Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Randomness, that seductive little whore, dances among the ward’s 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.

We have to wait for something to be destroyed in order to understand what had previously functioned properly.

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.

“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.”

“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 that guys who put down the grandmothers of girls they were dating would quickly stoop to putting down the girls themselves,

“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?”

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.

As Ravit continued to be amazed at the amount, Eitan was growing anxious that it might not be enough. The Eritrean woman might ask for 200,000. Or 300,000. Or even half a million. What was the price of silence? What was the price of a man’s life?

He had never lied to Liat like that, and it both relieved and frightened him that it was so easy.

Pain and consolation sound the same in every language.

Then, as if reading his mind, she smiled and said, Not that you really have a choice.

And though tonight is not the slightest bit different from all other nights—their bodies are intertwined in precisely the same way—something is nevertheless registered in the flutter of eyelids. Nose to neck, hand to hand, leg to thigh, stomach to back, but this time with an urgency, a desire to flee—the man who got into bed is a man running away.

The dead man was coiled around his neck and would not release him.

“I just don’t understand how a person can let someone die that way, like a dog.”

will be clean and peaceful. Because you must have one place that is free of questions and doubts.

But it happened to you. Not to someone else. To you.

But a family sitting at the table is actually made up of loose crumbs of moments. No one knows what the others were ashamed or proud of today. What they wanted, what they hated. They don’t talk about it. They eat schnitzel and mashed potatoes.

IT’S DIFFICULT TO hate for such a long, continuous period of time.

They came to the garage wrapped in their hatred, removed it for a few hours, and then rewrapped themselves in it before they went out into the night air.

There is nothing more loathsome than the whistle of a person you hate.

It returned and flowed between them without their speaking of it, without their paying it the attention that would destroy it. Not smiling, not moving closer. Simply because it was difficult to hate for such a long, continuous period of time.

A person gets off a boat and begins to walk, and a few meters later, he forgets the sea. On land, there are paths and mountains and sometimes rivers, and the person drinks from the rivers and doesn’t remember the sea, doesn’t remember the salt.

Just as you label a carton FRAGILE because of the rattling sound coming from inside but you don’t open it, don’t try to find out what it contains.

The sand didn’t know where it had been yesterday and didn’t know where it would be tomorrow. If that weren’t so, if the sand remembered all the places it had been, it would become so heavy that no wind would be able to carry it off to anywhere.

THE TASTE OF the tea she’d given him was still in his mouth as he drove toward the garage three days later.

She looked at him, her smile even broader than before. (How much she reminded him now of the wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood.” Who knew what lay in this woman’s stomach.)

anyone who saw truly frightened people could spot someone who was not ruled by fear.

“That’s his way, Tani, and he’s okay with it. Just be careful that you don’t feel so bad for him that he starts to feel bad too.”

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.

Then that fleeting sense of kinship with her was gone again, and he realized once again how unlike him she was. The distance between a hungry person and a sated one is greater than the distance between here and the moon.

despite changes in shape and size, their internal organs were the same: jealousy, greed, desire, affection, guilt, anger, affront. He could not imagine even one day in the lives of those people in Eritrea, but he could picture clearly how they would respond to trust that had been betrayed.

They wanted to be the sort of couple that gets up in the morning and spontaneously jumps into the car to go to see a flood. Instead, they’re the sort of couple that drives silently in their car and turns on the radio so that someone else will talk.

People tended to be much more courteous and cooperative after induction with propofol.

It would be his fault. Because he hadn’t taken good enough care of his family, and families are fragile things.

she didn’t close her ears when death came knocking at the door.

It was about how unbearably effortless it had been for him to switch their roles. She was waiting and he was deciding; he was the master of time, and she was the one sitting on the sidelines, scrubbing a sheet that would never be clean, waiting.

The world is full of goat paths of which no one speaks.

If there was an answer, the sort composed of ten words or ten thousand, the sort that began with “because” and ended with “that’s why,” the sort in which things began at point A and therefore had to reach point B—if there was such an answer, Eitan Green didn’t know it.

When had he stopped looking wonderingly at homeless people and begun to avert his gaze at any cost? When was the moment he had stopped being saddened at the sight of a person sprawled in the middle of the street and had begun to quicken his steps?

Perhaps the question of why he was coming back was merely the little sister of that bigger question: why hadn’t he stopped that night? For weeks he’d avoided it but couldn’t help circling around it. And perhaps there was no reason why he hadn’t stopped. Not because that man was black and he was white. Not because of Liat. Not because of the kids. Perhaps he’d never know why. And the only thing left for him to do was to keep asking. That was his atonement.

a broken sphinx is still a sphinx.

people found riddles only when they were looking for them, and the real sphinx might have rolled around on its back like a kitten if only someone had dared to come close and pet it.)

He didn’t want her to be a saint. All he wanted was for her to be human (and it never occurred to him that there are times when being human is a privilege).

“Awe,” “respect,” and “submission” were not words Eitan concerned himself with because he took their existence for granted. Just as people pay no attention to the miraculous flow of electricity through the wires of their houses until the flow stops.

The roses reached to the sky, the roots clutched the ground, and the package lay quietly, as packages do, indifferent to whether it would lie there for eternity or be pulled out to have its insides cut to pieces.

This was a different sort of mathematics: not the geometry of flat surfaces but the geometry of gaping pits.