Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  “But which one?” I asked, beside myself with excitement. “Which one?” repeated Lazar with a forgiving smile, nodding his head at my mother and father, who were approaching us from two different directions, as if they had sensed that important things were being said. “It’s too soon to say. We’ll see. When we know who’s staying and who’s leaving,” and here Lazar turned affably to my parents, to tell them about the offer he had just made me. My inquisitive young aunt, who saw my parents listening with deep attention, came hurrying up to take part in the conversation, which changed its language to English. My aunt asked the name and location of the hospital, but since she lived in Scotland the name of the area meant nothing to her, and other relations, better acquainted with London, were called in to help. A relative I did not know came up, a tall, very thin man dressed in black, with small metal-framed glasses whose thick bifocal lenses gave his long, pale face a strange expression, and this man, who had no connection with medicine, knew so many details about the hospital, which was in the northeastern part of London, that I wondered if he had been a long-term patient there. The term “a little old-fashioned,” which Lazar had used to describe the place, turned out to be a typical piece of Israeli ignorance; it was an ancient institution, a historical monument which had been founded way back in the Middle Ages, at the beginning of the twelfth century. Some of its wings were still housed in very old buildings, while others had been rebuilt. My two aunts were thrilled by the news, sure that my parents would not be able to stay away once Michaela and I were there and that they would soon see them again. And Dori, who was standing not far off, nodding as she listened to someone explaining something to her, watched the little group clustered around Lazar and me, and blushed deeply and uncharacteristically when my mother approached her to thank her too, for some reason, for her husband’s clever and generous idea.

  But had the idea really come from Lazar, who wanted to save his English colleague from an embarrassing situation and at the same time give me a consolation prize and a little hope, or had it actually come from her, because she was afraid and wanted to get rid of me after seeing how quickly I had fulfilled her implicit request to turn myself into a married and therefore more possible lover? Maybe she had had nothing to do with it, and Lazar himself had dimly sensed my feelings for his wife and wanted unconsciously to get me out of the way. All these thoughts were still running around inside my head when I said good-bye to the last of the guests, but I could not share them with anybody, including, of course, Michaela, who heard about Lazar’s offer only after the wedding was over, late that night in Eyal’s mother’s house. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of bringing back a doggie bag with some of the delicacies served at the wedding, to compensate her for what she had missed, and also to quiet the pangs of hunger that now assailed me, until Eyal’s mother, who had already gone to bed, got up to make me a salad and an omelet in spite of my protests and apologies. Only then did I tell them about Lazar’s offer for me to leave within the month for a year’s exchange at a hospital in London. Eyal’s mother was pleased for us, but in Michaela the proposal lit a veritable fire of enthusiasm. Her weariness vanished and her spirits soared, not only at the idea of going abroad but also because of England’s connection with India. And so when we went to bed in Eyal’s old bedroom, which still contained some of his childhood toys, Michaela’s passion flared, as if the strangeness of the house awaiting us in London had combined with the strangeness of Eyal’s room to double her desire. There was no way I could withstand this double desire, especially on our wedding night, but since I was afraid of embarrassing Eyal’s mother, who for some reason was still roaming around the house, with the noise of our lovemaking, I kept my lips pressed to Michaela’s and inserted my tongue in her mouth to stifle or at least muffle any possible cries or moans during our prolonged intercourse.

  But the next night, in the hotel next to the Dead Sea, so seductive in its strangeness, I decided to resist Michaela’s tireless lust. I did not want to subject our little English embryo to any additional jolting after all the jolting she had already suffered on the back of the motorcycle and was still to suffer on our approaching trip to England. We both already thought of the baby as an English baby par excellence, with the British citizenship she would inherit from me reinforced by her birth on English soil. Michaela couldn’t stop talking about the trip, and since she had been suffering from a mild depression over the past few months due to the loss of her freedom—first by the premature return from India, over which she was still grieving, and then by our hasty marriage, which was now compounded by the baby, who however sweet and good she was would still tighten the collar around Michaela’s neck—it was no wonder that the trip seemed to her like an escape hatch to—who knows—those magical and radiant realms, whose fascination I could hardly guess at, for I had flitted past them like distant lightning. In contrast to Michaela, I was more confused than excited by Lazar’s unexpected offer. First, because it meant a separation from the woman I could not get out of my thoughts. And even though I knew how narrow the scope of my hopes in that direction was, I also knew that I could always get on my motorcycle at the appropriate time and within a few minutes take up my position in the entrance to one of the buildings next to her house or her office, to watch her going in or coming out, smiling and pleased with herself, stepping lightly, apart from that slight pampered dragging of her left foot. And I hadn’t had enough of her mother’s apartment yet either, which still held the memory of the marvelous pleasure I had enjoyed on the day I signed the lease, which I didn’t know whether to continue or to cancel. Michaela, who had taken an instant dislike to the apartment, wanted us to cancel the lease, so that we could leave for England with a clean slate. She wanted to pack our things in crates and leave them in a warehouse next to the harbor, where her stepfather worked. “They can stay there till we come back,” she said, and added suddenly with a mischievous smile, “if we come back.” It was no problem for her, of course, because all her possessions could easily be packed in one not very large crate. But I refused to store all the clothes, furniture, books, and other possessions I had accumulated over the course of my life in a dubious warehouse next to the beach, and I couldn’t impose them on my parents either. Nor did I want to give up the connection with my landlady, for whose sake I had rented the apartment in the first place. So I suggested to my friend Amnon that he come and live in the apartment and look after our things until we returned, in exchange for a percentage of the rent. To my surprise he agreed, even though the apartment was far from his place of work, and it was hard to find parking there too. Ever since I had started going out with Michaela, Amnon had strengthened his ties with me, because Michaela had more patience with him than I did, and when I went out in the late afternoon to assist Dr. Nakash at the Herzliah hospital, she would invite him to come and have supper with her before going to his night watchman’s job. His doctoral thesis was still stuck in the same place, and there were moments when I blamed myself and my confused speech that night on the way from Jericho to Jerusalem, about the relationship between matter and spirit, for his plight, as if my words had actually penetrated his mind and begun to disturb him in spite of the contempt and skepticism with which he had greeted them at the time. Perhaps my philosophical speech had merged in his mind, too, with the warning I had given him that same night about my intention to get married. And when he realized some time later that I was talking about Michaela—whom he liked so much that I suspected he had fallen a little bit in love with her, without admitting it to himself, for his loyalty to me was absolute—my theoretical speculations had joined with her erotic attractions, and he began paying frequent visits to our apartment in order to talk to me, and especially to Michaela, about the way in which matter could be transformed into spirit. I was already getting tired of him, but Michaela had a limitless capacity to sit and listen to him, and to cloud the issue still further by embroidering my own disorganized and primitive theory with all kinds of mystical mumbo-jumbo she had
brought back from India.

  I had no doubt whatsoever that we would return at the end of the year. Otherwise I might lose the secret back door through which, according to Lazar and his bureaucratic metaphor, I had already returned to the hospital. He also promised to come and visit us during our year in England. “That would be wonderful,” I said with genuine delight. “We’ll be happy to put you up, or both of you, if Dori comes with you.”

  “Of course she’ll come,” said Lazar immediately. “If she insisted on going along to India, do you think she won’t insist on coming to England? You’ve already seen for yourself how hard it is for her to stay by herself.” Indeed I had, and the thought of a possible meeting in England gave me the confidence to notify Dr. Nakash that I was resigning from the remunerative work as his assistant anesthetist. To his credit, Nakash encouraged me to go. “Try to gain experience in anesthesiology there, together with your work in internal medicine,” he advised me. “The subjects are connected. It may be an old hospital with obsolete equipment, but you’ll always find someone unexpected whom you can learn something from.” My parents were of course delighted at our approaching trip to England, in spite of the separation; but when I told them, in Michaela’s absence, about the expected birth in six months’ time, and tried, not without difficulty, to convince them that I myself had been ignorant of the pregnancy until after the wedding, because Michaela hadn’t wanted to influence my decision to marry her, they were flabbergasted, as if they had only now grasped the wild side of Michaela’s nature, in addition to the ethical and independent aspects of her character. But their joy at being grandparents soon asserted itself and overcame everything else. They immediately decided to postpone their visit to England. Instead of arriving in three months’ time, in the autumn, they would arrive in the middle of winter, for the birth, and they would also stay longer than they had originally planned. The idea that their granddaughter would be born in the land of their birth amused them, but also excited them. “It will be as if we returned to England,” said my father, turning red with pleasure and embarrassment at the curious thought. “Exactly,” I laughed. “Shiva. Return. That’s exactly the name Michaela wants to give the baby, not because of you but because of its Indian sound.”

  Michaela, flushed from the long walk she had taken to give me a chance to be alone with my parents, came in and gave us a deep, proud, triumphant look. My father couldn’t resist hugging and kissing her as soon as she came in, forgetting his shyness now that a part of his own flesh and blood was inside her. My mother too went up to embrace her, even though I knew that she was secretly upset by Michaela’s deception. The speed of my transformation from a stubborn bachelor to the father of a child seemed to her unwise, and perhaps too much for me to cope with. But the news flooded her with joy nevertheless. I told Michaela that I had already confided the strange name she wanted to give the baby to my parents, and she was insulted and protested indignantly, “It’s not strange at all. That’s what we’re going to call her, Shiva, whether with a vav or a beth we’ll decide later,” and she explained to my parents the mythological meaning of the god Shiva, the Destroyer, and how he complemented the god Brahma, the Creator, and Vishnu, the Preserver. My parents smiled. “Don’t argue about it now, it’s silly. There’s plenty of time to decide. You’ll change your minds a thousand times,” they said, but I already felt that this would be my daughter’s name, and all I could do now was fight for it to be spelled with a beth and not with a vav, like the Indian god, whose name I remembered calling out to the barefoot boatman rowing me out between the ghats of Varanasi. Meanwhile we had to hide the fact of Michaela’s pregnancy from Lazar so he would not relax his pressure on his English colleague to find her a part-time job, not for fear that she would be bored in London, since Michaela always found something to interest her, but to supplement my salary, which would, it transpired, be extremely modest, since it would be calculated according to the shekel salary I would have received if I had remained at the hospital.

  But it was too late to change our minds, or even to grumble. We were both young, and our needs were modest. My parents, though, after telephone consultations with the family in England, decided to break into a savings account and give us some cash to tide us over until I received my first paycheck. With the money from the sale of the motorcycle we bought the plane tickets and good winter clothes, and the remainder we deposited in my bank account to cover the postdated checks for my share of the rent. In the plane Michaela was exuberant; leaving Israel had made her spirits soar, even though we were sailing west and not east. She believed that India was spiritually and intellectually closer to England than it was to Israel. I, in contrast, sat next to her in the doldrums, nervous and anxious about the future. Ever since my mysterious infatuation with Dori had begun, my life had been flowing along a crooked, winding course, because of the contradictory and ambivalent signals I received from the impossible object of my desire. Now I was being swept far away from her, and apart from Lazar’s promise that they might come for a short visit to England, I had nothing to hang on to. And it was supposed to be all for her: the hasty marriage, the rented apartment, even the growing dependence on Lazar and his schemes. I thought again of all the people putting themselves out for me, especially my parents, who knew nothing of my real motives. It would have been more honest to confess to them and ease my conscience. I looked at Michaela, whose great clear eyes reflected the radiant blue sky shining above the clouds. If I suddenly told her that I had fallen in love with Lazar’s wife, what would she say? Would the broad, magnanimous spirit of her Hindu or Buddhist beliefs calm and soothe the pain of this passion and absorb it into the common stream of our marriage?

  Because this was how Michaela defined marriage: it was a “common stream,” and that’s all it was. In the framework of such a tolerant definition, even a sudden confession of the kind I had in mind was entitled to be carried along on the current, like an uprooted tree trunk. But I decided to hold my peace. Nor, in fact, did I have anything to confess, for in the hectic month since our marriage I had had no contact with Dori except for one telephone call, in which I had asked her if we could sublet the apartment to Amnon until we returned from England. About the expected birth I said nothing, not only because I was afraid she might not want to continue the lease, which was intended for a single tenant and not an expanding family, but also because I didn’t want to draw attention to my sexual life with Michaela and give her an excuse for breaking off relations with me—as if our marriage were a mere formality. And indeed, although I could hear people going in and out of her office, she was very friendly, and her joyful, tender voice filled me with such lust that when I put the receiver down I felt drops of moisture on my penis, as if it were weeping. She too, like my parents’ friends, recalled the wedding as an exceptionally enjoyable occasion, perhaps because of the high spirits of our family from Scotland. Even the strictness of the young rabbi, whose beauty she remarked on, did not seem to her annoying or out of place. “It’s a good thing to be serious about the world sometimes,” she said, and her laughter flooded the receiver. Then she praised me for taking up her husband’s offer and admitted that she had had something to do with it. It was her legal mind that had remembered my English passport when Lazar told her about the complications they had run into with the exchange program in London. “Maybe you just wanted to get rid of me?” I asked in suspense, but without anger. She laughed again. “Maybe I did. But is it possible? I see that you’re putting your friend into the apartment to make sure it’s there when you come back.”

  It was true that thoughts of the return to Israel were already occupying my mind during our first few hours in London, where we disembarked into a gray, rainy day. The idea that from now on, because of the unfamiliarity of our surroundings, I would have to cling more closely to Michaela added a disturbing note. Sir Geoffrey himself came to meet us at the airport. He was a rather elderly red-haired Englishman who had remained stubbornly loyal and devoted to Israel in spite
of its unpopular policies. It was difficult at first to understand what he was saying, partly because he swallowed his words and partly because of their subtle, often baffling irony. I wondered how Lazar, with his primitive English, had succeeded in establishing such friendly relations with him. Although he was the administrative head of the hospital, he did not seem to enjoy Lazar’s absolute authority. His executive style was apparently more diffident and hesitant. For example, when we arrived at the hospital, he couldn’t even find a janitor to help us with our suitcases, and he dragged one of them with his own hands into the guest room, which was attached to one of the hospital departments and had been allocated to us for the first week of our stay, until we found a flat. For a moment, when we saw a nurses’ station with an old respirator standing next to it at the end of the corridor, we thought that Sir Geoffrey intended to hospitalize us, but as soon as we entered the room itself the hospital was forgotten. It was a charming, old-fashioned room, with a kind of canopy of green material over the high bedstead to make sleep sweeter and more secure. In days gone by the room had been occupied by the nobles and aristocrats among the patients, but it was now used by the hospital’s guests, especially those who came for short stays, to conduct seminars or supervise complicated treatments.

  A dark-skinned old nurse came in to offer us a cup of tea. We were happy to accept, especially since the forms Sir Geoffrey had brought with him still lacked a number of administrative details, which he was anxious to fill in with our help. He examined my British passport carefully and then turned to the notarized translation of our marriage certificate, stamped and sealed with a red wax rose, to extract the details, which he needed to establish Michaela’s status and obtain British citizenship for her, or at least the right to reside in the country and be legally employed. She herself was completely at ease. She took off her shoes and lay down on one of the little sofas in the room, fixing her wonderful, shining eyes with great goodwill on Sir Geoffrey, who would no doubt have been astonished at the ferocity of the lust aroused in this strange young woman by the cold, dim, foreign room—a lust that would oblige me, travel-weary and slightly depressed as I was, to perform my conjugal duties as soon as he left the room. But in the meantime the tea was brought, and in honor of England I decided to drink it as my parents did, with milk. After Sir Geoffrey had finished filling in the forms and folded them up and screwed on the top of his fountain pen, I began to question him about the different departments in the hospital, especially the surgical department, and I told him about my experience as a surgeon, and recently also as an anesthetist, and asked him hesitantly whether I might be able to take part in an operation from time to time. “Yes,” Sir Geoffrey replied. Lazar had spoken to him on the phone a couple of days before and told him about the true professional inclinations of the young doctor from Israel, and had also asked him if it would be possible to find a part-time job for his wife, and Sir Geoffrey had begun work right away to fulfill his friend’s request. But although the head of the internal medicine department had been willing to do without the services of the Israeli doctor, the head of surgery had no room for another doctor. The emergency room, however, would be happy to have an extra pair of hands, and there too, of course, emergency operations were performed, which were sometimes no less complex than those performed in the surgical department itself. If that was what I really wanted, there was nothing to prevent me from joining their team, either as a surgeon or as an anesthetist, as I wished.