A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

So I said to myself as I stepped out into the big parking lot and the strong but sweet light of a brilliant winter’s day. I walked over to my motorcycle, which I had recently taken to inserting between the cars of the directors, under their exclusive carport, not only in order to protect it from the rain but also in order to peek into Lazar’s car to see if Dori had forgotten anything of hers there. I kicked off and rode quickly out of the hospital grounds, but at the first traffic light, while I was waiting at a red light, I couldn’t resist looking back at the yellowish building with smoke spiraling out of its two tall chimneys, and suddenly it seemed to me that it was not I who was leaving the hospital but the hospital that was sailing away from me like some great ship, embarking with its doctors and patients on a journey full of new storms and adventures, which I had been found unworthy of participating in. Professor Levine was right — he had put his finger on something; mental illness sharpened the senses. It was true, there had been something a little theatrical about my actions in Varanasi. There was always something faintly theatrical in the contact between a doctor and his patient, because it was only through acting that you could overcome a total stranger’s natural embarrassment at getting undressed in front of you so that you could look into his mouth, feel his stomach, listen to his heart, and finger his sexual organs. But in the hotel in Varanasi, next to the purple-lacquered wicker chairs, it hadn’t only been a theatrical show, it had been the beginning of falling in love, a love that I now had to make sure didn’t die, didn’t turn into a passing episode.

When I arrived at my old apartment, I found the door open and strange suitcases standing in the hall and the landlady hurrying behind me to inform me that the new tenants were already moving in, because they had nowhere else to go and they couldn’t wait any longer. Since I had promised to vacate the apartment early, and if my new apartment was ready, why should I delay? I had no reason to delay, but no wish to start packing up my possessions either, which turned out to be more numerous than I had imagined, in front of this couple, fresh out of the army, quiet and in love, who began following me around and inserting themselves softly and insistently into every shelf I cleared. My motorcycle was of course no help in transporting my stuff, and I phoned Amnon, a childhood friend from Jerusalem who was busy writing his Ph.D. in the physics and astronomy department of Tel Aviv University, and supporting himself by working as a night watchman in a big canning plant in the south of the city. At night he had an old pickup truck at his disposal, and I asked him to use it to transport my belongings to the new apartment where I had already been to bed, but not to sleep. I had to wait until late in the evening, when his shift began, and in the meantime the young couple began to push me discreetly but firmly out of the apartment. At first we agreed that I would clear one room for them, where they could put their stuff until I cleared out the rest of the apartment. And at first they confined themselves to the room, giggling in undertones as they put things away in the closets and even hung pictures on the walls. But toward evening, when they saw that I was still hanging around, they grew impatient, and began wandering around the apartment, going into the kitchen to cook themselves supper, and the girl went into the bathroom to take a shower. They were a symbiotic couple, and kept up an incessant communication between them. Even when the girl was in the shower the boy kept going into the bathroom to give her things or get things from her. In the end Amnon called and announced that he would arrive within half an hour. I began taking down the suitcases, blankets, and cushions, and the young couple immediately volunteered to take down the cardboard boxes with my books and kitchen utensils. And even when I was sitting downstairs with all my possessions around me, waiting for Amnon and his pickup, they went on searching the apartment and bringing down all kinds of dirty and forgotten belongings of mine which I had left behind. It was highly disagreeable to have to part in such unseemly haste from my first Tel Aviv apartment, of which I was very fond, and where I had enjoyed a certain quiet and solitude, and which also preserved the memory of my initial excitement at the hospital, when I would reconstruct the operating table on the kitchen table and practice with a knife and fork and pieces of string, trying to imitate Hishin’s quiet, rapid movements.

Amnon arrived very late and found me sitting on the sidewalk covered with a blanket, surrounded by my possessions like a deported refugee. But I couldn’t be angry with him, since I knew that he was abandoning his watchman’s post for my sake. We quickly loaded everything onto the open truck, and I got onto my motorcycle and rode in front to show him the way. At the new place we unloaded everything onto the sidewalk, and Amnon drove away. “You still have to explain to me what Hawking’s problem is with the first three seconds of the big bang,” I said before he left. I knew he liked having me ask him questions about astrophysics, so that he could give me a long lecture while I sat and listened like a disciple at the feet of the master. He had been stuck on his Ph.D. for several years now, even though he devoted all his energies to it, and his friends were loath to ask him about it in case a note of incredulity crept into their voices. “Whenever you like — you know I’m all in favor of your taking a break from your quackery and learning a little real science,” he said affably. He asked for my new phone number, but I found that I had suddenly forgotten it, so I promised that I would call him that very night and give it to him. But in the new apartment the phone was dead. The thought that my parents had probably been trying to get in touch with me all evening and wondering where I had disappeared to began to worry me. During the past few weeks I had noted a new note of concern in their voices, and there was no reason to add to their anxiety. But what had happened to the telephone? No one had touched it since last night. For a moment it occurred to me that Dori had garbled her message to the phone company when she asked for an interim reading of the meter and had caused them to disconnect the phone by mistake. It was late, and the apartment was alarmingly full of my possessions. Now I had the feeling that it was actually smaller than the apartment I had left, and the closet full of the granny’s gray suits suddenly annoyed me. But above all, it upset me that I wouldn’t be able to keep my promise to call Amnon, and he would wait in vain in his cold watchman’s hut and think that I was trying to get out of meeting him after taking advantage of him and his truck. I left my belongings piled up on the floor and went out to look for a pay phone in order to call him and make a date. As I searched for a phone I thought about the obscurity of those first three seconds of the big bang, encountered by Hawking and others, and in which, according to Hawking’s own admission, the theory itself collapsed, owing to its inability to explain how the entire cosmos, compressed into a particle whose density was infinite and whose radius was zero, had begun to expand with such speed. Physics was helpless with regard to these three seconds, for they were simply outside physics. This was the point of transition from spirit to matter. In other words, how could matter shrink back into the single particle from which it was born? Spirit would do it, and not by magic but in a slow and gradual process. In fact, it had already begun. Take the airplane, for example. It compressed matter, canceled distance, and what was the airplane if not a smallish bit of matter in which an enormous amount of spirit had been invested — that is, laws and thought?