A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

The visit to my parents was important to me, since I wanted to get a sense of their reaction to Michaela before I made any fateful decisions. If I had known that she was pregnant, however, a fact she was still ignorant of herself, I would certainly not have taken her on the motorcycle but tried to catch one of the last buses to Jerusalem instead. Friday was always the busiest day for surgery in the Herzliah hospital, since on Fridays the surgeons in the big hospitals abandon their public patients to the care of their relatives and take time off for private operations, which sometimes last until after the beginning of the Sabbath. And indeed, by the time I examined the pupils of the last patient and wrapped him in heated sheets to make up for the heat he had lost during surgery, there was nothing left of the waves visible from the windows but faint lines of foam trembling in the dusk. Nevertheless, in spite of how late it was, I had no intention of giving up the visit to Jerusalem, and I called my parents and told them that we would be late and they should not wait for us with dinner — advice they ignored in the hope that we would not be as delayed as I thought, and in fact we left before too long. Michaela was soon ready, and I raced the Honda until it flew over the road, not only because of the lateness of the hour but also because I knew that Michaela delighted in speed and expected me to satisfy her desire. At eight o’clock, with the beginning momentum of the ascent at Sha’ar-Hagai, the road suddenly opened up in front of us, and a full moon rising between the mountains began to sail our way, occasionally dipping behind the cypresses and pines, which gave off a fragrance in the spring air that accompanied us all the way to my parents’ house. My father, listening for the sound of the motorcycle, heard it entering the street and came out onto the steps to meet us. I noticed that he was struck, perhaps even startled, by Michaela’s enormous eyes. But I knew that their blueness, like the color of his own eyes, would have a reassuring effect on him, and indeed, he immediately began to pay careful attention to her, taking her helmet and chivalrously helping her remove her army jacket, and he began chattering vivaciously, this quiet man, as he did so. My mother was more circumspect, examining my face to see what I expected of her on this visit I had imposed on them.

That night, in my old room, Michaela insisted on making love with me — a project that seemed to me not only superfluous but also dangerous, since my mother slept lightly, and presumably her sleep was especially troubled after Michaela’s total candor at dinner about her lack of any steady occupation over the past few years. It appeared that the only thing she had done in recent months with any point or meaning was her work with the sidewalk doctors in Calcutta. And for some reason she also took the first opportunity she found to announce to my parents her failure to graduate from high school, without indicating any ambitions to complete her education in the foreseeable future. Even though she radiated her usual confidence and independence, which did not detract from her gentle good manners, I knew that my mother would be upset by the conversation, and that after my father had fallen asleep she would wander restlessly around the house, and I thought it unfair of Michaela to insist on making love in these inconvenient circumstances when the next night we would have my apartment in Tel Aviv to ourselves. “The wine your father kept on giving me is making me horny,” she apologized, and she began stroking and kissing my stomach. But I stubbornly refused. “Why?” she said in surprise. “I can come without screaming,” she assured me. But I didn’t trust her, because recently she had been screaming and moaning a lot, and although I was already used to it, I didn’t want my mother hearing even a faint, smothered echo of her cries. In her unsatisfied lust Michaela went on tossing and turning in my narrow childhood bed long after I had already fallen asleep, with the result that she was still sound asleep in the morning when I sat down to breakfast with my parents, who expected me now to tell them my intentions, if in fact I had already clarified them to myself. But what could I tell them? I could hardly hint at my true passion for Lazar’s wife, which went on obsessing me even here, in the cool spring air of Jerusalem, with the scent of roses rising from its gardens. I could hardly tell my parents that the marriage I was contemplating with increasing seriousness was also a means of providing the impossible woman who still filled my thoughts with a shield against me.

So, before they had a chance to question me, I asked them to tell me their impressions of Michaela. As I had supposed, my father, who for some reason jumped in to answer first, saw no shortcomings in her, but only her virtues. “She’s fine. She’s just fine. She’ll be a great help to you,” he stated with a confidence unusual for him in such matters. “And she doesn’t seem spoiled either, in spite of her delicacy,” he added, and suddenly blushed. To my surprise, my mother too spoke of her in a positive spirit. “I agree. Perhaps because she’s looking for something that isn’t clear to her, she still hasn’t found her place in the world, and she really is a bit of a drifter. But I’m sure that as soon as she has a baby she’ll settle down and be a good mother.” Strange that my mother should have immediately pounced on something that was still unthinkable to me, even though on that Saturday morning it was already a substantial fact, to the extent that a two-week-old embryo can be called substantial, in the womb of the woman sleeping in the bed where I had passed so many years of my life. Three months later, after our wedding — when I told my parents about the pregnancy and reminded my mother of her words, and exclaimed at her intuition — she dismissed my exclamations at once. “Intuition had nothing to do with it,” she said sharply, “I didn’t suspect anything then,” and there was a note of annoyance in her voice, because even though she may have tried to understand Michaela’s reasons for hiding her pregnancy from me, she could not help feeling that we had behaved irresponsibly toward the baby. “Not only you and your feelings exist in the world. A baby is a human being too.” And it struck me as strange that she too, like Michaela, spoke about a tiny three-month-old fetus as if it were a complete, finished being. Yet the truth is that my mother was right. Michaela really had endangered the fetus by constantly riding behind me on the motorcycle and egging me on to recklessly increase my speed. If she had confided in me as soon as she found out that she was pregnant, a month and a half after we met, I would have forbidden her to ride on the motorcycle, and perhaps even exchanged the bike for a car, which I eventually did.

But until we finally parted from my beloved Honda we spent a lot of time racing around on it, especially after I hinted at my intention to ask her to marry me, and soon. This happened on our return from our second visit to Jerusalem, early on a Saturday morning, in the middle of the journey, at a roadside diner near the airport where we had made it a habit to stop. She was sitting opposite the big mirror behind the counter, her head encased in the black crash helmet, emphasizing the radiance of her eyes and artificially enlarging her face, which even in her own opinion was too small and thin for such big eyes. She was not surprised at my proposal; maybe she had already sensed that she had made a favorable impression on my parents, in spite of her failure to graduate from high school, her lack of a profession, and her obscure longing for the Far East. An inner sense told her that my reasons for wanting to get married were not strictly connected to her and that they were perhaps not even entirely clear to me myself, but the air of mystery and the sense of something ambiguous suddenly emanating from a person as rational as I was only added to my attraction in her eyes. I kissed her on her forehead, feeling the hard helmet between my hands, and I wanted to add the words “I love you,” but I couldn’t get them out of my mouth, and I said something more general: “There’s love between us.” This was really a more correct and appropriate formulation, because this love, although it was for another and impossible woman, was lying between us on the table like a rich and flavorful dish, which she too was entitled to taste. She listened to me attentively, thought for a while, and then said, “If you really want to get married so soon, I’ve got no objections. I feel good with you. Even though I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry — is it suddenly hard for you to be by yourself? But if we get married, it will only be on condition that you don’t prevent me from going back to India for another visit, not too long but not very short either. The best thing would be if you came with me, but if you can’t come with me, promise me that you won’t prevent me from going, and if we already have a child, then you or your parents will take care of her, because otherwise I’ll have to drag her with me to India.” I don’t know why I suddenly felt such a burst of joy that I couldn’t control myself, but I put my face to hers, lightly removed the helmet from her head, and planted a long kiss on and in her mouth, in full view of the few people sitting in the diner at that early Sabbath hour, who looked at us affectionately and encouragingly and seemed relieved that the heavy helmet had been removed at last from the young woman’s head.