Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  So I said to myself as I stepped out into the big parking lot and the strong but sweet light of a brilliant winter’s day. I walked over to my motorcycle, which I had recently taken to inserting between the cars of the directors, under their exclusive carport, not only in order to protect it from the rain but also in order to peek into Lazar’s car to see if Dori had forgotten anything of hers there. I kicked off and rode quickly out of the hospital grounds, but at the first traffic light, while I was waiting at a red light, I couldn’t resist looking back at the yellowish building with smoke spiraling out of its two tall chimneys, and suddenly it seemed to me that it was not I who was leaving the hospital but the hospital that was sailing away from me like some great ship, embarking with its doctors and patients on a journey full of new storms and adventures, which I had been found unworthy of participating in. Professor Levine was right—he had put his finger on something; mental illness sharpened the senses. It was true, there had been something a little theatrical about my actions in Varanasi. There was always something faintly theatrical in the contact between a doctor and his patient, because it was only through acting that you could overcome a total stranger’s natural embarrassment at getting undressed in front of you so that you could look into his mouth, feel his stomach, listen to his heart, and finger his sexual organs. But in the hotel in Varanasi, next to the purple-lacquered wicker chairs, it hadn’t only been a theatrical show, it had been the beginning of falling in love, a love that I now had to make sure didn’t die, didn’t turn into a passing episode.

  When I arrived at my old apartment, I found the door open and strange suitcases standing in the hall and the landlady hurrying behind me to inform me that the new tenants were already moving in, because they had nowhere else to go and they couldn’t wait any longer. Since I had promised to vacate the apartment early, and if my new apartment was ready, why should I delay? I had no reason to delay, but no wish to start packing up my possessions either, which turned out to be more numerous than I had imagined, in front of this couple, fresh out of the army, quiet and in love, who began following me around and inserting themselves softly and insistently into every shelf I cleared. My motorcycle was of course no help in transporting my stuff, and I phoned Amnon, a childhood friend from Jerusalem who was busy writing his Ph.D. in the physics and astronomy department of Tel Aviv University, and supporting himself by working as a night watchman in a big canning plant in the south of the city. At night he had an old pickup truck at his disposal, and I asked him to use it to transport my belongings to the new apartment where I had already been to bed, but not to sleep. I had to wait until late in the evening, when his shift began, and in the meantime the young couple began to push me discreetly but firmly out of the apartment. At first we agreed that I would clear one room for them, where they could put their stuff until I cleared out the rest of the apartment. And at first they confined themselves to the room, giggling in undertones as they put things away in the closets and even hung pictures on the walls. But toward evening, when they saw that I was still hanging around, they grew impatient, and began wandering around the apartment, going into the kitchen to cook themselves supper, and the girl went into the bathroom to take a shower. They were a symbiotic couple, and kept up an incessant communication between them. Even when the girl was in the shower the boy kept going into the bathroom to give her things or get things from her. In the end Amnon called and announced that he would arrive within half an hour. I began taking down the suitcases, blankets, and cushions, and the young couple immediately volunteered to take down the cardboard boxes with my books and kitchen utensils. And even when I was sitting downstairs with all my possessions around me, waiting for Amnon and his pickup, they went on searching the apartment and bringing down all kinds of dirty and forgotten belongings of mine which I had left behind. It was highly disagreeable to have to part in such unseemly haste from my first Tel Aviv apartment, of which I was very fond, and where I had enjoyed a certain quiet and solitude, and which also preserved the memory of my initial excitement at the hospital, when I would reconstruct the operating table on the kitchen table and practice with a knife and fork and pieces of string, trying to imitate Hishin’s quiet, rapid movements.

  Amnon arrived very late and found me sitting on the sidewalk covered with a blanket, surrounded by my possessions like a deported refugee. But I couldn’t be angry with him, since I knew that he was abandoning his watchman’s post for my sake. We quickly loaded everything onto the open truck, and I got onto my motorcycle and rode in front to show him the way. At the new place we unloaded everything onto the sidewalk, and Amnon drove away. “You still have to explain to me what Hawking’s problem is with the first three seconds of the big bang,” I said before he left. I knew he liked having me ask him questions about astrophysics, so that he could give me a long lecture while I sat and listened like a disciple at the feet of the master. He had been stuck on his Ph.D. for several years now, even though he devoted all his energies to it, and his friends were loath to ask him about it in case a note of incredulity crept into their voices. “Whenever you like—you know I’m all in favor of your taking a break from your quackery and learning a little real science,” he said affably. He asked for my new phone number, but I found that I had suddenly forgotten it, so I promised that I would call him that very night and give it to him. But in the new apartment the phone was dead. The thought that my parents had probably been trying to get in touch with me all evening and wondering where I had disappeared to began to worry me. During the past few weeks I had noted a new note of concern in their voices, and there was no reason to add to their anxiety. But what had happened to the telephone? No one had touched it since last night. For a moment it occurred to me that Dori had garbled her message to the phone company when she asked for an interim reading of the meter and had caused them to disconnect the phone by mistake. It was late, and the apartment was alarmingly full of my possessions. Now I had the feeling that it was actually smaller than the apartment I had left, and the closet full of the granny’s gray suits suddenly annoyed me. But above all, it upset me that I wouldn’t be able to keep my promise to call Amnon, and he would wait in vain in his cold watchman’s hut and think that I was trying to get out of meeting him after taking advantage of him and his truck. I left my belongings piled up on the floor and went out to look for a pay phone in order to call him and make a date. As I searched for a phone I thought about the obscurity of those first three seconds of the big bang, encountered by Hawking and others, and in which, according to Hawking’s own admission, the theory itself collapsed, owing to its inability to explain how the entire cosmos, compressed into a particle whose density was infinite and whose radius was zero, had begun to expand with such speed. Physics was helpless with regard to these three seconds, for they were simply outside physics. This was the point of transition from spirit to matter. In other words, how could matter shrink back into the single particle from which it was born? Spirit would do it, and not by magic but in a slow and gradual process. In fact, it had already begun. Take the airplane, for example. It compressed matter, canceled distance, and what was the airplane if not a smallish bit of matter in which an enormous amount of spirit had been invested—that is, laws and thought?

  When I finally found a phone, I was too tired to engage Amnon in any of my theories and simply asked him to notify the phone company of the problem, and gave him my new number, which I had written down on my identity card. And then, in spite of the lateness of the hour, I phoned my parents, who I thought would be worrying about my sudden disappearance, but it turned out that they were sleeping soundly, without a care in the world, for when they had phoned my new apartment in the afternoon, a recorded voice had informed them that the phone was temporarily disconnected.

  “It must be my new landlady’s fault,” I said immediately, laughing but annoyed. “Instead of asking for a simple reading of the meter, she must have confused the issue somehow, and they disconnected the phone. Terrific. Now what am I go
ing to do?” But my mother calmed me down; she had an inexplicable faith in government agencies, perhaps because my father worked for one of them. “They’ll connect it again in the morning, and in any case we won’t need it tomorrow, because we’re coming to Tel Aviv to sign the guarantee for you and help you organize things in your new place.” Suddenly I felt uncomfortable about their coming so soon to my new apartment, where my lovemaking with my landlady still lingered in the air. I was also sure that my mother wouldn’t approve of the apartment, which she had been hostile toward from the outset. And even if she restrained herself and didn’t say anything against it, she wouldn’t be able to resist questioning me about my real reasons for making this sudden change. “No, don’t come tomorrow,” I said quickly. “The guarantee can wait. I’ve given her enough postdated checks. Don’t come, I won’t have enough time to spend with you tomorrow. And tomorrow night I’m taking part in a private operation with Dr. Nakash, who’s taken me on as his assistant, and I’ll have to go in early to check out the anesthetizing equipment and begin to learn the subject. Why come in the middle of all the mess? Give me a chance to fix things up a bit. Besides, it makes more sense for me to come to Jerusalem on Friday to see you, and I’ll bring the guarantee with me so you can sign it there.” I concluded on a pleading note, and now there was a silence on the other end of the line. There was no doubt that they were disappointed, especially my father, who had probably planned the visit to Tel Aviv in detail. But my promise to come to Jerusalem for the weekend tipped the scales, and they gave in. “So tomorrow you’ll be operating again,” said my father, suddenly coming to life. “You see, nothing’s been lost. They want you in the operating room again.”

  “It’s only an operation for the surgeon, Dad. For me it’s just putting someone to sleep and waking him up again,” I said in despair, looking at a young woman wrapped in a winter coat, standing a few steps away in the empty street.

  I said nothing to them about my interview with Professor Levine, not wanting to cause them any more grief. I would have to accustom them gradually to the idea that I was out of the hospital. I hurried back to the apartment, and although I had had a difficult, confusing day, I didn’t feel tired and immediately began to tackle the task of arranging my possessions in their new places. It turned out that in addition to the granny’s closet, the Lazars had forgotten to empty the two little bedside cupboards, which contained mainly documents, old letters, and photograph albums. At first I didn’t know if I had the right to empty them on my own initiative, but the thought of having two family archives stuffed with letters and photographs and documents belonging to complete strangers weighing on my sleep at night was too much for me. After some hesitation, I decided to cram everything into some empty shoe boxes I found on the balcony, which I pushed between the gray suits in the granny’s closet. At first I thought of keeping one photograph album out, for on paging through it I had found a number of ancient photographs of Dori as a young soldier, a law student, with Lazar and without him, holding a baby in her arms, always smiling, attractive and shapely, a young woman of my own age. But in the end I put it away with the others. I felt alien and hostile toward these photographs. I couldn’t connect with her past; nothing here belonged to me, nor did I need it to fire my imagination and fuel my love. I wanted her the way I knew her now, plump, middle-aged, mature, pampered but sure of herself. Until the small hours of the night I was busy putting my things away and cleaning the apartment. I hung my pictures up on the nails which had remained in the walls, not wanting to disturb the silence with the banging of a hammer. Finally I took a shower and made the bed with the clean, fragrant sheets that had apparently been left for my use, and with the disconnected telephone ensuring that no one would disturb me, I sank into a deep, prolonged sleep, with the result that I arrived alert and clearheaded at the private hospital on the Herzliah beach for the operation which began at twilight the next day and lasted until dawn.

  It was complicated and dangerous brain surgery, performed by a surgeon of about thirty-five, a visiting professor from America, assisted by a local man, a well-known retired surgeon from our own hospital, who had worked with Dr. Nakash in the past and presumably trusted him to handle the particularly complex anesthesia procedure. For the first time I saw Nakash losing a little of his natural serenity and inner confidence. He was flushed and excited, and after introducing me to the visiting surgeon and his personal assistant, he began addressing me in English, and asked me to answer him in kind, so that we would fit into the linguistic ambience of the place, which from the moment of my arrival had impressed me with its pleasantness. In contrast to the operating rooms I had known up to then, which were always cold, windowless, isolated from the world, buried in the heart of the hospital like the engine room of a submarine, here we entered an operating room that was bright and cozy, behind whose attractive drapes were windows through which an almost pastoral view was visible, with people walking calmly along a well-tended seaside promenade. The instruments were newer than those in our hospital, smaller in their dimensions, light and pleasant to hold. And in the middle of all this was the large shaved skull of a handsome, sturdy man of about fifty-five. Since the days of my anatomy lessons I had not seen a human skull held between forceps and gradually opened up, layer after layer, sawed by the hand of an artist to expose the whitish brain pulsing with its minute capillaries, whose delicate balance between stillness and vitality Nakash was controlling from behind a state-of-the-art anesthesia machine full of little monitors displaying changing numbers. And so the long night began, during the course of which I learned how to stand rooted to the spot for hours at a time in order to follow the movement of the respirator, and especially the changing values of the oxygen concentration, the level of expired carbon dioxide, the volume of air pumped into the lungs, and of course the heartbeats, the systemic blood pressure, the venous pressure, and the state of hydration in the body—all of which make up the drama of anesthesiology, particularly in brain surgery, where the slightest twitch or cough on the part of the patient can cause the exposed brain to bulge.

  “If you’re getting bored,” Nakash whispered to me in the middle of the night in his heavily accented Iraqi Hebrew, “think of yourself as the pilot of the soul, who has to ensure that it glides painlessly through the void of sleep without being jolted or shocked, without falling. But also to make sure that it doesn’t soar too high and slip inadvertently into the next world.” I had heard him speak like this about his role before, but now, in the depths of the night, a little groggy after long hours of intent concentration on the changing monitors of the anesthesia machine, with the skull and brain not actually before my eyes but only flickering grayly on the suspended video screen, I felt that his words were true. I had turned from a doctor into a pilot or a navigator, surrounded by nurses, who looked like well-groomed stewardesses in this private hospital, coming in every now and then to draw a little blood to measure the potassium and sodium levels, or to pour cocktails of pentothal or morphine into the suspended infusion bags, with special additions concocted by Nakash to ensure the tranquillity of the “instrument flight.” And for the first time I saw this work, for all its boredom and frustration, as something that possessed spiritual significance, for the thought and attention of the anesthetist were addressed not to the body, not to the matter, not to the greenish tumor which the two surgeons at our side were battling to extract from the depths of the brain, but to the soul, which I suddenly felt was truly in my hands, in its silence and, who knows, perhaps also in its dreams.

  When the operation was over we saw that dawn had already stolen through the folds of the drapes. The two surgeons and the nurses left the room, and the patient was wheeled into the recovery room. Nakash sat next to him for a while and then went to see to the arrangements for us to be paid, leaving me to wait for the “landing”—in other words, to watch the respirator for the first signs that the patient was beginning to breathe independently. I now felt no tiredness. I parted the curtains
and let my eyes wander from the respirator to the sunrise painting the sea in soft pastel colors. My hands were clean, without any blood or smell of drugs, without the warmth of the depths of the human body, which I was used to feeling on my fingers after an operation, even if I had played a very minor role in it. And although I hadn’t even seen the tumor with my own eyes before it was sent for the biopsy, I felt a sense of profound satisfaction, as if I had truly taken part in the battle. I went up to the patient and raised his eyelids, as I had observed Nakash doing to his patients, but without knowing what exactly I wanted to see there. A new, very pretty nurse, who hadn’t been present during the operation, came into the room and sat down next to me and said, “Dr. Nakash sent me to take over from you, so that you can go and sign for the fee.” I didn’t want to leave the patient; I felt that I wanted to see for myself how the undercarriage of the soul touched the solid ground of the body. The nurse’s frank reference to the financial arrangements between myself and the hospital jarred me. But I was new here and I didn’t want to step out of line. I thus went to the secretary’s office, where a check for eight hundred shekels was waiting for me, together with an elegantly printed page setting out the details of the fee and the various deductions. Nakash examined my check and asked if everything was all right. Then he sent me home. “I’ll see that our patient lands safely,” he said with a smile. I went to the changing rooms, and even though I had not been soiled by the operation, I couldn’t resist the magnificent facilities, and I took a long shower. Then I dressed, tucked my crash helmet under my arm, and prepared to leave the hospital, but before doing so I couldn’t help going into the recovery room to see if the landing was over. It was, and the patient was now alone. Nakash had disappeared. The beautiful nurse was gone too. The anesthesia machine had been wheeled into a corner of the room. The soul had returned to the body. The patient was breathing by himself.