Marciano leaned back on his chair. “She’s something else, that Eritrean. First I thought we’d need an interpreter for her, but her Hebrew is better than the Bedouins’. You ever see anything like that?” Eitan shook his head. He had never seen anything like that. “Gifted with languages. Some people are like that. My grandfather, for instance, knew how to curse in nine different languages and order boiling-hot coffee in five others.” Eitan looked at Marciano. Either the precinct commander was one hell of a clever strategist or he was just a bullshitter. It was definitely a very strange way to extract a confession. (And maybe, Eitan thought suddenly, maybe he doesn’t need a confession at all. He has Sirkit, he has the Bedouins, he doesn’t really need me.) Marciano looked at him from behind two framed pictures of his children at a swimming pool. Eitan asked himself whether Liat had put pictures of the kids on her desk. Funny that he didn’t know something like that about her. On the other hand, maybe it was logical, given all the things she didn’t know about him.
Marciano’s children smiled atthe camera in their bathing suits, holding ice pops, and it was obvious from their faces that they hadn’t the slightest idea what their father did for a living. If they had known that he spent hours in his office in the company of murderers, thieves, drug smugglers and paedophiles, their smiles might have been less broad. Why the hell did he have to expose their faces to all the scum Israeli society is capable of producing? Only to broadcast to the world that he’d managed to reproduce? That his genes were walking the earth, splashing in the country-club swimming pool? The photos weren’t a warm reminder for Marciano of the intimate space waiting for him at home at the end of a work day. Eitan knew that for a certainty, because the pictures had been placed facing outward. It wasn’t Marciano who looked at them, but the visitors to his office. He knew his children’s faces – he wanted others to know them. And by doing so – they’d know him. A solid member of society. A man of law and order. Of signed confessions and exact bedtimes. Lights out at 7:20. No games.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Eitan. I’m not crazy about this story. I realize that for you, it’s kind of holy work, Hippocrates and all that, but I’m telling you, a country can’t exist like that. You can’t let everyone in. Ongoing medical treatment, welfare – if we give all that free, then half of Africa will be on its way here.”
The precinct commander gave Eitan a serious, understanding look. Eitan gave the precinct commander a totally uncomprehending look.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Marciano said, “I appreciate what you did. Not every doctor would go there voluntarily, in his free time, to treat those illegal immigrants. That’s what they call a Jewish heart. But look at what all that compassion has got us. Not to mention that sometimes things get complicated, like they did in your case. If we hadn’t had an undercover cruiser near Davidson’s restaurant, that gang would have slaughtered you in that garage. You think they would have stopped to find out if you were a drug dealer or David ben Gurion? Guys like that, as soon as they decide to make you a target, they don’t ask questions. If you hadn’t run over that abu Ayad, he would have shot you full of holes. You think I don’t know that? Hell, even your Eritrean knows that, and that’s without twelve years of schooling.”
Marciano spoke for another several minutes. Apologized for the night in jail, which must have been hard, and explained that he’d really had no choice. “True, the Eritrean woman cleared you completely in the first minute, and the csi crew found all the evidence of the clinic being operated in the garage, just like she said. But Doctor, you still ran someone over and killed him, and even though that someone had a gun and was a piece-of-shit drug dealer, it doesn’t mean I can let you out of the station the same night. It wouldn’t look good. But now that everything’s been checked out and we have signed witness statements and bagged evidence, you can go home, take a shower and go to sleep in your own bed.”
Marciano stood up and walked Eitan to the door, complaining about the Eritreans, the Bedouins and the reporters, who were always on his back. “Prepare yourself,” he told Eitan, “they’ll call you. It’s not every day a story like this comes their way. Secret medical treatment, drugs, murder. You want to talk to them, be my guest. But we won’t say anything. Case still under investigation. We still have to find the asshole who ran over that Eritrean and took the shipment. We have to find that Davidson. Let’s just say your wife’s going to be working hard this week. If you ask me, it’s all the Bedouins. This whole business, one gang against another. You know what they’d do to them in an enlightened country?”
He stopped talking. Maybe he was waiting for an answer. But Eitan just stared into space, as indifferent to Marciano’s silence as he had been to his words a moment before. There was only one thought in his mind: she hadn’t given him up. Other thoughts were eclipsed now. Liat, Yaheli, Itamar. Work. The media. They were all waiting in the darkness as one gigantic moon shone in his mind: she hadn’t given him up. She had turned him into a hero.
How stupid she felt now. The stupidest woman in the world. She felt so stupid it actually hurt her body. The pain was between her shoulders and in her lower back, on the side of her stomach and in her temples. (Although maybe it wasn’t the stupidity that hurt her, or the humiliation, but the insane drive from Or Akiva to Beersheba, two and a quarter hours without a break, cramped muscles and racing thoughts.) Liat stood in the hallway of the precinct and massaged her shoulders slowly, as if that were the only thing bothering her at the moment. As if it weren’t her husband sitting there, on the other side of the door at the end of the corridor. She massaged her shoulders and knew that Cheetah and Rachmanov, Esti the emergency phone-call operator and Amsalem from the patrol unit were looking at her from behind. Even if they weren’t actually standing there and looking, they were looking. They all knew. From the precinct commander down to the last prisoner. Everyone had seen what she hadn’t seen. What had been right in front of her eyes, and she hadn’t noticed.
The call from Marciano had come at three in the morning. She answered immediately. She didn’t have to wake up. As if she’d been waiting for that call. After that, things happened very quickly. She woke her mother and asked her to take care of Itamar and Yaheli. She got into the car and reminded herself that a senior detective can get into real trouble if she’s caught driving way over the speed limit. She drove the two and a quarter hours to Beersheba without stopping, asking herself all the way if it was possible. Two people live in the same house. Sleep beside each other. Fuck each other. Shower after each other. Cook, eat, put kids to bed, pass each other the remote, the salt, a roll of toilet paper. And all that time, they’re not really living together. Not even in parallel. They have been separate the entire time, and she had no idea.
Two and a quarter hours and she still couldn’t make sense of it. What had he been doing there, in the middle of the night, with Bedouin gangs and drug shipments? What the hell did any of it have to do with him? Her astonishment was so great that it left no room for anger. An enormous, swollen question mark had obliterated the face of the man who was her husband. His name – Eitan Green – suddenly stood outside the house, outside their common memories, like the first time they met, when she hadn’t yet known anything apart from his face, and the name was still an empty container waiting to be filled. Eitan Green, a stranger.
By the time she reached the station, Marciano could already tell her what had happened. But that only made everything more complicated. She read the Bedouins’ statements. The transcript of the Eritrean woman’s interview. She closed herself in her office (the corridor was too exposed to probing glances) and went over the material again. Something did not add up.
“Do you mind if I go in to talk to the Eritrean woman?”
“I thought you’d want to talk to your husband, who’s been cooling his heels in a jail cell.”
Liat listened to Marciano through the internal phone receiver and felt her stomach clench. It was a good thing she’d called instead of going into his office
. A punch in the diaphragm is easier to take when you’re sitting down.
“So I’m going in to talk to the Eritrean.”
“Should I talk to your husband in the meantime, let him know he’s free to go?” Marciano sounded quite amused and Liat thought he might not really understand. Perhaps that punch to the diaphragm wasn’t gloating or derision. He might actually think it wasn’t such a big deal. A half-funny marital spat. A sitcom conflict between a husband and wife. The husband does something without telling his wife, the wife gives him hell, makes his life miserable at home, and in the end it all works out.
“Don’t release him yet.” And she hung up before he could say anything else. Before he could say with a smile, someone screwed up, or suggest sarcastically that she come into his office to get a pair of handcuffs. Before he had time to wonder whether there was something more than a power struggle going on here, more than a small, pathetic bit of revenge being taken by a small, pathetic woman who didn’t know anything.
The Eritrean woman glanced at her when she opened the door. Her face looked terrible. A blackened, swollen left eye. A nose that was definitely broken.
“Hello Sirkit.”
Sirkit.
The Eritrean woman gazed at her silently. Liat looked her over carefully. Outside the interview room she wouldn’t have dared to look at anyone that way. An open, shameless glance. A brazen, direct look that didn’t shift when the person in front of you became aware of it. But here, inside, there was no need for politeness. People walking in the street have the right to demand they be looked at surreptitiously. For periods of time that do not cause cheeks to redden or knees to tingle. But a person sitting in an interrogation room is denied that right. So Liat allowed herself to relax in her chair and scrutinize the Eritrean woman’s face. Slowly, with the calm of someone who has all the time in the world.
Several moments later, the Eritrean woman looked away. Liat wasn’t surprised. Most people did that. Not only petty criminals, but the serious ones as well lowered their eyes to the floor after a minute at the most. Or they looked at another corner of the room. The more brazen among them stared at her breasts, deliberately. But the Eritrean woman didn’t look at the floor or at another corner of the room. Nor did she stare at her breasts. She closed her eyes.
“Sirkit? Is everything okay?”
Only after she had spoken the words did she realize that she had mispronounced her name again. This time the Eritrean woman did not correct her. Maybe she didn’t notice. Maybe she had given up the hope that anyone there would pronounce her name properly.
Everything’s fine.
Her eyes remained closed, and Liat didn’t know whether she should feel sorry for the woman who’d had her face battered like that, let her sleep a bit because she really looked wiped out, or insist on asking her what she’d come to ask (she never thought for a moment that eyes could be closed not only out of tiredness, but also out of defiance. It never occurred to her that such a woman could be defiant at all.)
But she asked all the same. Requested that the Eritrean woman repeat her version of events. She heard what she had read in the transcript of the interview: how Davidson had demanded that the woman’s husband deliver a shipment. How the Eritrean’s body had been found the next morning and the shipment gone. How the Bedouins had beaten his wife mercilessly because they thought she might know something about the gang that had taken off with the package.
“But the doctor,” Liat asked, “what about the doctor?!”
The woman suddenly stopped speaking and opened her eyes, which had been closed until then. As if she felt that the question was different from the previous ones the detective had asked her. Liat waited for a moment, then repeated the question. Slowly, evenly, with all the inner quiet she could muster.
“How does the doctor come into all of this?”
He was driving around in his SUV one night and saw us. Saw that we needed help. He wanted to help.
She asked her several more questions, and she got several more answers, all of them identical to the transcript of the interview and the evidence. There was a clinic in the garage, and the person operating it was her husband. Though there was no reason for Liat to be in that room, she couldn’t leave. Not yet. Once again, she examined the Eritrean woman’s face. A broken nose. A blackened left eye. A spot of dry blood under her ear. Before the Bedouins had surprised them, Eitan had gone to treat her injuries. He’d left Yaheli’s bed and driven two and a quarter hours to get there. Only an angel would do something like that. (But her man was no angel. So what happened here? She hadn’t let him be a hero and expose Zakai, so he went off to be a hero in the dead of night?) Maybe he did, she thought, suddenly straightening up. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. And she could already feel the tension in her shoulders and the pain near her stomach ease slightly. Felt her body being released from the tight grip of doubt. She grew more relaxed as the story became clearer, her relief increasing with each additional detail: he felt guilty about the silence she had imposed on him concerning Zakai’s bribes. He wanted to atone. That fit right in with his rigid morality. His damaged ego. And it was just like him not to tell her. After all, she would have stopped him. It was illegal. And dangerous. What about all that stuff you make me read about those refugees? he would have asked her. And she realized suddenly why he had been so interested in the investigation of that Eritrean’s death. Those people weren’t just a newspaper article for him. He knew them. He was helping them.
She still hated him. Was still ready to hang him upside down. Still intended not to talk to him for quite a few days. Even weeks. But when she went out of the interview room, leaving the Eritrean woman behind, she knew she had to thank the black woman for her ruined face. The broken nose. Blackened left eye. Spot of dried blood under her ear. Eitan had treated her. Her husband.
And he was a stranger to her no longer.
16
NOT FAR FROM THE REFUGEE DETENTION CAMP, he stopped the SUV and bought an ice pop. The gas station was full of families on their way to a weekend of fun in Eilat. Several people frowned at him, trying to recall where they knew his face from. One little boy asked if he was in the Children’s Song Festival. He almost said yes, but decided against it. He’d eaten his way through half the ice pop when a woman with a baby carriage came up to him and said, “You’re that doctor with the refugees. Your picture was in the paper.” He didn’t reply because she hadn’t actually asked him anything. “That’s nice, what you did,” she said. “We need more people like you in this country.” He thanked her. She seemed to be expecting it. Other people came over to them. They asked the woman what he’d done and she told them. The little boy who had asked about the Song Festival listened and asked for an autograph for his collection. “But I’m not a singer,” Eitan said. “I know,” the little boy agreed, looking disappointed, “but you were in the papers.” Several people began arguing. We can’t have all of Africa coming here. If those bleeding hearts have their way, we’ll end up without a country. The people saying those things looked at Eitan. They seemed to be waiting for him to speak. The woman with the carriage answered them. She too was looking at Eitan. Maybe she was also waiting for him to say something. He finished the ice pop and got into his car.
At the entrance to the camp he was met by a representative of the administration. A cheery guy of twenty-seven who was going to be married in a week and was constantly texting his girlfriend. He looked like a kid dressed up as a policeman. “They’re all in the yard now,” he said. “I’ll take you there.” As they walked past the high fences, the guy told him about their problems with the wedding hall. “Believe me, I had no idea that napkins came in so many colors.” They stopped in front of a large area full of people. “Okay, bro, here’s the yard. I’ll open the gate for you. You see her? What am I saying, they all look alike.”
Eitan went inside and scanned the bustling yard. They really did look alike. The same dark, deadened faces. The same slack expression of apathetic bor
edom. Any one of those people could be Sirkit. Brown eyes. Black hair. Flat nose. Black Eritrean African women refugees. Identical. They looked as alike as a herd of sheep. Of cows. Several years ago, when Spencer Tunick was in Israel to create one of his large-scale nude photographic installations, Eitan looked at the resulting pictures and was horrified. The newspapers talked about the liberation of the body from the tyranny of thinness. About pornography being transformed into intimacy. But he had looked at the naked bodies, the parade of nipples, navels and pubic hair and thought something had been stolen from those people. Not modesty – that had never bothered him. If each one had been photographed separately, stark naked, he would not have been repelled. But when he looked at them together, a crowded collection of bodies, he felt that they had lost every drop of selfhood, and all the small differences that made each of them who they were had been eclipsed by that large mass of identical flesh. The women in the yard were not naked, but the identical conditions and the overcrowded space stripped them of their personalities and made them a single entity – Eritrean women. The generosity of one or the meanness of another, this one’s sense of humor or that one’s shyness were of no value. They were Eritrean women waiting to be deported, and he was an Israeli looking at them.
Waking Lions Page 31