“And what did he say?” I inquired anxiously. She thought for a minute, and then said, “He said that the main thing was that it turned out all right.”
“What turned out all right?” I sneered, offended, but Einat was unable to explain Professor Hishin’s meaning, and so—with a pounding heart, tightening my grip on the receiver—I dared to ask to speak to her mother for a minute. But her parents weren’t at home. Lazar’s wife had gone to work after Hishin’s visit, and Lazar had gone out on errands shortly before I phoned. “And you’re at home alone?” I said in a tone that surprised even me by its anger. “Yes,” she said, presumably also taken aback by my inexplicable rage. When she saw that I had fallen into a strange silence, she asked if I wanted her father to call me when he got back. “No, it doesn’t matter,” I said quickly, “I’ll see him tomorrow at the hospital.” I hung up, undid the buttons of my leather jacket, threw it onto the floor, and immediately phoned the surgical department, to get hold of Hishin and hear from him directly what he thought of the blood transfusion. But it transpired that Hishin, who had only just arrived, had gone to the internal medicine ward to talk to Levine. “What for?” I asked anxiously. But the nurse didn’t know. “What did you come back in such a hurry for?” asked my rival-friend, the other resident, grabbing the phone from the nurse. “We all thought that you would take advantage of the trip to do a little sightseeing on your own.” He sounded friendly. Had he heard something from Hishin about the transfusion I had performed in Varanasi? He wanted to hear my first impressions of India, but I didn’t have the patience to talk about my trip, and I asked him what had happened in the department during my two weeks’ absence, inquiring about one patient after the other, mentioning their names, which I remembered perfectly, and asking about the results of the operations at which I had been present. He was surprised by my detailed questions, but he tried to answer them as fully as possible. Then I suddenly remembered the woman who had been lying on the operating table when Lazar came to call Hishin to his office. “How is she? How is she?” I asked in unaccountable agitation. “You sewed her up yourself.” He sounded slightly embarrassed when he replied, “She died of an internal hemorrhage a day or two after you left.”
“An internal hemorrhage?” I repeated, suddenly struck by real sorrow for the young woman, and for her husband and her mother, who had been waiting outside the door of the ward. “Why should she have hemorhaged?” I went on with a twinge of anger. “I remember every minute of that operation, I haven’t forgotten anything, I thought about it again in India—it was a simple benign operation.”
“Yes,” he confirmed in his deep voice, “that was our mistake. We thought it was a simple operation, but it wasn’t simple. The bleeding flooded and infected everything, and Hishin still hasn’t discovered the source.”
“And what about the postmortem?” I demanded.
“Nothing clear, a complete mystery.”
“Mystery?” I pounced in scorn and despair, as if he were personally responsible for this death. “What mystery? To call something a mystery, you don’t have to be a doctor.”
Seven
Has the time already come to consider marriage? If so, the author responsible for imposing the ideal of marriage on this chapter will have to begin melting the hard gray shell of bachelorhood in which he has wrapped his hero, who at this hour of wintry dawn is skillfully and responsibly maneuvering his motorcycle through the stream of Tel Aviv traffic, casting occasional sidelong glances at a woman sitting behind the wheel of her car and smoking a cigarette, no longer in the normal wish to enjoy the sight of a pretty face but in the new hope of encountering a familiar one.
But how will it come about, a marriage, which can sometimes be seen as an easy and self-evident thing, with a natural flow of its own, but is also liable to be difficult, demanding, and recalcitrant? It may, with the same justice, be called an unnatural and even absurd act, like two big, strong birds led on a chain by the rather irritable and myopic character who appeared as a mystery in the first part of this book and has turned, in the second part, into marriage without losing any of his original and delightful mysteriousness, or his nasty habit of paying brief, unexpected nocturnal calls in the guise of an ancient, forgotten relative, appearing suddenly from the bedroom closet, dragging behind him two predatory birds, who may appear to be stepping tamely and obediently in his wake but on closer inspection turn out to have been bound together.
“Maybe you should free them and let them fly?” we suggest with friendly compassion. “Free them?” he replies in surprise, in disappointment, even in annoyance, and tightens the chain in his hand. “How can that be possible? They’re married.” “Married?” We can’t help bursting into short peals of merry laughter in the silence of the night, bending down slightly to observe the curious couple standing in happy indifference, their tails touching. “In what sense?” We burst into laughter again. But we’re too late, and we can no longer obtain an answer to the question which our rash laughter has rendered superfluous, for the pair now draw themselves up gravely, shedding a golden feather, and with a silent, crooked gait they continue on their way, dragging the mystery of their marriage behind them, its deep purpose, its anxious bond, its dumb loyalty, its achievements, and its frustrations. Now the mystery passes before us, stern-faced and sad-eyed, bowed beneath the weight of a responsibility which is not always comprehensible, which is not always justified, and the chain wrapped around his hand trembles and chimes like a little bell.
When I arrived at the ward, Hishin was already doing his rounds. At first he seemed to be trying to avoid me, and he slipped into his office, and then he changed his mind and emerged and came at me from behind and embraced me warmly. “I heard all about it,” he said in a loud whisper. “A great success—I’m proud of my choice. I saw Einat too, and examined her thoroughly, and I’m with you a hundred percent. Not only in the diagnosis, but also in the emergency blood transfusion. I told the Lazars, it was the brilliant idea of a doctor whose insight is deeper than the sharpest knife. And if there’s a slightly different opinion, like that of my good friend Levine, who regards the transfusion as a frivolous and superfluous procedure on your part, take no notice—he’s a strange, proud man who thinks he invented hepatitis. Don’t be upset by what he says to you—he’s already said he wants to talk to you. Listen to him patiently, nod your head politely, but know that I’m behind your idea, especially from the psychological point of view, and as I’ve often told you, psychology is no less important than the knife in your hand,” and he gaily brandished an imaginary knife. But I wasn’t interested in hearing again about his belief in psychology. I wanted to clarify immediately whether behind that sly, jocular manner he really did support my blood transfusion, because I still thought with strange longing about the thin, transparent tube silently pumping the blood between the two beds in Varanasi while crowds streamed into the Ganges below. “But what’s Professor Levine’s problem?” I asked in despair, and before he could reply, I rapidly and angrily hurled the test results at him, all of which I still knew by heart. The two transaminases which rose from 40 to a 180 and to nearly a 158; the bilirubin level of nearly 30; the suspected damage to the coagulatory system. “Where’s my mistake?” I demanded. But Hishin was already waving his hands impatiently. “Please, my friend, don’t try to convince me, I’m already convinced, altogether I’m your greatest fan.” And he winked at me and at the nurse standing next to us, and joined his hands on his heart in a new, Indian gesture, which astounded me with its cunning. “I beg you, don’t start throwing those numbers at me now—I’ve never really understood what they tell us about the state of the liver. That’s what we’ve got Professor Levine for, he’s the one who understands the liver, I only cut it up.” He burst into laughter and hugged me again. “No, Dr. Rubin, don’t waste your energy, because I really am a great fan of yours, otherwise I wouldn’t have sent you to India, and I’m glad to know that others have now joined me in my good opinion.”
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p; I knew at once whom he meant, and the feeling of happiness was so sudden and overwhelming that the blood rushed to my face. I lowered my eyes and said nothing. But now Hishin decided to talk, and with the same speed with which he made his initial precise, elegant incisions, he seized me by the shoulder, dismissed the nurse, and led me into his office. He shut the door and seated me on a chair and said, “What do you think, that I don’t know what’s eating you all the time? But what can I do? There’s only one position available in the department, and I have to choose between the two of you, and it’s a very difficult choice, because you’ve each got a lot of virtues and only a few shortcomings. Lazar and his wife have also asked me if you’re going to continue as a resident with us.”
“Lazar and his wife? Why his wife?” I muttered, but the thought that she had shown an interest in my future at the hospital sent a powerful thrill through me. “Why did you tell them about me?” I asked in offended innocence. “But they were the ones who asked,” Hishin justified himself. “They both wanted to know what your chances in the department were, and I saw that it pained them to hear that I hadn’t chosen you, so I said to Lazar, you dare complain? The number of positions available are up to you; give me another position and I’ll keep him on for another year, even though”—and he raised an admonishing finger—“it’s not really his natural place. He’ll be an excellent doctor, but his true aptitude is in his soul, not his hands. Not because his hands aren’t good, but because he thinks too much before he cuts or stitches, and in the meantime time passes, and time in an operation isn’t just very precious but also very dangerous. So why insist on playing with knives when his feeling, his deep understanding, his bright ideas are needed elsewhere? So we both decided to speak to Professor Levine about you, because there’s a place for a substitute doctor for six months in his department. In the meantime take that, hang around there for a while and learn what you can—you’ll always find someone, if it’s really so important to you, to take you back to the operating table. But for God’s sake, get the business of that blood transfusion you performed in India out of the way first. Go and tell him why you thought it was necessary, so he won’t agitate himself for nothing, because he’s not a well man.”
And thus the final clarification of my position in the surgical department was concluded. There were only two weeks of the trial year left, and I tried to get the most out of them and not to miss a single operation. Sometimes I would stay in the hospital in the evening, after my shift was over, just on the off-chance that I might be able to take part in an emergency operation and look deep inside the human body again before my enforced banishment from surgery began. And now that I was about to leave, everyone was generous. From time to time I was allowed to finish minor sutures by myself, or even to begin primary incisions. And I did it well, or at least I thought so. Senior doctors in the department, who knew that I was soon leaving, nodded their heads in satisfaction, and Hishin himself would say, “Very good, excellent stitching, what a pity you’re leaving us,” and wink at me. But we never had a real talk. Once, when we were standing and waiting in the operating room for the results of the lab tests, he asked me to tell him about India, but I answered with deliberate dryness and blandness, and then he said nastily to the nurses busy with the instruments, “What do you think of Dr. Rubin? We sent him to India and he keeps all his experiences to himself. You could show us a few pictures, at least. The Lazars were at my place yesterday and they complained that you were still hanging on to all the photographs of the trip.”
Indeed, I was still hanging on to all the photographs of the trip, including the ones of Lazar and his wife. The pictures were lying on the little table next to my bed, and I would often look at the two of them, study the way they stood together in front of different views of the Taj Mahal, which I was now sorry I had missed owing to my exaggerated generosity. Again and again I examined her face and her body and the way she stood and the way she managed to smile spontaneously in all the pictures, and in my heart I insisted on calling her “my love.” I knew that if I gave the photos to Lazar, I would run the risk of finally parting from them, whereas I was busy racking my brains all the time for ways to renew my contact with Lazar, in order to reach her through him. The idea of secretly developing pictures of her by herself and keeping them struck me as immoral, even though I imagined that in the end I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation, at least with regard to one picture in which she looked particularly charming in the reddish brown Indian light. I wondered what they had in mind regarding the financial arrangements between us. Were they going to give me a fee or not? At the beginning of the month I received my full salary from the hospital, and I saw that there was no mention on the slip of a vacation or absence from work. As if the journey to India had taken place only in my imagination. Had the administrative head of the hospital issued secret instructions to the financial department to ignore my absence, or had it simply not been brought to their attention? For the time being I didn’t go to Lazar to ask him about it, so I wouldn’t have to remind him of the remuneration his wife had promised me in our telephone conversation on the eve of the trip. The knapsack with the medical kit was still in my apartment too, and for a few days I wondered what I should do with it. It occurred to me to confiscate it as compensation for my trouble, but I was afraid that Dr. Hessing, the head pharmacist, who had prepared it with such loving care, was still waiting for it. Finally I decided to hand it back to him personally, and to my surprise he was disappointed that I had seen fit to drag it back from India with me instead of donating it to some institution there, as he had suggested. “We were in an emergency situation there up to the last minute,” I explained to him. “I didn’t know whether I might need it until we were actually on our way home, and I could hardly leave it standing in the middle of the airport.”
“I would simply have written the word “Israel” and the name of our hospital on it and left it with one of the airport guards,” said the pharmacist regretfully. And he unpacked the drugs and dressings and threw them all away without even looking at them, and put the instruments into an old cardboard box. I wanted to say something to him about the resourcefulness and imagination with which he had prepared the kit, and tell him about how I had used it, but he was already shaking his head at me with a certain hostility, as if I had spoiled his intention of taking advantage of our trip to make a private gesture of humanity toward the true sufferers of this world.
After this I made up my mind to give the photos to Lazar, and thanks to the good education I had received at home, I refrained at the last moment from duplicating for myself even one of the pictures in which she was alone and contented myself with the more distant family photos I had taken in Bodhgaya. If I was to liberate myself from the thoughts enslaving me to this woman, I warned myself, it had better be sooner than later, and a good, clear picture like the one in which she was standing and smiling (albeit only a faint smile) with the entire Taj Mahal floating miraculously behind her head, shining in the rosy light, would only delay the desired liberation. Although three weeks had already passed since I had seen her, things kept on happening to complicate my feelings toward her. For example, there had been Hishin’s casual remark about how it wasn’t only Lazar who took an interest in my future in the hospital, and the sudden suspicion, idiotic but persistent, that Hishin too was secretly in love with her. Thus, in the afternoon of one of my last days in the surgical department, I went to the administrative wing to give Lazar the photos, to ask about the welfare of my patient, and at the same time to give my regards to his wife. But the secretary, who immediately recognized me and remembered my name and greeted me with genuine heartiness, informed me regretfully that Lazar had just left his office for his lunch break. A devil must have gotten into me, for just as I was, still in my white coat, I hurried to catch up with him or, more accurately, to follow him.
For I was sure that he was on his way to meet the woman I persisted in secretly calling “my love.” He didn’t like leav
ing her alone, I thought with anxiety and a spurt of lust, which hastened my steps and sharpened my senses so that I was soon able to identify the big head with the mane of curly gray hair in the distance, among the people streaming toward the hospital parking lot. And as I walked I took off my white coat, which I bundled into the Honda’s black box. I took out the crash helmet and quickly put it on, and although I didn’t have my leather jacket with me and it was quite cold outside, I started the motorcycle. Since I knew the make of Lazar’s car, which we had discussed on the long train journey from New Delhi to Varanasi, I was able to identify it as it pulled out of its reserved parking place. From the movies I was familiar with the advantages of pursuing an automobile on a motorcycle, but I had never considered the absolute advantage of the helmet visor, which allowed the pursuer to tail the target so closely as to be almost intimate. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and Lazar’s car wove confidently and cleverly among the traffic, aiming for the center of town and the street where Lazar’s wife’s office was. There was no parking, and he had to leave his car on the sidewalk, apologizing to the owner of the store whose display window he blocked, and wait for his wife there. She finally came out, after a few minutes of waiting which seemed interminable to me too as I sat at a little distance on my Honda, getting damp from the fine drizzle filling the air. When I saw her hurrying on her high heels, this middle-aged woman in a short skirt—perhaps too short for her age—draped in the velvety blue tunic that she had taken all the way to India but hardly worn at all, her plump face laughing, a bundle of office files tucked under her heavy arm, insisting on opening an umbrella to protect her bare head during the short distance between the office door and the car, I realized that there was no mistake about it, it wasn’t a delusion or a mirage: I was really in love with her.
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