Waking Lions

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Pushkin Press, £12.99

"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 … dust on advertising boards; dust on bus stops; dust on the bougainvillaea straggling along the edge of the sidewalk, faint with thirst." The beginning of Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s second novel, Waking Lions, is a none-too-subtle allusion to the opening of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath. Steinbeck’s struggling farming families flee the dustbowl of Oklahoma in search of the green – if not entirely pleasant – land of California; the Eritrean migrants in Gundar-Goshen’s story move from dustbowl to dustbowl: from a country of war and starvation to the lonely desert lands of Israel.

The central character in Waking Lions, however, is not a desperate immigrant. Doctor Eitan Green is an experienced Israeli neurosurgeon who lives in the city of Beersheba. After a particularly tiring shift at Soroka hospital he climbs into his SUV and drives out to Kibbutz Tlalim, a race track in the desert. It is out here, trying to achieve a cathartic release by driving around at top speed, that Eitan knocks down and kills an Eritrean man. At home, Eitan is coming to terms with what he has done when a tall and elegant black woman called Sirkit knocks on his door. She is the wife of the dead man, and is holding Eitan’s wallet in her hand.

Sirkit, it transpires, is one of the best things about Waking Lions. Beautiful, clever and sharp, she is a kind of down and out femme fatale who knows that only the ruthless survive when you live in a criminal underworld.

The price Eitan has to pay for Sirkit’s silence is to become a doctor to the endless procession of illegal immigrants resident and passing through Tlalim. In a garage near the track where he killed Sirkit’s husband, Eitan is forced into running a nightly clinic. His attempts to hide his crime and after-hours activities from his family are made all the more problematic when his police inspector wife, Liat, is tasked with finding out who killed Sirkit’s husband. As the narrator remarks: "You never understand how complex reality is until you have to find a replacement for it." The plot turns into a labyrinth that winds through the racial and class divides in Israeli society, and Gundar-Goshen tells this suspenseful story with a delving and fresh style that unearths the inner lives of her characters.

For all the drama, it is in the minutiae of Gundar-Goshen’s prose that the most pleasure is to be found. As an African immigrant, Sirkit is invisible to all who look at her. But in the restaurant where she illegally works, a different sort of oppression is encountered. The clientele do see her, but only as an object: "They stared at her when she walked and imagined her when she was gone, but at no point did they ever see her. They merely piled their desire on her, the way jugs of water are tied on a donkey’s back." The metaphor perfectly conjures up the utilitarian way that Eritrean women are treated, both by mainstream society, and by the Bedouins who exploit them and their labour. Eitan seems to be one of the few who understands Sirkit in a holistic way, mind and body, and soon the enmity between them turns into something close to love.

Gundar-Goshen’s debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, also explored the dangers of love and how it can change a person into something they thought they weren’t. The protagonist, Yaacov Markovitch, marries a woman to save her from Nazi-dominated Europe, but denies her a divorce in the hope that one day she will love him back. One Night demonstrated a wonderful tragi-comic sensibility and a sly sense of irony. Waking Lions leans more towards pathos, although there are comic interludes: the minor character Victor Balulo, for example, who seems to conduct his life in a respectable manner, then stands on street corners and screams expletives into the dusty air. The premise of this new novel – a privileged white male becomes enmeshed in a world he has spent his whole life working to avoid – is less original than Gundar-Goshen’s debut, but this is of little importance once one has entered her imaginary world. Moreover, Waking Lions shows us that there’s more mystery in who we think we are than in the narrative of any crime thriller.