A brief but wild scream now rose from one of the rooms, and a chorus of muttering immediately broke out from the other patients, as if they had been waiting up all night for one of their fellows to have a nightmare. The nurse cocked her head in the attentive gesture I remembered from my year in the surgical department, to see if they would all settle back down or if further intervention would be necessary. I felt a pang of pity for this hardworking woman, who as the head nurse in the surgical department had been accustomed to thinking in the drastic terms of knives and incisions, sutures and infusions and wounds to be dressed, and who now had to cope with mysterious mental illnesses by means of the little colored tablets lined up on the shelves of the cupboard behind her back. She was definitely disturbed by the freedom with which I went up to examine her stock. Although she knew that as a physician I was entitled to treat myself, she insisted that I could not take anything without the express permission of an authorized psychiatrist. In spite of this slight, I felt that she was right, for by dint of her strictness and her unimaginative honesty she was forcing me to try to calm my troubled spirit, torn between exhaustion and panic, by spiritual and not material means. For instance, a phone call to my parents, whose ability to judge my mood by the tone of my voice soon succeeded in locating the source of the pain and putting it into perspective. Even if my mother had distanced my father from me by refusing to allow him to know about my love for Dori, his natural, kindly patience could still be of value in a crisis. But it was five o’clock in the morning, and it was impossible to think of calling them before six, even if one of them happened to be awake and prowling around the house, as sometimes happened at this hour.
I said good-bye to the nurse, and to show her that I didn’t bear a grudge against her for refusing to let me help myself from the bottles of pills on her shelves, I promised to come back and visit her on one of her shifts. I returned to the main building, looking up at the cloudy sky and wondering whether Michaela too, in the heart of the desert, was searching the sky for the first stain of dawn. I went down to the intensive care unit to return my gown to its place, put on my leather jacket, and take my helmet, but instead of going upstairs I punched the code that opened the door to the surgical wing. It was a simple code, the first three even numbers, which hadn’t been changed since I started at the hospital, and it occurred to me that here was a job for the new administrative director—to change the code, because as things were there wasn’t a worker in the hospital who couldn’t open the door. As always in the hour between shifts there was no activity, but the darkness was new. The order to save electricity had succeeded in penetrating to the holy of holies of the hospital, and the operating rooms, always flooded with light coming from a separate and independent source, were all shrouded in darkness except for one little room. Although I spent a lot of time in the wing, since Lazar’s death I had not had any particular reason to visit that little room, which was full of instruments and medications used in cardiac surgery, first and foremost the cardiopulmonary bypass machine, with the white plastic tubes dangling from it like a great octopus’s arms. It wasn’t the big machine that attracted my attention, however, but the cupboard of anesthetics, most of which I knew not only by name and function but also by their pharmacological composition. With a giggle I thought of the strict nurse, who had refused to give me one little tranquilizer from her stock, whereas I was now standing before a cupboard full of powerful, expensive drugs, and without asking anyone’s permission, on my own initiative, I could easily prepare a little cocktail that I could inject into my vein and that would soon put me completely to sleep: a sleep without sensation, without consciousness, without movement or dreams. A sleep from which nothing would wake me.
But strangely enough, as I stood alone in the dark, empty surgical wing among dozens of sophisticated instruments capable of taking a man apart and putting him together again in an improved version, I felt none of the panic and anxiety that had interrupted my sleep and sent me rushing out of the house. It was as if what threatened me were connected not to the outside world but to what lay within the familiar walls of my own house, which had been abandoned by those closest to me. Was it possible that my love sought to embrace both the woman herself, and her inability to stay by herself, for fear of something that might be without form or shape but was sexual and infinitely malevolent in its intentions, not only hiding in the little storage space near the bathroom or the dark corner next to the kitchen where the brooms were kept but spreading through the little spaces between the closet shelves, pervading the drawers with the socks and underwear with a musty, invisible smell, until they turned to spiderwebs and skeins of dust underneath the bottom drawers where she kept her high-heeled shoes? Was this the smell she tried to sniff out in the hotel rooms where it was proposed that she should sleep? And suddenly this surprising new understanding of what was happening to me cheered me up so much that I switched off the light and left the surgical wing without taking a single drop of a sedative or analgesic or muscle relaxant, because I didn’t want anything material and external to calm my spirit, just the belief that whatever was disturbing me tonight would in the end strengthen me in my efforts to get closer to her and engulf her totally now that I was free of the yoke of my little family. On my way home I turned into the broad avenue next to her house in order to make sure that Lazar’s big car was parked in its usual spot, under the pillars of the building. I didn’t get upset when I spied an unfamiliar little car blocking its exit, because a little bit of imagination was all it took to realize that they must have bought it for the soldier, to make it easier for him to come home every night to be with his mother.
The minute I walked into my apartment, I could feel the agitation of abandonment stirring again in the ruins of my exhausted soul, as if only here, between these walls, this familiar furniture, lay the real world, substantial and secret, which immediately exposed one’s weakness and inability to remain and contend with it alone. Although the hands of the clock had not yet reached six, I didn’t want to wait and I phoned my parents to tell them the story of my parting from Michaela and Shivi and at the same time receive an encouraging word. My father was the one who picked up the phone, and he also conducted the conversation with me, asking questions and demanding details. He did not seem able or willing to give me any encouragement or comfort, for he more than anyone felt the loss of Michaela and Shivi, as if all the progress I had made in the past two years had gone down the drain with their departure. The rustle and echo accompanying the conversation told me that my mother was listening in on the phone next to her bed, but to my surprise she did not join in, as if she didn’t want to talk to me. I knew that her anger was deeper than my father’s, and also more justified, but her silence began to worry me, and when I felt that my father was about to bring the conversation to a close, I asked to talk to her. She interrogated me dryly and even coldly about where I was calling from, if I was at the hospital or at home. When I told her that my shift only began at noon, she wanted to know why I was calling so early. Did I wake up early, or couldn’t I fall asleep? “Both—I woke up and I couldn’t fall asleep,” I explained, and I told her a little about my night of wandering and added, “I seem to be having difficulty in getting used to staying by myself again.” For some reason a silence now fell in Jerusalem, and I heard the sound of my father putting his receiver down, as if now that my mother had taken over the conversation, he could express, in his shy but decisive way, his disapproval of me, for he never cut short a telephone call with me of his own volition. Then my mother’s voice softened a little, as if she too had understood the meaning of my father’s action, and she asked if I meant to come to Jerusalem for the weekend. When I said yes, she asked me not to use the new motorcycle but to come up by bus, as if the separation from Michaela had made my existence more dangerous and vulnerable. “And if you want to visit your friends, you can use your father’s car,” she added to encourage me to agree, and quickly put the phone down, as if from the distance she could fe
el me trembling on the brink of sleep.
I disconnected the phone, in part because I had already spoken to my parents, but also because I knew that if Michaela called before her flight, she’d call my parents and not me; she knew that their sorrow was greater than the sorrow she left behind in her own apartment, where I now began to draw the curtains to prevent any ray of light from sabotaging the sleep that almost had me in its grip. I was convinced that the more I blotted out the world around me, the less severe my anxiety would be. Indeed, a deep sleep, frightening in its power, overcame me at last, and nothing succeeded in penetrating the leaden curtain that came down on me, as if I were not lying on my bed on a noisy, busy Tel Aviv day but in an iron drawer in the hospital morgue. The hospital was also blotted from my mind for the first time since I had begun working there, for after nearly twelve hours of sleep I woke to discover that it was already six o’clock and long past the hour I was supposed to begin my shift. They must have tried to get in touch with me from the operating room, and given up in despair owing to the disconnected phone, and found someone to take my place. The thought that someone had taken my place did not increase my guilt, as might have been expected in someone as reliable, dutiful, and punctual as myself, but only gave me a sense of relief. As if not only Michaela and Shivi had disappeared from this reality, but I had too.
True, there was a clear contradiction between the pleasure I felt in this disappearance and the agitation and anxiety caused by my solitude. But I knew that there was one person in the world capable of understanding my situation perfectly. Accordingly, I did not switch off the little light, which was revealing more and more of the threat looming in the known and familiar world of my apartment—a threat that made me feel again as if I didn’t have enough red blood cells in my body—but in great excitement I got up to reconnect the phone, in order to call her office and demand the right to talk to her not, only as a lover and occasional doctor but also as a tenant calling on his landlady for help. Dori had just left to go to a café with one of her friends, and her secretary, who couldn’t tell me exactly when she would be back, asked me very civilly who I was and what I wanted. I couldn’t tell her what I wanted, but I agreed to tell her who I was, and asked her to have Mrs. Lazar call me back. “My wife and daughter left last night for India,” I told the secretary. And when I sensed by her silence that she didn’t know what to make of this announcement, I added in a hoarse voice, “And I’m sick in bed.” This strange lie, slipping so glibly from the lips of a man who had always been taught to tell the truth, began to depress me so much that I felt the need to disconnect the phone again, so as to spare myself the necessity of reinforcing the first lie with additional ones. Once I had announced my illness, I was sure that she would get in touch with me, but what I wanted from her now was not duty but love. I realized that the lie I had just told might poison whatever was between us, just as it would have poisoned my relations with the hospital if I phoned them now to excuse my absence on the same grounds. The fear of infection, even an imaginary illness, in an operating-room doctor was always taken very seriously and I felt it would be wrong to take the easy way out, playing off their justified anger aroused, no doubt, by my failure to show. If a replacement had already been found for Lazar, let him call me into his office and warn me about the consequences of another disappearing act—like the one I was contemplating right now, at six o’clock in the evening, while the outside world pulsed and throbbed in a tumult of activity and people who had just finished a successful and rewarding day’s work went from shop to shop and bought things to help them relax and spend a pleasant evening at home.
I got up and switched off the light so that I could disappear into the darkness and shut out the intimate world where the threat of loneliness grew greater the farther my wife and baby receded into the distance. But I was so saturated with sleep that I couldn’t even close my eyes in the utter darkness I had succeeded in creating around me, let alone sink back into slumber. After spending hours on call and growing accustomed to sleeping and waking quickly, I had lost that innocence of youth which allows itself to be engulfed in sleep without rhyme or reason. Quite the opposite: after ten hours of uninterrupted sleep my mind had begun to acquire the pure and lucid quality of an angel gliding through the sky, so that even hunger and thirst did not trouble me. I felt the stubble that had grown on my chin since the previous morning and asked myself whether Dori would come to look for me here. If I were really sick in bed, it wouldn’t be in the hospital or in my parents’ home but right here in this apartment, which she had signed the lease for, even though she wasn’t the actual owner. That didn’t of course oblige her to love me but it did oblige her to remember that here she had agreed to hear my declaration of love, which she had listened to without interrupting and in the wake of which she had gone to bed with me. Since my mind continued to accumulate clarity and lucidity, I began to believe that I had it in my power to influence from a distance not only her thoughts but also her plump, pampered body, whose sweet, secret map of beauty spots I had not yet finished studying. And thus, after her last client has left, she will stand up, wrap herself in her blue velvet tunic, scatter her smiles to everyone she is leaving behind in the office, and even if there is no real rain in the air but only a few solitary drops shaken by the wind from the trees, she will stop to open her umbrella over her head, even for the few yards between the office door and the big car parked carelessly and inconsiderately in the little side street. After smiling again into the rearview mirror as she checks to see if the road behind her is clear, perhaps she will remember the strange message I left for her and with her little foot on the brake, she will sigh and take her makeup out of the big bag lying on the seat beside her and draw a narrow line around her eyes and powder her nose and cheeks. But instead of painting a third eye in the middle of her brow, the better to perceive the reality around her, she will only flash another smile at the little mirror in front of her, in the hope that it will smile back and cheer her up. Only then will she relax her foot on the brake and sail into the middle of the street, very slowly but also with total indifference to the cars behind her.
Maybe she hopes I won’t hear her, knocking so softly on the door? For she is not only hesitant about entering this place she knows so well, which was taken over almost two years ago by her lover, she is also worried that none of her family or friends know that she is about to be swallowed up in a vortex of intense and demanding love, from which nobody can save her but herself. Maybe she hopes that the light knock on the door won’t be heard so that she can turn around and go downstairs with a clear conscience at not having deserted me in my illness, even if she’s sure it isn’t serious. But my soul, which I sent to accompany her here in the big car crawling through the dense early evening traffic, the soul that waits for her when she stops to buy a cake and fruit at the stores I recognize from the times when I followed her and Lazar home on my motorcycle, the soul that blows on her face through the air vents next to the dashboard to persuade her to make a detour and see what the meaning of this silence is on the part of one who left so clear a message about himself—this soul is also attuned to catch not only her lightest knock on the door but even the sound of her breathing if she decides to stand there, without moving, on the other side of my door, as I once stood outside her door.
Is it any wonder, then, that I sprang out of bed, trembling with excitement but protected by the darkness, to open the door to the woman illuminated by the dim light of the stairwell, her umbrella in one hand, her key ring and a little bunch of flowers in the other, and a new hat on her head, which suited the shape of her face and announced to the world by its black color that she still considered herself to be in mourning?
Only then, as she entered the apartment, did I dare switch on a single light, to dispel the darkness and reveal the shadows in the room and discover how exaggerated and even childish my fears were, if they could be so quickly banished. Although I was supposed to be ill, with my hair matted, my face pale and
unshaven, my body dressed in a pajama top, she did not ask me how I was but looked around as if she had only now remembered that she was also the landlady, entitled to check up on the nature and extent of the changes made by her tenant in her apartment. Judging by the way the smile vanished from her lips, she was not only surprised but also annoyed by the many changes that Michaela and I had made, wittingly and unwittingly, in her mother’s cozy, well-cared-for apartment. But she refrained from comment and just took a step toward the crib standing in the corner of the living room, and as she looked at the crumpled sheet and the furry teddy bear, which was too big to take to India, I wondered whether Shivi was missing him now, as she crawled down the aisle of the airplane. Anxiously inspecting the woman who was much older than I was, I saw that the new hat was only one sign of the change that had taken place in her appearance: gone was the tailored suit tightly encasing her body, the high heels which were so flattering to her legs, replaced by plain, sturdy comfortable flat shoes and a loose suit with pants, which, even though it completely concealed her stomach, transformed her into a shorter, squarer woman, although, strangely enough, also a younger one. Then at last she turned to me and asked in an inquiring and slightly mocking tone, “Are you really sick?” I bowed my head a little so that she wouldn’t see the faint blush spreading over my cheeks but would be able to hear my halting words of apology for the lie that had brought her to the only place which truly belonged to both of us, as well as the only place where we could now be free of the judgment of the third eye. But she interrupted me in a maternal tone, which also contained a new note of impatience. “Never mind, don’t apologize. I knew you weren’t.” As if to soothe my guilty conscience, she handed me the modest bunch of anemones. I filled a blue vase with water in the light of the quiet flashes of lightning flickering in the window over the sink, and raised the flowers to my face to search their scent for the scent of her body, trembling at the certain knowledge that these flowers were meant not to bring us closer but the opposite, to say good-bye. After I put them in the vase and saw that she was already sitting in the same place on the couch where she had sat two years before and listened silently to my confession, I was flooded by a wave of pain. Did I really have to begin again from the beginning every time I met her? Was everything that happened between us so contrary to nature and divorced from life that it evaporated from meeting to meeting, as if it didn’t have the strength to sustain itself for our benefit? If only she had been able to believe, as Michaela believed, that her husband’s soul had been reincarnated in me, it might have set her mind at rest. I didn’t have to wait for the plane to land in India in order to offer her everything an ardent young man had to offer, so she wouldn’t have to stay by herself anymore.
Open Heart Page 56