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Authors: A.B. Yehoshua

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BOOK: Open Heart
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On a low glass table lay a large open atlas, with photo albums and travel guides scattered around it. “You’re not the only one who was taken by surprise,” Lazar apologized. “It fell on us like a bolt out of the blue when that girl knocked on the door
yesterday
with the letter. But first come and see where we’re going. Here’s New Delhi, here’s Bombay, here’s Calcutta, a kind of
triangle,
and here’s Gaya, a remote but holy town surrounded by temples. Tomorrow I’m going to Jerusalem to meet someone who spent several months there a few years ago, and after that I’ll have a clearer picture of what to expect. But just a minute, before we go any further let me introduce you to my wife.”

A woman walked into the room, a plump brunette of about forty-five, of medium height, her hair gathered into a rather
untidy
knot on top of her head, her eyes flashing me a frank, vivid smile behind her glasses. I stood up and her husband introduced me to her. She nodded affably and immediately sat down
opposite
me with a regal movement, crossing long legs that didn’t match the heaviness of her arms and shoulders, and began watching her husband, who went on drawing lines on the map of India and calculating times. As I tried to follow the route he was mapping out I sensed her appraising me, and when I looked up at her, her eyes suddenly lit up again in the same warm, lively, generous smile, and she nodded her head slightly in a gesture of approval. Then, as if she sensed my gnawing doubts, she
suddenly
interrupted her husband and addressed me directly. “Do you really think you’ll be able to leave your work at the hospital and go abroad for more than two weeks?” Her husband, who was very put out by this question, answered crossly in my place. “First of all, why do you already say more than two weeks? Where do you get that from? It’ll be less. I have to be back on the Sunday after next, don’t forget. And second, why shouldn’t he be able to leave the hospital? He can leave it for as long as he likes. Hishin gave him carte blanche—he can take it as leave due to him, if he likes, or as ordinary working days and we’ll find a way to make them up.” But his wife immediately protested. “Why at the expense of his leave? Why should he sacrifice his vacation for us?” And again she looked directly at me, and said in a clear, firm voice, which did not suit her plump, soft looks, “Please find out what payment you’re entitled to for your services on a trip like this. We will gladly compensate you for your efforts.”

Suddenly I felt stifled in the elegant, spacious apartment. The two middle-aged people sitting opposite me looked powerful and influential. “It’s not a question of money”—I began to blush—“and it really is true that I’ve got a lot of leave coming, but if I go away now, even for two weeks, it’s as if I’ve already finished my trial year in surgery, and I don’t want to miss a single day there.”

“In the surgical department?” asked the woman.

“Yes,” I replied, “I started in surgery, and that’s where I want to continue.”

“In surgery?” said the woman, looking at her husband in
surprise
. “We thought you were transferring to internal medicine or
some other department, because Hishin told us that you weren’t going to continue in surgery.” A tremor of real pain passed through me on hearing the final verdict on my future spoken so casually by this strange woman. It wasn’t even a question of a position being available, I now realized, but a clear professional judgment against me. And Hishin’s tall figure seemed to loom up behind the woman, who never stopped examining me with her smiling eyes. “Who said I wanted to be an internist?” I burst into a bitter snort of laughter. “Even if Hishin has reservations, I’m still not giving up surgery. There are other hospitals, if not in Israel then abroad—England, for instance—and you can get
excellent
experience there too.”

“England?” repeated Mrs. Lazar, and her friendly smile
disappeared.
“Yes. My parents came here from England, I’m a British citizen, and I won’t have any problems doing my residency there.” Lazar, who was uninterested in the argument between me and his wife, suddenly beamed. “So I was right. I saw in your file that your parents were born in England, and I wondered if you were a British citizen too. That will help you on the trip to India. I suppose your English is perfect.”

“Perfect? I wouldn’t say so,” I said coldly, again trying to rebuff the single-minded enthusiasm of the man. “I was born and educated here, and my English is the same as everybody else’s—in other words, far from perfect. I usually speak Hebrew to my parents too, but of course, since I often hear them speaking
English
to each other, I’m fluent—not perfect, but fluent.” Lazar appeared more than satisfied with fluency and gave me a smile of undisguised gratification; it seemed that nothing could now
detract
from my virtues as a candidate for the trip to India, and he turned to his wife and raised his eyebrows. “What’s this? You haven’t offered our guest anything to drink! We’ve been talking so much we’ve forgotten our duties as hosts.” But the woman made no move to rise from the sofa. Instead she smiled at her husband and said, “Why don’t you make us some strong Turkish coffee? We’re all exhausted.”

Lazar jumped to his feet. “You don’t object to Turkish
coffee
?” His wife turned to me, as if to dare me to object; then she took out a slender cigarette and lit it. When her husband
disappeared
into the kitchen, her eyes flashed again with the same bright smile, and she leaned toward me and began talking
intimately 
in her soft but very clear voice. “I feel that you’re still having doubts. That’s natural. Because really, why should anybody be ready to drop everything from one day to the next and go to India? And if you feel that we’re trying to put pressure on you and it offends you, you’re absolutely right. But try to understand that we’re upset too. We have to bring our daughter home quickly; the disease—as you know better than I do—is
exhausting
and debilitating. According to the girl who brought the letter, her condition has already deteriorated, and everyone who’s been consulted strongly recommends taking a qualified doctor with us. Before you arrived, Hishin phoned and warned us not to let you wriggle out of it, because in his opinion you’re the ideal candidate.”

“Ideal again.” I interrupted her with an angry laugh that welled up inside me. “Hishin’s exaggerating. In what sense ideal? Ideal for what? Maybe, as your husband said, because of my British passport.” The woman laughed in surprise. “Of course not! Naturally, it won’t hurt to have a British passport in India, but that’s not what Hishin meant, he’s really very fond of you. He spoke of your quiet manner, your friendliness, your excellent clinical perception, and especially of your deep concern for your patients.” She spoke warmly, passionately, her words clear and eloquent, but I was aware of a certain hypocrisy and
exaggeration
too. It was impossible to tell if Hishin had actually heaped all that praise on my head or if she was inventing compliments to seduce me. I lowered my eyes, but I didn’t know how to stop her. In the end I let my hands fall wearily to my sides and asked, “How old is she, this girl of yours?”

“Girl?” The mother laughed. “She’s not a girl. She’s twenty-five years old. She has spent two years studying at the university. Here, this is a picture she sent two months ago, before she got sick.” She picked up an envelope of coarse green paper, from which she extracted two snapshots of a young woman with a pretty, delicate face. In one of them the woman was standing alone against the background of a vast river in which naked
figures
were crouching, and in the second she was near the entrance of a building which looked like an Indian temple, a boy and a girl on either side of her, their arms wrapped around her.

When I got home I decided, in spite of the late hour, to phone my parents in Jerusalem and ask their opinion. To my surprise,
both my mother, who was still awake, and my father, who was awakened by the ringing phone, thought that I should on no account turn down such a proposal from the head of the
hospital
. “He’s only the administrative director,” I kept explaining, but my father was adamant. “All the more so,” he insisted, beginning to speak English in his sleepiness. “Those are the people with the real power, because they’re permanent fixtures, and the others come and go around them. Even your Professor Hishin might disappear one fine day for one reason or another, and it won’t do you any harm to have the support of the administrative head of the hospital in the future.”

“That’s not the way things work, Dad,” I complained wearily. “It’s not so simple.” But my parents were resolute in their
enthusiasm
. “Just don’t be in such a hurry to refuse—the hospital’s not running away, and you’ve worked so hard this year that you deserve a vacation.”

“In India?” I said sarcastically. “What kind of a vacation can I have there?” But now my mother began praising the country. She had an uncle who had served there between the two world wars, and she remembered that he was in love with India and never stopped describing its charms. “That was a completely different India,” I said, trying to cool her ardor, but she persevered: “Nothing in the world ever becomes completely different, and it was once full of magic and beauty—something must have
remained
, and for such a short trip it will be quite enough.” I was surprised by my parents’ reaction. I had assumed that their
constant
anxiety would make them try to talk me out of the idea, and instead they were joining in the pressure to make me go. “I can’t see what kind of vacation I’ll have on a trip like this,” I grumbled into the phone, “and I don’t need a vacation now, either. My work at the hospital’s so fascinating I don’t want to miss a single day. In any case, I’ll think it over tonight. I
promised
to give them a final answer tomorrow morning.” I tried to put an end to the conversation. But my parents wouldn’t let me go. “Even if the idea of the trip doesn’t attract you at the
moment
,” argued my father, “people here are asking for your help—it’s an opportunity to do a good deed.”

“A good deed?” I laughed. “There’s no question of a good deed here—they want to pay me a fee for the trip. It’s got
nothing
to do with good deeds, and anyway, why me? They’ve got
the whole hospital at their disposal; they could easily find some other doctor to go with them and bring their daughter back for them.”

But of this I was not certain. When I had promised the Lazars a final answer early in the morning, they had repeated that if I refused, they wouldn’t have time to find and persuade another suitable doctor from the hospital.

“This is a chance for you to experience another world and refresh yourself,” said my mother. Recently she and my father had been worried about how absorbed I was in my work, fearing that I was in danger of becoming a slave to it.

“Another world? Perhaps,” I replied heavily, pulling the
telephone
onto my lap and falling exhausted onto my bed, “but will I be able to refresh myself there?” My parents were silent, as if I had finally succeeded in conveying to them across the distance that separated us the full weight of my weariness. “When would you have to leave?” my mother asked gently. “Right away.” I closed my eyes and covered myself with the blanket. “They want to fly to Rome the day after tomorrow.”

“The day after tomorrow?” repeated my astonished mother, who had not realized the urgency of the trip. “What did you think? It’s serious. There’s a very sick girl out there. Who knows what really happened to her? That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you, it’s not exactly a pleasure trip.” And suddenly I felt the pressure lifting on the other end of the line. “In that case, we really should think twice. Perhaps you’re right. We’ll all sleep on it, and talk again in the morning.” Now I was sorry that I had called them. I knew that their short night’s sleep would be even shorter tonight, because of their inexhaustible appetite for discussing me and my plans. In the first place I was their only child. Now, more than ever, I’d begun to worry them as an icicle of lonely bachelorhood had begun to grow inside me. I was only twenty-nine years old, but I noted with pity their attempts to steer me toward a life outside the hospital walls, prompted in part by their guilt for having put so much pressure on me to devote myself to my studies. And sure enough, early the next morning when I called, my father said, “We stayed up all night thinking about the trip to India, and we’ve changed our minds. It will only exhaust you, and you don’t need to go.” But to their astonishment I told them that only half an hour before I had
agreed to go, and asked them to find my British passport and take down a good suitcase for me.

Instead of pleasure and satisfaction, I now heard only tension and anxiety in their voices, as if all that talk the night before had referred not to an actual journey but to a theoretical one. Was it because of them that I had changed my mind? my mother wanted to know. I reassured them that I had thought it over again myself and decided that I should go. Then I gave them the unpleasant news that Hishin preferred the other resident to me. Who knew, maybe his hands really were better than mine. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Hishin prefers the other resident to you?” my father said incredulously. “How can that be possible, Benjy?” And my heart contracted painfully at their certain
disappointment
. “You’d be surprised at how possible it can be,” I said with deliberate lightheartedness. “Never mind, it’s not so
terrible
, and actually this might be a good time to go somewhere far away, where I can think about what to do next.” The truth was that I actually felt relieved, as if something had been liberated inside me. From the minute I had agreed to join the Lazars, at six-thirty in the morning, it was as if the excitement of the
journey
had swept the anger and the envy out of my heart. Lazar’s wife had answered the phone, and for a moment I failed to
recognize
her voice, which was younger and fresher than she had seemed the night before, and although she did not seem surprised by my decision—as if she had known that I would come around—she thanked me repeatedly, and asked me if I was quite sure. But then her husband lost patience and snatched the phone from her and began shooting out instructions with terrific
efficiency
. He was going to Jerusalem to meet some India expert at the Foreign Office and to get letters of recommendation and
introduction
, leaving his wife and me to conclude the necessary arrangements. “And what about the hospital?” I asked. “They’re still expecting me in the operating room this morning—there are operations scheduled.” But Lazar was unequivocal. As far as the hospital was concerned, I could leave it to him; it was his turf, and Hishin had given his express consent. “No,” he rebuked me firmly, “from this minute on, please stop thinking about the
hospital
and devote yourself exclusively to making arrangements for the trip. Time is short. This afternoon we’ll find time to sit down with the doctors and the head pharmacist and discuss the
medical 
aspects. All that’s no problem. The main thing—I almost forgot to ask—is your Israeli passport valid?”

BOOK: Open Heart
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