Open Heart (71 page)

I disconnected the phone, in part because I had already spoken to my parents, but also because I knew that if Michaela called before her flight, she’d call my parents and not me; she knew that their sorrow was greater than the sorrow she left behind in her own apartment, where I now began to draw the curtains to
prevent
any ray of light from sabotaging the sleep that almost had me in its grip. I was convinced that the more I blotted out the world around me, the less severe my anxiety would be. Indeed, a deep sleep, frightening in its power, overcame me at last, and nothing succeeded in penetrating the leaden curtain that came down on me, as if I were not lying on my bed on a noisy, busy Tel Aviv day but in an iron drawer in the hospital morgue. The hospital was also blotted from my mind for the first time since I had begun working there, for after nearly twelve hours of sleep I woke to discover that it was already six o’clock and long past the hour I was supposed to begin my shift. They must have tried to get in touch with me from the operating room, and given up in despair owing to the disconnected phone, and found someone to take my place. The thought that someone had taken my place did not increase my guilt, as might have been expected in someone as reliable, dutiful, and punctual as myself, but only gave me a sense of relief. As if not only Michaela and Shivi had disappeared from this reality, but I had too.

True, there was a clear contradiction between the pleasure I
felt in this disappearance and the agitation and anxiety caused by my solitude. But I knew that there was one person in the world capable of understanding my situation perfectly. Accordingly, I did not switch off the little light, which was revealing more and more of the threat looming in the known and familiar world of my apartment—a threat that made me feel again as if I didn’t have enough red blood cells in my body—but in great excitement I got up to reconnect the phone, in order to call her office and demand the right to talk to her not, only as a lover and
occasional
doctor but also as a tenant calling on his landlady for help. Dori had just left to go to a café with one of her friends, and her secretary, who couldn’t tell me exactly when she would be back, asked me very civilly who I was and what I wanted. I couldn’t tell her what I wanted, but I agreed to tell her who I was, and asked her to have Mrs. Lazar call me back. “My wife and
daughter
left last night for India,” I told the secretary. And when I sensed by her silence that she didn’t know what to make of this announcement, I added in a hoarse voice, “And I’m sick in bed.” This strange lie, slipping so glibly from the lips of a man who had always been taught to tell the truth, began to depress me so much that I felt the need to disconnect the phone again, so as to spare myself the necessity of reinforcing the first lie with additional ones. Once I had announced my illness, I was sure that she would get in touch with me, but what I wanted from her now was not duty but love. I realized that the lie I had just told might poison whatever was between us, just as it would have poisoned my relations with the hospital if I phoned them now to excuse my absence on the same grounds. The fear of infection, even an imaginary illness, in an operating-room doctor was always taken very seriously and I felt it would be wrong to take the easy way out, playing off their justified anger aroused, no doubt, by my failure to show. If a replacement had already been found for Lazar, let him call me into his office and warn me about the consequences of another disappearing act—like the one I was contemplating right now, at six o’clock in the evening, while the outside world pulsed and throbbed in a tumult of activity and people who had just finished a successful and rewarding day’s work went from shop to shop and bought things to help them relax and spend a pleasant evening at home.

I got up and switched off the light so that I could disappear into the darkness and shut out the intimate world where the threat of loneliness grew greater the farther my wife and baby receded into the distance. But I was so saturated with sleep that I couldn’t even close my eyes in the utter darkness I had succeeded in
creating
around me, let alone sink back into slumber. After spending hours on call and growing accustomed to sleeping and waking quickly, I had lost that innocence of youth which allows itself to be engulfed in sleep without rhyme or reason. Quite the opposite: after ten hours of uninterrupted sleep my mind had begun to acquire the pure and lucid quality of an angel gliding through the sky, so that even hunger and thirst did not trouble me. I felt the stubble that had grown on my chin since the previous morning and asked myself whether Dori would come to look for me here. If I were really sick in bed, it wouldn’t be in the hospital or in my parents’ home but right here in this apartment, which she had signed the lease for, even though she wasn’t the actual owner. That didn’t of course oblige her to love me but it did oblige her to remember that here she had agreed to hear my declaration of love, which she had listened to without interrupting and in the wake of which she had gone to bed with me. Since my mind continued to accumulate clarity and lucidity, I began to believe that I had it in my power to influence from a distance not only her thoughts but also her plump, pampered body, whose sweet, secret map of beauty spots I had not yet finished studying. And thus, after her last client has left, she will stand up, wrap herself in her blue velvet tunic, scatter her smiles to everyone she is leaving behind in the office, and even if there is no real rain in the air but only a few solitary drops shaken by the wind from the trees, she will stop to open her umbrella over her head, even for the few yards between the office door and the big car parked carelessly and inconsiderately in the little side street. After
smiling
again into the rearview mirror as she checks to see if the road behind her is clear, perhaps she will remember the strange
message
I left for her and with her little foot on the brake, she will sigh and take her makeup out of the big bag lying on the seat beside her and draw a narrow line around her eyes and powder
her nose and cheeks. But instead of painting a third eye in the middle of her brow, the better to perceive the reality around her, she will only flash another smile at the little mirror in front of her, in the hope that it will smile back and cheer her up. Only then will she relax her foot on the brake and sail into the middle of the street, very slowly but also with total indifference to the cars behind her.

Maybe she hopes I won’t hear her, knocking so softly on the door? For she is not only hesitant about entering this place she knows so well, which was taken over almost two years ago by her lover, she is also worried that none of her family or friends know that she is about to be swallowed up in a vortex of intense and demanding love, from which nobody can save her but
herself
. Maybe she hopes that the light knock on the door won’t be heard so that she can turn around and go downstairs with a clear conscience at not having deserted me in my illness, even if she’s sure it isn’t serious. But my soul, which I sent to accompany her here in the big car crawling through the dense early evening
traffic
, the soul that waits for her when she stops to buy a cake and fruit at the stores I recognize from the times when I followed her and Lazar home on my motorcycle, the soul that blows on her face through the air vents next to the dashboard to persuade her to make a detour and see what the meaning of this silence is on the part of one who left so clear a message about himself—this soul is also attuned to catch not only her lightest knock on the door but even the sound of her breathing if she decides to stand there, without moving, on the other side of my door, as I once stood outside her door.

Is it any wonder, then, that I sprang out of bed, trembling with excitement but protected by the darkness, to open the door to the woman illuminated by the dim light of the stairwell, her umbrella in one hand, her key ring and a little bunch of flowers in the other, and a new hat on her head, which suited the shape of her face and announced to the world by its black color that she still considered herself to be in mourning?

Only then, as she entered the apartment, did I dare switch on a single light, to dispel the darkness and reveal the shadows in the room and discover how exaggerated and even childish my fears were, if they could be so quickly banished. Although I was
supposed
to be ill, with my hair matted, my face pale and unshaven,
my body dressed in a pajama top, she did not ask me how I was but looked around as if she had only now remembered that she was also the landlady, entitled to check up on the nature and extent of the changes made by her tenant in her apartment.
Judging
by the way the smile vanished from her lips, she was not only surprised but also annoyed by the many changes that Michaela and I had made, wittingly and unwittingly, in her mother’s cozy, well-cared-for apartment. But she refrained from comment and just took a step toward the crib standing in the corner of the living room, and as she looked at the crumpled sheet and the furry teddy bear, which was too big to take to India, I wondered whether Shivi was missing him now, as she crawled down the aisle of the airplane. Anxiously inspecting the woman who was much older than I was, I saw that the new hat was only one sign of the change that had taken place in her appearance: gone was the tailored suit tightly encasing her body, the high heels which were so flattering to her legs, replaced by plain, sturdy
comfortable
flat shoes and a loose suit with pants, which, even though it completely concealed her stomach, transformed her into a shorter, squarer woman, although, strangely enough, also a younger one. Then at last she turned to me and asked in an inquiring and slightly mocking tone, “Are you really sick?” I bowed my head a little so that she wouldn’t see the faint blush spreading over my cheeks but would be able to hear my halting words of apology for the lie that had brought her to the only place which truly belonged to both of us, as well as the only place where we could now be free of the judgment of the third eye. But she interrupted me in a maternal tone, which also
contained
a new note of impatience. “Never mind, don’t apologize. I knew you weren’t.” As if to soothe my guilty conscience, she handed me the modest bunch of anemones. I filled a blue vase with water in the light of the quiet flashes of lightning flickering in the window over the sink, and raised the flowers to my face to search their scent for the scent of her body, trembling at the certain knowledge that these flowers were meant not to bring us closer but the opposite, to say good-bye. After I put them in the vase and saw that she was already sitting in the same place on the couch where she had sat two years before and listened silently to my confession, I was flooded by a wave of pain. Did I really have to begin again from the beginning every time I met her? Was
everything that happened between us so contrary to nature and divorced from life that it evaporated from meeting to meeting, as if it didn’t have the strength to sustain itself for our benefit? If only she had been able to believe, as Michaela believed, that her husband’s soul had been reincarnated in me, it might have set her mind at rest. I didn’t have to wait for the plane to land in India in order to offer her everything an ardent young man had to offer, so she wouldn’t have to stay by herself anymore.

But it was apparently precisely because she sensed what I was about to offer her now that she had answered my call and made a detour on her way home after a long day’s work. It wasn’t my supposed illness that had drawn her here but the fact of Michaela’s and Shivi’s departure, which had taken place with such speed and which she now realized wasn’t just an idle threat made in anger on the night when I had not come home. The fact that I had cooperated in this adventure of Michaela’s, and agreed to let her uproot the baby from her home and set off on a backpacking trip with no definite limits in time, in strange places filled with filth and sickness, just so that I could be as free as she was—this worried Dori and alarmed her with the obligations it sought to impose on her. When she could no longer contain
herself
, she blurted out a strange and surprising question—“But who are you?”—even before she asked me what I wanted.
Perhaps
this was the question I had long been waiting for, for
without
hesitating I began to tell her, the mere glint of her glasses now filling me with excitement, about the other river, the fifth river, which had flowed alongside me throughout our trip to
India
: the love and closeness between herself and Lazar. If at first I had been disturbed and put off by the intensity of the
relationship
between them, which was so different from anything I had known at home between my parents, in the end I was powerfully drawn to it. While I had been careful to wet only the tips of my fingers in the four real rivers flowing between New Delhi and Calcutta, in this fifth river I had bathed my whole body, and as if that weren’t enough, I had also drunk from its waters, which now, after the death of Lazar, were bursting from me until I was no longer sure who I really was. And although I knew that the disparity in age between us made us impossible for each other, I also knew that only I could guarantee that she would never be alone again.