did he actually know? How many kilometers had she walked on white chalkstone, on red loam; when had her feet been defeated by hard gravel and when had she struggled through sand dunes? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. He could count the kilometers, but he couldn’t describe what she saw on the side of the road.)
Unconsciously, he moved his hand on the desk. The surface was cold, smooth. Not a drop of dust. And yet something in the feel of it bothered him, he didn’t know why. As if the pads of his fingers felt how much deception there was in that cleanliness. How much falsehood. He pushed his chair back, looked at the desk again uncomprehendingly. Everything stood in front of him within easy reach. No layer of dirt separated him from the thing itself. (But that wasn’t true. A layer always accumulated there, in the center. You couldn’t erase the curtain of particles, the veil that separated you from the other. The dust resisted the hand trying to wipe it away. Adding more before you could see it. The dust persisted.)
Finally he stood up. Turned off the computer. He could stare at pictures and maps for hours. Compare the Hebrew Wikipedia to the English entry. Damn it, he knew by heart the GNP for the last ten years – and it wouldn’t move him even a centimeter forward. It didn’t matter how much he read and studied, even if he caught a plane and toured. He would not understand her. An unknown in an equation he couldn’t solve. A reality evading him in an entry on the computer.
He had loved encyclopedias even before he knew how to read. He loved the idea that two shelves in his parents’ library could store knowledge on everything there was. Even when he understood that they didn’t, he still loved to think it was merely a matter of the number of shelves. If only there were more shelves, everything could be catalogued. Minerals. Butterflies. Capital cities. TV series. Types of irons. Everything. Even if no single human brain was capable of containing all that information, it still existed – sorted, detailed, comprehensible. Just as a person didn’t have to actually stand on Pluto in order to appreciate the fact that it was five trillion kilometers from the sun, and that its atmosphere was composed of nitrogen and methane.
But here, with her, he had his first encounter with a fence behind which was knowledge inaccessible to him. Though he had long ago conquered Pluto with the power of his mind, through his knowledge, he was unable to conquer even a small part of her. She put up boundaries against him. Her differentness drove him mad; he was naïve, ignorant in the face of it. She herself was the master of things that existed in the depths of her eyes. He could read as much as he wanted about Eritrea, could wander among countless sites, articles, position papers on Eritreans. But that Eritrean he could not understand.
Although occasionally he thought he could. For instance, when he saw her carrying a carton of drugs in the garage one night and accidentally bang into the iron leg of the table. It hurt like hell, her face screamed it. A small but nasty blow, the sort that doesn’t do any real damage, but makes you writhe in pain a few minutes later. It happened right in front of the waiting patients, and Eitan suddenly realized that Sirkit wasn’t the least bit bothered by the blow, but by the fact that it had happened in the presence of witnesses. It embarrassed her to hurt herself so stupidly in front of everyone, and she was smart enough to recognize the slight undertone of gloating in the others’ sympathetic words, (“that’s a funny way to get hurt” or “I’m glad it didn’t happen to me”). And then, right before his eyes, she did exactly what he himself would have done in that situation – pretended everything was fine. She wiped the expression of pain from her face. Straightened up. Responded with a soothing smile to the words of one of the women awaiting treatment. Then she limped out of there, trying with all her might to hide the fact that she was limping. He watched her leave, his eyes wide, as if he had suddenly met a double of himself on the street. His twin, of whose existence he had known nothing. When he’d fa
llen from a pine tree during the summer vacation before middle school and received a blow to his testicles that had almost made him faint, he too had pushed away the pain instantly in the face of a larger monster – the fear that it would be seen. The terror of mortification was greater than the pain in his groin. The twelve-year-old boy he had been then and the thirty-year-old woman she was now both shrank from a scornful look more than from any physical pain.
There were other moments like that. For example, when he realized that she also stared in fascination through the garage door at the rising of a red moon. Moments when he looked at her and thought: she’s like me. (But never, I’m like her.) Such as when he had discovered the roses she grew outside of her caravan, and returned to the garage deeply moved. But then, he reminded himself, when he had returned to the garage, he’d discovered how unlike him she was. She was ready to send away that Bedouin girl. Africa is a cruel continent, and a cruel continent grows cruel people on it. Savage people. She was ready to let that girl bleed to death. Had looked at her with the coldest eyes in the world. And you, he thought in sudden anger, weren’t you ready to let someone bleed to death? How do you even know about what unfinished business she might have with the Bedouins? Then that fleeting sense of kinship with her was gone again, and he realized once again how unlike him she was. The distance between a hungry person and a sated one is greater than the distance between here and the moon.
He left his computer on the desk and went over to the fridge. Goat yoghurt, granola, a banana, an apple. He put everything on the counter and went out to the garden. The ground was still damp from the rare, pre-dawn rain. He ignored the manicured lawn, squinted and focused on the moon. She would have loved the smell. There was no one who didn’t love that smell. He inhaled the miracle of the night rain and thought that perhaps she wasn’t really that distant. Because he knew with absolute certainty that her nostrils would widen with pleasure at the smell of rain-wet earth. And if there was rain-wet earth, then there certainly must be other things. They could understand one another. She was angry at him, and he understood why. And if her anger was comprehensible to him, it meant he could imagine how he himself would feel in her shoes. (In her sandals? In her bare feet?) And when she smiled, an event even rarer than desert rain, he understood why. He could guess her and she could guess him, and since a guess was always based on the guesser’s soul, then apparently their souls were not so distant.
Waking Lions Page 19