A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

“Our doing?” repeated Lazar in bewilderment, tilting his head to grasp the meaning hidden behind her thick Scottish accent. But my aunt was not in the least put out. She hugged me affectionately and continued. “He met Michaela at your place, didn’t he? And that made up for the position he lost at the hospital because of the trip to India.” Extremely agitated, I tried to correct her, but Lazar gripped my hand to calm me and bent over my big-mouthed, tactless aunt again and asked her to repeat her words, which I could see had offended him and gotten me into trouble. “He hasn’t lost his position yet,” he said in his simple English, but with the confident smile of a director whose power lay in knowing things that other people didn’t know — including his wife, who turned to him now with a worried expression. “What do you mean?” I asked him in English, to avoid offending my aunt, who didn’t know Hebrew. “First get married,” continued Lazar in English, pointing to the very serious young rabbi who had just entered the hall, “and afterward you’ll get another present.” Then turned to my aunt, who was looking at him admiringly. “Don’t worry, we’re taking care of him.”

Despite the arrival of the rabbi, the ceremony was delayed a little longer, because Michaela was held up by her parents, who had been leading each other astray in the streets of Jerusalem. But it was worth waiting for her. The hairdresser’s work had a stunning effect: her face seemed to have grown bigger, her hair was darker and full of new curls, and her enormous, shining eyes were now in proportion to the rest of her head. She looked really beautiful, and her few friends and relations, who so far had been swallowed up by our guests, hurried to hug and kiss her. But the grave young rabbi sent by the rabbinate was already waiting under the canopy erected by the hotel waiters. In my opinion and that of my father, he was much too rigid and long-winded and did not take the spirit of his audience into account. He forced the independent Michaela, of all people, to circle me seven times. His sermon on the meaning and importance of marriage was complicated and full of references to Cabalist sages nobody had heard of. Worst of all, there wasn’t a drop of humor in it; he made none of the jokes usually made on such occasions, and for a moment it even seemed that he regarded our marriage as something dangerous, which he had to warn us against. But it turned out that this fanatical Jerusalem rabbi, who annoyed a lot of people with his dry, severe style, pleased Michaela. She did not find the ceremony too long, and the fact that she was obliged to circle me seven times did not cause her any feelings of humiliation but excited her with its exoticism. From the day she had left India she had been thirsty for ritual, and since she had already outgrown, in her words, the childish stage of shallow, petulant protest at every mild manifestation of religious coercion, real or imaginary, she enjoyed connecting the mystery she found in our marriage ceremony with all those rites and rituals she had come across in the streets of India. Her pregnancy, however, she did not include in the mystery of our marriage, and she spoke about it in a rational and logical way. It was just twenty-four hours after the wedding when she told me that she was pregnant, as we sat half naked, taking a sunset dip in the heavy water of the Dead Sea. We were staying at the same new hotel my parents had enjoyed so much after Eyal’s wedding; they generously gave us “a few days of honeymoon” there, with all our meals, in addition to their wedding gift. Michaela took most of the blame for our carelessness that night in the desert, and therefore, she repeated, if I decided that this baby was too sudden and too soon, she was perfectly willing to have an abortion. She attached no significance to life at this early stage. She had already had two abortions, and as I could see for myself, no harm had been done. “But it could have been,” the doctor in me immediately whispered, overcoming for a moment the astonishment of the new husband, whose head was spinning at the speed with which his freedom was shrinking, and all because of his impossible love for another woman. I don’t know how and why Michaela had found out the sex of the fetus after discovering the fact of its existence. But I think that because she spoke of it as “she,” a girl baby and not an anonymous fetus, I immediately decided against an abortion. It was clear to me too that Michaela had behaved toward me with true morality, in spite of the complications she had created. Now she also repeated her intention of taking another trip to India, and there was no doubt that a baby would delay these plans, or at least complicate them, and that a secret abortion six weeks before, when she had found out about it, would have suited her better. But since she didn’t want to deceive me, for the baby belonged to me as well, she did not terminate the pregnancy, and she didn’t tell me of its existence so that I would not feel in any way constrained to marry her.

I saw this now with absolute clarity, a clarity which was emphasized by the silence and stillness of the desert evening; we were almost alone on the beach in this sweltering summer season. I was excited by the news but also somewhat sad. Michaela’s concealment of her pregnancy seemed to me more moral than my own concealment of my impossible infatuation, whose chances of realization seemed even dimmer now, in light of what she had just told me. I felt that I had to make some gesture in honor of the baby, and I bent my head to plant a kiss on Michaela’s hard, flat stomach. I licked her navel, and when I saw that nobody was watching I lifted the bottom half of her bikini and went on probing with my tongue toward the place where the baby would emerge when its time came. But Michaela’s skin was so salty from the water of the Dead Sea that it burned my tongue; besides, I didn’t want to arouse her now and make us both restless before supper. I only said laughingly, “So what do you think? We’ll have to call her Ayelet, because we made her at Eyal’s wedding!” But Michaela already had another name ready, more significant and compelling, with a special meaning for her. Shiva, the Destroyer; Shiva, which in Hebrew means “return”—a name connected with the person who had brought us together not only in a technical but also in a deeper sense, Einat, whose gift Michaela had brought with her to the Dead Sea shore to fortify her on her honeymoon.

I found Einat standing sadly and absentmindedly next to her parents, with the gift-wrapped package in her hand, only after the ceremony was over, when I began making my way through the crush in search of her father, to hear what he had to say to me. Dori was surrounded by a number of my parents’ friends, standing with overflowing plates in their hands. She herself had not yet eaten anything but was smoking one of her slender cigarettes, in spite of the press of people around her, her eyes sparkling and flashing. I warmly embraced Einat, who gave me a gentle, hesitant hug and immediately asked for Michaela, because she wanted to give her the gift, which she firmly announced was “for Michaela, not for you,” with her own hands. “Okay, okay.” I raised my hands in laughing submission. “But why aren’t you eating anything?” I added in the tone of an offended host. “Would you like me to bring you something?” But Einat refused my offer and said in embarrassment, “No, why should you? You’ve already looked after me enough. I’ll get something myself. It looks very good.” Indeed, everyone praised the catering. Lazar returned again and again to the buffet, thrusting through the crowd with his head lowered in order to refill his plate with roast beef, which seemed particularly to his taste, while Nakash and his wife, thin and hungry, never moved from the buffet area in case they missed one of the new dishes which kept arriving from the kitchen. Even my shy father, in spite of all the friends and relations surrounding him, kept finding excuses to return to the buffet and praise the headwaiter for the excellent food, ready to be seduced by new offers. Toward the end of the wedding, when the hall began to empty out, Michaela, who had not tasted anything up to then, also succumbed to an attack of voracious hunger. She sat in a corner with her parents and their respective spouses and sent her little brother to fill and refill her plate with leftovers. My mother had refrained from eating in order to be able to give her undivided attention to her guests, and throughout the reception she had not held even one small plate of food in her hands, but my loyal young aunt from Glasgow had not forgotten her older sister, and from time to time she would squeeze through the crowd with a forkful of “something delicious” and press it on my mother, who at first refused in embarrassment but in the end opened her mouth like an obedient baby to swallow the tidbit and join in the universal chorus of praise. It seemed that only Dori and I ate nothing. Dori may have wanted to eat, but she was too proud to push and shove with everyone else around the buffet, and by the time Lazar finally took pity on her and returned from one of his forays with an extra plate for her, she was so hungry that her fork slipped from her eager fingers and fell to the floor. She stood there smiling with a plate full of food in her hands, waiting for someone to bring her a new fork, until one of the waiters, thinking that she had finished eating, discreetly relieved her of her plate. But I had not even approached the buffet, or accepted any of the hors d’oevres from the waiters circulating with big trays, and with complete indifference, even nausea, I watched my friends and relations diving into the spread. A great joy was welling up inside me, wave after wave; the joy of my parents, their excitement at the presence of their beloved relations who had come especially from Britain; my own joy in my good friends who had surrounded me under the chuppah, and in Michaela, who looked so beautiful, and of course in the secret and thrilling presence of the woman I loved, standing on her long straight legs and looking at me from across the room with her laughing eyes, and on top of all this Lazar’s surprising offer, which suddenly held out the hope that I could return to the hospital via a back door which led through England.