A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

You’d better drive carefully, I admonished myself at the first turn on the descent from Jerusalem, as the Honda went into a serious skid on an invisible layer of ice on the road. I immediately reined in the fast, powerful engine, shifted to second gear, and with a muffled roaring sound rode slowly down the middle of the road, slowing the cars behind me, whose drivers felt confident on the snow-free road and even had the nerve to honk at me. But I had no intention of picking up speed, and raised my visor so I had a better view of the slippery black pavement. As I proceeded at this leisurely pace, I noticed the coppery Jerusalem light, which the white snow had shot through with noble shades of purple. At first I thought that this light was given off by the snow-covered rocks at the side of the road, but when I raised my eyes and saw that the horizon of the white mountains all around was full of the same strange light, I felt as if the heavy snowfall had penetrated the very soul of the city, and for a moment I was seized by anxiety and I slowed down even more, as if this new light had it in its power to rob me of control over my bike. In the next lane the drivers passing me were looking at me uncomprehendingly and even angrily, as if the fear I was betraying by my slow driving were not only incompatible with my heavy black crash helmet but also objectively unjustified. Even on the broad, majestic three-lane ascent to the Castel, which was entirely mantled in snow, I did not increase my speed much and only went into third gear, although the Honda was easily capable of flying up the hill in fifth and devouring the distance in a single roar. The strange light suffusing the familiar coppery pink of Jerusalem with such a sad, mysterious hue was still preoccupying me so much that I did not want to hasten its inevitable loss in the abundant stream of clear, cheerful light that would come pouring in from the open western horizon when I passed the summit.

But the horizon of the plain, which first appears as a solemn promise at the summit of the Castel, then it gradually disappears again on the steep descent separating the new stone houses of Abu Gosh from the springs of Aqua Bella, was now stained not only by the big round sun going down in the west but by the blue lights of police cars surrounding a huge, showy motorcycle that had crashed on the road and the large white helmet lying next to it. Drivers slowed down and turned their heads, trying to figure out from the exact position of the helmet what was left of the life of the wretched rider, who was already being borne toward the awesome Jerusalem light. And now the cars behind me and next to me expected me to slow down even more on the dangerous multilane descent. But I stayed in third gear as I sailed down to the little valley of Abu Gosh, thinking not of the motorcyclist but of myself. If it had been me, would Lazar’s wife — whom I still hesitated to call Dori to myself — remember me and my name, let’s say in one or two years’ time, when the trip to India was already forgotten?

But could a journey like that be forgotten? I wondered, as the Honda began eagerly devouring the short, straight ascent that divided the blue-branched pomegranate orchards of Abu Gosh from the white houses of an Arab village whose name I had never succeeded in learning, and which still looked to me like a Jewish settlement onto which the minaret of a mosque had been grafted. After all, India wasn’t Europe or America, buried in identical airports and brightly lit avenues of churches and giant department stores. Could the golden Varanasi, with the sweetish smoke of its dead, or the temples of Bodhgaya, with their statues of animals and birds, be forgotten just like that? And was this woman, whose nickname I tried to whisper against the wind, doomed to go on remembering the journey to India even when she was an old woman in her nursing-home bed? What a pity that she would not be able to add to this memory, which from now on would become absolute, the strange passion that the young doctor accompanying them had conceived for her, a passion which gave an unexpected sexual value to a woman approaching her fiftieth year. Strange, I thought to myself as the motorcycle began picking up speed on the pleasant curves of the Sha’ar-Hagai road and I had to lower the plastic visor against the stinging, pine-scented wind, strange that I still didn’t know the date of her birth, even though her passport had lain open more than once before my eyes.

And thus, full of tender thoughts of love in spite of the savage roaring of my motorcycle behind my back, I emerged in fifth gear from Sha’ar-Hagai into the Ayalon Valley, crossing the last border of Jerusalem, which had steeped me in rest but also in enforced idleness, with a feeling of relief. Before I could enjoy the orchards and broad fields, and the large water reservoir which had recently been built here, a first quiet flash of lightning appeared on the horizon, which was the greenish color of a computer screen, signaling a warning that the big cloud floating merrily toward me like a dirigible, ignited by the rosy glow of the setting sun, was already preparing to burst not into fire but with water. I had to hurry, I said to myself, and increased my speed to over sixty-five miles an hour, noticing too late the police car parked on the other side, which caught me in its radar trap. The blue light began to blink and the car started to move, which forced me, even before the policeman decided on his policy, to shoot up to a hundred and sixty and disabuse him of even the glimmer of a hope of catching up with me. And at a really wild speed, foreign to my nature and also to my values, I ate up in a few minutes the twelve miles separating the Trappist monastery from the interchange leading to the airport, the thought of the passenger terminal filling me with intense longings, and by side roads and detours I entered the heart of Tel Aviv, which seemed to me, in spite of the nagging, miserable rain, full of a secret new promise.

Once home, with my bags crouching in the middle of the room like a couple of wild, wet animals, I phoned Lazar’s house immediately. It wasn’t only my right, I thought, but also my duty to check up on my patient, who to my surprise answered the phone herself and sounded more confused and lost in her own home than she had in India. But perhaps thanks to the trust I had inspired in her on our first meeting, when she was lying on a sleeping bag in the Bodhgaya monastery, she soon bucked up and shed her listlessness, and gave me a few details about her physical condition, at least insofar as she understood it. The head of internal medicine at the hospital, Professor Levine, had come to see her the previous morning and had wanted to hospitalize her immediately in his ward, but her parents had decided to wait for their friend Hishin, who had returned from Paris this morning. Hishin had come straight from the airport, given her a long examination, and recommended that she remain at home, even though her temperature had gone up again. Her temperature had gone up? I was profoundly disappointed, because I had presumed that the blood transfusion would also eliminate the liver infection, which was apparently the cause of the ongoing dysfunction in the immune system. “Did you tell Hishin about what happened in India?” I asked. “Of course,” replied Einat. “My mother and father told him everything.”

“And what did he say?” I inquired anxiously. She thought for a minute, and then said, “He said that the main thing was that it turned out all right.”

“What turned out all right?” I sneered, offended, but Einat was unable to explain Professor Hishin’s meaning, and so — with a pounding heart, tightening my grip on the receiver — I dared to ask to speak to her mother for a minute. But her parents weren’t at home. Lazar’s wife had gone to work after Hishin’s visit, and Lazar had gone out on errands shortly before I phoned. “And you’re at home alone?” I said in a tone that surprised even me by its anger. “Yes,” she said, presumably also taken aback by my inexplicable rage. When she saw that I had fallen into a strange silence, she asked if I wanted her father to call me when he got back. “No, it doesn’t matter,” I said quickly, “I’ll see him tomorrow at the hospital.” I hung up, undid the buttons of my leather jacket, threw it onto the floor, and immediately phoned the surgical department, to get hold of Hishin and hear from him directly what he thought of the blood transfusion. But it transpired that Hishin, who had only just arrived, had gone to the internal medicine ward to talk to Levine. “What for?” I asked anxiously. But the nurse didn’t know. “What did you come back in such a hurry for?” asked my rival-friend, the other resident, grabbing the phone from the nurse. “We all thought that you would take advantage of the trip to do a little sightseeing on your own.” He sounded friendly. Had he heard something from Hishin about the transfusion I had performed in Varanasi? He wanted to hear my first impressions of India, but I didn’t have the patience to talk about my trip, and I asked him what had happened in the department during my two weeks’ absence, inquiring about one patient after the other, mentioning their names, which I remembered perfectly, and asking about the results of the operations at which I had been present. He was surprised by my detailed questions, but he tried to answer them as fully as possible. Then I suddenly remembered the woman who had been lying on the operating table when Lazar came to call Hishin to his office. “How is she? How is she?” I asked in unaccountable agitation. “You sewed her up yourself.” He sounded slightly embarrassed when he replied, “She died of an internal hemorrhage a day or two after you left.”