Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (6 page)

I wouldn’t have believed that my faith in humanity would revive just when I’d lost it and decided that human life had less substance than a bubble of air… nor that when I’d lost it amidst the bright lights of the city with all its glittering buildings, aeroplanes and advanced weaponry, I’d recover it in a benighted cave… and at the hands of a sick old countryman who owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in, rather than among professors of medicine and intellectuals.

It was a little smile from dry, cracked lips but it contained the meaning of life… that meaning which is lost to people in the crowd, which science loses sight of amid the clamour of its apparatus, and which reason is incapable of explaining. That meaning was love — a love of life and all its pleasure and pain, in sickness and in health, the known and unknown parts of it, the beginnings and the endings. Love. My heart pounded at the new word, a tremor of longing went through me and a fire was kindled within me.

How could I go on living? I was at one and the same time an eager child with unspoilt, untried feelings and a qualified doctor with an old mind. Twenty-five years of my life had passed without my feeling what it was to be a woman. My heart hadn’t once beaten faster because of a man, nor had my lips tasted that wondrous thing known as a kiss. I hadn’t passed through the glowing heat of adolescence. My childhood had been wasted fighting against my mother, my brother and myself. Textbooks had consumed my adolescence and the dawn of my womanhood. And so here I was, a child of twenty-five wanting to play, run, fly and love.

I gathered together my few belongings and boarded the train which was to carry me out into the world and away from myself. I’d become acquainted with my self: I no longer needed to cling so strongly to it that I was cut off from life. Life, the essence of which I’d gathered from the earth like a pigeon picking up grain in its beak; life, which I’d begun to love with every cell of my being, body and soul, and which I felt an overwhelming desire to hold on to.

After all that had happened how could I shut myself away in dreary isolation? I had to go back; so I returned to my home, my family, my work and my patients. I opened my arms to life and embraced my mother, feeling for the first time that she was my mother. I embraced my father and understood what it meant to be a daughter, and embraced my brother and knew the feeling of brotherly love. Then I looked around me, searching for something that was still missing, someone who wasn’t there. Who was it? My depths cried out for him, my soul called to him. Who could he be?

A violent longing swept through me, my body and soul — the yearning of a soul thirsty for love and set free by reason, and of a virginal body newly let out of its iron cell. I wondered what an encounter between a man and a woman was like. The nights grew longer as the fantasies and illusions gathered round my bed. Long powerful arms encircled my waist. A man’s face came closer to mine. He had eyes like my father’s and a mouth like my cousin’s, but he wasn’t either of them. Who was he? The chatter of the girls at school floated to the surface of my memory. I sighed and moaned and had the fantasies of an adolescent girl; it was as if I’d never dissected a man’s body or stripped it naked and been repelled by its ugliness.

Had I forgotten… ? I don’t know… But I had forgotten... And now the mystery and wonder of the living human body was restored for me… Perhaps my womanhood had emerged defiantly from its prison, dismantling on its way all the memories stored in my mind. Perhaps the stormy yearnings of my soul had uprooted the ugly images of the body from my imagination, or the violent trembling of my heart had dislodged the knowledge of medical science from my head.

Dawn no longer broke. The warmth of my bed turned into a blazing furnace and the morning light could do nothing to scatter the dreams of the night.

The telephone shrilled next to my bed and I half opened an eye to look at the time. It was two in the morning. Sluggishly I picked up the receiver and an urgent voice said to me: ‘Doctor! My mother’s very ill. Please come and save her.’

I jumped out of the warm bed, hurriedly pulled on my coat, snatched up the little case that stood ready for emergency calls and drove at speed to the patient’s house.

I listened to her fading heartbeat, the sound of a heart weakened through old age, and from which life was about to slip away. I took the stethoscope away from my ears and looked about me, registering the presence of a tall man standing near me with a look of desperate anxiety in his eyes: ‘Is she very bad, doctor?’

I went out of the room without replying. He followed me into the living-room and asked me again impatiently, ‘Is it very serious?’

‘No,’ I said slowly, ‘it’s nothing serious. She’s just dying.’

He stared at me in horror and amazement and said, ‘Dying? No! That’s impossible!’

He buried his head in his hands, flung himself into a nearby chair and began to cry with a stifled, shuddering sound. I waited till his fit of sobbing had passed and he lifted his eyes to look at me, then I said to him, ‘Everybody has to die.’

‘But she’s my mother, doctor.’

‘Old age has caught up with her. It’s quite normal for her to die now.’

He wiped his eyes and I reached out my hand to shake his, saying, ‘Let her stay in her own room so that she can end her life in peace.’

Tears welled up in his eyes again and I opened the door and went out.

I was sitting in my office with a glass of warm aniseed in my hand — the duty nurse had made it for me as the last patient left the surgery. My tired fingers curled around the glass seeking comfort and relaxation in its warmth. I brought my weary face close to the steam rising from it, inhaling deeply, for I liked the smell of aniseed more than its taste. At that moment the nurse came in and announced that there was a man who wanted to see me.

The man came in. I recognized him and stood up to shake his hand. As he sat down opposite, I noticed that he was wearing a black tie. I offered him my condolences. ‘Thank you, doctor,’ he replied, looking down.

He remained with his head bowed and I picked up my glass of aniseed and took a long drink from it. He raised his eyes and looked curiously at the glass.

‘Would you like a glass of aniseed?’ I asked him.

He looked at me in surprise: ‘Aniseed?’

I laughed at his surprise, and he smiled and said, ‘I came to thank you.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘You came out in the middle of the night.’

‘That’s a doctor’s job.’

‘You told me the truth.’

‘I wouldn’t have kept it from you in this case.’

‘It’s a very painful thing.’

I didn’t answer and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you find it painful to look at a person who’s dying?’

‘It’s the most bearable form of pain that I come across.’

‘What’s harder to accept than death?’

‘An incurable illness or severe physical deformity or mental deficiency.’

‘Have you had to see all these things?’

‘They’re part of every doctor’s life.’

‘Forgive me, doctor. I don’t deal with vulnerable human beings in my work. I handle solid rock.’

‘Are you an engineer?’

‘Yes.’

We were both silent for a moment, then I said to him, ‘But have you never known pain and suffering in your life?’

‘That’s the first time I’ve seen someone dying and the first time I’ve cried since I was a tiny child.’

This amazed me. Life was hard, much harder than rock! ‘So you haven’t experienced life yet,’ I said.

He looked me in the eye and seemed about to say something but then decided against it. I thought I saw a strange expression in his eyes: an expression of weakness and need mixed with childishness and naivety, which made me eager to do something for him. He stood up and stretched out his hand saying, ‘Thanks again, doctor.’

He turned and made for the door but didn’t go out immediately. He looked back at me, apparently struggling to get some words out. Then I heard him say, ‘I’d like to talk to you again some time, but... ’

He stopped then began again, not looking anywhere near me: ‘I know you don’t have much spare time.’

I didn’t answer and, still averting his eyes from me, he stammered out, ‘Can I see you again?’

I stared into his face: there was a look in his eyes which caught my attention, but his expression didn’t convince me; the only death he had seen was his mother’s, and he was unfamiliar with illness and pain. Would he be able to satisfy this old experienced mind or excite the interest of this greedy and totally unrestrained child?

But he was the first man my eyes had rested on, and I said, ‘You can see me again.’

I sat beside him on one of the big stones forming the base of the pyramid, straining my eyes to the distant horizon and watching the sun’s red disc as it crept out from behind thick grey clouds.

‘What are you thinking about, doctor?’ I heard him saying.

‘Why do you always call me doctor?’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘It reminds me of my patients calling me when they’re in pain.’

‘It’s a magical title. I feel proud to use it when I’m talking to you. You’re the first woman doctor I’ve known.’

‘Really?’

‘When I sent for you to come and see my mother, I didn’t think I was talking to the doctor when I heard your voice on the phone. And when I saw you coming into my mother’s room I couldn’t believe you were the doctor.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’d imagined that a woman doctor would be ugly or old or both, with thick glasses and a bent back from so much reading and hard work. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be a beautiful woman.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s difficult for a woman to combine being beautiful with being clever.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then I’ll tell you: because from early childhood a girl is brought up to believe that she’s a body and nothing more, so her body becomes her main concern for the rest of her life, and she doesn’t realize that she’s got a mind as well which must be looked after and encouraged to develop.’

‘Why do they do that?’

‘Because men, who hold the key positions in life, don’t want women to be anything more than beautiful, stupid animals whose legs they can lie between when they feel like it. Men don’t want women as equals or partners; they want them to be subordinate and to serve them.’