I hurried home, and although I was only half an hour late I saw by the dread on my mother’s face that she had taken my threat with alarming seriousness, and after lunch I decided not to go out again but spent the afternoon dozing in my room, in anticipation of the sleepless nights awaiting me now that I was unable to stay by myself in the empty house. My father too, still tipsy from the wine they had plied him with at the synagogue, sank into a deep sleep. My mother sat up trying to read her novel, but in the end she couldn’t help herself and came into my room to make me swear not to divulge a word of our conversation to my father. Why make him any more miserable than he already was? She didn’t say anything about my threat, as if talking about it added to its reality. But in the evening, when I was already back in Tel Aviv, she took advantage of a brief absence on my father’s part to call and ask how I was feeling now. My vague and detached answers, and especially my fear of not being able to sleep, increased her anxiety, and she suggested that I come back to spend a few days in Jerusalem. “But how can I? I’m expected at the hospital tomorrow.” She thought for a moment and then said that perhaps she or my father, or both of them, could come to Tel Aviv for a day or two. To her surprise, I didn’t turn this offer down immediately. “We’ll see,” I said. “Let’s think about it.” But she persisted, and suddenly she began speaking haltingly in English, which she never spoke to me. If I was thinking of doing anything drastic, I should warn her, at least. “Don’t take us by surprise,” she whispered over the phone, turning the vague threat I had presented her with that morning into something real and alive. “You have no moral right to keep even the thought from me,” she added. “I’ve never hidden anything from you.” And she was right; neither she nor my father had ever hidden anything from me, nor did it seem as if they had anything to hide. “But why are you in such a panic?” I said with grim humor, lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, laying the side of my face on the exact spot where Dori had sat with her legs crossed, listening with excited sympathy to the declaration of love bursting out of me. “Not that I’m really thinking of harming myself, but if you believed in reincarnation, you would find the world less alarming. Because if anything happens to me, I’ll leave you my soul, at least.” But she was in no mood now to understand irony or witticisms on my part.
In the middle of the night the phone rang, shattering the remnants of my brittle sleep. It was Michaela, calling as the dawn rose in Varanasi. Her voice was warm, clear, and joyful. “Varanasi?” I cried in astonishment, and with a note of envy. “I thought that this time you wanted to go to places you haven’t been to before.” “Right,” admitted Michaela, who sounded happy and relaxed, but how could she deprive Stephanie of the chance to touch the open heart of India? Even I, the superficial tourist, knew that the heart was there, in the ghats and temples lining the banks of the Ganges. “And Shivi?” I cried. “What about Shivi?” Shivi too could not fail to be impressed by the spiritual power of Varanasi, because she was now happy and contented after a little restlessness in New Delhi, perhaps because of the diarrhea, which was already clearing up. “But what was it?” The strange cry that escaped me was not only the cry of a father and physician, too far away to save his child, but also the cry of someone in need of salvation himself. But Michaela, who even in her joy grasped my pain, quickly reassured me. I could rely on her. When it came to Shivi there were no compromises. In any case, in a few days’ time they would be in Calcutta, where they would be surrounded by excellent doctors and good friends. “Calcutta again?” I exclaimed in surprise, and the suspicion entered my heart that the doctors of Calcutta were as much an attraction to her as the mystery and fascination of India. “And Shivi?” I couldn’t help bursting out again. “How are the Indians treating her?” And this strange question, which had broken out of me in the hallucination of nighttime, was greeted with excitement. Even an “expert” on India like Michaela would never have imagined that Shivi would arouse such interest and affection among the Indians, who were not accustomed to seeing such a small representative of the West; in her tininess, she exposed the humanity common to us all. When Michaela told them her name, their interest turned to real enthusiasm. “They’re not annoyed that you gave her the name of one of their gods?” I cried, with a tumult of feelings flooding me. But it appeared that not only did they feel no anger, they expressed only joy and admiration at seeing the little creature with her light blue eyes bearing the name of the stern and dangerous god, the destroyer of the world—so much so that people sometimes followed her around. “Be careful, Michaela, for God’s sake, be careful,” I began to shout into the receiver as her voice grew fainter as if it were being carried away in a gale. Then it was completely lost.
I couldn’t go back to sleep after this conversation, and I had to be at the hospital very early in the morning anyway, since all the operations had been moved up to the first half of the day because of the farewell party for Dr. Nakash, which was to take place at lunchtime. Nakash himself appeared in the operating room as usual on this, his last day of work, to stand with his famous serenity next to the anesthesia machine, his smooth bald head gleaming darkly through the plastic of his cap. No wonder the speakers at the farewell party in the little auditorium next to the administrative wing were full of sincere praise for the devoted loyalty of this man, who in forty years of work had never missed a day. Hishin also made a speech in honor of his faithful anesthetist, but ever since Lazar’s death he had lost his confidence and humor, and his speech soon became boring. The ceremony was conducted by a young man of about thirty, who was introduced as one of the two directors who were taking over Lazar’s job. “I see,” I said with some emotion to Miss Kolby—who came to the party not because she knew Nakash but because she was still at loose ends after having been removed from her position in the administrative director’s office—“that one man isn’t enough to fill the void left by Lazar.” Indeed, it needed more than one man to overturn some of the decisions taken by the former director, such as bestowing a permanent a half-time position on a young doctor. My job was canceled that very day, right after the party, when I spoke with the new man, who was my age and who apologized profusely and tried to appease my obvious depression, which was caused not by the cancellation, which I had expected, but by the youth of the man now rocking in the chair of the previous director, whose soul had rapidly departed from my body.
Until a new post was found for me as a regular resident in the anesthesiology department, I could only be grateful to Dr. Nakash, who invited me the next day to act as an assistant anesthetist in a private operation at the hospital in Herzliah. During the entire course of the lengthy operation, removing malignancies and metastases from the patient’s abdomen and chest, Hishin was unusually quiet and sad, and when I saw that he was deliberately avoiding my eye, it occurred to me that he had heard either directly or indirectly about my affair with Dori. But after the operation was over, when we were getting dressed in the changing room, I discovered the real reason for his hostility. Professor Adler had told Hishin about my visit to his father. “What exactly are you up to, Dr. Rubin?” He pushed me into a corner. “Are you really only interested in discovering the truth?”
“Yes,” I replied immediately and unhesitatingly, trying to hide my naked legs from his eyes, “that’s all. Nothing else. And I would keep it to myself as well. What did you think? That I would go and tell Dori?” His little eyes scrutinized me in silence, believing and not believing. Then he continued sternly, “I hope so. I certainly hope so…. I hope you won’t get it into your head to go to her and involve her in your truth. It’s time you grew up, Dr. Rubin, and realized that there are mysteries in medicine too. That’s its fascination. We deal with living human beings, not inanimate objects.” I couldn’t resist asking, “But how is she? How is Dori? Is she getting over it?” Now Hishin couldn’t help smiling a faint smile of satisfaction. “Can you ever really tell?” He spread his hands out in a questioning gesture. “But at least we’ve succeeded in persuading her t
o go on a trip to Europe. We’ve already made a date to meet her in Paris next week.” Because of his obscure marital status, there was no knowing whether there was another woman behind his use of the first-person plural or he was referring only to himself. In any case I couldn’t restrain myself. “She’s going to Europe already?” I burst out in a cry of pain. The old ironic gleam returned to Hishin’s eyes. “I trust you don’t have any objections?” He leaned over and gave my shoulder a friendly pat. My heart beat painfully. Was she already capable of taking a trip on her own, whereas I found it more difficult from minute to minute to stay by myself?
When I recognized Dr. Nakash standing quietly at the bus stop, I braked and offered him my crash helmet if he would agree to let me take him home. Nakash had had his driving license suspended for three months for speeding. “You, speeding?” I marveled as he put the helmet, still warm from my head, onto his own bald head. “And I always see you as the most stable person in the world.”
“Is that what you see?” Nakash grinned and got onto the pillion. He confessed that he had never been on a motorcycle before, but I felt no current of fear behind my back; instead, his hand, which sometimes seemed to put patients to sleep and wake them up by its touch alone, lay lightly on my shoulder, somewhat calming my anxiety about the lonely night ahead. I took him home and gladly accepted his invitation to go up and have something to drink in his small apartment, which in contrast to my expectations was rather chaotic; the living room was filled with scientific journals, and the equipment of a small, improvised laboratory dominated half the room. Nakash and his wife were testing the possibilities of combining anesthetics, analgesics, and muscle relaxants used in the operating room into tranquilizers for everyday use. “Only tranquilizers?” I asked, willingly giving Mrs. Nakash my cup for another round of coffee, which had a good but unfamiliar taste. “Or more than that?” They exchanged looks, as if wondering how far they could trust me. They were both very dark and skinny, as alike in their ugliness as identical twins.
They naturally avoided giving me a full and unequivocal answer, but it was evident that they wanted to give me a hint, mentioning that their own end would be quick and gentle, and above all free of the arbitrary decisions of self-righteous doctors, sanctifying the suffering of life. In order to show me concrete proof of their success, they gave me a little bottle containing a few sleeping tablets, the product of their home laboratory, which differed from the usual sleeping pills prescribed by family doctors not in the heaviness or duration of the sleep they induced but in the speed with which it descended, and perhaps also in the ease and pleasantness of waking from this sleep. Even though I felt more prepared to face the night with the little bottle in my pocket, I decided not to hurry home, and in spite of the gale-force winds blowing, it occurred to me to keep an old promise and go to visit Amnon at his place of work. He was so surprised and pleased to see me that he could hardly bring himself to let me out of his bearlike embrace. “And I was beginning to think that you were getting fed up with me because of that damn thesis,” he blurted out—a strange but accurate complaint, which gave me a guilty pang. “But I’ll finish it, Benjy, you’ll see. If I’m a little stuck, it’s only because I don’t want to chew over the same old stuff as everybody else, I want to say at least one thing that will be absolutely original.” And this original idea he sought not only by day, at home or in the library, but also by night at his watchman’s post, especially now that he had been promoted and no longer had to walk around the perimeter of the factory, but sat with a walkie-talkie and telephone in the little hut, which was full of his books and papers. But before talking about himself and his plans, he wanted to hear about all the women I had sent to India. Had they already reached their destination in Calcutta? Michaela had promised to phone him from there, directly to this hut. If Michaela had revealed to him what she had hidden from me, I said to myself, perhaps he knew other things about her too. And to my astonishment I discovered that Amnon did indeed know things about her, and about me, that nobody had told him but that he had grasped through his own intelligence and intuition, and especially through his immense curiosity, dating from our high school days, about his friends and acquaintances.
“Did you guess about my impossible love affair too?” I couldn’t resist asking him, without looking him in the eye, my head bent over the papers strewn on the table in an attempt to identify something familiar in his equations and charts. He was surprised by the unexpected confidence I was placing in him. No, he admitted honestly. He had heard about it for the first time from Michaela when they said good-bye. He had guessed that something which affected me deeply had happened in India, but he thought it was connected with Einat and not her mother. Yes, at first he had sensed that something had opened up in me when I came back from India, but on the way back from Eyal’s wedding, when we had stopped on the little hill on the road from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem and I had begun holding forth about my own private theory of the contraction of the universe and how spirit was going to shrink matter until there was nothing left of it, he had begun to worry about me. I had always been the good friend whom nobody had to worry about, the successful student who homed in steadily and accurately on the target his parents had set for him. But when he saw the speed with which I decided to marry Michaela—whom, if I didn’t mind his saying so, I didn’t really love enough—he began to feel that I might be following in his footsteps and losing my way. Even now, if I had come to visit him here in the middle of the night, it meant that I wasn’t in the greatest shape. While he himself was stuck and buried in the ground, maybe because of his brother—yes, because of his poor little brother—I, who had always seemed to him the ideal, well-balanced man, had turned into a kind of spaceship which had gone out of orbit and was now spinning aimlessly among the stars. But a spaceship that could be brought back on course. I myself must have seen how astronauts left their shuttles to return straying objects to their original course. Because that was the great advantage of space—nothing crashed there.
For a moment he was silent, astonished at himself for having blamed his failure on his retarded brother. And then, as if unable to contain his emotion, he stood up and hugged me warmly again, pressing the revolver on his belt against my chest until I too had to stand up and return his hug. Thus we stood embracing in the little watchman’s hut, listening in the silence to the wind howling outside, accompanied by the unearthly whistles of the walkie-talkie. Although my heart genuinely ached for him, I felt repelled by the sentimentality that had been overpowering him of late. God save me from deteriorating into this kind of pain and self-pity, I thought with increasing disgust. Better to be detached—not depression but Nirvana, which is the end of all incarnations. I was already thinking of Nakash’s sleeping pills, which would sweeten the night for me. You can always rely on Nakash, Hishin used to say. The news that Dori was going to travel to Europe by herself continued to astound me. Was it possible? I thought in anger and envy. Mightn’t it be dangerous? And a new thought came into my mind. I had to find Einat and talk to her. Gently but decisively I extricated myself from Amnon’s emotional embrace, and although I had the telephone number of Einat’s apartment, I asked him if he knew what she was up to. He hadn’t bumped into her since the night of Michaela’s departure, but he thought she was still working as a waitress in the same pub where she had worked before.
In spite of his detailed explanations, I did not find the place easily. The savage wind buffeting the motorcycle led me astray in the little streets close to the sea in the north of the city, and it was a long time before I found myself standing in front of the red-painted wooden door with the name of the pub emblazoned on it. It was a small place, apparently not very popular, for even on a night like this only a handful of people had taken refuge in it, and even they were sitting in a noncommittal way, as if they were still making up their minds whether to stay. The music was not too loud and pleasant enough, and I didn’t have to look far for Einat, in jeans and a red tee shirt with the
name of the place printed on it, collecting glasses from one of the tables. Remembering her panic on the night I took her home after we said good-bye to Michaela, I didn’t go up to her at once, but only waved to her from a distance and sat down in a quiet corner where we would be able to talk later. Although she must have realized that I had gone there looking for her, she didn’t come up to me but sent the second waitress to take my order while she went to stand behind the bar, as if to place an additional barrier between us. She knows everything, I thought fearfully. After I had traveled to the ends of the earth to take care of her, and may have saved her life at a certain moment, could she really want to sever all contact with me? Even now I could remember the results of her blood tests, and my hands still remembered her swollen liver. I couldn’t help myself. I took my beer from the waitress and carried it over to the bar, to sit opposite her and force her to listen to what I had to say. But Einat, who had obviously been watching my every move, hurried to a remote corner of the pub and began talking to the people sitting at one of the tables. The few people and low music made it impossible to force her to face me and listen to at least one question without arousing attention. I therefore remained standing at the bar, sipping my beer slowly, knowing that sooner or later she would have to come back. But instead she disappeared. I asked the other waitress where she had gone, but she said she didn’t know. I waited a few minutes and then asked for my glass to be refilled and returned to my table. But Einat didn’t come back, and since no new customers showed up, the second waitress did not seem bothered by her disappearance.
Open Heart Page 59
