Open Heart (33 page)

When I finally found a phone, I was too tired to engage Amnon in any of my theories and simply asked him to notify the phone company of the problem, and gave him my new number, which I had written down on my identity card. And then, in spite of the lateness of the hour, I phoned my parents, who I thought would be worrying about my sudden disappearance, but it turned out that they were sleeping soundly, without a care in the world, for when they had phoned my new apartment in the
afternoon
, a recorded voice had informed them that the phone was temporarily disconnected.

“It must be my new landlady’s fault,” I said immediately, laughing but annoyed. “Instead of asking for a simple reading of the meter, she must have confused the issue somehow, and they disconnected the phone. Terrific. Now what am I going to do?” But my mother calmed me down; she had an inexplicable faith in government agencies, perhaps because my father worked for one of them. “They’ll connect it again in the morning, and in any case we won’t need it tomorrow, because we’re coming to Tel Aviv to sign the guarantee for you and help you organize things in your new place.” Suddenly I felt uncomfortable about their coming so soon to my new apartment, where my lovemaking
with my landlady still lingered in the air. I was also sure that my mother wouldn’t approve of the apartment, which she had been hostile toward from the outset. And even if she restrained herself and didn’t say anything against it, she wouldn’t be able to resist questioning me about my real reasons for making this sudden change. “No, don’t come tomorrow,” I said quickly. “The
guarantee
can wait. I’ve given her enough postdated checks. Don’t come, I won’t have enough time to spend with you tomorrow. And tomorrow night I’m taking part in a private operation with Dr. Nakash, who’s taken me on as his assistant, and I’ll have to go in early to check out the anesthetizing equipment and begin to learn the subject. Why come in the middle of all the mess? Give me a chance to fix things up a bit. Besides, it makes more sense for me to come to Jerusalem on Friday to see you, and I’ll bring the guarantee with me so you can sign it there.” I concluded on a pleading note, and now there was a silence on the other end of the line. There was no doubt that they were disappointed,
especially
my father, who had probably planned the visit to Tel Aviv in detail. But my promise to come to Jerusalem for the weekend tipped the scales, and they gave in. “So tomorrow you’ll be
operating
again,” said my father, suddenly coming to life. “You see, nothing’s been lost. They want you in the operating room again.”

“It’s only an operation for the surgeon, Dad. For me it’s just putting someone to sleep and waking him up again,” I said in despair, looking at a young woman wrapped in a winter coat, standing a few steps away in the empty street.

I said nothing to them about my interview with Professor Levine, not wanting to cause them any more grief. I would have to
accustom
them gradually to the idea that I was out of the hospital. I hurried back to the apartment, and although I had had a
difficult
, confusing day, I didn’t feel tired and immediately began to tackle the task of arranging my possessions in their new places. It turned out that in addition to the granny’s closet, the Lazars had forgotten to empty the two little bedside cupboards, which
contained
mainly documents, old letters, and photograph albums. At first I didn’t know if I had the right to empty them on my own
initiative, but the thought of having two family archives stuffed with letters and photographs and documents belonging to
complete
strangers weighing on my sleep at night was too much for me. After some hesitation, I decided to cram everything into some empty shoe boxes I found on the balcony, which I pushed between the gray suits in the granny’s closet. At first I thought of keeping one photograph album out, for on paging through it I had found a number of ancient photographs of Dori as a young soldier, a law student, with Lazar and without him, holding a baby in her arms, always smiling, attractive and shapely, a young woman of my own age. But in the end I put it away with the others. I felt alien and hostile toward these photographs. I couldn’t connect with her past; nothing here belonged to me, nor did I need it to fire my imagination and fuel my love. I wanted her the way I knew her now, plump, middle-aged, mature,
pampered
but sure of herself. Until the small hours of the night I was busy putting my things away and cleaning the apartment. I hung my pictures up on the nails which had remained in the walls, not wanting to disturb the silence with the banging of a hammer. Finally I took a shower and made the bed with the clean,
fragrant
sheets that had apparently been left for my use, and with the disconnected telephone ensuring that no one would disturb me, I sank into a deep, prolonged sleep, with the result that I
arrived
alert and clearheaded at the private hospital on the Herzliah beach for the operation which began at twilight the next day and lasted until dawn.

It was complicated and dangerous brain surgery, performed by a surgeon of about thirty-five, a visiting professor from America, assisted by a local man, a well-known retired surgeon from our own hospital, who had worked with Dr. Nakash in the past and presumably trusted him to handle the particularly complex
anesthesia
procedure. For the first time I saw Nakash losing a little of his natural serenity and inner confidence. He was flushed and excited, and after introducing me to the visiting surgeon and his personal assistant, he began addressing me in English, and asked me to answer him in kind, so that we would fit into the linguistic ambience of the place, which from the moment of my arrival had impressed me with its pleasantness. In contrast to the operating rooms I had known up to then, which were always cold,
windowless
, isolated from the world, buried in the heart of the
hospital
like the engine room of a submarine, here we entered an operating room that was bright and cozy, behind whose
attractive
drapes were windows through which an almost pastoral view was visible, with people walking calmly along a well-tended seaside promenade. The instruments were newer than those in our hospital, smaller in their dimensions, light and pleasant to hold. And in the middle of all this was the large shaved skull of a handsome, sturdy man of about fifty-five. Since the days of my anatomy lessons I had not seen a human skull held between
forceps
and gradually opened up, layer after layer, sawed by the hand of an artist to expose the whitish brain pulsing with its minute capillaries, whose delicate balance between stillness and vitality Nakash was controlling from behind a state-of-the-art anesthesia machine full of little monitors displaying changing numbers. And so the long night began, during the course of which I learned how to stand rooted to the spot for hours at a time in order to follow the movement of the respirator, and
especially
the changing values of the oxygen concentration, the level of expired carbon dioxide, the volume of air pumped into the lungs, and of course the heartbeats, the systemic blood pressure, the venous pressure, and the state of hydration in the body—all of which make up the drama of anesthesiology, particularly in brain surgery, where the slightest twitch or cough on the part of the patient can cause the exposed brain to bulge.

“If you’re getting bored,” Nakash whispered to me in the
middle
of the night in his heavily accented Iraqi Hebrew, “think of yourself as the pilot of the soul, who has to ensure that it glides painlessly through the void of sleep without being jolted or shocked, without falling. But also to make sure that it doesn’t soar too high and slip inadvertently into the next world.” I had heard him speak like this about his role before, but now, in the depths of the night, a little groggy after long hours of intent concentration on the changing monitors of the anesthesia
machine
, with the skull and brain not actually before my eyes but only flickering grayly on the suspended video screen, I felt that his words were true. I had turned from a doctor into a pilot or a navigator, surrounded by nurses, who looked like well-groomed stewardesses in this private hospital, coming in every now and then to draw a little blood to measure the potassium and sodium levels, or to pour cocktails of pentothal or morphine into the
suspended infusion bags, with special additions concocted by Nakash to ensure the tranquillity of the “instrument flight.” And for the first time I saw this work, for all its boredom and
frustration
, as something that possessed spiritual significance, for the thought and attention of the anesthetist were addressed not to the body, not to the matter, not to the greenish tumor which the two surgeons at our side were battling to extract from the depths of the brain, but to the soul, which I suddenly felt was truly in my hands, in its silence and, who knows, perhaps also in its dreams.

When the operation was over we saw that dawn had already stolen through the folds of the drapes. The two surgeons and the nurses left the room, and the patient was wheeled into the
recovery
room. Nakash sat next to him for a while and then went to see to the arrangements for us to be paid, leaving me to wait for the “landing”—in other words, to watch the respirator for the first signs that the patient was beginning to breathe
independently
. I now felt no tiredness. I parted the curtains and let my eyes wander from the respirator to the sunrise painting the sea in soft pastel colors. My hands were clean, without any blood or smell of drugs, without the warmth of the depths of the human body, which I was used to feeling on my fingers after an
operation
, even if I had played a very minor role in it. And although I hadn’t even seen the tumor with my own eyes before it was sent for the biopsy, I felt a sense of profound satisfaction, as if I had truly taken part in the battle. I went up to the patient and raised his eyelids, as I had observed Nakash doing to his patients, but without knowing what exactly I wanted to see there. A new, very pretty nurse, who hadn’t been present during the operation, came into the room and sat down next to me and said, “Dr. Nakash sent me to take over from you, so that you can go and sign for the fee.” I didn’t want to leave the patient; I felt that I wanted to see for myself how the undercarriage of the soul touched the solid ground of the body. The nurse’s frank reference to the financial arrangements between myself and the hospital jarred me. But I was new here and I didn’t want to step out of line. I thus went to the secretary’s office, where a check for eight hundred shekels was waiting for me, together with an elegantly printed page setting out the details of the fee and the various deductions. Nakash examined my check and asked if everything
was all right. Then he sent me home. “I’ll see that our patient lands safely,” he said with a smile. I went to the changing rooms, and even though I had not been soiled by the operation, I couldn’t resist the magnificent facilities, and I took a long shower. Then I dressed, tucked my crash helmet under my arm, and prepared to leave the hospital, but before doing so I couldn’t help going into the recovery room to see if the landing was over. It was, and the patient was now alone. Nakash had disappeared. The beautiful nurse was gone too. The anesthesia machine had been wheeled into a corner of the room. The soul had returned to the body. The patient was breathing by himself.

I reached my apartment without any problems, leaving behind me rows of despairing cars struggling to enter Tel Aviv. The check was in my pocket, about a quarter of my monthly salary at the hospital. Now I thought about Dori. Should I wait until my parents had signed the guarantee, or should I try to make contact without any actual pretext for doing so? Children in school
uniforms
were coming down the stairs. Neighbors examined me
suspiciously
when they saw me standing in my black leather jacket and crash helmet, opening the door to my apartment, but no one dared to say anything to me. I made myself a big breakfast, and then I let down the blinds and prepared for a sweet sleep without any disturbances, not even the chance ringing of the phone. But while I was fast asleep the line was reconnected, and at one o’clock in the afternoon the phone rang insistently. It was my mother, who was glad to see that her efforts on my behalf with the phone company had borne fruit and who asked me when I intended to arrive the next day. “Early,” I said immediately,
because
I knew that I had to compensate them for missing their visit to Tel Aviv. And indeed, I arrived in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon before my father came home from work and told my mother about the interview with Professor Levine and my final banishment from the hospital. At first she listened in silence. Whenever I was involved in a quarrel, she was always careful not to get carried away and blame the other party, and even when it was clear to her that they were in the wrong and had treated me unjustly, she would examine what it was in me and my behavior that had caused them to wrong me. Now, too, she tried to
interrogate
me tactfully but insistently—was I sure that the blood transfusion had been essential? And how had I felt when I was
performing it? I felt sorry for her. She was groping in the dark, looking for something that she could never have imagined was actually there. But I was afraid that she might discover
something
, so I deliberately increased the darkness in which she was floundering. In the end my father arrived. I wanted to spare him the bad news for a while, but my mother immediately told him. At first he turned a little pale, then he recovered and listened with unseemly gratification to Dr. Nakash’s pithy definitions of
Professor
Levine’s mental illness. The fact that Hishin had not
challenged
the transfusion appeared to him to confirm my innocence of any wrongdoing, and he seemed satisfied. He was also very impressed by my descriptions of the private hospital in Herzliah, and was amazed at the high fee I had received for one night’s work. “Dealing with the soul is more important and expensive than dealing only with the body,” I said with a smile, “because in the end the legal responsibility falls on the anesthetist. If
something
happens to the patient, who will they blame? Who’ll have the strength to open up the stomach or the brain again to poke around in there and decide what was cut right or wrong?” My mother sank into a profound silence and gave me a searching look. I felt that for some reason she was dissatisfied with me, but I also knew that she was incapable of putting her finger on the precise source of her complaints.