Open Heart (32 page)

“It stopped on its own, not because of you.” Professor Levine flung these words at me heatedly. “The clotting factors, which you thought you were giving her in your transfusion, are
enzymes
, not blood cells, and they behave completely differently in a transfusion. They’re absorbed and disappear—they’re
ineffective
unless they’re diluted in a special serum to bind them and prevent them from dissolving. But this, my friend, not even your excellent teachers in Jerusalem could have taught you, and you simply couldn’t have known. I don’t blame you, as Professor Hishin has already confessed that he forgot to give you my
article
, which I prepared specially for you, because I anticipated such complications with bleeding. But, Dr. Rubin, I do blame you for so recklessly endangering the mother, whom you could have
infected
with the daughter’s virus. When they told me in their
innocence
how you put off the return flight to New Delhi in order to perform a blood transfusion in that city of the dead of theirs, whose name I’ve forgotten, I was careful not to say a word to betray my horror at what you’d done. It’s a miracle that nothing happened. Sometimes God protects people from their doctors. But still, I asked myself, is this young man simply an idiot, who never learned the ABCs of performing a blood transfusion, or did
he perhaps have some hidden purpose beyond my
comprehension
? And then, when I was asked to consider you for a
temporary
residency in my department, I thought at first, no, not him, I don’t even want to hear his name. But Lazar, and his secretary too, and even your Professor Hishin began putting pressure on me, and other people, objective people, said that you were really a conscientious young man, reliable and modest, and I must say, this is my impression too. So, Dr. Rubin, if you want to join our department, even on a temporary basis, I suggest that you spend the coming week in the library boning up on a few elementary laws of physics, such as the law of equilibrium, and consulting a biology textbook about the movement of viruses and how they multiply in the bloodstream, with particular attention to viruses B and C, which are interesting in themselves, and come back to me next week or the week after. There’s no hurry—come back and we’ll discuss it, so that you’ll understand for once and for all what a catastrophe you could have brought down on a perfectly healthy woman we’re all fond of, for the sake of your pointless theatrics.”

Now I remembered with a chill how my friend Eyal had
spontaneously
reacted in exactly the same way when I told him about the blood transfusion in Jerusalem. I could hardly suspect Eyal of inventing things for the sole purpose of tripping me up. So what was the truth of the matter? Had I really been so wrong? A shiver ran down my spine at the thought that Dori might believe I had done something reckless to endanger her health, and lose
confidence
in me as a doctor. But I also knew that I must on no account get into an argument now with this neurotic man. I had better behave in my best “Anglo-Saxon” manner, as my father proudly called it, and avoid a dispute, and not even confront him about the mortifying expression “your pointless theatrics.” I rose to my feet, my face burning, humiliated to the depths of my soul, and parted from him with hardly a word, or a promise either. Turning by mistake into the internal medicine ward and walking down the corridor between the rooms, where most of the
patients
were middle-aged or old and where my eyes suddenly flooded with tears, I thought to myself, No, it’s impossible, he’s wrong, his fears are imaginary, but I’ll never be able to prove to him how absurd his arguments are, because all he wants is to depress me, like Dr. Nakash said—yes, Nakash knows him, all
right. And suddenly I felt a powerful desire to see Dr. Nakash, so that he would give me, in his simple, straightforward way, a foothold in the world, because now I felt that I had been finally banished from the hospital which up to a few months ago I was sure would become my true and final place in life. I looked for Nakash in the recovery room, but there I was told that he was in the operating room. Still, I didn’t want to give up the idea of seeing him, and I slipped into the wing. Through the window in the door I saw my friends from the surgical department standing there in their green gowns, and Dr. Nakash, dark and skinny, in a short white coat, his head close to the head of the patient. He soon noticed me and sent me a friendly wave, as a sign that I should wait for him. After a few minutes he came out to me. I told him about my meeting with Levine, including the vicious remark about my “pointless theatrics.” He wasn’t surprised; he only smiled and cursed under his breath. “I told you. He’s a difficult man—all he wants to do is depress you without giving you anything in return. Leave him alone. You don’t need him. Tomorrow night we’ve got a big private operation, and at the end of the month two more long, serious operations. I’ve
recommended
you to other anesthetists too. Don’t worry, Benjy, you won’t starve, you’ll specialize in anesthesiology, and you won’t regret it, because even if you go back to surgery in the end, it will give you a big advantage over your anesthetists. You’ll be able to get more out of them.”

He returned to the operating room to sit at the patient’s head while I hurried out of the hospital, which for the first time since I had started working there had become intolerable to me. Above all, I didn’t want to bump into anyone I knew from the medical staff and have to justify myself to him. Who could have imagined two months ago, when I stood in the big office between the two strongest, most influential men at the hospital, who saw me as the “ideal man” for the job and succeeded in persuading me to go to India, that things would turn out like this, that in this whole great hospital there was no room for me now, not even a temporary post, and that of all the hopes I’d cherished in the past year, all I’d be left with was a bizarre, impossible infatuation,
which would now only make me suffer more? For if it had
remained
an abstract fantasy, as it had been until yesterday, it might still have been possible to extricate myself gradually, but now that my body had miraculously touched hers, I had
committed
not only my soul but also my body, which had been seared with pleasure, to go on and prove to myself that it was no
passing
episode, as she had announced with such confidence while she was quickly putting on her clothes. Because if I was the one who had started, only I could stop. And I didn’t want to stop, I didn’t want to stop.

So I said to myself as I stepped out into the big parking lot and the strong but sweet light of a brilliant winter’s day. I walked over to my motorcycle, which I had recently taken to inserting between the cars of the directors, under their exclusive carport, not only in order to protect it from the rain but also in order to peek into Lazar’s car to see if Dori had forgotten anything of hers there. I kicked off and rode quickly out of the hospital grounds, but at the first traffic light, while I was waiting at a red light, I couldn’t resist looking back at the yellowish building with smoke spiraling out of its two tall chimneys, and suddenly it seemed to me that it was not I who was leaving the hospital but the hospital that was sailing away from me like some great ship, embarking with its doctors and patients on a journey full of new storms and adventures, which I had been found unworthy of participating in. Professor Levine was right—he had put his
finger
on something; mental illness sharpened the senses. It was true, there had been something a little theatrical about my
actions
in Varanasi. There was always something faintly theatrical in the contact between a doctor and his patient, because it was only through acting that you could overcome a total stranger’s natural embarrassment at getting undressed in front of you so that you could look into his mouth, feel his stomach, listen to his heart, and finger his sexual organs. But in the hotel in Varanasi, next to the purple-lacquered wicker chairs, it hadn’t only been a theatrical show, it had been the beginning of falling in love, a love that I now had to make sure didn’t die, didn’t turn into a passing episode.

When I arrived at my old apartment, I found the door open and strange suitcases standing in the hall and the landlady
hurrying
behind me to inform me that the new tenants were already
moving in, because they had nowhere else to go and they couldn’t wait any longer. Since I had promised to vacate the apartment early, and if my new apartment was ready, why should I delay? I had no reason to delay, but no wish to start packing up my possessions either, which turned out to be more numerous than I had imagined, in front of this couple, fresh out of the army, quiet and in love, who began following me around and inserting themselves softly and insistently into every shelf I cleared. My motorcycle was of course no help in transporting my stuff, and I phoned Amnon, a childhood friend from Jerusalem who was busy writing his Ph.D. in the physics and astronomy department of Tel Aviv University, and supporting himself by working as a night watchman in a big canning plant in the south of the city. At night he had an old pickup truck at his disposal, and I asked him to use it to transport my belongings to the new apartment where I had already been to bed, but not to sleep. I had to wait until late in the evening, when his shift began, and in the meantime the young couple began to push me discreetly but firmly out of the apartment. At first we agreed that I would clear one room for them, where they could put their stuff until I cleared out the rest of the apartment. And at first they confined themselves to the room, giggling in undertones as they put things away in the closets and even hung pictures on the walls. But toward evening, when they saw that I was still hanging around, they grew impatient, and began wandering around the
apartment
, going into the kitchen to cook themselves supper, and the girl went into the bathroom to take a shower. They were a symbiotic couple, and kept up an incessant communication
between
them. Even when the girl was in the shower the boy kept going into the bathroom to give her things or get things from her. In the end Amnon called and announced that he would arrive within half an hour. I began taking down the suitcases, blankets, and cushions, and the young couple immediately volunteered to take down the cardboard boxes with my books and kitchen
utensils
. And even when I was sitting downstairs with all my
possessions
around me, waiting for Amnon and his pickup, they went on searching the apartment and bringing down all kinds of dirty and forgotten belongings of mine which I had left behind. It was highly disagreeable to have to part in such unseemly haste from my first Tel Aviv apartment, of which I was very fond, and where
I had enjoyed a certain quiet and solitude, and which also
preserved
the memory of my initial excitement at the hospital, when I would reconstruct the operating table on the kitchen table and practice with a knife and fork and pieces of string, trying to imitate Hishin’s quiet, rapid movements.

Amnon arrived very late and found me sitting on the sidewalk covered with a blanket, surrounded by my possessions like a
deported
refugee. But I couldn’t be angry with him, since I knew that he was abandoning his watchman’s post for my sake. We quickly loaded everything onto the open truck, and I got onto my motorcycle and rode in front to show him the way. At the new place we unloaded everything onto the sidewalk, and Amnon drove away. “You still have to explain to me what Hawking’s problem is with the first three seconds of the big bang,” I said before he left. I knew he liked having me ask him questions about astrophysics, so that he could give me a long lecture while I sat and listened like a disciple at the feet of the master. He had been stuck on his Ph.D. for several years now, even though he devoted all his energies to it, and his friends were loath to ask him about it in case a note of incredulity crept into their voices. “Whenever you like—you know I’m all in favor of your taking a break from your quackery and learning a little real science,” he said affably. He asked for my new phone number, but I found that I had suddenly forgotten it, so I promised that I would call him that very night and give it to him. But in the new apartment the phone was dead. The thought that my parents had probably been trying to get in touch with me all evening and wondering where I had disappeared to began to worry me. During the past few weeks I had noted a new note of concern in their voices, and there was no reason to add to their anxiety. But what had
happened
to the telephone? No one had touched it since last night. For a moment it occurred to me that Dori had garbled her
message
to the phone company when she asked for an interim
reading
of the meter and had caused them to disconnect the phone by mistake. It was late, and the apartment was alarmingly full of my possessions. Now I had the feeling that it was actually smaller than the apartment I had left, and the closet full of the granny’s gray suits suddenly annoyed me. But above all, it upset me that I wouldn’t be able to keep my promise to call Amnon, and he would wait in vain in his cold watchman’s hut and think that I
was trying to get out of meeting him after taking advantage of him and his truck. I left my belongings piled up on the floor and went out to look for a pay phone in order to call him and make a date. As I searched for a phone I thought about the obscurity of those first three seconds of the big bang, encountered by
Hawking
and others, and in which, according to Hawking’s own
admission
, the theory itself collapsed, owing to its inability to
explain
how the entire cosmos, compressed into a particle whose density was infinite and whose radius was zero, had begun to expand with such speed. Physics was helpless with regard to these three seconds, for they were simply outside physics. This was the point of transition from spirit to matter. In other words, how could matter shrink back into the single particle from which it was born? Spirit would do it, and not by magic but in a slow and gradual process. In fact, it had already begun. Take the
airplane
, for example. It compressed matter, canceled distance, and what was the airplane if not a smallish bit of matter in which an enormous amount of spirit had been invested—that is, laws and thought?