Open Heart (74 page)

I hurried home, and although I was only half an hour late I saw by the dread on my mother’s face that she had taken my threat with alarming seriousness, and after lunch I decided not to go out again but spent the afternoon dozing in my room, in
anticipation
of the sleepless nights awaiting me now that I was unable to stay by myself in the empty house. My father too, still tipsy from the wine they had plied him with at the synagogue, sank into a deep sleep. My mother sat up trying to read her novel, but in the end she couldn’t help herself and came into my room to make me swear not to divulge a word of our conversation to my father. Why make him any more miserable than he already was? She didn’t say anything about my threat, as if talking about it added to its reality. But in the evening, when I was already back in Tel Aviv, she took advantage of a brief absence on my father’s part to call and ask how I was feeling now. My vague and
detached
answers, and especially my fear of not being able to sleep, increased her anxiety, and she suggested that I come back to
spend a few days in Jerusalem. “But how can I? I’m expected at the hospital tomorrow.” She thought for a moment and then said that perhaps she or my father, or both of them, could come to Tel Aviv for a day or two. To her surprise, I didn’t turn this offer down immediately. “We’ll see,” I said. “Let’s think about it.” But she persisted, and suddenly she began speaking haltingly in English, which she never spoke to me. If I was thinking of doing anything drastic, I should warn her, at least. “Don’t take us by surprise,” she whispered over the phone, turning the vague threat I had presented her with that morning into something real and alive. “You have no moral right to keep even the thought from me,” she added. “I’ve never hidden anything from you.” And she was right; neither she nor my father had ever hidden anything from me, nor did it seem as if they had anything to hide. “But why are you in such a panic?” I said with grim humor, lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, laying the side of my face on the exact spot where Dori had sat with her legs crossed, listening with excited sympathy to the declaration of love bursting out of me. “Not that I’m really thinking of harming myself, but if you believed in reincarnation, you would find the world less
alarming.
Because if anything happens to me, I’ll leave you my soul, at least.” But she was in no mood now to understand irony or witticisms on my part.

In the middle of the night the phone rang, shattering the
remnants
of my brittle sleep. It was Michaela, calling as the dawn rose in Varanasi. Her voice was warm, clear, and joyful. “Varanasi?” I cried in astonishment, and with a note of envy. “I thought that this time you wanted to go to places you haven’t been to before.” “Right,” admitted Michaela, who sounded happy and relaxed, but how could she deprive Stephanie of the chance to touch the open heart of India? Even I, the superficial tourist, knew that the heart was there, in the ghats and temples lining the banks of the Ganges. “And Shivi?” I cried. “What about Shivi?” Shivi too could not fail to be impressed by the spiritual power of Varanasi, because she was now happy and contented after a little restlessness in New Delhi, perhaps because of the diarrhea, which was already clearing up. “But what was it?” The strange cry that escaped me was not only the cry of a father and physician, too far away to save his child, but also the cry of someone in need of salvation himself. But Michaela, who
even in her joy grasped my pain, quickly reassured me. I could rely on her. When it came to Shivi there were no compromises. In any case, in a few days’ time they would be in Calcutta, where they would be surrounded by excellent doctors and good friends. “Calcutta again?” I exclaimed in surprise, and the suspicion
entered
my heart that the doctors of Calcutta were as much an attraction to her as the mystery and fascination of India. “And Shivi?” I couldn’t help bursting out again. “How are the Indians treating her?” And this strange question, which had broken out of me in the hallucination of nighttime, was greeted with
excitement
. Even an “expert” on India like Michaela would never have imagined that Shivi would arouse such interest and affection among the Indians, who were not accustomed to seeing such a small representative of the West; in her tininess, she exposed the humanity common to us all. When Michaela told them her name, their interest turned to real enthusiasm. “They’re not annoyed that you gave her the name of one of their gods?” I cried, with a tumult of feelings flooding me. But it appeared that not only did they feel no anger, they expressed only joy and admiration at seeing the little creature with her light blue eyes bearing the name of the stern and dangerous god, the destroyer of the world—so much so that people sometimes followed her around. “Be
careful
, Michaela, for God’s sake, be careful,” I began to shout into the receiver as her voice grew fainter as if it were being carried away in a gale. Then it was completely lost.

I couldn’t go back to sleep after this conversation, and I had to be at the hospital very early in the morning anyway, since all the operations had been moved up to the first half of the day because of the farewell party for Dr. Nakash, which was to take place at lunchtime. Nakash himself appeared in the operating room as usual on this, his last day of work, to stand with his famous serenity next to the anesthesia machine, his smooth bald head gleaming darkly through the plastic of his cap. No wonder the speakers at the farewell party in the little auditorium next to the administrative wing were full of sincere praise for the devoted loyalty of this man, who in forty years of work had never missed a day. Hishin also made a speech in honor of his faithful
anesthetist
, but ever since Lazar’s death he had lost his confidence and humor, and his speech soon became boring. The ceremony was conducted by a young man of about thirty, who was introduced
as one of the two directors who were taking over Lazar’s job. “I see,” I said with some emotion to Miss Kolby—who came to the party not because she knew Nakash but because she was still at loose ends after having been removed from her position in the administrative director’s office—“that one man isn’t enough to fill the void left by Lazar.” Indeed, it needed more than one man to overturn some of the decisions taken by the former director, such as bestowing a permanent a half-time position on a young doctor. My job was canceled that very day, right after the party, when I spoke with the new man, who was my age and who apologized profusely and tried to appease my obvious
depression
, which was caused not by the cancellation, which I had
expected
, but by the youth of the man now rocking in the chair of the previous director, whose soul had rapidly departed from my body.

Until a new post was found for me as a regular resident in the anesthesiology department, I could only be grateful to Dr. Nakash, who invited me the next day to act as an assistant
anesthetist
in a private operation at the hospital in Herzliah. During the entire course of the lengthy operation, removing malignancies and metastases from the patient’s abdomen and chest, Hishin was unusually quiet and sad, and when I saw that he was
deliberately
avoiding my eye, it occurred to me that he had heard either directly or indirectly about my affair with Dori. But after the operation was over, when we were getting dressed in the
changing
room, I discovered the real reason for his hostility. Professor Adler had told Hishin about my visit to his father. “What exactly are you up to, Dr. Rubin?” He pushed me into a corner. “Are you really only interested in discovering the truth?”

“Yes,” I replied immediately and unhesitatingly, trying to hide my naked legs from his eyes, “that’s all. Nothing else. And I would keep it to myself as well. What did you think? That I would go and tell Dori?” His little eyes scrutinized me in silence, believing and not believing. Then he continued sternly, “I hope so. I certainly hope so…. I hope you won’t get it into your head to go to her and involve her in your truth. It’s time you grew up, Dr. Rubin, and realized that there are mysteries in
medicine
too. That’s its fascination. We deal with living human
beings,
not inanimate objects.” I couldn’t resist asking, “But how is she? How is Dori? Is she getting over it?” Now Hishin couldn’t
help smiling a faint smile of satisfaction. “Can you ever really tell?” He spread his hands out in a questioning gesture. “But at least we’ve succeeded in persuading her to go on a trip to
Europe
. We’ve already made a date to meet her in Paris next week.” Because of his obscure marital status, there was no knowing whether there was another woman behind his use of the
first-person
plural or he was referring only to himself. In any case I couldn’t restrain myself. “She’s going to Europe already?” I burst out in a cry of pain. The old ironic gleam returned to Hishin’s eyes. “I trust you don’t have any objections?” He leaned over and gave my shoulder a friendly pat. My heart beat painfully. Was she already capable of taking a trip on her own, whereas I found it more difficult from minute to minute to stay by myself?

When I recognized Dr. Nakash standing quietly at the bus stop, I braked and offered him my crash helmet if he would agree to let me take him home. Nakash had had his driving license suspended for three months for speeding. “You, speeding?” I marveled as he put the helmet, still warm from my head, onto his own bald head. “And I always see you as the most stable person in the world.”

“Is that what you see?” Nakash grinned and got onto the
pillion
. He confessed that he had never been on a motorcycle
before
, but I felt no current of fear behind my back; instead, his hand, which sometimes seemed to put patients to sleep and wake them up by its touch alone, lay lightly on my shoulder, somewhat calming my anxiety about the lonely night ahead. I took him home and gladly accepted his invitation to go up and have
something
to drink in his small apartment, which in contrast to my expectations was rather chaotic; the living room was filled with scientific journals, and the equipment of a small, improvised
laboratory
dominated half the room. Nakash and his wife were
testing
the possibilities of combining anesthetics, analgesics, and muscle relaxants used in the operating room into tranquilizers for everyday use. “Only tranquilizers?” I asked, willingly giving Mrs. Nakash my cup for another round of coffee, which had a good but unfamiliar taste. “Or more than that?” They
exchanged
looks, as if wondering how far they could trust me. They were both very dark and skinny, as alike in their ugliness as identical twins.

They naturally avoided giving me a full and unequivocal
answer
,
but it was evident that they wanted to give me a hint, mentioning that their own end would be quick and gentle, and above all free of the arbitrary decisions of self-righteous doctors, sanctifying the suffering of life. In order to show me concrete proof of their success, they gave me a little bottle containing a few sleeping tablets, the product of their home laboratory, which differed from the usual sleeping pills prescribed by family doctors not in the heaviness or duration of the sleep they induced but in the speed with which it descended, and perhaps also in the ease and pleasantness of waking from this sleep. Even though I felt more prepared to face the night with the little bottle in my pocket, I decided not to hurry home, and in spite of the gale-force winds blowing, it occurred to me to keep an old promise and go to visit Amnon at his place of work. He was so surprised and pleased to see me that he could hardly bring himself to let me out of his bearlike embrace. “And I was beginning to think that you were getting fed up with me because of that damn thesis,” he blurted out—a strange but accurate complaint, which gave me a guilty pang. “But I’ll finish it, Benjy, you’ll see. If I’m a little stuck, it’s only because I don’t want to chew over the same old stuff as everybody else, I want to say at least one thing that will be absolutely original.” And this original idea he sought not only by day, at home or in the library, but also by night at his watchman’s post, especially now that he had been promoted and no longer had to walk around the perimeter of the factory, but sat with a walkie-talkie and telephone in the little hut, which was full of his books and papers. But before talking about himself and his plans, he wanted to hear about all the women I had sent to India. Had they already reached their destination in Calcutta? Michaela had promised to phone him from there, directly to this hut. If Michaela had revealed to him what she had hidden from me, I said to myself, perhaps he knew other things about her too. And to my astonishment I discovered that Amnon did indeed know things about her, and about me, that nobody had told him but that he had grasped through his own intelligence and intuition, and especially through his immense curiosity, dating from our high school days, about his friends and acquaintances.