To Know a Woman (Harvest in Translation)
Page 26
"What's your name, miss? Yes. It's burning. I know. It's burning terribly. You're right. Hellish pain. But it's a good sign. It's supposed to be burning now. It proves that the operation has been successful. Tomorrow it'll burn less, and the day after it'll only itch."
Or:
"Never mind, friend. Throw it all up. Don't hold back. It'll do you good. You'll feel better afterward."
Or:
"Yes. I'll tell her. Yes. She was here when you were asleep. Yes, she loves you a lot. It's plain to see."
In a strange way that Yoel again made no effort to understand or anticipate, he sometimes experienced some of the patients' pain in his own body. Or so he imagined. This pain thrilled him and put him in a state of mind that resembled pleasure. Yoel also was better than the doctors, better than Maxine and Arik and Greta and all the others, at calming desperate relatives who sometimes burst in screaming or threatening violence. He knew how to extract from himself an accurate combination of compassion and firmness. Of sympathy, sorrow, and authority. In the way that the words "Unfortunately I don't know the answer to that" often emerged from his mouth, there was such an undertone of knowledge, albeit vague and concealed beneath layers of responsibility and reserve, that after a few minutes the desperate relatives were filled with a mysterious feeling that here was an ally who would fight cleverly and courageously on their behalf against disaster, and would not easily be defeated.
One night an unfamiliar young doctor, almost a boy, told him to go to another ward chop-chop and get him his bag, which he had left on the table in the consulting room. When Yoel returned a few minutes later without the bag, explaining that the room was locked, the young doctor shrieked at him, Then go and get the key from somebody, you nincompoop. Yet even this humiliating treatment did not humiliate Yoel; it almost gratified him.
If he happened to witness a death, Yoel would maneuver himself into a position from which he could observe the death throes and would absorb every particular with the whetted senses that his professional life had developed in him. He filed it all away in his memory and went on counting syringes, wiping toilet seats, sorting dirty linen, all the while playing back the death scene in slow motion in his mind's eye, freezing the picture and scrutinizing every tiny detail, as though he had been instructed to trace a strange misleading blip that might in fact have occurred only in his imagination or in his tired eyes.
Often Yoel had to take a senile, dribbling old man, hobbling on crutches, to the toilet, and help him lower his pants and sit down. He would kneel and hold the old man's legs while he painfully emptied his bubbling bowels; then he had to wipe away the excrement, mixed with blood from his hemorrhoids, carefully and very patiently, so as not to hurt him, and dry his behind. After that he would wash his hands thoroughly with soap and carbolic, take the old man back to his bed, and put the crutches away carefully by his bedside. And all in total silence.
Once, at one o'clock in the morning, nearly at the end of the volunteer shift, when they were drinking coffee in the little cubicle behind the nurses' station, Christina or Iris said:
"You should have been a doctor."
Yoel hesitated before answering:
"No. I can't stand blood."
And Maxine said:
"Liar. I've seen all sorts of liars in my time, so help me, but I've never yet met a liar like this Sasha. He's a liar you can trust. A liar who doesn't lie. More coffee anybody?"
Greta said:
"To look at him, you'd think he was floating in another world. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing. Even now, when I'm talking about him, he looks as though he's not listening. But later it turns out that he's filed it all away. You watch out for him, Arik."
And Yoel, putting his coffee cup down very gently on the stained Formica table, as though fearful of hurting the table or the cup, ran two fingers between his neck and his shirt collar and said:
"The boy in room 4, Gilad Danino, had a nightmare. I told him he could sit in the nurses' stadon and draw for a while, and then I promised him an exciting story. So I'm off. Thanks for the coffee, Greta. Remind me, Arik, before the end of the shift to count the cracked cups."
At quarter after two, as they were both walking out, very tired and silent, to the parking lot, Yoel asked:
"Have you been to Karl Netter?"
"Odelia's been. She said you were there too. And the four of you played Scrabble. Maybe I'll drop by tomorrow. That Greta tires me out. Perhaps I'm getting too old for that sort of thing."
"Tomorrow is today," said Yoel.
Suddenly he also said:
"You're all right, Arik."
And the man replied:
"Thanks. You too."
"Good night. Drive carefully, friend."
And so Yoel Ravid began to give in. Since he was capable of observing, he grew fond of observing in silence. With tired but open eyes. Into the depth of the darkness. And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days, even for years, well there was no finer thing than this to do. Hoping for a recurrence of one of those rare, unexpected moments when the blackness is momentarily illuminated, and there comes a flicker, a furtive glimmer, which one must not miss, one must not be caught off guard. Because it may signify a presence which makes us ask ourselves what is left. Besides elation and humility.
About the Author
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, AMOS OZ is the author of numerous works of fiction and essays. His international awards include the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, and the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Israel.