A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

“No,” I said, trembling with excitement. “He’s a strange man; I don’t understand him. He claims that I could have infected you with Einat’s hepatitis when I performed the blood transfusion in Varanasi.” She burst into surprised laughter — was she really unaware of Levine’s accusations? “Perhaps you really did infect me,” she said with a slight smile, and turned around and went back into her room, and through the open door I saw her folding the scarf and putting it into one of the drawers of her desk.

At seven o’clock that evening Dr. Nakash phoned me to ask if I could come immediately to the hospital in Herzliah. In an hour’s time an operation was scheduled to begin. It had originally been planned without an assistant anesthetist, in order to reduce the costs to the patient, but the day before Nakash himself had caught a severe cold, and this morning his temperature had risen, and although he had treated himself aggressively during the day, he was still afraid of spreading germs in the operating room, and he wanted me to come and “fly the plane” myself, though he would be right next door to guide and direct me. “Don’t you think it’s too soon to leave me on my own?” I asked in excitement. “No,” answered Nakash confidently, “you’ll be fine. I didn’t choose you by accident. I’ve been watching you in the operating room for a whole year now, and I’ve seen your grasp of internal processes. You understand what anesthesia means. Hishin hit the nail on the head when he praised you that time in the cafeteria. By the way, if you’re missing him, you’ll be able to see him soon, because he’s performing the operation tonight. But for God’s sake, Benjy, get on your horse and get over here as quickly as you can.” My spirits, which were low after the meeting with Dori, began to soar. I jumped onto my motorcycle, and with the resolution of someone on an emergency rescue mission I began to weave boldly through the heavy traffic leaving Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, I arrived at the operating room after the first premedication shot had already been given under Nakash’s supervision. In order to protect his surroundings from his germs he had made himself a strange mask which enveloped his entire head, leaving only two holes for his narrow black eyes. The patient was a woman of about fifty, plump and blue-eyed, whose figure reminded me of Dori’s. She had to have abdominal surgery, the correction of a hiatal hernia and a vagotomy — the kind of operation at which Hishin excelled, in spite of the mystery of the death of the young woman on whom he had operated on the eve of the trip to India. I put on a mask, and with the help of the nurses I began preparing the patient for the operation. Since Nakash was keeping at a distance from us, I myself began talking to the patient, asking her about her feelings and sensations, her husband and children, and in the meantime I exposed her chest in order to auscultate her heart and lungs again, to avoid any unpleasant surprises. From the corridor rose Hishin’s loud laughter, and Nakash signaled me to hurry up. I gave her the first shot of dormicum, smiled at her, placed the mask on her face, and connected her to the anesthesia machine, and felt her body relaxing under my hands; I gave her the first shot of pentothal, to relax her muscles, and inserted the infusion needle for the anesthetic; she lost consciousness, and I immediately felt her soul asking to be liberated and soar; I took hold of the cylinder with both hands and gave her an initial dose of oxygen; then I forced her clamped mouth open and inserted the small iron blade of the laryngoscope to prevent her mouth from closing, and in the narrow beam of light I succeeded in getting an exact view of the pinkish passage to the vocal cords, through which I slowly inserted the tube into her lungs. Then I turned on the respirator. The nurse exposed the round white stomach, cleaned it with alcohol, and drew the line for the incision. Nakash, who was standing behind the door with his face masked, like a white mummy with burning eyes, made a V sign with his fingers and signaled me to clear his field of vision, so that from a distance he could watch the monitors of the anesthesia machine piloting the body which had been abandoned by its soul.

Hishin was still delaying his entry, like a conductor waiting for the members of the orchestra to tune their instruments. But when the nurse came in with the X-rays and placed them like a musical score on the illuminated screen, I sensed his close presence and trembled with excitement, for I knew that Nakash had kept my participation in the operation a secret from him. He came in slowly, tall, smiling, pleased with himself, humming under his breath. The mauve color of his gown and mask, which in this hospital took the place of the standard green, gave him a gay, lighthearted air, as if he had dressed up as somebody else. He stopped and stared in playful surprise at the masked Nakash standing in the corner, and then his eyes met mine, which were fixed on the monitors of the anesthesia machine. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said when he had recovered. “My friend Dr. Rubin! So you’ve abandoned the knife but not the operating room. Very good. A very positive direction. When you left us, I myself thought of advising you to specialize in anesthesiology, but I was afraid you would think I was antagonistic to your great ambitions. But I see that Dr. Nakash has succeeded in persuading you. Congratulations, Nakash, you’ve found the ideal assistant.”

And then at last, the hard, green, open eye — whether it is male or female is still impossible to tell — begins to flicker and dim, until its anxiety is subdued by sleep. And despite the sorrow and the disappointment, for freedom has eluded them again, the caress of a strange but familiar feather brings comfort in the darkness. And when slender spears of light appear between the bald yellow crags and a purple brush paints the sky, the two are already huddled close together, tangled in the branches of a dry, sturdy bush, waiting for the sun to hammer the sky into a bright, unblinking blue. They have penetrated the heart of the Arava in order to learn the lesson that neither of them is capable of remaining alone.

But since they have broken the chain of marriage which joined them, from now on they are doomed to scratch the desert soil for food and to drink the bitter, salty water of the sea of death. Awed by the fatefulness of their meeting, they reverently circle the torn, bleeding remains of the mystery, which never left them and pursued them relentlessly in order to join them together again. Now the ruined, pitiful remains lie before them on the stones, mangled and exhausted but still twitching, as if they want to fly again or to change their form. A severed arm turns into a black wing, a lost leg into a tail, and cracked eyeglasses into a sharp beak, until the furnace of noon welds all the pieces into one, and a glossy black crow rises from the dry ground and flaps its dark wings.

For some reason, Eyal’s approaching wedding gave rise in me to excitement mingled with a faint anxiety, as if something significant were about to take place. Eyal himself tirelessly drummed up interest in the event by constant consultations about how to increase the numbers of his guests. Since he feared that people would be deterred by the distance and the wedding would be poorly attended, he decided to send out as many invitations as possible, and he kept phoning me to remind him of the names and addresses of forgotten friends from our school days. But even the long list of wedding guests failed to reassure him, and he was constantly on the phone, calling people up to make sure that they weren’t planning a last-minute defection. And perhaps it was only the familiar anxiety of my friend Eyal, who ever since he had lost his father was afraid of being abandoned and rejected, that aroused my excitement and expectation, which were apparently conveyed to my parents too, for not only did they buy a handsome and expensive present for the young couple from all of us, but my mother bought herself a new dress as well, and my father took the car to the garage for a general overhaul. The old car and the long drive were now our main concern, and in order to make the long day’s drive easier on my father and to avoid unnecessary complications with the meeting in Beersheba, my parents arrived in the morning in Tel Aviv, and after visiting an elderly aunt in an old folks’ home, they had lunch with me in a little restaurant and came home with me for a short rest in my new apartment, which to my surprise my mother decided she liked better than the old one in spite of its many disadvantages. “Even though you made a mistake,” she said in her pedagogical way, “it was in the right direction.” I made my bed for them with clean sheets and blankets, and placed a little electric heater in the room. I insisted that they take off their clothes and put on pajamas and take a proper nap, to refresh themselves before the great adventure. At first they were amused by my insistence, which was uncharacteristic of me, but in the end they gave in. And although my mother emerged from the room after fifteen minutes, my father fell into a deep sleep, which lasted so long that it began to worry us both. It was only when I saw him emerging from my bedroom dazed and confused, more exhausted after his sleep than before it, that I suddenly felt a pang of compassion for them both, and I wondered whether I shouldn’t give up the idea of riding down separately on my motorcycle and join them in the car, to help my father with the driving. The problem was the drive from the kibbutz to the hotel on the Dead Sea; I knew that if I left my motorcycle behind, I’d have to drive them there after the wedding, spend the night in the hotel, and take the bus back to Tel Aviv in the morning, a tedious and time-consuming project that I was not prepared to undertake. Especially since I had promised Amnon — who was riding down with his parents, who had also been invited, in a special bus from Jerusalem — to give him a lift back to Tel Aviv on my motorcycle, and during the course of the ride we would finally be able to hold the promised and long-delayed astrophysical debate.