“So he can be a little happy at last,” said Michaela in English, in a quiet but mildly rebuking tone, and she went on to explain to Sir Geoffrey how passionately I wanted to stand next to the operating table. Though her English was very basic, she spoke in a correct British accent, which she must have picked up in India, and without a trace of an Israeli accent. Sir Geoffrey listened to her with undisguised interest, apparently spellbound by her great, shining eyes, which added a note of brilliance to the dull gray light in the big room. I was still marveling at Lazar’s phone call. Was it simply one more sign of his kindheartedness and concern, or had the hand of my beloved been secretly at work here, to seduce me by means of my surgical ambitions into prolonging my stay in England, or at least to remove any thoughts of an early return? Indeed, I may not have been as happy as Michaela expected yet, but I was definitely pleased and full of hope. The thought that I would soon be allowed to hold a scalpel in my hand and to cut into living flesh in an atmosphere of quiet English politeness, without being exposed to the mocking scrutiny of Hishin or the jealous looks of my rival, excited me so much that I was too late to step in and prevent Michaela from unhesitatingly accepting Sir Geoffrey’s offer of a job as a glorified cleaning lady in the little chapel attached to the hospital. The idea of Michaela’s doing physical work during her pregnancy, and what’s more in a church attached to the hospital where I was working as a doctor, was not at all to my liking, but I held my tongue in order not to embarrass her in front of Sir Geoffrey, who at long last took his leave of us, very pleased with himself at having met the needs of the Israelis he so admired with such unprecedented speed and efficiency.
I began to unpack the suitcase we had prepared in advance with everything we would need for the transition period, until we found a suitable apartment. Michaela took the Indian statue that Einat had given her out of her knapsack and put it on a little shelf above the bed, where she saluted it with a bow. Then she suggested that we lie down to rest for a while on the big bed before we finished unpacking. But I didn’t feel tired, and I didn’t want our clothes to become even more wrinkled in the suitcase. She took off her sweater and her socks and undid the buttons of her jeans to relieve the pressure on her stomach, which according to her had already begun to swell a little. Then she sprawled out on the bed, waiting for me to finish putting our things away in the capacious wardrobes and join her. Her eyelids began to droop, and I knew that she was charging her batteries with the lust radiated by the big, strange room. But I didn’t feel the faintest desire for sex. I was tired from the journey and excited by the surgical prospects that had opened out before me. “I can’t now, Michaela,” I announced when I saw her stretching out her arms to me with her eyes closed. But she didn’t give up, and with her usual shamelessness she got up, took off all her clothes, lay down again, naked and shivering on the bedspread, which didn’t look very clean to me, and said, “Then come and warm me up at least—are you capable of that?” And even though I had no wish to warm her up, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings either, especially since I knew how important it was to her to make love in new places, as a sure way of dispelling anxiety and domesticating the unknown. But when I went to make sure that the door was properly shut, I saw that it didn’t have a lock or a key but only a slender chain, which made it possible for others to open it slightly and peep in—perhaps to prevent the patients or the medical staff from using the room for illegitimate purposes. “Can’t we leave it now?” I said imploringly, afraid not only of an unexpected visitor but also of a cry or moan which might alarm any patients wandering around in the corridor. But Michaela refused to leave it. She was burning with desire. “Don’t be such a coward,” she said, and pulled me down next to her, taking my head firmly between her hands and placing it first between her breasts and then on her belly, and finally between her legs, so that my tongue could give her the pleasure my prick was too weak to provide. And then there was a light knock at the door, which opened as far as the chain would permit to reveal for a second the blushing face of Sir Geoffrey, who had forgotten to give us the list of apartments for rent in the area which his secretary had drawn up for us. He was too embarrassed even to apologize, and left the list stuck on the door. But later that evening, when we met for supper in the hospital dining room, he seemed even friendlier than before, as if the scene that had flashed before his startled eyes had only confirmed his view of the dynamic, energetic nature of the typical Israeli.
And in fact we both showed plenty of dynamism and energy in the initial stages of our acclimatization, which succeeded more than we could have hoped, perhaps partly because my correct English accent, which I had been making efforts to improve ever since our arrival by remembering my father’s speech and taking it as an example, inspired the confidence of the real estate agents and the car salesmen. After only two days we found a suitable apartment for a reasonable rent a short distance from the hospital. The apartment consisted of two large, comfortable rooms, enough to accommodate my parents comfortably during the day but not enough for them to settle in. The small secondhand car we bought also seemed clean and in good running order. And even though I was not officially entitled to a parking place in the hospital lot, which was reserved for the senior staff, Michaela, who had established a slightly ironic, good-humored form of communication of her own with Sir Geoffrey, succeeded in getting permission for us to park in the backyard of the little chapel, which freed us from the need to look for parking places—a daunting task, especially at night, when the area was packed with cars. It was mainly Michaela who used the car, and her knowledge of the streets of London became more intimate and precise from day to day. Although I didn’t like the growing proximity between her stomach and the steering wheel as her pregnancy advanced, and I warned her constantly not only to use the seat belt, which she sometimes forgot to do, but also to drive slowly, which was almost an impossibility for her, I had no alternative but to honor her independence and trust her good sense, even when she began haunting the seedy areas inhabited by immigrants from the Far East in an effort to renew contact with her beloved Hindus. I had to rely on her increasingly obvious pregnancy to protect her from harassment. I knew that she had only four months of liberty left until the baby was born, while I myself was being completely swept up in the work at the hospital, which filled me not only with enthusiasm but also with anxiety.
In order to give validity and prestige to the exchange agreement between himself and Lazar, Sir Geoffrey introduced me to all the doctors in the emergency room as an experienced surgeon and anesthetist. My experience as a military doctor also gave me special authority in his eyes. After only one week, before I had time to learn the names and places of the instruments in the little operating room or acquaint myself with the contents of the medicine cabinets, I was summoned to assist at the operation of a small, dark-skinned girl of about ten who had sustained severe stomach injuries in a road accident. Just as the operation was getting started, the senior physician was called to treat another victim of the same accident, who had suffered a heart attack, and without asking any questions, in complete confidence, he gave me the scalpel and asked me to go ahead and conclude the operation, during the course of which it proved necessary to remove the damaged spleen. And so I found myself standing alone in front of the delicate, long-limbed body of a cut and bruised little girl who had just been too vigorously anesthetized and seemed to be losing her pulse. The nurse assisting me was young and seemed inexperienced, but the physician in charge of the anesthesia was an elderly, white-haired woman who inspired my confidence. At first I imagined that there wasn’t enough light in the room, because I couldn’t see everything I wanted to see inside the deep, open stomach. Perhaps the child’s dark skin confused me. But after the nurse tried in vain to increase the light over the operating table, she offered me a little headlamp to strap onto my forehead, like the ones coal miners wear in the movies when they descend into the bowels of the earth. And I felt a little like a miner, bending down and delvin
g into the depths of internal organs which for the first time in my life were my exclusive responsibility.
I immediately discovered that the internal hemorrhaging had not been completely arrested, and I found additional torn blood vessels which had to be reconstructed. I ordered another unit of blood and continued with the operation, which I performed very slowly, waiting for the physician in charge to come back and take the knife from me. But he didn’t come back, and I had to continue alone, admitting to myself that maybe Professor Hishin and Dr. Nakash were right when they said that I thought too much during surgery and this hesitancy made me unsuited to being a surgeon. But here, in the English operating room, I believed that my slowness would be accepted in a more tolerant spirit. For although the pulse was regular again, and the breathing was normal, and the dark, slender body was properly relaxed, I was in the grip of a terrible anxiety that something unexpected and unknown would break out in the course of the operation and kill the child under my hands, bringing disgrace not only to me but also to Lazar and his wife, who had sent me here. And so I slowed down the pace of the operation even further and checked and rechecked every cut, and at a certain stage I even insisted on calling in the X-ray technician to take additional X-rays of the spine. It was already long past midnight, and the white-haired anesthetist had taken her eyes off her instruments in order to stare at me, baffled by my slowness. Perhaps it was only good manners that prevented her from asking me what was going on, for she had every right to do so. The young nurse, however, did not hide her anger, and she flung the instruments huffily and noisily into the sterilizing unit, muttering to herself. But I ignored her, and after sewing up the stomach with small, neat stitches that wouldn’t leave a scar, I finally, after five hours, signaled the anesthetist to begin bringing the child around. I wouldn’t allow her to be removed from the operating room until I had made sure that the words she was mumbling in her peculiar accent made sense, and that there was no brain damage as a result of the operation I had performed from beginning to end all by myself. Without removing my bloodstained gown, I walked behind her bed as it rolled slowly into the emergency room, which at this late hour was completely quiet, and where even the patients who had not yet been sent up to the various wards had fallen asleep. I looked for the senior physician to report to him and discovered that he had retired to his room to rest long before, without even taking the trouble to inquire about the results of the operation he had left in my hands, so great was his trust in the new young doctor. The only signs of life were in the waiting room, where a group of tall, long-limbed Africans greeted me with grateful respect and awe. For them, it turned out, my slowness had been an omen of hope.
Thus I quickly found my place in the work of the hospital, and since I saw that independent operations were likely to come my way in the emergency room, I volunteered to work the evening shift and to be on call at night, to the grateful appreciation of my colleagues, who turned out on the whole to be less ambitious than Israeli doctors. And so I found myself standing in the little operating room attached to the emergency room, sometimes as an anesthetist and sometimes as a surgeon, performing quite complicated surgery on my own, albeit in my own particular way—that is, with the extreme slowness to which the white-haired anesthetist had already grown accustomed; and as for the impatient blond nurse, I got rid of her in favor of a placid, obedient Scottish nurse. At the end of each night, when I saw that nothing more of interest was going to come my way, I would walk home to our nearby apartment and wake Michaela and tell her about my adventures. She would wake up immediately and listen eagerly to everything I had to say, not only because she always liked hearing about medical matters but also because she was happy to see me full of enthusiasm. Her round belly was rising steadily like a little pink hill under the blanket, and sometimes as I spoke I thought I could see a slight movement stirring inside it, proof that the baby too was listening to me. Michaela’s sexual appetite diminished greatly during her last months of pregnancy, both because the strangeness of the little apartment had worn off and because of a peculiar notion she had picked up from a traveler who had returned from India: that intercourse could arouse frustrated desire in the fetus. I didn’t want to get into theological debates with her about the meaning of life and consciousness in embryos, especially since I was not particularly keen just then on making love to her. But the memory of the love I had known on that other stomach, no less large, round, and white, at the beginning of spring in the granny’s apartment, filled my heart with longings so fierce and sweet that I had to avert my head to prevent Michaela from seeing the tears in my eyes.
But Michaela had no desire to notice unexpected tears pooling in her husband’s eyes. She was full of happiness at being in London, delighting in her freedom to roam where she would, meeting people connected with India, and dreaming about another trip there herself. And so when I got into bed after having a long soak in the bath to cleanse my soul of the blood and pus, I would find her fast asleep, preparing herself for her little morning job, her only obligation—sweeping and mopping the floor of the little chapel and tidying the seats for the congregation coming to pray or tourists coming to admire the quaint old building. She was quite satisfied with this simple manual labor, for which she earned a relatively handsome sum, leading me to suspect a hidden subsidy from Sir Geoffrey, to bolster my low salary. She would bring home candle-ends from the chapel too, and light them from time to time to create a festive atmosphere. Sometimes, when I emerged from the bathroom at the gray hour before dawn, I would see that before she had gone back to sleep she had set a half or third of a candle by my bedside, to dispel my loneliness before I too fell asleep, and in fact the flickering light would gradually calm my agitated spirit and lull me to sleep, or at least show me when it was five o’clock in the morning, when I would sometimes call my parents before they went to work, at the reduced nighttime rates. In the beginning I phoned often, because I hadn’t heard anything from Amnon and I was worried about his paying the rent on time. The two-hour time difference between London and Jerusalem ensured that I would always find my parents at home, fresh and alert, ready with news about themselves and the country but mainly eager to hear about what was going on in my life, and how Michaela’s pregnancy was progressing, and if there were any signs of an early birth. They had already reserved their flight and paid for their tickets, and Michaela had undertaken to find them a room near our apartment. Although they were careful not to drag out the telephone conversations that I paid for, they couldn’t resist asking for more information about rooms for rent in the area so they could decide what might suit them. They sounded excited, not only in anticipation of the birth of their grandchild and the meeting with us but also because of the long stay they planned in England, to which they had paid only brief visits since they had emigrated to Israel. They were now going to stay for two whole months; it was as if they were coming home, back to the land of their birth.
Thirteen
Sometimes dust collects on the little statuette, until its original color is dulled. And if nobody comes to wipe it off occasionally with a soft cloth, a skinny spider will finally descend from the ceiling to patiently weave a great complex web of dense transparent threads around it, like a delicate lacy dress—until a sunbeam borne on the breeze floating in from the open window transforms the forgotten statuette into a dusty little girl, her shining dress ruffling softly around her, ready to dance with anyone who asks her.
But who will ask her? Who can forget that death is death, however it disguises itself?
The birth took place on a freezing winter night in our own little apartment, a few hundred yards from the hospital. I still can’t understand how Michaela succeeded in persuading me, and especially my parents, to agree. But were we really persuaded, or did we simply give in to her determination to give birth at home with only a midwife present? For what, indeed, could we do? We couldn’t force her to have the baby in the hospital. “I’m sorry,” she announced with a tolerant smile at the si
ght of our misgivings, “but it was me, not you, who carried the baby all this time, so I think I have the right to decide where to bring her into the world.” And with these words the argument was closed. Nevertheless, I don’t think we tried hard enough to change her mind, as if we had resigned ourselves to the fact that she had a few private eccentricities that we had to accept in return for her many virtues, which in London took on a very practical aspect. Not only did she find an excellent apartment for my parents at a reasonable rent, with a separate entrance and a little kitchenette, only a few streets away from us—a room attached to a small house surrounded by a little garden, whose owners were away on a long vacation in Italy—but she also prepared a very warm welcome for them when they arrived. Although she was in the middle of her ninth month, she insisted on going to the airport to meet them and from there bringing them back to our house, where a rich repast awaited them, with all kinds of sausages and cheeses that she knew my father liked. She surprised my mother, who was not a big eater, with a dish that had been a favorite of hers as a child—raspberries and cream, something she had picked up from a chance remark made by my Glasgow aunt. The day before they arrived, Michaela made the beds in their room with fresh, spotless linen, and she added an extra pillow to my mother’s bed, which in this room was next to my father’s, so that she could sleep with her head raised, as she did in Jerusalem. And on top of everything else she had borrowed two hot water bottles from her new friend Stephanie, in case the English heating was insufficient for my parents, especially since an intense cold had descended on the whole country in the week of their arrival, at the beginning of January.
Open Heart Page 36
