The hospital parking lot was fairly empty at that time of day. Eitan and Visotski walked side by side toward their cars. Across the street, a group of students was singing holiday songs at the top of their lungs. Eitan couldn’t decide whether they were drunk or just happy. Visotski stopped at his car. Eitan stopped at his. “How’s your son?” he asked, and Visotski took his keys out of his pocket.
“Breathing on his own, and that’s about it. But the grocery store decided to give me a discount on disposable diapers.” Visotski got into his car and closed the door. He nodded goodbye to Eitan. It was a small gesture, and Eitan was surprised at how relieved it made him feel.
Before starting the SUV, he called Liat. Wanted to ask if she’d put the kids to bed yet, maybe they could still wait up for him. “They’re sleeping already, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. I’m tiptoeing around.”
“If that’s how it is,” he said, “maybe you should undress and get into bed. I’ll be right home.”
She laughed, but he knew she didn’t really take it seriously. Neither did he. They said things like that to each other, but only rarely did anything about it. Most of the time it was simply a way to feel sexy. A sort of game which, to be honest, felt a bit artificial to him now. As if it wasn’t Eitan and Liat speaking, but people who were supposed to be Eitan and Liat. The way the furniture you bought in Ikea always looked weird when you got it home, as if it missed its former home, the one in the catalogue.
The sign at the entrance to Omer wished him a happy holiday. The SUV passed over one traffic bump after another like a ship crossing waves. He stopped the car in front of the rosemary bushes and was about to get out when he suddenly saw a shadow on the other side of the street. (Later, he thought he’d been waiting for her the entire time. Waiting without knowing he was waiting. Otherwise, why did he see that particular shadow on a street full of shadows? A couple in running clothes. A stray dog. Recycling bins waiting with open covers. But his eye leaped to that place, to that straight neck, that relaxed way she was sitting. The gleaming whites of those eyes.)
“What are you doing here?”
She didn’t reply. Didn’t hurl in his face all the calls he hadn’t answered, the days that had passed without a response from him. She rose slowly from the stone fence she’d been sitting on. Now she was slightly taller than Eitan.
Let’s go.
When she said that, he knew immediately that he would go with her. The black of her eyes had never been brighter. He’d go, and if he didn’t, she’d walk straight across the street to his house and ring the doorbell. Yaheli would wake up immediately. He was a light sleeper. Itamar might stay asleep. Liat would open the door in her pajamas, silently cursing all those neighbors who didn’t know when it was too late to ask for a cup of sugar. Then she’d see Sirkit. Who would tell her everything.
They drove to the garage in silence. He thought about stealing a glance at her, but was too proud and too angry. But she looked at him occasionally, considered his forehead, his nose. Reached no decision. Of one thing she was certain: he looked different. Two weeks was more than enough to create a genuine gap between the memory of his face and his actual face. Not a great difference, because it had only been fourteen days. And yet – a gap that had to be closed. Subtle, yet visible differences between that Eitan and this one. The difference between the image in her mind and the one sitting beside her now was almost impalpable. Yet it still bothered her. She remembered him differently. It was difficult to say how. Not exactly more handsome or less impressive. The differences were not in the proportions of his nose or the receding hairline. It was really difficult to say. But it seemed to her that there was something deliberate about the changes. If the image in her mind tended toward any direction, it was toward the familiar. Earlier, his face had been more familiar, and now it was unknown. Earlier his features had been joined together into one clear meaning, and now those same features – nose, eyes, mouth, eyebrows – were inscrutable and alien. Unconnected.
There was reproof in the glance Sirkit gave Eitan now. Not only because he had disappeared, but also because he had changed, even though the changes were so small you couldn’t really talk about them, only sense them. And along with the reproof she felt curiosity: who was the man driving and why did he look different from the man she remembered? And amidst the reproof and curiosity was a fleeting moment of wondering whether she looked as different to him as he did to her. What had he thought when he saw her? But she actually knew the answer to that question. She had read it on his face, familiar or not: at first he was frightened. Then angry. (And between those emotions, for an instant that might have escaped them both, also happy.)
He kept driving and she looked away from him because she saw that her glance was making him uncomfortable. She looked outside instead. At a traffic light, her eyes met those of a pair of sightseers in the car next to them. That they averted their glance so quickly could only mean they were talking about her. About them. A white man driving an SUV with a black woman sitting beside him. A mixed couple on their way to a vacation. The woman in the other car said how nice it was to see that there were people like that. The man beside her replied: even though society can be very judgmental, and that’s not right. The woman nodded. The light changed. The car was fueled by the subject of their conversation and could go on its way now. The woman in the passenger seat smiled encouragement at Sirkit. Sirkit smiled back, thinking: they don’t know that he was coerced into driving with me. They think he’s chosen to do so.
Inside the SUV, Eitan saw Sirkit’s smile and didn’t know what to make of it. Her smiles were so rare, so unclear, and they always left him with the feeling that he was missing something. He accelerated and moved out of his lane to pass. He had driven to the garage many times at this hour, but the road had never been so busy. The Hanukkah travelers were making their way to one desert B&B or another, or perhaps they were going as far as Eilat. Eitan wondered if any of them had looked into the SUV driving beside them. If any of them had seen a white man sitting next to a black woman, and what they thought. When he turned onto the dirt road leading to the garage, he was glad to get away from the sea of potential glances on the main road. But when he heard the first scream, he turned to Sirkit, shocked.
“Don’t tell me someone’s giving birth in there.”
She didn’t have to reply. The screams replied in her stead. The sound was unmistakable. Over the years, Eitan had heard many different screams of pain, but women in labor had a scream all their own. Perhaps because, apart from the pain, there was something else. Expectation, let’s say. Or hope. He wasn’t sentimental. He had spent two months of medical training in the obstetrics department. He knew quite well that, between labor pains, 70 per cent of women scream that it’s a living hell. Maternal tenderness comes only after the epidural. Sometimes the pain was so great that they no longer remembered where they were, who they were, and wanted only for it to end. But even that wasn’t just a nightmare. It wasn’t like the screams of people whose pain comes only from the realm of death. The pain of life sounds different.
The woman was standing in a corner of the garage, sweaty and panting. Her huge stomach jutted out from under her dress. Two worried-looking women stood on either side of her. When they saw Sirkit, they hurried over to speak.
They say that the water from her belly spilled out a long time ago. They say that the baby should have come out by now.
The woman swayed from side to side, gathering strength for the next pain. She hardly looked at Eitan, Sirkit or the other women. Eitan remembered those delirious eyes. He had seen them as a student in the department. The whole body is focused inward, the outside becomes a blur of images and sounds. The problem was that he didn’t remember much beyond that. When Itamar and Yaheli were born, he had been an observer. He had watched from the sidelines while Ami gave Liat the most personal treatment a woman giving birth could receive. He and Ami had played basketball together twice a week, and although at some point Eitan g
rew tired of his idiotic jokes and the never-ending political arguments, he had always known that gynecologists were a long-term investment. But now Ami was at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, while he was here, in the middle of a garage, with an Eritrean woman about to give birth.
“What’s her name?”
Semar.
He went over to the woman and said her name. He said it twice before she looked at him. It was then that he realized he was actually glad to be there. (Because it really wasn’t a good thing for someone to give birth this way, alone in a garage, like a work animal on some remote farm. And because there was a tiny person in her womb who wanted to come out and he knew he could help it. Because the pleasant tickle of adrenaline was caressing him inside as he began reminding himself of the procedures for delivering a baby. Because he was sick and tired of feeling small and guilty, and now he could finally feel large and needed. Because Sirkit looked at him with those black eyes of hers and asked him, What should I do?)
It took less time than he thought it would. Or perhaps he had just grown accustomed to preparing himself for the worst. But six hours later, he was standing between Semar’s spread thighs, shouting at her, “Push, push.” Along the way, there had been labor pains and screams and faeces and urine, and genuine danger to the eardrums of everyone present. But he didn’t give any of that even a moment’s thought, although it was the sort of mess that had led him to choose neurosurgery. He liked meeting his patients when they were anaesthetized. People tended to be much more courteous and cooperative after induction with propofol. And here, instead of the gleaming white of the department sheets, were the rust stains on the table, which refused to go away no matter how much Sirkit scrubbed them. But on that rusty table, in that filthy place, he heard a new scream six hours later. The one that doesn’t come from the mother’s mouth, but from the mouth of the newborn, which a moment earlier hadn’t been there and now inhaled air lustily. Inhaled the cold air of the desert on the outskirts of Beersheba, inhaled the night’s breath in the deserted garage, the sweat of the doctor and the women, the smells of neglect from the caravans. Inhaled – and immediately exhaled it all with its first scream, with an enormous huge, infant cry that was all disbelief: this place?
He instructed Sirkit on how to cut the umbilical cord and handed the baby to its mother. Semar reached out with tired, gangly arms. Like a doll that had been handed a smaller, baby doll, Eitan thought, which she held because it had been handed to her. But when she looked at the baby, she was suddenly revitalized. She was still lying there, and the baby was still in her arms, but now there was no doubt that the baby hadn’t simply been put into her arms – she was holding it.
Eitan turned to look at Sirkit to see whether she had noticed that change, and was surprised to see that she had disappeared. He gestured for the Eritrean women to watch over the new mother and left the garage. A moonless sky. Anonymous stars (they had names, of course, but Eitan began to wonder why he had ever taken the trouble to learn them. A person gives a name to something that is his. His dog, his car, his child. How much arrogance it took to give names to those points of light). He didn’t see her in the unpaved area around the garage, so he kept walking toward the hill.
She was sitting on the sand, her back to him. He considered sitting down beside her, but remained standing.
That was so terrible, she said, so terrible and beautiful.
“Yes,” he said, “it really was terrible. And beautiful.”
She turned around to him and he could see that she had been crying. Her black eyes were red-ringed. He wanted to hug her but had no idea how to even begin to embrace a woman like Sirkit. So he simply stood there and looked at her, thinking again that she was a beautiful woman, knowing again that if he were to pass her on the street, he wouldn’t give her a second glance. A few moments later, it began to feel strange, standing beside her like that. “I think I’ll go to sleep for a while,” he said. “She’s still bleeding, so I’ll stay here tonight and keep an eye on her.” Sirkit smiled and said she’d go to sleep for a while too, and she went and brought two thin mattresses from the caravan to the garage. They placed them on the floor, Sirkit put hers next to the new mother and Eitan put his near the door.
“Goodnight,” he said.
Goodnight, she replied.
But he couldn’t sleep, and even though there wasn’t a sound in the dark garage, he knew that neither could she. Not after she had held that small round head in her hands and pulled it into the world. He thought again about her red eyes. Excitement? Gratitude? Sorrow for the children she had never borne? Sorrow for the children she had left behind? It was no wonder, he thought, that he didn’t dare to hug her. That woman who had ruled two months of his nights – what did he actually know about her? That she had been married to a man he had killed. That the man had beaten her. That she grew roses. That she wasn’t afraid of blood or people. That one battered Eritrean had called her an angel and one grief-stricken Bedouin had called her a devil, and that both of them were wrong, had to be wrong. Because neither angels nor devils existed. Of that Eitan was convinced. People existed. That woman lying on the mattress only a few meters from him, that woman was a person. She slept. She ate. She urinated. She defecated. And suddenly, before he had time to object, he had a clear image in his mind of that woman fucking, and his body responded to the sight with such a powerful erection that it took his breath away.
Lions roared inside him all night. He turned onto his side. Tried to think about Itamar, about Yaheli. In the darkness of the garage, it was suddenly remarkably clear to him how easily he could lose his family. Not because of a fatal car accident, or two planes colliding on a stormy night, or a terrorist attack. Because of him. Like others, he sometimes had horrible thoughts driving home at night. His brain conjured up endless possible accidents, disasters, funerals. Hinted at the question, how will you go on? and replied, you won’t, this is the end. When the anxiety grew too great, unbearable, someone in his mind turned on the lights, stopped the horror movie and said, calm down, it’s just a daydream. Wandering thoughts. And it was funny that, with all those scenarios, it had never occurred to him that he could be the cause. That he would live his life without Itamar and Yaheli not because of an evil terrorist or drunk driver, but because Liat would take them from him. That strange phrases like custody rights would become quite familiar to him. It would be his fault. Because he hadn’t taken good enough care of his family, and families were fragile things.
He had sworn to himself, long before he got married, that he would never touch another woman. Fantasizing was fine and he could look as much as he wanted, but he would never actually endanger the thing he had built. He saw friends from school, doctors in the department. He could recognize unfaithfulness from a distance, just as he could recognize pneumonia even in its earliest stages. The faces radiant with a secret. The new skin glow. The dreamy walk. The relaxed posture. And several weeks later – the haunted look in the corner of the eyes. The intense stiffness of the upper back. Oral herpes due to tension. No fuck is worth that. No fleeting passion justified that moment when you sat your kids down on the living-room couch and said, “First of all, you have to know that your Mom and I love you.”
But if that were true, why was he thinking about her so much, thinking about her – he hated to admit it – more than about them. How could it be that, over the weeks that had passed since the extortion had begun, he often found himself counting the hours until he would see that woman, when he should have been doing everything to see her as little as possible. How had she gained such a hold on him, what had she done to make him want her like this? Less than four meters between his mattress and hers, and her body throbbed at him in the darkness.
Although he knew that nothing was visible in the blackness of the garage, he turned on his mattress to face her and opened his eyes. Total darkness. He saw nothing, and that was precisely why he saw everything. There was her round shoulder gleaming at him every time she bent to lift something
and her dress fell slightly to the side. And there were her breasts, finally released from the restraints of her cotton dress, round and proud and full. And there were her lips, her cheeks, her thighs. And the cat-like way she moved and walked, so suggestive of dormant, wild passion. Her remoteness, her strength and the knowledge that he would never be inside her even if he were inside her – all that stirred his blood until it almost hurt.
Calm down, he told himself, calm down. But he didn’t calm down. Just the opposite. His brain continued to draw more and more pictures of Sirkit in ever-greater detail. Even when he tried to erase them along with the cerebral processes that were creating them (his pituitary gland was working overtime, there was no doubt about that), they still appeared, clear and seductive. When she finally lifted the blanket and lay down beside him in the long chaos of the night, he drowned in the blue-black of her hair and kissed her silent lips, and he didn’t think about angels or devils. Or about people either.
*
She didn’t need to look in order to see that he wasn’t sleeping. She could hear his desire for her in every heavy breath, in every loud swallow of saliva. The air in the garage was heavy and quivering, and so was her doctor, heavy and quivering. And there was an unbearable, almost painful sweetness between her legs, and inside, something thick and trembling waited. But she didn’t get up and go to him, just as he didn’t get up and come to her. Less than four meters between her mattress and his, but a large desert separated them. And that was good. She had crossed enough deserts to know that nothing waited on the other side but another desert.
Waking Lions Page 21