Open Heart (2 page)

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All that I have undertaken in my life has been with her. Journeys, projects, dreams of yet more projects—we do it all together. But this time, that is not possible.

Marion attempts a smile. I know that she shares my doubts and fears. The door closes, and I am alone.

“
IN A
few moments, we’ll be ready,” announces a voice.

Eyes closed, I listen to my heart beating. How much longer? Has the rhythm of the beats slowed down? What about the palpitations?

My thoughts jump wildly; I am disoriented. Where am I? Ideas and images follow one another and collide in my burning head in a frenzied dance. In front of me, the cemetery; behind me, the garden of my childhood. The future is shrinking; the past is dying. And it all unfolds in a dark void. So, I tell myself, I was always told that the void is truly empty, with nothing inside: no flames, no ashes, no wind, no river, no breath and no pain. All nonsense.

I had not even hoped for it—but suddenly I sense the presence of the dead. Have they come to take me with them? Or just to accompany me? Or, why not, to protect me?

And yet, long ago, I did not protect them. I relive the last moments of our shared existence on the train. And then on the infamous ramp built expressly for the new Hungarian transports. I see my little sister, Tsipuka, so beautiful, so innocent. I see her from afar, clutching my mother’s hand. I was not with them, at the end.

I see my father at the camp. We were inseparable there. Never had we been so close, so united. Can one die more than once? One could, there. During the death march, the night of the evacuation from Buna. And then during the nocturnal journey in the snow. There again we were together. I protected him and he protected me. Our only disagreement? He wanted me to accept a portion of his miserable bread ration, pretending that he was not hungry. I used the same ploy. Each of us wishing to offer the other one more moment of survival.

And now I shall meet him again; I shall finally die. Absurd, is it not? Long ago, over there, death lay in wait for us at every moment, but it is now, eternities later, that it shall have its way. I feel it.

A VOICE
penetrates my consciousness: “We are ready.”

So am I.

“Would you please count to ten?”

I panic: They are going to put me to sleep—and I shall never wake up again.

“Not yet. Give me another minute. Please. Just a minute.”

The silence around us is unreal.

“Why?”

They must be surprised. I don’t answer. Shall I explain to them that a practicing Jew, before giving up his soul, if he lacks the time to properly prepare himself, must at least recite a short prayer—a kind of act of faith—a prayer he has known since childhood? Too complicated. To tell them that countless dying victims, martyrs, repeated this prayer before closing their eyes forever: I cannot tell them that.

But I recite it to myself.

Shema Yisrael
, hear o Israel,
Adoshem Elokeinu
, God is our God,
Adoshem e’had
, God is one and unique.

“Now I am yours,” I say weakly.

“Count. To ten.”

I think I stopped before I reached ten.

IN THE
operating room, I am floating in semidarkness. Hasty movements, muffled sounds, low voices: all sorts of whispered admonitions as well as encouragement.

All of a sudden, I am afraid. A name has come to my mind, a face: Aviva, a friend of Marion’s and the wife of our friend Émil Najar, former Israeli ambassador to Rome and Tokyo. She too had suffered heart problems, and she too underwent surgery. But she did not get up from the table.

To chase this onset of anxiety, I let my thoughts take me back to a distant past. I am eight or nine, and a doctor, my cousin Oscar, is removing my tonsils. During the operation I take refuge in heaven, where angels are running back and forth, paying me no heed. Clearly, they do not think me worthy of their attention. I recall this dream because when I awoke, I told it to Oscar.

A more serious operation: I am ten or eleven years old, and I am on a train with my parents. It is Shabbat, a day on which, in principle, a practicing Jew may not travel. However, our close neighbor, the Rabbi of Borshe, a brother of the famed Rabbi Israël of Wizsnitz, had granted my parents permission to violate the sanctity of the Seventh Day to take me to Satmar. My appendix has to be removed, and the only Jewish hospital is located there. The surgery takes place the next day. They try to put me to sleep with ether, but I refuse to inhale. Amazingly, what I remember most vividly after all this time—decades—is the young and beautiful nurse with long dark hair and a warm smile. She reassures me: “Let me put you to sleep.” I let her. She takes care of me the entire following week. If at that time I could have expressed myself better, and had not been afraid of words, I would have admitted to myself that I had fallen in love with her. For a long time, I was ashamed when I met her again and again in my adolescent dreams.

Suddenly, I realize that I am in the hands of the surgeon and must face the truth: When
I fall asleep, it may well be forever. Am I afraid to die? In the past, whenever I thought of death, I was not frightened. Hadn’t I lived with death, even
in
death? Why should I be afraid now?

YET, THIS
is not how I imagined my end. And in no way did I feel ready.

So many things still to be achieved. So many projects to be completed. So many challenges yet to face. So many prayers yet to compose, so many words yet to discover, so many courses yet to give, so many lessons yet to receive.

This is when I learned much about myself and my surroundings. In particular, I learned that, sadly, when the body becomes a prisoner of its pain, a pill or an injection is more helpful than the most brilliant philosophical idea.

There are still so many things I want to share with my two grandchildren, for whom my love is without limits.

When Elijah smiles at me, I know that happiness exists after all.

His little sister, Shira, both charming and
authoritarian, orders me around and makes me laugh.

To watch them play together, to listen to Elijah reading to his sister, is the most beautiful present I could receive.

Am I ready to lose their love?

THE PAIN
of the incision wakes me up. As well as the surgeon’s voice, perceived through heavy fog:

“It’s over. Everything is fine. You’ll live.”

His face! I shall never forget the smile on his face. My surgeon is happy. Yes, happy to have brought back to life a human being he had never met before. He tells me, “You’ve come back from far away.”

A question: Had I really dreamed during the operation? Had my brain really continued to function while my heart had stopped?

I later learned the exact procedure of bypass surgery: dramatic and impressive on every level.

I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, just how complicated it is, with risks and dangers that defy imagination. For the layman that I am, this surgery is not unlike a walk on the
moon. There is the frightening discovery of the need to temporarily stop the heart, to replace it with a machine while the surgeon operates. He begins by opening the thoracic cage—via an incision down the entire length of the sternum—and then makes a second incision on the inside of one leg in order to remove a vein that will replace the blocked arteries.

I was “coming back” from far away, very far away indeed. And I could just as easily have stayed on the other side.

I am overcome with a feeling of gratitude.

Still under the influence of anesthesia, I try to whisper: “Thank you. Thank you, doctor.”

At that moment, did I think of thanking God as well? After all, I owe Him that much. But I am not sure that I did. At that precise moment, only the surgeon—His messenger, no doubt—moved me to gratitude.

I ask weakly, so weakly that I’m afraid I’m not heard, “Do they know?”

No need to be more specific; do Marion and Elisha know that I’m all right?

Yes. Even before I woke completely, the
surgeon himself went to give them the good news.

We are reunited an hour later. The three of us, in our own way, try to cover up our emotion.

IS IT
dawn or dusk? Elisha is with me, in my room. How long has he been here?

I glance at the clock on the wall. Around me and my son, objects dissolve. “Elisha,” I say breathlessly.

I don’t know if he hears me. But it does me good to pronounce his name. As always, I cling to him to defeat anxiety, and that helps me pull myself together.

Now too?

As always.

I perceive voices coming from the hallway. But only his has meaning and purpose.

NUMEROUS SCENES
appear before me. Elisha as a child, an adolescent, an adult.

Elisha’s birth changed my life. From that moment, I felt more concerned and responsible than ever before. This tiny creature looking at me without seeing me would have to be protected. And the best way to protect him would be to change the world in which he would grow up.

For the circumcision ceremony we had invited friends, among them the great violinist Isaac Stern, the philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, many writers and survivors. All had come, naturally, for legend tells us that this is the only invitation one may not decline, since a circumcision always takes place “in the presence” of the patriarch Abraham and the prophet Elijah.

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

We had also invited a number of Hasidim from Brooklyn, and when the name of the newborn—Shlomo Elisha son of Eliezer, son of Shlomo—was pronounced for the first time, an old Hasid cried out, “A name has come back to us.” And he and some of the other Hasidim formed a circle and began to dance around, and in honor of, the newly arrived Jew. I, who do not know how to dance, joined in.

After the ceremony, I sat down and wrote a letter to my friend Georges Levitte, one of the great intellectuals of France, father of Jean-David Levitte, the future diplomatic counsel to Jacques Chirac and then to Nicolas Sarkozy. We were close friends and saw each other often whenever I was in Paris.

Some time earlier, he had heard me on the radio saying that I planned never to marry and surely not to have children. Why? I quoted a Talmudic sage: “When God punishes a sinful world, it is wiser not to marry.” Georges did not agree and disapproved of my response. He felt I had no right to discourage young people and thus contribute to their despair.
Our discussion had lasted several hours, and we had parted with neither having convinced the other.

My letter was brief: “You were right. My son bears my father’s name, Shlomo. One more name regained, for we have lost too many. He is also called Elisha.”

To say that the love I felt for my son was filled with fervor and hope would not be enough. I would spend hours and hours just looking at him. To leave him for more than a day was painful. And whenever I had to go out of town, I somehow managed to return before Shabbat. To hold him in my arms as I made Kiddush fulfilled a strong emotional need.

Mornings, when he left for nursery school, Marion and I would walk him to the yellow school bus. As I watched the vehicle draw away, my heart beat faster. I see him still, his little hand motioning to us. And deep inside me I prayed to God to protect him.

After graduating from college, Elisha decided to go to Israel for a semester, to join other young non-Israelis in a training camp
for the Israel Defense Forces. On the way to the airport, I found myself repeating the prayer my mother recited at the end of every Shabbat, imploring God to bless our house and our family.

“
ELISHA
,”
I
say very quietly.

My son hears me: “What can I do for you?”

During his first year at Yale, Elisha studied philosophy, history and literature. Secretly, I was hoping that he would follow in my footsteps, but he was recruited by Wall Street. The economy, the markets: alien territories to me.

And now he is a father. In my view, the best father in the world.

I motion him to approach. Now he is very close to my bed. He takes my hand in his and caresses it gently. I try to squeeze his hand but don’t succeed. I know that he wishes to transmit to me his strength, his faith in my recovery.

BY DINT
of searching for him in the past, suddenly I picture him as an orphan. I remember promising myself to watch over him even after my death, and here I am, on the threshold of the beyond.

Have I followed the advice of the Talmudic sage: “It is incumbent on you to live as if you were to die the next day”?

The first question the angel asks the dead is “Were you honest in your dealings with others?” And then: “Did you truly live waiting for the Messiah?”

When will the angel interrogate me?

Images rise up from ancient midrashic and mystical sources, crowding my brain and my memory. In my adolescence at the yeshiva, they used to make me tremble. Many texts describe the beyond. Few take place in paradise; most unfold in hell. The sinners
and their punishment in the flames. Their deafening screams, their unimaginable suffering, which ends only with the arrival of Shabbat.

Am I, in fact, already on the other side? If not, would I have been permitted a glimpse into the beyond?

I am lying on my hospital bed, but it is hell. My skin is ripping apart; my entire body is aflame. I see myself in hell, ruled by cruel, pitiless angels. My head filled with medieval descriptions of unimaginable punishments, I think I know—I do know—what takes place in these dreadful abysses.

Tears and screams fill the subterranean hells.

That is the fiery universe inflicted upon sinners. Men hanged by their tongues, women by their breasts. I try to identify them; in vain. Their faces are disfigured, unrecognizable. Is mine among them?

And then my gaze turns to the others, the Just: They are imploring the supreme Judge to show mercy to His people in exile. The ancestors,
the prophets, the visionaries and their friends, the masters and the poets—one more step ahead and I shall be their student; I shall be one of them.