Open Heart (70 page)

The doctor on duty was sound asleep. Still, I found someone to talk to in the person of an old acquaintance, none other than the ex-head nurse of Hishin’s surgical department, whose
application
to have her retirement postponed for a year had been
rejected
and who was doing night shifts as a substitute nurse in various departments of the hospital in order to supplement her modest pension. “But who rejected your application so quickly?” I exclaimed sympathetically, and I told her that I had seen her file on Lazar’s desk a few days before. “If Lazar was still alive, he would never have rejected a request from Professor Hishin to leave you with him for another year,” I added confidently, for like other people working in surgery, I had felt the greatest
respect
for her, even though I knew that she too preferred Dr. Vardi to me. But the white-haired nurse sitting in the cold,
deserted
nurses’ station, wrapped in a thick winter coat with a little electric heater at her feet, was not at all sure how Lazar would have treated her request if he had been alive. “Sometimes he could be rigid and almost cruel in his obstinacy,” she
pronounced
, and when she saw that I was astonished by her words she added, “Don’t imagine, Dr. Rubin, that just because you spent a couple of weeks with him and his wife in India, you knew all the sides of his personality.” There was a slightly aggressive note in her voice, and I expressed my surprise that even though two years had passed she still remembered my trip to India. “But how could I forget?” She laughed. “I still remember you coming
in all confused with that big medical kit you got from Dr.
Hessing
and asking me to inoculate you. You looked so pressured and so angry and bitter about the whole business that Professor Hishin had forced you into.” I suddenly was overcome with
affection
for this noble elderly woman, uncomplainingly doing the job of a substitute nurse to take a few more shekels home every month. I also remembered how I had dropped my trousers in front of her that evening, behind an improvised screen, so that with a light and steady hand she could inoculate me with the two shots I had brought from the Health Bureau. “It’s strange that we’re meeting again today,” I said, unable to control the little confession that had been burning inside me ever since I had
arrived
at the hospital, “because my wife and baby left tonight on a trip to India. Only a few hours ago I took them to the bus to the airport in Egypt, and when I got home, tired out, and went to bed, I suddenly woke up after an hour or two. I couldn’t go back to sleep again. In fact, I can hardly stand to be on my own, something that has never happened to me before.”

She listened quietly to my complaint with a serious expression on her face. I knew that she didn’t have much imagination, but she had a lot of common sense and sympathy for any human distress, as long as she was convinced that it was genuine distress and not just a passing mood. She offered me a cup of coffee, but I
refused
. “No, I still want to try to sleep,” I explained. “I have to go back to bed. In less than eight hours I have to be on my feet in the operating room.” Like everyone else on the hospital staff, she was surprised at the strange half-time post Lazar had created for me, and she asked me if I thought the arrangement would last now that he was dead. “Why not?” I asked with some
annoyance
. She shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps they’d find a way to eliminate irregularities committed in the name of friendship, things that weren’t strictly according to the letter of the law, she said—it all depended on the new director. “But is there a new director already?” I asked. “Has anybody seen him? Has Hishin said anything?” It appeared that she knew nothing, and neither did Hishin. But her guess was that somebody had already been appointed to the job, maybe even two or three people. Lazar had
had a lot of power in the hospital, and perhaps the time had come to spread it around a little. That, at least, was what
Professor
Hishin thought should be done. “Yes,” I reflected quietly, “Hishin’s going to miss Lazar a lot.” She nodded her head. Her conclusions were graver than mine. Hishin was afraid of the new director’s revenge, and that was why he was demanding that his powers be divided. In spite of his eulogy at the graveside, he was well aware of the damage he had caused, not because of
overconfidence
in his medical decisions, as many people thought, but out of jealousy, for fear that some other doctor in the hospital would take charge of the case and get close to Lazar and usurp his favored position. That was why Hishin was still tortured by guilt, both toward the deceased and toward his wife, because everybody knew how close a couple the Lazars had been and how they had always done everything together, and anyone who loved one of them loved the other one too. For a second my blood froze. “In what sense, love?” I smiled, and my heart filled with despair at the possibility of the guilt and the love uniting into a powerful emotion that nothing would be able to
withstand
. “In what sense?” Hishin’s old nurse, taken aback, tried to think of an appropriate answer. “In the sense that he’ll stay close to her now and take care of her until he’s sure that she isn’t angry with him and she doesn’t hate him. Because the truth is that Hishin is peculiarly attracted to people who’re angry with him or who hate him,” she said. For many years she had been sharpening her perception of the head of her department, just as Miss Kolby had done with Lazar. “But how can he stay close to Lazar’s wife now that he’s got a woman of his own?” I objected. “Only one woman?” she retorted. “Hishin has a lot of women that he’s attached to. He’ll have no problem adding another one to the list.”

A brief but wild scream now rose from one of the rooms, and a chorus of muttering immediately broke out from the other
patients
, as if they had been waiting up all night for one of their fellows to have a nightmare. The nurse cocked her head in the attentive gesture I remembered from my year in the surgical
department
, to see if they would all settle back down or if further intervention would be necessary. I felt a pang of pity for this hardworking woman, who as the head nurse in the surgical
department
had been accustomed to thinking in the drastic terms of
knives and incisions, sutures and infusions and wounds to be dressed, and who now had to cope with mysterious mental
illnesses
by means of the little colored tablets lined up on the shelves of the cupboard behind her back. She was definitely
disturbed
by the freedom with which I went up to examine her stock. Although she knew that as a physician I was entitled to treat myself, she insisted that I could not take anything without the express permission of an authorized psychiatrist. In spite of this slight, I felt that she was right, for by dint of her strictness and her unimaginative honesty she was forcing me to try to calm my troubled spirit, torn between exhaustion and panic, by
spiritual
and not material means. For instance, a phone call to my parents, whose ability to judge my mood by the tone of my voice soon succeeded in locating the source of the pain and putting it into perspective. Even if my mother had distanced my father from me by refusing to allow him to know about my love for Dori, his natural, kindly patience could still be of value in a crisis. But it was five o’clock in the morning, and it was
impossible
to think of calling them before six, even if one of them
happened
to be awake and prowling around the house, as sometimes happened at this hour.

I said good-bye to the nurse, and to show her that I didn’t bear a grudge against her for refusing to let me help myself from the bottles of pills on her shelves, I promised to come back and visit her on one of her shifts. I returned to the main building, looking up at the cloudy sky and wondering whether Michaela too, in the heart of the desert, was searching the sky for the first stain of dawn. I went down to the intensive care unit to return my gown to its place, put on my leather jacket, and take my helmet, but instead of going upstairs I punched the code that opened the door to the surgical wing. It was a simple code, the first three even numbers, which hadn’t been changed since I started at the hospital, and it occurred to me that here was a job for the new administrative director—to change the code, because as things were there wasn’t a worker in the hospital who couldn’t open the door. As always in the hour between shifts there was no activity, but the darkness was new. The order to save electricity had
succeeded
in penetrating to the holy of holies of the hospital, and the operating rooms, always flooded with light coming from a
separate and independent source, were all shrouded in darkness except for one little room. Although I spent a lot of time in the wing, since Lazar’s death I had not had any particular reason to visit that little room, which was full of instruments and
medications
used in cardiac surgery, first and foremost the
cardiopulmonary
bypass machine, with the white plastic tubes dangling from it like a great octopus’s arms. It wasn’t the big machine that attracted my attention, however, but the cupboard of anesthetics, most of which I knew not only by name and function but also by their pharmacological composition. With a giggle I thought of the strict nurse, who had refused to give me one little tranquilizer from her stock, whereas I was now standing before a cupboard full of powerful, expensive drugs, and without asking anyone’s permission, on my own initiative, I could easily prepare a little cocktail that I could inject into my vein and that would soon put me completely to sleep: a sleep without sensation, without
consciousness
, without movement or dreams. A sleep from which nothing would wake me.

But strangely enough, as I stood alone in the dark, empty
surgical
wing among dozens of sophisticated instruments capable of taking a man apart and putting him together again in an
improved
version, I felt none of the panic and anxiety that had interrupted my sleep and sent me rushing out of the house. It was as if what threatened me were connected not to the outside world but to what lay within the familiar walls of my own house, which had been abandoned by those closest to me. Was it
possible
that my love sought to embrace both the woman herself, and her inability to stay by herself, for fear of something that might be without form or shape but was sexual and infinitely
malevolent
in its intentions, not only hiding in the little storage space near the bathroom or the dark corner next to the kitchen where the brooms were kept but spreading through the little spaces between the closet shelves, pervading the drawers with the socks and underwear with a musty, invisible smell, until they turned to spiderwebs and skeins of dust underneath the bottom drawers where she kept her high-heeled shoes? Was this the smell she tried to sniff out in the hotel rooms where it was proposed that she should sleep? And suddenly this surprising new
understanding
of what was happening to me cheered me up so much that I
switched off the light and left the surgical wing without taking a single drop of a sedative or analgesic or muscle relaxant, because I didn’t want anything material and external to calm my spirit, just the belief that whatever was disturbing me tonight would in the end strengthen me in my efforts to get closer to her and engulf her totally now that I was free of the yoke of my little family. On my way home I turned into the broad avenue next to her house in order to make sure that Lazar’s big car was parked in its usual spot, under the pillars of the building. I didn’t get upset when I spied an unfamiliar little car blocking its exit,
because
a little bit of imagination was all it took to realize that they must have bought it for the soldier, to make it easier for him to come home every night to be with his mother.

The minute I walked into my apartment, I could feel the
agitation
of abandonment stirring again in the ruins of my exhausted soul, as if only here, between these walls, this familiar furniture, lay the real world, substantial and secret, which immediately
exposed
one’s weakness and inability to remain and contend with it alone. Although the hands of the clock had not yet reached six, I didn’t want to wait and I phoned my parents to tell them the story of my parting from Michaela and Shivi and at the same time receive an encouraging word. My father was the one who picked up the phone, and he also conducted the conversation with me, asking questions and demanding details. He did not seem able or willing to give me any encouragement or comfort, for he more than anyone felt the loss of Michaela and Shivi, as if all the progress I had made in the past two years had gone down the drain with their departure. The rustle and echo
accompanying
the conversation told me that my mother was listening in on the phone next to her bed, but to my surprise she did not join in, as if she didn’t want to talk to me. I knew that her anger was deeper than my father’s, and also more justified, but her silence began to worry me, and when I felt that my father was about to bring the conversation to a close, I asked to talk to her. She interrogated me dryly and even coldly about where I was calling from, if I was at the hospital or at home. When I told her that my shift only began at noon, she wanted to know why I was calling so early. Did I wake up early, or couldn’t I fall asleep? “Both—I woke up and I couldn’t fall asleep,” I explained, and I told her a
little about my night of wandering and added, “I seem to be having difficulty in getting used to staying by myself again.” For some reason a silence now fell in Jerusalem, and I heard the sound of my father putting his receiver down, as if now that my mother had taken over the conversation, he could express, in his shy but decisive way, his disapproval of me, for he never cut short a telephone call with me of his own volition. Then my mother’s voice softened a little, as if she too had understood the meaning of my father’s action, and she asked if I meant to come to Jerusalem for the weekend. When I said yes, she asked me not to use the new motorcycle but to come up by bus, as if the
separation
from Michaela had made my existence more dangerous and vulnerable. “And if you want to visit your friends, you can use your father’s car,” she added to encourage me to agree, and quickly put the phone down, as if from the distance she could feel me trembling on the brink of sleep.