Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Miss Kolby flushed with pleasure, not just because of the cheese sandwich I offered her but mainly because I wanted to eat my lunch in her company. “Lazar used to do that sometimes,” she said, and the sweet light of memory touched her delicate, faintly lined face. “When he saw that I was staying in the office because of the workload and refusing to go to the cafeteria for lunch, he would get annoyed with me, and in the end he would go and get me something to eat.”

  “Someone who’s become accustomed to taking care of one woman is apparently drawn to taking care of other women too.” I laughed affectionately at the thought of the energetic director, who was probably suffering torments of frustration in his grave because of his inability to take care of things. “He used to take care of me too,” I recalled. “On the trip to India, on the flight from Rome to New Delhi, when I fell asleep and missed supper, I woke up and found a sandwich and a chocolate bar in the pouch of the seat in front of me.” Lazar’s secretary bowed her head in sorrow. Grief for her patron was apparently welling up in her again, especially in view of the changes that had taken place in her office since yesterday, as if the many administrative problems that had seemed to vanish along with the administrative director had not found anyone else in the entire hospital to take care of them and had come back to flood the office in the form of stacks of files piled on and around her desk. Was an heir about to appear and take over? Judging by the arrival of an unfamiliar secretary, who had replaced the vanished typist, it seemed so. This new secretary had apparently been brought in from outside the hospital, and although she had not known Lazar, she listened avidly to every word Miss Kolby and I exchanged, a secret, faintly mocking smile occasionally crossing her face. When she saw that Lazar’s secretary was ignoring her and not troubling to introduce me to her, she waited for a break in our conversation and introduced herself and asked me my name, which I knew she would not forget but would file away for future reference, like all ambitious secretaries. Then she offered to make me something to drink. But Miss Kolby dismissed this offer and took me into Lazar’s office, both to give me the treatment a member of the inner circle of the previous director’s friends deserved and to escape the curiosity of this woman, who might have been hired not only to assist her but to replace her.

  When I entered the big room I saw that the sofa which had been missing the day before had now been returned, apparently after undergoing some minor refurbishment or repair. The dry soil in the planters had been watered. Here too stacks of files awaited the attention of the new director, signs of whose imminent arrival were apparent everywhere. “Do you know who it’s going to be?” I asked Miss Kolby, who was putting on the electric kettle. “No.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t even know if they’ve decided on anyone yet. But I can already feel him in the air.”

  I suddenly felt a twinge of envy, as if the man who was going to replace Lazar and run the hospital were superseding me too, for I was both willing and able to make decisions regarding these files, one of which I even picked up and paged through, to the evident disapproval of Miss Kolby, who said nothing. “What does the administrative director actually do all the time?” I asked when I saw that the file in my hands was a personnel file, with the photograph of a young woman attached to it. “Personnel problems?”

  “Not just those, of course,” she replied, “but they did take up a lot of Lazar’s attention. He was attracted to them. Yes, he took satisfaction in secretly controlling people’s lives.” I took the cup of coffee she offered me and sank onto the sofa with a deep sigh, overcome by exhaustion after standing on my feet for six hours during the surgery, on top of the nearly sleepless night I had spent at the Lazars’.

  But this secretary was so devoted to the Lazar family that it didn’t surprise her at all to hear that I had spent the whole night there. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why I had remained awake. “That’s going too far,” she rebuked me, as one who had accumulated a few nights’ experience in keeping vigil over the loneliness of Mrs. Lazar herself. “It would have been enough for her to know that you were there, sleeping on the sofa in the living room.” She settled into an armchair next to me, crossing her extremely thin legs and speaking as if she thought it likely that I might be called on to spend the night again this evening, and other nights to come too. A wave of pleasure flooded through me, and a wish to confess what had really happened. Why should Michaela have the right to spread the news in her Indian version of events while I was sentenced to silence? And the woman sitting next to me wasn’t just a secretary, but a bosom friend of the Lazars. In the depths of her soul she must have realized who was really sitting beside her, because when she saw me yawn and sink back into the cushions, she suddenly suggested that I remove my shoes and use the sofa for a short nap before my next operation, in only half an hour. “Sometimes I used to arrange things so that Lazar could take a short nap between appointments without anyone’s noticing. You deserve a rest too. Why not?” she declared warmly. And while I was hesitating over whether to accept this tempting offer, she drew the curtains to darken the room, took a thin blanket out of one of the bottom drawers, and disconnected the battery of telephones, after which she left the room, saying, “Even fifteen minutes will help to make up for the sleep you missed last night, and in the meantime I’ll phone to find out what’s going on and where Mrs. Lazar disappeared to.” There was no doubt, I reflected with an obscure satisfaction, that Lazar’s sudden death had turned this usually correct and refined woman’s head too, if she could suddenly invite me to take a nap on his sofa. The idea of sleep seemed impossible, excited and intoxicated as I was by the previous night’s events. But I closed my eyes and withdrew like a snail into my thoughts, and wrapped myself in Lazar’s blanket, which was too thin to provide any warmth and apparently intended only to protect him symbolically from the world constantly knocking at his door.

  In the stillness of the room I suddenly became aware of the steady dripping of the rain, and it began to oppress me, as if it too were joining in the general hostility that would confront me as soon as Michaela’s departure for India and my love affair became known. But if, in addition to taking Lazar’s place with the woman who was only a few years younger than my mother, I was called upon to fill his chair, which I could see looming behind the desk, and to administer the hospital in his place, the hostility might be seriously diminished. And why not? I might be only a young doctor, but I felt that I had the ability and the strength to make decisions. With my medical education, I would even be able to improve the quality of the decisions taken in this room. Prompted by a sudden urge to examine the file I had previously glanced through, I got up and walked over to the desk in my stocking feet, only to discover that the picture of the young woman on the cover had misled me and that the file belonged to the head nurse in the surgical department, who had written to ask Lazar to postpone the date of her retirement and added a recommendation from Hishin. But while I was deliberating over what I would say if the decision were up to me, Lazar’s secretary, who had overheard the rustle of the papers in the next room, knocked on the door and came in to announce the good news that Dori was at home, her temperature had gone down, and she was feeling fine. She had gone out to do some shopping and was about to go in to her office for a few essential meetings. She sounded altogether more cheerful, and tonight her son the young soldier would arrive for a few days’ leave, so we could all relax. “Didn’t you tell her that I was here?” I asked. But, faithful to her principle of never betraying anyone’s presence without their explicit permission, she immediately replied, “Of course not. We’ve already given you enough trouble. Now her son’s with her, and Hishin has also promised to get in touch with her. You’ve already done more than enough.”

  With this confirmation, I left the administrative wing for the surgical wing, where I was scheduled to assist Dr. Joubran, who was soon to replace Nakash as anesthetist in the intensive care unit, in a thyroidectomy. But when I arrived, th
ere was nobody there except for the patient, an elderly man with a lot of red hair, who had just been brought down from the ward to the operating room. In spite of the premedication he had been given in the ward, he was still very alert, sitting up restlessly on his bed in a short white open gown, his naked legs swinging in the air, listening to the sound of the storm raging outside, his eyes wide open and terrified. I went up to him, introduced myself, and urged him to lie down. I gently rubbed his neck and shoulders, as if I were calming a frightened animal. His medical file and the brown envelope with his X-rays were lying at the foot of his bed, and although it was not my duty as the assistant anesthetist to study them, I took out all the documents and X-rays and spread them on the bed and examined them one by one. Then I asked him a few questions about himself. He was a quiet, modest man of about seventy, a member of a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, who was proud not only that he still worked six hours a day in one of the regional factories but also that his son, who had brought him down from the ward and was now waiting outside in the waiting room, was also a loyal member of the kibbutz. I talked to him a bit about his illness and asked him to tell me how he felt and where it hurt. He said that he had hardly any pain, and his main feeling was fear at being left alone in the operating room. His face was flushed and his breathing heavy and noisy. I decided to examine him, in order to pass the time and also to set my mind at rest. First I measured his blood pressure, which as I had suspected was alarmingly high, and totally unsuitable for the lengthy surgery he was about to undergo; his pulse and heartbeat were irregular too. It was impossible to tell if these findings were temporary, caused by the panic raging inside him, or if there was some organic cause which nobody upstairs had noticed. I called the internal medicine department and asked to speak to one of the doctors. When they put me through I recognized the voice of Professor Levine. At first I wanted to put the receiver down, but he had already recognized my voice and called me by my name. Ever since Lazar’s death we hadn’t exchanged a word, and so I tried to be as careful as possible and to give him only the dry facts, without interpretations or suggestions. He listened to me attentively and did not try to belittle any of the details I mentioned or dismiss my speculations. Instead he inquired, with a very uncharacteristic anxiety, what I would recommend doing, as if I, not he, were the true source of authority here. “I thought maybe one of your people could come down and discuss it with the surgeons,” I suggested cautiously. “There’s no point in talking to the surgeons,” he said with inexplicable anger. “Once they’ve got their hands on the patient, they won’t let go. No, the best thing would be for you to get him out of there right away and bring him back to the ward, and after that perhaps we’ll decide what to do together.” Now I knew that I had made a mistake by interfering. The terror of the patient, and the anxiety that had been floating around inside me since the morning, had already fanned the flames of Levine’s paranoia. But I had no option now, and I went out into the corridor to look for the patient’s son, a sturdy kibbutznik who was sitting and reading a newspaper, to ask him to take his father back upstairs. I refrained from accompanying them, not only because I had to wait for the operating team to explain the disappearance of their patient, but also because I didn’t want to meet Professor Levine, who I knew wasn’t interested in discussing the patient’s condition but in denouncing Professor Hishin and his role in Lazar’s death. The surgeon soon arrived, and as I had imagined, it was none other than my old rival, Dr. Vardi. I told him dryly about my examination of the patient, my phone call to Professor Levine, and the decision to postpone the operation. He listened quietly to my explanations, his blond head slightly bowed. I knew that he was dying to come out with some crushing remark about the strange new collaboration between myself and Professor Levine, but he restrained himself and said nothing, as if he realized that I was not myself and did not want to upset me any more. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and said, “In that case, we can all go home.”

  Since I didn’t have the car with me, I thought of getting a ride part of the way with Dr. Vardi, but when I stood in the entrance to the hospital and realized how heavy the downpour was, I was overcome by a desire to wash away all the tension and tiredness that had accumulated inside me with the pure water filling the air. I said good-bye to him and went out into the storm, occasionally taking shelter under a store awning or in the entrance to a building, vacillating between the need to go home and rest and the intense desire to go to Dori’s office in the south of the city and see for myself if she was as well as she said she was. But my problem was solved when a deluge soaked me to the skin, forcing me to go home and change my clothes. The apartment was empty, and judging by the few plates in the rack over the sink, Michaela and Shivi had not even come home for lunch. I switched on the hot water heater and got undressed and into bed, where I covered myself completely with the quilt. The thought of sending the red-haired patient back to the ward without his operation now filled me with remorse. Who would have imagined that the mere sound of my voice would throw Levine into confusion? If he was really tormented by guilt over Lazar’s death, I would have to be particularly careful in any future contact with him. The telephone rang. For a moment I was afraid to answer in case it was a summons to return to the operating room, but it was only Hagit, Michaela’s childhood friend and the mother of our young baby-sitter. She was looking for Michaela, who was supposed to have arrived at her place with Shivi an hour before. “They must have been held up by the rain,” I said, without feeling worried, and I asked her to tell Michaela that I had come home early from the hospital. “Do you want her to call you when she gets here?” she asked. “Only if she wants to,” I replied, and after I put the phone down I called my parents. They weren’t at home, but they had installed a new answering machine, which I knew they had been considering buying. My father’s slow, excited voice answered first in Hebrew and then in English and asked the caller to leave a message after the beep. I congratulated them on their new acquisition, which was intended to improve communication between us without making it too burdensome, for ever since Shivi had arrived in the country their craving for daily contact had increased. I added something about the storm raging in Tel Aviv, told them how their granddaughter had accidentally smashed the Indian statuette to smithereens this morning, and promised to call again during the evening. Now that I had fulfilled all my duties to the world, I snuggled up under the granny’s big down quilt and dove into my soul to discover what remained there.

  At last, a dream bathed in light rose quickly in the darkness of my closed eyes. And clearly the dream was mine and nobody else’s, for my father was supposed to be present in it, since I had gone especially to meet him in a rural settlement next to a lake which lay hidden in the gentle fold of a pleasant hill whose slopes were covered with plots of land so well tended that they looked like flourishing gardens. Although it was a fine spring day, vestiges of the long, hard winter were still floating at the edges of the sky, scraps of gray cotton wool sailing past the stone window of one of the houses, which consisted of nothing but one narrow room. In it a handful of silent farmers, their reddish hair proclaiming them to be blood relations, were sitting around a long narrow table full of knives and forks, waiting for the last guest so they could begin their meal, which an invisible woman was cooking in a lean-to kitchen. Maybe they’re waiting for me to bring him to them, I thought, and I went out to search for my father among the narrow canals of water winding between the houses, and as I walked I thought not of him but of the old car he had given me. Where had it disappeared to, I wondered, where had I parked it? Was it possible that I had driven up the narrow dusty paths through the flourishing fields covering the slopes of the hill? The hill was so easy to climb that I effortlessly reached its summit and looked down at the large lake surrounded by empty wasteland, and I went down the other side, and as I walked I felt full of distress that I was here all alone and there was nobody to help me drag the old car out of the grim gray water of the lake, into which I h
ad apparently absentmindedly allowed it to roll. But then I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone, which immediately rescued me from my distress. It was Hagit, phoning to tell me not to worry, because Michaela had called to say that she and Shivi were on their way to her house.

  “Thank you. But I really wasn’t worried,” I explained affably to this good friend, who apologized for waking me up in her eagerness to reassure me. “I always have complete faith in Michaela. Soon you’ll see just how much I trust her, when you hear about her new plan to return to India, this time with Shivi.”

  “So you gave in to her in the end?” cried Hagit, who sounded upset at the idea of parting from her friend, even though she knew how Michaela longed for India. “And you? Are you going too?”