A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

Is it any wonder, then, that I sprang out of bed, trembling with excitement but protected by the darkness, to open the door to the woman illuminated by the dim light of the stairwell, her umbrella in one hand, her key ring and a little bunch of flowers in the other, and a new hat on her head, which suited the shape of her face and announced to the world by its black color that she still considered herself to be in mourning?

Only then, as she entered the apartment, did I dare switch on a single light, to dispel the darkness and reveal the shadows in the room and discover how exaggerated and even childish my fears were, if they could be so quickly banished. Although I was supposed to be ill, with my hair matted, my face pale and unshaven, my body dressed in a pajama top, she did not ask me how I was but looked around as if she had only now remembered that she was also the landlady, entitled to check up on the nature and extent of the changes made by her tenant in her apartment. Judging by the way the smile vanished from her lips, she was not only surprised but also annoyed by the many changes that Michaela and I had made, wittingly and unwittingly, in her mother’s cozy, well-cared-for apartment. But she refrained from comment and just took a step toward the crib standing in the corner of the living room, and as she looked at the crumpled sheet and the furry teddy bear, which was too big to take to India, I wondered whether Shivi was missing him now, as she crawled down the aisle of the airplane. Anxiously inspecting the woman who was much older than I was, I saw that the new hat was only one sign of the change that had taken place in her appearance: gone was the tailored suit tightly encasing her body, the high heels which were so flattering to her legs, replaced by plain, sturdy comfortable flat shoes and a loose suit with pants, which, even though it completely concealed her stomach, transformed her into a shorter, squarer woman, although, strangely enough, also a younger one. Then at last she turned to me and asked in an inquiring and slightly mocking tone, “Are you really sick?” I bowed my head a little so that she wouldn’t see the faint blush spreading over my cheeks but would be able to hear my halting words of apology for the lie that had brought her to the only place which truly belonged to both of us, as well as the only place where we could now be free of the judgment of the third eye. But she interrupted me in a maternal tone, which also contained a new note of impatience. “Never mind, don’t apologize. I knew you weren’t.” As if to soothe my guilty conscience, she handed me the modest bunch of anemones. I filled a blue vase with water in the light of the quiet flashes of lightning flickering in the window over the sink, and raised the flowers to my face to search their scent for the scent of her body, trembling at the certain knowledge that these flowers were meant not to bring us closer but the opposite, to say good-bye. After I put them in the vase and saw that she was already sitting in the same place on the couch where she had sat two years before and listened silently to my confession, I was flooded by a wave of pain. Did I really have to begin again from the beginning every time I met her? Was everything that happened between us so contrary to nature and divorced from life that it evaporated from meeting to meeting, as if it didn’t have the strength to sustain itself for our benefit? If only she had been able to believe, as Michaela believed, that her husband’s soul had been reincarnated in me, it might have set her mind at rest. I didn’t have to wait for the plane to land in India in order to offer her everything an ardent young man had to offer, so she wouldn’t have to stay by herself anymore.

But it was apparently precisely because she sensed what I was about to offer her now that she had answered my call and made a detour on her way home after a long day’s work. It wasn’t my supposed illness that had drawn her here but the fact of Michaela’s and Shivi’s departure, which had taken place with such speed and which she now realized wasn’t just an idle threat made in anger on the night when I had not come home. The fact that I had cooperated in this adventure of Michaela’s, and agreed to let her uproot the baby from her home and set off on a backpacking trip with no definite limits in time, in strange places filled with filth and sickness, just so that I could be as free as she was — this worried Dori and alarmed her with the obligations it sought to impose on her. When she could no longer contain herself, she blurted out a strange and surprising question—“But who are you?”—even before she asked me what I wanted. Perhaps this was the question I had long been waiting for, for without hesitating I began to tell her, the mere glint of her glasses now filling me with excitement, about the other river, the fifth river, which had flowed alongside me throughout our trip to India: the love and closeness between herself and Lazar. If at first I had been disturbed and put off by the intensity of the relationship between them, which was so different from anything I had known at home between my parents, in the end I was powerfully drawn to it. While I had been careful to wet only the tips of my fingers in the four real rivers flowing between New Delhi and Calcutta, in this fifth river I had bathed my whole body, and as if that weren’t enough, I had also drunk from its waters, which now, after the death of Lazar, were bursting from me until I was no longer sure who I really was. And although I knew that the disparity in age between us made us impossible for each other, I also knew that only I could guarantee that she would never be alone again.

“But I want to be alone.” The surprising answer came in a whisper but with great vehemence, and a gleam of anger flashed in her eyes before it died and disappeared, together with the lights, which now went out not only in the room and the apartment but in all the windows of the buildings surrounding us. And from the entire neighborhood, in which the power had suddenly failed, a faint, muffled sigh rose, a mixture of sorrow and excitement, leading me to pronounce with a smile, which held a little pity too, “But you can’t.”

“Because I never really wanted to before,” she replied with a curious confidence, as if the unexpected darkness that had descended on us enabled her to explain her entire life as if it were purely a matter of will. No wonder then that when I got up to look for a candle or a flashlight, she said, “What for? Leave it. The light will come on again soon anyway.” She took a slender cigarette out of her bag, and with its tip burning in the darkness around us, which seemed to be trying to produce light from every pale object in the room, even from the white smoke curling up from her cigarette, she spoke not only of the need to part from me but also of the obligation to do so, just because we had both lost the protection of our mates. Now that the man whose heart had failed to keep up with the intensity of his desire to dominate her was dead, she felt that the secret relationship that had come into being with me, which had been meant to give her some relief from the suffocation of his boundless and domineering love, was quickly turning into the same kind of demanding love, until she could almost believe, with me sitting in front of her in the dark, that Lazar’s soul had been reincarnated in me.

When I heard this sentence coming explicitly from the mouth of the person who had been closest to him, I could no longer restrain myself and I rose from my place, transported by the heady knowledge that I was now free to realize all my hopes, not only with regard to her but also about the hospital and wherever else I wanted to go. As if not only the city, the country, and the world were opening up before the spirit which bore my darkest and most secret desires, but even the universe itself, where the most beautiful stars were now shining in the continuing darkness around us. But Dori too apparently felt the power of the terrible freedom seeking to engulf her, and she stood up, angry and frightened, and said with a hysterical sob in her voice, “No. Don’t come any closer. You mustn’t touch me. I won’t allow you. It’s impossible. Einat already knows about us. It’s horrible. You have to let me go. Say to yourself, She’s gone. She’s gone to join her husband in the land of the dead.”