Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  Half an hour passed. One of the customers requested rock and roll, and the second waitress immediately complied with his wishes. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t used to drinking, and the two beers had made me slightly light-headed. I decided to leave, but not before visiting the bathroom. It was deserted, but next to it was a door leading to the little neon-lit kitchen. I saw her immediately, sitting in the corner next to a big refrigerator and holding a glass of milk. Presumably it hadn’t occurred to her that I would pursue her, for when she saw me she turned very pale, as if she had seen a ghost, jumped up from her chair, and held her slender hand up to stop me with a desperate, pathetic gesture, which I immediately respected. She looked frantic, afraid to meet my eyes, her fingers nervously pleating the edges of the big red tee shirt, hoping against hope that someone would come in to save her from confronting me. But nobody came in, and the savage new music grew louder inside the pub.

  “Tell me, Einat, did I make a mistake when I fell in love with your mother instead of falling in love with you?” I asked her in a quiet voice, without beating around the bush. Her face, which looked even purer than usual against the gaudy background of the colored bottles on the wall, turned bright red. She shook her head quickly, as if trying to repulse me, and mumbled, “No, you didn’t make a mistake.”

  “Your mother and father took me to India to fall in love with you, and I behaved like a doctor,” I went on. “Was I wrong? Tell me, was I wrong?” She went on shaking her head with a tormented expression on her face and said, “No, you weren’t wrong. You couldn’t have behaved any differently.” Now a deep calm descended on me, as if I had received her approval for the oblivion I sought. But she didn’t know what I intended to do, and fearing a continuation of the conversation, she slipped nimbly past me like a little squirrel, taking great care not to touch me. She hurried up the steps and just as she was, in the thin tee shirt, opened the wooden door, letting in a wild gust of wind, and disappeared, perhaps into the pub next door.

  In the stairwell I heard the telephone ringing as I arrived home. It can only be Michaela, I thought, and I began running upstairs. But the ringing stopped before I could open the door. On the little bottle Dr. Nakash had given me was a label listing all the ingredients of the home-produced drug he had concocted. Should I take a whole pill? I wondered, and broke one of the little tablets in two. I swallowed one of the halves, and judging by the speed with which my eyes drooped, I realized that the minute quantities of a distilled poppy extract which the experienced anesthetist had added to the usual ingredients had produced a knockout sleeping pill. But I couldn’t allow the wonderful heaviness to overpower me, because in the depths of my mind I was waiting for the phone to ring again. Which it soon did. But it wasn’t Michaela, it was my mother. “Where have you been? Where have you been?” Her voice rose complainingly in my ear, as if I owed it to her to be at home when she was looking for me. It turned out that Michaela had called my parents from Calcutta early in the evening and had a long conversation with them. “So what do you want?” I responded sulkily to this information, hanging on to the thin, slippery thread of wakefulness trying to slip away from me. “Couldn’t it have waited until morning?” But my mother had a definite aim in mind. Michaela and Shivi had arrived safely and found rooms in a hostel where some of the volunteer doctors were staying, but Shivi had not yet recovered from the diarrhea that had started in New Delhi, and she had a slight fever too. Ever since this conversation my parents had had no peace. Didn’t I think it was time for me to take a firmer line with Michaela? They had succeeded in getting the phone number of a store near the hostel where it would be possible to leave a message for her. While I struggled against the thick blanket of sleep that was now wrapping itself around me, I tried to reassure her. Diarrhea was endemic in India, especially in newly arrived tourists. Lazar had suffered from it throughout the trip, and nothing had happened to him in the end. But the main thing—which they seemed to have forgotten—was that Michaela was now in the company of real, Western doctors, and they would help her overcome all of Shivi’s problems. I didn’t know if I had succeeded in dispelling my mother’s anxiety, but the shock effects of Nakash’s half-tablet made it impossible for me to say anymore, and I rudely cut the conversation short, perhaps even without saying good-bye.

  The next day in the afternoon, when I began disconnecting my patient from the anesthesia machine before checking his pupils in the narrow beam of my flashlight, one of the nurses from the intensive care unit came up to me and told me that there was a woman waiting for me in the waiting room. To my surprise I found my mother sitting among the relatives of the people undergoing surgery, probably listening as usual to other people’s troubles without saying anything about her own. Had she identified herself as the mother of one of the young doctors standing next to the operating table, or had she kept quiet in order not to appear boastful? Even from a distance she looked very tired and tense, like someone now fighting alone on two fronts without knowing which was the most important. She was wearing her gray wool suit, which I remembered from my high school graduation ceremony, and although last night’s gale had swept the clouds from the sky and left it a sparkling, polished blue, she had not forgotten to bring her umbrella, like the native of the British Isles she was. I touched her shoulder and bent over her tenderly. She interrupted her conversation and looked up, confused to see me in my green operating-room uniform. Then she introduced me to the woman sitting next to her, who immediately asked me if I knew anything about her husband’s operation. I apologized to her for not knowing anything, and without asking my mother what had brought her to me, I lifted her to her feet and offered to show her around the operating rooms, which she had never seen before. She was surprised and pleased by my offer, and only wanted to know first if I had permission to take her inside. I told her that I didn’t need anyone’s permission and took a white gown from one of the trolleys and helped her on with it. Then I secured a plastic head-cover over the thin, childish braid coiled on the nape of her neck. Naturally I didn’t take her into the room where an operation was underway, but into the one that had just been vacated, to show her the various instruments and especially the anesthesia machine and to tell her the names of the different anesthetics, pointing out the little colored bottles. She listened attentively to my explanations, and although she didn’t appear to be taking in too much of what I said, she didn’t ask any questions, as though some new and menacing thought were preoccupying her and paralyzing her mind as she gazed at all the lethal possibilities at my disposal.

  Since I was due to participate in another operation shortly, we had no time to dawdle, and I took her up to the cafeteria to hear the real reason for her unexpected visit. It was hard to get anything clear out of her. First of all, she protested, she hadn’t made a special trip to see me. She had been to visit my father’s aunt in the old folks’ home, the grandmother of his niece Rachel, who had been so nice to them in London, she and her husband Edgar. And afterward it had occurred to her to drop in on me in the hospital, to talk to me about Shivi. My reassurances the night before had not succeeded in putting her mind to rest. She wanted to give me the phone number in Calcutta where I could get in touch with Michaela again. If Michaela wanted to endanger herself, let her, but she had no right to put the baby at risk. Altogether, my mother was surprised at me—how could I be so indifferent to my own child? I wanted to make a crushing reply, but I said nothing, trying unsuccessfully to imagine Shivi in Calcutta. While I was drinking the last drops of coffee, I looked into her bloodshot eyes and tried to figure out what it was she wanted from me. She, who never lingered over partings, was now finding it difficult to part from me, and after I accompanied her to the exit, she turned around and followed me back to the surgical wing. “Don’t worry about Shivi,” I repeated before pressing the numbers of the code that opened the big glass doors. For a moment I wanted to add, You should worry about me instead, but I didn’t, and I disappeared from her view into the bright corridor opening o
ut in front of me.

  The next evening, after I had eaten my supper, despairingly aware of how my new dread of being alone was creeping up on me even in the early twilight hours, I decided to return to the hospital and explore the possibilities available to me in one of the empty operating rooms. The thought of going to sleep on the operating table and never waking up seemed increasingly attractive to me. But at seven o’clock my father phoned from Jerusalem. It appeared that when he came home from work that afternoon my mother wasn’t at home, although the insurance agency where she worked as a secretary was closed on Tuesday afternoons. He had found a vague note saying, “Gone out for a while, don’t worry.”

  “Then why are you worried?” I said impatiently. “She’ll probably come back soon.” But about two hours later he phoned again, to say that there was no sign of her and nobody knew where she was. “You know I’m not a hysterical type,” he said, trying to defend himself, “but I don’t know where she could be.” We arranged to talk again in an hour, but after fifteen minutes he phoned again. It was after nine. He had conducted a little search of the house, and it seemed to him that the new suitcase which she had bought in London was missing. Perhaps she had lent it to somebody without telling him. “Surely she couldn’t have gone anywhere without giving me any warning?” he asked, and now he spoke in English, without even an occasional word in Hebrew, as if he had made up his mind to cling firmly to his mother tongue, which alone was capable of anchoring him in the chaos swirling around him. I asked him if he wanted me to come to Jerusalem. “Not yet. But if I have to go and report her missing to the police,” he added in a humorous tone, “you should come with me.” I promised him that I would stay near the phone, sensing how my father’s new anxiety, streaming to me from Jerusalem, was making me forget my own anxiety, which quickly turned to astonishment when he phoned with the update. Not only was the new suitcase missing, but her favorite summer dress was also gone. “Could she have suddenly taken it into her head to take a trip somewhere? But where?” he asked himself more than me, without any note of complaint or anger against his wife for leaving him without a word. “See if you can find her passport,” I suggested to him at ten o’clock at night. He went to look for it immediately, and fifteen minutes later he announced that he had found her Israeli passport, but the British passport, which was always in the same place as his, was missing. Could she have taken it with her? But why? “I’ll give you an answer soon,” he promised with a peculiar confidence in his voice, and half an hour later he phoned to say that he had just concluded a long conversation with my mother’s sister in Glasgow, and even though she had been astonished and also a little amused by his announcement and couldn’t give him any leads, he had the feeling that she wasn’t as worried as she should have been. Did she know something that she was hiding from him? Or were the Scots just more phlegmatic than the English?

  It was now clear to both of us that my mother had undertaken a mysterious journey to an unknown destination. If my father had been more familiar with her wardrobe, he might have been more able to find out what was missing, but he was indifferent to such details, and it was hard to get anything specific out of him. His concern, however, evaporated the minute he realized that my mother had gone on a trip. Now he began to see the whole thing in a different light. Although people might disappear in the course of a journey to an unknown destination, at least a journey progressed in a definite direction; a rational woman like my mother would never set off without a goal, and this notion calmed him. “I’m turning into Sherlock Holmes in my old age,” he said with a chuckle at one o’clock in the morning, astonishingly wide awake, and he reported on private investigations of her belongings in the secret corners of unfamiliar drawers. At five o’clock in the morning, between one fitful doze and another, I tried to call him, but there was no answer. I left a message with the hospital switchboard to say that my mother had disappeared, I had to go to Jerusalem at once to help my father look for her, and I wouldn’t be coming to work. Why couldn’t I have lied and said my mother was sick? I castigated myself as I sped along the expressway to Jerusalem in the teeth of an east wind that had blown up, watching the rays of the sun forcing their way through the haze. Luckily the key to the house was always on my key ring, and I was able to walk inside and find my father sleeping soundly in his bed.

  “I want to keep calm,” he said, his face pink with the pleasure of sleep in spite of the vicissitudes of the night. “I know that she’s a sensible woman, with logical goals. But I’m sure that this disappearance of hers is directed at you, not at me. I’ve sensed for a few weeks that something wasn’t right between you. That she was angry with you for something you did. But however hard I tried to get at the truth, she wouldn’t give me even a crumb. Perhaps you can tell me now what happened between you.” But I had vowed to my mother, who was now trying to direct my life by remote control, that I wouldn’t tell my father anything. And I certainly didn’t intend to add to his troubles now. Soon he would have to decide how to excuse his absence from work. Would he too feel that he had to tell the truth about his wife’s disappearance to his colleagues and make a laughingstock of himself? But at half-past seven the phone rang. It was my aunt, talking excitedly from Glasgow. My mother was on her way to Calcutta to bring the baby back. She would land there in a couple of hours. Michaela knew that she was coming. It seemed that my aunt had not been able to rest all night long, and eventually she had succeeded in getting the details of my mother’s sudden flight out of Edgar, our pale, thin London relation, for he was the only one my mother had trusted enough to confide in.

  With the news of my mother’s flight to Calcutta a profound calm descended on my father, and he got dressed and went to work. “If you find out something new, phone me at the office,” he said as he left the house. And I stayed alone in my parents’ apartment as in the days when I stayed home sick from school. I didn’t call the hospital. Since I had made the bizarre announcement of my mother’s disappearance, I might as well give it time to sink in and take on the menacing dimensions it deserved before I canceled it. But since I had remembered to slip the little bottle Nakash had given me into my pocket before leaving for Jerusalem, so that I would have something to give my father to calm his anxiety, I took the second half of the little sleeping pill and swallowed it, saying to myself as I did so, Now that my mother’s flying over India to bring the baby home, I’ll need all my reserves of strength for her return, when she will undoubtedly lay the whole burden on me.

  When my father returned in the early afternoon he found me sleeping deeply, and he didn’t wake me, for unlike my mother he had always respected my sleep. He let me go on sleeping even when he received another phone call from my aunt in Glasgow, who until my mother’s return from India served as the go-between for us and Edgar, the strange relation whom my mother had rightly chosen to guide her on his journey because of his connections with firms doing business in India; through telephone calls, telegrams, and faxes, he was able to guide her safely to her destination by means of faithful Indian clerks who waited for her at airports and train stations, making modest but respectable arrangements for the comfort of an elderly woman traveling alone and returning with a slightly feverish infant, straight there and back, without looking right or left at the glorious and terrifying abundance of life that surrounded her.

  My mother left on Tuesday morning and returned on Friday evening. Her whole trip took seventy-seven hours. For about twenty-six of them she was in the air, and for about six she traveled by train. Since I returned to work in the hospital on Thursday and I didn’t want to complicate things for my colleagues with another absence, I didn’t go to the airport to meet them but let my father go instead. I took off from the emergency room as soon as I could get away, and as dusk began to fall I was already racing to Jerusalem on my motorcycle, with my visor raised so I could enjoy the scents of the wild grasses and early blossoming of the almond trees. In my parents’ house the lights were on in all the rooms, and I quickly sa
w that there were new lines on my mother’s exhausted face, but also a new radiance. Shivi, whom my mother now insisted on calling Shiva, like Michaela’s Indian friends, was really in pretty bad shape, though not at all critical. She was thinner and browner, and in her little yellow sari, with the third eye (which my mother had not wiped off during the entire journey home) shining between her eyes, she reminded me for a moment of the Indian children who had run after me when I went down to the Ganges. In our time apart, she had learned to walk, and since she now recognized me immediately—not like the time at the airport when the two English girls had brought her back from England—she began tottering toward me. I swept her up into the air and clasped her little body tightly to my chest. All this time I had thought of her as being a part of Michaela, and I hadn’t realized how much she was also a part of me. It appeared that Michaela had agreed to let my mother have her without any arguments. She was a realistic woman, and she knew that there were risks for a small child in India. In the short, stormy night my mother had spent in Calcutta, she had received the impression that Michaela’s spiritual attraction to India was reinforced by the simple human experience of working with the sidewalk doctors, which gave her a feeling of worth and led the Indians to regard her as almost a doctor herself, even though she had never graduated from high school. Nevertheless, my mother believed that she would soon return. “But will you be able to take her back?” she asked, still not looking me in the eye. “Because if not, you’ll have to come back to Jerusalem.”