Waking Lions E-Book

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

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

Seitenzahl: 562

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.

A strange instrument, the brain. You never really know what sound you’ll get when you press one key or another. Of course, if you stimulate the occipital lobe with a mild electric shock, the man sitting in front of you will most likely report that he sees colors, just as pressing on neurons in the temporal lobe will probably lead to the illusion of sounds. But while science is extremely partial to general, uniform rules, people are partial to being distinguished from one another. Two patients with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex will never have the courtesy to coordinate their side effects. One will behave crudely and the other will become obsessively cheerful. One will make tasteless sexual remarks and the other will feel an uncontrollable need to pick up every object in his path. Randomness, that seductive little whore, dances among the department beds, spits on the doctors’ lab coats and tickles the exclamation marks of science until they bow their heads and become rounded into question marks.

“So how can we ever know anything at all?!” he once blurted out in the lecture hall. Fifteen years had passed since then and he still remembered the anger that had risen in him on that sleepy afternoon when he realized that the profession he was training for was no more certain than any other. A student who had fallen asleep beside him was startled awake by his cry and gave him a hostile look. The rest of the class was waiting for the remainder of what the senior lecturer had to say, which would most likely contain material for their exam. The only person who did not consider the question an annoyance was Prof. Zakai himself, who shot him an amused glance over the lecturer’s podium. “And what is your name?”

“Eitan. Eitan Green.”

“The only way to know something, Eitan, is to investigate death. Death teaches you everything you need to know. Take, for example, the case of Henry Molaison. In 1953 he underwent an innovative surgical resection of the areas responsible for his epilepsy, among them the hippocampus. You know what happened afterwards?”

“He died?”

“Yes and no. Henry Molaison didn’t die because he woke up after the surgery and continued to live. But in another sense, Henry Molaison did die because from the moment he woke up after the surgery, he was incapable of creating even a single new memory. He couldn’t fall in love or hold a grudge or be exposed to a new idea for longer than two minutes because after two minutes the object of his love or grudge was simply erased. He was twenty-seven when the surgery was performed, and even though he didn’t die until he was eighty-two, he actually remained twenty-seven for ever. You see, Eitan, only after the hippocampus was removed did they discover that it was in fact responsible for encoding long-term memories. We have to wait for something to be destroyed in order to understand what had previously functioned properly. That is, in fact, the most basic method of brain research – you cannot simply dismantle parts of people’s brains and see what happens; you wait for the case to do it for you. And then, like a guild of scavengers, scientists swoop down on what remains after the case has done its job and try to arrive at what you desire so fervently – knowing something.”

Was that where the bait had been laid, in that lecture hall? Had Prof. Zakai known then that his diligent, fascinated student would follow him like a loyal dog wherever he went? As he donned his lab coat, Eitan laughed at his naivety. He, who didn’t believe in God, who even as a child had refused to listen to any story that contained the slightest hint of the supernatural, had transformed that lecturer into a living god. And when the faithful dog refused to play dead, to play deaf-dumb-blind, the living god poured out all his wrath on him and drove him from the Tel Aviv Garden of Eden to this wilderness, to Soroka Hospital.

“Dr Green?”

The young nurse stopped beside him and reported on the night’s events. He was suitably attentive, then went to make himself some coffee. Walking along the corridor, he glanced quickly at the patients’ faces – a young woman choked with quiet weeping. A middle-aged Russian man trying to do a Sudoku puzzle with a palsied hand. Four members of a Bedouin family staring with glazed eyes at a TV set high on the wall. Eitan looked up at the screen – a determined cheetah was vigorously chewing up the bits of flesh left over from what had once been – according to the voiceover – a red-tailed fox. The fact that all of life is destined to be annihilated was never alluded to in hospital corridors, and yet here it was, openly presented on a TV screen. If Dr Eitan Green were to walk through the concrete jungle known as Soroka Hospital and actually speak about death, the patients would go mad. There would be crying, shouting, attacks on the medical staff. Countless times he had heard impassioned patients call them “angels in white”. And though he knew that under their lab coats they were not angels but flesh-and-blood people, he didn’t nitpick. If people needed angels, who was he to prevent them from having them? So what if a nurse had escaped a negligence suit by the skin of her teeth after pouring a medication meant for one parched throat down a different parched throat? Even angels make mistakes sometimes, especially if they haven’t slept for twenty-three hours. And when family members, stricken with grief and anger, attacked a frightened intern or a terrified specialist, Eitan knew that they would have attacked real angels the same way, would have torn the feathers from their wings so they couldn’t fly off to the golden kingdom of heaven while their beloved relative was being dispatched into the darkness of the earth. And now all those people who could not bear even a fleeting glance at the face of death were watching it serenely, even eagerly, as it spread fear on the African savannah. Because now it wasn’t only the Bedouins staring at the screen – the Russian man had put down his Sudoku and raised his head, and even the weeping woman was watching the scene through tear-soaked lashes. The cheetah energetically chewed the remaining flesh of the red-tailed fox. The narrator spoke about drought. In the absence of rain, the animals on the savannah would begin to eat their young. Everyone at the neurosurgery department desk was riveted by the rare description, given by the narrator, of an African lion devouring its cubs, and Eitan Green knew with all his heart that it wasn’t for morphine that he had to thank the gods of science, but for the 33-inch Toshiba.

Four years earlier, a bald woman patient had called him a cynic and spat in his face. He could still remember the sensation of the saliva running down his cheek. She was a young woman, not especially attractive. But she walked around the department with a certain majesty, other patients and nurses unconsciously moving aside to let her pass. One day, when he visited her on morning rounds, she called him a cynic and spat in his face. He tried in vain to understand what had caused her to do that. During earlier examinations, his questions had been matter-of-fact and her replies brief. She had never spoken to him in the corridor. And it was because he could find no reason that the incident upset him. Against his will, he was drawn into magical thinking about blind people who see clearly, bald women whose approaching death equips them with a sort of sixth sense. That night, in the double bed whose sheets smelled of semen, he had asked Liat, “Am I a cynic?”

She had laughed, and he was hurt.

“That bad?”

“No,” she said, and kissed the tip of his nose, “no more than anybody else.”

And he truly wasn’t a cynic. No more than anybody else. Dr Eitan Green didn’t grow more – or less – tired of his patients than doctors in the department usually did. And yet he had been banished beyond the sea to a land of dust and sand, driven from a hospital in the bustling heart of the country to the desolate concrete wilderness of Soroka. “You idiot,” he whispered to himself as he struggled to revive the wheezing air conditioner in his office, “You naive idiot.” Because what else but idiocy would push a medical prodigy into a head-on confrontation with his boss? What else but sheer idiocy would lead him to insist that he was right when his boss had warned him to watch his step? What new forms of idiocy had the medical prodigy invented when he banged on the desk in a pale imitation of assertiveness and said, “It’s bribery, Zakai, and I’m going to blow the whistle on it.” And when he went to the hospital director and told him about the envelopes of money and unscheduled emergency operations that followed, had he really been stupid enough to believe the expression of surprise in his eyes?

And worst of all, he would do it again. All of it. In fact, he had almost given a repeat performance when he found out, two weeks later, that the only action the hospital director had taken was to arrange his transfer.

“I’m going to the media,” he had told Liat.“I’ll make so much noise that they won’t be able to bury it.”

“Fine,” she said, “right after we pay for Yaheli’s nursery school, the car and the apartment.”

Later, she’d say that it was his decision to make, that she would support him in whatever path he chose. But he remembered how the brown of her eyes had turned instantly from honey to hard chestnut, remembered how she had tossed and turned in bed that entire night, struggling in her dreams with horrors whose nature he could guess at. The next morning he went into the hospital director’s office and agreed to the transfer.

And three months later, here he was, in the whitewashed house in Omer. Yaheli and Itamar played on the grass. Liat considered where to hang the pictures. And he stood and looked at the bottle of whiskey the department members had given him as a farewell present, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

In the end, he had taken the bottle to the hospital with him and put it on the shelf among his diplomas. After all, like them, it symbolized something. An era that had come to an end, a lesson he had learned. If he was lucky enough to enjoy a few moments of peace between patients, he took the bottle off the shelf and studied it, dwelling on the card. “To Eitan, Good Luck.” The words seemed to mock him. He knew Prof. Zakai’s handwriting very well, small Braille scribbles which, during Eitan’s time in medical school, had brought students to tears. “Could you explain what you wrote?” “I prefer that you, young lady, learn to read.” “But it’s not clear.” “Science, ladies and gentlemen, is an unclear subject.” And everyone would bend their heads and write, storing up their anger for particularly venomous end-of-year feedback forms, which never changed anything. The following year, Prof. Zakai returned to stand in the lecture hall, his handwriting on the blackboard a series of indecipherable pigeon droppings. The only person happy to see him was Eitan. Slowly, painstakingly, he learned to puzzle out Prof. Zakai’s scrawl, but the professor’s character remained an enigma to him

“To Eitan, Good Luck.” The card hung on the neck of the whiskey bottle in an eternal embrace that sickened Eitan. Several times he had contemplated tearing it up and throwing it into the waste basket, perhaps even ridding himself of the bottle altogether. But he always stopped himself at the last minute, concentrating on Prof. Zakai’s words exactly as he’d concentrated on solving a complicated equation when he was a schoolboy.

 

He was working too much that night, and he knew it. His muscles ached. The cups of coffee lost their effect after half an hour. Behind his hand, the yawns threatened to swallow up the entire waiting room. At eight o’clock he called to say goodnight to his kids, and he was so tired and irritable that he hurt Yaheli’s feelings. The boy asked him to make horse sounds and he said, “Not now” in a tone that frightened both of them. Then Itamar took over the conversation, asked how things were at work and whether he’d be home late, and Eitan had to remind himself that his perceptive older son wasn’t even eight yet. While speaking to Itamar, he heard Yaheli sniffing in the background, probably trying to keep his big brother from hearing that he was crying. After the conversation, Eitan was even more tired than before, and feeling very guilty.

He almost always felt guilty when he thought about his children. No matter what he did, it felt like too little. There was always a chance that it would be this particular conversation, in which he adamantly refused to make horse sounds, that Yaheli would remember years later. After all, it was exactly that kind of thing he himself remembered from the time he was Yaheli’s age – not all the hugs he’d received, but the ones he hadn’t. Like the time he burst into tears during a tour of his father’s lab at Haifa University and his mother simply stood there with all the other visitors and whispered that he should be ashamed of himself. Or perhaps she had actually hugged him later. Or taken a five-shekel note out of her wallet as a substitute for a hug and sent him to buy a popsicle as consolation. It didn’t matter. He didn’t remember that. Just as he didn’t remember all the times he’d jumped off the tree in the yard and the ground had received him gladly, but only the one time he’d landed on it with a crash and broken his leg.

Like all fathers, he knew that it was inevitable, that he was destined to disappoint his son. But like all fathers, he harbored a secret hope that perhaps not. Perhaps that wouldn’t happen with them. Perhaps he would manage to give Itamar and Yaheli exactly what they needed. Yes, children cry sometimes, but with him they would cry only when they really had to, because they had failed, not because he had.

He walked down the department corridor, under the frozen flames of the fluorescent lights, and tried to think about what was happening at home now. Itamar was in his room, lining up dinosaurs according to size. Yaheli had most likely calmed down by now. That child was like Liat, heated up quickly and cooled down just as fast. Not like Eitan, whose anger was like a Sabbath hotplate: you turn it on and don’t turn it off for two days. Yes, Yaheli had already calmed down and was sitting on the couch now watching March of the Penguins on TV for the thousandth time. Eitan knew that film by heart. The narrator’s jokes, the musical theme, even the order of the final credits. And he knew Yaheli’s reactions equally well: when he would laugh, when he would recite a favorite punchline along with the narrator, when he would peer at the screen from behind a pillow. The funny parts made him laugh every time, and the scary parts scared him every time, and that was strange, because how many times can you laugh at a joke you already know, and how scared can you be at the sight of a sea lion’s ambush if you already know for sure that in the end the penguin will outwit the sea lion and escape? And yet, the moment the sea lion appeared, Yaheli dived behind the pillow, where he observed from a distance what was happening to the penguin. And Eitan would watch him watching the penguin, wondering when he would finally tire of that video, wondering when children stop asking for the familiar all the time and begin to ask for something new.

On the other hand, how much fun and how comfortable it was to know already halfway through the film just how it was going to end. The dangerous storm at the 32nd minute became so much more bearable when you knew that it would die down at the 43rd minute. Not to mention the sea lions, the seagulls and all the other evil creatures that stared covetously at the egg laid by the penguin queen but never managed to get it. And when the sea lion’s ambush finally failed, as he knew it would, Yaheli would cheer, emerge from behind the pillow and say – Daddy, can I have some chocolate milk?

Of course you can. In the purple cup – he wouldn’t drink from any other. Three teaspoons of Chocolit powder, mix well so there are no lumps, remind Yaheli that if he drinks it now, there won’t be any chocolate milk later because it’s not healthy. Knowing that in two hours he’d wake up and ask for it again. And there was a good chance that he’d get it, because Liat couldn’t cope with that crying of his. He asked himself why he actually could. Was it because he was such a brilliant educator, such an authoritative and consistent father, or was it something else?

He had fallen in love with Itamar right after he was born. With Yaheli, it took time. He didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t the sort of thing you say about your children. About women, yes. For example: we’ve been dating for a month and I still haven’t fallen in love with her. But when it’s your child, you’re supposed to love him right then and there. Even if you don’t know him yet. With Itamar, it really was like that. Even before they washed him, before he saw his face clearly, he had already made room in his heart for him. Perhaps because during the weeks preceding the birth, all he did was make room for him. Room in the closet for his clothes, room in the cabinets for his toys, room on the shelves for his diapers. And when Itamar finally arrived, he slipped into that place as naturally as possible, settled in there and didn’t move.

Or at least that’s how it was for Eitan. It had been a bit more difficult for Liat. They agreed that it was because of the pain and the drop in her hormone levels, and that if she didn’t stop crying within ten days they would see a doctor. She stopped crying in less than ten days, but it took time for her to begin smiling. They didn’t talk about it because there was nothing to talk about, but they both knew that Eitan had loved Itamar immediately and Liat had joined him two weeks later. And that with Yaheli it had been the opposite. But the question always remained: did the parent who joined later, with a slight delay, catch up with the other parent’s love in a guilty, panting run? Did that parent really walk at the same pace now, or was he still lagging behind?

*

Six hours later, when they finally managed to stabilize the injured victims of a road accident in the Arava, he was able to take off his lab coat at last.

“You look wiped out,” the young nurse said. “How about sleeping here?”

Eitan was too tired to contemplate the hidden meaning that did or didn’t lie behind her words. He thanked her politely, washed his face and went out into the night air. With the very first step, he felt what nineteen hours of air conditioning had made him forget: oppressive, dusty desert heat. The gentle humming in the hospital corridors – a muted symphony of beeping monitors and pinging elevators – was abruptly replaced by Beersheba night sounds. The crickets were too hot to chirp. The alley cats were too dry to mew. Only the radio in an apartment across the street doggedly screeched a familiar pop song.

Through the hospital gate Eitan could see an empty parking lot, and he dared to hope that someone had stolen his SUV. Liat would be furious, of course. She’d start pulling strings, curse the Bedouins in her inimitable fashion. Then the insurance money would arrive and she’d demand that he buy a new one. But this time, he’d tell her no, the “no” he hadn’t had the courage to say then, when she’d insisted on getting him a special treat to celebrate his transfer. She’d said “treat”, not “compensation”, but they both knew it was the same thing. “We’ll plow through the dunes around Beersheba in it,” she’d said, “you’ll do a doctorate in all-terrain driving.” It sounded almost right when she said it, and during the first few days of packing up he still consoled himself with thoughts of sharp inclines and steep slopes. But when they arrived in Beersheba Liat became immersed in her new job, and Saturday SUV outings seemed further away than ever. At first, he’d still tried to persuade Sagi and Nir to join him, but after he left the hospital they spoke less and less, until the very idea of spending time together began to seem strange. The red SUV quickly grew accustomed to its shift from wild wolf to domesticated poodle, and apart from the slight growl it emitted when he accelerated suddenly on the way out of Omer, it was like any other standard suburban car. Eitan hated it more from week to week, and now – seeing it behind the guard’s booth – he could barely control his urge to kick the bumper.

When he opened the door, he was astonished to realize that he was wide awake. His last reserve of noradrenaline began to pump now from some forgotten shelf in his brain, sending a new, unexpected spurt of energy through his body. The full moon above him glowed with the whiteness of promise. When he started the SUV, the engine growled a question. Perhaps tonight?

He jerked the wheel to the right instead of the left and sped toward the hills south of the city. A week before the move, he had read on the Internet about a particularly challenging SUV track not far from Kibbutz Tlalim. At this hour, with the roads wide open, he’d be there in twenty minutes. He could hear the engine’s purr of pleasure as the speedometer crossed the 120-kilometer mark. For the first time in weeks, Eitan found himself smiling. The smile turned into actual happiness when, eighteen minutes later, he saw that the track’s reputation was well deserved. The enormous moon washed over the white ground and the SUV’s tires sped forward into the depths of the desert. Four hundred meters later, his brakes squealed to a stop. An extremely large porcupine stood on the road. Eitan was convinced it would run off, but the animal simply stood there and looked at him. It didn’t even bother to raise its quills. He had to tell Itamar about this. He hesitated for a moment, unable to decide if he should take out his phone and snap a picture, but he knew it would only detract from the story. The porcupine in front of him was less than a meter long, and the porcupine he’d describe to Itamar would be at least a meter and a half. This porcupine did not have raised quills, but that one would be shooting quills out in every direction. This porcupine wasn’t uttering a sound, but the one in his story would ask, “Excuse me, but do you happen to know what time it is?”

Imagining Itamar’s laughter, Eitan smiled to himself. Who knows, maybe he’d repeat the story to his classmates. But Eitan knew that it would take much more than a desert porcupine to break down the glass wall between his son and the other children. He never understood where Itamar’s introversion had come from. And although Liat always said there was no point in digging around for reasons, that’s what made him happy, Eitan was not at all sure it was the boy’s choice. It wasn’t that he was shunned. He had one friend, Nitai. But that was it. (Which is fine, Liat kept saying – some children like to be part of groups and others feel better with more intimate relationships.)

Perhaps she was right. There were no signs that Itamar was suffering in school. And yet he worried. Because he, Eitan, was not like that. Because when all the boys had gone to hang out in the square on Friday nights, he’d been there. Not in the center of things, but there. His son wasn’t. And even though it shouldn’t have mattered to him, it did.

Outside the SUV, the porcupine turned its back and continued on its way. Slow, haughty, its quills tagging along behind it. He watched as it vanished among the dark rocks. The road in front of him was once again empty, inviting. Suddenly, he felt as if that stop had only clarified for him how hungry he was for movement. How much he wanted to surge forward. But hold on, a good sprint needs a soundtrack. He took a minute trying to choose between Janis Joplin and Pink Floyd, but decided that, for this sort of nocturnal journey, nothing could compare to Joplin’s tormented screams. And she really did scream, at full volume, and the engine screamed as well, and shortly after that even Eitan joined in, screaming exuberantly on the wild descent, screaming defiantly as he took the steep rise, screaming with total abandon as he careened around the curve near the hill. Then he was quiet (Janis Joplin continued; that woman’s vocal cords were incredible) and kept driving, occasionally joining her when she sounded particularly lonely. It had been years since he had enjoyed himself so much alone, with no other eyes to share the wonder with him, with no one else to echo his joy. He glanced at the enormous, majestic moon through the rearview mirror.

He was thinking that the moon was the most beautiful he had ever seen when he hit the man. For the first moment after he hit him, he was still thinking about the moon, and then he suddenly stopped, like a candle that had been blown out.

At first, all he could think about was how much he needed to defecate. An urgent, total need that he could just barely contain. It was as if his stomach had plummeted all at once and in another second he’d lose control and everything would pour out of him. And then all at once his body disconnected. His brain shifted to automatic pilot. He no longer felt the need to defecate. He no longer wondered if he would ever reach his next breath.

He was Eritrean. Or Sudanese. Or God knows what. A man of about thirty, maybe forty; he could never determine with any certainty how old those people were. At the end of the safari in Kenya, he had given the driver a tip. Flattered by the man’s gratitude, he’d added a few bland questions with an amiability which, at the time, he believed was sincere. He had asked the man what his name was, how many children he had and how old he was. His name was Husu, he had three children, and he was the same age as Eitan, though he looked a decade older. Those people were born old and died young, and the in-between wasn’t much to speak of. When he asked him what his exact date of birth was, he learned that they had been born a day apart. It didn’t mean anything, but still… Now here was this man, thirty or maybe forty years old, lying on the road, his head crushed.

Janis Joplin begged him to take another little piece of her heart, but he knelt on the ground and put his head close to the Eritrean’s cracked lips. A doctor at Soroka who finished work at two in the morning after a nineteen-hour shift. Instead of driving home to sleep, he decided to check out his SUV’s performance. In the dark. At high speed. How many years do you get for something like that? Eitan looked imploringly at the hole in the man’s head, but the two sides of the split skull showed no intention of miraculously uniting. At the end of their fifth-year examination, Prof. Zakai had asked them what to do when a patient comes to them with an open skull. Pens were chewed, whispers were exchanged, and still, everyone failed. “Your problem is that you assume that something can be done,” Prof. Zakai had said when the objections began to pile up on his desk. “When the calvarium is crushed and there is extensive neurosurgical damage, the only thing you can do is have a cup of coffee.” And yet Eitan took the man’s pulse, which was thready, examined his capillary filling, which was remarkably slow, and also checked with ludicrous precaution that his airways were unimpeded. Damn it, he couldn’t just sit there and watch the man die.

“Twenty minutes,” Zakai’s voice reverberated serenely. “Not a minute longer. Unless you’ve begun to believe in miracles.” Eitan examined the Eritrean’s head wound again. It would take much more than a miracle to recover the gray matter that showed under the hair: naked, exposed neurons that glowed in the moonlight. Blood trickled from the man’s ears, bright and watery because of the cerebrospinal fluid, which had already begun to leak from the cracked skull. None the less, Eitan stood up, hurried to the SUV, returned with a first-aid kit and had already opened the package of bandages when he suddenly froze. What was the point? This man was going to die.

And when it finally appeared, the explicit word, he suddenly felt his internal organs become sheathed in ice. A layer of white frost spread from his liver to his stomach, from his stomach to his intestines. Unfolded, the small intestine is eight meters long. More than three times a person’s height. Its diameter is almost three centimeters, but the size is not uniform at all ages. The small intestine is divided into the duodenum, the jejunum and the ileum. Eitan drew a strange sense of tranquility from that knowledge, frozen white tranquility. He lingered on the small intestine. He examined it. Its internal surface, for example, is enlarged by finger-like projections called villi. Those structures increase the interior surface area of the small intestine by 500 times to about 250 square meters. Incredible. Simply incredible. Now he truly appreciated his studies. A wall in the shape of knowledge that stood between him and that filthy verb, “to die”. This man was going to die.

You have to call the hospital, he said to himself, and have them send an ambulance. Prepare an operating room. Get hold of Prof. Tal.

Call the police.

Because that’s what they’d do. That’s what they always do when they receive a report of a road accident. The fact that the doctor attending to the patient happened to be the driver who hit him wouldn’t change anything. They’d call the police and the police would come and he would explain to them that it had been dark. That he hadn’t been able to see anything. That there had been no reason to expect that someone would be walking on the side of the road at that hour. Liat would help him. He wasn’t married to a senior detective in the Israeli police for no reason. She’d explain to them and they would understand. They would have to understand. True, he was driving way over the speed limit, and yes, he hadn’t slept for more than twenty hours, but the irresponsible party here was the Eritrean; Eitan had no reason to assume that anyone would be here.

And did the Eritrean have a reason to expect anyone to be here?

Liat’s voice was cold and matter-of-fact. He’d already heard her speak that way, but always to others. To the cleaner who had finally admitted that she had stolen her pearl earrings, to the guy who renovated their house and confessed that he had inflated his prices. How much he had loved to imagine her at work, giving the suspect sitting opposite her a distant, amused look, a languid lioness toying with her prey for a bit before pouncing on it. But now he saw her in front of him, her brown eyes fixed on the man lying on the ground, then rising to stare at him.

He looked at the Eritrean again. Blood flowed from his head, staining his shirt collar. If he was lucky, the judge would give him only a few months. But he wouldn’t be able to do surgery anymore. That was for certain. No one would hire a doctor convicted of manslaughter. And then there was the media and Yaheli and Itamar and Liat and his mother and the people he happened to meet on the street.

And the Eritrean kept bleeding as if he were doing it deliberately.

Suddenly he knew he had to go. Now. He couldn’t save this man. At least he’d try to save himself.

The possibility stood in the night air, clear and simple: get into the SUV and get the hell out of here. Eitan contemplated that possibility from a distance, tensely following its movements. Now it leaped up and grasped him, all of him, the choking icy fear that screamed in his ears – get into the SUV. Now.

But right then, the Eritrean opened his eyes. Eitan froze once again. The air grew thinner and his tongue felt like sandpaper in his mouth. At his feet, right beside the shoes with the orthopaedic inner soles he’d bought in the duty-free shop, the Eritrean whose skull had been crushed lay with wide open eyes.

He didn’t look at Eitan, merely lay there and stared at the sky, stared at it with such concentration that Eitan couldn’t help stealing an upward glance at the spot the Eritrean was focused on. Perhaps there might actually be something there. There was nothing there. Only the spectacular moon in a glittering indigo sky, as if someone had Photoshopped them. When he returned his gaze to the ground, the Eritrean’s eyes were closed, his breathing calm. Eitan’s breathing, however, was loud and rapid, and his entire body shook. How could he drive away if the man’s eyes were still open, still liable to open. On the other hand, open eyes meant nothing, while the cerebrospinal fluid now leaking not only from his ears, but from his nose too, foaming from his mouth, meant a great deal. The Eritrean’s limbs were stiff and shrunken, the decorticate posture. Even if he had wanted to, there was not even a sliver of life to fight for. Truly.

And truly, the Eritrean appeared to be reconciled to his situation with that well-known African complaisance, because the fact was that he was kind enough to keep his eyes shut and breathe quietly with a grimace on his face that wasn’t very different from a smile. Eitan looked at him again before going to the SUV. Now he was sure that the Eritrean was smiling at him, his closed eyes signaling his approval.

2

HE SLEPT WELL THAT NIGHT. More than well – he slept really well. A deep, solid sleep that continued even after the sun rose. After the children got out of bed. After Liat had shouted at them to get a move on. He slept when Yaheli screamed about a toy that frustrated him. He slept when Itamar turned on the TV at full volume. He slept when the front door closed and the car carrying his entire family drove away. He slept and slept and slept, and then he slept some more, until the moment came when he could absolutely sleep no more – and then he woke up.

The midday sun shone through the shutters and danced on the bedroom walls. A bird sang outside. A small, brave spider dared to defy Liat’s obsessive cleanliness and labored vigorously to spin a web in the corner above the bed. Eitan watched the spider for a while before the blessed fog of sleep faded, leaving one simple truth: last night he had run a man over and driven away. Every cell of his body woke to that clear, unalterable reality. He had run a man over. He had run a man over and driven away. He kept repeating the words to himself, trying to connect the vowels and the consonants into something that made sense. But the more he said them, the more they fell apart in his mind until they totally lost substance. Now he spoke the words aloud, allowing the sounds to take shape in the room. I ran a man over. I ran a man over and drove away. The more he repeated the words, first in a whisper and then more loudly, the more unreal, even stupid, they sounded, as if he were talking about something he’d read in the newspapers or seen in a bad TV show. Nor did the spider or the bird help him: you would expect birds to refrain from singing at the window of someone who had run a man over and driven away, and spiders to refuse to build their homes over the bed of such a person. Even the sun – instead of shifting its angle – persisted in shining through the shutters and painting truly breathtaking splashes of light on the wall.

Suddenly, Eitan simply had to study them carefully. Spots of light on a white wall at the same angle at the same time every morning. Because that which hath been is that which shall be, and today, like yesterday, the earth would carry on rotating on its axis with the same slow, sleepy movement that rocked Eitan as if he were a baby. If the earth suddenly rotated in the other direction, Eitan would stumble and fall.

Though he was already completely awake, he continued to lie in bed, unmoving. How could he dare to stand on his feet after running a man over and driving away? The ground would surely fall away beneath him.

Or would it, a cold, dark, smiling voice asked, would it fall away? After all, it continued to support Prof. Zakai’s feet quite nicely.

That thought caused Eitan to sit up in bed and place one bare foot on the marble floor. And then the other. He took three steps toward the kitchen before a quick flash of the dead man’s face stopped him in his tracks. It was one thing to tell yourself over and over again that you ran a man over and drove away, but something else to see that man’s face right in front of you. With great effort he pushed the image to the back of his mind and kept walking. In vain. Before he reached the door, the image, sharper than ever, struck him again: the Eritrean’s eyes opened to slits, the pupils frozen in an eternal expression of incredulity. This time he pushed the image away more forcefully. Get back there. Get back to the same dark room where all those other images are stored – the corpses they had dissected in their first year of medical school, the hideous photographs of amputated, scorched, acid-burned limbs that the trauma lecturer had shown them with such obvious pleasure in his third year, delighting in every groan of revulsion coming from the class. “You have weak stomachs,” she’d say when one of the students mumbled a pathetic excuse and ran out into the fresh air for a few minutes, “and people with weak stomachs don’t become doctors.” The memory of Prof. Reinhart’s stern face helped to ease his agitation somewhat.

Now he reached the kitchen. So clean. As if it had never been the scene of cornflakes wars, as if coffee had never been spilled in it. How did Liat manage to keep this house looking like a display in a furniture shop?

He looked through the large window at the SUV in the driveway. Not a scratch on it. Not for no reason had the car salesman called it “a Mercedes tank”. Nevertheless, he had examined it for a long time yesterday, kneeling in front of the bumper, straining his eyes in the pale glow of the flashlight of his cell phone. It wasn’t possible to hit a person that way without leaving a sign. A dent in the tin, a kink in the bumper, some indication that something had indeed occurred. Proof that it had not only driven through air, but had hit a body, a mass, a cause of friction. But the SUV stood in the driveway intact and unchanged, and Eitan turned away from the window and filled the kettle with a shaking hand.

Flashes of the dead man’s face assailed him again as he made himself coffee, but they were less intense. The smell of lemon-scented detergent that filled the air of the kitchen and the almost sterile gleam of the work counter pushed away images of the previous night the way doormen in Tel Aviv restaurants block the way of beggars trying to get inside. Eitan ran a grateful hand over the stainless-steel surface. Three months ago, when Liat had insisted on buying it, he’d objected to the extravagance. So much money for a kitchen he was hoping to leave behind in less than two years, when his forced exile to the heart of the desert would come to an end. But Liat had already made up her mind and he was forced to consent, though he reserved the right to look angrily at the needless expense every time he went into the kitchen. Now he looked at it gratefully because there was nothing like a shiny stainless-steel surface to obliterate dark images. He was convinced that nothing bad would happen to him between the ultra-modern dishwasher and the top-quality cooker hood. True, he almost dropped the coffee mug when he picked it up because the memory of the dead man’s hand attacked him mercilessly, but he managed to push it away and steady the mug before it could fall. And even if it did fall – that wasn’t a problem. He would take a rag and clean the marble floor. Because it had to be acknowledged – cups would fall in the days to come. There would be moments of distraction. Nightmares, perhaps. But he would pick up the pieces, clean the floor and get on with his life. He would have to get on with his life. Even if the coffee tasted stale and bitter in his mouth, even if his hands were sweating despite the desert chill, even if he had to restrain himself from falling to the floor weeping with guilt, he would keep walking, the mug of coffee in his hand, to the armchair in the living room. The pain would have to pass in the end. It would take two weeks or a month or five years, but would pass in the end. The new stimulus was causing the neurons in his brain to transmit electrical signals with enormous speed. But as time passed, the pace of the transmission would slow down until it stopped completely. Habituation. The gradual loss of sensitivity. “You walk into a room,” Prof. Zakai had told them, “and there’s a terrible smell of garbage. You think you’re going to vomit. The molecules of the smell stimulate the olfactory epithelium, which sends urgent signals to the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. Your neurons scream for help. But you know what happens after a few minutes? They stop. They get tired of screaming. And suddenly someone else comes into the room and says, ‘It stinks here,’ and you have no idea what he’s talking about.”

Sitting in the armchair, the mug of coffee in his hand almost empty, Eitan looked at the dark residue at the bottom of the mug. His first argument with Liat had taken place three weeks after they met when she told him that her grandmother read coffee grounds.

 

You mean, she thinks she reads coffee grounds.

No, Liat had insisted, she really reads coffee grounds. She looks at them and knows what’s going to happen.

Like the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow? That we’re all going to die eventually?

No, you idiot, things that not everyone knows. Let’s say – if the husband of the woman who drank the coffee is cheating on her. Or whether she’ll be able to get pregnant.

Liat, how the hell can coffee beans picked by an eight-year-old kid in Brazil and sold for an outrageous price in the supermarket predict whether some stupid woman in the godforsaken town of Or Akiva will get pregnant?

She told him he was being condescending, and that was true. She told him that there was nothing wrong with Or Akiva, and that too was apparently true. She told him that guys who put down the grandmothers of girls they were dating would quickly stoop to putting down the girls themselves, which sounded fine but wasn’t necessarily true. Finally she told him that they probably shouldn’t see each other again, and that frightened him so much that the next day he appeared at her house and suggested that they go immediately to visit her grandmother in Or Akiva so she could read his coffee grounds. Liat’s grandmother welcomed them warmly, made excellent, if somewhat tepid coffee, took a quick look at the grounds and said that they were going to get married.

That’s what you see in the grounds? he asked with all the awe he could muster.

No, Liat’s grandmother laughed, it’s what I see in your eyes. You never read people’s coffee grounds, you read their eyes, their body language, the way they ask the question. But if you tell them that, they’ll feel naked, which is not pleasant for anyone and also not polite, so instead, you read their coffee grounds. Do you understand, child?

Now he tilted the mug to the side and examined the coffee residue. Black and thick, like yesterday. It seemed that, like the birds, the spiders and the sunbeams, the coffee grounds saw no reason to deviate from their routine just because yesterday he’d run somebody over and driven away. Habituation. The Eritrean’s face grew dimmer in his mind, the way the images of a bad dream fade gradually as the day progresses, until all that remains is a general feeling of unease. Unease is not pain, he told himself. People live entire lives with some measure or another of unease. Those words felt so right that he repeated them in his mind several more times, so focused on the liberating new insight that at first he didn’t hear the knock on the door.

 

The woman at the door was tall, thin and very beautiful, but Eitan didn’t notice any of those details. Two others captured his full attention: she was Eritrean and she was holding his wallet in her hand.

(And once again, he felt as if he had to empty his bowels, even more than he had the previous day. His stomach plummeted suddenly, pulling all his internal organs with it, and he knew clearly that this time he would not be able to control it. He’d run to the bathroom or relieve himself right there, on the threshold of the front door, in front of this woman.)

But he remained where he was, barely breathing, and looked at her as she showed him the wallet.

This is yours, she said in Hebrew.

“Yes,” Eitan said. “It’s mine.”

And immediately regretted it because, who knew, perhaps he could persuade her that the wallet didn’t belong to him at all, but rather to someone else – a twin brother, let’s say – who had flown somewhere yesterday, Canada for example, or Japan, somewhere far away. Perhaps he could simply ignore her and close the door, or threaten to call the immigration police. Possible courses of action filled his head like colorful soap bubbles, bursting at the first touch of reality. To fall on his knees and beg her forgiveness. To pretend he had no idea what she was talking about. To accuse of her of being crazy. To claim that the man was already dead when he hit him. After all, he should know. He was a doctor.

The woman did not take her eyes off him. The hysterical voices in his head were replaced by a different, icy voice: she’d been there.

And as if to confirm those words, the woman looked at the whitewashed house in Omer and said, Your house is lovely.

“Thank you.”

The yard is lovely too.

The woman looked at the toy car he’d bought for Yaheli. On Saturday he’d raced it back and forth along the length of the lawn, shouting and cheering, until another toy caught his eye and the car was left upside-down on the pathway to the house. Now the red plastic wheels were turned to the sky like damning evidence.

“What do you want?”

I want to talk.

 

He could hear the Dor family’s Mazda sliding into its parking spot behind the stone wall. The slamming of the doors as Anat Dor and her children got out of the car. The tired reprimands as they walked toward the house. Thank God for the stone wall, for the wonderful suburban alienation that had managed to seep into communities like Omer. If not for that alienation, he’d be standing across from Anat Dor’s curious look now because she would certainly rather forget her own troubles for a brief moment to wonder why her doctor neighbor was standing in his yard with a black woman. But the consolation of the stone wall was dwarfed by the knowledge that Anat Dor was merely the first robin to herald not spring, but the arrival of an entire flock of cars making its way toward the street at that very moment. And in each one sat a tiny chick asking what there was for lunch. In another few minutes – two? three? – Liat and his chicks would arrive. This woman had to leave.

*

“Not now,” he told her, “I can’t talk now.”

So when?

“Tonight. Let’s talk tonight.”

Here?

Was that a glimmer of sarcasm he saw in her eyes as she pointed to the pine chairs on the porch?

“No,” he said, “not here.”

At the deserted garage outside of Tlalim. Turn right 200 meters after the turnoff to the access road. I’ll be there at ten.

And suddenly he knew for certain that she had planned this encounter down to the smallest detail. The arrival a moment before the children were picked up at nursery school. The nerve-wracking lingering at the front door. The cold emanating from her eyes. For the first time since he had opened the door and found her standing there, he actually looked at her: tall, thin and very beautiful. And she, as if she understood that only now was he actually seeing her, nodded and said:

I am Sirkit.

He didn’t bother to answer. She knew his name. If she hadn’t known it, she wouldn’t be standing on his lawn, an ecological marvel of reclaimed water irrigation, telling him where to be at ten that night.

“I’ll be there,” he said, then turned around and went inside. His mug of coffee was where he’d left it, on the table beside the armchair. The stainless-steel kitchen gleamed as usual. The sun continued to dance on the wall in truly breathtaking splashes of light.

3

LESS THAN TWENTY MINUTES after the woman left and he went back into the house, he felt he had never met her at all. He studied the yard through the half-open shutters: the rosemary bush, the manicured lawn, Yaheli’s upside-down toy car. It was difficult to believe that less than half an hour ago a woman named Sirkit had stood right there on the path. Her existence grew even fainter when Liat and the children came home. Itamar and Yaheli ran around the yard in what might have been either a game or a life-and-death struggle. The clatter of their feet easily blotted out the memory of the Eritrean woman, and he gave her no more thought than someone sitting on a bus would give to the person who had occupied the seat before him. An hour and a half later, he could almost persuade himself that the visit had never taken place at all.