A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

Since I didn’t have the car with me, I thought of getting a ride part of the way with Dr. Vardi, but when I stood in the entrance to the hospital and realized how heavy the downpour was, I was overcome by a desire to wash away all the tension and tiredness that had accumulated inside me with the pure water filling the air. I said good-bye to him and went out into the storm, occasionally taking shelter under a store awning or in the entrance to a building, vacillating between the need to go home and rest and the intense desire to go to Dori’s office in the south of the city and see for myself if she was as well as she said she was. But my problem was solved when a deluge soaked me to the skin, forcing me to go home and change my clothes. The apartment was empty, and judging by the few plates in the rack over the sink, Michaela and Shivi had not even come home for lunch. I switched on the hot water heater and got undressed and into bed, where I covered myself completely with the quilt. The thought of sending the red-haired patient back to the ward without his operation now filled me with remorse. Who would have imagined that the mere sound of my voice would throw Levine into confusion? If he was really tormented by guilt over Lazar’s death, I would have to be particularly careful in any future contact with him. The telephone rang. For a moment I was afraid to answer in case it was a summons to return to the operating room, but it was only Hagit, Michaela’s childhood friend and the mother of our young baby-sitter. She was looking for Michaela, who was supposed to have arrived at her place with Shivi an hour before. “They must have been held up by the rain,” I said, without feeling worried, and I asked her to tell Michaela that I had come home early from the hospital. “Do you want her to call you when she gets here?” she asked. “Only if she wants to,” I replied, and after I put the phone down I called my parents. They weren’t at home, but they had installed a new answering machine, which I knew they had been considering buying. My father’s slow, excited voice answered first in Hebrew and then in English and asked the caller to leave a message after the beep. I congratulated them on their new acquisition, which was intended to improve communication between us without making it too burdensome, for ever since Shivi had arrived in the country their craving for daily contact had increased. I added something about the storm raging in Tel Aviv, told them how their granddaughter had accidentally smashed the Indian statuette to smithereens this morning, and promised to call again during the evening. Now that I had fulfilled all my duties to the world, I snuggled up under the granny’s big down quilt and dove into my soul to discover what remained there.

At last, a dream bathed in light rose quickly in the darkness of my closed eyes. And clearly the dream was mine and nobody else’s, for my father was supposed to be present in it, since I had gone especially to meet him in a rural settlement next to a lake which lay hidden in the gentle fold of a pleasant hill whose slopes were covered with plots of land so well tended that they looked like flourishing gardens. Although it was a fine spring day, vestiges of the long, hard winter were still floating at the edges of the sky, scraps of gray cotton wool sailing past the stone window of one of the houses, which consisted of nothing but one narrow room. In it a handful of silent farmers, their reddish hair proclaiming them to be blood relations, were sitting around a long narrow table full of knives and forks, waiting for the last guest so they could begin their meal, which an invisible woman was cooking in a lean-to kitchen. Maybe they’re waiting for me to bring him to them, I thought, and I went out to search for my father among the narrow canals of water winding between the houses, and as I walked I thought not of him but of the old car he had given me. Where had it disappeared to, I wondered, where had I parked it? Was it possible that I had driven up the narrow dusty paths through the flourishing fields covering the slopes of the hill? The hill was so easy to climb that I effortlessly reached its summit and looked down at the large lake surrounded by empty wasteland, and I went down the other side, and as I walked I felt full of distress that I was here all alone and there was nobody to help me drag the old car out of the grim gray water of the lake, into which I had apparently absentmindedly allowed it to roll. But then I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone, which immediately rescued me from my distress. It was Hagit, phoning to tell me not to worry, because Michaela had called to say that she and Shivi were on their way to her house.

“Thank you. But I really wasn’t worried,” I explained affably to this good friend, who apologized for waking me up in her eagerness to reassure me. “I always have complete faith in Michaela. Soon you’ll see just how much I trust her, when you hear about her new plan to return to India, this time with Shivi.”

“So you gave in to her in the end?” cried Hagit, who sounded upset at the idea of parting from her friend, even though she knew how Michaela longed for India. “And you? Are you going too?”

“How can I leave everything here? You tell me,” I demanded. Then I added, “Maybe I’ll go in the end to bring them back.” And with this thought I also reassured myself when shortly afterward I heard how much Michaela had already accomplished in preparation for the journey. It was as if to compensate for the dismemberment of her beloved statuette she had decided to grow another head and two more pairs of hands during the few hours of my absence so she could transform her return to India into a fact from which there was no turning back. She had been to several travel agencies to compare dates and prices of cheap flights and make notes of possible alternatives, and she had visited the Indian consulate that had recently opened in Tel Aviv to apply for a visa, and of course she had not forgotten to go to the Health Bureau to find out whether a baby of Shiva’s age could be vaccinated. Since all this wasn’t enough for her to feel that her trip was becoming a concrete reality, she had made her way in the pouring rain to a number of used-car lots to find out how much she could get for our car, which she had decided to sell to pay for her trip, and at the same time to inquire about a secondhand motorcycle for me so as not to leave me without any means of transport after she was gone. All this had been preceded, of course, by a long telephone conversation with Stephanie in London, to warn her of the imminence of the date of departure. She told me all this on the phone as soon as she arrived at Hagit’s place, as if she were afraid that I might have changed my mind during the day and would try to prevent her from taking Shivi, whose participation in the trip she regarded as absolutely essential, especially now that Stephanie had agreed to go along.

Michaela’s voice was full of excitement; it was evident that the day of running around in the rain to prepare for the trip had filled her with joy, as if the possibility of a great love had opened up today not for me but for her. Darkness had already descended on the apartment in spite of the earliness of the hour, and the rain which had been falling all day was still pouring down, as if the winter so often promised by the weather forecasters had finally burst forth in full force. I had taken a shower and changed into clean, warm clothes, and when Michaela called I was in the middle of wondering whether to go to Dori’s office to find out where I stood after the night before. It was even dark in the kitchen, which was usually full of light in the afternoons, and only a single ray of light succeeded in escaping the sunset hiding behind the clouds and weakly penetrating the window above the sink. To Michaela’s credit, I have to say that her great happiness did not prevent her from sensing my somber mood, which was due not only to the return of the soldier-son and my growing uncertainty about my position but also to the thought that I would soon have to travel around on foot. After repeating her assurance that she would not have Shivi vaccinated without first consulting me, Michaela suddenly took pity on me and said persuasively, “You remember how amazed I was the first time we met, at Eyal’s wedding, that you hadn’t taken advantage of your free trip to India to stay on for a while by yourself? If you regret what you missed then and you want to join us, why don’t you come along? We’ll welcome you with open arms and accept you just as you are, whatever the state of your soul.” And her laughter burst out, free and uninhibited, just as it had always done in London. For a moment the thought crossed my mind, Why not? Perhaps this was my chance to escape from the snares in which I was getting increasingly entangled. Maybe in the place where the gorgeous silk of my infatuation had gradually been woven, my love might slowly unravel and dissolve into the mystery that had given birth to it.