A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

If it had been even six o’clock in the morning I might have called my parents and avoided this weird nocturnal expedition. However, I could not have unburdened myself to my mother in my father’s presence or spoken of everything weighing on my heart — the parting from Michaela and Shivi, our plans for the future — though sharing these feelings would have eased my sudden sense of abandonment. But it was three o’clock in the morning, and since I never had had time to become acquainted with the Tel Aviv pub scene, let alone with the all-night discos, I could not seek human contact at this hour with anyone but those who were always prepared to give it — in other words, those at the hospital, where I knew that even at this still, secret hour, absolute and eternal vigilance held sway over even the remotest corner in the building, wrapping staff and patients alike in a blanket of security, whether they were tossing in their beds or asleep in their chairs or dead in their iron drawers. I knew that after getting over the surprise of my sudden arrival at the wrong time, one of the anesthetists in the emergency room might try to coax me into changing places with him, so I decided to go to one of the other parts of the hospital. It seemed much darker than usual. I asked one of the security guards about the darkness. He too was aware of the difference and concerned by it — if darkness reigned over the entire hospital, it meant that it wasn’t just a coincidence or an accident but the result of a new directive from administration to save electricity. And then it dawned on me, like a flash of lightning: they had found a successor to Lazar, and he must be someone from outside, if his first instruction was to dim the lights. I decided to go up to the pediatric ward, where there were always parents awake, sitting in vigil. But first I went down to my locker in the intensive care unit, to leave my helmet and leather jacket and put on the coat with my name embroidered on it and hang a stethoscope around my neck. Thus protected by the neutral identity of a doctor on night duty, I went up to the pediatric ward. As I had guessed it was humming with activity, not so much because of the concern of the parents, some of whom were sleeping in corners while others paced the corridors red-eyed with despair, but thanks to the wakefulness of those children whose as yet undiagnosed illnesses gave them the right to demand unremitting attention. I too wanted attention, but the parents who surrounded me did not see that I was no less exhausted than they were. Although I repeatedly explained that I was not a pediatrician but an anesthetist and I had only come up here to look for someone, they clung even to this passing medical authority and showered me with questions of a medical or bureaucratic nature, which I answered patiently but in a general, ambivalent, evasive, and noncommittal way, as if the source of authority which had always given strength and clarity to my responses and diagnoses were slipping away from me. It was not surprising that after a while even the most insistent of the parents turned away from me, and with my whole being crying out for the sleep that had been denied me, I walked down the corridor and peeped into the rooms full of bright posters and toys, to soften my burning eyes with the sight of the sleeping babies, some of whom were no older than Shivi, now lying in the warmth and safety of Michaela’s arms, or perhaps Stephanie’s lap. Even after I had gone downstairs, firmly resolved to go home, get into bed, and drown the inexplicable anxiety that had taken hold of me in sleep, I nevertheless made one last effort, going outside, still in my white coat and stethoscope, oblivious to the wind raging in the little stand of trees behind the main building, and into the annex that housed our small psychiatric department, which Lazar’s death had perhaps saved from extinction. Although I had never been there before, I knew very well that no concerned relatives would be wandering around its corridors. And even if they were, it was not them I was seeking but the doctor on duty, to ask his advice.

The doctor on duty was sound asleep. Still, I found someone to talk to in the person of an old acquaintance, none other than the ex-head nurse of Hishin’s surgical department, whose application to have her retirement postponed for a year had been rejected and who was doing night shifts as a substitute nurse in various departments of the hospital in order to supplement her modest pension. “But who rejected your application so quickly?” I exclaimed sympathetically, and I told her that I had seen her file on Lazar’s desk a few days before. “If Lazar was still alive, he would never have rejected a request from Professor Hishin to leave you with him for another year,” I added confidently, for like other people working in surgery, I had felt the greatest respect for her, even though I knew that she too preferred Dr. Vardi to me. But the white-haired nurse sitting in the cold, deserted nurses’ station, wrapped in a thick winter coat with a little electric heater at her feet, was not at all sure how Lazar would have treated her request if he had been alive. “Sometimes he could be rigid and almost cruel in his obstinacy,” she pronounced, and when she saw that I was astonished by her words she added, “Don’t imagine, Dr. Rubin, that just because you spent a couple of weeks with him and his wife in India, you knew all the sides of his personality.” There was a slightly aggressive note in her voice, and I expressed my surprise that even though two years had passed she still remembered my trip to India. “But how could I forget?” She laughed. “I still remember you coming in all confused with that big medical kit you got from Dr. Hessing and asking me to inoculate you. You looked so pressured and so angry and bitter about the whole business that Professor Hishin had forced you into.” I suddenly was overcome with affection for this noble elderly woman, uncomplainingly doing the job of a substitute nurse to take a few more shekels home every month. I also remembered how I had dropped my trousers in front of her that evening, behind an improvised screen, so that with a light and steady hand she could inoculate me with the two shots I had brought from the Health Bureau. “It’s strange that we’re meeting again today,” I said, unable to control the little confession that had been burning inside me ever since I had arrived at the hospital, “because my wife and baby left tonight on a trip to India. Only a few hours ago I took them to the bus to the airport in Egypt, and when I got home, tired out, and went to bed, I suddenly woke up after an hour or two. I couldn’t go back to sleep again. In fact, I can hardly stand to be on my own, something that has never happened to me before.”

She listened quietly to my complaint with a serious expression on her face. I knew that she didn’t have much imagination, but she had a lot of common sense and sympathy for any human distress, as long as she was convinced that it was genuine distress and not just a passing mood. She offered me a cup of coffee, but I refused. “No, I still want to try to sleep,” I explained. “I have to go back to bed. In less than eight hours I have to be on my feet in the operating room.” Like everyone else on the hospital staff, she was surprised at the strange half-time post Lazar had created for me, and she asked me if I thought the arrangement would last now that he was dead. “Why not?” I asked with some annoyance. She shrugged her shoulders. Perhaps they’d find a way to eliminate irregularities committed in the name of friendship, things that weren’t strictly according to the letter of the law, she said — it all depended on the new director. “But is there a new director already?” I asked. “Has anybody seen him? Has Hishin said anything?” It appeared that she knew nothing, and neither did Hishin. But her guess was that somebody had already been appointed to the job, maybe even two or three people. Lazar had had a lot of power in the hospital, and perhaps the time had come to spread it around a little. That, at least, was what Professor Hishin thought should be done. “Yes,” I reflected quietly, “Hishin’s going to miss Lazar a lot.” She nodded her head. Her conclusions were graver than mine. Hishin was afraid of the new director’s revenge, and that was why he was demanding that his powers be divided. In spite of his eulogy at the graveside, he was well aware of the damage he had caused, not because of overconfidence in his medical decisions, as many people thought, but out of jealousy, for fear that some other doctor in the hospital would take charge of the case and get close to Lazar and usurp his favored position. That was why Hishin was still tortured by guilt, both toward the deceased and toward his wife, because everybody knew how close a couple the Lazars had been and how they had always done everything together, and anyone who loved one of them loved the other one too. For a second my blood froze. “In what sense, love?” I smiled, and my heart filled with despair at the possibility of the guilt and the love uniting into a powerful emotion that nothing would be able to withstand. “In what sense?” Hishin’s old nurse, taken aback, tried to think of an appropriate answer. “In the sense that he’ll stay close to her now and take care of her until he’s sure that she isn’t angry with him and she doesn’t hate him. Because the truth is that Hishin is peculiarly attracted to people who’re angry with him or who hate him,” she said. For many years she had been sharpening her perception of the head of her department, just as Miss Kolby had done with Lazar. “But how can he stay close to Lazar’s wife now that he’s got a woman of his own?” I objected. “Only one woman?” she retorted. “Hishin has a lot of women that he’s attached to. He’ll have no problem adding another one to the list.”