A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

But she went on sipping the last drops of tea in her cup, as if intent on stressing her independence and showing that she could be satisfied with herself and cope very well with the world around her, as long as she wasn’t left alone. Finally she stood up slowly, draped the long black cape negligently around her shoulders, took a blue scarf out of her pocket and then a sheet of paper, which she held out to the secretary, who appeared to hesitate between her natural loyalty to Lazar and her admiration for his wife. And Dori gave her a friendly smile and asked, “Do you think I could leave this medical report for my mother’s old-age home with you for Professor Levine to fill in? I’ll phone him this evening and explain.”

“It will have to wait,” Lazar intervened, with what sounded like a note of malicious satisfaction in his voice. “Levine isn’t here. He’s sick.”

“Levine’s sick again?” cried his wife, who judging by the faint alarm in her voice apparently knew the secret of his mysterious disease. “So what will we do? We have to return the questionnaire the day after tomorrow.”

“Nothing terrible will happen if your mother goes to the Health Service doctor for once,” said Lazar firmly. “She pays her dues every month and she never goes near the place.”

“Out of the question!” His wife dismissed this possibility angrily, turning to the secretary for support. “How can she go by herself to the Health Service? And who will she see there? She hasn’t seen a doctor there for years.” But Lazar seemed too tired after a hard day’s work to deal with this problem, and he grabbed his wife’s umbrella, collected the empty cups and put them on the tray, quickly cramming the remains of his wife’s cream cake into his mouth as he did so, and hurried toward the door, where I was waiting for an opportunity to take my leave. “Perhaps some other doctor in the internal medicine department could do it instead of Professor Levine,” suggested the secretary carefully. “I can’t ask anyone to do it,” snapped Lazar. “This isn’t my private hospital, and the doctors aren’t my servants. Levine is a friend of mine, and he looks after her mother out of friendship. Nothing terrible will happen,” he said, turning to his wife again, still in a faintly spiteful tone, “if your mother goes to the Health Service for once. It won’t kill her.” And he switched off the light in the room, even though the two women were still in it; and I, having already advanced into the illuminated secretaries’ office, looked back and saw the heavy shadow on the wall, trapped between the shadows of the foliage of the two big plants, and once again my heart was struck with bafflement at this inexplicable attraction, and still I hesitated, waiting for the right moment to say good-bye without making it final. They were leaving through the brightly lit office cubicles, stepping between computers and gray-covered typewriters, and I waited politely for her to pass me. To my surprise, I smelled the sharp, sweet scent of the perfume she had bought at the airport when we arrived at New Delhi, where she had asked our opinion of it. Now she was listening to the secretary telling her some long, complicated, personal story which Lazar had apparently already heard during the course of the day, and I went on trailing behind them — a young doctor whose position in the hospital may have deteriorated recently, but whose participation in the trip to India nevertheless gave him the status of a kind of distant member of the family, if not in the eyes of the devoted secretary — to whom it had not even occurred, for example, to propose me as a substitute for Dr. Levine, to spare that nice grandmother the misery of going to the Health Service the next day in the pouring rain and waiting for hours in line in order to coax a medical certificate out of some rigid bureaucrat of a doctor. But as we were standing in the corridor, about to say good-bye, my heart suddenly pounded with joy at the thought that I didn’t need any favors from the secretary: I could offer my services myself, and thus wind a flimsy thread — for I was well aware of the flimsiness of all these threads — around this impossible woman.

And so, just before parting from them in the dimly lit main corridor, I stopped and in simple, straightforward words offered them my help in filling out the medical report required by the old people’s home. I saw Dori’s eyes shine, although she said nothing, waiting for Lazar to respond first. He seemed to hesitate, unwilling to owe me yet another favor, and then he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You really mean it? That’s a wonderful idea. And you’ll be free tomorrow, too.” But he immediately added a condition to the wonderful idea, that this time I would accept a proper fee for my services, not like the trip to India, which in the end I had given them as a present. At this his wife was very surprised. “How come we didn’t pay him?” She turned to her husband indignantly. “He refused to take it,” cried Lazar angrily. “Go on, you tell her yourself.”

“That’s not right,” she went on, working herself up to the kind of tantrum I knew she was capable of throwing. “That’s not right,” she repeated. “We can’t possibly let it all come off his vacation.”

“It hasn’t come off his vacation,” replied Lazar in embarrassment. “It’s been left as if he were at the hospital all those two weeks. For the time being. Until we decide what to do.”

“But that’s impossible,” she scolded her husband, “and it’s illegal too.” All of a sudden, amused and excited by their agitated exchange, I leaned toward her, and in the yellowish light of the corridor I looked straight through her glasses into her brown eyes, around which her automatic smile had etched many little lines. “Madame Solicitor,” I said in a new, humorous, familiar tone, which no doubt surprised them as well as me, “what’s illegal here? Friendship? Here”—I took hold of the slender hand of the secretary, who seemed delighted by the spirit of levity which had seized hold of me, and reproached the two Lazars—“she can bear witness before any committee of inquiry that not only didn’t I obtain any benefits from the director or his wife, but on the contrary, they haven’t renewed my residency in the surgical department, and they’re barely allowing me to be a temporary substitute in the internal medicine department.” I took a little prescription pad out of my pocket and jotted down my telephone number, in case they had lost it or even thrown it away, and took Dori’s mother’s address and phone number from them, and we arranged that the next day, early in the morning, we would set a time for my visit. “I’ll try to be there with you,” she promised. “Highly desirable,” I said promptly. And they thanked me warmly once more, their arms already groping for each other next to the revolving door, from which they emerged together, wrapped up like a pair of clumsy bears, into the thick, heavy rain flooding the illuminated plaza.

A new thread had unexpectedly been tied, I thought with satisfaction, to reinforce the Indian connection, which had weakened and would soon have snapped. And now that the scalpel had been forcibly removed from my hand and I had been transformed into an internist against my will, I could become their family doctor and treat their sore throats, blood pressure, hot flashes, mysterious stomachaches, perhaps even give them advice on questions of weight, and at the same time feed the fever of this strange, impossible love in my fantasies until it died down of its own accord, as I was sure it would. But as soon as she disappeared from view, short and awkward, trying to hold her umbrella over her husband as he hurried to their car, I felt the strange yearning again. Was what I felt for her, in the last analysis, simple lust? Yes, I felt lust, but it wasn’t simple and direct, for I had no desire to undress her in my fantasies, and no need to either, because for a long time I had had an intimate, vague, but nevertheless satisfying sense of her body, which had been acquired not only in the enforced closeness of the trip itself but even before that, in the big bedroom of their apartment in Tel Aviv, when she insisted on my inoculating her, and I took in at a glance her large but shapely breasts, scattered with unusually large moles; and it was these brown moles, rather than the breasts themselves, that I would repeatedly conjure up before me when I was seized with the desire to be engulfed by her innermost being.