A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

And thus the final clarification of my position in the surgical department was concluded. There were only two weeks of the trial year left, and I tried to get the most out of them and not to miss a single operation. Sometimes I would stay in the hospital in the evening, after my shift was over, just on the off-chance that I might be able to take part in an emergency operation and look deep inside the human body again before my enforced banishment from surgery began. And now that I was about to leave, everyone was generous. From time to time I was allowed to finish minor sutures by myself, or even to begin primary incisions. And I did it well, or at least I thought so. Senior doctors in the department, who knew that I was soon leaving, nodded their heads in satisfaction, and Hishin himself would say, “Very good, excellent stitching, what a pity you’re leaving us,” and wink at me. But we never had a real talk. Once, when we were standing and waiting in the operating room for the results of the lab tests, he asked me to tell him about India, but I answered with deliberate dryness and blandness, and then he said nastily to the nurses busy with the instruments, “What do you think of Dr. Rubin? We sent him to India and he keeps all his experiences to himself. You could show us a few pictures, at least. The Lazars were at my place yesterday and they complained that you were still hanging on to all the photographs of the trip.”

Indeed, I was still hanging on to all the photographs of the trip, including the ones of Lazar and his wife. The pictures were lying on the little table next to my bed, and I would often look at the two of them, study the way they stood together in front of different views of the Taj Mahal, which I was now sorry I had missed owing to my exaggerated generosity. Again and again I examined her face and her body and the way she stood and the way she managed to smile spontaneously in all the pictures, and in my heart I insisted on calling her “my love.” I knew that if I gave the photos to Lazar, I would run the risk of finally parting from them, whereas I was busy racking my brains all the time for ways to renew my contact with Lazar, in order to reach her through him. The idea of secretly developing pictures of her by herself and keeping them struck me as immoral, even though I imagined that in the end I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation, at least with regard to one picture in which she looked particularly charming in the reddish brown Indian light. I wondered what they had in mind regarding the financial arrangements between us. Were they going to give me a fee or not? At the beginning of the month I received my full salary from the hospital, and I saw that there was no mention on the slip of a vacation or absence from work. As if the journey to India had taken place only in my imagination. Had the administrative head of the hospital issued secret instructions to the financial department to ignore my absence, or had it simply not been brought to their attention? For the time being I didn’t go to Lazar to ask him about it, so I wouldn’t have to remind him of the remuneration his wife had promised me in our telephone conversation on the eve of the trip. The knapsack with the medical kit was still in my apartment too, and for a few days I wondered what I should do with it. It occurred to me to confiscate it as compensation for my trouble, but I was afraid that Dr. Hessing, the head pharmacist, who had prepared it with such loving care, was still waiting for it. Finally I decided to hand it back to him personally, and to my surprise he was disappointed that I had seen fit to drag it back from India with me instead of donating it to some institution there, as he had suggested. “We were in an emergency situation there up to the last minute,” I explained to him. “I didn’t know whether I might need it until we were actually on our way home, and I could hardly leave it standing in the middle of the airport.”

“I would simply have written the word “Israel” and the name of our hospital on it and left it with one of the airport guards,” said the pharmacist regretfully. And he unpacked the drugs and dressings and threw them all away without even looking at them, and put the instruments into an old cardboard box. I wanted to say something to him about the resourcefulness and imagination with which he had prepared the kit, and tell him about how I had used it, but he was already shaking his head at me with a certain hostility, as if I had spoiled his intention of taking advantage of our trip to make a private gesture of humanity toward the true sufferers of this world.

After this I made up my mind to give the photos to Lazar, and thanks to the good education I had received at home, I refrained at the last moment from duplicating for myself even one of the pictures in which she was alone and contented myself with the more distant family photos I had taken in Bodhgaya. If I was to liberate myself from the thoughts enslaving me to this woman, I warned myself, it had better be sooner than later, and a good, clear picture like the one in which she was standing and smiling (albeit only a faint smile) with the entire Taj Mahal floating miraculously behind her head, shining in the rosy light, would only delay the desired liberation. Although three weeks had already passed since I had seen her, things kept on happening to complicate my feelings toward her. For example, there had been Hishin’s casual remark about how it wasn’t only Lazar who took an interest in my future in the hospital, and the sudden suspicion, idiotic but persistent, that Hishin too was secretly in love with her. Thus, in the afternoon of one of my last days in the surgical department, I went to the administrative wing to give Lazar the photos, to ask about the welfare of my patient, and at the same time to give my regards to his wife. But the secretary, who immediately recognized me and remembered my name and greeted me with genuine heartiness, informed me regretfully that Lazar had just left his office for his lunch break. A devil must have gotten into me, for just as I was, still in my white coat, I hurried to catch up with him or, more accurately, to follow him.

For I was sure that he was on his way to meet the woman I persisted in secretly calling “my love.” He didn’t like leaving her alone, I thought with anxiety and a spurt of lust, which hastened my steps and sharpened my senses so that I was soon able to identify the big head with the mane of curly gray hair in the distance, among the people streaming toward the hospital parking lot. And as I walked I took off my white coat, which I bundled into the Honda’s black box. I took out the crash helmet and quickly put it on, and although I didn’t have my leather jacket with me and it was quite cold outside, I started the motorcycle. Since I knew the make of Lazar’s car, which we had discussed on the long train journey from New Delhi to Varanasi, I was able to identify it as it pulled out of its reserved parking place. From the movies I was familiar with the advantages of pursuing an automobile on a motorcycle, but I had never considered the absolute advantage of the helmet visor, which allowed the pursuer to tail the target so closely as to be almost intimate. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and Lazar’s car wove confidently and cleverly among the traffic, aiming for the center of town and the street where Lazar’s wife’s office was. There was no parking, and he had to leave his car on the sidewalk, apologizing to the owner of the store whose display window he blocked, and wait for his wife there. She finally came out, after a few minutes of waiting which seemed interminable to me too as I sat at a little distance on my Honda, getting damp from the fine drizzle filling the air. When I saw her hurrying on her high heels, this middle-aged woman in a short skirt — perhaps too short for her age — draped in the velvety blue tunic that she had taken all the way to India but hardly worn at all, her plump face laughing, a bundle of office files tucked under her heavy arm, insisting on opening an umbrella to protect her bare head during the short distance between the office door and the car, I realized that there was no mistake about it, it wasn’t a delusion or a mirage: I was really in love with her.