A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

His wife emerged in sunglasses, ready to go out. She had changed the blue tunic for a colorful Indian scarf, which she had purchased that morning and immediately draped round her shoulders. On her feet she wore flat walking shoes, which made her look short and clumsy. When she saw me at the door of my room, she put her hands together and bowed her head mischievously in the Indian greeting and said, “We owe you our thanks for the Red Fort. After your stories last night we ran to see it this morning, and it really is exquisite.”

Lazar rummaged in his pockets, took out my train ticket, and said, “Here, you’d better keep it yourself.” Then he took out a pen and wrote the name of the station on the back of the ticket, and said that we should meet at the hotel at eight o’clock before leaving for the station together. “Eight o’clock?” his wife protested. “Why so early? The train leaves at ten. We’ll never get back from that place everyone says you should see at sunset. Why don’t we meet at the train station? He’s already proved himself.”

I felt a sudden surge of resentment at the way she was calmly laying down the law. I fingered the stubble of my two-day beard and said with a provocative smile, “And if we do get separated? What happens then?”

“But why should we get separated?” she asked in genuine surprise, this woman who was only here with us because she couldn’t bear being left alone. But Lazar immediately backed me up. “You’re right, everything’s possible, and if you really do get lost here, there isn’t even anyone to inform.” He rapidly wrote down the address of the hospital in Gaya on a piece of paper. “It’s over a thousand miles from here,” he said, smiling, “but at least it’s a clear and definite address. I’ve already given you money and paid for your room in the hotel. And tonight we’ll meet here, just as I said, at eight.” He turned to his wife with a frown. “You always think you can play with time. But not now. So we’ll all be back here by eight. And until then you’re free,” he added, turning back to me. “I see you like to roam around by yourself. Just see that you don’t get into trouble. And we won’t get on each other’s nerves.”

But they still didn’t leave. Now they were waiting in the corridor for a dark, very delicate boy who came to take their luggage down, and I slowly closed my door on them. In spite of my tiredness, I didn’t go back to bed but immediately began to shave, and suddenly the thought flashed across my mind, Yes, those were the right words exactly. This overweight couple was really beginning to get on my nerves, though I didn’t yet know how or why. Maybe I’m too sensitive, I said to myself, but something about the strong, deep bond shining between them, slipping to and fro with sly efficiency between Lazar’s dry, practical concern and his wife’s warm, phony charm, with her sudden, superfluous smiles, was beginning to irritate me profoundly. In spite of their openness, they weren’t frank with me, and I didn’t know what was going on in their heads, which undoubtedly worked like one constantly coordinated head. I still didn’t even know something as simple and straightforward as how much they were going to pay me for the trip. It was hard to tell what their real attitude to money was, their calculations between themselves and their calculations regarding me. And wasn’t there something strange about the fact that they were both here and dragging a doctor with them? Surely one person would have been enough to bring this sick daughter home? Suddenly it struck me that they were a little afraid of the meeting with their daughter and they had brought me along as a kind of go-between. Had Lazar been telling me the truth outside his house when he said that his wife couldn’t be without him? And if so, in what sense? It was insane. I could already sense the powerful nature of this smoothly oiled conjugality, which was only a little younger than the one between my parents, but how different they were. It would never occur to my father in a million years to take my mother’s hand like that and squeeze it in order to make her stop talking. My father would never embarrass a strange young man watching them like that. But perhaps, I said to myself as I lathered my face for the third time in anticipation of the long journey beginning tonight, perhaps I really was too sensitive, without cause, perhaps because in my heart of hearts I was still lamenting this trip imposed on me by Professor Hishin, who at this early morning hour in Israel I could see stepping, fresh and cocky, into the operating room, where the nurses, together with the anesthetist and the second resident, are waiting for him. I could even imagine Hishin’s jokes, as he teases the patient lying on the stretcher, sedated, and pale with fear, ready for the “takeoff.” Perhaps he even makes a few ironic remarks to the operating team about me and the fantastic trip he has graciously bestowed on me, although he and all the rest of them know very well that all I ever wanted was to stay at his side, next to the operating table, looking and looking deep inside the human body, in the hope that one day the knife would be placed in my hand.

Is it possible to bring up the word “Mystery” yet? Or perhaps as of now it can only be thought of? For our three characters (three? for the time being)are not seeking mystery; the relative stability of their personalities, the reasonable rationality of their thinking, has set before them a well-lit goal and a clear road to reach it. And if they only remain free of the tyranny of the imagination, of its arbitrariness, they will arrive by their own powers at the simple heart of the matter and return safely to their homes, after parting from each other without acrimony or pain.

For what will they gain from a mystery that leads nowhere? And this young doctor, a rather reflective and solitary hero, abruptly cutoffthree days agofrom ProfessorHishin’s surgical department, which has filled his life for the past year and on which he pinned his hopes for the future, is now, owing to the sudden trip to India, left without even the possibility of any other hope to cling to. He finishes shaving, washes his face, and begins packing in a mood of sullen resentment. But before he finally parts from the dim room where the colorful silk curtains are still drawn and prepares himself for a dayof intensive sightseeing — so that he will not be shamed by friends and acquaintances at home for having traveled all the way to New Delhi and failed to see the things you have to see there — he goesto check that the door is locked, quickly takes off all his clothes and lies down naked on the bed, and masturbates heavily and without recourse to fantasy, in order to feel freer and lighter for the long journey ahead, since he knows that the next bed offered him by his purposivecompanions will be very far away.

But the young doctor had no hidden desire to imagine this bed as in any sense mysterious, even though as he emerged from the hotel, erect and slightly dizzy, straight into the heart of the rosy Indian light floating over the streets stinking with stunning, colorful humanity, a twinge of anxiety entered his soul, whereas the day before, in these very same streets, even in the darkness of night, he had felt quite relaxed. Because the English movie in which he imagined that he was taking part in order to protect himself had completely vanished during the night, and now he was exposed without any barriers to the alien and powerful reality. And this anxiety was so new and sudden to the doctor that he stopped the first available rickshaw, even though it was drawn by a bicycle and not a motorcycle, and threw himself onto the soft seat, and said, Take me first to Humayun’s Tomb. And the rider-driver, a serious Indian of about fifty who wore dark glasses and spoke better English than his passenger, turned out to be an excellent tour guide and spent the rest of the day guiding the young tourist intelligently and efficiently about the city, so that he would see not only the sights the guidebooks defined as not to be missed but also those listed as optional Thus, after they had visited Humayun’s Tomb, the Qutab Minar complex, and even the National Museum, and after the guide had noted that his tourist was not a dawdler but looked quickly and walked briskly, he suggested that the tourist pay a visit, perhaps in his capacity as a doctor, to a unique site — a hospital for birds, not far from the Red Fort. There, on the second floor, in a dimly lit room, opposite stinking cages in which lay sick and wounded birds — some of them with their legs in splints, among them crushed and mangy birds of prey who would suddenly shriek horribly — the doctor’s anxiety deepened, until his soul trembled and he asked to leave. “What a crazy idea,”he argued outside, but when he saw his guide’s disappointment, he corrected himself and said, “Maybe the idea of a birds’ hospital is original, but shouldn’t human suffering come first?”