People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  I remember I was pretty surly with that intern, at the time. Basically told her to butt out and mind her own business. But inside, somewhere, what she said made me really proud. The trouble was, what was great for her was poison for me. When it came to medicine, Mum was a real evangelist. And I was like the minister’s daughter who grows up apostate.

  When the nurse left the room, Mum signaled weakly. “Yes, actually, you can get me something. A pen and paper. Write down this address.”

  I took down the street name she gave me, an avenue somewhere in Brookline.

  “I want you to go there.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s Delilah Sharansky’s home. Tonight they will be sitting shivah. It’s the Jewish mourning ritual.”

  “I know what it is, Mum,” I said, a trifle curtly. “I’ve got a bloody degree in biblical Hebrew.” I wanted to say, The big surprise is that you know what it is. I’d always suspected she was a bit of an anti-Semite. Mum’s bigotries were very bifurcated. When it came to patients, she didn’t see skin color. But watching the news, she’d make casual ethnic slurs about “the lazy Abos” or the “bloodthirsty Arabs.” Likewise, she’d given plenty of bright Jews coveted spots in her residency program, but I never recall her inviting one home to dinner.

  “These people, the Sharanskys? They don’t know me from soap. They won’t want a stranger there.”

  “They will.” She shifted her weight in the bed, and winced from the effort. “They will want you there.”

  “But why would they? Who was Delilah Sharansky, anyway?”

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  “It’s no good now. All bound to come out at the inquest, or whatever damn thing they have here.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  She opened her eyes and looked right at me. “Delilah Sharansky was your grandmother.”

  I stood on the steps of the tall redbrick house for a long time, trying to get up the guts to knock on the door. It was in my favorite part of Brookline, the edgy part right near Alston where the burrito joints give way to the kosher groceries and the street life is equal parts artstudenty goth and Jewish frum.

  There’s a very good chance I never would have knocked at all, if another group of mourners hadn’t arrived behind me and just sort of swept me inside with them. The door opened on a dozen or so loud voices, all talking at once. Someone handed me vodka in a shot glass. Somehow, I hadn’t pictured shivah like this. I guess that was the Russian part of Russian Jewish.

  The house also wasn’t at all what you’d expect, going by the conventional exterior or by the fact that an eighty-one-year-old woman had lived here. The inside had been all opened up, in a very contemporary way, with white walls and light pouring in from well-placed skylights. There were tall, spare ceramic vases with twisted branches in them, and Mies chairs and other vintage-modern, Bauhaus-y pieces.

  On the far wall, there was a very large painting. The kind of painting that knocks your breath out of you. It was a gorgeous, burning expanse of Australian sky with just a strip of hard red desert implied in a few lines of paint in the lower quarter of the canvas. So simple, so powerful. It was one of the pictures that had made the artist’s name in the early 1960s. You could see one from that series in just about any major museum that bothered at all with Australian art. But this was one of the greats. The best I’d seen. We had one ourselves—I mean, Mum did—at the house in Bellevue Hill. I’d never thought about it that much. She had quite a few trophy paintings: Brett Whiteley, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd. Always the big boys with the big names. No reason why she wouldn’t have an Aaron Sharansky.

  That morning, Mum and I had talked for quite a while, until I could see I was exhausting her. I’d got the nurse to give her something, and when she fell asleep, I went to Widener Library to look up the facts of Aaron Sharansky’s biography. It was all there, easily retrieved. Born in 1937. Father, survivor of Ukrainian concentration camp, professor of Russian language and literature at Boston University. He brought his family to Australia when he was invited to create the first Russian language department at the University of New South Wales in 1955. Aaron attended art school at East Sydney Tech, went jackarooing in the Northern Territory, started doing the paintings that made him famous. Became an enfant terrible of Aussie art. Outspoken, outrageous. Deeply political when it came to the desert environment and the mining industry’s destruction thereof. I remembered seeing him on the news, being arrested at some sit-in, protesting a bauxite mine, I think it was. He’d had long black hair, and the rozzers—who were rough in those days—were using it to drag him through the sand. There was a big scandal about it, I remembered that. He refused the bail conditions, that he not go back to the mining site, and sat in jail for a month with a dozen Aboriginal men. He came out of it with a lot to say about the terrible treatment of Aboriginal people in custody. He was quite the hero in some circles after that. Even conservatives had to listen politely, if they wanted a crack at buying one of his paintings. Every time he had a show, there was a kind of frenzy to get one, no matter how high the prices rose.

  Then, at twenty-eight, the story took a different turn. His vision started to fail. Turned out he had a tumor, pressing on his optic nerve. Risked delicate surgery to remove it. A few days later, he died of “postoperative complications.”

  What was not noted in any of the profiles or the numerous obits was the name of the neurosurgeon who had performed the operation. Australian doctors weren’t allowed to be named in the press in those days—some kind of medical ethics policy. Although I wasn’t in a position to know for sure, I suspected that, in her early thirties, my mother already had the complete lack of self-doubt that would have made it possible for her to operate on his difficult tumor. But had she? If so, she’d gone against a long-standing tradition, that doctors don’t operate on those with whom they are emotionally involved.

  Sarah Heath and Aaron Sharansky were lovers. At the time of his surgery, she was four months’ pregnant with his child.

  “You thought I didn’t love your father?”

  The look on her face was one of absolute astonishment. It was as if I’d said there was a hippopotamus in the hand basin. I’d returned to the hospital from Widener in the afternoon. She was still asleep when I got there, and it was all I could do not to shake her awake. When she finally opened her eyes, I was almost standing over her, crazy with questions. We talked then, questions, answers, and long silences. It was the longest conversation we’d ever had that wasn’t an argument.

  “Well, why wouldn’t I think you didn’t love him? You never mentioned him. Ever. Not once. And when I finally got up the nerve to ask you, you just walked away with a disgusted look on your face.” The memory of that moment still hurt. “D’you know, for a long time after that, I was convinced that I was the child of a rape, or something….”

  “Oh, Hanna….”

  “And it seemed clear that you couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

  “Of course that wasn’t true.”

  “I…I thought I must remind you of him, or something….”

  “You did remind me of him. You looked so much like him, right from the minute you were born. That dimple you’ve always had, the shape of your head, your eyes. Later, your hair—the exact color and texture of his. The expression on your face when you concentrate—it’s the same look he had when he was painting. And I thought, All right, she looks like him, but she’ll be like me, because she’s with me. I’m raising her. But you weren’t like me. You were interested in the things he loved. Always. Even your laugh is like his, the way you look when you are angry…. Every time I looked at you I thought of him…. And then, when you hit adolescence, and you seemed to hate me so much…it was as if that was part of my punishment.”

  “Punishment? What do you mean? Punishment for what?”

  “For killing him.” Her voice was suddenly very small.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Mum. You’re the o
ne who’s always telling me not to be self-dramatizing. Losing a patient is hardly the same as killing him.”

  “He wasn’t my patient. Are you mad? Haven’t you learned anything about medicine from living with me all those years? What kind of a doctor would I be if I’d operated on someone I was absolutely, passionately in love with? Of course I didn’t operate on him. I did the tests, got the diagnosis—he presented complaining of blurred vision. He had a tumor. Benign, slow growing, not life threatening at all. I recommended radiation, and he tried that, but the visual impairment persisted. He wanted the surgery, risks and all. So I referred him to Andersen.”

  The legendary Andersen. I’d heard the name all my life. Mum practically worshipped him.

  “So, you sent him to the best. How can you blame yourself for that?”

  She sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You could give me a chance to—”

  “Hanna, you had your chance. A long time ago.” She closed her eyes then, and I sat there, squirming. I couldn’t believe we were falling into the same old, same old. Not at a time like this, when there was so much I needed to know.

  Outside, it would have been getting dark, but in the bowels of the hospital there was no way to know that. Corridor sounds of clanking gurneys and beeping pagers filled the silence. I wondered if she’d drifted back into a medicated doze. But then she stirred, and started speaking. She still had her eyes closed.

  “You know, when I applied for a neurosurgical residency, they didn’t want to give it to a woman. Two of the assessors said straight-out that it would be a waste of training, that I’d marry and have kids and never practice.”

  Her voice rose and hardened. In her mind, I could tell she was back there in that room, facing the men who wanted to deny her the future she’d set her heart on. “But the third assessor was the chair of the department. He knew I’d had the highest marks of anyone in my year, that I’d consistently excelled during my internship. He said to me, ‘Dr. Heath, I am going to ask you just one question: is there anything, anything in the world, that you can imagine yourself doing, other than being a neurosurgeon? Because if the answer is yes, then I urge you to withdraw your application.”

  She opened her eyes then, and looked at me. “I didn’t hesitate for a second, Hanna. There wasn’t anything else, for me. Not a thing. I didn’t want to be married. I didn’t want a child. I’d let go of all those ordinary, normal desires. I tried to make you understand it, Hanna, how utterly amazing and wonderful it is, to be able to do it—the hardest surgery, the surgery that matters most. To know that you have a person’s thoughts, their personality, under your fingertips and that your skill—I don’t just save lives, Hanna. I save the very thing that makes us human. I save souls. But you never…” She sighed again, and I shifted in my seat. The evangelist was back in her pulpit. I’d heard it all before and knew where it went from here, and that was no place I wanted to go. But she changed gears suddenly.

  “When I got pregnant, it was a mistake, and I was so angry with myself. I had no intention of having a baby, ever. But Aaron was thrilled, and he made me thrilled, too.” She was still holding me in a direct blue gaze, and her eyes started to glisten.

  “In some ways, Hanna, we were the most unlikely lovers. He was this tomato-tossing lefty iconoclast, and I was—” She broke off. Her hands were traveling nervously across the sheet, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles. “Until I met him, Hanna, I’d never looked up. I’d never voluntarily spent a minute of my time on anything that didn’t lead to being a doctor, and then, when I was one, to being a better one. Politics, nature, art—he introduced me to all those things. I don’t believe in clichés like love at first sight and all that, but that was what it was, with us. I’d never felt anything like it. Never have, since. He walked into my surgery, and I just knew—”

  A nurse’s aide backed into the room, pulling a tea cart. Mum’s hands were shaking, so I held the cup for her. She took a few sips and then waved it away. “Americans can’t make decent tea.” I plumped the pillows, and she adjusted her position, wincing with the effort.

  “Do you want me to ask them for something?”

  She shook her head. “Dopey enough already,” she said. She took a deep breath, gathering her strength, then she went on. “That first day, when I got home, there was a painting waiting for me—the one that hangs over the sideboard in the dining room.”

  I whistled. Even then, that painting must’ve been worth a hundred grand. “Most I ever got from a would-be suitor was a bunch of flowers, wilted, actually.”

  Mum gave a crooked grin. “Yes,” she said. “It was quite a statement of intent. There was a note from him, with it. I still have it. Always. It’s in my wallet. You can see it if you like.”

  I walked over to her locker and took out her handbag.

  “The wallet’s in the zip compartment. Yes, that’s right, there.”

  I pulled it out. “It’s behind my driver’s license.”

  It was short, just two lines, written with an artist’s charcoal pencil in big, swooping letters.

  What I do is me, for that I came.

  I recognized the line. It was from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Underneath, Aaron had written:

  Sarah, you are the one. Help me to do what I came for.

  I was staring at the words, trying to imagine the hand that had written them. My father’s hand, which I had never held.

  “I called him, to say thank you for the painting. He asked me to come over to his studio. And after that…after that, we spent every spare moment together. Until the end. It wasn’t long. Just a few months, really. I’ve often wondered if it would have lasted, what we had, if he’d lived…. He might have ended up hating me, just like you.”

  “Mum, I didn’t—”

  “Hanna, don’t. There’s no point. I know you’ve never been able to get past the fact that I wasn’t a 24/7 mother to you, when you were little. By the time you hit adolescence you might as well have been a cactus plant, as far as I was concerned. You wouldn’t let me get near you. I’d walk into the house and I’d hear you and Greta laughing together. But when I came up to you, you’d shut down. If I asked what the joke was, you’d just give me this stone for a face and say, ‘You wouldn’t get it.’”

  It was true. I’d done exactly that. My little way of punishing her. I let my hands fall open in my lap in a gesture of surrender. “That’s all a long time ago, now,” I said.

  She nodded. “All of it. All a long time ago.”

  “What happened, with the operation?”

  “I didn’t tell Andersen about our relationship when I referred Aaron to him. I was already pregnant, but no one knew. Amazing what you can hide under a white coat. Anyway, Andersen invited me to scrub in, but I said no—made some lame excuse. I remember how he looked at me. Usually I’d walk over hot coals for a chance to scrub in with him. For that type of tumor, you go in through the skull base. You peel back the scalp and—”

  She broke off. I realized I’d involuntarily raised my hand to my ears, to shut out the gruesome description. She gave me a lacerating stare. I dropped my hands like a guilty child.

  “In any case, I didn’t choose to scrub in. But I did find some reason to be hanging around the OR when Andersen came out. He was pulling off his gloves, and I’ll never forget his face when he looked up. I thought Aaron must have died on the table. It took everything I had, just to stand there, upright. ‘It was a benign meningioma, as you diagnosed. But the optic nerve sheaths were extensively involved.’ He’d tried to peel the tumor off the sheaths to get the blood supply back to the nerves, but there was too much of it. Anyway, I knew from what he said that Aaron wouldn’t be able to see. And I knew right then and there that Aaron wouldn’t consider it living. As it happened, he never woke up to find out he was blind. That night, there was a bleed, and Andersen missed it. By the time they took your father back into the OR to evacuate the clot—”

  The nurse came in then. She gave Mum
an appraising look. It was obvious how agitated she was. The nurse turned to me. “I think you’d better let the patient rest for a while,” she said.

  “Yes. Go.” Mum’s voice sounded strained, as if even those two small words required a huge effort. “It’s time. It’s time you were with the Sharanskys.”

  “Hanna Heath?” I turned away from the painting on Delilah Sharansky’s wall and found myself looking into a familiar set of features. Mine, translated onto the face of a much older man.

  “I’m Delilah’s son. Her other son. Jonah.”

  I held out a hand, but he grabbed me around the shoulders and drew me to him. I felt desperately awkward. When I was a little girl, I’d longed for family. Mum had been an only child and not close to her parents. Her dad had made a pile in the insurance business and taken his wife off to a tennis and golf retirement community in Noosa before I was even born. I think I’d met my grandmother once before she died suddenly, of a heart attack. My grandfather rather hastily married someone else, a tennis coach. My mother didn’t approve, so we never visited.

  Suddenly, here I was, surrounded by strangers who were my blood relations. There were quite a few of them: three cousins, an aunt. There was another aunt, apparently, who was working as a trade rep in Yalta. And there was Uncle Jonah, the architect who had renovated this house for Delilah.

  “We were so relieved to hear that your mother is recovering,” he said, flipping back a troublesome strand of straight black hair in a nervous gesture that was, I realized, a mirror of one of my own. “None of us wanted Mom to keep driving after she turned eighty, but she was a stubborn old bat.” She’d been a widow for more than fifteen years, he said, and had grown used to calling her own shots. “Ten years ago she went back and got her PhD—so I suppose it’s understandable that she wouldn’t let us tell her what to do. But we all feel terribly about your mother. If there’s anything we can do…”