by Russ Rymer
“Still There Drips In Sleep Against the Heart,” I chanted to myself and began mentally ticking things off: syringes, tape, drips, intubation tray, suction, airway, heparin. It was just a nervous exercise—there weren’t any drugs or bags or anything yet. No endotracheal tube, no line-in catheter. I pulled the overhead operating lamp—it was a very fancy model, one I’d never seen—around on its articulated arm until its shadowless glare was centered over the table. The table, without its protective veil of blue shroud and red wound, reflected back blameless as a saint’s face.
There is always something eerie about an operating theater not in use: hushed, lambent, shiny with soundlessness. In no other venue on earth does so much transpire leaving so little trace. Ritual gore is swept aside and tidied up so efficiently that fifteen minutes after the most invasive and drastic procedure, when a new team convenes over all-new gore, it is as though nothing had ever happened there before. You would think, wouldn’t you, that this space, of all spaces, would confess its history. Shouldn’t a taint of such a past persist? Yet coming into a room like this one, expectant before an operation, I’d wonder that a place of intensest concentration and ultimate consequence, of deepest mortal struggle, could be washed so spic-and-span. Washed by Lethe (same seminar). Harm sank into oblivion, and the waters closed above it.
“‘Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory,’” I repeated, oratorically this time, taking the lamp as my stage light and assuming (in error) that I was alone. But there was no memory, should be none, not in any OR of mine, not if I could help it, for memory and forgetting were my province, just as Willem’s province was restoration through carnage. The ancient chorus had words for that too. “‘From the gods who sit in grandeur,’” I continued, readying to give Willem his tragic due, but it was someone else who finished.
“‘. . . grace comes somehow violent.’” The torso that emerged into the halo of light wasn’t Mahlev’s, and neither was the voice, though I recognized it.
“Oh, hello,” I said, embarrassed, and in a flustered attempt at recovery, I reached my hand across the table.
“I’ve startled you,” Sahran said. “Forgive me.” He took my hand in both of his and held it, held it a moment too long for cordiality, as though he were appraising or adoring it, as though I wore a fisherman’s ring and he were about to go down on his knees.
“They’ve given us a beautiful room,” I said nervously, retrieving my extremity. “Good of you to come and check it out.”
“Have they,” Sahran said.
“Not every patient is so conscientious,” I said.
“Nor every doctor, Dr. Anselm.”
“Matilde,” I offered.
“Emil,” he countered, and invited me—S’il vous plaît, tutoyez-moi—to address him informally. “But would you mind, terribly, Doctor, if I stuck with your title? I know you may think it absurd—many doctors do, all that MD mystique—but there’s some consolation to be found in mystique backed by merit, and since our relationship will be ultimately a formal one, I admit the formality comforts me.”
I could feel my cheeks burning; I’d never been accosted with such brash propriety.
“So, yes, Dr. Anselm, it must look odd,” Sahran said, “me, here. Today I’m not here as a patient, though, thankfully. You see, I enjoy a complicated relationship with this hospital.”
“I’m sure I don’t need to—”
“Need,” he interrupted. “What’s need? You are curious, so I am telling you. You were informed you’d be in a private hospital. But even among private hospitals, as you see, this is a special place.” Sahran called it a “diplomatic facility,” though not belonging to a particular nation. It had been founded, he said, during the Algerian conflict, “when some of my brethren felt the need for a medical . . . alternative, shall we say,” where Muslim extra-nationals could be assured of proper treatment. Sahran declared it “an encouraging sign” that the place was currently little used, except when, say, a visiting Saudi prince was in town and in need of medical care. In service of such clientele, it was kept in tiptop condition.
“One thing to understand is that, technically speaking, we are not standing in France. You and I, we are here by invitation, diplomatically secured,” Sahran said. “And as it turns out, I am a diplomat of sorts. I stress the ‘of sorts.’” He smiled softly, and assured me of the simplicity of what he called “the situation. An operation is necessary, and for convenience it is best done in France. But not in the French jurisdiction. Why? Because of you, quite frankly, and the other doctors we have enlisted who are not all licensed to practice here. And so I have made arrangements and resolved the problem. As matters go, it wasn’t difficult. Am I clarifying things?”
He was, in part. Willem had assured me before I left New York that all relevant credentials issues would be handled on his end, and now I knew what he’d meant. Sahran and I headed out from the table toward the recovery room. At the swinging doors, I reached for the lamp switch, and he paused to look back, as though he were afraid he’d left something behind. “It’s beautiful, you’re right,” he said. He scanned the air, slowly; whatever he sought, it didn’t lie on the floor; it was floating in the ether. “Ever seen a battlefield?” he asked, by which he meant a historic one, “like your Gettysburg?”
I said I didn’t favor them, preferring more pacific parks; for instance, just the other day I’d walked through Buttes-Chaumont, and I would have prattled on longer in this prattling manner if he hadn’t said, “In its own way, a battleground too,” and returned me to his point. He’d visited Gettysburg once, when he was in the States, just as he’d visited other, similar spots. “Verdun, same thing,” he said. “Very odd experience. You go there looking for an answer, some evidence. And here’s this trench and that bridge, exactly where you’d read they’d be, and aside from that: nothing, nothing that can enlighten you. Whole armies bled into the dirt, and it’s all disappeared. After all that violence, not even a ghost.” His eyes finished their circuit of the room and came back around to mine. “Not even a ghost,” he said.
I went to thank Mahlev (“Please, don’t get up!”) and retrieve my things, and found the big man in a dither. “Oh, here you are!” he exclaimed and said with flustered apologies that he was just coming around to find me, that he’d directed me to the wrong OR. “You’ll be in number five.” He wanted to take me back in, but I said, No, no, another time, no big deal, I’m sure the room is similar. My ritual had fulfilled its symbolic purpose regardless of practical accuracy. I still felt anxious, but not concerning the facilities.
When I got to the elevator, Sahran was there too, with his overcoat on and a newspaper folded beneath his arm. He’d already pressed the down button. He carried a leather briefcase and was wearing a rain hat with a wide flat brim and a string under his chin, an item whose floppishness had the strange effect of emphasizing his dignity. The bell dinged; the doors opened. We talked small on the ride down, on our way through the lobby—did I have friends here? Was I missing New York?—and my impatience grew with each exchange. As we paused on the pea gravel in front of his car, I mustered my resolve.
“Mr. Sahran . . . Emil . . . I appreciate your explanation,” I said. “You’re right, it helps. But based on what you’ve told me, I have no idea what legal authority we’re under here, if any, and I would hate to find out that that was really the point.”
He took this without flinching, and his face managed to appear contemplative and even a little sad under the silly rain hat. Then he said, “I’m hosting a dinner before the surgery period starts, at my place, and I would enjoy it very much if you could join us. Some evening soon. I will let you know. May I count on you?”
I heard myself respond that I’d be delighted.
“Good, then,” he said. “Goodbye, Matilde.”
And I told him goodbye and was almost to the Mercedes before it occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten my answer and before I registered the name.
The phone was
ringing on the table by the couch even as I unlocked the door to the suite, and the voice spilled out of it before I could even say hi.
“What the hell, Matilde.”
“Willem, hello. I thought I might hear from you.”
In fact, I’d resolved, during the ride back into the city, to give him a call. My afternoon at the hospital had sunk in on me slowly, but during the ride my thoughts had avalanched, and with them my composure, and I knew nothing would settle matters except a long-delayed mano-a-mano heart-to-heart with Willem, though I certainly didn’t need the tirade that now greeted me. Willem had heard from Sahran, and Willem wasn’t pleased. I was sabotaging the effort, he shouted, was making him look bad, was paranoid, was a troublemaker, was—
“Replaceable.”
“What?” Willem said.
“Replaceable. Willem, I’m an anesthesiologist. There are scads of us. You could probably even find a few in France. If my questions make you uncomfortable, get rid of me. Get someone you like.”
“I’ve considered it,” he said.
“But.”
“It isn’t up to me. He wants you.”
“Who?”
“Sahran, naturally. Who else?” For some reason, Willem said, that was beyond his ability to fathom, Sahran was insisting I be on the team. And anyway, he, Willem, didn’t want me to go either, it was far too late for such changes, we had an operation coming up and soon.
“November thirtieth at seven A.M.,” I ventured.
“Soon, like I said.”
“Seven A.M., Willem! November thirtieth! A specific time on a specific day. It’s on Mahlev’s computer.”
“Yes?”
“Willem! We aren’t taking out tonsils!” Why was he feigning ignorance of fundamentals? With me! “You can’t schedule a heart transplant, because a heart transplant requires a heart, and, geez, you just never know when a heart might become available,” I said. “Or do you?”
“Implying what?” he said.
“I’m not implying anything, I’m asking you. Do you know? Have you arranged for someone to donate his heart at a time convenient for all? Unless you can convince me that this is not what it looks like, then I am out of here; it doesn’t matter what you think. I may be a lot of things, but I will not be an accessory to murder.”
“Of course not, Tilde. You must calm down!”
I was giving myself the same instruction but could feel myself not cooperating. Everyone had heard of such horrors—a surgery where an organ was secured through lavish payment or lavish threat, by abduction or attack, or by means of a contract made with a healthy but impoverished donor to provide for his family forever, educate his kids. All it took was money and power and will: diplomacy. My hand was shaking and the phone receiver drummed against my ear. “At the very least,” I said, “you’re jumping the queue.” For however sick Sahran might be, he was clearly not at death’s door, was still gadding about with a long way to go before he could be considered urgent. “At the worst—” I said.
“Stop it!” Willem barked. “You’re being hysterical.” He understood my alarm, but I was wrong. “It isn’t what’s going on.” He hadn’t seen Mahlev’s calendar, he said . . . didn’t care what was on it . . . no time was set . . . probably just something penciled in . . . dibs on a room . . . their bureaucratic way. Yes, the setup was unusual, Willem said, but not fundamentally. “Fundamentally, we’re waiting for a heart, and when we get a heart, we’ll go. Just like in any transplant. Tilde? Do you hear what I’m saying? You’re blowing things way out of proportion.”
“Out of proportion,” I said.
“Wildly,” he said. “How many years have we known each other? I did not bring you over here to do anything illegal. Okay? I promise you. Will you accept that, and quit this crazy talk? If this were scheduled, why are we sitting around waiting a whole month? If I knew the time, why would I make you call in twice a day?”
Well, that was true. “Oh, Willem, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so. Why do I feel so unsure about this?”
We agreed to argue again soon, and I hung up. Then I picked the phone back up and dialed room service and ordered a glass of white wine. Before it arrived, I called again and changed the white to red and ordered some dinner to go with it. I watched the television until the food arrived and at the same time kept an eye on (as though it might jump, or flee) the telephone. Soon, I thought, he’ll call back, won’t he? Once he’s calmed down a little? Call and tell me something to assuage my despair. How many years? Surely he knows how I feel.
When I finished eating, I took a long shower, then got out my suitcases and threw my clothes and toiletries in them along with a bar (or three) of l’Hôtel la Clairière de l’Armistice almond-scented bath soap. And then I picked up the phone again.
The front desk confirmed no messages. “Could you send up a bellhop, please?” I said. “With a luggage cart, thank you. No, that’s okay. I’ll be checking out.”
May I tell you a story? Did you ever experience an occasion when you learned some lesson that wasn’t in the syllabus, that wasn’t the moral the fable was supposed to impart? For instance: It’s a late-fall weekend and I am in the Girl Scouts—or is it still the Brownies?—at any rate, one of those children’s paramilitaries with caps and sashes and pledges and badges for this and that, and the leaders have got us out on what they’ve advertised as Nite Hike, which basically means we are tromping through the woods in the dark, our sneakers in the mulch and our camping gear on our backs. The exercise is meant to teach us fortitude in confronting our girlish fears, I suppose, and certainly the path is lurid with terrors. It’s epically, interminably, endlessly long, and every branch is a bony claw and the tiniest peep from off in the forest is the baying of predator death, and the waves kiss the lakeshore with a lugubrious little suck that means the depths are rising to snatch us under so that later we’ll be dredged up covered with pond slime and white as pickled onions with our skin sloughing off and our eyes eaten out by arthropods, and eventually we get to a campground where we pitch our tents and roll out our sleeping bags by the light of a bonfire that is itself an errant piece of reddish hell, throwing shadows deeper than the night. Several bumptious hours later we emerge from our sleeping bags to find our orderly covey of tents smiling beneath a diamond sun and we boil our oatmeal over a pale agreeable domestic flame that cauterizes all our fears and banishes our demons forever.
That’s my story, though I now know the trek could not have been longer than a mile or maybe two, and I see that at the end of it I didn’t feel I’d faced down an enemy so much as met a lifelong friend and discovered something crucial: that you can build in darkness the village you’ll inhabit in the light; that superstition may blaze the trail for reason; that the thinking mind will find its way in blindfolds, by blunder and grope, through the dimmest corridors to brilliant places it otherwise would never have known.
The morning after my flight from la Clairière, I woke in Saxe’s bed, or rather on top of it, rolled up in my quilt and attired in a terry-cloth hotel bathrobe I’d pilfered along with the soap. The sun streamed through the windowpanes onto the evidence of my nocturnal bivouac. After the taxi ride and the repeated bumping ascents trying to get up the precipitous stairs before the minuterie went out, I’d entered and dropped my suitcases inside the door and hung my better dresses in the closet, where I visited them now to see that they weren’t rumpled, as though they were tucked-away children and I needed to be sure they weren’t forlorn or scared. Then I walked out to Portbou, had a café au lait and a famous croissant at Saxe’s favorite table, and begged Passim for recommendations on neighborhood emporiums, and I returned to my apartment after a circuit of the quartier lugging new towels, a set of sheets, a tablecloth, votive candles, instant oatmeal, a bottle of red vin de table, a pint of skim milk, tea, a teakettle, and, my pièce de résistance, a small chafing dish with extra Sterno refills. A subsequent trip brought a bag of ice and a bouquet of Gerber daisies.
With the ba
g and the pint in the icebox and all my purchases in place, I emptied my suitcases into dresser drawers and onto bathroom shelves and closet rods; this, though, after first giving the closet a serious dusting out. My timing was lucky, as I’d stumbled upon an important element to life at Saxe’s: for a few minutes midmorning, the sun through the window caromed off the bureau mirror and ricocheted into the closet, lighting its depths like a magnesium flare. At least, that’s what it did this morning; perhaps for the one time in the year, the way, on the solstice, the sun’s rays line up through the columns of Stone Age temples, requiring a sacrifice. The glare lit every hanger scratch and drifting dust mote, every ding in the old horsehair plaster. I dragged a suitcase in, and as I anointed the renovated closet with fresh clothes, the sun shifted farther and glinted off a shiny object, a nugget of Nibelung gold embedded in the side of the cave. It was a key, hanging from a nail in the wall beside the sealed-up door. Its correlate sprang immediately to my mind.
