A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

I went into a fabric shop for the first time since I’d arrived in India, to buy something for my parents. Entering the fragrant darkness, which rustled with flowered fabrics, I thought of my parents’ two very separate beds and wondered if they would consent to having anything so bold and blazing in their bedroom. In the end I bought two lengths of brightly colored cloth which seemed to me suitable for bedcovers; I wanted to go on and buy something else as well, because everything was so amazingly cheap, but suddenly I was fed up with wandering around alone and decided to go back to the hotel and chat for a while with Lazar and his wife; maybe she too would thank me for the enjoyable day I had given her. When I got back they had apparently gone to bed, for there was no sound in their room, not even a crack of light under the door. There was nothing left to do but go up to bed myself, and as on the last night in Bodhgaya, I tossed and turned for hours in search of sleep, which usually came to me the minute I put my head on the pillow.

We arrived in Rome in the afternoon, and of course we missed the El Al plane, that always left exactly on time so it would reach Israel before the beginning of the Sabbath. We had to wait until Sunday, but Lazar had not yet given up hope of arriving in time for his important meeting. No sooner had we settled into a big old-fashioned hotel in Via dei Coronari than he went off, to his wife’s obvious annoyance, to find a cheap flight that would get him back to Israel the next day. When I returned to the hotel in the evening, after strolling around the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, I found the two of them in the hotel lobby, a new sadness on his wife’s face. It appeared that in spite of his age, he had succeeded in getting himself onto a cheap student flight that left early the next afternoon and arrived in Tel Aviv via Athens late on Saturday evening. Delighted with his own ingenuity, he now tried to appease his wife, who saw the whole thing as vanity and caprice on the part of a man who believed that he was indispensable. The next day at noon we said good-bye to him. He seemed tense, and adopted a slightly mocking air toward his wife, who to my surprise looked really upset, as if what was at stake were not a parting for twenty-four hours but total desertion. Although I was standing next to them he embraced her and kissed her again and again, smiling as if he were secretly enjoying the anxiety that stemmed from some deep and obscure source within her, and over which she had no control. Then he turned to me, as if I were a member of the family, and said, “Take care of her until tomorrow.” I saw that these innocent and half-joking words intensified her anger and her stress, and she immediately extricated herself from his embrace, gave him a little push, and said, “Go on, go, and be careful on the way and phone the minute you get home.”

For a moment I felt a desire to try and calm the childish anxiety of this middle-aged woman, who was only nine years younger than my mother yet so strangely bound to her husband, who seemed conversely unable to tear himself away from her. But as soon as he was gone, before I had a chance to think of something suitable to say, her eyes gleamed with that smile again, as if her pride would not allow her to look miserable in my presence. She asked me if I had any plans, and when I hesitated, she asked if I would be kind enough to stay with Einat for a little while, because she had to go and have her hair done, since she too had to go straight back to the office on Monday. For a moment I was flabbergasted. I had baby-sat for them for an entire day in New Delhi, and now she had the nerve to expect me to stay stuck in the hotel again, as if I really were their hired hand, even though nothing had yet been said about the fee due to me for the trip. Her confident assumption that she would be returning to work on Monday, too, with the mental image it brought back to me of the self-assured woman in the short black dress and the high heels who had greeted me with such aplomb in her legal office, infuriated me. And who was going to take care of Einat on Monday, and take her to have the tests she still needed? Did they mean to turn me into their family doctor and nursemaid? But before I could say anything, I saw that my silence had been taken for consent, and she turned away and disappeared around the corner, as if she knew exactly where she was going. I returned unwillingly to my room and picked up my book, no longer interested in questioning Einat. Then I knocked lightly on her door, but there was no answer. I knocked again, and called her name, but there was dead silence on the other side of the door, and for the first time since meeting her I felt real panic. I hurried to the reception desk, introduced myself and explained my connection with the Lazars, and asked them to open the door. At first they refused, but I insisted, and eventually I was able, with the help of my doctor’s ID, to infect them with my alarm. But when the bellboy attempted to open the door with the master key, it transpired that a key was stuck in the lock on the inside of the door, and the door refused to open. We banged on it, but there was no reply. I tried to reassure myself that Einat’s condition had already shown signs of steady improvement after the blood transfusion; she was even strong enough for me to think of giving her a whole diuretic pill later in the afternoon to accelerate her kidney functions, since I was still worried by the small amount of urine she passed. But by now the Italians were panicking, and they began to talk excitedly among themselves. In the end a solution was found. Another young bellboy, who looked like a North African, was summoned, and he immediately entered the adjacent room and with the agility of a monkey succeeded in entering the Lazars’ room through the window. When he opened the door and let us into the room, we found Einat sound asleep — after many sleepless nights she had finally succeeded in falling into a deep, restful sleep.

“Everything’s okay, everything’s okay,” I reassured the disappointed Italians, who were anticipating a big drama and didn’t want to go away. I sat down next to my patient; even her hands, which hadn’t stopped their incessant scratching since we arrived in Bodhgaya, were now lying quite still on the bed. I lit a small lamp and began once more to read Hawking’s book, which according to the blurb on the cover had already been bought by millions of readers, who had no doubt thought, like me, that they were about to have the secrets of the universe explained to them, only to discover that these secrets were extremely difficult and complicated, and above all, controversial. Nevertheless, I went on reading, turning pages and skipping to more comprehensible passages and thinking crossly of Lazar’s wife. Even though my presence at the bedside of my sleeping patient was not really necessary I didn’t budge, in part because I wanted to see how she would apologize to me when she finally returned. And when she walked into the room with her elegantly styled hair, her face made up, her hands full of parcels, her high heels tapping, blushing at her lateness, I felt not anger but a strange, frightening happiness, which flooded me as if I were in love.

My face turned red and I immediately sat up in the armchair. She would never be able to guess, not even in her wildest dreams … All she did was apologize, and apologize again. She hadn’t thought that I would still be sitting next to Einat, who for some reason woke up as soon as her mother entered the room, assumed a suffering expression, and began voraciously scratching herself again. When I told Lazar’s wife about Einat’s long sleep, she looked worried and asked me to examine her again. I therefore went to fetch my stethoscope and sphygmomanometer, and palpated Einat’s flat stomach, trying to feel the damaged liver. There did not seem to be any change for the worse; the kidneys still seemed somewhat enlarged, but I decided against intervening at this stage with any additional medication, and left them after agreeing to come back to the room later for dinner. Outside it was raining, and the display windows of the European shops which had taken the place of the Indian temples gleamed with colored lights. I walked along the sidewalks, getting wet, amazed at my sudden new feeling for this impossible older woman. It’s completely idiotic, I scolded myself, but nevertheless I soon retraced my steps and returned to the hotel, went up to my room to shower, put on the shirt I had washed in Bodhgaya, and joined the two women for an excellent Italian meal. In spite of my excitement, I tried to joke with Einat, whose deep sleep had brought a fresh, rosy color to her cheeks. Her mother laughed a lot all evening, and when the phone rang and Lazar announced his safe arrival, she sounded loving and tender and not at all angry. She asked him about the flight and assured him that all was well with us. They spoke for a long time, as if they weren’t going to meet again in less than twenty-four hours. I looked at her legs, which for most of the trip had been hidden by slacks. They were youthful and very shapely, but the overflowing belly and full arms spoiled her appearance. Nevertheless my excitement persisted, not without the accompaniment of an inner nervousness, and I stayed with them longer than they expected me to.