Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  “They took Father.” She heard a voice behind her; it was Olga, the nurse she liked, coming out of one of the rooms. “Come with me,” she said, and put her hand on Shira’s arm. “The doctor’s still here; he wants to talk to you.” She felt like a chastened schoolgirl late for class. “Father’s in Intensive Care. It’s one floor up.” Shira asked if he was conscious. “No, honey.” The nurse held her hand, swinging it from side to side. “He lost consciousness this morning.” She thought of the word morning, of the meaning it had here, how her father’s morning had begun long before hers. “Come, sweetie,” Olga said, and led her to the physicians’ room. “Dr. Amir wants to talk to you. He’ll explain everything.” She peeked into the room and told the young doctor sitting at the desk drinking coffee out of a paper cup, “The daughter is here.”

  Dr. Amir was a handsome man. He had a square face, smooth black hair, and green feline eyes. He took short sips of coffee, as if it were medicine, and told Shira that her father was in critical condition.

  “Judging by your voice I’d say it was worse than critical,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled sadly. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “And I understand he’s no longer conscious.”

  “He’s hazy.”

  She thought about the difference between the way the nurse had phrased it and what the doctor said—she didn’t know if Amir was his last or first name—and he, as if reading her mind, said, “You could say he’s no longer conscious.”

  He seemed tired. She had seen him around the ward before—he had examined her father a few times—and she wondered what made such a young person want to specialize in geriatrics. “I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, tossed his empty cup into the trash can with perfect aim, and explained that yesterday one of her father’s kidneys had stopped functioning, and this morning he had developed a blood infection. “Sepsis,” he called it, and when she looked at him questioningly, he said, “An infection. A severe infection.”

  “It happened very quickly,” she said. “Yesterday he was all right. It’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

  “No. It’s not odd.”

  “It’s as if his organs conspired against him. Or, in fact, for him, because what kind of a life did he have here anyway?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “That’s exactly what it is: a conspiracy. With people of your father’s age, that’s exactly how it happens. It’s unexpected but also predictable.”

  “I see.” She thought that if it weren’t for Yonatan she could easily fall in love with Dr. Amir.

  “Which doesn’t make it any less sad,” he added.

  “On the contrary,” she said, and suddenly wanted some coffee, although she had already had two cups this morning before urinating on the stick. “The fact that it’s predictable is what makes it tragic.”

  “I agree with you,” Dr. Amir said.

  “You specialize in a pretty tragic area.” She was troubled by the thought of her father with his fading consciousness one floor above them. “Why did you choose it?” She hoped he would admit to an affection for the elderly, a beloved grandparent, or say he was obsessed with death, confess he did not like to fight, say he was a kind of pacifist in the world of medicine. But his beeper went off and he glanced at it, put his hand on the phone, and, in a new impatient tone of voice said, “I have no answer to that question.”

  She didn’t know if she was supposed to get up and leave now and go upstairs or wait until the doctor finished his phone call. When he saw her hesitating, he motioned for her to wait, and she was grateful for the extension. She felt she couldn’t make that journey up one steep floor without first having a layover in a place where she could sit and chat with a young doctor, who might or might not be an idealist, talk to him about old age in general, as if she were interviewing him for a book on the topic, as if they were on a blind date: a young doctor specializing in geriatrics, and a writer whose elderly father was dying. The room, with its sparse furnishings, the windows on which drops of rain slowly trickled down, the trash can that was empty except for the paper cup, the telephone, the beeper on the table, the closed door—the room looked like a play area in a mall, padded with rubber mats, a place where children could play without getting hurt.

  He put down the receiver, looked outside, and said, “Winter’s here.”

  “Yes.” She started to sense the panic crawling down her back like a frozen drop of water.

  “It’s about time,” he said, and she nodded. “Anyway, concerning your father, the next twenty-four hours are critical. At the moment he’s breathing independently, but I expect that will only last another few hours. He’s in Intensive Care so we can monitor him, and he’s getting intravenous antibiotics, but he’s not hooked up to a respirator. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “There’s already massive damage to his system, both prior damage and damage resulting from the kidney failure. So even if we can help him breathe, I’m not sure what quality of life he can expect if he comes through this.”

  “I know. He had no quality of life before, either.”

  “I suppose it’s all relative. Subjective, anyway.”

  She nodded but didn’t know what he meant—whether by subjective he was referring to her father or to her.

  “And if he does come through,” he said, his voice tender but his eyes firm, “it won’t necessarily be ideal. Do you see?”

  The rain was audible now. It slammed down on the window and on the tiled square outside, accompanied by echoes of thunder that sounded dim and far off, as if they were coming from someone’s stomach, and she thought about the meatball her father had yesterday for lunch, how it now had the honor of the final meatball, and her eyes welled up.

  Last week, when she went to his apartment to look for some childhood pictures to show Dana, who was curious to see what she had looked like as a baby, she passed by the deli where he bought his meals and her heart sank. She was suddenly filled with love for the place, unpleasant love, with a touch of something cold and damp. She went inside, and when she came out she had no idea what she was going to do with all the food she had bought. She climbed up to her father’s apartment, put the bags on the kitchen counter, and went into the room that had become a storeroom to look for the photo albums. Since his hospitalization she had been there a few times, but the windows and blinds were closed, and now the smell of food filled the apartment like a ghost scampering around the rooms, and her father’s absence became an oppressive presence. She returned to the kitchen, placed the albums she had found on the counter, opened one of the plastic containers, and hesitantly tasted a stuffed pepper.

  It was the most delicious stuffed vegetable she had ever eaten. At first her mouth refused to admit it, looking for aftertastes, aggressive spices, hints of staleness, but when it found none she took another bite, and another, until she had finished the whole pepper. Then she tried a stuffed zucchini, which was also surprisingly wonderful. She felt that some truth had been concealed from her; had she known, she might have been able to change her father’s destiny, or the past, or at least eat his meals with him, compliment his taste, make him happy in some way that was not so condescending or desperate. She took a plate out of the cabinet, arranged the containers in a row, and opened them all. She heaped portions of rice and lentils, Jerusalem kugel, and cucumber and beet salad onto her plate and ate standing up, looking around at the kitchen and knowing that the next time she saw it would be when she came to pack it up. Then she took in the half-empty containers in a row on the counter and burst into tears. It was a short dry sob, a cry that knows it is merely prologue. She packed up the leftovers, took the photo albums, went downstairs, and threw the bag of food in the trash can.

  Dr. Amir asked if her father had any other children and she said, “No, just me.”

  “I see. Hard to be an only child?”

  “It is now.”

  He smiled.

  “Are you an only child
too?” she asked.

  “No, I have three siblings.”

  “Boys?”

  “Boys.”

  “Are they all doctors?”

  “No, only me.”

  “Why did you ask if I had siblings?” She felt a chill.

  “I asked because I want to know if you have someone you can talk to about what’s going on with Dad.” Dad, he said, as if her father belonged to them both.

  “What is going on with my dad?”

  “He’s not artificially respirated at the moment.”

  “Yes, I know. You already said that.”

  “Well, that’s it.”

  “What do you mean, that’s it?” she asked, and suddenly realized she was in the midst of negotiations.

  “Do you want us to resuscitate him, if necessary? I can tell you with certainty that it will be.”

  “No,” she said firmly, and when she realized what she had said, that she had uttered the small word in a voice that was too large, she said, “He wouldn’t want it. It’s unfair to keep torturing him.”

  “I agree with you one hundred percent,” Dr. Amir said, as if she had given the correct answer on a quiz.

  She felt cold. She rubbed her arms, leaned back in the chair, and asked what happened now.

  “Nothing. We wait.” He asked if there was someone close, a friend she would like to have with her; she could call from here. He pointed to the phone, but she said she had a cell phone and had already left a message for her partner. Dr. Amir got up and said he would go up to Intensive Care with her, and as she followed him down the hall to the elevators, Olga, who was standing by the nurses’ station, blew her a kiss of the sort you give a child with an injured knee.

  She stood in the elevator next to Dr. Amir and suddenly noticed that he was very short; his pants were too big, the fabric bunched up like a curtain, and he wore childish gym shoes. She looked at her watch and saw it was ten o’clock; she had sat in his room for only an hour but felt as if she was coming out of a long movie, blinking in the light, her eyes covered with movie cobwebs. At eight-fifty, she thought, when she had first got into this elevator, her clothes had still smelled of cigarettes and autumn.

  ( 23 )

  Just before the end of class, the storm began. He was in the middle of a sentence about Faulkner when lightning lit up the classroom—during the past hour, the sky had blackened and the room had grown dark but no one had bothered to switch on the light—and the students turned to the window and then back to him, hypnotized, waiting for him to continue. From the moment he had walked in and seen the twelve students, seven women and five men, trying to guess who would drop the class and who would fall in love with him—from the moment he had sat down behind his desk and said, “I’m Yonatan Luria; I’m your lecturer; I was an author but I’m not anymore, and I’m really, really happy about it”—they were his.

  “I’m going to talk with you about a few truly great authors and about how they found their voices,” he said, looking at the eyes that examined him, still skeptical. “Our basic working assumption is that a literary voice acts exactly like a human voice. At first it’s high-pitched, like a baby’s cry, spewing out all sorts of nonsense, imitating other voices. This is the stage when what matters are the sounds the voice makes, not necessarily the content. Then we have adolescence, a very difficult age. You know how teenage boys’ voices start to crack and they sound like toads? Later, the voice matures and stabilizes—this is its apex; this is when it’s at its best. Finally, over time, the voice becomes hoarse, weakened; the vocal cords develop warts and all kinds of other afflictions, until it can barely be heard and sometimes even starts to sound babyish again, but without the charm this time, without the magic, without the wonderful innocence that is the turbocharger of any debut work.” He examined the twelve pairs of eyes, their skepticism gone. “And every so often there is one last cry, sometimes pathetic, sometime exquisite. We will look at these things during this course, as if we were—and forgive me for the comparison, but it seems appropriate—these authors’ ear, nose, and throat specialists. Any questions so far?”

  A handsome young man with curly brown hair and a long sharp face raised his hand.

  “Yes? What’s your name?”

  “Yonatan,” the student said, and a rustle of laughter went through the class.

  “Yes, Yonatan,” he said, smiling.

  “Why did you stop writing?”

  “Why did I stop writing?” he repeated. He picked up a piece of chalk, although he had no plan to write anything, and leaned against the blackboard. “You’re asking why?”

  His young double nodded.

  “Because I lost my voice,” he said, and the class giggled. I lost my voice, he wrote on the board, and soaked up the pleasure on his students’ faces. It was clear that no one would drop his course; perhaps there would even be a few new students next week, once word spread about the best show on campus. “That’s the way it goes,” he said gleefully, and scribbled some more words on the blackboard: I now speak in the passive voice.

  “But at the top of your voice,” said the young Yonatan.

  “Nice!” He wrote the sentence on the board. “Anyone else?”

  “And with a voice of reason?” a student with glasses sitting near the window suggested cautiously.

  “Excellent!” Yonatan said. “What’s your name?”

  “Ma’ayan,” she said, and he repeated her name back to her.

  “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau,” offered the girl sitting next to her, whom Yonatan had noted as a beauty when he came into the class, hoping not to develop a crush; he wanted to be a professor, not a caricature of a professor.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  “I’m Noa.”

  “Noa,” he repeated.

  “The voice of a generation,” said the boy sitting on her other side, who looked a lot like her.

  “Great! What’s your name?”

  “Itamar.”

  “Are you two related by any chance?”

  “We’re twins,” Noa said.

  “Really?” He wasn’t sure whether to believe her.

  “Yes,” Itamar said. “But we don’t speak with the same voice.” Yonatan laughed with the class and felt that the love he had hoped for, and had not known how he would do without, could be taken for granted.

  “I’m glad to see you’re a creative bunch,” he said, and hated himself for using the word bunch, which made him sound old. He rapped his chalk on the board. “Anything else?”

  “Dissenting voices!” someone called out from the back row.

  “Thank you. With whom do I have the pleasure?”

  “Dana.”

  He smiled. “My daughter’s name is Dana.”

  “We know,” Noa said.

  “You do?” he asked, flattered and slightly afraid.

  “Yes,” her brother said. “You’re a public voice, after all.”

  A white light flashed through the already electrified room, just as he started to say something about Faulkner—later, driving down from Mount Scopus in the pouring rain, he realized he’d never finished his sentence, that the glorious introductory lecture he had spent weeks drafting in the living room had been discarded along with his fears—and when the lightning cut off his train of thought and he fell quiet and faltered for a moment, looking at his admiring class, he heard the young and cynical Yonatan, who had quickly become his favorite and who had confessed to writing a novel, asking, “Is your writing influenced by Faulkner? Do you imitate him?”

  “No. I was always too arrogant to imitate anyone.” His heart soared. He was standing there lecturing them about a genius, but they wanted to know about him.

  When he turned onto the road going into the center of town, he remembered what his friend from the literature department had told him when they’d sat in the cafeteria a few weeks ago and Yonatan had asked for his advice. “You could get a great class or a terrible one. It’s the luc
k of the draw.” He felt lucky. He had an excellent class, a class worthy of a talented teacher, a class that would happily function as confessor. He felt that his confession of being a failed writer, of the loneliness of failure, the freedom of failure, a tiresome confession heard by so many in so many versions, had through these young ears become meaningful and free from bitterness.

  The rain was falling so hard that he considered stopping on the shoulder. The wipers jerked over the windshield and he couldn’t see the road, but he kept driving. He couldn’t remember ever having seen such a harsh first rain. It usually stuttered, a celestial warm-up, but this downpour had begun over two hours ago. It was self-confident rain, he thought as he watched the water cascade down the windshield and saw that the sky still looked far from empty. He only wished Shira could have been there to see him in action, not because he wanted to boast—he knew that had she been in the room he would have been quieter; he would have stuttered and talked only to her—but because he thought she had fallen in love with the man he was this morning, that she had guessed who he truly was. In his anxiety, she saw generosity; in his acquiescence, courage; in his cynicism, an invitation to his playground. It was as if she held his negatives in her hands. She was not, as he had once imagined Ilana, the left-hand solo to his right-hand accompaniment; that image now seemed distant and childish. She was not someone playing in the next room, not an audience or a teacher, but someone who could read his score, see his black notes before her eyes, the swirling instructions, and hear the music in her mind.

  He wondered if she was home now, if she had come back from visiting her father. He drove down the road leading to the Hinnom Valley, passed by the Cinemateque, and stopped at the light at Hebron Road. His mother was expecting him for lunch. After class he had been planning to go by the department office, hand in some material to be photocopied, and meet his friend, who wanted to hear how his debut performance had gone, but he was so excited when he left the class, and so engaged in talking with Yonatan and Itamar and Noa, that he forgot.