Waking Lions Read online

  For Yoav

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  HE’S THINKING THAT THE MOON 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?�
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  “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 g
entlemen, 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.