A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

But there was no time to discuss this question now. The operation in which I was to participate as an anesthetist was scheduled to begin in half an hour. Surprisingly enough, in spite of the sharp words we had exchanged and Michaela’s explicit announcement that she was going back to India, I did not feel that a real rift had taken place between us, and I left for the hospital feeling excited, and even a little happy at the idea that Michaela was giving me permission to continue my affair without throwing me out of the house. When she asked me just before I left if I would leave her the car in view of the rainy weather and the chores she had to do, I agreed immediately, since I had no idea that she meant chores connected with her trip to India. Surely the broken statuette alone could not have been enough to make her get up and leave immediately for the Far East. Nor did I believe that my infidelity had shocked her. A woman as free-spirited as Michaela wasn’t outraged by infidelities, hers or anyone else’s. No, it made more sense to think that what was happening to me had simply reawakened, with great intensity, her old longing for the spiritual climate in which she felt, as she had repeatedly explained to me, free and liberated, in a place that only seemed so wretched and defeated. But was it really only her old longing for India? Perhaps there was a new yearning behind it all, not for the great subcontinent but for herself, as the true source of what was happening to me, since more than two years before it had been she who had come back from India in order to tell the Lazars about their daughter’s illness. Now, just as I too was being swept up into an ill-fated karma, she felt that in order to rescue me she had to return to the starting point, and to take my baby with her, so that she might draw me back to the place where wise and understanding forces would come to my aid, working through those who needed me urgently — in other words, the truly sick and maimed of the world, waiting on the sidewalks of Calcutta for volunteer doctors to come to them from the world that called itself free and happy. But I only began to understand all this when Michaela finally decided to take Shivi with her, after Stephanie in London agreed to join her on this trip to India. On the morning in question, in the operating room, feeling slightly dizzy as I stood behind the anesthesia machine, I was thinking neither of Michaela nor of myself but of the woman I had left sleeping in the spacious apartment, either sick or well, who would soon wake up and find herself alone and begin to worry about when I, or somebody else, would come to keep her company.

When I reached the hospital I wanted to go straight to the administration wing to tell Lazar’s secretary that I had responded to the call she had referred to me in the fullest possible way, and to find out indirectly if she had already received any reports from the other party. But there was no time. So I waited until after the “takeoff” had succeeded and the patient had begun to sail gently along his appointed course before slipping into the anteroom to call her and tell her that I had made a house call and there was nothing to worry about. She thanked me gratefully. “I know we’re being a bit of a burden to you,” she said, glibly including herself with the woman who was constantly in my thoughts, “but I saw that Mrs. Lazar was a little lost, without knowing exactly who to turn to, because Lazar used to put the whole hospital at her disposal. And although everyone’d be happy to help her, after what happened, everybody thinks that someone else is taking care of her.”

“Yes,” I said, “I thought that Professor Levine had taken her under his wing. He’s more or less their family doctor, isn’t he?”

“He was,” she corrected me emphatically. “He was in the past. But now he’s angry with her because she refuses to put all the blame on Hishin. He isn’t satisfied with what I keep telling him, and what I told you too — that we’re all a little to blame, me, Dori, her mother, and even Lazar himself. But no — that crazy, stubborn man, who was forgiven so many times by Lazar, wants to set up a kangaroo court to sentence Professor Hishin. He’s not like you, Dr. Rubin, and refuses to take responsibility for himself. Yesterday, after you left, I felt a little bad about including you in my accusations.”

“But why?” I reassured her. “You’re right. We’re all guilty, morally at least. Me too. No less than Lazar himself.” But there was no time to elaborate on the moral guilt for Lazar’s death while the patient I had left on the operating table could implicate me in criminal guilt as well. I therefore hurried back to make sure that the numbers flickering on all the monitors were compatible with the smooth continuation of the flight, leaving Miss Kolby with the promise that I would get back to her during the day for a firsthand report on the quarrel that had flared up between the two friends. This secretary was proving herself to be a pillar of support on which we could all lean in the confusion left by her boss’s death. But how much support would she give me, I wondered, when sooner or later she found out about my relationship with his widow? I decided to go on investing in her, for I very much wanted this loyal and lonely woman on whom Lazar had depended, like many powerful executives depended on their secretaries, to be my ally not only in the little battles of the hospital but also in the great battle that had commenced this morning. At the end of the operation, after I saw the clear gleam of consciousness in the pupil of the anesthetized patient’s eye, which meant I could leave him with the nurses in intensive care, and after I received no reply when I called the Lazars’ apartment, I bought two sandwiches in the cafeteria instead of joining the surgeons for lunch and hurried to Lazar’s office.

Miss Kolby flushed with pleasure, not just because of the cheese sandwich I offered her but mainly because I wanted to eat my lunch in her company. “Lazar used to do that sometimes,” she said, and the sweet light of memory touched her delicate, faintly lined face. “When he saw that I was staying in the office because of the workload and refusing to go to the cafeteria for lunch, he would get annoyed with me, and in the end he would go and get me something to eat.”

“Someone who’s become accustomed to taking care of one woman is apparently drawn to taking care of other women too.” I laughed affectionately at the thought of the energetic director, who was probably suffering torments of frustration in his grave because of his inability to take care of things. “He used to take care of me too,” I recalled. “On the trip to India, on the flight from Rome to New Delhi, when I fell asleep and missed supper, I woke up and found a sandwich and a chocolate bar in the pouch of the seat in front of me.” Lazar’s secretary bowed her head in sorrow. Grief for her patron was apparently welling up in her again, especially in view of the changes that had taken place in her office since yesterday, as if the many administrative problems that had seemed to vanish along with the administrative director had not found anyone else in the entire hospital to take care of them and had come back to flood the office in the form of stacks of files piled on and around her desk. Was an heir about to appear and take over? Judging by the arrival of an unfamiliar secretary, who had replaced the vanished typist, it seemed so. This new secretary had apparently been brought in from outside the hospital, and although she had not known Lazar, she listened avidly to every word Miss Kolby and I exchanged, a secret, faintly mocking smile occasionally crossing her face. When she saw that Lazar’s secretary was ignoring her and not troubling to introduce me to her, she waited for a break in our conversation and introduced herself and asked me my name, which I knew she would not forget but would file away for future reference, like all ambitious secretaries. Then she offered to make me something to drink. But Miss Kolby dismissed this offer and took me into Lazar’s office, both to give me the treatment a member of the inner circle of the previous director’s friends deserved and to escape the curiosity of this woman, who might have been hired not only to assist her but to replace her.