Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

aside the garment of light and tenderness with which people cloak their loved ones, revealing the beloved body as it was, naked and exposed, flesh and blood and bone.

no one ever knows another person completely.

to sleep here in the symphony of inhaling and exhaling, what it would be like to wake

turning private shames into public

There were no good or bad people, only strong and weak ones.

she was an expert in hiding from life.

And he needed her fear. He had to have it in order to know who he was.

knew that if she wanted, she could tell her doctor to come, and he would do so immediately. And if she told him to treat

The silence of the heart between one beat and the next, that was what her life had seemed like to her.

you will never know how much of that power is yours and how much is just chance.

pride, that invisible

organ men need in order to exist,

her lioness’s instincts knew there was no greater temptation, no hunt more tantalizing, than the ambush of your loved ones.

You had to remember—not everything should be examined.

It was a complicated business, seeing.

remoteness that grew out of a lack of confidence and remoteness that stemmed from condescension,

Be careful you don’t get mixed up with the looks. Don’t be too sure that you’re looking outside when all you’re actually seeing is what’s inside you.

Only one line can be drawn between two points, but an endless number of lies and deceptions can be drawn between two people.

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.

to become totally involved in other people’s secrets and not ponder her own.

The terror of mortification was greater than the pain in his groin.

The distance between a hungry person and a sated one is greater than the distance between here and the moon.

A person could easily bear the idea that his lungs functioned the same way as another person’s. But not the possibility that his love, or his loss, was identical to his neighbor’s.

Ridicule can be a fantastic bonding substance when properly applied.

Because in order to say what you want, you have to believe that someone is listening.

The lie, like a wool sweater that was itchy at first, had become something he was accustomed to wearing.

It can’t be that we’re just a group of people closed up together between cement walls, under artificial lighting, from morning until night.

It isn’t like the screams of people whose pain comes only from the realm of death.

The pain of life sounds different.

It lowers the morale in the battle against death.

Ordinary people don’t know them. Real people, the sort who are registered in institutions and whom other real people know, the sort who don’t know anything about the blue baby or his mother. And so the blue baby and his mother can drop out of the world without anyone noticing.

Perhaps they’d thought that the endless jabbering of the broadcasters, the journalists, the interviewed people who had suddenly heard a boom—all those words somehow protected them. An invisible wall of situation

He simply had that elusive quality that makes the world nod.

Eitan wouldn’t allow his children to be turned into a memorial for other children.

the clear, unmistakable direction of life emptying out

Waiting was something she knew how to do very well.

That chemical transformation of sadness into anger relieves the body and quiets the soul.

how useful it was to divide the world into good guys and bad guys.)

Bad adults were once bad youngsters, and even before that, they were children who’d had something bad done to them.

that roads lead somewhere and do not just happen.

so a moment of choice is required. A crossroads is required, and a decision.

nothing more dreadful than an object that outlives its owner.

He needed things to be put in order.

To emigrate is to leave one place for another, with the place you’ve left tied to your ankle with steel chains. If it’s difficult for a person to emigrate, it’s only because it’s difficult to walk in the world when an entire country is shackled to your ankle, dragging behind you wherever you go.

“from a distance” had a name: respect.

His brain was filled with pleasant emptiness.

he didn’t think even once about what he was doing. If he had, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. He would have sat there thinking, considering, debating, deliberating, agonizing, philosophizing, wavering—and meanwhile, the people

he could not shake the fear that if he extended a hand to the world, it would remain empty.

The women in the yard were not naked, but the identical conditions and the overcrowded space stripped them of their personalities and made them a single entity—Eritrean women.

the land of the dead children,