You Are My Heart and Other Stories (18 page)

That night I heard her explain to my father that he left too early for work, so that when she got out of bed to go to the bathroom or have breakfast with him, she was still groggy and bumped into things. That was where her bruises came from. All
she wished was for him to be kind with her the way he used to be. “We can't keep blaming everything on the war, Jake,” she said. “After all, we
won
the war, right?”

“Sure,” my father said. “We won the war, but like they say, we lost a few battles.”

“Yeah,” she laughed. “You could say that too, couldn't you?”

She spotted me watching from the foyer. “Hey Willy,” she called. “Did you hear what your father said? We won the war but we lost a few battles too. Ain't he got a way with words, our old man?”

She leaned over my father then, while he ate his roll and butter, and when she kissed him on the back of the neck, his head snapped up straight, as if she'd rammed him with one of her knitting needles.

The next morning he did what my mother wanted. He stayed in bed late, and while she took a bath, he came into my room and told me he would never stop loving her, no matter what.

“She kept me alive over there,” he said. “Just remembering how she'd take my face in her hands and, her eyes shining, tell me, ‘I love you, Jake!'—that was what kept me alive and enabled me to come home and see you both again.”

“Over there you were a real hero,” I said, “weren't you?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all. I did my job and was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I was able to kill a few of our enemies, and my fellow soldiers were able to save my life. We're talking about chance, Willy—about minutes and miles. If I'd moved a minute earlier or later. If the bullet had been an inch lower or higher. If the field hospital had been a mile further away. If the doctor had been more fatigued or less skilful. You can take any moment in time and think of all the contingencies, and see how fortunate we are, and thereby come to understand our obligations.”

“I don't understand you when you talk like this,” I said.

“I think you do, Willy. Tell me: What have I taught you?”

“That I should always tear up envelopes. That an American is always an American. That you'll never stop loving my mother.”

“You're the best son a father could wish for, and someday you're going to be a fine man,” he said. “For a while you may be the only man in your mother's life, but I have great confidence in you. Here are three dollar bills. You get started now. You take your mother out to breakfast, and see that she has a good meal. Leave a generous tip. It never hurts to be nice to people.”

I went into their bedroom and told my mother that father was still at home, but that he'd switched his shift and wouldn't be leaving for a while, and that I wanted to take her out to breakfast.

When she finished brushing her hair dry, she stood in front of the mirror and pinned her maroon felt hat onto the side of her head. Its feather was the golden brown color her hair was in the summer. She said it made her look and feel old to have a son grown up enough to take her out to eat, so I told her how pretty she was, and I repeated jokes I knew, and I tried to act in a way that would make her look younger—the way I imagined she'd looked inside my father's head during those times when she'd been saving his life.

When Uncle Joe came to our apartment that morning and got into bed, my father was waiting in the bedroom. My father shot Uncle Joe, and then he shot himself. When I came home from breakfast, the apartment was quiet. I went into the bedroom first, and then I brought my mother in, to show her what had happened.

W
hen Ira opened his good eye, the men were still there, staring down at him. Doctor Chehade, who had performed the eye surgery the day before, reached under the sheet and took one of Ira's hands in his own.

“It was as I thought,” he said, speaking in English. “Several of your arteries had significant occlusions. In addition, there is evidence of a prior myocardial infarction—a
silent
heart attack, I believe you call such events. Am I correct, Doctor Guérard?”

A lime-green surgical mask dangling around his neck, Doctor Guérard nodded, then spoke to Ira in French. Struggling to comprehend what he was saying—the words came to him as if through heavy gauze—Ira asked the doctor to speak in English.

“Ah yes, well when I saw what was occurring with the occlusions, I did the angioplasties. Three.
Coated
angioplasty—stents, you call them, yes?—so there should be minimal fibrosis—scar tissue from the inflammatory, yes?—and for the rest, I am not worried.”

“Why should you be,” Ira said. “It's not
your
heart.”

“
Je ne comprends pas
.” Doctor Guérard turned to Doctor Chehade. “Did I use the wrong languages?”

Doctor Chehade explained that Ira had been making a joke.

“
Ah—tu rigoles avec moi!
” Doctor Guérard exclaimed. “That shows that your spirit is remaining vital. It is always a good warning when the patient is to joke with the doctor.
Donc.
It was my correct decision to not open your chest to do the
pontages—
the grafts—yes?”

“Where am I?” Ira asked.

Doctor Chehade explained that Ira was lying on a gurney in a hallway until a new room could be assigned to him.

“When can I get out of here?” Ira asked. “Out there—
dehors
,
là-bas—
people are
dying—
”

“In here too,” Doctor Chehade said, and turned to Doctor Guérard, who said that he wanted Ira to stay in the hospital for at least one more night to allow time for the anesthesia to wear off.

“
Then
I can go?”

“Perhaps,” Doctor Guérard said, and added that he would visit Ira later in the day to talk with him about a cardiac rehabilitation program, and about “
le stress
”—about Ira's work schedule in the United States.

 

Ira shifted a lever so that he was in a sitting position on the gurney, and he became aware, for the first time, of a weight on his leg. He lifted the sheet, saw that a sandbag had been placed over his thigh where a catheter had been inserted into the femoral artery. He looked over his shoulder, expecting to see a nurse's station, but saw only a long, dimly lit corridor, the pale glow of television sets coming from rooms on both sides of the hallway, but without sound. Was everybody asleep already? Had they forgotten he was there? Had he died and been transported to some medical purgatory where he would spend eternity waiting in a silent corridor—a world without words—for a bed?

He considered climbing down from the gurney in order to find a nurse, but if he did, he was afraid he might bleed onto the floor, or become dizzy and pass out.
A world without words
: wasn't that what his wife Hannah had named the hours they were able to spend together—hours they cherished—when they took walks together, hand in hand, or when they sat and read, evenings, in their living room, without music or television.

Ira, a pediatrician with a practice in Brooklyn's Park Slope
neighborhood, had arrived in France three days earlier, to attend an international medical conference in Nice, and it was at this conference that he had become friendly with Doctor Chehade. Doctor Chehade had inquired about the patch Ira wore over his eye, and Ira had explained that it was the result of being hit in the eye by a tennis ball several weeks before. He and Doctor Chehade talked easily with each other, and Ira quickly learned that the doctor had worked and studied, early in his career, at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where Ira had also spent time. On two evenings, he and Doctor Chehade had had dinner together—had talked about Hadassah Hospital, about Israel, about their families, their work—and it was to Doctor Chehade's hotel room that Ira had gone at once, earlier in the day, when he experienced sudden tell-tale flashing signs at the periphery of his vision, signs that he knew were symptomatic of the beginnings of retinal detachment.

 

“Yes, I agree that sleep is of utmost importance at a time like this,” the man was saying, “and so I am grateful that you have slept so well. We French, you know, still believe in the
cure de sommeil
, which I understand finds little favor in your country even though it has proven quite effective, especially for women.”

Ira was not aware of when this man, dressed in suit and tie, had arrived, or of how long he had been there. The man was explaining that of course one utilized medications—combinations of anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications, along with
hypnotiques—
but that what was essential to the sleeping cure was that patients be removed from the ordinary anxieties that pressed upon them, that they be put into prolonged states of calm in which they would be cognizant not only of the sanctuary the doctor was providing, but also of the real world that could be perceived, if at a distance, through the veil of sleep and dreams.

“Who are you and why are you telling me this?” Ira asked.

“But I am Doctor Chehade,” the man said. “I was waiting for you to awaken so that we might have a conversation before I leave for home. Also, I would like to take a look at your eye again. So come—I will take you to your room.”

Doctor Chehade, whose voice had a mellow, liquid quality that Ira found beguiling, reached below the gurney, unlocked the brake, and, holding an IV pole with one hand, pushed Ira along the corridor.

“I was able to obtain a private room for you, which is one reason for the delay,” he said. “But also, I wanted to talk with you of something existent on a more personal note.”

In the hospital room, Doctor Chehade offered Ira his hand, and when Ira stood in the space between bed and gurney, he felt his knees give way.

“I'm weak,” he said. “The journey from the gurney, right?”

Doctor Chehade laughed. “I agree with Doctor Guérard—the fact that your sense of humor has not departed is an excellent indicator of regeneration. But you have not eaten for many hours, and so I have ordered a special dinner for you. I think you will be pleased.”

“Thanks.” Ira sat on the bed. “You've been very kind.”

“It has been my pleasure, for a man of your eminence and generosity.” Doctor Chehade smiled. “I took the liberty of searching for you on the internet, you see, and I state now that the honorable charitable work you have done in your own country, and in Indonesia during the tsunami, serves as a reminder to me to consider seriously the filing of an application to be of service to
Médecins Sans Frontières
, an organization that at this time benefits only from my modest financial support. And you are also a man of Jewish descent, am I correct?”

“Yes. But why—?”

“My parents were friendly with a Jewish man—Austrian, not Israeli—when I was a young boy in Beirut. He was a merchant involved in silk and linens, and we ate in his home upon occasion.
I am Christian—not Muslim or Druse—and thus did not have restrictions against eating pork, but neither did this man and his family. His name was Emanuel Mandelbaum, and he loved electrical appliances and had acquired many—vegetable choppers, small ovens,
grillades
, egg boilers. In his basement, he repaired appliances for friends and neighbors. He was a fastidious man, and, remembering now the deftness of his fingers—they were quite small, and what I think you call ‘stubbed'—it occurs to me that he would have made an excellent surgeon.”

“Was he a survivor?”

“A survivor?”

“Of the camps.”

“Of course.”

Doctor Chehade reached into an inside jacket pocket and, like a magician, so deft were his moves, he withdrew a piece of equipment which he quickly attached to his forehead. It was a head lamp, Ira saw, and it gave off a long rod-like beam of pure white light. Doctor Chehade directed the beam of light onto the palm of his left hand so that he could adjust its intensity. Then he removed the bandage from Ira's damaged eye, after which, very gently, he probed the area surrounding the eye with his fingers.

“Very good,” he said. “Excellent.”

He turned out the room's overhead light, closed the door. In his left hand he held a small piece of glass, which he moved back and forth in the space between Ira's eye and the light that came from the head lamp.

“No more split-lens ophthalmoscopes?” Ira asked.

“We have not used those for many years,” Doctor Chehade replied. “This is a convex lens, you see, and creates a
virtual
image, but an image that is indefinitely more accurate.”

“You mean infinitely—
infinitely
more accurate.”

“Of course.”

The lens, which Doctor Chehade rotated between thumb and
forefinger, looked to Ira like a large cat's eye. Ira closed his good eye, and when he did, saw nothing but gray, as if a sheet of slate had been slipped into a slot behind his retina in the way a photographer slipped a photographic plate into a camera.

Doctor Chehade was replacing the bandage, washing his hands. “It is as I thought,” he said. “The healing has already begun, but we will not know for some time yet how much regeneration we will have. You may dispense with the bandage tomorrow, nor will you require an eye patch afterward. I have ordered antibiotic drops, to prevent infection and inflammation, and I am confident that you will regain, at the least, some portion of your peripheral vision.”

“And after that—?”

Doctor Chehade shrugged. “Who knows? Time, Doctor Farb. Time must become our friend. In four to six weeks, we will know more. But I would look forward, frankly, to a healing period of at least several months.”