A. Yehoshua - Open Heart

The audience rose to its feet in a storm of applause, including my shy father, who clapped enthusiastically while Michaela actually wept with joy and triumph at the success of her efforts to open closed hearts such as mine and my parents’ to the Indian experience. She was still determined to return to India, and she was afraid that since it “seemed to me” that I had already been there, and it “seemed to me” that I had grasped the principle of India, I would have no motive to return. She would repeat this formula with utter seriousness, as if my trip to India hadn’t been real, as if I hadn’t sailed down the Ganges River in the evening to see the burning of the bodies next to the ghats of Varanasi, as if I hadn’t gone into the temples of Bodhgaya and sat in the dark, rotting cinema in Calcutta. No, none of this counted with her, because it had all been secondary to the external aim of taking care of Einat and finding favor in the eyes of her parents. As long as I hadn’t been to India for my own sake, to try to purify my soul, which was in need, like all souls, of purification, it was as if I had never been there at all. Although I had given her my promise, after proposing to her in the roadside diner next to Lydda airport, that I would not stop her from going back to India, she now feared the opposition of my parents, whom she had grown very fond of during their visit to London. She knew they would be scandalized if she took off alone for India, with the baby or without her, and it was therefore important to her for me to accompany her, for part of the time at least, perhaps in the context of observing the sidewalk doctors of Calcutta — or the “doctors of the forgotten,” as the French called them — and thus take responsibility for her trip vis-à-vis my parents. On the face of things, it seemed strange that a woman as free and independent as Michaela, whose relations with her own parents were tenuous in the extreme, should worry about upsetting mine, but I was already aware that a bond had formed between my wife and my parents — especially my mother, who had apparently decided to take her daughter-in-law under her wing in the wake of my coldness, which she sensed in spite of my efforts to appear smiling and attentive and to fulfill all my obligations, real or imaginary, toward Michaela.

On the day of my sexual disgrace on the green floral bedspread, in the light of the pale sunbeam piercing through the half-open curtain, when I came home with Shivi in my arms, depressed and upset by my failure and worried by the incident with Lazar’s heart, I felt that I had to compensate Michaela for my unfaithfulness to her. After telling her about the events of my day as she sat serenely breast-feeding the baby, who had calmed down at last, I suddenly knelt at her feet and put my head between her strong, smooth legs and began kissing not only the inside of her thighs but also the delicate, slightly parted lips of her vagina, which I had not touched since I had sewed up the tears of the birth over six weeks before. My lips and tongue now felt my skillful stitches. Michaela was so surprised by this sudden two-pronged attack on her privates, with me between her legs and Shivi at her breast, that she began moaning deeply and uttering loud cries of pleasure, which would no doubt have put my mother’s mind at rest if she had heard them, and allayed her suspicions about the weakness of my love for my wife.

When we said good-bye to my parents in an uncharacteristically emotional parting at Heathrow airport, my mother agreed, in spite of her lingering cough, to kiss the baby, whom we had brought along to soften the sadness of their departure from England. My mother also found a momentary lull in the excitement to take me aside and praise her beloved daughter-in-law, and warn me not to let her roam around London by herself too much, since leaving her to her own devices in this way would only accustom her to a kind of freedom that would be hard for her to find on our return to Israel. “I’ve got no objections to your going back to India at some future date, especially now that Michaela has increased our appreciation for the country,” she added in her clear way, “but to go there now would be irresponsible and dangerous for the baby, who’s too small even to be inoculated against all the dreadful diseases they’ve got there, some of which you’ve already seen for yourself. Wait a few years, until Shivi grows up, and after you’ve got full tenure at the hospital you can take an unpaid leave and go to India not just as a tourist but as a doctor, and do some good. And who knows, maybe your father and I will come and visit you there too.”

On the way back from the airport, with Michaela driving and me hugging Shivi to my chest, we both felt an unexpected sadness at my parents’ departure, as we would find it difficult now to manage without them. But while I was sure we would see them in four months’ time in Israel, Michaela was cherishing hopes of extending our stay in London by at least one more year, not only because all the Indians she had discovered in various London suburbs helped alleviate her longings for the place itself but also because of the fact that dropping out of high school did not carry the same stigma in London as she felt it did in Israel. In London nobody made any demands on her. Just the opposite: her status had only been strengthened here. Friends of her youth from Israel who came to spend a week in London would call her up from the airport to get instructions about finding things in the city that ordinary tourists didn’t even know existed. Sometimes the shoestring travelers among them would be invited to stay with us for a night or two, until they found a suitable place to live. Since I worked nights, it did not bother me to find sleeping figures curled up in the living room when I came home at dawn, because I knew that when I woke up in the middle of the day they would be gone. On one of these occasions Michaela told me, to my astonishment, that one of the sleeping figures I had encountered in the night was none other than Einat Lazar, who was on a one day stopover in London on her way to the United States. “How come you didn’t wake me up before she left, so that I could say hello to her at least?” I exclaimed in angry surprise. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I never thought that you were interested in Einat, or that you made any real contact with her when you were together in India. Besides, it seemed to me that the way you waited on her parents when they were here would be more than enough to promote your career interests in Israel.” Naturally I sulked and protested at this cynical remark, but at the same time I was relieved to see that Michaela had no suspicions about my feelings for Lazar’s wife, even though the sexual norms of the circles she moved in were broad-minded enough to encompass even the impossible passion that was still filling her husband’s heart. But no, Michaela dismissed the Lazars as she now dismissed everything connected with the possibility of our return home. “What’s the hurry?” she would repeatedly ask me. Israel wasn’t running away, and if we stayed for one more year I would be able to accumulate a wealth of surgical experience, which if it didn’t convince Hishin might convince the head of surgery in some other hospital to hire me. “We’re happy here,” she repeated, her great eyes shining imploringly. “There’s nobody waiting for us in Israel except your parents, and to a certain extent mine, and we can go and visit them all next Christmas.” But there was somebody else, and I was determined to make up for my failure with her.

I therefore insisted on returning on the original date, at the beginning of autumn, in spite of all Michaela’s arguments, which actually made a lot of sense and which were seconded by Sir Geoffrey, who tried to change my mind and persuade me to stay another year. Sir Geoffrey had become fast friends with Michaela and often found time to drop in to the chapel when she was working there. He would sit next to the altar, on which Shivi reposed in her portable crib, and chat to Michaela as she swept and mopped the floor, about Israel, India, and the world at large. Although Michaela’s English lacked even the rudiments of grammar, she had a great facility in picking up idioms, which she adroitly inserted into her uninhibited chatter, and she was universally praised for the richness of her vocabulary. It sometimes crossed my mind to wonder whether her relations with Sir Geoffrey were strictly platonic — a bizarre suspicion that was apparently founded on nothing more solid than my wish to balance my unfaithfulness to her in the past and the unfaithfulness I was contemplating in the future. Thus, when I came home from the hospital, I would sometimes imagine that I could detect Sir Geoffrey’s smell in the house. But what exactly this smell was, I couldn’t say, except that it was the smell of the hospital, which I myself carried on my body and in my soul. In any case, after Sir Geoffrey gave up trying to persuade me to stay for another year, he wrote to Lazar and asked him to send another doctor to replace me. When there was no reply, he phoned his office, but Lazar was never there. In the end Lazar returned his call, agreed to his request, and told him by the way that he was going in for a catheterization soon. He mentioned this not to complain or arouse Sir Geoffrey’s pity, which would not have been at all in character, but simply to let him know that the accidental EKG reading in London was evidently not an aberration. In fact, Lazar wanted to tell Sir Geoffrey that the old machines he had offered were in good working condition, and that as a result of the discovery of the asymptomatic arrhythmia he had undergone a stress test in Israel, as well as a stress heart scan, whose poor results had led the doctors to recommend a catheterization, even though he did not complain of chest pains.