A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

When I entered the big room I saw that the sofa which had been missing the day before had now been returned, apparently after undergoing some minor refurbishment or repair. The dry soil in the planters had been watered. Here too stacks of files awaited the attention of the new director, signs of whose imminent arrival were apparent everywhere. “Do you know who it’s going to be?” I asked Miss Kolby, who was putting on the electric kettle. “No.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t even know if they’ve decided on anyone yet. But I can already feel him in the air.”

I suddenly felt a twinge of envy, as if the man who was going to replace Lazar and run the hospital were superseding me too, for I was both willing and able to make decisions regarding these files, one of which I even picked up and paged through, to the evident disapproval of Miss Kolby, who said nothing. “What does the administrative director actually do all the time?” I asked when I saw that the file in my hands was a personnel file, with the photograph of a young woman attached to it. “Personnel problems?”

“Not just those, of course,” she replied, “but they did take up a lot of Lazar’s attention. He was attracted to them. Yes, he took satisfaction in secretly controlling people’s lives.” I took the cup of coffee she offered me and sank onto the sofa with a deep sigh, overcome by exhaustion after standing on my feet for six hours during the surgery, on top of the nearly sleepless night I had spent at the Lazars’.

But this secretary was so devoted to the Lazar family that it didn’t surprise her at all to hear that I had spent the whole night there. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why I had remained awake. “That’s going too far,” she rebuked me, as one who had accumulated a few nights’ experience in keeping vigil over the loneliness of Mrs. Lazar herself. “It would have been enough for her to know that you were there, sleeping on the sofa in the living room.” She settled into an armchair next to me, crossing her extremely thin legs and speaking as if she thought it likely that I might be called on to spend the night again this evening, and other nights to come too. A wave of pleasure flooded through me, and a wish to confess what had really happened. Why should Michaela have the right to spread the news in her Indian version of events while I was sentenced to silence? And the woman sitting next to me wasn’t just a secretary, but a bosom friend of the Lazars. In the depths of her soul she must have realized who was really sitting beside her, because when she saw me yawn and sink back into the cushions, she suddenly suggested that I remove my shoes and use the sofa for a short nap before my next operation, in only half an hour. “Sometimes I used to arrange things so that Lazar could take a short nap between appointments without anyone’s noticing. You deserve a rest too. Why not?” she declared warmly. And while I was hesitating over whether to accept this tempting offer, she drew the curtains to darken the room, took a thin blanket out of one of the bottom drawers, and disconnected the battery of telephones, after which she left the room, saying, “Even fifteen minutes will help to make up for the sleep you missed last night, and in the meantime I’ll phone to find out what’s going on and where Mrs. Lazar disappeared to.” There was no doubt, I reflected with an obscure satisfaction, that Lazar’s sudden death had turned this usually correct and refined woman’s head too, if she could suddenly invite me to take a nap on his sofa. The idea of sleep seemed impossible, excited and intoxicated as I was by the previous night’s events. But I closed my eyes and withdrew like a snail into my thoughts, and wrapped myself in Lazar’s blanket, which was too thin to provide any warmth and apparently intended only to protect him symbolically from the world constantly knocking at his door.

In the stillness of the room I suddenly became aware of the steady dripping of the rain, and it began to oppress me, as if it too were joining in the general hostility that would confront me as soon as Michaela’s departure for India and my love affair became known. But if, in addition to taking Lazar’s place with the woman who was only a few years younger than my mother, I was called upon to fill his chair, which I could see looming behind the desk, and to administer the hospital in his place, the hostility might be seriously diminished. And why not? I might be only a young doctor, but I felt that I had the ability and the strength to make decisions. With my medical education, I would even be able to improve the quality of the decisions taken in this room. Prompted by a sudden urge to examine the file I had previously glanced through, I got up and walked over to the desk in my stocking feet, only to discover that the picture of the young woman on the cover had misled me and that the file belonged to the head nurse in the surgical department, who had written to ask Lazar to postpone the date of her retirement and added a recommendation from Hishin. But while I was deliberating over what I would say if the decision were up to me, Lazar’s secretary, who had overheard the rustle of the papers in the next room, knocked on the door and came in to announce the good news that Dori was at home, her temperature had gone down, and she was feeling fine. She had gone out to do some shopping and was about to go in to her office for a few essential meetings. She sounded altogether more cheerful, and tonight her son the young soldier would arrive for a few days’ leave, so we could all relax. “Didn’t you tell her that I was here?” I asked. But, faithful to her principle of never betraying anyone’s presence without their explicit permission, she immediately replied, “Of course not. We’ve already given you enough trouble. Now her son’s with her, and Hishin has also promised to get in touch with her. You’ve already done more than enough.”

With this confirmation, I left the administrative wing for the surgical wing, where I was scheduled to assist Dr. Joubran, who was soon to replace Nakash as anesthetist in the intensive care unit, in a thyroidectomy. But when I arrived, there was nobody there except for the patient, an elderly man with a lot of red hair, who had just been brought down from the ward to the operating room. In spite of the premedication he had been given in the ward, he was still very alert, sitting up restlessly on his bed in a short white open gown, his naked legs swinging in the air, listening to the sound of the storm raging outside, his eyes wide open and terrified. I went up to him, introduced myself, and urged him to lie down. I gently rubbed his neck and shoulders, as if I were calming a frightened animal. His medical file and the brown envelope with his X-rays were lying at the foot of his bed, and although it was not my duty as the assistant anesthetist to study them, I took out all the documents and X-rays and spread them on the bed and examined them one by one. Then I asked him a few questions about himself. He was a quiet, modest man of about seventy, a member of a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, who was proud not only that he still worked six hours a day in one of the regional factories but also that his son, who had brought him down from the ward and was now waiting outside in the waiting room, was also a loyal member of the kibbutz. I talked to him a bit about his illness and asked him to tell me how he felt and where it hurt. He said that he had hardly any pain, and his main feeling was fear at being left alone in the operating room. His face was flushed and his breathing heavy and noisy. I decided to examine him, in order to pass the time and also to set my mind at rest. First I measured his blood pressure, which as I had suspected was alarmingly high, and totally unsuitable for the lengthy surgery he was about to undergo; his pulse and heartbeat were irregular too. It was impossible to tell if these findings were temporary, caused by the panic raging inside him, or if there was some organic cause which nobody upstairs had noticed. I called the internal medicine department and asked to speak to one of the doctors. When they put me through I recognized the voice of Professor Levine. At first I wanted to put the receiver down, but he had already recognized my voice and called me by my name. Ever since Lazar’s death we hadn’t exchanged a word, and so I tried to be as careful as possible and to give him only the dry facts, without interpretations or suggestions. He listened to me attentively and did not try to belittle any of the details I mentioned or dismiss my speculations. Instead he inquired, with a very uncharacteristic anxiety, what I would recommend doing, as if I, not he, were the true source of authority here. “I thought maybe one of your people could come down and discuss it with the surgeons,” I suggested cautiously. “There’s no point in talking to the surgeons,” he said with inexplicable anger. “Once they’ve got their hands on the patient, they won’t let go. No, the best thing would be for you to get him out of there right away and bring him back to the ward, and after that perhaps we’ll decide what to do together.” Now I knew that I had made a mistake by interfering. The terror of the patient, and the anxiety that had been floating around inside me since the morning, had already fanned the flames of Levine’s paranoia. But I had no option now, and I went out into the corridor to look for the patient’s son, a sturdy kibbutznik who was sitting and reading a newspaper, to ask him to take his father back upstairs. I refrained from accompanying them, not only because I had to wait for the operating team to explain the disappearance of their patient, but also because I didn’t want to meet Professor Levine, who I knew wasn’t interested in discussing the patient’s condition but in denouncing Professor Hishin and his role in Lazar’s death. The surgeon soon arrived, and as I had imagined, it was none other than my old rival, Dr. Vardi. I told him dryly about my examination of the patient, my phone call to Professor Levine, and the decision to postpone the operation. He listened quietly to my explanations, his blond head slightly bowed. I knew that he was dying to come out with some crushing remark about the strange new collaboration between myself and Professor Levine, but he restrained himself and said nothing, as if he realized that I was not myself and did not want to upset me any more. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and said, “In that case, we can all go home.”