Open Heart (27 page)

The quick-thinking secretary, who judging by her bare fingers and the time she had on her hands was presumably single, brought in a tray with three cups of tea and slices of a cream cake left over from some private party in the administrative wing. Lazar’s wife thanked her in her usual enthusiastic and
exaggerated
style. “You’ve saved my life, I’m completely parched. All afternoon I’ve been running around with my mother making arrangements for an old-age home.”

“Your mother’s going into an old-age home?” the secretary asked in surprise. “Why? I met her in a café a month ago and she looked wonderful.”

“Yes,” said Dori complacently, as if she were personally
responsible
for her mother’s appearance, “she’s just fine, she
manages
by herself, but when we were in India she heard that a place had become available in an old-age home she had put her name down for a few years ago. We’d almost forgotten about it,
because
nobody seems to die there, and even though she’s
independent
and she could go on living alone in her apartment, she’s afraid to lose her place there. What can I do? We have to respect their wishes.” She turned her face to me, as if surprised by my silent presence, and in the almost intimate tone which had come into being among the three of us in the last days of the trip, she repeated the question I had not yet answered: “Well, what have you been up to?” When she saw that I was groping for an
answer
, as if I weren’t sure what she had in mind, she went on to ask companionably, “Have you recovered from our trip yet?” Although I was gratified by her use of the word “our,” I was still unable to come up with a graceful reply, and I stammered
awkwardly
, “In what sense?”

“In what sense?” she repeated, perplexed by my pedantic
question
. “I don’t know … You looked a little sad and depressed at the end.”

“Depressed?” I whispered, completely taken aback, and
somewhat
hurt by the fact that my secret love had transmitted not warmth but depression. But I was nevertheless pleased that she
took an interest in my moods. “Sad?” I smiled at her with faint irony. “Why sad?” Her eyes immediately looked around for her husband, to have her feelings confirmed. But he had lost patience with this idle chatter, and after clearing the papers and files off his desk and snapping his briefcase shut, he stood up and
ostentatiously
switched off his desk lamp and sent a look of open hostility in the direction of his wife, who was still eating her slice of cake. “We thought you were sad,” continued Dori, “because of losing your place in Hishin’s department.” Lazar, who was already putting on his short khaki raincoat and briskly pulling a funny fur hat onto his head, interrupted confidently, “Don’t worry, we’ve found him a temporary job in Levine’s
department
.”

“The internal medicine department?” said his wife
enthusiastically
, and turned to me: “Well, are you pleased?”

“Yes,” Lazar answered for me, “why shouldn’t he be pleased? You heard for yourself what Hishin said about him all the time: he’s a born internist, and he’ll be able to do a good job there.” And when he saw that his wife was still slowly sipping her tea, he said impatiently, “Come on, Dori, you’ve had enough, we have to get home.”

But she went on sipping the last drops of tea in her cup, as if intent on stressing her independence and showing that she could be satisfied with herself and cope very well with the world around her, as long as she wasn’t left alone. Finally she stood up slowly, draped the long black cape negligently around her
shoulders
, took a blue scarf out of her pocket and then a sheet of paper, which she held out to the secretary, who appeared to
hesitate
between her natural loyalty to Lazar and her admiration for his wife. And Dori gave her a friendly smile and asked, “Do you think I could leave this medical report for my mother’s old-age home with you for Professor Levine to fill in? I’ll phone him this evening and explain.”

“It will have to wait,” Lazar intervened, with what sounded like a note of malicious satisfaction in his voice. “Levine isn’t here. He’s sick.”

“Levine’s sick again?” cried his wife, who judging by the faint alarm in her voice apparently knew the secret of his mysterious
disease. “So what will we do? We have to return the
questionnaire
the day after tomorrow.”

“Nothing terrible will happen if your mother goes to the Health Service doctor for once,” said Lazar firmly. “She pays her dues every month and she never goes near the place.”

“Out of the question!” His wife dismissed this possibility
angrily
, turning to the secretary for support. “How can she go by herself to the Health Service? And who will she see there? She hasn’t seen a doctor there for years.” But Lazar seemed too tired after a hard day’s work to deal with this problem, and he grabbed his wife’s umbrella, collected the empty cups and put them on the tray, quickly cramming the remains of his wife’s cream cake into his mouth as he did so, and hurried toward the door, where I was waiting for an opportunity to take my leave. “Perhaps some other doctor in the internal medicine department could do it instead of Professor Levine,” suggested the secretary carefully. “I can’t ask anyone to do it,” snapped Lazar. “This isn’t my private hospital, and the doctors aren’t my servants. Levine is a friend of mine, and he looks after her mother out of friendship. Nothing terrible will happen,” he said, turning to his wife again, still in a faintly spiteful tone, “if your mother goes to the Health Service for once. It won’t kill her.” And he switched off the light in the room, even though the two women were still in it; and I, having already advanced into the illuminated
secretaries
’ office, looked back and saw the heavy shadow on the wall, trapped between the shadows of the foliage of the two big plants, and once again my heart was struck with bafflement at this
inexplicable
attraction, and still I hesitated, waiting for the right
moment
to say good-bye without making it final. They were leaving through the brightly lit office cubicles, stepping between
computers
and gray-covered typewriters, and I waited politely for her to pass me. To my surprise, I smelled the sharp, sweet scent of the perfume she had bought at the airport when we arrived at New Delhi, where she had asked our opinion of it. Now she was
listening
to the secretary telling her some long, complicated,
personal
story which Lazar had apparently already heard during the course of the day, and I went on trailing behind them—a young doctor whose position in the hospital may have deteriorated
recently
, but whose participation in the trip to India nevertheless
gave him the status of a kind of distant member of the family, if not in the eyes of the devoted secretary—to whom it had not even occurred, for example, to propose me as a substitute for Dr. Levine, to spare that nice grandmother the misery of going to the Health Service the next day in the pouring rain and waiting for hours in line in order to coax a medical certificate out of some rigid bureaucrat of a doctor. But as we were standing in the corridor, about to say good-bye, my heart suddenly pounded with joy at the thought that I didn’t need any favors from the secretary: I could offer my services myself, and thus wind a flimsy thread—for I was well aware of the flimsiness of all these threads—around this impossible woman.

And so, just before parting from them in the dimly lit main
corridor,
I stopped and in simple, straightforward words offered them my help in filling out the medical report required by the old people’s home. I saw Dori’s eyes shine, although she said
nothing
, waiting for Lazar to respond first. He seemed to hesitate, unwilling to owe me yet another favor, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You really mean it? That’s a wonderful idea. And you’ll be free tomorrow, too.” But he
immediately
added a condition to the wonderful idea, that this time I would accept a proper fee for my services, not like the trip to India, which in the end I had given them as a present. At this his wife was very surprised. “How come we didn’t pay him?” She turned to her husband indignantly. “He refused to take it,” cried Lazar angrily. “Go on, you tell her yourself.”

“That’s not right,” she went on, working herself up to the kind of tantrum I knew she was capable of throwing. “That’s not right,” she repeated. “We can’t possibly let it all come off his vacation.”

“It hasn’t come off his vacation,” replied Lazar in
embarrassment
. “It’s been left as if he were at the hospital all those two weeks. For the time being. Until we decide what to do.”

“But that’s impossible,” she scolded her husband, “and it’s illegal too.” All of a sudden, amused and excited by their
agitated
exchange, I leaned toward her, and in the yellowish light of the corridor I looked straight through her glasses into her brown
eyes, around which her automatic smile had etched many little lines. “Madame Solicitor,” I said in a new, humorous, familiar tone, which no doubt surprised them as well as me, “what’s
illegal
here? Friendship? Here”—I took hold of the slender hand of the secretary, who seemed delighted by the spirit of levity which had seized hold of me, and reproached the two Lazars—“she can bear witness before any committee of inquiry that not only didn’t I obtain any benefits from the director or his wife, but on the contrary, they haven’t renewed my residency in the surgical
department,
and they’re barely allowing me to be a temporary
substitute
in the internal medicine department.” I took a little
prescription
pad out of my pocket and jotted down my telephone number, in case they had lost it or even thrown it away, and took Dori’s mother’s address and phone number from them, and we arranged that the next day, early in the morning, we would set a time for my visit. “I’ll try to be there with you,” she promised. “Highly desirable,” I said promptly. And they thanked me warmly once more, their arms already groping for each other next to the revolving door, from which they emerged together, wrapped up like a pair of clumsy bears, into the thick, heavy rain flooding the illuminated plaza.

A new thread had unexpectedly been tied, I thought with
satisfaction
, to reinforce the Indian connection, which had weakened and would soon have snapped. And now that the scalpel had been forcibly removed from my hand and I had been transformed into an internist against my will, I could become their family doctor and treat their sore throats, blood pressure, hot flashes, mysterious stomachaches, perhaps even give them advice on questions of weight, and at the same time feed the fever of this strange, impossible love in my fantasies until it died down of its own accord, as I was sure it would. But as soon as she
disappeared
from view, short and awkward, trying to hold her
umbrella
over her husband as he hurried to their car, I felt the strange yearning again. Was what I felt for her, in the last
analysis
, simple lust? Yes, I felt lust, but it wasn’t simple and direct, for I had no desire to undress her in my fantasies, and no need to either, because for a long time I had had an intimate, vague, but nevertheless satisfying sense of her body, which had been
acquired
not only in the enforced closeness of the trip itself but
even before that, in the big bedroom of their apartment in Tel Aviv, when she insisted on my inoculating her, and I took in at a glance her large but shapely breasts, scattered with unusually large moles; and it was these brown moles, rather than the breasts themselves, that I would repeatedly conjure up before me when I was seized with the desire to be engulfed by her
innermost
being.

I turned back in the direction of the surgical ward to say my final farewells to whoever happened to be there, to collect my few belongings, and to throw my coat into the laundry bag, even though it had my name embroidered on its pocket. And again I began to wonder what I was going to do about my growing attraction to this woman, which was beginning to make me look ridiculous even in my own eyes. Did I really want to conquer her in my fantasies? Perhaps all I wanted from her was the right inspiration, to guide me in identifying the young woman I wanted to fall in love with, the one my parents were dying for me to marry. Perhaps all I really wanted was a certain closeness, which would give me a more accurate idea of the young woman she had once been; to sketch by means of the big beauty spots scattered over her arms and shoulders, as if they were signposts, the figure that had once been slimmer and younger, borne on long legs in its kittenish walk. Then I would have a more
accurate
picture of the type of woman I wanted to spend my life with. My parents thought that my dedication to my work and my
devotion
to my patients robbed me of my erotic powers. But this was not the case. Even after twenty-four hours of a grueling shift at the hospital, when I came home exhausted, I could ejaculate quantities of semen in the hot shower which I frequently took half asleep. The problem wasn’t my erotic powers but my
inability
to recognize the girls I should have fallen in love with. Because when I came across old girlfriends with whom I had had pleasant but noncommittal relations in the past, and in the
meantime
they had married or moved somewhere else—and I
discovered
that since we had last met they had grown not only more beautiful but more intelligent and mature—the pang of loss was especially painful, since I knew that I hadn’t missed my chance through arrogance or emotional sterility but through a kind of lethargy, not physical but spiritual, whose source was apparently
my increasing ability not only to satisfy myself in solitude but also to enjoy it. And here I had encountered a woman who was my absolute opposite; whose inability to stay at home by herself, without her husband by her side, was not only ridiculous and annoying but wildly attractive.