Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Without language, without the ability to exchange a single sentence the way people do—one speaks, the other listens, and vice versa—without words, only flesh remained. Stinking. Rotting. With ulcers, excretions, inflammations, scars. Perhaps this was how a veterinarian felt.

Good night. I’m lying to you. In the narrow gap between our lips lies an entire world.

Children like David the Homo turn other children into monsters. Even if you swore to yourself that you wouldn’t do anything to him, even if you wanted to feel sorry for him, the moment always came when you couldn’t hold back anymore. You began hating him for being such a nothing.

What defined him more—a full life of careful driving, of medical studies, of carrying an old lady’s groceries from the supermarket, or that single moment?

And yes, it mattered that he’d been an Eritrean. Because they all looked alike to him. Because he didn’t know them. Because people from another planet are not really people. And yes, that sounded terrible, but he wasn’t the only one who felt that way. He was only the one who had happened to run one of them over.

But when it came right down to it, she wouldn’t go to a swimming pool full of Arabs even if she ranted and raved when there was a sign at the entrance saying NO ARABS ALLOWED. That was the whole point: to get angry when someone discriminated against Arabs or when there was a racially motivated clash at the Sachne spring, knowing that she herself would never go to the Sachne spring because she spent her vacation at the elegant Mizpe Hayamim spa. There were no Arabs or loud, low-class types there, only people in lovely white robes smelling of lavender.

That one battered Eritrean had called her an angel and one grief-stricken Bedouin had called her a devil, and that both of them were wrong, had to be wrong. Because neither angels nor devils exist. Of that Eitan was convinced. People exist. The woman lying on the mattress only a few meters from him, that woman was a person. She slept. She ate. She urinated. She defecated.

“When we go to sleep,” he’d said many times, “how do we know that things in the world don’t start to move? The tree in the yard, or the mailbox—how do we know they’re still there?”