A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

And in fact we both showed plenty of dynamism and energy in the initial stages of our acclimatization, which succeeded more than we could have hoped, perhaps partly because my correct English accent, which I had been making efforts to improve ever since our arrival by remembering my father’s speech and taking it as an example, inspired the confidence of the real estate agents and the car salesmen. After only two days we found a suitable apartment for a reasonable rent a short distance from the hospital. The apartment consisted of two large, comfortable rooms, enough to accommodate my parents comfortably during the day but not enough for them to settle in. The small secondhand car we bought also seemed clean and in good running order. And even though I was not officially entitled to a parking place in the hospital lot, which was reserved for the senior staff, Michaela, who had established a slightly ironic, good-humored form of communication of her own with Sir Geoffrey, succeeded in getting permission for us to park in the backyard of the little chapel, which freed us from the need to look for parking places — a daunting task, especially at night, when the area was packed with cars. It was mainly Michaela who used the car, and her knowledge of the streets of London became more intimate and precise from day to day. Although I didn’t like the growing proximity between her stomach and the steering wheel as her pregnancy advanced, and I warned her constantly not only to use the seat belt, which she sometimes forgot to do, but also to drive slowly, which was almost an impossibility for her, I had no alternative but to honor her independence and trust her good sense, even when she began haunting the seedy areas inhabited by immigrants from the Far East in an effort to renew contact with her beloved Hindus. I had to rely on her increasingly obvious pregnancy to protect her from harassment. I knew that she had only four months of liberty left until the baby was born, while I myself was being completely swept up in the work at the hospital, which filled me not only with enthusiasm but also with anxiety.

In order to give validity and prestige to the exchange agreement between himself and Lazar, Sir Geoffrey introduced me to all the doctors in the emergency room as an experienced surgeon and anesthetist. My experience as a military doctor also gave me special authority in his eyes. After only one week, before I had time to learn the names and places of the instruments in the little operating room or acquaint myself with the contents of the medicine cabinets, I was summoned to assist at the operation of a small, dark-skinned girl of about ten who had sustained severe stomach injuries in a road accident. Just as the operation was getting started, the senior physician was called to treat another victim of the same accident, who had suffered a heart attack, and without asking any questions, in complete confidence, he gave me the scalpel and asked me to go ahead and conclude the operation, during the course of which it proved necessary to remove the damaged spleen. And so I found myself standing alone in front of the delicate, long-limbed body of a cut and bruised little girl who had just been too vigorously anesthetized and seemed to be losing her pulse. The nurse assisting me was young and seemed inexperienced, but the physician in charge of the anesthesia was an elderly, white-haired woman who inspired my confidence. At first I imagined that there wasn’t enough light in the room, because I couldn’t see everything I wanted to see inside the deep, open stomach. Perhaps the child’s dark skin confused me. But after the nurse tried in vain to increase the light over the operating table, she offered me a little headlamp to strap onto my forehead, like the ones coal miners wear in the movies when they descend into the bowels of the earth. And I felt a little like a miner, bending down and delving into the depths of internal organs which for the first time in my life were my exclusive responsibility.

I immediately discovered that the internal hemorrhaging had not been completely arrested, and I found additional torn blood vessels which had to be reconstructed. I ordered another unit of blood and continued with the operation, which I performed very slowly, waiting for the physician in charge to come back and take the knife from me. But he didn’t come back, and I had to continue alone, admitting to myself that maybe Professor Hishin and Dr. Nakash were right when they said that I thought too much during surgery and this hesitancy made me unsuited to being a surgeon. But here, in the English operating room, I believed that my slowness would be accepted in a more tolerant spirit. For although the pulse was regular again, and the breathing was normal, and the dark, slender body was properly relaxed, I was in the grip of a terrible anxiety that something unexpected and unknown would break out in the course of the operation and kill the child under my hands, bringing disgrace not only to me but also to Lazar and his wife, who had sent me here. And so I slowed down the pace of the operation even further and checked and rechecked every cut, and at a certain stage I even insisted on calling in the X-ray technician to take additional X-rays of the spine. It was already long past midnight, and the white-haired anesthetist had taken her eyes off her instruments in order to stare at me, baffled by my slowness. Perhaps it was only good manners that prevented her from asking me what was going on, for she had every right to do so. The young nurse, however, did not hide her anger, and she flung the instruments huffily and noisily into the sterilizing unit, muttering to herself. But I ignored her, and after sewing up the stomach with small, neat stitches that wouldn’t leave a scar, I finally, after five hours, signaled the anesthetist to begin bringing the child around. I wouldn’t allow her to be removed from the operating room until I had made sure that the words she was mumbling in her peculiar accent made sense, and that there was no brain damage as a result of the operation I had performed from beginning to end all by myself. Without removing my bloodstained gown, I walked behind her bed as it rolled slowly into the emergency room, which at this late hour was completely quiet, and where even the patients who had not yet been sent up to the various wards had fallen asleep. I looked for the senior physician to report to him and discovered that he had retired to his room to rest long before, without even taking the trouble to inquire about the results of the operation he had left in my hands, so great was his trust in the new young doctor. The only signs of life were in the waiting room, where a group of tall, long-limbed Africans greeted me with grateful respect and awe. For them, it turned out, my slowness had been an omen of hope.

Thus I quickly found my place in the work of the hospital, and since I saw that independent operations were likely to come my way in the emergency room, I volunteered to work the evening shift and to be on call at night, to the grateful appreciation of my colleagues, who turned out on the whole to be less ambitious than Israeli doctors. And so I found myself standing in the little operating room attached to the emergency room, sometimes as an anesthetist and sometimes as a surgeon, performing quite complicated surgery on my own, albeit in my own particular way — that is, with the extreme slowness to which the white-haired anesthetist had already grown accustomed; and as for the impatient blond nurse, I got rid of her in favor of a placid, obedient Scottish nurse. At the end of each night, when I saw that nothing more of interest was going to come my way, I would walk home to our nearby apartment and wake Michaela and tell her about my adventures. She would wake up immediately and listen eagerly to everything I had to say, not only because she always liked hearing about medical matters but also because she was happy to see me full of enthusiasm. Her round belly was rising steadily like a little pink hill under the blanket, and sometimes as I spoke I thought I could see a slight movement stirring inside it, proof that the baby too was listening to me. Michaela’s sexual appetite diminished greatly during her last months of pregnancy, both because the strangeness of the little apartment had worn off and because of a peculiar notion she had picked up from a traveler who had returned from India: that intercourse could arouse frustrated desire in the fetus. I didn’t want to get into theological debates with her about the meaning of life and consciousness in embryos, especially since I was not particularly keen just then on making love to her. But the memory of the love I had known on that other stomach, no less large, round, and white, at the beginning of spring in the granny’s apartment, filled my heart with longings so fierce and sweet that I had to avert my head to prevent Michaela from seeing the tears in my eyes.