A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

I stayed there until after midnight. We spoke about aches and pains, illnesses and eating habits. I checked the old lady’s medicine chest and recommended a few changes, which I wrote down on the prescription pad my parents had once had printed for me, with their Jerusalem address under my name. Then I asked her to take off her white silk blouse so that I could auscultate her lungs and heart with my stethoscope. Dori helped me clear the cushions off the sofa and settle her mother comfortably on it so that I could examine the abdominal organs. Her skin was very withered, but washed with scented soap, and at a superficial glance her body looked more like her granddaughter’s body than her daughter’s. The map of her beauty spots was completely different. Dori stood next to me, looking at my hands palpating her mother’s stomach. Was she too remembering the dim chamber in the Thai monastery in Bodhgaya? I wanted to ask her, but I restrained myself. Finally I completed my examination and sat down to fill in the questionnaire with scrupulous care. In general the grandmother’s health was fine, but it seemed to me that Professor Levine was keeping her on an excessively rigid medication regime. His approach was more appropriate to recent hospital cases than to ordinary patients who led normal lives. As a consequence she occasionally suffered from severe constipation. I suggested ways of obtaining relief and reduced her medication. My long day of rest had made me exceptionally lucid and eloquent, and when midnight approached and my job was done, I agreed to have tea with the two women, who did not seem in a hurry, even though Lazar had already phoned his wife twice. Was he too incapable of staying at home by himself?

The night into which I now emerged was not the same night in which I had arrived. In the new clarity flowing from the star-spangled sky, diamond drops slid separately down the the windshield of Dori’s car. Dori drove me to the post where I had chained my motorbike, teasing me about the lake of yellow water that I been afraid to cross, which had in the meantime drained completely. “What do you need a motorcycle for in the first place?” For some reason this question seemed to me too personal, and I felt unable to give her a satisfactory reply. I expressed my admiration for her mother and asked her what she intended to do with the apartment. Would she sell it? “No,” she replied, driving slowly but with no consideration for the other drivers on the road, “in the beginning we’ll only rent it, so my mother can always go back there if the experiment with the old-age home doesn’t work out.”

“Have you found somebody to rent it yet?” I asked softly. “No.” She shook her head wearily. “So far we haven’t even thought about it.”

“The reason I ask,” I kept on, “is because I’m looking for an apartment.” She gave me a quick glance which seemed to hold a mild suspicion of hidden motives. “How much are you paying now?” she asked. I told her. “That’s not much,” she stated, with justice — the rent I paid was definitely low. Now she fixed her eyes on me. I noticed an incipient double chin blurring her jaw-line. “We’ll want more than that for my mother’s apartment,” she warned me. “I don’t care,” I said calmly, with my eyes focused on the road, as if I were the one driving the car, “not only because it would be nice to think of you as my landlady, but also, who knows, I might get married soon, and then there’d be someone to help me pay the rent.” And then I saw the smile disappear completely, for the first time, from her eyes, which widened as her face turned a little red in the headlights of an approaching car. “You’re getting married?” she asked softly, as if marriage weren’t a possibility for me at all. “Not exactly, not yet,” I replied with a mysterious smile, full of love and sympathy for her. “I mean, there isn’t even a candidate yet, but I feel that she’s already marked, even if she isn’t yet aware of my existence.”

But in fact, how do marriages come about? Why should two separate creatures wish to tie themselves to each other with one chain, however slender and delicate? Is it the mystery — which in the dead of night smuggles a schoolgirl in a pale blue uniform with a badge pinned to her heart into the house, where she sits bowed over her books and workbooks at the kitchen table, waiting for an empty bed — is it the mystery which clouds their minds and ties them to each other, in order to turn itself into their subject, their willing slave, seeking to take responsibility for something that may prove too much for its powers?

Here they are, sailing serenely down the river while the hidden chain joining them underneath the water is slowly covered with rust, like a film. And even when they step onto the green land and begin combing methodically for invisible seeds and grubs, their free and natural gait still disguises the fixed distance between them, strictly maintained by the figure which has taken off its cracked metal-framed glasses and settled down with its eyes closed on a little mound of hay next to the river, exposing its weak chest to the warm spring sun.

Do they know how to fly too? And who will take care that in the air too they remain unseparated? The pair approaches us; a solemn creature thrusts a long, black, glistening neck toward us, and a one-eyed stare — whether it belongs to a male or a female, we will never know — pierces us. And before the answer we await is given to us, a beak as big and strong as a sword stabs the weak chest which the mystery has abandoned to the warm spring sun, and four great gray wings are opened and stretched as far as they will go, and with one mighty flap they fly high into the sky, to tear whatever held them together to tatters.

I raced back home, cleaving the clear night air with the roar of my motorcycle, which as always was infected by the excitement inside me; I had thrown this woman another thread, which if it indeed lassoed her would not easily be undone. If I were a tenant, the connection between us would no longer depend on occasional medical matters or chance encounters in the hospital, nor would it depend on the wishes or the presence of Lazar; it would be based on a clear legal contract, which she herself would probably draw up, and would include not only payments, promissory notes, and deposits, but also a regular correspondence, municipal taxes, broken boilers, leaking pipes, and perhaps even complaints by neighbors, if I decided to throw a party for my friends, for example. In short, a new and independent bond, which would override the memories of the trip to India and its weakening aftermath, and for the sake of a bond like this it would be worth paying a higher rent and doing night shifts at the MADA First Aid Station, as I’d done in my student days, to make ends meet. After all, I would have more time now, for the enthusiasm and devotion that had tied me to Hishin and his department would not be necessary in the internal medicine department, if indeed Professor Levine agreed to take me on after he recovered from his mysterious disease and we resolved whatever issues lingered between us over the blood transfusion.

But would she want to rent me the apartment after what I had said? If she was thinking about that sentence now, it must be causing her a lot of confusion, and I doubted if she would tell Lazar, who was probably waiting up in bed. It was hard to imagine that after she explained why she was so late and described the thorough medical examination I had given her mother, she would add with a mysterious smile, “Guess what, I already have a tenant for Mother’s apartment.” Even if there were no secrets between them, not even concerning something as obscure and ambiguous as my parting words, it was inconceivable that Lazar would have remained under the blanket, looking out from the sleepy slits of his eyes. No, he would sit up, rumpling the bedclothes still further, as I had seen him do on the first night in New Delhi when I had peeped into their room, and exclaim, “Really? He wants that apartment? How come? He really likes it?” imagining instead that all I really wanted was to keep up the connection with him, hoping he could influence Hishin to change his mind. Lazar probably thought that I considered him all-powerful in the hospital, whereas I knew that even if he could do something, he would never interfere in professional appointments, precisely to save his clout for more important things. Then she would undo her bun, loosen her tresses, take off her glasses and put them on the bedside table, and stick her head through the neck of the nightgown spotted with sprigs of pale yellow flowers. She’d sit down to rub cream into her long naked legs and massage her bare feet, utterly rejecting her husband’s interpretation in her heart, because she would have already felt that it was she I meant, only she, and in the midst of the astonishment flooding her, perhaps a little wave of pity for me would well up too, as if now she understood that something had upset my balance during the trip we took to India together. Therefore, she’d decide to keep her counsel and not to tell her husband anything about what had passed between us, but to let him go on lying under the blanket, the tired slits of his eyes turning into two little sparks, and she’d prick up her ears to listen to Einat, who was still dragging out the last of her hepatitis and who had now awakened and gone into the kitchen. Then she’d slip in next to her husband, tickle him a little, and say, “Wait, wait, don’t go to sleep yet, give me a hug, warm me up,” and she’d put two cold little feet onto his warm thighs.