A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

My mother thought that I should do the driving as the storm gathered force around us, but my father refused to forfeit his place at the wheel. “It will be all right,” he reassured her. “I know the road, it’s plain sailing,” and she had to make do with seating me beside him to guard against possible mistakes on his part. He took off his coat, cleaned his glasses, and as usual overheated the engine. He hadn’t yet spoken to me. Only after he had brought us calmly and carefully out of the parking lot into the heart of the storm, and turned onto the main road, did he turn his face to me at last. He looked at me affectionately and said, “So, it was a success.”

“A success?” I said, startled. “In what sense?”

“In the sense that you had to prove yourself,” my father replied in his characteristically calm tone. “Lazar’s secretary said that you had performed the correct medical procedure and saved the situation over there.” I quickly turned my head to my mother, who was sitting in the backseat. She did not seem pleased that my father had blurted out the story, stealing my thunder, so to speak. However, happiness surged up in me. Had Lazar already managed to tell one of the professors about the tests in Calcutta and the blood transfusion in Varanasi, and was that how the news had traveled to the administrative office? Or had he said something in all innocence to his secretary, and she, full of goodwill but without really understanding anything, had sung my praises to my parents when she called to tell them when the plane was due to arrive? I would find all that out tomorrow, I said to myself, but in the meantime my father, who was eager to hear every detail, and in the right order, was already forcing me to describe the medical part of the trip from both the practical and the theoretical point of view. He drank in my explanations thirstily. He possessed the virtue of being able to learn something from everyone, which was why he was such a silent man and such a profound listener. Now, as he sat erect and slightly back from the wheel, silently contemplating, like an objective judge, the concerted efforts of the car, the wipers, the headlights, the windshield, and the road itself as they battled the savage storm threatening to drive us off the road, he wanted to learn from my lips the full extent of the salvation I had brought to the Lazars. He was afraid that the modesty he attributed to me, which he regarded as an unfortunate inheritance he himself had bequeathed to me, would make me belittle the importance of my achievement. Likewise, he had still not resigned himself to the fact that the second resident had been given the longed-for post we had all been hoping for. My mother too listened in silence. From time to time she slipped in a brief question, ultimately succeeding in picking up my lack of enthusiasm for Einat, for whom she had cherished secret hopes. She was trying to hear the inner story, which I was attempting to disguise as I spoke. In the end she blurted, “You keep saying Lazar’s wife, Lazar’s wife, but what’s her name?”

“Her name’s Dorit, but her husband calls her Dori,” I replied, and a sweet pain gripped me. “And what did you call her?” my mother stubbornly demanded. “Me?” I wondered momentarily why she was so insistent, staring wearily at the road which loomed up through the rain. “I called her Dori too in the end,” I admitted. “And what kind of a woman is she?” my mother kept on. “A spoiled woman,” I answered at once. “In the beginning she made a big fuss about the hotels.” And I closed my eyes in exhaustion, seeing the plump little woman advancing along the alleys of Varanasi with her slow, pampered walk, stepping carefully in the mud and smiling absentmindedly at the Indians crowding around her. And a wave of warmth suddenly engulfed me and almost choked me.

And I realized at that moment that I had to be careful when I was talking to my mother, because she sometimes succeeded in seeing into my soul with astonishing accuracy, and she was liable to sense something of the strange feeling I had brought back with me from the trip, and it was only natural that this feeling would offend and upset her and give rise to the wish to do something to nip this ridiculous infatuation in the bud. If that was the right word for my thoughts about this woman, which now included a lust that I was just becoming aware of, sitting cozily next to my father as we drove through the night from Lydda to Jerusalem. I looked at the road climbing between the hills, from which the rain and mist had cleared, giving way to lightly falling snowflakes. It would be a shame, I said to myself, if my mother had to suffer even for an instant because of a feeling that was absurd and hopeless by its very nature. It would be better not to talk too much about the trip to India, in case I unintentionally let slip some hint that would embarrass us all unnecessarily. Accordingly, I suggested to my father, who was a little offended, that I take his place by the wheel, because the airy flakes were turning the journey home into an adventure that might become dangerous. And in fact the light, shining flakes, which had begun flying through the air a few miles after Sha’ar-Hagai, turned into a heavy snowfall as we approached the city, and for the next two days I was stuck in Jerusalem, because my parents, who generally trusted my driving, implored me not to return to Tel Aviv on my motorcycle on the snowy roads. Since I felt a great weariness rising in me, the fruit of the unexpected excitements of the trip to India, I agreed to settle down again in the old bedroom of my childhood and relax into a delicious sensation that had nothing to do with food and drink — for my mother had never distinguished herself as a cook — but with the silent stirrings of a ghostly British presence in the apartment, which gave me the feeling that even when I was lying in bed that I was participating in an old black-and-white family movie full of stable, kindly values, whose happy, moral conclusion was guaranteed in advance. Thus, hidden at home, surrounded by a blanket of snow, I tried to cool and perhaps even to kill my infatuation with Lazar’s smiling round-limbed wife, and I tried to stop thinking about her, so that here, in the faithful room of my childhood and youth, she would sink into the depths of the darkness, dragged down by the weight of her years.

But the smiling middle-aged woman refused to sink, and blended instead with the familiar furniture and curtains of the room to which I had been brought at the age of two, when my parents moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv because of my father’s government job. And so I escaped into sleep, careful not to leave traces of my lust on the spotless sheets provided by my mother, who marveled together with my father at my sudden craving for sleep. They had grown accustomed to seeing me as a serious student who burned the midnight oil, a hard worker who got up early in the morning, and more recently as a doctor on call, capable of going without sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch. “You’re taking us back to your days in boot camp,” said my mother with a slightly worried air when I entered the dim old kitchen at twilight after sleeping the whole afternoon, feeling a pang of intense longing for the bright colors of the Indian temples. “It’s the soporific effect of the snow,” explained my father, in English, and he got up to give me my old place at the table, which he had taken for himself when I left home. “Yes, yes, you sit in your place,” he insisted when I tried to refuse, at the same time checking on my mother as she poured my tea and set it before me with a slice of crumb cake, on which I immediately spread a layer of jam to take away the dry, slightly moldy taste, which had depressed me even as a child.

“While you were asleep, your father went to town and had the photographs you took in India developed,” my mother said with a slightly embarrassed air as she handed me two envelopes crammed with pictures. “My photographs?” I turned to my father almost with a yell, refusing to believe that this quiet, aristocratic man had stolen into my room on his own initiative and taken the two rolls of film lying next to my bed while I was sleeping. In fact, it turned out that the initiative was my mother’s — she had gone into my room to check if I was warm enough, noticed the two rolls of film, and sent my father to have them developed in the center of town. She must have wanted to find out more about the trip to India, since I was too busy sleeping and too preoccupied with my thoughts to tell her. I suppose she can sense that something happened to me over there, I thought, hanging my head and avoiding her eyes, but even her native intelligence would never dare to imagine what had really happened. “Don’t you want to see how your pictures came out?” she wondered, as I went on gripping the two envelopes tightly in my hand. “But they’re not all mine,” I explained quickly. “Some of them are the Lazars’, I lent them the camera when they went on a trip to the Taj Mahal.” My parents were astounded to hear that the Lazars had gone off together and left me by myself with their sick daughter, and even after I told them that it had been my idea to send them to see the Taj Mahal, they went on criticizing the Lazars for accepting my offer, though they were proud of my generosity. “Well, why don’t you show them to us already, and tell us all about them,” said my mother as she stretched out an eager hand for the envelopes. “Of course,” I said, “but I thought you’d already looked at them.” And a little panic took hold of me at the thought of confronting her image here, in my parent’s sad kitchen, and I stood up at once and put my cup and plate in the sink and went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth again, and when I returned the kitchen was flooded with light and the table was covered with colored pictures glowing with India’s reddish brown light, and already from a distance I saw her figure, which had miraculously managed to insert itself in more pictures than I would have imagined possible, and not only those taken by Lazar at the Taj Mahal. Was it her innate serenity and automatic smile that enabled her, in spite of her abundant plumpness, to look so natural and photogenic in every picture, even when she was surrounded by Indians in rags or sitting on a rickety bench in the twilight next to the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? My father passed one picture after another before his eyes and requested detailed explanations, but my mother fell silent, and a new pallor covered her cheeks. “She certainly likes having her picture taken,” she said at last, and there was a note of complaint in her voice. “Who?” I asked innocently. “Lazar’s wife — or what do you call her?” My mother kept her head lowered, as if she were afraid of meeting my eyes. “It’s her husband, it’s Lazar. I lent him my camera,” I said in self-justification, my voice muffled by the wave of excitement that surged up in me again at the sight of the woman strewn in bright glossy squares all over our gray kitchen table.