Waking Lions Read online

  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.