Open Heart (51 page)

On the day of my sexual disgrace on the green floral bedspread, in the light of the pale sunbeam piercing through the half-open curtain, when I came home with Shivi in my arms, depressed and upset by my failure and worried by the incident with Lazar’s heart, I felt that I had to compensate Michaela for my
unfaithfulness
to her. After telling her about the events of my day as she sat serenely breast-feeding the baby, who had calmed down at last, I suddenly knelt at her feet and put my head between her strong, smooth legs and began kissing not only the inside of her thighs but also the delicate, slightly parted lips of her vagina, which I had not touched since I had sewed up the tears of the birth over six weeks before. My lips and tongue now felt my skillful stitches. Michaela was so surprised by this sudden two-pronged attack on her privates, with me between her legs and Shivi at her breast, that she began moaning deeply and uttering loud cries of pleasure, which would no doubt have put my mother’s mind at rest if she had heard them, and allayed her suspicions about the weakness of my love for my wife.

When we said good-bye to my parents in an uncharacteristically emotional parting at Heathrow airport, my mother agreed, in spite of her lingering cough, to kiss the baby, whom we had brought along to soften the sadness of their departure from
England
. My mother also found a momentary lull in the excitement to take me aside and praise her beloved daughter-in-law, and warn me not to let her roam around London by herself too much, since leaving her to her own devices in this way would only accustom her to a kind of freedom that would be hard for her to find on our return to Israel. “I’ve got no objections to your going back to India at some future date, especially now that Michaela has increased our appreciation for the country,” she
added in her clear way, “but to go there now would be
irresponsible
and dangerous for the baby, who’s too small even to be inoculated against all the dreadful diseases they’ve got there, some of which you’ve already seen for yourself. Wait a few years, until Shivi grows up, and after you’ve got full tenure at the
hospital
you can take an unpaid leave and go to India not just as a tourist but as a doctor, and do some good. And who knows, maybe your father and I will come and visit you there too.”

On the way back from the airport, with Michaela driving and me hugging Shivi to my chest, we both felt an unexpected
sadness
at my parents’ departure, as we would find it difficult now to manage without them. But while I was sure we would see them in four months’ time in Israel, Michaela was cherishing hopes of extending our stay in London by at least one more year, not only because all the Indians she had discovered in various London suburbs helped alleviate her longings for the place itself but also because of the fact that dropping out of high school did not carry the same stigma in London as she felt it did in Israel. In London nobody made any demands on her. Just the opposite: her status had only been strengthened here. Friends of her youth from Israel who came to spend a week in London would call her up from the airport to get instructions about finding things in the city that ordinary tourists didn’t even know existed. Sometimes the shoestring travelers among them would be invited to stay with us for a night or two, until they found a suitable place to live. Since I worked nights, it did not bother me to find sleeping figures curled up in the living room when I came home at dawn, because I knew that when I woke up in the middle of the day they would be gone. On one of these occasions Michaela told me, to my astonishment, that one of the sleeping figures I had encountered in the night was none other than Einat Lazar, who was on a one day stopover in London on her way to the United States. “How come you didn’t wake me up before she left, so that I could say hello to her at least?” I exclaimed in angry
surprise
. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I never thought that you were interested in Einat, or that you made any real contact with her when you were together in India. Besides, it seemed to me that the way you waited on her parents when they were here would be more than enough to promote your career interests in Israel.” Naturally I sulked and protested at this cynical remark,
but at the same time I was relieved to see that Michaela had no suspicions about my feelings for Lazar’s wife, even though the sexual norms of the circles she moved in were broad-minded enough to encompass even the impossible passion that was still filling her husband’s heart. But no, Michaela dismissed the Lazars as she now dismissed everything connected with the
possibility
of our return home. “What’s the hurry?” she would
repeatedly
ask me. Israel wasn’t running away, and if we stayed for one more year I would be able to accumulate a wealth of surgical experience, which if it didn’t convince Hishin might convince the head of surgery in some other hospital to hire me. “We’re happy here,” she repeated, her great eyes shining imploringly. “There’s nobody waiting for us in Israel except your parents, and to a certain extent mine, and we can go and visit them all next
Christmas
.” But there was somebody else, and I was determined to make up for my failure with her.

I therefore insisted on returning on the original date, at the beginning of autumn, in spite of all Michaela’s arguments, which actually made a lot of sense and which were seconded by Sir Geoffrey, who tried to change my mind and persuade me to stay another year. Sir Geoffrey had become fast friends with Michaela and often found time to drop in to the chapel when she was working there. He would sit next to the altar, on which Shivi reposed in her portable crib, and chat to Michaela as she swept and mopped the floor, about Israel, India, and the world at large. Although Michaela’s English lacked even the rudiments of
grammar
, she had a great facility in picking up idioms, which she adroitly inserted into her uninhibited chatter, and she was
universally
praised for the richness of her vocabulary. It sometimes crossed my mind to wonder whether her relations with Sir
Geoffrey
were strictly platonic—a bizarre suspicion that was
apparently
founded on nothing more solid than my wish to balance my unfaithfulness to her in the past and the unfaithfulness I was contemplating in the future. Thus, when I came home from the hospital, I would sometimes imagine that I could detect Sir
Geoffrey
’s smell in the house. But what exactly this smell was, I couldn’t say, except that it was the smell of the hospital, which I myself carried on my body and in my soul. In any case, after Sir Geoffrey gave up trying to persuade me to stay for another year, he wrote to Lazar and asked him to send another doctor to
replace
me. When there was no reply, he phoned his office, but Lazar was never there. In the end Lazar returned his call, agreed to his request, and told him by the way that he was going in for a catheterization soon. He mentioned this not to complain or arouse Sir Geoffrey’s pity, which would not have been at all in character, but simply to let him know that the accidental EKG reading in London was evidently not an aberration. In fact, Lazar wanted to tell Sir Geoffrey that the old machines he had offered were in good working condition, and that as a result of the
discovery
of the asymptomatic arrhythmia he had undergone a stress test in Israel, as well as a stress heart scan, whose poor results had led the doctors to recommend a catheterization, even though he did not complain of chest pains.

But Sir Geoffrey was not happy to hear that his hospital’s old EKG machine had been right. He would have preferred it to be wrong. He told me about Lazar’s impending catheterization with a grave face, which immediately caused me new anxiety. Even though catheterizations and coronary bypass surgery had by now become such daily occurrences that Hishin, who was not a
cardiac
surgeon, dismissed them with contempt, the fact that
coronary
heart disease was apparently associated with arrhythmias in London made the whole case more complicated. I tried to
remember
if Dr. Arnold had mentioned whether Lazar’s was a
ventricular
or supraventricular arrhythmia, the ventricular being the more dangerous. Who did I think I was, I rebuked myself, trying to diagnose the heart disease of a person thousands of miles away, the director of a hospital who was surrounded by experts in their field and who certainly didn’t need the help of a young resident like me with practically no experience in cardiology? But perhaps it was the thought that the incriminating EKG had taken place exactly at the time when one or two miles away I had been committing adultery with his wife that which gave rise to my anxiety and guilt, as if in some mysterious way my actions had caused his heart to fibrillate while at the same time he had made me fail. All these thoughts may have been legitimate in a young man embarking on the kind of adventures you read about in novels, but in my case they prompted me to take action. I went to a pay phone and put through a call to Lazar’s office to ask how he was feeling and how the catheterization had gone. Lazar’s loyal and devoted secretary was very moved by my interest, and
she tried to answer as briefly and economically as possible in order to save me money. It appeared that the doctors thought that it was not a case of simple coronary disease, although they could not be sure until they had the results of the catheterization. The trouble was, complained the secretary, that too many
doctors
, friends and acquaintances, were interfering and giving
advice
, so it was a good thing that Professor Hishin was going to take charge. “But how come?” I cried in protest. “He’s not a cardiac surgeon!”

“So what?” she answered. “He won’t do the operation, but he’ll decide on the surgeon, and naturally he’ll supervise him during the surgery.”

This report from Tel Aviv, instead of reassuring me, only
increased
my agitation. I say agitation and not anxiety because what was there to be anxious about? If they decided on bypass surgery—with one, two, or even three or more bypasses—this was a routine operation in good hands, with a mortality rate of less than one percent in healthy men who had never suffered a myocardial infarction. My inner agitation therefore stemmed from moral rather than medical concerns. Since we now had only one month left before our return, and Sir Geoffrey insisted that I take the last two weeks as vacation due to me, I decided to ask Michaela, as tactfully as I could, if we could go home two weeks earlier than planned so that I could be present at Lazar’s surgery. At first she couldn’t believe her ears, and demanded that I
explain
my reasons again and again. After she had begged me to extend our stay, if only by a month, I was now asking her to move the date up by two weeks. She was stunned. For the first time since our wedding one year before, we began a
confrontation
that almost turned into a real crisis. Although the argument was conducted in cold and ironic tones, it was fierce and even cruel. Because of the cooling off in our sexual relations, we did not try, as a more passionate pair might have, to take our
revenge
on each other in bed. Free of any overtones of sexual
aggression
or calculation, our argument might have seemed to an outside observer calm and civilized, if sharp and penetrating. I did not try to lie to Michaela and invent excuses for my wish to return, but spoke frankly about my concern for Lazar and my need to be there to support him and his wife during the surgery. Since I could not yet admit, even to myself, the true, deep source
of my anxiety and agitation, in order to persuade Michaela I had to transfer part of my impossible love for Dori to Lazar himself, as if he had become a beloved friend during the trip to India, even a kind of father figure, to whom I owed my support. “You really think he’ll be short of people to support him there? To the extent that you have to go running from England wagging your tail like a puppy?” said Michaela bitterly, narrowing her big eyes as if she could already see in the distance a miserable little dog slinking into the hospital gates and wagging his tail
ingratiatingly
. “You’re right,” I admitted frankly, “he won’t be short of people there. But how can I explain it to you? I’m not going for his sake but for my own.” In the end she grew tired of struggling against my obscure desires and vague arguments and cut short the argument with a surprising suggestion. If I was so desperate to attend Lazar’s operation, I could go alone, and she would come later, on the date we had previously agreed on, or even, why not?—a sly, unfamiliar smile suddenly dawned on her face, while her eyes widened again in enjoyment—perhaps she would come later, for if I allowed myself to go home two weeks early, by the same logic, and according to the principles of justice and equality, she could allow herself to come two weeks late. “And the baby?” I asked immediately. “What about Shivi?”