He turned the SUV onto the dirt road leading to the garage. Tried unsuccessfully to remember how many times he’d made that turn. But he felt the confidence of his fingers on the wheel, the way his body remembered the place. Here was a pothole, there was a depression on the side of the road, here you had to stay to the right and there, left was better. He knew the road by heart, even if he realized it only now. Suddenly, he thought about the house in Haifa, the fact that although he hadn’t called it his parents’ house for years, it insisted on still being his house. Several years ago, during a winter storm, he, Liat and the children were having Friday night dinner with his parents when there was a power outage. The darkness was absolute. Dense and thick. Yaheli was still too young to be afraid, but Itamar grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. His mother asked him to go and get some candles, and at first he’d wanted to tell her to go herself – what were the chances that he’d find anything in the dark, in a house he hadn’t slept in for ten years? But his parents were already at the age when it was a bit scary to send them anywhere alone in the dark, so he had stood up and begun groping his way. It was incredible how easy it was. Here was the dining-room wall. If you walked along it, you reached the kitchen wall. A great observation post for him and Yuval when they were trying to discover, once and for all, where the chocolate was hidden. You had to be careful at the kitchen wall; the heavy cabinet was still standing there, as nasty as always, just waiting for you to stub your little toe on it. He hadn’t known that he remembered that, but it was still all there, exactly where he had left it. So were his mother’s candles, on the second shelf, way back behind the tea service that came out only on special occasions, and which he actually hadn’t seen since the shiva. He went back with the candles, and shortly after that the electricity came on again and he could tell himself once more that it wasn’t his house, that he had built himself a different house in which he didn’t feel like an outsider. But he still remembered how his body had navigated it so confidently in the dark and wondered whether he would ever be able to move that way in any other house.
Now it seemed that not only the house in Haifa was burned into his memory. This road was also imprinted on his neurons. Two and a half months ago he hadn’t known it existed, and now he drove along it almost as if he’d been doing it for ever. There was less than a kilometer to go before he arrived and he still didn’t know why he’d come back. And maybe that made sense, because he didn’t really know why he’d driven out here the first time. Perhaps the question of why he was coming back was merely the little sister of that bigger question: why hadn’t he stopped that night. For weeks he’d avoided it, but couldn’t help circling around it. And perhaps there was no reason why he hadn’t stopped. Not because that man was black and he was white. Not because of Liat. Not because of the kids. Perhaps he’d never know why. And the only thing left for him to do was to keep asking. That was his atonement.
They had broken her nose, two teeth and two ribs, and her left eye was ringed in bright purple. Her goddess’s face now looked like a shattered mask. She was lying on the mattress, her eyes closed, breathing slowly between her broken ribs and then through her broken teeth. She didn’t open her eyes when Eitan came in, nor did she show any sign that she was aware of his presence, even when he bent beside her and took her pulse. He looked at her wide-eyed because despite the great number of faces he’d seen in that condition or even worse, he had never believed he would see that face looking like that.
Nevertheless, even now, with that shattered face and all the blood, she still possessed the nobility that had disturbed him from the beginning. Her silent lips looked a thousand times more silent. In some way, she was still brazen, provocative, still could drive him mad with that waiting of hers. Because he suddenly realized that she was indeed waiting. Not sleeping, not semi-conscious, but lying there with closed eyes, waiting. (But he didn’t realize that she wasn’t waiting in an effort to be provocative or contemptuous, but because she knew that if she opened her eyes now, she would do what she had not done earlier and would not do later – burst into tears.)
“Who did this?” The words came out matter-of-factly, quietly, and he was surprised at how hard his voice was. He hadn’t come here to be hard. He hadn’t left wife, children and mother-in-law at home in Or Akiva only to be cold and callous when he arrived here. Just the opposite. He wanted to help her, to feel pity for her. Wanted her to open her eyes and look at him differently. Or perhaps, see that he was different. And now, without even beginning to understand why, the anger rose in him once again. She must have felt it, because when she did open her eyes, there was no trace of the tears she had held back only a moment ago. Scorched earth. It had all been absorbed into the blackness of her pupils without leaving a sign. Her left eye was half closed from the blow, but her right eye was functioning properly and saw clearly: her doctor had returned and he was full of questions. He needed things to be put in order. She almost laughed, but restrained herself. It wasn’t his fault that for him, everything was ordered, explained. It wasn’t his fault that he had no idea what to do with stories that had no order or explanation, stories that swept in like a sandstorm and departed like one. Dust wandering from one country to another. He couldn’t understand her story, just as he couldn’t eat her African food or drink her African water. Because it would make his stomach turn. Because his body wasn’t built for the sort of things they had there. So she remained silent, as did he, and as the moments passed, the anger in him grew larger and larger. Her insolence. Her arrogance. He had driven all the way here, had dropped everything and come, only to discover that a broken sphinx is still a sphinx.
He barricaded himself in his silence and she barricaded herself in hers, and the barricades grew higher. In another moment, Eitan and Sirkit would have completely disappeared behind them, would have vanished from each other’s sight, if a drop of blood hadn’t suddenly oozed from Sirkit’s ear.
Eitan saw it and was horrified. He hadn’t even examined her yet, hadn’t yet understood the depth of the damage. And a drop of blood like that could definitely be the harbinger of catastrophe. A cracked skull. Cortical hemorrhage. Increasing intracranial pressure, and the brain, in a final attempt to halt collapse, drains the liquid through the ears. That nightmarish scenario filled his mind for a few seconds before he noticed the cut right under her ear. That was where the blood was coming from, not from her brain. But he had to be sure, so he bent over her, looked and touched her ear. Gently. Without asking. Without explaining. She trembled. Perhaps from pain. Perhaps from pleasure. Either way, her look changed abruptly. There was no longer any insolence or arrogance in it, no trace of the sphinx. (And there was no denying the possibility that, from the beginning, she had demonstrated none of those qualities, that people found riddles only when they were looking for them, and the real sphinx might have rolled around on its back like a kitten if only someone had dared to come close and pet it.)
“Does it hurt?”
Yes.
She replied so simply, so acceptingly, that Eitan felt all the anger that had accumulated in him against her suddenly turn into anger against them. Against the ones who had come here and shattered this woman with their blows. He began to sterilize the wounds. Saw her cringe. Thought of saying, “It’ll be over in a minute,” but stopped himself. How do you know it’ll be over in a minute? You don’t even know why it had begun. You say it’ll be over in a minute to a child who has scraped his knee, to a person slightly injured in a motorcycle accident when he’s brought into the emergency room. But what do you say to this woman lying here and looking at you with eyes so black that the darkness outside looked bright in comparison?
So he was silent. But this time, it was a different kind of silence. And it was because she felt that this silence wasn’t demanding or probing that she began to tell him. She told him there had been three of them. That they had been waiting for her in the caravan and had asked about Asum, becoming angry when she hadn’t answered. She began to describ
e what they did and how they did it, but that appeared to be too much for her doctor, because he interrupted her, asking emotionally, “But why?”, not seeing that she flinched again now, even more violently than she had when the antiseptic had burned her, and he persisted, “How could they do something like this?!”
Then she laughed in front of him for the first time. Out loud, her mouth open, despite the flashes of pain every facial movement caused. She laughed and laughed, and saw the surprise in his face, then the confusion, the anger, and finally the concern. He seemed to think her laughter was a side effect of what the Bedouins had done. Hysteria, a touch of madness. He didn’t know that it wasn’t because of the Bedouins that she was laughing, but because of him. And perhaps not because of him, but because of herself. Stupid woman, how could you even think he would understand?
They knew what they came for, she told him. Asum was supposed to deliver a shipment that night. They thought I knew where it disappeared to. And when Eitan continued to stare at her with confusion in his eyes, the eyes of a good-natured dog that had to deal with something other than herding sheep, she added, And they were right.
“A shipment?”
That’s what they call it, don’t they?
“Of… drugs?” She burst out laughing again, but this time less loudly, and with her mouth opened less widely, not only because of the pain in her face, but also because of his face. She had already seen him upset and furious, nervous and smiling, fascinated and excited, but she had never seen him disappointed. And his disappointment angered her more than anything she had seen before. More than that night. How dare he be disappointed by her? How dare he expect her to be different?
“What did you think you’d do with it?”
She shrugged and said, Sell it.
He straightened up and stood over her, agitated. He paced the garage, shaking his head in some kind of internal argument she didn’t hear but could definitely guess at. “Do you have any idea what it means to sell?” he suddenly blurted out. “Do you know how many people get into trouble because of that? Do you even know how to do it? You need people, you need…”
I have enough people who owe me a favor.
He froze in the middle of a step. Turned around, looked at her. That witch knew exactly what she would do. Every cut she had sterilized, every wound she had bandaged. The grateful faces of dozens of Eritreans and Sudanese. World champions in the 500-meter run. At her command.
He wanted to yell at her, but even before he opened his mouth she laughed for the third time. She should have known that he’d prefer her to be the victim and not the victimizer. Her doctor loved saintly people, and he didn’t care how often they were trampled. On the contrary, that only made them saintlier. But she had no desire to be saintly. She wanted to be the one doing the trampling. And it seemed as if even God had wanted her to do a bit of it because he had dropped that shipment right into her hands, and he’d also dropped this doctor right into her hands. The doctor could go now if he wanted. But the shipment stayed with her, and she didn’t care how many of her teeth they broke.
Eitan looked at her and said nothing. A moment later, he saw another drop of blood ooze out of the cut under her ear. But he didn’t go to her this time. Didn’t touch her. To keep from catching that blackness, that filth of hers. She was wrong. He didn’t want her to be a saint. All he wanted was for her to be human (and it never occurred to him that there were times when being human was a privilege).
The blood, which at first had made him feel sorry for her, now seemed like a cheap trick to him. Another manipulation in an endless chain. Now he was definitely ready to believe that he had never run over that man. That the entire accident had been nothing but an illusion, a bloody, terrifying magic spell orchestrated by the witch with the broken nose. That possibility seemed much more reasonable than the more solid, silenced one: that the corruption, if indeed there had been any, had occurred gradually. That the woman lying in front of him hadn’t planned anything. Hadn’t schemed in secret. But at every step along the way, had chosen the possibility that seemed best to her. When she had first come to his house many days ago, she had wanted only to see his face. To look into his eyes and see whether her husband’s face a moment before the accident was preserved in them. But when he opened the door, she saw nothing but panic and suddenly realized that she could definitely turn that panic into money. She had told him to come to the garage and went back to the caravan, her brain as white and airy as flour all the way. When she arrived, everyone already knew about Asum, and she had to look as surprised as she could. No one asked her about the shipment. No one but that filthy man had known. And he didn’t know she’d been there that night. He’d paced around his restaurant, looking upset, and spoke to no one. She’d gone into the caravan and sat down on her mattress. After a while, people began to ask why she wasn’t crying. Gently, at first. Then less so. It angered them that she didn’t even look sad. Mostly the men. A man needs to know that his woman will cry for him after he dies. There were so many ways you could be screwed here. Thirst. Hunger. The Bedouins’ beatings. The Egyptians’ bullets. Now the Israelis’ cars. You needed to know that if something happened to you, your woman would take the trouble to squeeze a few tears out of her fucking eyes. But Sirkit’s eyes had remained dry and open, and two hours later they saw the new man who had come from the border.
They put him on the mattress next to hers and fussed over his wound all afternoon. In addition to the genuine concern for the man, there was also a great deal of anger toward the woman on the adjacent mattress. Her refusal to cry turned her tragedy from mutual loss into a personal enigma. Her dry eyes were more than an affront to her husband. They were an affront to them as well. She was denying them the pleasure of offering consolation to another person. At a certain point, they left the man who had been wounded at the border. With all due respect to wounded hands, people had to go back to work. He remained lying there with closed eyes. Every now and then, he moaned in pain. Sirkit’s eyes darted over his wound. The infection was as fascinating as it was repulsive. The people who had examined the wound earlier said the Egyptians had started to put poison on the fences. There was no other explanation for that hideous cut. How stupid, she had thought, as if the Egyptians cared enough about them to bother to poison them. His hand looked that way because that’s what happened to a wound that wasn’t treated.
It was more or less then that she had decided to take him with her to see the doctor. She hadn’t been thinking about money yet, hadn’t even guessed that the illegal hospital would be set up. She had simply known that she couldn’t sleep at night if the man kept up that moaning. The noise would kill her. Maybe she had even wanted to feel benevolent and compassionate. Maybe she truly was benevolent and compassionate. At least then, before everything became complicated.
That night, in the garage, she had understood for the first time how much power she had. The package the doctor had given her contained more money than she had ever seen in her life, and his eyes told her that if she demanded it, there would be more, much more. She hadn’t demanded it. She’d ordered him to go into the garage and treat that man, and meanwhile her brain was working so fast it hurt. A moment before the doctor went inside, the man had offered her money. At first, she hadn’t understood what he wanted and thought it was his fever talking. But the man had said again that a real doctor cost a lot of money, and she realized that it had never occurred to him that she was helping him free of charge. She was about to correct him, but stopped herself.
When she was six, her father had given her a goose. He’d brought it from town one especially yellow morning. All the chickens in their village were sick and scrawny, and the new fowl, with its beautiful white feathers, looked like the cleanest thing in the world. They put it in the yard and Sirkit went to visit it every few hours. She opened the gate to give it seeds, stroke its white feathers and check to see which of them was taller. Most of the time it was Sirkit, but when the goose was excited, it stood on its
legs, spread its wings and stretched its neck so that the tip of its beak was a full centimeter higher than Sirkit. It was impressive. A few months later Sirkit was already taller than the goose, but she still went to visit it every day, and may even have loved it more now that it was smaller than she was.
One morning, people hung flags because it was a holiday, and her father told her mother that the next evening, they would eat the goose. Sirkit didn’t say anything – her father wasn’t the sort of person you argued with – but that night, she got up and sneaked into the yard. She opened the gate to let her goose escape. In the morning, she’d blame it on thieves. Maybe they’d believe her. Maybe they’d suspect she’d been careless and would hit her. Either way, the white feathers would remain in place. She hugged the goose and kissed her goodbye, surprised at how efficiently the feathers absorbed her little girl’s tears. Then she untied the rope that kept the goose from flying, left the gate open and went back to sleep. How shocked she was when she went back in the morning and saw the goose pecking away peacefully exactly where she had left it. The gate was open, the rope untied, but the goose hadn’t even contemplated an escape. The thought had never entered the goose’s mind simply because geese don’t do things like that. The white feathers were plucked a short while after, when the morning coolness still stood in the air like a false promise.
The man who had come from the border kept talking about money and she began to wonder whether she should really refuse him, set him straight. She hadn’t considered asking him for anything. Simply because people don’t do such things. Even if you open the gate for them. Even if you untie their ropes. Even if you can hear, in the adjacent yard, the crackling of the fire that has been lit for your flesh.
Waking Lions Page 28