A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

“But in the meantime he’s changed them all back again,” she said sharply, and smiled with obvious enjoyment at my discomfort.

The old folks’ home was in darkness, even though it was only ten o’clock at night, but the old lady didn’t seem in the least upset. She thanked me warmly, allowed me to extricate her from her seat belt, put on a white beret to protect her head from the persistent drizzle, and stepped carefully out of the car. I got out too and offered to accompany her inside. In her excellent physical and mental condition, she was in no need of an escort, but with her sharp wits she sensed that I was eager to continue the conversation, and she therefore thanked me gratefully, as if I were doing her a great favor. We walked slowly across the deserted terrace. I asked her a question or two about the place, and she answered briefly. Now we were standing in front of a big glass door, behind which the doorman was sitting opposite a television screen on which the two of us flickered like a couple of ghosts. Suddenly she shivered, as if she too had finally recognized the lost soul of her son-in-law in some movement of my head or hand, or even in the tone of voice that I had just adopted. The glass door did not open immediately. The old lady looked straight at me, but without realizing that it was my very presence which now forced her to speak of him. “Poor Lazar, my heart aches for him,” she said sadly, and she tugged at the white beret to protect at least one side of her face from the blustering wind. As if she wasn’t sure whether I shared the intensity of her emotion, she added, “Do you know how fond he was of you, and how well he spoke of you?” I nodded my head painfully, as if everything I had felt since my return from England had now been confirmed. “But what’s going to happen to Dori now?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulders. “It will be very hard for Dori. Very hard.”

I saw that she still hadn’t grasped the crux of the matter. “But how will she stay by herself?”

“How?” Dori’s mother sighed, still not understanding what I was getting at. “I don’t know how. She’ll have to find a way. It will be very hard for her. As it is for everyone else.”

“But what way? In what sense?” I pressed her, refusing to let her evade the issue. “She’s incapable of being on her own for a minute. It’s impossible for her.” I saw that my insistence was beginning to confuse her. Her eyes wandered, and she hugged the door for shelter, afraid to meet my eyes lest she admit that I knew something nobody was supposed to know, something that even she refused to acknowledge. But I pressed on, oblivious to her discomfort in my fervor. “How, for example, will she stay by herself at night? Who’ll be there with her?” Finally she understood that she could no longer evade my questions, which sprang from a deep inner source, perhaps prompted by Lazar himself. “Don’t you worry your head about that,” she said, smiling in relief. “She’ll find a way not to be by herself. She’ll find someone to be with her. Even when she was a child and we sometimes left her alone in the evening, she would run to find some little friend to spend the night with her. She always knew how to find people to look after her, so that she wouldn’t have to stay by herself for even a minute.” I was flooded with sweetness at the thought of the little girl running in the pleasant evening streets of childhood to find a little friend to spend the night. I suddenly felt as if the worry had been removed from my heart and, more significantly, as if a new horizon had opened before me, full of a reassuring promise. I pressed the button next to the door and asked the doorman over the intercom to open it. He checked his list for the old lady’s name, and after he found it he pressed the buzzer and I left her. But I didn’t leave the place before calling Michaela on a pay phone to apologize for my lateness and to tell her that I was on my way home.

Michaela was indifferent to this announcement, but Amnon, who was still at the apartment and eagerly waiting for my return, wasn’t. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist passing Dori’s house again, and after checking that Hishin’s car was no longer there, I climbed softly up the dark stairs, and stood holding my breath outside the door, with my hand on the lock, to give my beloved the feeling that even if her mother had already gone home and her daughter was asleep in her room and her son had not yet returned, she was not alone.

Has the time come to reflect on love, so that what was impossible will become possible? The solitary bird — which broke into the room in the dead of night and underneath the bed, among the clay fragments of the broken statuette, pecked crumbs from the heart of an ancient sandwich, which had been prepared for a school lunch and for some reason had found its way there and been forgotten — mayspread itsgreat wings at dawnand flyaway to find where she has disappeared to, the curly-haired little girl in the blue uniform with the school badge fastened to her chest with a safety pin, who was left to do her homework at the kitchen table many years ago.

After the official mourning period was over, I found myself drawn to the administrative wing to find out if Lazar’s heir had already been designated. This was, of course, a pointless and ridiculous project, not only because it was only a week since he had died, but also because Lazar was not one of those executives who chose an heir-apparent during their lifetime, but believed that his true heir would have to make it on his own, after stiff competition with his peers. Nevertheless, when I walked down the corridor on my way from the surgical wing, in my green uniform, with the mask still hanging around my neck, my feet would lead me to the administrative wing and I would hesitantly advance toward Lazar’s office, whose door still bore, as if nothing had happened, the bronze plate inscribed with his name and office hours. In those days I would find the office quiet, with none of the feverish activity that had always characterized it, as if most of the urgent administrative problems demanding his attention had solved themselves with his death. The two secretaries who had always been there had disappeared, replaced by a young Anglo-Saxon typist who appeared not to be typing documents or letters but to be slowly copying material from a thick old medical textbook, presumably for one of the clinical seminars held in the hospital. The absence of Miss Kolby, Lazar’s faithful personal secretary, who had always treated me with particular affection, struck me as strange. I say “absence” and not “disappearance” because sometimes I would find traces of her in her room — a handbag, or a coat hanging on a hook. But when I tried to find out where she was, the secretaries in the adjacent rooms would shrug their shoulders, unable to give me a clear answer. “She’s wandering around” was the best answer they could come up with, referring to the confines of the administrative wing, to other parts of the hospital, and to a space beyond its geographical limits. “She’s still wandering around,” a friendly secretary tried to explain when I came back to the wing after my day’s work was over, illustrating not only the extent but also the rhythm of this wandering with a circular motion of her arm.

The truth is that I too had been infected by this aimless wandering. The women apparently realized this, and accordingly did not bother to ask exactly what I wanted from Lazar’s secretary, or whether I wished to leave a message. They seemed to sense that I had no explicit question or request but only an abstract desire to hang around in one of the many empty spaces left in the hospital by the death of the administrative director. For I had a lot of spare time now, not only because Michaela’s return took Shivi off my hands, but also because I was employed at the hospital only on a half-time basis and the private work in Herzliah had not yet been renewed. After my year in London and all the experience I had gained at St. Bernadine’s it seemed beneath my dignity to apply for night shifts at the Magen-David-Adom station, but until Michaela found a job and we knew where we stood, at least financially, I had no choice but to request a few night shifts there at the end of the month. Lazar’s departure had deprived me of the administrative patronage I still required. The permanent half-time job I had taken was more administrative than medical, the fruit of Lazar’s manipulations, which were intended to compensate me for some undefined injustice done me, in India or here. And although the permanency of the position was an achievement that most of my peers could only dream about, its partial nature left me in a situation of disturbing ambivalence, so that sometimes I wished I had the guts to give it up altogether and look for a full-time job, even on a temporary basis, in the surgical department of some other hospital. Because of this, my search for Lazar’s personal secretary was intended not only to give me a chance to rub up against one of the intimate voids left by the energetic director but also to clarify my position and prospects at the hospital as she, an experienced secretary, saw them.