Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “Yes, and so she could!” This sentence may have sounded arrogant, but genuine emotion gripped me as I remembered the dark alcove, the sleeping bag crumpled in the corner, and the two astounded Japanese girls crouching over their little gas burner. “And did she by any chance tell you too about the blood transfusion I gave her in Varanasi?” I asked Michaela eagerly, for there was something in the way she spoke which made me hope that by means of her story I might be able to dispel the mist that still clung not only to my actions but also to my character during the trip to India. “Of course, she told me all about it,” said Michaela. “She claims you saved her life.” I was very moved. I wanted to keep quiet and let these wonderful words sink slowly into my soul, but I couldn’t control myself, and I asked her hesitantly, “And you? How does it seem to you? Like the truth or like an illusion?” She wasn’t surprised by my strange question. A faint smile wrinkled her face, which wasn’t in the least beautiful, but whose great, shining eyes held out a promise of something that was stronger than beauty. “I think you really did save her,” she replied simply, unhesitatingly, and generously, and then I couldn’t control myself any longer, and in great excitement I leaned over and took her in my arms, embracing her warmly with those same hands that Einat had found so trustworthy, careful however not to speak a word of love, in order not to desecrate the true love I bore for that other woman. I contented myself with saying sincerely, “I like you. I like you very, very much,” and taking her curly head between my hands I carefully placed my lips on her eyes. But she, with a movement whose naturalness belied a lot of experience, slid her lips up to mine and drew a real, prolonged kiss out of me, while below us the singing died down, the lawn was flooded with light again, and cries of “Mazel tov!” greeted the couple emerging from under the canopy.

  Now we had to hurry back. But the kiss that had taken place between us seemed to have glued us to each other, and we had hardly begun to descend the path winding down the dark side of the rock when Michaela stopped and invited me into a kind of little alcove or cave. And in the bitter-herb smell of the dry desert soil I encountered no difficulties in removing her white blouse and exposing to the cold moonlight her two little breasts, which I rubbed my face between, not only to feel their comforting softness but perhaps also to smell what remained of the strong Indianness buried inside her. But I immediately realized that her rich experience of men, and the steady honesty of her way of thinking, would not allow me to be content with a dreamy head buried between cool breasts, for her long, rather hard legs were already coiled around my body in a tight grip, pushing me gently onto the dry ground and demanding what a man is expected to provide once he begins rubbing his head between a woman’s breasts. So we began to make love, quickly, without great passion but also without suffering or embarrassment, without the words of love which belonged to someone else, with a tenderness and generosity which ensured that we would both enjoy ourselves and also come, quickly and together, and of course silently, for she knew as well as I did that not only my parents but many friends, both hers and mine, were within hearing distance.

  “Do you believe in the reincarnation of souls?” I suddenly asked her softly when she had finished putting on her clothes and brushing the dry grass off her hair and turned in the dark toward the path to return me to my parents. She stopped immediately, as surprised as I had hoped she would be. “The reincarnation of souls?” She fixed me with her big eyes, in which a new glint of rebuke had appeared. “I wouldn’t have expected you to talk like that.”

  “Why not?” I asked curiously.

  “Because I would have thought a doctor would know.”

  “Know what?” I asked in confusion.

  “That there’s no such thing as a soul,” she answered quickly.

  “There’s no such thing as a soul?” I was amused but also a little alarmed by the vehemence of her words.

  “Of course not,” she said with a new note of impatience in her voice. “The soul is only a figment of the imagination of people who need the idea of having something permanent and unchanging inside themselves, which they have to worry about and keep on stroking and petting.” There was something delightful and captivating now in her annoyance, and I therefore kept on at her as we went down the path. “So what is reincarnated then, if it isn’t the soul? Isn’t there anything that passes from one person to another?” She was silent for a moment, examining me to see if I was mocking her or speaking seriously, and then she started explaining that what was reincarnated was only a bundle of inclinations and aptitudes which underwent constant changes, for human beings weren’t permanent, they were just chains of events that repeated themselves, because the energy they used, the energy that was necessary for any material or spiritual action, was not consumed but released at the end of these actions, and then reused. And thus actions or events which had taken place in the past returned in a different guise. Something new in her personality, attractive but also somewhat dogmatic, was revealed to me in the way she delivered her opinions to the accompaniment of strong, decisive gestures. She was so carried away that she paid no attention when we entered the illuminated area, and the guests standing around with little cups of aromatic coffee and glasses of wine eyed us speculatively as we stepped onto the lawn together, probably wondering where we had been secluding ourselves during the wedding ceremony. We parted without a word, by mutual consent, and went off in different directions to mingle with our friends. And suddenly Eyal was in front of me in his white wedding clothes, and I embraced him emotionally. “But where did you disappear to?” he asked in an aggrieved tone. “Michaela took me up the cliff to watch the ceremony from above,” I informed him. The sly smile glinted in his eyes again, as if he already knew exactly what had been going on above his head during his wedding ceremony. “So she caught you in the end.”

  “Caught me?” I said in a puzzled tone. But Eyal persisted. “She asked Hadas a week ago if you were coming to the wedding, and she only decided to come herself when we promised her that you would be here.” I was amazed by this news and eager to get more details out of him, but my parents had already noticed me and they now came hurrying up, afraid that I would disappear again. “Where have you been?” asked my father, his cheeks very flushed from the wine. I told them that I had been watching the wedding ceremony from the edge of the cliff with Michaela. My mother stood there silently, her eyes flickering over my face. Can she really tell from the expression on my face, I wondered, what I’ve just been doing with Michaela? “The ceremony was very nice,” I said. “At first I was afraid it was going to be ridiculous, but in the end it was even moving.” They both confirmed my feelings. They were very pleased that they had traveled down to the heart of the desert. It would give them something to talk about for years to come. But they were also eager to get started. Although it was only nine o’clock, the journey to the Dead Sea was liable to take more than an hour and a half, and they were accustomed to going to bed at ten. I went to call Amnon, who was supposed to be coming with us. At first it was difficult to pry him away from the excited conversations he was still busy conducting with old friends, but in the end he agreed to come. We began saying our good-byes, and I of course went to look for Michaela. For a moment I thought she had disappeared, but I soon caught sight of her, sitting at a table by herself and eating hungrily.

  Should I tell her before we left, I wondered as I watched her gulping wine from a big glass, not to dismiss the soul so lightly, or should I leave this adolescent argument open till our next meeting? That there would be one, I had no doubt. This girl possessed certain qualities that suited me to the core. Not only the easygoing, carefree lightness she radiated, but also that air of self-containment, the way she had held back, even though she was expecting me, and waited for me to come to her. Yes, I definitely liked her, I thought to myself; even the way she sat alone, eating so heartily, pleased me. She could be the perfect mate for me, precisely because I didn’t want to and couldn’t fall in love with her, since I was st
ill in love with the woman I had successfully turned into my landlady. This being the case, why should I argue with her and try to persuade her of the existence of the soul, when her view of the world would lead her to give me the freedom I wanted—a free marriage, to banish my landlady’s fears that I would overwhelm her with my lust? I went up to say good-bye to her. She did not seem embarrassed, but just the opposite: she looked straight into my face. “You must be hungry too,” she said with a smile, and pointed to the brimming plate in front of her. “Yes, I’m hungry, but my parents are in a hurry to leave.” And suddenly I couldn’t resist adding, “But as far as the soul is concerned, the argument isn’t over yet. Because, you know, I’m on the other side of the operating table now. Not a surgeon anymore, but an anesthetist. And to be an anesthetist you have to believe in the possibility of freeing the soul from the body and bringing it safely back again.”

  “So you’ve turned into an anesthetist?” she asked calmly, taking a big sip of her wine and trying to grasp the significance of the change, since the world of medicine was not completely strange to her after three months with the sidewalk doctors of Calcutta. “Yes,” I replied, and again I couldn’t resist adding a phrase I thought would please her, “putting those who’ve never been awake to sleep.” She registered the message and smiled a somewhat suspicious, bitter little smile, very unlike the wholehearted, generous one that had already captured my heart. We exchanged telephone numbers and arranged to get in touch at the end of the week in Tel Aviv. When I said good-bye to her, I saw my mother standing a little way off and watching us.

  Before we set out I decided to offer a little ride to Amnon’s retarded brother, who was standing and looking at the Honda with an admiring expression on his face. I put my helmet on his head and rode slowly between the houses of the kibbutz. He was very excited and frightened, and held on to me tightly from behind. His parents thanked me warmly. When we left the illuminated area of the kibbutz for the Arava road, we realized how much light was pouring from the moon, which had risen an hour before from the direction of the Jordan River, enabling us to get up to a good speed on the ruler-straight road. After thirty minutes we had already reached the Arava junction, and after another twenty we passed the white potash works of Sodom, where we slowed down a little on the winding road next to the Dead Sea, not just to enjoy the magnificent contours of the mountains of Edom in the bright moonlight but mainly in order not to miss my parents’ hotel, which turned out to be a new, recently opened place set a little apart from the others. It was a quarter past ten when Amnon succeeded in making out the little signpost directing us onto a dirt road, and we found the hotel in darkness. Since my parents had notified the hotel that they would be arriving late, the reception clerk was not surprised to see them, although he was somewhat startled at the sight of the black-helmeted motorcyclist carrying their luggage. “Perhaps we can find a room for you and Amnon to spend the night here,” my mother suggested. Amnon received this proposal gladly. He was worn out after the tiring day, which had come directly on top of his night job, and he liked the idea of spending the whole night going over his experiences at the wedding with me. But I refused. I was impatient to get back to my apartment and be by myself, to digest everything that had happened and to think about Michaela and the role she might play in my life. “Don’t worry,” I said to my parents, “it’s a very clear night, and the Honda’s running perfectly. The two of us will take care of each other,” a beloved phrase of my father’s which I always added when I went out at night with a friend. We had black coffee in the hotel lobby, and I bought a small bar of chocolate from one of the vending machines to appease my gnawing hunger. I took a spare helmet out of the black box at the back of the motorcycle for Amnon, and we started off. Meanwhile the moon had disappeared on its westward wanderings, and the sky was now full of an astonishing abundance of stars. The coastal road leading to the Jericho junction was completely deserted, and we could ride right down the middle, as if it were our private road. From the way that Amnon was clutching my waist I could sense his alarm as I kept gaining speed, but after a while he began to relax and lifted his head up to enjoy the journey. The rocky mass of Masada soon appeared on our left, looking in the stillness of the night like an ancient aircraft carrier which had risen from the depths of the sea. A few minutes later the lights on the fence of Kibbutz Ein Geddi appeared, and the buildings of the field school above the creek of Arugoth. The road began climbing steeply to the top of the cliff, and it was all I could do to restrain the motorcycle from flying off it in my enthusiasm at the sight of the steely expanse of the Dead Sea spread out below us. And then came the descent to the shores of the sea, as we coasted past Mizpeh Shalem to a stretch of straight, level road where the motorcycle could easily hit ninety miles an hour. We didn’t even notice the turnoff to the Ein Feshka hot springs, and if not for the curve in the road after the Qumran caves we might have raced past them too without even noticing their existence. Only the imposing silhouette of the abandoned old hotel looming up on the Kalya shore told us that we were about to take our leave of the lowest place in the world. And then the Almagor junction was upon us, its green signs pointing us to the west, to the mild ascent leading to the city of our common childhood, Jerusalem.

  “But when are we going to get a chance to discuss your astrophysical theory, Benjy?” Amnon yelled despairingly into my ear, realizing that at the speed I was going he would soon find himself on the sidewalk outside his house in Tel Aviv, before he had had a chance to rescue me from my ridiculous mistakes about A Brief History of Time. “You’re right,” I shouted back. “I thought we could go and sit in the Atara or some other café in downtown Jerusalem, but perhaps it’s already too late for that—Jerusalem’s not Tel Aviv. So why don’t I just stop somewhere along the road? Maybe the open sky will help me to explain my ideas.” And after Mitzpeh Jericho, in a place called the Mishor Adumim, I left the main road and drove up a short dirt track leading to something halfway between a tree and a bush stuck on top of a little hill, over which the heavens were spread out like a brilliant canopy, infinite but also intimate, gathering even the distant spires of Jerusalem into its folds. I took off my helmet and prepared to expound to my friend in the stillness of the night the theory that had been elaborating itself in my brain over the past few weeks. But first I had to warn him not to interrupt me, however strange my words might sound to him, for new ideas always seemed ridiculous at first. He snickered to himself and sat down on the ground. For some reason he didn’t take off his helmet, and he looked like an absentminded space traveler who had arrived here from some other planet. There was a rustle in the branches of the tree next to us, apparently made by birds we had startled from their sleep.

  “Hawking himself admits,” I began, “that he has two unsolved problems, the problem of the beginning and the problem of the end, which are of course not separate from each other. The first problem is connected to Guth’s theory about the inflationary expansion, during which the universe expanded at a rapidly increasing rate in the first split seconds after the big bang. And the second problem is what’s going to happen to the universe in the end. Hawking denies the possibility that the universe will go on slowly expanding forever, since the force of gravity, which I was surprised to read is the weakest of all the forces of nature, but which is also strong because it has no antithesis, will increase in the expanding universe until the gravity and the expansion balance each other and the universe stops expanding. But in this case we have to ask, where’s the symmetry between the dramatic, mysterious, incomprehensible beginning of the big bang, which from a point of zero size but also of infinite density, gave birth to this whole tremendous universe—between that and what will remain in the end, a kind of static universe without any movement, in which a perfect and absolute balance between gravity and expansion will pertain? What’s the connection between the beginning and the end? This is what I ask myself. Are you with me?” He nodded hesitantly. Presumably he was already dying to correct m
e, but he restrained himself. “It simply doesn’t make sense for there to be a beginning that has no identity or connection with the end. Because that would mean that there was a beginning to time and there was some intention in this beginning, and they’ll still say there’s a God too, which Hawking categorically denies. And in the last chapter he says that we have to assume that just as the universe began with a big bang, it will end in a big crunch, with complete contraction and collapse, and then there’ll be a connection between the beginning and the end, which will turn into the beginning again, for this is the only conceivable cycle.” A worried, suspicious expression now appeared on Amnon’s face, as if he felt that his friend was beginning to say things that were completely illogical, and even childish. But I hurried on, to forestall him until I came to my main point. “In brief, what I want you to think about, because it’s possible that there a lot of things I don’t understand here, is that the shrinking of the universe will not take place according to the physical laws of expansion and gravity, which Hawking and the others have a problem with, but will be accomplished by the human spirit, because spirit isn’t something alien to the universe. Even the first minute particle, which possessed zero volume but infinite density, and from which the big bang began—you yourselves say that not only all the material possibilities we see before us were inherent in it, but also all the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. In short everything, including ourselves as biological entities, and of course our thoughts too, and our feelings, in other words the whole human spirit, was inherent in that point of departure. And therefore it’s this spirit which will shrink the universe back to the original starting point, which was, in the last resort, what? If Hawking himself says that it was like a particle whose volume was zero but whose density was infinite, what’s that? Matter? No, only spirit, or what I call spirit.”