A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

In the middle of the night I woke up, opened the closet, stood in front of the mirror, and examined my reflection in the dark. I suddenly whispered her name, Dori, Dori, as if by the mere act of whispering her name I was exorcising her or secretly taking possession of her. This is too weird, this is insane, I chided myself. The room was heated to boiling point, and in spite of the high ceiling I felt stifled. I got dressed and went downstairs to see if I could get a glass of milk. But it was two o’clock in the morning, and the hotel bar was still and silent. Even the reception clerk — perhaps the same one who had helped me to break into the Lazars’ room that afternoon — was asleep on a bed hidden behind the desk. I wandered around the big, dark dining room, where the tables were already laid for breakfast, and before going back upstairs I opened the door into the kitchen, as I was in the habit of doing when I was on call in the hospital at night, in the hope of finding something there. And indeed, the big kitchen was not in total darkness. In its recesses a faint light flickered redly on great copper saucepans, and I heard low laughter. I advanced past the neat tables and gleaming sinks. Next to a big dining table I saw three people sitting and talking in a foreign language, not Italian, eating soup from pottery bowls decorated with pink flowers. They were foreign workers, perhaps refugees. One of them immediately rose from his seat and asked me what I wanted, in Italian and with a friendly expression on his face. “Milk,” I said in English, and I laid a heavy hand on my stomach, to signal the burning pain of my sudden fall into love, while with my other hand I raised an imaginary glass to my lips and drank it to the dregs. He understood at once, repeated my request to his guests in their language, and went to the refrigerator to pour me a glass of milk. Then I saw that next to the giant fridge, whose motor was humming like a small plane’s, sat a little girl with a waiflike appearance, looking at the screen of a small television set. And next to her a thin bespectacled man with a very sickly appearance sat paging through a school workbook.

Lazar received special permission, apparently on medical grounds, to meet us in the arrival lounge immediately after passport control. Even before his wife and daughter noticed him, I saw his stocky, broad-shouldered figure in a wet raincoat standing next to the guard at the end of the barrier, anxiously inspecting the people walking past him as if he really doubted our ability to get home without him. Next to him, his long hair soaking wet and a distracted expression on his face, which resembled his father’s, stood Lazar’s son, whom his mother hurried to gather lovingly to her bosom, as if he were the dangerously ill child who had to be brought back home. But Lazar had no intention of allowing anyone to waste time on hugs and kisses. He handed his son a big black umbrella and instructed him to lead his sister, draped in a raincoat, straight to the car, while he himself hurried to seize an empty cart and began to collect the luggage. “Wait till you see the storm raging outside — you’ll wish you were back in India,” he warned us. “Was it really necessary for you to get back in such a hurry?” his wife asked him, her tone still showing vestiges of her anger at having been left alone for twenty-four hours. “Not only necessary but essential,” he replied with a triumphant smile, and when he saw me looking at him somberly, he reassured me cheerfully, “Don’t worry, your parents are here too, waiting for you outside.”

“My parents?” I was astonished. “What on earth for?” Lazar seemed taken aback. “What for? I don’t know — so that you won’t have to go home by yourself in the rain, I suppose. My secretary got hold of them on the phone this morning, and they promised to be here to take you back to Jerusalem.” But I didn’t want to go to Jerusalem now, even though I had left my Honda there; I wanted to remain in Tel Aviv so as to report back to the hospital at the crack of dawn. Lazar had kept his promise; the whole trip had lasted only two weeks, and here, next to the luggage conveyor turning emptily on its axis, the length of our absence shrank to its natural proportions. Nevertheless, I was afraid that significant changes to my disadvantage had taken place in the meantime. “Did you have time to tell Hishin about what happened?” I asked, dying to know if Hishin had already been told about the blood transfusion I had performed in Varanasi. “No,” said Lazar, with his arm around his wife’s shoulder, as if he still had to appease her. “Hishin’s not here, he took off for Paris a few days ago. That’s why he didn’t want to come with us himself. He kept the real reason from us. Never mind, we managed very well without him.” He smiled at us complacently, as if the medical responsibility had been shared equally among the three of us. He seemed elated now. The meeting with the group of donors had been a success. I saw that underneath his raincoat he was elegantly dressed in a suit and tie. His wife started to fawn on him, the abandonment of yesterday suddenly forgiven. I looked at her and found myself blushing. She looked tired but happy to be back home. Had I really fallen a little bit in love with her, I wondered, or was it all some strange hallucination?

But there was no time to go on thinking about it, because the luggage started arriving, and soon it would be time to say good-bye. My suitcase, which had already been separated from theirs on the plane, turned up first, and Lazar saw no reason to keep me waiting. “You still have to drive to Jerusalem — you’d better get moving,” he said firmly, and while I was still wondering how to say good-bye to them, he remembered something and grabbed hold of my suitcase. “Just a minute, let’s free you of the silly shoe box we dumped on you before you go.” To my surprise, Dori tried to stop him. “It’s not important, not now, don’t trouble him with that now, his parents are waiting for him. He’ll give it back when he’s got time.” But Lazar could see no reason why I should have to drag his wife’s shoes to Jerusalem and back. “It won’t take more than half a minute,” he said, and he helped me to undo the straps and open the suitcase, and without even waiting for me to assist him, he inserted his hands as delicately as an experienced surgeon into my belongings and quickly extracted the cardboard box, which I had carefully avoided opening throughout the trip. He said, “There you are, no trouble at all,” and smiled good-bye. “Then I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow,” I said in an effort to keep the thread of a connection between us. “At the hospital?” Lazar seemed puzzled, as if this weren’t the place where we both worked, but he immediately remembered and said, “Of course.”

“Then I won’t see him again?” said his wife, examining me with surprise but not with sorrow. Locks of her long hair had fallen onto her face and neck, her makeup had faded during the flight, and under the white neon light, her wrinkles were once more revealed. She didn’t know how to say good-bye to me, and a sweet wave of pain trembled inside me. “The photographs,” I stammered in embarrassment, and my face began to burn as if I were playing some trick on them. “The pictures I took of you are still in my camera. When they’re ready, I’ll bring them.” Lazar and his wife remembered the snapshots and exclaimed happily, “Right, our pictures!”

“Yes,” I promised, “maybe I’ll bring them around to your place, because I should check up on my patient anyway and see how she’s getting along.”

And perhaps because of the promise that we would meet again we parted casually, as we had parted from time to time in India, without shaking hands or embracing. Still I refused even to wonder whether Dori had been touched by a spark of that absurd nocturnal fantasy of falling in love, which would no doubt vanish as soon as I got through customs and emerged into the night, where the stormy rain and hail had gathered the people loyally waiting into a dense huddle under the scant protection of the shelter — a huddle that still managed to display the traditional Israeli enthusiasm, embracing every returning citizen of the state as if his absence warranted a gentle hand to guide him home. This at any rate was apparently the attitude of my parents, who had waited for an hour at two different observation posts in order not to miss me when I came out. My mother spotted me first, and we had to go to some trouble to find my father, who was standing calmly under his umbrella in the pouring rain, after giving up his place under the shelter with his natural gentlemanliness to two elderly women who had been reduced to hopeless despair by the storm. “You look well,” said my mother as we followed my father in the dark to the parking lot, trying to shelter me under her little umbrella. “You’re a little thinner, but you look happy. So you weren’t disappointed by our India.” My mother was always afraid of disappointments and disillusionments that might come my way, afraid of those states of emptiness that threaten to overwhelm the young. Consequently, as the person who had encouraged me to accompany the Lazars on the trip to India, which she felt entitled to call “ours” because of her uncle’s memories, she was on tenterhooks to know how I had managed. And although I hadn’t yet had a chance to say anything of substance, she sensed that I had returned satisfied. If not the rain, which forced us to step carefully between the puddles of water, she might have sensed something of my feelings for Dori as well, and of the pain of parting which had already started to bubble inside me.