A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

In the stairwell I heard the telephone ringing as I arrived home. It can only be Michaela, I thought, and I began running upstairs. But the ringing stopped before I could open the door. On the little bottle Dr. Nakash had given me was a label listing all the ingredients of the home-produced drug he had concocted. Should I take a whole pill? I wondered, and broke one of the little tablets in two. I swallowed one of the halves, and judging by the speed with which my eyes drooped, I realized that the minute quantities of a distilled poppy extract which the experienced anesthetist had added to the usual ingredients had produced a knockout sleeping pill. But I couldn’t allow the wonderful heaviness to overpower me, because in the depths of my mind I was waiting for the phone to ring again. Which it soon did. But it wasn’t Michaela, it was my mother. “Where have you been? Where have you been?” Her voice rose complainingly in my ear, as if I owed it to her to be at home when she was looking for me. It turned out that Michaela had called my parents from Calcutta early in the evening and had a long conversation with them. “So what do you want?” I responded sulkily to this information, hanging on to the thin, slippery thread of wakefulness trying to slip away from me. “Couldn’t it have waited until morning?” But my mother had a definite aim in mind. Michaela and Shivi had arrived safely and found rooms in a hostel where some of the volunteer doctors were staying, but Shivi had not yet recovered from the diarrhea that had started in New Delhi, and she had a slight fever too. Ever since this conversation my parents had had no peace. Didn’t I think it was time for me to take a firmer line with Michaela? They had succeeded in getting the phone number of a store near the hostel where it would be possible to leave a message for her. While I struggled against the thick blanket of sleep that was now wrapping itself around me, I tried to reassure her. Diarrhea was endemic in India, especially in newly arrived tourists. Lazar had suffered from it throughout the trip, and nothing had happened to him in the end. But the main thing — which they seemed to have forgotten — was that Michaela was now in the company of real, Western doctors, and they would help her overcome all of Shivi’s problems. I didn’t know if I had succeeded in dispelling my mother’s anxiety, but the shock effects of Nakash’s half-tablet made it impossible for me to say anymore, and I rudely cut the conversation short, perhaps even without saying good-bye.

The next day in the afternoon, when I began disconnecting my patient from the anesthesia machine before checking his pupils in the narrow beam of my flashlight, one of the nurses from the intensive care unit came up to me and told me that there was a woman waiting for me in the waiting room. To my surprise I found my mother sitting among the relatives of the people undergoing surgery, probably listening as usual to other people’s troubles without saying anything about her own. Had she identified herself as the mother of one of the young doctors standing next to the operating table, or had she kept quiet in order not to appear boastful? Even from a distance she looked very tired and tense, like someone now fighting alone on two fronts without knowing which was the most important. She was wearing her gray wool suit, which I remembered from my high school graduation ceremony, and although last night’s gale had swept the clouds from the sky and left it a sparkling, polished blue, she had not forgotten to bring her umbrella, like the native of the British Isles she was. I touched her shoulder and bent over her tenderly. She interrupted her conversation and looked up, confused to see me in my green operating-room uniform. Then she introduced me to the woman sitting next to her, who immediately asked me if I knew anything about her husband’s operation. I apologized to her for not knowing anything, and without asking my mother what had brought her to me, I lifted her to her feet and offered to show her around the operating rooms, which she had never seen before. She was surprised and pleased by my offer, and only wanted to know first if I had permission to take her inside. I told her that I didn’t need anyone’s permission and took a white gown from one of the trolleys and helped her on with it. Then I secured a plastic head-cover over the thin, childish braid coiled on the nape of her neck. Naturally I didn’t take her into the room where an operation was underway, but into the one that had just been vacated, to show her the various instruments and especially the anesthesia machine and to tell her the names of the different anesthetics, pointing out the little colored bottles. She listened attentively to my explanations, and although she didn’t appear to be taking in too much of what I said, she didn’t ask any questions, as though some new and menacing thought were preoccupying her and paralyzing her mind as she gazed at all the lethal possibilities at my disposal.

Since I was due to participate in another operation shortly, we had no time to dawdle, and I took her up to the cafeteria to hear the real reason for her unexpected visit. It was hard to get anything clear out of her. First of all, she protested, she hadn’t made a special trip to see me. She had been to visit my father’s aunt in the old folks’ home, the grandmother of his niece Rachel, who had been so nice to them in London, she and her husband Edgar. And afterward it had occurred to her to drop in on me in the hospital, to talk to me about Shivi. My reassurances the night before had not succeeded in putting her mind to rest. She wanted to give me the phone number in Calcutta where I could get in touch with Michaela again. If Michaela wanted to endanger herself, let her, but she had no right to put the baby at risk. Altogether, my mother was surprised at me — how could I be so indifferent to my own child? I wanted to make a crushing reply, but I said nothing, trying unsuccessfully to imagine Shivi in Calcutta. While I was drinking the last drops of coffee, I looked into her bloodshot eyes and tried to figure out what it was she wanted from me. She, who never lingered over partings, was now finding it difficult to part from me, and after I accompanied her to the exit, she turned around and followed me back to the surgical wing. “Don’t worry about Shivi,” I repeated before pressing the numbers of the code that opened the big glass doors. For a moment I wanted to add, You should worry about me instead, but I didn’t, and I disappeared from her view into the bright corridor opening out in front of me.

The next evening, after I had eaten my supper, despairingly aware of how my new dread of being alone was creeping up on me even in the early twilight hours, I decided to return to the hospital and explore the possibilities available to me in one of the empty operating rooms. The thought of going to sleep on the operating table and never waking up seemed increasingly attractive to me. But at seven o’clock my father phoned from Jerusalem. It appeared that when he came home from work that afternoon my mother wasn’t at home, although the insurance agency where she worked as a secretary was closed on Tuesday afternoons. He had found a vague note saying, “Gone out for a while, don’t worry.”

“Then why are you worried?” I said impatiently. “She’ll probably come back soon.” But about two hours later he phoned again, to say that there was no sign of her and nobody knew where she was. “You know I’m not a hysterical type,” he said, trying to defend himself, “but I don’t know where she could be.” We arranged to talk again in an hour, but after fifteen minutes he phoned again. It was after nine. He had conducted a little search of the house, and it seemed to him that the new suitcase which she had bought in London was missing. Perhaps she had lent it to somebody without telling him. “Surely she couldn’t have gone anywhere without giving me any warning?” he asked, and now he spoke in English, without even an occasional word in Hebrew, as if he had made up his mind to cling firmly to his mother tongue, which alone was capable of anchoring him in the chaos swirling around him. I asked him if he wanted me to come to Jerusalem. “Not yet. But if I have to go and report her missing to the police,” he added in a humorous tone, “you should come with me.” I promised him that I would stay near the phone, sensing how my father’s new anxiety, streaming to me from Jerusalem, was making me forget my own anxiety, which quickly turned to astonishment when he phoned with the update. Not only was the new suitcase missing, but her favorite summer dress was also gone. “Could she have suddenly taken it into her head to take a trip somewhere? But where?” he asked himself more than me, without any note of complaint or anger against his wife for leaving him without a word. “See if you can find her passport,” I suggested to him at ten o’clock at night. He went to look for it immediately, and fifteen minutes later he announced that he had found her Israeli passport, but the British passport, which was always in the same place as his, was missing. Could she have taken it with her? But why? “I’ll give you an answer soon,” he promised with a peculiar confidence in his voice, and half an hour later he phoned to say that he had just concluded a long conversation with my mother’s sister in Glasgow, and even though she had been astonished and also a little amused by his announcement and couldn’t give him any leads, he had the feeling that she wasn’t as worried as she should have been. Did she know something that she was hiding from him? Or were the Scots just more phlegmatic than the English?