by Yael Hedaya
The vet knelt by the dog, stuck the syringe into his fur, and stood up. “How long does it take?” her father asked, and she hated him.
“A minute or two,” the vet said, and went back to his car.
“Is he asleep yet?” the little children asked, and the vet said, Soon. Her mother’s arms tightened around her chest, the dog stopped breathing and trembling and looked very calm. “Now?” the kids shouted. “Now is he asleep?”
The vet yelled back from his car, “In a minute,” and she slammed the back of her head repeatedly against her mother’s collarbone and tears streamed down her face.
Through them she saw her father go up close to the puppy and ask the vet, who had returned with a black plastic bag, “Tell me, is he suffering now?”
“No,” the man said, “he’s already dead”—and at that second a stream of urine had erupted from beneath the dog’s tail, and the kids from next door burst out laughing.
She wasn’t sure if she should call the doctor. Perhaps the filling bag of urine indicated a change in his condition, a deterioration—but what deterioration could occur in the condition of someone who was now breathing his final superficial breaths? Someone who, since this morning, was not really there and whom no one was trying to bring back? She glanced at her watch: five forty-five. As she had walked behind the orderly who wheeled the bed in here, she had glanced into the rooms along the hallway, and they looked bustling, even happy, full of patients and visitors, food carts parked in the doorways. It occurred to her that they had purposely put him in this empty room, purposely left them alone, as a gesture of consideration, an act of abandonment, and as if her father had heard her thoughts, his chest rose and fell like a bellows and the mask covered over with vapors, and she thought she heard a sigh trapped under the rubber dome.
She wondered how his death would have been had he not had a child. No one would have looked at him this way, as she was, delineating him within the fences of her consciousness, dismantling and reassembling him, painting his body inside and out with nameless colors. She sat on the edge of the bed and put her head on his chest, and her cheek felt his sunken, spiky ribs, and a pleasant sensation spread through her body, as if he had placed his large hands on her head to bless her, had stroked the back of her neck to calm her, as if his chest had broadened and no longer looked like a cage with bent bars—as if her father had finally, for the first time in his life, been able to contain her. She sat that way, with her head on his chest, and thought that if not for the tension in the air, her body waiting for a sign from his, if not for the silence that was so complete you could hear the footsteps of the seconds escaping, she would have fallen asleep and woken up once he was gone, and in his place they would put a pillow beneath her cheek, and she would say to the doctor or nurse, whoever came to wake her, in a sleepy, indulgent voice, Is that it? They would nod sadly, and say, “He passed away.” And her guilt at falling asleep at the wheel would be mingled with relief: She was with him when he died, but not completely. They were both in the room and they were both unconscious, and neither of them suffered.
Within the sacred silence, she heard her stomach grumble, at first just a dim, hesitant noise that sounded like a question. She sucked her stomach in to silence it, but the sounds kept rolling out into the surprised room, loud and persistent, as if her stomach were trying, in impolite baby language, to protest at having been forgotten, at having spent an entire day—twenty-four absolutely real hours—without being fed. She wondered if he could hear it, because she thought she saw his eyes flicker. She put her hands on her stomach to dam the torrent of rumbles emerging, leaned her head aside to examine his face from below, as she used to do sometimes as a child when she wanted to see if he was asleep, and thought his eyelids were quivering. Perhaps the final thought was darting behind them: a tornado, with fragments of furniture, momentary colors, a down of words, breezes, and sounds swirling within its eye, blending and colliding with one another: the ironed smell coming from his pajama collar and I love you and the salty smell of her cheek and a few stomach noises.
A decisive but amputated inhalation sucked the mask in. She held his hand again, caressed it encouragingly, and waited for the exhalation, for the half-breath to find its way out, but it seemed the air had been lost inside him and was sinking, defeated, in his chest like a yellowish haze. Perhaps now she should call the doctor; the doctor had said she would be able to tell, and he was right—she knew, on her own, and now she was completely alone with this knowledge, which was sharp and full of life as if it had sucked the oxygen her father’s fearful lungs had wanted for themselves. She interlaced her fingers with his, crushing them farewell, put his hand aside, and took the other, which seemed lonely and deprived, its blue veins intertwined like the roots of an ancient tree beneath his skin. She kissed it and put it aside too, then got up to look at him, taking a few steps back.
From where she stood at the foot of the bed, her father looked like a tree on a winter day, small and gray and struggling. Perhaps not like a tree, she then thought, but like the winter day itself. She kept looking at him, waiting for one more breath she knew would come. The doctor was right, possessed of some prior knowledge about death, as if he had predicted a thousand deaths and had learned their mechanics. Sobs began to escape her throat, little coughs of fear, dry, unlike her eyes, which shed huge tears, wetting her face, her hands that held the bed railing and trembled, because what she had seen was still surprising, different from what she thought she knew, at once insulting and comforting.
There had been no trace of the complexity of his life in the elegant simplicity with which it had collapsed. The machine had shut down so simply and smoothly: every switch, every conveyor belt, each cogwheel taking a final bite out of the next one, all the pistons rising and falling, curtseying goodbye to each other. How clear was this moment that ended decades of vagueness, as if death knew the material it had to work with and did its work precisely, and modestly, and did not squirm with infinite wordings, did not contradict itself, did not hate itself—death, she thought, was not an artist but an artisan.
Her father’s throat suddenly emitted a damp sound, a kind of gargle or clearing of the throat, something that sounded like a flood, like the tide, and within the crackling sound she also heard a soft thud and a flutter of wings, as if his final breath were a moth caught in a lampshade. And then it came, responsible and punctual, and was inhaled into his waiting mouth, and from his throat came a call of surprise, as if this were not his final breath but his first one, and his eyes opened briefly, devoid of any look, their egg-whiteness murky and muddy, already flooded with other bodily substances. Dotted with clouds of blood, they moved like the ocean surface after a storm, threatening to swallow up the two dots that floated on it, sole survivors of a shipwreck—his brown pupils, in which she now saw no tree and no winter day but simply her father, and his eyes shut and his mouth opened slightly, and she suddenly felt a breeze on her back, and a freezing cold flooded the room.
( 29 )
A large clear plastic bag with the hospital logo imprinted across it sat between them in the car like a passenger, rustling under their interlaced fingers, a pair of brown plastic glasses sticking out of its opening.
He had found Shira sitting on the floor in her father’s former room in the nursing ward, taking his things out of the cabinet and putting them in two piles, one on the right and one on the left. He arrived out of breath from climbing the stairs, after watching the doors open and close on several full elevators. “Busy day,” said a potbellied orderly who was wheeling an elderly lady in a wheelchair, talking as if he had known Yonatan for years. “It’s visiting hours now, so it’s busy. How’s the father?” He parked the old lady in front of him, her knees almost touching his.
“Mine?” he asked, slightly amazed but eager to correct the nosy stranger’s mistake.
“No, the wife’s,” the orderly said. “He wasn’t doing well at lunchtime, not well at all.” He shook his head. “He’d
already lost consciousness, poor man,” he whispered into the old lady’s ear, and Yonatan suddenly felt rebuked and exiled: strangers had taken part in this day, his part, whereas he had arrived at Internal H just after seven, holding a little bag with a homemade sandwich—cheese and pickles—because they had talked about it once and he wanted to re-create the flavor she missed.
He went to the nurses’ station and asked which room Max Klein was in, and a doctor with a foreign accent, who was standing there looking at medical charts, said, “He passed away an hour ago; the daughter went to get his personal items.” How superfluous the sandwich now seemed, which only a moment ago had looked so festive. How pathetic the comfort he had tried to reconstruct for her seemed, wrapped in a napkin, when he saw her sitting on the floor with her back to him, putting the little transistor radio he knew so well from his visits on the left pile—the old transistor held together with masking tape—and then changing her mind and moving it to the right, where she had placed handkerchiefs, a wristwatch, and reading glasses.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said softly, turning to look at him, and held out the transistor, as if she knew he was there the whole time or perhaps had not noticed his absence all day. “We have to throw out some of these things but I don’t know which ones.” He went up to her, waiting for her to realize he had finally arrived and she didn’t have to sit on the floor sorting through her father’s things anymore; this was neither the time nor the place. He was grateful that his mother was the one who had been left with his father’s things. First you need to break down, he whispered to her silently. First we hug; then you can start talking about his things. As if reading his mind the way she had guessed his presence at the door, she got up quickly and fell into his waiting arms, and puppyish wails escaped her throat into his T-shirt.
He smelled clean, like the new laundry detergent she had bought at the SuperPharm, as if he had brought with him scents from the world she felt she had been absent from for so long. She wanted to return to it now, like this, with her head buried in his shirt, to be led out like a suspect who emerges from the courthouse with a shirt over his head, under cover of this fragrant darkness, and in her eyes, shut tight against his chest, she saw the picture of her father being removed from the room.
The doctor with the foreign accent had determined his death at twelve minutes past six and had asked her to leave the room, and she had found herself once again leaning on the wall and waiting. But when he came out with the nurse, and the nurse said, “You may go in now,” she said she didn’t want to. “To say goodbye,” the nurse said. “Go in to say goodbye.” But Shira shook her head and kept standing there, until two orderlies went into the room and wheeled her father out on a rolling stretcher, with a sheet covering his face. She turned aside and closed her eyes, as if blinded, and listened to the sounds the stretcher wheels made as it receded. She opened her eyes and watched as her father traveled to the end of the hallway, where one of the orderlies pressed the button for the service elevator, and the other leaned down to tie his shoelaces.
Yonatan sat her on the bed and said, “Later, later we’ll decide what to do with the things. Is there anything else you need to take care of here?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sinking into passivity as into a hot bath, and he gathered the things into the bag she gave him and told her he would ask the nurse what to do. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s do it tomorrow. I don’t have the strength now.”
“Of course.” He put the bag on the bed next to her. “Wait here a minute, don’t leave.”
She looked at him, exhausted: Where could she go? She had been in all possible worlds today.
He went to the nurses’ station and told the young nurse that a patient of theirs had died this evening and his daughter wanted to know what to do, if there were any forms to fill out.
“Where did he die? Here in the ward?” He said no, in Internal H. “Then you have to go there.”
He went back to the room and found Shira sitting on the bed in the same position in which he’d left her. “I’m going down to Internal. Are you all right?”
She nodded. “I’m dying for a cigarette.”
“Come on then,” he said cheerfully, “let’s go and have a smoke.”
She got up and started looking for her cigarettes in her bag, and before they left she pointed to the bed and said, “But what about that?”
“The bag?”
“Should we leave it here?” she asked, troubled.
“Sure, no one will take it.”
“No. But someone may think it’s trash and throw it out.”
He took the bag and said, “Come on, we don’t need to come back here anyway.”
She started crying again and said, “It’s awful, that bag. Couldn’t they come up with something less transparent?”
Once again, she sat in her regular corner by the vending machine, next to the big ashtray, which was overflowing with paper cups and empty cans. She nodded feeble mourners’ gestures at the passersby who waved to her, sons and daughters visiting their parents, accustomed to seeing her there. But now she felt like an impostor. There was no longer any reason for her to sit here, on the hard chair, her shoulder squeezed against the rattling machine, flicking ash into muddy remnants of Turkish coffee; she was free, at liberty to go and smoke at home like a normal human being.
“How long has it been since you had a cigarette?” he asked.
She tried to think how many hours had gone by since she had smoked her last cigarette in the car. “I think it was at eight. Something like that.”
“Wow. When did you get here?”
“Ten to nine,” she said, and the words dispossessed the time from its great insignificant importance.
“It happened really quickly,” he said, and she said she didn’t know, she had no sense of time. When she put her cigarette out she said she felt like another one, and he said, “Go on, then. I’ll have one too.”
After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The line echoed through her head again, but now she understood what Dickinson meant.
Later, after he made the arrangements for her and they went out into the parking lot, he remembered he’d left the sandwich on the cabinet in her father’s room. Like a stone placed on a grave, he thought, and suddenly felt as if his soul was also connected to those items, that when he had seen them on the floor, separated into piles of less important and more important and then once again unified into the classless mixture that now rattled in the bag he carried, he felt he was watching old age itself, a simple pile of things. He felt sorry for these things that were destined to look so meager only because they belonged to an old man. He thought about the battered transistor radio. If it had belonged to a child—to Dana, for example—it would have looked completely different. He would have praised a child who had decided to repair it, instead of feeling sorry for the old man who refused to buy a new one.
The night air attacked her face with warm kisses, as if it had missed her too. “It’s really like summer,” she said. “Hard to believe it was raining this morning.”
“Raining? It was a squall.”
“Really? A real storm?”
“You have no idea.” He was happy to tell her something she didn’t know, something refreshing. “You can’t imagine what the roads were like today; that’s why I was so late.”
Then she remembered he’d taught in Jerusalem that day, and asked how it went.
“Amazing,” he said quickly, as if he had been waiting all day to tell her, and she looked at him questioningly, with eyes still wet from tears. “Simply amazing.”
Although she didn’t think she could feel anything but pain now, she was overcome by a great sense of relief. Yesterday she had feared he would fail, that he would come home defeated, loathing his new career, loathing her for her success in the old one, and before falling asleep she had tried to think of ways to encourage him.
“You should have seen me,” he said, and put the key in the
car door. “I was incredible!”
“Really?” she asked, and felt a lump in her throat. The funeral would be the next afternoon, he had told her, after talking to the Chevra Kadisha. As an expert in these matters, he had made the arrangements for her while she sat by the vending machine and smoked one cigarette after another, listening to him talk on her cell phone as he paced back and forth. She tried to imagine where her father was, because she knew the movie that kept running through her head had not ended in the hallway, by the service elevator that took him somewhere—it had gone down, not up—and when she tried to picture the refrigerator where he would spend the night, without being part of it, the place where there was no night or day but only a twilight full of blinking fluorescence, when she thought about tomorrow, about the first morning when he would not be alive, a pain cleaved her spine and pooled in her knees.
She felt Yonatan’s arm around her shoulder and heard him say, “But what am I telling you all this for now? Your father died today.”
“But I want to hear about it,” she mumbled.
“You will, but not now.” He ran his hand down her back.
“Now,” she protested. “Tell me now. Life goes on.”
Yonatan smiled. “Yes, but it can go on tomorrow.”
When they drove out of the parking lot and contended with drivers who wouldn’t let them merge into traffic, trying to trap them eternally within the confines of the hospital, she remembered her car and said they should go back and she would drive it home.
“No way. You’re not driving in your condition.”