And so, just before parting from them in the dimly lit main corridor, I stopped and in simple, straightforward words offered them my help in filling out the medical report required by the old people’s home. I saw Dori’s eyes shine, although she said nothing, waiting for Lazar to respond first. He seemed to hesitate, unwilling to owe me yet another favor, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You really mean it? That’s a wonderful idea. And you’ll be free tomorrow, too.” But he immediately added a condition to the wonderful idea, that this time I would accept a proper fee for my services, not like the trip to India, which in the end I had given them as a present. At this his wife was very surprised. “How come we didn’t pay him?” She turned to her husband indignantly. “He refused to take it,” cried Lazar angrily. “Go on, you tell her yourself.”
“That’s not right,” she went on, working herself up to the kind of tantrum I knew she was capable of throwing. “That’s not right,” she repeated. “We can’t possibly let it all come off his vacation.”
“It hasn’t come off his vacation,” replied Lazar in embarrassment. “It’s been left as if he were at the hospital all those two weeks. For the time being. Until we decide what to do.”
“But that’s impossible,” she scolded her husband, “and it’s illegal too.” All of a sudden, amused and excited by their agitated exchange, I leaned toward her, and in the yellowish light of the corridor I looked straight through her glasses into her brown eyes, around which her automatic smile had etched many little lines. “Madame Solicitor,” I said in a new, humorous, familiar tone, which no doubt surprised them as well as me, “what’s illegal here? Friendship? Here”—I took hold of the slender hand of the secretary, who seemed delighted by the spirit of levity which had seized hold of me, and reproached the two Lazars—“she can bear witness before any committee of inquiry that not only didn’t I obtain any benefits from the director or his wife, but on the contrary, they haven’t renewed my residency in the surgical department, and they’re barely allowing me to be a temporary substitute in the internal medicine department.” I took a little prescription pad out of my pocket and jotted down my telephone number, in case they had lost it or even thrown it away, and took Dori’s mother’s address and phone number from them, and we arranged that the next day, early in the morning, we would set a time for my visit. “I’ll try to be there with you,” she promised. “Highly desirable,” I said promptly. And they thanked me warmly once more, their arms already groping for each other next to the revolving door, from which they emerged together, wrapped up like a pair of clumsy bears, into the thick, heavy rain flooding the illuminated plaza.
A new thread had unexpectedly been tied, I thought with satisfaction, to reinforce the Indian connection, which had weakened and would soon have snapped. And now that the scalpel had been forcibly removed from my hand and I had been transformed into an internist against my will, I could become their family doctor and treat their sore throats, blood pressure, hot flashes, mysterious stomachaches, perhaps even give them advice on questions of weight, and at the same time feed the fever of this strange, impossible love in my fantasies until it died down of its own accord, as I was sure it would. But as soon as she disappeared from view, short and awkward, trying to hold her umbrella over her husband as he hurried to their car, I felt the strange yearning again. Was what I felt for her, in the last analysis, simple lust? Yes, I felt lust, but it wasn’t simple and direct, for I had no desire to undress her in my fantasies, and no need to either, because for a long time I had had an intimate, vague, but nevertheless satisfying sense of her body, which had been acquired not only in the enforced closeness of the trip itself but even before that, in the big bedroom of their apartment in Tel Aviv, when she insisted on my inoculating her, and I took in at a glance her large but shapely breasts, scattered with unusually large moles; and it was these brown moles, rather than the breasts themselves, that I would repeatedly conjure up before me when I was seized with the desire to be engulfed by her innermost being.
I turned back in the direction of the surgical ward to say my final farewells to whoever happened to be there, to collect my few belongings, and to throw my coat into the laundry bag, even though it had my name embroidered on its pocket. And again I began to wonder what I was going to do about my growing attraction to this woman, which was beginning to make me look ridiculous even in my own eyes. Did I really want to conquer her in my fantasies? Perhaps all I wanted from her was the right inspiration, to guide me in identifying the young woman I wanted to fall in love with, the one my parents were dying for me to marry. Perhaps all I really wanted was a certain closeness, which would give me a more accurate idea of the young woman she had once been; to sketch by means of the big beauty spots scattered over her arms and shoulders, as if they were signposts, the figure that had once been slimmer and younger, borne on long legs in its kittenish walk. Then I would have a more accurate picture of the type of woman I wanted to spend my life with. My parents thought that my dedication to my work and my devotion to my patients robbed me of my erotic powers. But this was not the case. Even after twenty-four hours of a grueling shift at the hospital, when I came home exhausted, I could ejaculate quantities of semen in the hot shower which I frequently took half asleep. The problem wasn’t my erotic powers but my inability to recognize the girls I should have fallen in love with. Because when I came across old girlfriends with whom I had had pleasant but noncommittal relations in the past, and in the meantime they had married or moved somewhere else—and I discovered that since we had last met they had grown not only more beautiful but more intelligent and mature—the pang of loss was especially painful, since I knew that I hadn’t missed my chance through arrogance or emotional sterility but through a kind of lethargy, not physical but spiritual, whose source was apparently my increasing ability not only to satisfy myself in solitude but also to enjoy it. And here I had encountered a woman who was my absolute opposite; whose inability to stay at home by herself, without her husband by her side, was not only ridiculous and annoying but wildly attractive.
The next morning I woke up at dawn, even though I was completely at liberty to sleep late, in a way I had not experienced since graduating from high school. Not only didn’t I have to go to work, I didn’t have any work to go to, at least not until Professor Levine recovered and conducted his medical clarification with me. And so I forced myself to rest, and decided not to shave, and not even to take off my pajamas, and to stay in bed until she phoned. At first I didn’t care if the phone call didn’t come for a while, because that would prolong the pleasure of waiting, and also because I had immersed myself again in A Brief History of Time; although I had nearly given up on it in the last days in India, where the atmosphere was not at all suited to scientific books of this nature, I had decided that I had to pit myself against a few of its utterly obscure chapters again. After all, it was a popular book, or so it said on the cover at least, and even though the study of medicine is only on the fringes of pure science, it was inconceivable that a science graduate from the Hebrew University High School should be incapable of understanding the mysteries of the big bang and the black holes of the expanding universe. I thus snuggled down under my blanket and abandoned myself to the pleasures of cosmic freedom, which were particularly enjoyable in view of the heavy rain steadily pouring down on the world outside, and hardly noticed that the phone call was taking longer and longer to come. It was nearly three o’clock before I concluded that she had decided to dispense with my services and that the flimsy line I had cast over her had been snapped even before I had given it a single tug. Nevertheless, I refrained from leaving the apartment, even to buy a carton of milk and fresh cream cheese. Nor did I go down to the ground floor to pay the landlady the money I owed her for cleaning the stairs. Instead I turned up the heat in the room and took off my pajama top.
As dusk descended, I began to have various interesting thoughts of my own about the fate of the universe, whose future—when it w
ould contract again into a particle with zero radius and infinite density, at the opposite pole to the big bang—concerned Hawking, although he seemed unable to construct a clear and convincing theory about it. Still the telephone did not ring, but I refused to call her and demean myself in front of them, as if I needed this connection more than they did. I switched on the hot water heater in the bathroom, but I hesitated to take a shower in case the phone rang and I failed to hear it. And when I saw that the day was drawing to a close and it would soon be night, I decided to forgo my daily shave. It had been a day of complete physical rest and clear spiritual pleasure, and now, as I sat down to eat the supper I had prepared, I felt that I had finally succeeded in overcoming the matter of Hawking’s black holes, both logically and emotionally, and I contemplated his elderly child’s face as it looked out from the cover of his book, full of trust in the ability of the intelligent layman to understand him. Only as night fell, after the nine o’clock news on television, when sadness crept into my soul, did I decide to phone the old granny directly and introduce myself.
Not only did she immediately recognize my name, but it turned out that she too had been waiting all day, dressed and ready in her apartment, because Lazar’s wife had incorrectly assumed that I had taken her address and phone number in order to get in touch with the old woman directly and arrange a time that suited everybody for the visit. And even though they had spoken to each other during the course of the day, Lazar’s wife had prevented her from calling me, on the grounds that I was a very reliable person, and if I didn’t call it must be because I was unable to make it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I repeated several times to the old lady, who firmly rejected any manifestation of guilt on my part and was only angry with her daughter for misleading us both. “Never mind that, when can we meet?” I interrupted her apologies enthusiastically, as if we were talking about a romantic date rather than a doctor’s visit. “Whenever you like.” The old lady laughed happily. “I haven’t got any other rendezvous.”
“Tomorrow morning?” I suggested immediately. “Yes, tomorrow morning’s fine, or tomorrow afternoon, whenever it suits you—even this evening, if you like.”
“This evening?” I repeated in surprise. “But it’s already night.”
“Not yet,” the old lady protested. “The news has just finished, and there are still plenty of programs to see.” I hesitated for a moment, and then agreed. “Just give me time to get organized,” I requested. “It’s twenty to ten now. I’ll be at your place by half past ten.”
“You’ll find me here even if you come later,” she reassured me jokingly, “and in the meantime I’ll phone Dorit. Maybe she’ll want to come too.”
“Yes, I think that would be a very good idea,” I said, and went quickly to take a shower.
In spite of my haste, I arrived later than ten-thirty; while I had spent the day in bed reading about the expanding universe, a number of the central arteries of Tel Aviv had turned into real lakes, in whose murky yellow waters I had no desire to dip my motorcycle or wet the instrument bag my parents had given me in honor of my graduation from medical school. Accordingly, I chained the Honda to the post of a taxi rank and took a cab to Grizim Street, one of the little streets in the north of the city which despite their proximity to busy main roads are themselves quiet, with pretty, comfortable houses. Lazar’s wife had not yet arrived. “But she’s coming,” promised her mother, who was quite elderly but, unlike Dori, very slim. She was wearing a tailored gray wool suit, and warm slippers on her feet. The centrally heated house was scrupulously neat, although the furniture was old. On a low table next to the couch, a tea service and dishes of candies and nuts were waiting, perhaps since morning. “We won’t wait for her,” I announced, and I requested the medical questionnaire required by the old-age home, which was packed with questions and demands. I sat myself down at the table and began asking her about herself and her childhood diseases, in order to fill in the first, more trivial items. Then I hurried to remove my sphygmomanometer from my bag, but before I could wrap the cuff around her frail arm the old lady admitted, or perhaps simply recalled, that she sometimes had peaks of high blood pressure, reaching levels of over 200—the systolic—and 110—the diastolic. “We’ll soon see,” I said, and measured her blood pressure a number of times, one after the other. It changed every time I measured it, but the average was a little high. “Are you excited now?” I asked gently. She blushed, thought for a minute, said, “Perhaps,” and smiled with a faint echo of her daughter’s enigmatic smile. I asked her to show me the pills prescribed by Professor Levine, which she didn’t like taking regularly because they made her sleepy and depressed. Indeed, they included a powerful sedative used in the emergency room. “Maybe I’ll give you something gentler instead,” I suggested, “but in the meantime you must take it regularly. Even a half or a quarter of a tablet a day is sufficient—the main thing is the regularity.” I stood up and went to the kitchen and fetched a big knife to show her how easily the tablet could be divided into four. As I was returning to the living room a key turned in the front door, which opened to admit Lazar’s wife wrapped in her cape, her hair wet from the rain, wearing the black velvet jumpsuit which I remembered from my second visit to their house. She was also wearing clunky white running shoes. She was pale and not made up, and when she saw the knife in my hand she raised her finger threateningly and said in a mock-serious tone, “I hope you’re not about to operate on my mother. I don’t want any more misunderstandings between us.”
I stayed there until after midnight. We spoke about aches and pains, illnesses and eating habits. I checked the old lady’s medicine chest and recommended a few changes, which I wrote down on the prescription pad my parents had once had printed for me, with their Jerusalem address under my name. Then I asked her to take off her white silk blouse so that I could auscultate her lungs and heart with my stethoscope. Dori helped me clear the cushions off the sofa and settle her mother comfortably on it so that I could examine the abdominal organs. Her skin was very withered, but washed with scented soap, and at a superficial glance her body looked more like her granddaughter’s body than her daughter’s. The map of her beauty spots was completely different. Dori stood next to me, looking at my hands palpating her mother’s stomach. Was she too remembering the dim chamber in the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? I wanted to ask her, but I restrained myself. Finally I completed my examination and sat down to fill in the questionnaire with scrupulous care. In general the grandmother’s health was fine, but it seemed to me that Professor Levine was keeping her on an excessively rigid medication regime. His approach was more appropriate to recent hospital cases than to ordinary patients who led normal lives. As a consequence she occasionally suffered from severe constipation. I suggested ways of obtaining relief and reduced her medication. My long day of rest had made me exceptionally lucid and eloquent, and when midnight approached and my job was done, I agreed to have tea with the two women, who did not seem in a hurry, even though Lazar had already phoned his wife twice. Was he too incapable of staying at home by himself?
The night into which I now emerged was not the same night in which I had arrived. In the new clarity flowing from the star-spangled sky, diamond drops slid separately down the the windshield of Dori’s car. Dori drove me to the post where I had chained my motorbike, teasing me about the lake of yellow water that I been afraid to cross, which had in the meantime drained completely. “What do you need a motorcycle for in the first place?” For some reason this question seemed to me too personal, and I felt unable to give her a satisfactory reply. I expressed my admiration for her mother and asked her what she intended to do with the apartment. Would she sell it? “No,” she replied, driving slowly but with no consideration for the other drivers on the road, “in the beginning we’ll only rent it, so my mother can always go back there if the experiment with the old-age home doesn’t work out.”
“Have you found somebody to rent it yet?” I asked softly. “No.” She shook her he
ad wearily. “So far we haven’t even thought about it.”
“The reason I ask,” I kept on, “is because I’m looking for an apartment.” She gave me a quick glance which seemed to hold a mild suspicion of hidden motives. “How much are you paying now?” she asked. I told her. “That’s not much,” she stated, with justice—the rent I paid was definitely low. Now she fixed her eyes on me. I noticed an incipient double chin blurring her jaw-line. “We’ll want more than that for my mother’s apartment,” she warned me. “I don’t care,” I said calmly, with my eyes focused on the road, as if I were the one driving the car, “not only because it would be nice to think of you as my landlady, but also, who knows, I might get married soon, and then there’d be someone to help me pay the rent.” And then I saw the smile disappear completely, for the first time, from her eyes, which widened as her face turned a little red in the headlights of an approaching car. “You’re getting married?” she asked softly, as if marriage weren’t a possibility for me at all. “Not exactly, not yet,” I replied with a mysterious smile, full of love and sympathy for her. “I mean, there isn’t even a candidate yet, but I feel that she’s already marked, even if she isn’t yet aware of my existence.”
Open Heart Page 21
