Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  (But there was one here who’d had an effect on you. There was one here whose body, whose specific body haunted your dreams. There was someone named Sirkit, and her voice was icy cold, her skin velvety soft. You hate her and you love her, and now she’s standing in front of you and you can’t see her.)

  A few moments later he did see her and at first didn’t realize that he was seeing her. She was leaning against the fence with a group of other women, her long hair coiled around the top of her head. For a moment, his eyes passed over her just as they passed over all the others, and the next moment stopped abruptly. He knew that look. Knew that body. Her body. Feet in plastic flip-flops. Hips drowning in wide, shapeless pants. Blue shirt printed with the logo MY NETIVOT, words that the woman wearing the shirt couldn’t read. Her body. Fingers with bitten nails holding the gate. He hadn’t known that she bit her nails. Perhaps she’d started here, or perhaps the proof had always been right under his nose and he never saw it. Unequivocal proof that even Lilith was a mere mortal. They called her a devil because she was awake when upstanding women were asleep in their beds, because she rode a man when he should have been riding her. Because she kidnapped babies. And all that time, she had been biting her nails. Unconsciously, Eitan felt his own fingernails. Clean. Carefully cut. Growing at the average rate of four centimeters per year. (Not only his, but all the fingernails here. An average of four centimeters per year. For a moment, he could see them all, the residents of this place, dozens of black women, the Russian guard at the entrance, the jailer who was about to be married, even his future wife. All of them at the rate of four centimeters per year.)

  She still hadn’t seen him. He stood there looking at her. Who is she when I’m not looking at her? When I don’t feel guilty about her or don’t want her? Who is she when she’s alone, as she was a moment before I arrived, as she will be a moment after I leave?

  The women standing around Sirkit spoke, and she might have been listening or simply staring outside, beyond the fence. At any moment, an enormous tiger might appear from the desert, leap over the concrete and barbed wire and land at her feet. The other women would scream, the Russian guard would run for his life, but she would reach out and pet the striped fur of its forehead. The tiger would purr its consent. It would lick her face like a puppy. She would climb onto its back, it would leap once again, and they would gallop off into the distance until they disappeared.

  It was because of the tiger that he recognized her, that he picked her out from all the others. Many women were staring through the fence that morning, but only one summoned a tiger with her glance. Eitan was almost saddened that he was about to deliver a poor substitute for that beast of prey – himself – and leaping over fences was something he did not know how to do (and if he did know, would he leap?). He looked at the fence. Horizontal and vertical metal wires dividing the world into squares. The desert outside, the sky and the horizon, all partitioned into identical, ironframed squares.

  When he turned his glance from the fence, he saw that she had been looking at him for several moments. That made him uncomfortable. It was one thing for him to look at Sirkit without her knowing it, and something else for Sirkit to look at him. It made no difference whether the glance was critical or favorable. Generous or judgmental. The very fact that you don’t know you’re being looked at gives the observer the upper hand. One is looking and the other is being looked at. One scrutinizes and the other is under scrutiny. Sirkit looked at him without his knowing it, which meant that she had been close to him without his knowledge, had been inside him and hadn’t told him. That night as well, the first night, she had looked at him without his being aware of her. Hidden by the night. It was that first look that had given her possession of him. And only because she had taken possession of him had he begun to look at her. But even then, he hadn’t seen her bitten nails.

  She left the fence and walked toward him. The other women followed her with their eyes. Suddenly Eitan was very much aware of the sweat that had gathered in his armpits.

  You came to visit.

  He nodded. All the things he wanted to say to her, all the words that had filled his SUV on the drive there, everything vanished when she stood before him, as if he were a scolded child. But behind the scolded child was a sketch artist. And he used every moment to examine her features, to memorize them, to keep her from vanishing into the sea of years as she had vanished into the sea of faces a few moments before. Nose. Mouth. Forehead. Eyes. Sirkit.

  Suddenly he realized that she was sketching him as well, standing there and sketching him in her mind. Nose. Mouth. Forehead. Eyes. Eitan. Her doctor. She had already done it before. The night he hit Asum. She had lain on the sand after that vicious punch in the stomach. Asum was good at punches like that. If you angered him at noon, he didn’t hit you right away. He waited patiently. An hour, two hours, a day. And then when you thought it had passed, when air entered your lungs without that smell of fear, he’d punch you. Quick and smooth. He never spoke when he did it. Didn’t shout or explain. He punched you and moved on, the way someone hits a cow that kicked or a goat that insists on drifting away from the herd. Without emotion, simply because it had to be done.

  The night she had lain on the sand and thought that one day she would kill him, the way the cows would if they had the intelligence. But she knew she wouldn’t do it, just as the cows and goats didn’t. Sometimes bulls raise their heads, or dogs. They have pride, those animals. That’s why people smash their heads with stones if they’re dogs, or slit their throats if they’re bulls. No one wastes a bullet on them; it’s too expensive.

  That night, Asum had stood there with the shipment in his hand and told her to get up, they were late, and then the car came out of nowhere and hit him. For the first moment she thought it was because of her, that her hatred had been so red and so strong that it had come out of her and turned into a red SUV moving at 100 kilometers an hour. But then a white man stepped out of the red SUV, and she took a very good look at his face. She saw the fear on it when he realized what he had hit, and the repulsion on it right before he placed his lips on Asum’s. Even before he stood up and drove away, she knew he was going to get up and drive away. She had seen that on his face as well. Then he really made her angry. Not because of Asum. She didn’t shed a single tear for Asum. But because the man got into the SUV and ran his hand over his face as if he were trying to rub away a bad dream, without understanding that it was someone else’s bad dream. The cows drove me mad today, her father used to say; my hands hurt from hitting them.

  A moment later, the SUV wasn’t there anymore. She stood up. The moon in the sky was the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. Round and perfect. He was still breathing, her husband. His eyes looked at her evilly. He hadn’t let her pee before they went out, wanted her to come right away. She hadn’t known where they were going, but she understood that Davidson had given him a mission, and he was going to take advantage of it to punch her or smack her around without anyone hearing. The caravans were too crowded for beatings or moaning, and now Davidson had given him an excuse to get far away from them. She ran after him in the sand even though she had to pee, until he turned around and gave her that vicious punch without saying a word, and a moment later the SUV hit him. She took off her underpants and stood over him. A hot, yellow stream flowed out of her, down her thighs and onto the evil eyes beneath her. Urine that had been accumulating for hours burst out freely. A pleasant, satisfying flow. And the smell that rose from it was incredibly beautiful.

  Later, she saw the wallet that had been dropped next to where the man had knelt. His picture on a card: serious, confident. The complete opposite of the man who had been there a few minutes ago, who had stumbled out of the SUV on shaky legs. She looked carefully at the picture. Since that night, she had already learned to know that face. His smile, his anger, his scientist’s excitement and his white man’s righteousness. But in the days she had spent here, behind the fence, his face had become blurred in her
mind. Not only his. The whole garage. The treatment table. The people waiting in line. They disappeared because there was no point in remembering them. She had to think about other things; for instance, about looking carefully into the guards’ faces to see which of them she could have sex with. Which of the older, heavy men or the younger ones who still had pimples on their faces. Checking out breasts, evaluating asses, pointing out to each other that the one over there was actually pretty, don’t you think. But she needed more than their looks. She needed a heavy body to lie on top of her, a pimply face that would contort when he came so that she could utter the one word that would get her out of there: rape. They didn’t settle for anything less than that here. Less than that, and they might even send you back there. Although she missed her village, and even more the sea beside her village, she knew that there, the land of the dead children, was not a place she wanted to go back to. She only had to look carefully, find the right guard. Then there would be a trial, and when it all ended they wouldn’t dare send her back. She’d stay here and make new children in place of the ones she’d had, and they’d look like all the previous babies in every way, except that they would be alive. One of those new children would be a girl. She would comb her hair and braid it. The last little girl – her hair hadn’t grown long enough for braids. The new little girl would reach the age when she could talk to her as if she were a big girl. A person. None of her previous children had reached the age when you could talk to them as if they were people. Yamana and Miriam had still spoken the language of babies when they took sick, and Goitom had already spoken the language of grown-ups, but he had never really understood – he didn’t stop when that soldier told him to stop. The new children would never know what she’d had to do to bring them into the world. They would be proud and stupid. Not like the women here, who were smart and understood how the world worked, and that was why they didn’t have a single drop of pride. Unlike her.

  Sirkit wasn’t waiting for a tiger to leap over the fence into the detention camp. The tiger was already inside her, lying in wait, quiet, watching. Or maybe there was no tiger at all, but a crazy, hallucinating antelope that kept insisting on being something it was not. She didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. Such thoughts could only hurt her. If a bird asked how it could fly, it would fall immediately. That was her mother’s answer to every question but the simplest. For instance, you could ask where the flour was, but if you asked why the soldiers took all the flour, she’d explain to you that if a fish asked how it could breathe underwater, it would choke. So she had stopped asking questions and did what the birds and the fish did: she moved forward. From the village to the desert, from the desert to the border, from the border to a different desert that was actually the same desert, but someone had drawn a line and called it Egypt. From the Egyptian desert to the Egyptian Bedouins, the ones her memory had to pass over very quickly, without stopping, because if she stopped, she really wouldn’t be able to push onward. And from the Egyptian Bedouins to that country where the people were white and the roads were wide and the houses had red roofs that slanted at a strange angle. Here she stopped. From here she would not move. If she had to stand at the fence all day and look at the faces of the guards, she’d stand and look. Sooner or later she’d find the dark glint in the eyes. It was always there, that glint. You just had to know how to look.

  And suddenly her doctor appeared out of nowhere. She had almost forgotten him. Or at least, wanted to think that she had forgotten him. When she first saw him, she wanted to punch him and slap him. Scream “Get out of here. What are you doing here!” Because if he was here, then it wasn’t all in her mind. Those things she had felt, had pushed away, maybe they had really existed. Maybe dark, heavy water had flowed between them the entire time, though they never spoke of it.

  She looked at him, stuck in the sea of black women, a white sailboat in dark waters (Asum’s sailboat, she thought suddenly, recalling how she had watched as it moved out to sea, and how disappointed she had been when it reappeared with the other sailboats in the evening. He hadn’t drowned.) A moment later, she saw that her doctor was standing in front of her, but wasn’t looking at her. Was thinking of other things at that moment. Maybe his wife, his children. Funny, she had no idea whether he had boys or girls. Whether he’d ever tried to braid a tangle of hair. Whether they were at the age when they still had to be carried, or they walked beside him, heads held high. One thing was clear to her: they were stupid and proud. Like him.

  He finally looked at her, that gray look of his. She walked toward him and he stayed where he was.

  You came to visit.

  “Yes.”

  Then he was silent. So was she. Her brain was suddenly empty of thoughts, like that well near the village that one day, simply had no more water. The silence grew larger and thicker, like a swelling elephant, reaching truly huge proportions. Finally he said, “I wanted to say thank you,” and regretted the words even as he spoke them because why in the world did he owe this woman thanks? He could have died that night. One good shot and the whole business would have ended completely differently. She listened to his thank you and thought that if he wanted to, he could fight for her. Send letters, make calls, bang on desks. When people like him bang on desks, the world listens. But he wouldn’t bang on any desks. It might hurt, might cause damage to the joints. And suddenly she knew that he hadn’t come there to thank her, and he certainly hadn’t come to secure her release. He had come to say goodbye. With a sad look, a wave of the hand, a hope that remained hidden even to him, that he would never see her again. He had come to end the whole dark story that had upset him and threatened his family, even his life. But no matter how much that dark story had upset him, it had been fascinating and seductive, and had aroused him to the depths of his soul the way such dark stories do. But stories must come to an end. Life must continue along its sure, quiet paths. Even if he looked at her with eyes that caressed the features of her face, even if you could actually see him making room in his memory for her image, in the end he wanted nothing more than a picture on the wall. A memory to ponder. And to move forward. Like the birds and the fish. For even he, were he to stop for too long, if he were to ask why, would fall and choke.

  It’s okay.

  Two people stand facing each other with nothing left to say. The woman wearing flip-flops, too-wide pants, a MY NETIVOT shirt. The man wearing jeans, a shirt and running shoes with orthopedic insoles bought in the duty-free shop. The words they have spoken and the words they could have spoken become superfluous all at once.

  Fifteen minutes later, when the red SUV turned onto the road leading to Omer, Eitan Green kept carefully to the speed limit. A person gets up in the morning, leaves the house and finds that planet earth is back in its orbit. He says to his wife “See you tonight,” and they do indeed see each other that night. He says “See you later” to the grocery store clerk, knowing that they’ll see each other again the next day, knowing that the tomatoes, even if their price goes up tenfold, will always be within reach of his hand. How beautiful the earth is when it moves properly. How pleasant to move with it. To forget that any other movement ever existed. That a different movement is even possible.

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