A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

When I returned to the apartment at midday, I found not only the little girls and their mother but also the doctor and his brother, waving the results of the tests. My suspicions were right. There was liver damage. The coagulation system was impaired. The bilirubin was very high, nearly thirty. The ALT had risen from 40 to 180, and the AST was also elevated. Hypoglycemia was causing the extreme fatigue. The patient needed an urgent injection of glucose, and perhaps also something to replenish the depleted clotting factors, the simplest thing being a unit of fresh blood. They also showed me results of tests I hadn’t requested. There was no doubt that they had done a thorough job — spent the whole morning running from one laboratory to the next and squeezing the maximum information out of the samples I had given them. Now I had to get back to my patient as quickly as possible; I didn’t have a minute to waste. I took out my wallet and gave them a hundred dollars, a very generous sum, not only in their eyes but in mine. However, I added a condition: that they wouldn’t leave me to get back by myself but would put me on the right train for Gaya, since there was no hope of getting on a flight. They were astonished and delighted by the fee and promised to make a generous donation to charity with part of it, and they said that of course they would put me on a good train to Gaya, but first they wanted to know if I had seen anything of Calcutta. “Very little,” I replied. “It’s a rough place, but it’s not hell on earth.” They burst into hearty laughter, but insisted that parts of the city were indeed hellish, as if being a hell on earth constituted a major tourist attraction they were reluctant to give up. On the way to the train station they would show me places that would really depress me, but on condition that I first sit down to feast. I wasn’t hungry, and my anxiety for my patient was beginning to overwhelm me, but I couldn’t refuse the blandishments of my genial hosts. In the meantime a lot of little dishes arrived, full of every possible kind of food in a variety of original shapes and colors. The doctor and his brother sat down next to me with the little girls in their arms, and they all watched to make sure that I didn’t miss tasting a single dish. I soon felt full and slightly nauseated. The grave looks of the dark little girls added to my anxiety. I stood up and announced apologetically that the results of the tests had deprived me of my peace of mind. “I beg you, my friends, in the name of God, let’s go, and if you want to show me something on the way, maybe you can drop me next to the river, because I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but ever since I arrived in India I’ve been drawn to rivers as if I’ve fallen in love with them.” Although they were sorry at the interruption of the feast, they quickly did as I asked and took me to the Maidan, a vast green expanse overlooking the river, at the northern end of which stood a tall column, where they took a photograph of me with my camera and posed for me to take one of them. But I wasn’t satisfied with looking at the river, I wanted to go right down to the water. They took me down, and when they saw me suddenly bending over and dipping my fingers in the chilly water, they bowed their heads in gratification. This private and independent dip reinforced their opinion that I was worthy of seeing hell from within, and not only from the window of a speeding car but very slowly, in a man-drawn rickshaw, through terrible alleys full of vast piles of stinking garbage, in some of which decaying human beings were crawling, dying from the moment they were born, cast-off humans twitching like broken insects squashed beneath a giant boot. For an entire hour they led me through streets that had apparently once been pleasant and civilized, in which fine houses had once stood, and that now looked as if they had been ravaged by a terrible leprosy, and the pain was even greater because of the vestiges of beauty that were still evident. And so we advanced in the clear winter sunshine, I in the slow rickshaw and my two bearded escorts in their white suits walking beside me, occasionally taking a coin out of their pocket and placing it in the palm of a dying man or a child, seemingly pleased by my interest. “Could hell be worse?” they asked, turning to me in the end with a strangely triumphant expression as we entered the station.

Although the train trip lasted nine hours, I couldn’t sleep a wink. The sights of Calcutta mingled with the gnawing anxiety about Einat had turned into a single entity weighing on my heart. In the end, when sleepiness almost overcame me, I went and stood in the corridor, afraid that Gaya might slip past in the night. After midnight I was ejected onto the platform, which looked like the last station at the end of the world, and picked my way carefully through the rickshaws standing outside in the hope of finding the rickshaw driver with the white turban, but he wasn’t there. Another, younger driver took me to Bodhgaya on a country road winding through pleasant hills outlined by a slender crescent moon. The hotel by the river was closed and dark, and for a moment I forgot where the entrance to our little bungalow was. On my last legs, I walked around the building, and for the first time on this trip I felt my composure collapse, and a painful, unfamiliar sob escaped my lips. Would I really have to stay outside all night in the chill rising from the river, just because I wanted to be ideal not only in the eyes of the Lazars but in my own eyes too? I sat down under one of the large trees to recover, and remembered I still had one sandwich left, which I ate in order to ward off sleep. Then I stood up, heartened as if by a glass of good wine, and walked around the grounds again until I recognized the bungalow. I knocked lightly and the door opened at once. It was Dori, without her glasses, her hair loose, in a thin nightgown that outlined her full body and her big, firm breasts. I saw that her slippers had high heels. At first she seemed about to bestow only one of her automatic eye-smiles on me, but her emotions got the better of her and she spread out her arms and embraced me with forbidden warmth. For a moment we lingered in the gloomy kitchen, where dirty pots stood on the stove, but Lazar immediately appeared and gripped my head in a powerful embrace of both anger and deep affection. “What’s the matter with you? Where did you disappear to? In a little while we would have left without you! Just don’t tell me that you took those tests all the way to Calcutta!”

“Didn’t you get my note?” I questioned him with a strange pride. “Was it really necessary to go all the way there?” said Lazar as if he hadn’t heard me. “Yes, it was necessary,” I replied with a new firmness. “I got all the results possible in a reliable form, and now I know where we stand.”

“Where?” asked Lazar, who seemed offended by the way I had spoken. “In a minute,” I said. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Just let me check on Einat first.” And just as I was, without washing my hands, I went into the room where a yellow light illuminated the sick girl, who was still scratching herself in her restless sleep and who had no idea of the dangerous time bomb ticking inside her. I crouched down by her bed and laid my hand on her forehead. The fever was the same as before. Lazar and his wife looked at me impatiently. Her condition in the past twenty-four hours had not been encouraging, and now I had come back with the results of the tests and I was bending over her in such concern. I have to worry them, I said to myself, otherwise they won’t cooperate with me; otherwise the authority I’m going to need here will be compromised. I held her limp wrist to take her pulse. Her green eyes opened wide in her thin, beautiful face, but she didn’t smile like her mother. “Well?” said Lazar, irritated by my performance. “In a minute. Just let me wash my hands,” I said, and went into the kitchen. Lazar’s wife handed me a towel and soap, and I smiled at them, turned to Lazar, and said, “As far as Calcutta’s concerned, you were right. But there are good people there, and you won’t believe it, I actually saw a movie.”