Open Heart (28 page)

The next morning I woke up at dawn, even though I was
completely
at liberty to sleep late, in a way I had not experienced since graduating from high school. Not only didn’t I have to go to work, I didn’t have any work to go to, at least not until
Professor
Levine recovered and conducted his medical clarification with me. And so I forced myself to rest, and decided not to shave, and not even to take off my pajamas, and to stay in bed until she phoned. At first I didn’t care if the phone call didn’t come for a while, because that would prolong the pleasure of waiting, and also because I had immersed myself again in
A
Brief
History of Time;
although I had nearly given up on it in the last days in India, where the atmosphere was not at all suited to scientific books of this nature, I had decided that I had to pit myself against a few of its utterly obscure chapters again. After all, it was a popular book, or so it said on the cover at least, and even though the study of medicine is only on the fringes of pure
science
, it was inconceivable that a science graduate from the
Hebrew
University High School should be incapable of
understanding
the mysteries of the big bang and the black holes of the expanding universe. I thus snuggled down under my blanket and abandoned myself to the pleasures of cosmic freedom, which were particularly enjoyable in view of the heavy rain steadily pouring down on the world outside, and hardly noticed that the phone call was taking longer and longer to come. It was nearly three o’clock before I concluded that she had decided to dispense with my services and that the flimsy line I had cast over her had been snapped even before I had given it a single tug.
Nevertheless,
I refrained from leaving the apartment, even to buy a carton of milk and fresh cream cheese. Nor did I go down to the ground floor to pay the landlady the money I owed her for cleaning the stairs. Instead I turned up the heat in the room and took off my pajama top.

As dusk descended, I began to have various interesting thoughts of my own about the fate of the universe, whose
future
—when
it would contract again into a particle with zero
radius
and infinite density, at the opposite pole to the big bang—concerned Hawking, although he seemed unable to construct a clear and convincing theory about it. Still the telephone did not ring, but I refused to call her and demean myself in front of them, as if I needed this connection more than they did. I switched on the hot water heater in the bathroom, but I hesitated to take a shower in case the phone rang and I failed to hear it. And when I saw that the day was drawing to a close and it would soon be night, I decided to forgo my daily shave. It had been a day of complete physical rest and clear spiritual pleasure, and now, as I sat down to eat the supper I had prepared, I felt that I had finally succeeded in overcoming the matter of Hawking’s black holes, both logically and emotionally, and I contemplated his elderly child’s face as it looked out from the cover of his book, full of trust in the ability of the intelligent layman to understand him. Only as night fell, after the nine o’clock news on television, when sadness crept into my soul, did I decide to phone the old granny directly and introduce myself.

Not only did she immediately recognize my name, but it turned out that she too had been waiting all day, dressed and ready in her apartment, because Lazar’s wife had incorrectly
assumed
that I had taken her address and phone number in order to get in touch with the old woman directly and arrange a time that suited everybody for the visit. And even though they had spoken to each other during the course of the day, Lazar’s wife had prevented her from calling me, on the grounds that I was a very reliable person, and if I didn’t call it must be because I was unable to make it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I repeated several times to the old lady, who firmly rejected any manifestation of guilt on my part and was only angry with her daughter for misleading us both. “Never mind that, when can we meet?” I interrupted her apologies enthusiastically, as if we were talking about a romantic date rather than a doctor’s visit. “Whenever you like.” The old lady laughed happily. “I haven’t got any other rendezvous.”

“Tomorrow morning?” I suggested immediately. “Yes,
tomorrow
morning’s fine, or tomorrow afternoon, whenever it suits you—even this evening, if you like.”

“This evening?” I repeated in surprise. “But it’s already night.”

“Not yet,” the old lady protested. “The news has just finished, and there are still plenty of programs to see.” I hesitated for a moment, and then agreed. “Just give me time to get organized,” I requested. “It’s twenty to ten now. I’ll be at your place by half past ten.”

“You’ll find me here even if you come later,” she reassured me jokingly, “and in the meantime I’ll phone Dorit. Maybe she’ll want to come too.”

“Yes, I think that would be a very good idea,” I said, and went quickly to take a shower.

In spite of my haste, I arrived later than ten-thirty; while I had spent the day in bed reading about the expanding universe, a number of the central arteries of Tel Aviv had turned into real lakes, in whose murky yellow waters I had no desire to dip my motorcycle or wet the instrument bag my parents had given me in honor of my graduation from medical school. Accordingly, I chained the Honda to the post of a taxi rank and took a cab to Grizim Street, one of the little streets in the north of the city which despite their proximity to busy main roads are themselves quiet, with pretty, comfortable houses. Lazar’s wife had not yet arrived. “But she’s coming,” promised her mother, who was quite elderly but, unlike Dori, very slim. She was wearing a
tailored
gray wool suit, and warm slippers on her feet. The centrally heated house was scrupulously neat, although the furniture was old. On a low table next to the couch, a tea service and dishes of candies and nuts were waiting, perhaps since morning. “We won’t wait for her,” I announced, and I requested the medical questionnaire required by the old-age home, which was packed with questions and demands. I sat myself down at the table and began asking her about herself and her childhood diseases, in order to fill in the first, more trivial items. Then I hurried to remove my sphygmomanometer from my bag, but before I could wrap the cuff around her frail arm the old lady admitted, or perhaps simply recalled, that she sometimes had peaks of high blood pressure, reaching levels of over 200—the systolic—and 110—the diastolic. “We’ll soon see,” I said, and measured her blood pressure a number of times, one after the other. It changed every time I measured it, but the average was a little high. “Are you excited now?” I asked gently. She blushed, thought for a minute, said, “Perhaps,” and smiled with a faint echo of her
daughter’s enigmatic smile. I asked her to show me the pills
prescribed
by Professor Levine, which she didn’t like taking
regularly
because they made her sleepy and depressed. Indeed, they included a powerful sedative used in the emergency room. “Maybe I’ll give you something gentler instead,” I suggested, “but in the meantime you must take it regularly. Even a half or a quarter of a tablet a day is sufficient—the main thing is the
regularity
.” I stood up and went to the kitchen and fetched a big knife to show her how easily the tablet could be divided into four. As I was returning to the living room a key turned in the front door, which opened to admit Lazar’s wife wrapped in her cape, her hair wet from the rain, wearing the black velvet
jumpsuit
which I remembered from my second visit to their house. She was also wearing clunky white running shoes. She was pale and not made up, and when she saw the knife in my hand she raised her finger threateningly and said in a mock-serious tone, “I hope you’re not about to operate on my mother. I don’t want any more misunderstandings between us.”

I stayed there until after midnight. We spoke about aches and pains, illnesses and eating habits. I checked the old lady’s
medicine
chest and recommended a few changes, which I wrote down on the prescription pad my parents had once had printed for me, with their Jerusalem address under my name. Then I asked her to take off her white silk blouse so that I could auscultate her lungs and heart with my stethoscope. Dori helped me clear the
cushions
off the sofa and settle her mother comfortably on it so that I could examine the abdominal organs. Her skin was very withered, but washed with scented soap, and at a superficial glance her body looked more like her granddaughter’s body than her daughter’s. The map of her beauty spots was completely
different
. Dori stood next to me, looking at my hands palpating her mother’s stomach. Was she too remembering the dim chamber in the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? I wanted to ask her, but I restrained myself. Finally I completed my examination and sat down to fill in the questionnaire with scrupulous care. In general the grandmother’s health was fine, but it seemed to me that
Professor
Levine was keeping her on an excessively rigid medication regime. His approach was more appropriate to recent hospital cases than to ordinary patients who led normal lives. As a
consequence
she occasionally suffered from severe constipation. I
suggested 
ways of obtaining relief and reduced her medication. My long day of rest had made me exceptionally lucid and eloquent, and when midnight approached and my job was done, I agreed to have tea with the two women, who did not seem in a hurry, even though Lazar had already phoned his wife twice. Was he too incapable of staying at home by himself?

The night into which I now emerged was not the same night in which I had arrived. In the new clarity flowing from the
star-spangled
sky, diamond drops slid separately down the the
windshield
of Dori’s car. Dori drove me to the post where I had chained my motorbike, teasing me about the lake of yellow water that I been afraid to cross, which had in the meantime drained completely. “What do you need a motorcycle for in the first place?” For some reason this question seemed to me too
personal
, and I felt unable to give her a satisfactory reply. I
expressed
my admiration for her mother and asked her what she intended to do with the apartment. Would she sell it? “No,” she replied, driving slowly but with no consideration for the other drivers on the road, “in the beginning we’ll only rent it, so my mother can always go back there if the experiment with the
old-age
home doesn’t work out.”

“Have you found somebody to rent it yet?” I asked softly. “No.” She shook her head wearily. “So far we haven’t even thought about it.”

“The reason I ask,” I kept on, “is because I’m looking for an apartment.” She gave me a quick glance which seemed to hold a mild suspicion of hidden motives. “How much are you paying now?” she asked. I told her. “That’s not much,” she stated, with justice—the rent I paid was definitely low. Now she fixed her eyes on me. I noticed an incipient double chin blurring her
jaw-line
. “We’ll want more than that for my mother’s apartment,” she warned me. “I don’t care,” I said calmly, with my eyes
focused
on the road, as if I were the one driving the car, “not only because it would be nice to think of you as my landlady, but also, who knows, I might get married soon, and then there’d be
someone
to help me pay the rent.” And then I saw the smile disappear completely, for the first time, from her eyes, which widened as her face turned a little red in the headlights of an approaching
car. “You’re getting married?” she asked softly, as if marriage weren’t a possibility for me at all. “Not exactly, not yet,” I
replied
with a mysterious smile, full of love and sympathy for her. “I mean, there isn’t even a candidate yet, but I feel that she’s already marked, even if she isn’t yet aware of my existence.”

But in fact, how do marriages come about? Why should two separate creatures wish to tie themselves to each other with one chain, however slender and delicate? Is it the mystery—which in the dead of night smuggles a schoolgirl in a pale blue uniform with a badge pinned to her heart into the house, where she sits bowed over her books and workbooks at the kitchen table,
waiting
for an empty bed—is it the mystery which clouds their minds and ties them to each other, in order to turn itself into their subject, their willing slave, seeking to take responsibility for something that may prove too much for its powers?

Here they are, sailing serenely down the river while the hidden chain joining them underneath the water is slowly covered with rust, like a film. And even when they step onto the green land and begin combing methodically for invisible seeds and grubs, their free and natural gait still disguises the fixed distance
between
them, strictly maintained by the figure which has taken off its cracked metal-framed glasses and settled down with its eyes closed on a little mound of hay next to the river, exposing its weak chest to the warm spring sun.

Do they know how to fly too? And who will take care that in the air too they remain unseparated? The pair approaches us; a solemn creature thrusts a long, black, glistening neck toward us, and a one-eyed stare—whether it belongs to a male or a female, we will never know—pierces us. And before the answer we await is given to us, a beak as big and strong as a sword stabs the weak chest which the mystery has abandoned to the warm spring sun, and four great gray wings are opened and stretched as far as they will go, and with one mighty flap they fly high into the sky, to tear whatever held them together to tatters.

I raced back home, cleaving the clear night air with the roar of my motorcycle, which as always was infected by the excitement inside me; I had thrown this woman another thread, which if it indeed lassoed her would not easily be undone. If I were a tenant, the connection between us would no longer depend on
occasional
medical matters or chance encounters in the hospital, nor would it depend on the wishes or the presence of Lazar; it would be based on a clear legal contract, which she herself would
probably
draw up, and would include not only payments, promissory notes, and deposits, but also a regular correspondence, municipal taxes, broken boilers, leaking pipes, and perhaps even complaints by neighbors, if I decided to throw a party for my friends, for example. In short, a new and independent bond, which would override the memories of the trip to India and its weakening aftermath, and for the sake of a bond like this it would be worth paying a higher rent and doing night shifts at the MADA First Aid Station, as I’d done in my student days, to make ends meet. After all, I would have more time now, for the enthusiasm and devotion that had tied me to Hishin and his department would not be necessary in the internal medicine department, if indeed Professor Levine agreed to take me on after he recovered from his mysterious disease and we resolved whatever issues lingered between us over the blood transfusion.

But would she want to rent me the apartment after what I had said? If she was thinking about that sentence now, it must be causing her a lot of confusion, and I doubted if she would tell Lazar, who was probably waiting up in bed. It was hard to
imagine
that after she explained why she was so late and described the thorough medical examination I had given her mother, she would add with a mysterious smile, “Guess what, I already have a tenant for Mother’s apartment.” Even if there were no secrets between them, not even concerning something as obscure and ambiguous as my parting words, it was inconceivable that Lazar would have remained under the blanket, looking out from the sleepy slits of his eyes. No, he would sit up, rumpling the
bedclothes
still further, as I had seen him do on the first night in New Delhi when I had peeped into their room, and exclaim,
“Really? He wants that apartment? How come? He really likes it?” imagining instead that all I really wanted was to keep up the connection with him, hoping he could influence Hishin to change his mind. Lazar probably thought that I considered him all-
powerful
in the hospital, whereas I knew that even if he could do something, he would never interfere in professional
appointments
, precisely to save his clout for more important things. Then she would undo her bun, loosen her tresses, take off her glasses and put them on the bedside table, and stick her head through the neck of the nightgown spotted with sprigs of pale yellow flowers. She’d sit down to rub cream into her long naked legs and massage her bare feet, utterly rejecting her husband’s interpretation in her heart, because she would have already felt that it was she I meant, only she, and in the midst of the
astonishment
flooding her, perhaps a little wave of pity for me would well up too, as if now she understood that something had upset my balance during the trip we took to India together. Therefore, she’d decide to keep her counsel and not to tell her husband anything about what had passed between us, but to let him go on lying under the blanket, the tired slits of his eyes turning into two little sparks, and she’d prick up her ears to listen to Einat, who was still dragging out the last of her hepatitis and who had now awakened and gone into the kitchen. Then she’d slip in next to her husband, tickle him a little, and say, “Wait, wait, don’t go to sleep yet, give me a hug, warm me up,” and she’d put two cold little feet onto his warm thighs.

But I was pleased with myself and with the first clear sign of the emotion that I had succeeded in conveying to this woman. Although I knew it was all hopeless and absurd—and even if it had a chance, it wouldn’t lead anywhere—I still refused to crush my love with my own hands but wanted this woman, who had appeared after long years of emotional desolation, of
lovelessness
, to crush it herself, with the same charm with which she crushed those long cigarettes of hers, which Lazar regarded with hostility and sometimes with outright protest. Therefore I said to myself, You have to rent that apartment, come what may. And since I found it difficult to go to sleep anyway after my day of deep rest, and the view from my window showed clearly that the storm was finally over, I could not resist putting on my leather coat and helmet and riding at a leisurely pace back to the street
and the building where I already saw myself as a tenant. In the dark I inspected the neighborhood and the shops, and figured out whether I would be able to park the Honda under the building’s pillars. I was pleased by everything I saw, including the short distance from the apartment to the sea, which I covered in a few minutes as I drove right down to the beach, where I stood for a long time opposite the waves breaking enthusiastically on the shore, still faithful to the storm which had disappeared without a trace.

Now a period of uncertainty began. In the personnel
department
of the hospital I was registered as an employee on vacation, but in actual fact I was up in the air, waiting for Professor Levine to recover from an illness whose nature suddenly seemed suspect. The secretary of the department and also the nurses put me off with vague replies on the telephone, until I decided to go to the hospital myself and have lunch in the staff cafeteria in order to bump into someone from internal medicine who would be able to shed some light on the situation. At first I thought of dropping into the surgical ward and retrieving the coat with my name embroidered on it before it disappeared, as personal possessions had a way of disappearing in the hospital. But at the last minute I changed my mind, because I didn’t want to bump into Hishin or any of the other doctors, who would ask me questions about my unclear future. So I entered the cafeteria without my white coat, wearing my black leather jacket and holding my crash helmet in my hand. As soon as I walked in I saw Hishin sitting over the remains of his meal with other doctors and nurses from the
department
, smoking, arguing, and gesticulating. I tried to keep out of sight and took my tray to the opposite corner, where I looked for a familiar face from the internal medicine department. But I couldn’t see any internists I knew. I sat down at a little table that was still covered with what was left of someone else’s meal, and for the first time I found myself feeling faintly nauseated by the hospital smell rising from the food in front of me. The cafeteria, which I had always regarded as a pleasant refuge, now seemed to me, after the quiet days I had spent in my apartment, noisy and ugly. I left most of the food on my plate, and slowly ate the pink pudding which I had always enjoyed. Suddenly a hand came down on my shoulder, and even before turning my head I knew by the lightness of its touch that it belonged to Hishin. He was
standing over me with his entire team, even the old anesthetist Dr. Nakash, all in the green uniforms of the operating room. They looked pleased with themselves, as if they had just
successfully
concluded a complicated operation. “What’s the matter with you? Are you boycotting us?” he asked gently, bending down and looking at me with pitying, sympathetic eyes. And before I could reply, he shook his head sadly and said, “Don’t be angry with everyone because of me. They’re not to blame.” Now I realized that it had been a mistake to ignore them and sit by myself. “And you are to blame?” I decided to adopt a tone of indignant protest and honest surprise. “You’re quite wrong. I’ve got no complaints. The trip to India turned out to be fantastic. Why should I be angry with you when I know that you’ve got my best interests at heart?” I looked straight into his eyes. He was taken aback by my words; in spite of the seriousness and
sincerity
of my tone, he was sure that they hid a subtle sarcasm he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He looked around at his team, trying to read my intention on their faces, but they all looked away, as embarrassed as he was. Then he apparently decided to take my words at face value, and placed his hand lightly on my shoulder again, nodded his head, and took off with the rest of them, except for the anesthetist, who wanted to talk to me. Dr. Nakash was a man of about sixty-five, thin and bony, whose white hair, clustered around his bald pate, becomingly contrasted the darkness of his complexion. In India I had seen quite a few people who reminded me of Nakash, which gave me a feeling of sympathic closeness with him. Hishin respected him and
preferred
to work with him, even though he was not the most senior of the anesthetists. “Nakash doesn’t always understand what’s going on in the operation,” Hishin would say behind his back, “but he’s always alert, even in ten-hour operations. And that’s the most important thing. Because the patient abandons himself not to the hands of his surgeon but to the hands of his
anesthetist
.”

Now Nakash asked me when I was starting work in internal medicine. I told him that I was waiting for Professor Levine to recover. “Isn’t he out of there yet?” said Nakash in surprise. “Out of where?” I asked, and Nakash revealed with complete naturalness the secret that up to now everyone had succeeded in keeping from me: “They clean his head out,” he said in his
direct
,
simple way, “and he comes out fresh and new, until he gets depressed and commits himself again. What can he do? His
patients
depress him, and he can’t cut them open like Hishin does.” After that he asked me if I was interested in having work as his assistant in operations at a private hospital. Lately they had been very strict about the anesthetist having an assistant. The pay was strictly by the hour, without all the extras and under-the-counter payments, but the fee was high, tax-free, and unambiguous. “But I have no training as an anesthetist,” I said, surprised. Nakash insisted, though, that the art of anesthesiology was not beyond my understanding; the technical side was simple and could be quickly learned, and the main thing was not to abandon the
patient
, to think of his soul and not only of his breathing.

While the surgeon and his team concentrate on a small part of the patient, he explained, only the anesthetist is thinking all the time of the patient as a whole, not as a collection of parts. The anesthetist is the real internist, no matter how much the surgeon pokes around in the patient’s innermost organs. “And you,” Nakash added, concluding his little speech, which surprised me by its eloquence, “want to be an internist.”

“Want? Not exactly,” I said with a bitter smile. “I haven’t got a choice.”

“I thought you were being sincere when you admitted that Hishin made the right decision. Believe me, Benjy, I’ve been through a lot of surgeons in my time. Who knows them as I do? And I’m telling you, I’ve seen you at work, and it’s not for you. Your scalpel hesitates, because it thinks too much. Not because you’re inexperienced, but because you’re too responsible. And in surgery too much responsibility is fatal. You have to take a risk; to cut a person up and still tell him it’s good for him, you have to be partly a charlatan and partly a gambler. Look at Hishin—who, by the way, also performs private operations sometimes, so you’ll be able to stand next to him in the operating room again, if you miss it so much.” The offer was so tempting that I didn’t even ask for time to think it over, and said immediately yes. Nakash was not surprised. “I knew you’d like the idea, and
anyway
you’re at loose ends until Professor Levine gets out and finds time to cross-examine you about that blood transfusion you
performed
in India. He’s a difficult customer; he’s always trying to depress his colleagues in the department, and when he doesn’t
succeed he gets depressed himself. So if I were you, I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to fall into his hands.” I wrote down Nakash’s phone number at home, and he wrote down mine. “But it’s only temporary,” I warned him. “I’m moving into a new apartment soon.”