Waking Lions E-Book

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The compelling and timely new novel by the author of One Night, Markovitch Dr Eitan Green is a good man. He saves lives. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road in his SUV after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene. It is a decision that changes everything. Because the dead man's wife knows what happened. And when she knocks at Eitan's door the next day, tall and beautiful, holding his wallet, he discovers that her price is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan's safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated. Waking Lions is a gripping, suspenseful and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire. It looks at the darkness inside all of us to ask: what would we do? What are any of us capable of? Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982 and holds an MA in Clinical Psychology from Tel Aviv University. Her film scripts have won prizes at international festivals, including the Berlin Today Award and the New York City Short Film Festival Award. Her debut novelOne Night, Markovitch won the Sapir Prize for best debut and is being translated into five languages.

Leseprobe

For Yoav

Contents

Title PageDedicationPART ONE12345678910PART TWO12345678910111213141516About the PublisherCopyright

HE’S THINKING THAT THEMOON is the most beautiful he has ever seen when he hits the man. For the first moment after he hits him he’s still thinking about the moon, and then he suddenly stops, like a candle that has been blown out. He hears the door of the SUV open and knows that he’s the one opening it, that he’s the one getting out now. But that knowledge is connected to his body only loosely, like a tongue skimming over gums shortly after a Novocain injection: it’s all there, but different. His feet tread the desert gravel and the crunching sound he hears confirms that he’s walking. Somewhere beyond the next step the man he hit is waiting for him; he can’t see him from here, but he’s there, another step and he’s there. He slows down, tries to delay that final step, after which he’ll have no choice but to look at the man lying on the side of the road. If only he could freeze that step, but of course he can’t, just as he can’t freeze the previous moment, the exact moment he ran him down, the moment a man driving an SUV ran down a man walking on the road. Only the next step will reveal whether that man is still a man or is now – something else. The mere thought of the word paralyzes him because when he takes that last step, he might discover that the man is no longer a man, but the cracked, empty shell of one. And if the man lying there is no longer a man, he cannot imagine what will become of the man standing there, shaking, unable to complete one simple step. What will become of him.

PART ONE

1

THE DUST WAS EVERYWHERE. A thin white layer, like the icing on a birthday cake no one wants. It had accumulated on the palm tree fronds in the central square, mature trees that had been trucked in and planted in the ground because no one believed that young seedlings could take hold there. It covered the local campaign posters still fluttering on apartment balconies three months after the election: balding, mustached men observing a crowd of voters from beneath the dust, some smiling authoritatively, some looking grave, each following the advice of his latest media consultant. Dust on advertising billboards; dust on bus stops; dust on the bougainvillaea straggling along the edge of the sidewalk, faint with thirst; dust everywhere.

And yet no one appeared to notice. The residents of Beersheba had grown accustomed to the dust, just as they had grown accustomed to all the rest – unemployment, crime, public parks strewn with broken bottles. The people of the city continued to wake up to dust-filled streets, went to their dusty jobs, had sex under a layer of dust and produced children whose eyes reflected the dust. He sometimes wondered which of the two he hated more – the dust or the residents of Beersheba. Apparently the dust. The residents of Beersheba weren’t spread over his SUV in the morning. The dust was. A thin white layer that dulled the blazing red of the SUV, turning it to faded pink. Angrily, Eitan ran a finger over the windshield and wiped away some of the disgrace. It remained on his hand even after he rubbed it on his trousers, and he knew he would have to wait until he scrubbed in at Soroka before he’d feel really clean again. Fuck this city.

When he got into the car he was careful to keep his dirty finger from touching anything, as if it wasn’t part of his body but rather a tissue sample he was holding and would momentarily place in front of Prof. Zakai so they could examine it together avidly – tell us who you are! But Prof. Zakai was many kilometers away from here now, waking to a dustless morning in the leafy green streets of Raanana, sitting in the comfort of his silver Mercedes as it made its way to the hospital through the traffic jams of the highly populated center of the country.

Racing through the empty streets of Beersheba, Eitan wished Prof. Zakai at least an hour and a quarter of sweaty waiting at the Geha intersection, with the air conditioner broken. But he knew very well that Mercedes air conditioners didn’t break and that the traffic jams at Geha were nothing more than a sweet reminder of what Eitan had left behind when he moved here – the big city. Granted, there are no traffic jams in Beersheba, something he mentioned in every conversation he had with people from the Tel Aviv area. But when he did – a serene smile on his face, the clear-eyed look of a desert aristocrat – he always had the thought that there were no traffic jams in cemeteries either, but he wouldn’t make his home in one. The buildings along Rager Boulevard really did remind him of a cemetery. A faded, uniform row of stone blocks that had once been white and were now bordering on gray. Giant headstones with the tired, dusty face of one apparition or another occasionally appearing in their windows.

In the Soroka Hospital parking lot he met Dr Zandorf, who gave him a broad smile and asked, “And how is Dr Green today?” He dredged up a battered smile, did his best to spread it across his face and replied, “Fine.” They entered the hospital together, replacing the climate and time that nature had imposed upon them with the insolent defiance of an air conditioning and lighting system that guaranteed them eternal morning and endless spring. Eitan parted from Dr Zandorf at the entrance to the department and had begun a prolonged scrubbing at the sink when a young nurse walked by and remarked that he had a pianist’s hands. That’s true, he thought, he did have a musician’s fingers. Women always told him that. But the only strings he strummed were damaged, truncated neurons.