Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  I did not join the convoy taking the sleeping and bandaged Lazar up to the intensive care unit that had been prepared for him in Hishin’s department. Hishin had also turned his own office into an improvised bedroom for Lazar’s wife, who intended to spend the night there. Now that the operation was over and I had seen what I wanted to see and felt what I wanted to feel, all I wanted was to be by myself. But since it was already past one o’clock in the morning and the rates for overseas calls were particularly low, I decided to phone Michaela to make the final arrangements for Shivi’s return in two days, and at the same time to tell her how smoothly Lazar’s surgery had gone and how admirably the Jerusalem wizard had performed and how I did not regret my early return from London, even though I hadn’t been needed there at all. But in spite of the lateness of the hour—eleven o’clock in London—Michaela was not at home. I found it strange and also annoying that she was prepared to drag the baby around London in buses at this hour of the night.

  We had sold our little car, after strenuous efforts, to one of the nurses at the hospital, in order to pay for our plane tickets. Mine and Michaela’s, that is, for Shivi flew home free, on the ticket of one of the two sweet young English girls who amused themselves with her on the way. When I met them at the airport, it turned out that Michaela had promised them, without my knowledge, that they could stay in our apartment for their first few days in Israel. I was furious. Only a few days before I had finally succeeded in getting rid of Amnon and all his possessions, and now I had two new guests on my hands—an intolerable nuisance when I was still in a state of inner turmoil stemming from Lazar’s operation. Although the operation had taken place forty-eight hours earlier, I had not yet visited Lazar in the special room set aside in Hishin’s department, for fear that Dori, or anyone else, would notice the storm raging inside me.

  However, I had no option but to keep Michaela’s promise, and I sullenly gave the two English girls the key, wrote the address down clearly in both languages, and warned them to be careful in the apartment, since it did not belong to me. I also asked them not to stay longer than one or two days. “You won’t want to hang around in Tel Aviv anyway,” I warned them gloomily. “It’s a filthy place. Go down to the desert, take a bus to Eilat—that’s where you’ll find the real pleasures Israel has to offer.” I strapped Shiva into the special seat I had bought and installed in my father’s car, and with her sitting next to me but facing in the opposite direction, I drove to Jerusalem to leave her for seven days with my mother, who had taken a week’s vacation as an advance on her next year’s leave, since she had already used up all her vacation on the trip to England. On the way to Jerusalem Shivi gave me an inquiring look, as if trying to remember who I was. She was still too young to remember me clearly after an absence of two weeks, but she was old enough not to have forgotten me entirely. And thus, on the border between memory and forgetfulness, she stared at me suspiciously, but so sweetly that I couldn’t resist bending down to kiss her whenever traffic permitted, while keeping up a stream of chatter, telling her about my plans for the future and sometimes even bursting into forgotten old songs, to amuse her and also to raise my own spirits. Ever since Lazar’s surgery I had been confused, as if the bypasses planted in his heart had somehow wound their way into mine as well, and sometimes I would even feel a sharp pain in my chest, as if it too had been split open with an electric saw.

  But when I reached my parents’ home in Jerusalem, I immediately stopped concentrating on my inner sensations in order to be free to give all my attention to their concerns. In spite of their joy at seeing their granddaughter again, they were worried about their ability to take care of her for a week, especially my mother, who was usually so calm and composed about everything. It was clear that she was full of secret resentment against Michaela, and even suspected that she would not return when she had promised to. But I reassured her. Michaela always kept her promises, and since it was only because of my insistence that she had agreed against her will to return to Israel instead of extending our stay in London, I could hardly object if she permitted herself one last little fling: two weeks on her own to enjoy her liberty and independence to the fullest. After putting Shivi down in the crib my father had borrowed from a young colleague at his office and giving my parents detailed instructions about feeding and bathing her, as well as telling them a little about Lazar’s successful surgery and my own prospects at the hospital, I went to bed early and immediately fell into a deep sleep, which for some reason was so haunted by recurrent nightmares that I got up before dawn, said a whispered good-bye, and set out for the return journey to Tel Aviv and to my first day of work at the hospital as a permanent, albeit half-time, member of the medical staff.

  Since I had given the keys to the English girls, I was forced to stand outside banging on the door of the apartment until one of them, in short pants and a blouse that barely covered her breasts, woke up and let me in. They had misunderstood my instructions and unrolled their sleeping bags in the bedroom instead of the living room, but apart from this mistake I saw that they had not disturbed anything in the apartment and had left the kitchen clean and tidy. Nevertheless, I urged them again to go down to the desert and enjoy an experience which they could never have in England. At close quarters, I saw that they were not as young as I had imagined them to be at the airport. They were my age, and in the spare, athletic build of their bodies they reminded me of Michaela, whose depression when she landed in Israel in two weeks’ time I could already imagine. I drove to the hospital, and since I didn’t yet have a parking space, I had to park a long way off and walk. Although autumn had officially begun, the morning light was still so bright that I had to put on my sunglasses so my eyes could make the transition from English to Israeli light. First I went to the anesthesiology department, to introduce myself to its head, an energetic middle-aged woman with a sharp, ironic tongue, whom Lazar had informed of my appointment a week before and who was ready, although the official confirmation had not yet arrived, to fit me into the night shifts in the operating rooms. Strange, I thought, that here too I was beginning with night duty, as in London, but I accepted her offer, not only to cut my contact with the English girls down to a minimum but also to enable me to keep an eye on Lazar and perhaps alleviate his loneliness. In the cafeteria I came across Nakash and asked him about Lazar. His recovery was proceeding as expected. He had already been disconnected from most of the equipment and transferred to the ninth floor, to a private room in Levine’s department, where Levine could also take an active part in treating him. In three or four days’ time he would be able to go home. There you are, I said to myself, what were you so frightened of? But I refrained from going up to visit him, knowing that the room would be crowded with visitors from the hospital and from outside. I decided to postpone my visit until the evening, before my night shift began.

  I returned to the apartment in the hope of finding my two visitors already gone, but it seemed that they had just woken up, and, wearing bathrobes over their bathing suits, they asked me the way to the beach and invited me to go with them. I was about to refuse, but suddenly I said to myself, Why not? Perhaps a soothing dip in the sea was just what I needed to banish the oppression from my heart. I began to look for my trunks, which I had not worn for ages, and which, judging by the amused looks of the English girls, had indeed gone out of fashion long ago. It was a strange feeling to find myself walking down the busy Tel Aviv street in the middle of the day in a pair of trunks and a light summer shirt, like a teenager, in the company of these two strange English girls, who turned out to be cousins who liked traveling the world together. “Have you been to India?” I asked. No, they hadn’t been to India yet. I immediately urged them to go. Yes, they heard praises of India everywhere, including, of course, from Michaela. In fact, they were considering joining us when we went, to help us look after dear little Shivi. We entered the sea, which was warm and gentle, without any waves. For a moment the smell of the water reminded me of the smell of
the amniotic fluid in the London apartment, perhaps because there was an amniotic element in the algae constantly breaking up in the water. But the smell didn’t stop me from enjoying diving into the water and racing one of the English girls. Now I began to feel lighter, as if whatever had been weighing on me since Lazar’s operation had been swallowed up and dissolved inside me. After emerging from the sea and drying myself, I invited the English girls to join me for hot corn on the cob. On the beach I found Amnon playing ball with an intelligent-looking boy. “Now I know why your thesis is stuck,” I couldn’t help saying, scolding him, but I immediately regretted it. However, he did not seem hurt by my remark, and he was very interested in the two girls. “Ah,” he said with a bitter laugh, “now I know why you were in such a hurry to get me out of the apartment.” I had a hard time convincing him that they had descended on me without any warning, and feeling the need to make some kind of gesture, I didn’t object when he suggested returning to the apartment with us. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon, and Amnon and the girls, still in their swimsuits, began putting together an improvised meal. “I’m sorry, but tomorrow you’ll have to leave the apartment,” I warned the girls again, this time without mentioning the desert. “Because it looks as if I’m going to bring the baby back tomorrow, and she needs peace and quiet,” I suddenly added, in order to provide a logical-sounding pretext for the evacuation order. Amnon immediately invited them to go and stay with him, and they accepted the invitation gladly. They didn’t look like promiscuous women to me, but perhaps their blood relationship gave them a boldness and confidence to embark on secret adventures together that ordinary girlfriends wouldn’t have had. They weren’t pretty, even though their bodies were smooth and appealing. Taken separately, neither of them seemed particularly attractive, not even to a man like me, who hadn’t slept with his wife for over two weeks now, but the sudden thought that perhaps Amnon would go to bed with both of them at once immediately aroused me, even though the fantasy of making love to two women at once was not among my favorites.

  I called my parents to hear how they were getting on with Shivi. Everything was going smoothly, although my father had had to come home early from work to help my mother, who sounded, despite her calm, reassuring voice, rather strained. I had already noticed that ever since the severe influenza she had come down with in Scotland, she seemed frailer, and I promised myself that as soon as Lazar recovered and Michaela returned to Israel, I would go up to Jerusalem for a day or two to check up on her health. In any case, my parents did not disguise their profound enjoyment of their granddaughter, who had already demonstrated a number of cute tricks. I said good-bye to Amnon and the two English girls, who were still eating the meal they had prepared, and set off for the hospital. It was six o’clock. First I went to intensive care unit to announce my arrival. I took my beeper and turned it on, and then I went up to the ninth floor to internal medicine to look for Lazar. He wasn’t hard to find. At the end of the corridor I saw a few doctors and members of the administrative staff, who evidently couldn’t wait to visit the recovering director, and peals of happy laughter, immediately recognizable as Dori’s, rang out in the distance. I turned back, not wanting to be part of the crowd, and only returned two hours later. Now it was quieter. Dori was sitting on a bench in the corridor. Their son was sitting on one side of her, and her mother on the other.

  I greeted them all and asked how the patient was feeling. Dori went very red and for a moment she was speechless, as if she were in love with me too, but the granny, who was delighted to see me, said that her son-in-law was doing well, and Professor Hishin, who had changed his dressings in the morning, was very pleased with the rate of his recovery. Dori regained her composure and smiled brightly and introduced her son to me. He nodded indifferently, no doubt sick and tired of the constant introductions to the stream of visitors making the pilgrimage to the ninth floor. I reminded him that we had already met for a moment almost two years before, when I had gone to their house on that first evening to talk about the trip to India. He raised his eyes to examine me. “Yes, it’s the famous Dr. Rubin,” repeated his mother, avoiding the use of my first name. They were all waiting outside, it seemed, because Professor Levine was examining the patient and changing his dressings. Although I knew that my intrusion would annoy Levine, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get a look at the place where I had seen the chest being rapidly sawed open, and I knocked lightly on the door and went inside. Professor Levine, who was busy smearing iodine on the long line of brown stitches running down Lazar’s chest, glared at me angrily as I entered the room, which surprised me with its size, the stunning view from its window, and the multitude of flowers filling it. But the warmth of Lazar’s greeting prevented him from objecting aloud to my entry. “Where did you disappear to?” cried Lazar—his eternal cry to me, which had first been sounded in India, although it was they, not I, who had disappeared in the train station at New Delhi. “I’m right here,” I said with a smile, “I’ve been here all the time.” I asked him how he was feeling and he immediately said that he was feeling fine, as if he wanted to please me too, along with the rest of the doctors who had participated in his operation, at which for some reason he insisted on thinking I had played an active role. Levine, who had finished smearing the stitches with ointment, now began to bandage the wound with the unpracticed hands of the head of an internal medicine department. I picked up the patient’s charts, which were pinned together at the foot of the bed, and looked at the temperature, the blood pressure, the EKG, and the results of the blood and urine tests which had been run on Lazar over the past few days. Maybe the fact that I had taken part in the surgery gave me the nerve to draw Levine’s attention to the acute irregularities to be seen in a number of the EKG strips, which showed premature ventricular beats, sometimes even in couplets or triplets, whose origin was unclear to me. “Isn’t there a danger of ventricular tachycardia here?” I asked. At first Levine tried to ignore my question, but since I stubbornly repeated it, he decided to say something, perhaps in order not to worry Lazar. “Yes, Dr. Rubin,” he said rapidly and rudely. “We saw that too. We’re not blind, you know, and we’re perfectly capable of drawing our own conclusions. We don’t need every doctor in the hospital sticking his nose in here, even if the patient is the director. No doubt you have work to do elsewhere. Why don’t you get back to it and let us worry about Mr. Lazar?”

  But I couldn’t stop worrying, and four hours later, late at night, I knew that I would have no rest until I went up again to the ninth floor, already in darkness except for the nurses’ station, which, in my doctor’s gown, I had no problems passing. I stopped outside the closed door of Lazar’s room and listened, but all I could hear was the television. I knocked lightly, careful not to burst in without an invitation. But the fact that there was no answer did not make me turn away and only increased my anxiety. I opened the door. Apart from the moonlight pouring into the room through the open window and the glare of the television, the room was in darkness. Dori was curled up in a big armchair, sleeping with her legs tucked up underneath her, one hand clutching her glasses and the other holding the outstretched hand of Lazar, whose little eyes were fixed on the television suspended from the ceiling next to the screen of his monitor, which was turned off. Ever since the trip to India, when I had first become aware of the strength of the bond between them, I had not felt the unique nature of their intimacy so strongly. After a whole day at his side, she couldn’t leave him to his own devices for a while and go home to be by herself. Suddenly I felt a shiver of pain running through me for the way I had betrayed him. And I wanted to take a vow that after Lazar recovered I would never try to touch her again, not even if she asked me. If it really was an impossible love, then everything about it should be impossible and unreal. Lazar regarded my entrance in the dead of night as completely natural, and he greeted me with a friendly wave. I went up to him, and since his eyes were slightly glittering and his cheeks flushed, I put out my hand instin
ctively to feel his forehead, which he offered me obediently, as if from the moment he had crossed the lines in his hospital he had become the patient of every nurse and doctor in it, who were all at liberty to touch him as much as they liked. He had a slight temperature, which was natural and expected after the brutal shock his whole system had suffered, but which might also be interpreted as a warning sign. He told me that the nurse had discovered the fact that he was febrile a short time before but had decided to wait until morning to consult Professor Levine. “I’ll get you a pill to bring your temperature down,” I said simply. Because Lazar had been “stolen” from cardiac surgery and taken under the personal wings of the heads of two different and even contradictory departments, and the master surgeon who had operated on him had disappeared into thin air, he was essentially abandoned in this attractive private room, which was still full of the smell of flowers although all the vases had been removed for the night. Our whispers had awakened Dori, who opened her lovely eyes, which immediately filled with her brilliant, happy smile as if nothing untoward had happened in her world. “Well, Benjy, how does he look to you?” she asked, and it was hard to tell if she was asking me as a physician or a friend. “He looks fine,” I said with a smile. “But with all these important professors looking after him, I’m afraid he might get a little lost between them,” I added, and immediately regretted it, because I saw that her anxiety for him was so great that any expression of doubt or concern coming from outside could upset her equilibrium. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Nothing, really,” I said, trying to reassure her, “but I just dropped in by chance and discovered that he has a temperature, and it turns out that nobody’s given him a pill to bring it down because they don’t want to wake Professor Levine, as if no other doctor is allowed to touch him.”