A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

“Heavy, yes, that’s only natural,” I agreed, “but long-drawn-out? I’m not so sure.” Michaela listened to me attentively, still trying unsuccessfully to catch my eye. “What do you intend to do about the phone call?” she pressed me before I shut the door behind me. “You can’t just ignore her.”

“I know,” I reassured her, and I promised that I would drop in on her on my way home. When I went back inside and took my medical bag out of the closet, Michaela looked relieved.

I didn’t call Dori, mostly because I was afraid that if I did, she would content herself with asking a couple of questions and reject my offer to go over and examine her. I was determined not to allow my role as doctor to replace my true role, which was becoming more possible from minute to minute, and which so flooded me with anxiety and desire that I didn’t even wait for our baby-sitter to wave to me from her window, but drove off the moment her curly head disappeared into the stairwell, in a hurry to arrive before something inside me could subvert my decision to interpret Dori’s phone call as the true call for which I had been waiting. Accordingly, I decided to leave my medical bag in the car, and as I soared to the top floor in the elevator, I knew that I needed no external confirmation in order to go in to her. I was impelled forward by the presence that had been stirring inside me ever since the death of Lazar, and as I stood in front of the door, surrounded by blossoming plants, I actually put my hand into my pocket to look for the key. When no key was forthcoming, I pressed the bell. It immediately uttered a shrill, piercing, birdlike whistle, but nobody seemed to hear it or to pay any attention to it. There was silence. The door was one of those heavy, opaque security doors, and left no crack to reveal if there was a light on behind it. I again pressed the bell, which the Lazars must have installed after they returned from India, for I didn’t recall such a piercing whistle the first time I visited them, and during the week of mourning I had had no opportunity to hear it because the door had been left open to accommodate the constant stream of visitors.

In the distance I could hear her footsteps hesitating. And rightly so, for how could she have guessed that I would turn up unannounced on her doorstep at an hour like this? But when I sensed her hesitating on the other side of the door, unable to make up her mind whether to ignore the visitor or to ask who it was, I pressed the whistling doorbell again and called out, “It’s only me.” And in order not to let her off the hook, I added, “You were looking for me?” Then the door opened, and she stood there clumsily attired in a flannel nightgown and a thick green sweater of Lazar’s. Her hair was disheveled, and by the red spots on her cheeks and the dull glitter of her eyes I could see that she had a real temperature, which actually reassured me, for even if it turned out that no love-call had been or could have been intended, it was still a good thing that I had come. “They’ve left you alone!” This strange cry escaped my lips, intended only as an exclamation of astonishment, but it also, to my surprise, contained a note of pain. “Who left me?” she asked with a frown, an expression of resentment crossing her face, perhaps because she sensed that in the depths of my heart I still insisted on thinking of Lazar as someone who might not have left her alone. “I mean,” I stammered, “Einat, or …” and I couldn’t remember the name of her son. But she immediately understood and leapt to his defense. “He had to return to his base,” she said, still without a single smile, almost with hostility. Was it possible that she was angry at me? I felt a thrill of happiness, accompanied by a shadow of fear, as I identified the note of impatience with which she had sometimes addressed her husband in India. “Were you looking for me?” I repeated stubbornly, without even mentioning her obvious illness, in order to force her to address me as a young lover whose way was suddenly clear before him, not as a doctor on house call.

“Yes, I was looking for you,” she admitted somberly, also ignoring the illness that had her in its grip. As if it were now my job to be at her beck and call, and she added resentfully, “Where have you been hiding from us?”

Outraged by the light shed on my situation by the last word in this short sentence, I did not hesitate, and with the feeling of confidence that had been swelling inside me ever since the first sign I had received from the secretary at the beginning of the evening, I clasped her to me in a firm embrace, her heaviness feeling curiously weightless in my arms. Whether it was the ardor burning in her limbs which gave her this new lightness or the strength of Lazar’s soul bursting out of me, it was impossible to tell. Now, when I touched her, I realized that her fever was high and worrying, and that she herself was apparently unaware of how high it was. Her skin, which was very dry, without a trace of perspiration, seemed to show signs of a viral infection, which no antibiotic, including those in my bag downstairs, would be effective against. In spite of Lazar’s heavy sweater wrapped around the upper part of her body, she was shivering, and I knew that if I insisted on removing it now and taking off her nightgown, the shivering would increase. I therefore knelt down in front of her and put my head on her stomach in the hope of kindling her desire.

But she didn’t want any part of it, and with a savage gesture she pulled my hair as if to raise me to my feet and demanded clear protestations of love from me, as if she were no longer prepared to put up with the panic-stricken silence of our last encounter in bed. Because her feverish weakness gave this unexpected demand strength, I began, without releasing my grip on her, kissing and stroking her face and her hair and groping my way down the hallway to the bedroom, which seemed to have been taken over by chaos again, I began to seek and also to find new words, not only to describe my impossible love for her but also to try to tell her of the passionate desire aroused in me by the new obligation I felt not to leave her alone. “I know why you’re looking for me. I know exactly why,” I repeated in my emotion, and I helped her get back into the big bed, torn between the natural desire of a doctor to cover her with the blanket and balance the inner heat of her body with the heat of the air around her and the impulse to go on exposing her flesh, to undo the buttons of the thick old sweater so that I could pull up the nightgown and look at the strong breasts resting peacefully and abundantly above that round, pampered belly. And for the first time since my arrival, I saw a weak smile crossing her face, and although she seemed willing to postpone covering herself with the blanket, she was not ready to allow me to make love to her before I told her how much I loved her or explained my attraction to her in the light of the deepest secret of her being.

“It was Lazar.” I couldn’t resist betraying her dead husband as I went on stroking and kissing her arms and her bare legs. “Right at the beginning, when I wanted to know the real reason that you insisted on coming with us to India.” She tried to open her eyes, heavy with both sickness and desire. “Even though he spoke about it complainingly, it was interesting to see how attracted he was, too, by your fear of abandonment.” I went on talking, gradually lowering my body onto the big double bed to bring my head closer to her and slowly slide it down between her thighs, to be engulfed by the source of warmth itself. She was surprised to hear that Lazar had spoken about her so intimately to a stranger, even before the beginning of our trip. But now she understood too why sometimes at train stations I had tried to help him by staying with her in his place, not understanding that for her there was no difference between “being left alone” and “being left without him.”