Open Heart (4 page)

No, my Israeli passport wasn’t valid. I had checked it the night before. Lazar gave me instructions on how to get to his wife’s office in the center of town. His wife, a lawyer by profession and a partner in a big law firm, would take care of it. I barely
recognized
her when she came out of her office to meet me, dressed in black, wearing high heels, her face made up. Again she thanked me for my decision, with a friendliness that struck me as artificial and exaggerated. I handed her my passport, and she immediately passed it to one of the girls sitting in the frenetic front office. Then, she took out her checkbook, signed a number of blank checks, which she gave me, and said, “Here, this is Hannah, who’s going to devote herself to you this morning and get you ready for the trip.” In the travel agency, surrounded by posters of glorious tourist sites, I sensed a sudden joyful wanderlust
burgeoning
inside me. Two of the travel agents put themselves at our service to speed things up. First of all, they informed Hannah and me that travelers to India had to present certificates of
vaccination
against cholera and malaria to obtain a visa, and told us not to forget to tell Lazar and his wife. “His wife?” I asked in
surprise
. “Why his wife?” But the travel agents’ records clearly showed that the previous afternoon Mrs. Lazar had asked them to book her on a flight too, with an open ticket. “She probably wasn’t sure if I’d agree to go,” I tried to explain, “and so she asked you to get a ticket for her just to be on the safe side.”

“You may be right,” they replied politely, “but don’t forget to tell her about the vaccinations anyhow.” It was then I sensed the first shadow falling on the happiness that had just begun to awaken in me. I had been imagining a vigorous, perhaps even rather adventurous expedition undertaken by two men, who in spite of an age difference of twenty years might still be able to enjoy the kind of fine friendship that grows up in a small army reserve unit. But if Lazar’s wife was going to tag along, I reflected in concern, mightn’t the whole thing turn into a tedious, leaden trip with a couple of middle-aged parents?

But could I still back out? I wondered, sitting late that morning opposite a bank clerk and waiting for the foreign currency, my now valid passport in the slim, strong hands of Hannah, who had spent the morning leading me efficiently from office to office and organizing everything for me as if I suffered from some kind of handicap. Why on earth was Lazar’s wife going? Was it really out of concern for her daughter’s health, or did the situation require the strengthening of a parental delegation for some
reason
? I still hoped that Mrs. Lazar would decide not to go at the last minute. I didn’t like her constant concern and warm smiles. She could only be a drag on the speed and ease of our travels, I thought as I parted with her office clerk, taking back my passport and rejecting, with some mortification, her offer to accompany me to the Health Service to receive the necessary vaccinations, and perhaps to pay for them too.

I mounted my Honda and rode to the place, where I found the door of the vaccination room sealed shut because of a nurses’ strike. As I wandered around the corridor looking for a solution, I was recognized by an old friend from medical school, who had dropped out in his fourth year because of an involvement with a girl he later married and who was now working here as the
medical
secretary of the district physician. He bounded gleefully toward me, and when he heard about the trip to India, he was very much in favor of it. I told him that I would be paid a fee on top of my travel expenses, and he became so excited that he slapped me on the back in congratulations and said with
undisguised
envy, “You’re a clever bastard, a quiet, clever bastard. And you’re a lucky bastard too—you always have been. What wouldn’t I give to change places with you?” Immediately, he rushed off to find the key, ushered me into the nurses’ room, opened a big glass cupboard, pointed at the rows of rainbow-colored vaccine bottles, and said jokingly, “Our bar is at your service, sir. You can be vaccinated here against any disease you like, the weirdest and most wonderful diseases you ever heard of.” And while I studied the exotic labels on the little bottles, he took a sterile syringe out of a drawer and offered to inject me himself; he was two-thirds a doctor, after all. “You’re not afraid of me?” he cried with incomprehensible hilarity, waving the
syringe
in his hand. But I suddenly drew back; the empty room filled me with an inexplicable anxiety, as if I missed the
reassuring
presence of reliable nurses, whose quiet and careful
movements
always calmed me. “No,” I said, “you’ll only hurt me. Give me the syringes and I’ll find someone to do it for me at the hospital. Just stamp the certificate.” And he gave in unwillingly. He found a yellow vaccination certificate, stamped it, and began dragging out a long, boring conversation, trying to recall the names of erstwhile fellow-students, wallowing in nostalgia for his wasted student days, inviting me to go and have a cup of coffee. When we got to the dreary little cafeteria and sat among the indolent government clerks, next to a big window which raindrops were beginning to streak, I thought about the
exhausting
day ahead of me and how I was going to find time to say good-bye to my parents. I listened absent-mindedly, with
uncharacteristic
passivity, to my companion justifying his academic failures with all kinds of tortuous arguments and complaining about the unfairness of his teachers. Finally I pulled myself
together
, cut the conversation short, and stood up, saying, “Listen, I really have to run. Let’s go back to your ‘bar’ for a minute.” We returned to the vaccination room, where I opened the cupboard myself and collected additional bottles of vaccine against cholera and malaria and also against hepatitis. I added a few syringes in sterile wrappings and asked my companions to stamp two more vaccination certificates without filling in the names. He agreed generously to all my requests, but in the end he couldn’t resist saying somewhat sourly, “I see the travel bug has really bitten you hard.”

Indeed, I was already burning with travel fever, a dull, somewhat sullen fever, and when I reached the hospital on my motorcycle, wet from the rain, I felt alienated from the place that I had served so lovingly and faithfully for the past year. In spite of the nurses’ strike, which had been declared that morning, everything seemed to be functioning normally, and I hurried to the ward only to find no doctors present—just the usual shift of nurses, who seemed surprised to see me. “You?” They giggled archly. “Hishin’s been telling everybody that you’re already winging your way to India.” I put on my white coat, with the name “
Benjamin
Rubin” embroidered in red on the pocket, and went to look for Hishin, but he, it appeared, had been urgently
summoned
to the operating room. The young woman he had
operated
on the day before had developed complications. My first impulse was to hurry there after him, but I knew that the other resident, my rival-friend, would be there too and I might have to face rejection or be painfully ignored again before saying
good-bye
. Accordingly, I decided to let it go and to pay a little private visit to the patients in the ward instead. However, the senior nurse, a noble-spirited woman of about sixty, who was sitting in her corner dressed in ordinary clothes in order to express her solidarity with the strike without actually striking herself, stood up and stopped me: “What do you need to make rounds for, Dr. Rubin? You’ve got a long, difficult journey—you should go home and get ready. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of everything for you here.” What she said made sense, and I was so touched by her sympathetic tone that I couldn’t resist putting my arm around her and giving her a little hug before I slipped off my coat.
Without
another word, I took two little bottles of vaccine out of my pocket and asked her to give me the shots, which she did with such a light touch that I didn’t even feel the prick. I threw my coat in the laundry bin and set off for administration to look for Lazar. In the office the girls recognized me immediately, even without my coat, and greeted me in a friendly, respectful manner, saying, “Here’s Dr. Rubin, the volunteer doctor.” They called the head secretary, Miss Kolby, who said that Lazar had phoned a number of times from Jerusalem to ask about me. “He’s still in the Foreign Office, looking for India experts?” I exclaimed in surprise. But it turned out that he was in the Treasury, not about the trip to India, but about the nurses’ strike. However, he had still found time to instruct the head pharmacist of the hospital to put together a kit with the appropriate medical equipment, and also to remind Hishin to prepare a medical brief for me. In the meantime his wife’s office had left the message that my ticket was ready. So there was nothing to worry about. “Is his wife really coming with us?” I asked the secretary in a tone of annoyance, and I saw her hesitate, as if taking refuge in uncertainty, perhaps for fear of antagonizing me and giving rise to some new
resistance
. For a moment it crossed my mind that because of the nurses’ strike Lazar might have to stay behind, and his wife was getting ready to go in his place, and instead of having a male traveling companion I would have to negotiate the complicated
routes of India with two women, one of them middle-aged and the other very sick.

I ordered the secretary to get my mother on the phone, so that I could prepare her for the possibility that I might not be able to get there before evening. My mother, who thought that I was already on my way to Jerusalem, was not upset but instead tried to calm me down. “Never mind, Benjy, don’t worry; you’ll sleep at home tonight, and we’ll drive you to the airport tomorrow. I’ve already told your father to take a day off.”

Now I was impatient. I had already agreed to travel to a
completely
foreign and remote world the next day—so why was I still hanging around the hospital, which suddenly seemed gloomy and stifling? I hurried to the surgical ward to look for Hishin and get the article about hepatitis from him, but since I wasn’t wearing my coat the new guard outside the entrance failed to recognize me and refused to let me in. On a bench in the corridor I again saw the two relatives of the young woman who had been
operated
on the day before. They recognized me but for some reason ignored me, as if they too had already realized how weak my position was here and how false my promise about the patient’s rebirth had been. I wanted to go up to them and ask them how she was, but I stopped myself. In the space of one day I had become superfluous here. I decided not to wait and made my way to the office of the head pharmacist, Dr. Hessing, a bald old German Jew, who immediately dropped everything and led me into one of the cubicles in the depths of the storage area, where he showed me a large knapsack. He immediately opened it to display the wealth and variety of the medical equipment it
contained
and the snugness and efficiency with which it had all been packed—drugs, ampules and syringes, thermometer and
sphygmomanometer
, stethoscope and test tubes, scissors and little
scalpels,
and of course infusion sets; like an entire miniature hospital. Maybe the pharmacist had been so generous because his budget depended more than that of any other department of the hospital on the personal whims of the administrative director. But at the sight of the overflowing knapsack, my spirits fell. “Why do I have to drag all this with me?” I protested. “I’m not going on a climbing expedition to the Himalayas.” I demanded that he take out some of the equipment, but he stubbornly refused to remove
a single item from the kit, which he had evidently prepared with loving care. “Take it,” he coaxed me. “Don’t be foolish, who knows what you might need there. You’re going to one of the filthiest places in the world, and if you decide you don’t need something once you’re there, you can always give it away.”

And so, carrying the knapsack, I returned to the surgical ward to look once more for Hishin. To my surprise, the operation was still going on. Something’s gone wrong there, I thought to myself, trying not to meet the eyes of the woman’s relatives, who were still sitting on their bench in the growing darkness, rigid with anxiety. Now nobody stopped me at the entrance to the ward, and with the knapsack on my back I stood outside the big door of the operating room, in exactly the same spot where Lazar had stood waving his hand, and through the same porthole I saw the same team as the day before; only I was missing. The other
resident’s
back was bent in a tense and supple arch next to Professor Hishin, who I guessed by his movements was struggling to solve a serious problem deep in the woman’s guts. All I could make out from the porthole was her delicate white feet, shining out from under the sheet at the end of the table. Nobody noticed me, apart from Dr. Nakash, who hurriedly whispered something to Hishin. Hishin immediately raised his eyes and waved, and a few minutes later he came out to me, the scalpel in his hand, his gown covered with bloodstains, looking tired and upset. Before I could open my mouth, he silenced me and said in his ironic
Hungarian
accent, “Yes, yes, forgive me, I know I’m keeping you waiting, but you can see for yourself, I’m not taking part in an orgy here.” And I knew immediately that for the past hour he had been battling against death itself, because whenever he felt death near he would refer in one way or another to sex. I felt a pang because I was not participating in the dramatic battle
taking
place on the operating table, not even as an onlooker. “What’s going on in there?” I asked accusingly. “Why did you have to operate on her again?” But Hishin waved his bloody hand in my face, refusing to talk about the operation, and with unaccountable emotion he put his arm around me and hugged me and said, “Never mind, don’t worry about it. Just some stubborn woman who keeps on hemorrhaging from unexpected places. But you stop worrying, you have to keep your head clear
for the journey. You have no idea how grateful Lazar is to me on your account. They’ve fallen in love with you already, him and his wife. So what do you need now? Ah, you want to know what to do about our hepatitis? As a matter of fact, nothing. Yes, yes, sorry, I forgot to bring the article. But it doesn’t matter. I see you’ve already been given equipment and drugs. And the truth is, there isn’t much to be done in these cases. Just reassure them all psychologically. Everything’s psychological nowadays, isn’t that what everyone says? Soon we’ll be able to do without surgery too. So don’t worry, you won’t have much to do. I told you, hepatitis is a self-limited disease.”