A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

This door was connected with an agreement between our hospital and a London hospital, St. Bernadine’s, whose medical and administrative director, an elderly gentile called Sir Geoffrey, had visited Israel a few years before and fallen in love with the country. He had donated medical equipment and drugs to our hospital, and books to the library, and in order to strengthen the connection further he had persuaded Lazar to agree to an exchange of physicians between the two hospitals. In this framework, an English doctor had recently begun work in Professor Levine’s internal medicine department, where he had been very successfully absorbed, and our own Dr. Samuel had been about to travel to London with his family to take the place of that doctor. But there had been a hitch at the last minute, for in spite of his assurances, the director of the London hospital had failed to obtain a work permit for the Israeli doctor so that he could be paid a full salary, and to the director’s shame and regret, he had been about to bring his doctor back to England, having failed to keep his end of the bargain. But the sharp-witted Lazar remembered my British passport from the Indian consulate in Rome, and he immediately said to himself, Dr. Rubin is the ideal man for the job! It couldn’t have come at a better time; it will fall into his lap like a gift from heaven — the possibility of working in a hospital that may be a little old-fashioned but is nevertheless a very decent place, and under the supervision of a director who’ll be like a second father to him. And even though the whole exchange was only a matter of ten months, it would still be on behalf of our hospital in Israel, and it would be as if I had come back to it — albeit through a back door, but one which was nevertheless real enough from the bureaucratic point of view. And who could tell, and without making any promises — because even God would be foolhardy to make promises in the State of Israel — perhaps on my return from England a place would be found for me here, in one of the departments.

“But which one?” I asked, beside myself with excitement. “Which one?” repeated Lazar with a forgiving smile, nodding his head at my mother and father, who were approaching us from two different directions, as if they had sensed that important things were being said. “It’s too soon to say. We’ll see. When we know who’s staying and who’s leaving,” and here Lazar turned affably to my parents, to tell them about the offer he had just made me. My inquisitive young aunt, who saw my parents listening with deep attention, came hurrying up to take part in the conversation, which changed its language to English. My aunt asked the name and location of the hospital, but since she lived in Scotland the name of the area meant nothing to her, and other relations, better acquainted with London, were called in to help. A relative I did not know came up, a tall, very thin man dressed in black, with small metal-framed glasses whose thick bifocal lenses gave his long, pale face a strange expression, and this man, who had no connection with medicine, knew so many details about the hospital, which was in the northeastern part of London, that I wondered if he had been a long-term patient there. The term “a little old-fashioned,” which Lazar had used to describe the place, turned out to be a typical piece of Israeli ignorance; it was an ancient institution, a historical monument which had been founded way back in the Middle Ages, at the beginning of the twelfth century. Some of its wings were still housed in very old buildings, while others had been rebuilt. My two aunts were thrilled by the news, sure that my parents would not be able to stay away once Michaela and I were there and that they would soon see them again. And Dori, who was standing not far off, nodding as she listened to someone explaining something to her, watched the little group clustered around Lazar and me, and blushed deeply and uncharacteristically when my mother approached her to thank her too, for some reason, for her husband’s clever and generous idea.

But had the idea really come from Lazar, who wanted to save his English colleague from an embarrassing situation and at the same time give me a consolation prize and a little hope, or had it actually come from her, because she was afraid and wanted to get rid of me after seeing how quickly I had fulfilled her implicit request to turn myself into a married and therefore more possible lover? Maybe she had had nothing to do with it, and Lazar himself had dimly sensed my feelings for his wife and wanted unconsciously to get me out of the way. All these thoughts were still running around inside my head when I said good-bye to the last of the guests, but I could not share them with anybody, including, of course, Michaela, who heard about Lazar’s offer only after the wedding was over, late that night in Eyal’s mother’s house. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of bringing back a doggie bag with some of the delicacies served at the wedding, to compensate her for what she had missed, and also to quiet the pangs of hunger that now assailed me, until Eyal’s mother, who had already gone to bed, got up to make me a salad and an omelet in spite of my protests and apologies. Only then did I tell them about Lazar’s offer for me to leave within the month for a year’s exchange at a hospital in London. Eyal’s mother was pleased for us, but in Michaela the proposal lit a veritable fire of enthusiasm. Her weariness vanished and her spirits soared, not only at the idea of going abroad but also because of England’s connection with India. And so when we went to bed in Eyal’s old bedroom, which still contained some of his childhood toys, Michaela’s passion flared, as if the strangeness of the house awaiting us in London had combined with the strangeness of Eyal’s room to double her desire. There was no way I could withstand this double desire, especially on our wedding night, but since I was afraid of embarrassing Eyal’s mother, who for some reason was still roaming around the house, with the noise of our lovemaking, I kept my lips pressed to Michaela’s and inserted my tongue in her mouth to stifle or at least muffle any possible cries or moans during our prolonged intercourse.

But the next night, in the hotel next to the Dead Sea, so seductive in its strangeness, I decided to resist Michaela’s tireless lust. I did not want to subject our little English embryo to any additional jolting after all the jolting she had already suffered on the back of the motorcycle and was still to suffer on our approaching trip to England. We both already thought of the baby as an English baby par excellence, with the British citizenship she would inherit from me reinforced by her birth on English soil. Michaela couldn’t stop talking about the trip, and since she had been suffering from a mild depression over the past few months due to the loss of her freedom — first by the premature return from India, over which she was still grieving, and then by our hasty marriage, which was now compounded by the baby, who however sweet and good she was would still tighten the collar around Michaela’s neck — it was no wonder that the trip seemed to her like an escape hatch to — who knows — those magical and radiant realms, whose fascination I could hardly guess at, for I had flitted past them like distant lightning. In contrast to Michaela, I was more confused than excited by Lazar’s unexpected offer. First, because it meant a separation from the woman I could not get out of my thoughts. And even though I knew how narrow the scope of my hopes in that direction was, I also knew that I could always get on my motorcycle at the appropriate time and within a few minutes take up my position in the entrance to one of the buildings next to her house or her office, to watch her going in or coming out, smiling and pleased with herself, stepping lightly, apart from that slight pampered dragging of her left foot. And I hadn’t had enough of her mother’s apartment yet either, which still held the memory of the marvelous pleasure I had enjoyed on the day I signed the lease, which I didn’t know whether to continue or to cancel. Michaela, who had taken an instant dislike to the apartment, wanted us to cancel the lease, so that we could leave for England with a clean slate. She wanted to pack our things in crates and leave them in a warehouse next to the harbor, where her stepfather worked. “They can stay there till we come back,” she said, and added suddenly with a mischievous smile, “if we come back.” It was no problem for her, of course, because all her possessions could easily be packed in one not very large crate. But I refused to store all the clothes, furniture, books, and other possessions I had accumulated over the course of my life in a dubious warehouse next to the beach, and I couldn’t impose them on my parents either. Nor did I want to give up the connection with my landlady, for whose sake I had rented the apartment in the first place. So I suggested to my friend Amnon that he come and live in the apartment and look after our things until we returned, in exchange for a percentage of the rent. To my surprise he agreed, even though the apartment was far from his place of work, and it was hard to find parking there too. Ever since I had started going out with Michaela, Amnon had strengthened his ties with me, because Michaela had more patience with him than I did, and when I went out in the late afternoon to assist Dr. Nakash at the Herzliah hospital, she would invite him to come and have supper with her before going to his night watchman’s job. His doctoral thesis was still stuck in the same place, and there were moments when I blamed myself and my confused speech that night on the way from Jericho to Jerusalem, about the relationship between matter and spirit, for his plight, as if my words had actually penetrated his mind and begun to disturb him in spite of the contempt and skepticism with which he had greeted them at the time. Perhaps my philosophical speech had merged in his mind, too, with the warning I had given him that same night about my intention to get married. And when he realized some time later that I was talking about Michaela — whom he liked so much that I suspected he had fallen a little bit in love with her, without admitting it to himself, for his loyalty to me was absolute — my theoretical speculations had joined with her erotic attractions, and he began paying frequent visits to our apartment in order to talk to me, and especially to Michaela, about the way in which matter could be transformed into spirit. I was already getting tired of him, but Michaela had a limitless capacity to sit and listen to him, and to cloud the issue still further by embroidering my own disorganized and primitive theory with all kinds of mystical mumbo-jumbo she had brought back from India.