Open Heart

by A. B. Yehoshua

  The next day in the Lazars’ apartment, among the many people filling the large living room—Dori wearing the black velvet jumpsuit I remembered, her face pale and free of makeup—I heard her asking about the eulogies that had been delivered outside the hospital, admitting that she had been unable to take in what was being said. But although the people surrounding her tried their best, none of them could remember the details. When I could no longer restrain myself, I intervened from the other end of the room and repeated almost word for word not only Lazar’s biography as sketched by the medical director but also the emotional phrases of the mayor, who had obviously felt both affection and respect for Lazar in spite of the bitter financial disagreements between them. But there was no need to repeat Professor Hishin’s words next to the freshly dug grave to her, both because she, like everyone else there, could not forget their power and eloquence and because Hishin himself was now sitting beside her with the strange young woman who was his mistress or perhaps already his wife and who lived for most of the year in Europe. During the week following the funeral he went to see the Lazars twice a day, partly to give his support and protection to the widow of his good friend, who was a beloved friend in her own right, and maybe partly to confront, if necessary, any complaints against him then and there. So it was only natural that in the quiet stir of people coming and going he would not overlook my presence. Even though I was sitting in a remote corner of the room, far away from him, I could feel his eyes returning to me, trying to guess if I intended to surprise Dori with something she did not yet know. But I had no desire to surprise anybody. The heaviness I had felt inside ever since Lazar’s death, accompanied from time to time by a slight dizziness, as if I had no control over what was happening inside me, had banished any complaints from my mind, especially any complaints against Hishin, who could never have guessed that the pity that flooded me at the sight of Dori’s and Einat’s tearstained eyes was accompanied by a great and paralyzing joy, which made me forget my manners, and instead of getting up to take my leave after half an hour and giving my seat to one of the other people who kept streaming in through the open door, I stubbornly sat where I was, nodding somberly to acquaintances from the hospital, as if I too were one of the mourners here.

  While I could not count myself as a member of the grieving family, I felt that I secretly belonged here in this apartment, although I had only briefly visited it twice before, including on the eve of the trip to India, and from the moment I crossed the threshold I felt warmly and intimately at home. Ever since the return from India it had been the scene of my constant fantasies, and now the wounded spirit of the master of the house, which had been compassionately gathered into my soul, enabled me not only to get up and go into the kitchen without asking permission to pour myself a glass of cold water, but even to advance down the hallway and peep into the bedroom where I had given Lazar and his wife their vaccination shots before we left for India. After all, Dori, who had invaded the bedroom of a strange house in London, could hardly rebuke me for standing mesmerized in the doorway of her large, elegant bedroom, where the soft autumn twilight turning the big windows red only intensified my distress at the sight of the female clothes thrown onto the bed and the chairs, the scattered shoes, the drawers left open in a kind of chaos, which to the best of my knowledge would have infuriated Lazar. No wonder I jumped at the light touch on the back of my neck. It was Hishin. His tall body had seemed slightly stooped during the last few days, and his little eyes were tired and bloodshot. Was he looking for something too, or had he simply followed me here? He stood silently next to me, as startled as I was at the sight of the chaos created by the despairing and perhaps also angry widow. “Have you ever been here before?” He surprised me by the strange question. “A long time ago”—I blushed—“before the trip to India.” Suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn’t referring to the apartment but to the bedroom itself, and I continued hesitantly, “I vaccinated both of them here before the trip.” He nodded his head. There was something profoundly attentive in his manner toward me. Ever since Lazar’s death, and despite the great difference in our status, I had felt that there were unanswered questions between us, connected more with medical ethics than with medicine itself. But since I had never seen him so vulnerable before, I was careful to avoid saying anything that might upset his confidence in the natural course of events leading to the death and in the impossibility of preventing it. My curiosity on one point, however, was so intense that I couldn’t stop myself from asking: how did Professor Adler, who had performed the operation, explain what had happened? “Bouma?” cried Hishin angrily, and the childish nickname seemed intended now to shrink the Jerusalem master back to his natural human dimensions. “He doesn’t know anything about it. He left the country right after the operation and he won’t be back until next week. But what can he tell us, Benjy, that we don’t already know? You know yourself that the ventricular tachycardia had nothing to do with the surgery, which you saw succeed with your own eyes.” A warm surge of happiness welled up in me to hear Hishin using my diagnosis as if it had now been confirmed as the absolute, undisputed truth.

  Glowing with the excitement of this unexpected triumph, I went on looking at the bedroom, which suddenly filled with rose-tinted shadows that swallowed up the chaos left by the woman with whom I had fallen impossibly in love, and I decided to reward Hishin, who, although he had not found a place for me in his department and preferred my rival to me, had nevertheless seen me as the ideal man to send to India. I began to praise the eulogy he had delivered at the cemetery. “Your eulogy was terrific,” I said, “if that’s an appropriate word in this context.” He closed his eyes impatiently and bowed his head modestly in acknowledgment as he listened to the footsteps of the people going in and out of the front door. Although he had already received a lot of compliments on his speech, it seemed that my response was important to him. “I feel so sorry for her,” I added, unable to restrain myself. “What will she do without him?” Hishin gave me a quick glance, somewhat surprised, as if he considered it inappropriate for a young man like me to speak in a tone of such concern about people who were almost as old as his parents. “She’s incapable of staying by herself for a minute,” I added in a resentful voice, which included a note of despair. “In what sense is she incapable of staying by herself?” he said in surprise, as if by this cunning denial of a well-known fact he might be able to obtain some secret knowledge hitherto hidden from him. But I realized that I had better be careful, precisely because the events of the last few days had drawn us closer together, and the devastating guilt which continued to tear him apart, even if he didn’t admit it, would sharpen his awareness of the abyss gradually opening up inside me. The words of the eulogy he had delivered between the Kaddishes were still echoing in my mind. Had he prepared them in advance, or had they really welled out of him spontaneously with the grief and the tears breaking out all around him as the grave was filled? When I saw the men lifting the stretcher to slide the body into the grave, I had eluded the invisible grip of Nakash and his wife in order to break into the inner circle, and I had seen Hishin supporting Dori, whose legs suddenly gave way beneath her as she began to sob. He waited until she steadied herself and only then opened two buttons of his black suit, exposing a tie that was surprisingly red, as if he had wanted to tear a symbolic wound in his own chest, and delivered his astonishing speech, whose gist I repeated to Michaela on the way back from the airport. And although Michaela would no doubt have preferred to hear first about Shivi, who had recognized her mother immediately in spite of the long separation and was now lying serenely in her lap, she restrained herself and listened attentively as I repeated Hishin’s words to her, for she knew that if I thought something that had been said there was important to me, it was important to her too. Hishin began his speech with the unequivocal statement that the hospital director had been worthy of the title “the ideal man”—not as a cheap romantic compliment, but on the grounds of a realistic examination
of the personality of the deceased, who, although he had been forced to abandon his medical studies in his youth as a result of his parents’ difficulties, had never abandoned the vocation of medicine in the wider sense of the word and had joined the administrative staff of the hospital, where because of his energy and talent he had soon risen to a position of power and authority. Here Hishin straightened himself up next to the fresh grave and began to describe in an almost critical tone the nature and extent of the power that Lazar had accumulated as the administrative director, secure and permanent in his position while the medical directors changed every few years. He went on to describe the way in which Lazar had used his power to serve the medical staff efficiently and well, on the condition that they put loyalty to their patients first. His power, explained Hishin, was built on two principles: “knowledge of the details, and acknowledgment of limits.” There wasn’t a detail in the life of the hospital, from the numbers of doctors absent on leave to a broken cogwheel in the dialysis machine, that Lazar considered beneath his notice, and the moment he knew something he turned it into his responsibility. But the vast scope of the responsibility that Lazar was prepared to take on himself, continued Hishin, had never blurred his awareness of the precise limits of his authority, especially with regard to the medical staff—he respected the doctors in the hospital and never interfered with their professional judgment.

  Michaela listened quietly and patiently, apparently sensing that if I felt it was so important to repeat Hishin’s eulogy to her even before she reached home after being away for a year, something more personal, touching on me and her, was bound to come. And indeed, the real excitement came only after Hishin abandoned the tone of general praise for the “ideal man” and began talking in a tender, intimate tone about Lazar’s reactions to his trip to India two years before, in order to illuminate a different, hidden aspect of the soul of the efficient administrator who had left us for another world. The many mourners, standing scattered among the white headstones in the afternoon light of an autumn that was already anticipating the first winter rains, began quietly coming closer in order to hear Lazar’s impressions and thoughts about India, as quoted by Professor Hishin—not only to my own astonishment, but also, as I sensed immediately, to that of Dori, who wiped her tears and looked questioningly at the speaker. Even though Lazar had been shocked and horrified by what he had seen on the dusty streets of India, said Hishin, and especially indignant at the sight of the sick and maimed lying abandoned in their poverty and filth, he had not avoided honestly facing the question of whether the great gap between our own world and theirs granted us a spiritual advantage too. Could we claim with any degree of confidence that our happiness was any greater and more real than theirs? “And perhaps,” Hishin went on to ask on behalf of Lazar, who could not rise from his grave to deny the strange thoughts attributed to him, “perhaps it is just the contempt and indifference shown by the people of the world whom we call ‘backward’ and ‘undeveloped’ for both details and limits—perhaps it is just they who can give us a truer sense of the universe through which we pass so quickly, and help to assuage the longings we all feel for immortality, especially at painful moments of parting like this, when we bury those dear to us.” Then, looking around at the faces of the mourners listening to him attentively, Hishin straightened the black baseball cap on his head and went on to speak of the night Lazar had spent with a retired Indian clerk in the little compartment of a train traveling from New Delhi to Varanasi, and of Lazar’s amazement at this Indian clerk’s calm confidence in his ability to ensure his rebirth by dint of a correct immersion in the waters of the Ganges. It was strange to hear Hishin talking about that night in the train as if Lazar had been all alone in the compartment, but then I remembered that Hishin was right and Lazar had been alone that night, sitting awake in the dark and looking at the three people sleeping next to him. And Hishin continued in a voice full of pain, as his eyes came to rest for a moment on me, “Can we deny that we too, people as completely modern as we are, sometimes dream of being born again, especially as we stand before a freshly filled grave? But how can we console ourselves with the idea of rebirth when it becomes clearer from day to day that there is nothing to be born again? For there is no such thing as a soul and never has been.” Now a murmur of protest passed through the crowd, but Hishin continued undeterred. He himself, he announced, had spent his whole life prying into the most secret corners of the human body, and he had not yet come across any traces of a soul; and his brain-surgeon friends argued that everything they found and touched was pure matter, without a hint of the existence of any informing spirit, until they were as convinced as he was that one day it would be possible to reconstruct the whole thing artificially, and certainly to transplant parts of the brain. Just as today we implanted artificial devices and donor organs in the body, the day would come when it would be possible to implant or inject into the brain devices or substances that would expand our memories, sharpen our intelligence, or intensify our pleasure. “And so,” Hishin concluded with a surprising turn, “I can’t console myself with the immortality of Lazar’s soul, from which I could ask forgiveness, but only with the memory of what I received from the flesh-and-blood man himself and what I gave him. And if, indeed, a mistake was made, it was only because of my great love for him.”

  A faint, ironic smile crossed Michaela’s lips. It was impossible to tell whether it was occasioned by Hishin’s words themselves or by my efforts to quote him word for word. “So that’s how he thinks he’ll get out of it,” she said softly, without explaining what she meant, and her great eyes tried again to meet mine, which had been avoiding her ever since I met her at the airport and which were now scanning the familiar streets around our apartment, looking for a parking place. In the apartment too, where I had not yet rearranged the furniture moved by Amnon, Michaela went on trying to meet my eyes, to make me repeat the dramatic announcement I had made in my excitement when I had called her from Lazar’s office a few hours after his death, an announcement that was so important that without a second thought she had cut her stay short, canceled her trip to the Isle of Skye, and returned home. But I went on avoiding her eyes, and she put Shivi down in the little playpen my parents had bought her the week before and followed me into the kitchen, where I was standing in front of the sink, and put her arms around me and kissed me, not only with the lust aroused in her by every change in location—and the apartment could be considered a new locale after a year’s absence—but also in order to let me know that the bizarre and mysterious message I had conveyed to her that night was both credible and attractive to her. A new warmth and sweetness began streaming into me from Michaela’s strong arms clasping me to her body and from the long tongue licking my face. And the desire that I had forgotten in the anger of our parting and in the drama and distress of Lazar’s illness and death surged up in me with such force that I almost choked in my enthusiasm as I tried to swallow her tongue and to cover her eyes with kisses, if only to hide the penetrating look she still beseeched me with in order to hear again the wild confession which had compelled her to hurry back to Israel. I picked her up in my arms, and while Shivi raised her head to follow our movements, I carried her into the other room, which because of Amnon’s love for the sea had turned from the grandmother’s bedroom into the living room. I laid her on the narrow couch, and without stopping to open it up and double its size, I took off her clothes and knelt down to caress and kiss her private parts, trying to find some sign of her unfaithfulness to me in England or Scotland. But I found no such sign, and I stood up and lay down next to her and made love to her at length, pleasurably and generously, as on that night in the desert, overlooking Eyal’s wedding. And we only stopped when Shivi’s whimpering turned into a demanding cry.

  “Did I make love to Lazar too?” she asked me with a hint of laughter in her eyes when she came out of the shower, shaking her wet hair. She watched me affectionately as I fed Shivi, who was sitting in her high chair facing the g
low of the sunset in the kitchen window. Her air of amusement made it easier for me to answer her question. “You’ve just made love to a lot of people, alive and dead,” I said quietly, “and among them perhaps—why not?—Lazar too.” And in the darkness of the evening descending on us, next to the baby listening and playing with her empty bowl, I told Michaela the whole story of the drama of his death: the diagnosis, the surgery, the recovery, and the sudden collapse. I spoke not as a doctor intent on proving the superiority of his diagnosis but with the profound emotion of a young man who had seen the steadfast heart of his friend open like a book and did not want to leave him alone even after it had ceased to beat. “You didn’t want to leave him alone?” said Michaela in surprise, with a note of disappointment in her voice, as if she had expected something more definite but also more mysterious. “Exactly,” I said, wondering whether to switch on the light in the kitchen, which was already full of shadows. “That’s what I meant. What did you think I meant?” I laughed lightly. “That I really thought Lazar’s soul could migrate into mine?”