Open Heart (41 page)

In the meantime my parents’ pleas had an effect, and two days after their meeting she called them on her own initiative and said
that she would agree to expand the scope of the wedding, which from now on was defined as “medium-sized,” on condition that she herself approved of the reception hall. Since the hall had to be medium-sized, the selection was not particularly wide, and from the uninspiring possibilities available, Michaela, who was becoming more alienated from me with each passing day, chose a smallish place in an old hotel in the middle of downtown
Jerusalem
. The entrance to the hotel was ugly, but the hall itself was attractive and well cared for, full of lush green plants, and the hotel owners boasted of their excellent catering. After Michaela had given her approval, we rode back to Tel Aviv on the
motorcycle
, stopping as usual at our favorite diner near the airport. She was tense, a little sad; this time she immediately removed her helmet, without flirting with her reflection in the big mirror. Even though I didn’t know that she had received the results of her pregnancy test two days before, I could feel her new tension, which came not only from the depressing appearance of the hotel but also from her decision to conceal the fact of her pregnancy from me so that we would be free to cancel the wedding at the last minute if for any reason we chose to do so. Maybe this was what she was hoping for in her unconscious mind, whose
workings
I tried to follow with interest and concern, feeling that I was conducting my own silent, separate dialogue with it.

The invitations were finally printed, with English facing the
Hebrew
, and my parents hurried to send a batch of them off to England, to give the family there time to prepare for the trip. Then we sat down to draw up a list of the local guests. My parents kept strictly to their promise to Michaela, careful not to exceed the limits of a medium-sized wedding. I noticed that my mother’s attitude to Michaela had changed as a result of her violent outburst and sudden tears in the Tel Aviv café; she was beginning to treat her with a mixture of apprehension and pity. The problem, of course, was who to exclude from the wedding, and who to invite on the assumption that they would not come. My father prepared three lists of possible guests. First, they asked me for the names of people I thought were “essential.” I wrote down Eyal and Hadas, Eyal’s mother, Amnon without his
parents
,
two good friends from my army days, and two more from medical school. I added Dr. Nakash and his wife, whom I had never met, hesitated for a moment over Hishin and decided to leave him out, and confidently added Lazar and his wife, and of course Einat, thanks to whose illness I had met Michaela. My mother smiled sourly. “It’s funny that we’re not allowed to invite good neighbors, people we’ve been living next door to for so many years, while two total strangers like the Lazars will
suddenly
be our guests.” “Not yours,” I said, reacting sharply, “mine. Why not? I have my own reasons for inviting them. But don’t worry, they won’t come.” “Yes they will,” said my mother, confusing my father, who was poised to put them down on the list of guests who wouldn’t attend. In my heart of hearts I knew that my mother was right. Lazar’s wife wouldn’t forgo the chance of seeing me standing under the chuppah, not only
because
of the desire she might feel for me but also because she knew that I was marrying for her sake too.

And if she didn’t know, I reflected, I would have to let her know. With this aim in view, I would have to find a way deliver the invitation to her in person. About the wedding itself she must have heard from Einat, with whom Michaela was still in touch and whom she had even invited to a party to mark the end of her single state. I was a little excited at the idea of meeting Einat again, since I had not seen her since our return from India. “At least you had no trouble finding the apartment,” I said when I greeted her at the door and gave her a little hug. She smiled in embarrassment and blushed. Could she have seen me as
something
more than her physician during the time we spent together in India? She had put on a little weight, and the signs of the hepatitis had vanished, together with all traces of the Indian
suntan
, which Michaela still had. Now she looked healthy and very cute. She was wearing wide-bottomed black trousers and a white silk blouse with a richly embroidered little red bolero over it. Green earrings, the color of her eyes, dangled from her ears. She was shy, but also a little amused at being in her grandmother’s apartment, now taken over by strangers. When she was a
schoolgirl
, she said, she had often come here straight from school to
have lunch with her grandmother and do her homework, and sometimes she had stayed over, sleeping on the couch in the
living
room. “Were you comfortable sleeping all night on that
narrow
couch?” I asked. “Why narrow?” said Einat in surprise. “It only takes a minute to convert it into a big bed.” The fact that the plain old couch could easily be turned into a large bed had escaped my notice, and if not for Einat I might never have
noticed
it. Despite Michaela’s protests, I moved the chairs and the coffee table aside, and Einat showed me the hidden lever that raised the couch and converted it into a large, comfortable bed, with an old sheet still spread over it and the long-forgotten
summer
pajamas of the child Einat. “You see, it’s a good thing you came,” I said to her affectionately. “You discovered your
pajamas
and we discovered an extra bed. When your mother handed over the apartment to me, she forgot to show me the mysteries of the magic sofa.”

“My mother,” said Einat in a sneering, hostile tone, “hardly knows what she’s got in her own bedroom.” And suddenly,
without
warning, I felt my face flushing and my throat choking up, as if the mere mention of my beloved’s bedroom were enough to conjure up a flickering but very vivid memory of her heavy white body and pampered little feet, before which I had knelt in the bedroom next door, from which Michaela now emerged with a plastic bag for the forgotten pajamas to give to Einat, who was standing and smiling to herself in blissful ignorance of what was going on inside me.

In the meantime more guests knocked at the door, and I quickly returned the sofa to its original state. Two “Indian” friends of Michaela’s and Einat’s arrived. Both of them had
recently
returned from India after spending more than a year there, and Michaela pounced on them to hear details about new places and especially to hear news of acquaintances, Israelis and others, who had been or were still wandering around the country.
Suddenly
the great subcontinent was transformed into an almost
intimate
place, like some big kibbutz full of private corners and friendly people—until I felt that my own short trip to India had not taken place on solid ground at all but in a distant, floating daydream. Accordingly, I sat silently and listened, occasionally asking a brief question. I found it strange that Einat participated in the conversation enthusiastically, mentioning places and
people
as if she too had been a big heroine and not a poor sick girl whose mother and father had had to come and rescue her and take her home. I could not take my eyes off her. She was
attractive
in her way, but there was nothing in her movements or
gestures
which reminded me of her mother. Her face was different, bearing more of a resemblance to her father’s, but more delicate and very fair. Had her liver really emerged unscathed? I
wondered
suddenly, and congratulated myself on still remembering the results of her transaminases levels. There were a number of medical questions on the tip of my tongue, but I repressed them, not wanting to appear in the role of the doctor this evening. In the meantime one of Michaela’s “Indian” friends noticed my prolonged silence and suggested changing the subject. “But it’s his own fault,” Michaela smilingly protested. “He could have stayed a little longer and not gone home like a good little boy with Einat’s parents. It won’t do him any harm to hear a few stories—maybe it will whet his appetite to go back again with me.” But then the doorbell rang, and Amnon, who had found a guard to take his place for a few hours, came in with a bottle of red wine, followed by another two couples who had come to strengthen our spirits in anticipation of our marriage, and behind them a few gate-crashers, and the apartment was soon “as crowded as the Calcutta train station,” as I said with a smile to the “Indian” friends. But nobody heard me, for the group had already broken up, and some people had went into my bedroom to sprawl out on the grandmother’s big bed. Einat too went into the bedroom, slipped off her shoes and her pretty bolero, and lay down on the bed with the others. I sat down next to her and managed to speak to her quietly in the middle of the din, asking her first about her grandmother, and enjoying with her the thought of how the old lady would react to what was going on in her apartment now; then I proceeded to questions about her
parents
, casually collecting new items of information about her mother and tactfully prodding her to reconstruct her feelings and sensations from the moment we first met in the monastery in Bodhgaya. Her replies were hesitant at first, but they gradually began to pour out freely and eagerly. Her face glowed prettily in the dim, shadowy light. She too considered the blood transfusion in the pilgrims’ hostel as the turning point in her illness. Her mother agreed with her, and even her father had stopped
belittling
the decision lately, though he was still a little angry at my hysteria in the airport, when I had forced the stopover in Varanasi.

“Hysteria?” I was astounded to hear this word coming so
naturally
out of her mouth. “Are you serious? Did I seem hysterical to you?”

“Yes,” said Einat, and on seeing my offended expression she added, “A little. But you were right. It’s just that when my father makes up his mind to do something, it’s hard to budge him. You’d have to have been hysterical to interrupt the flight to New Delhi.” But I remained flabbergasted. Nobody had ever called me hysterical before. I had always been well known for my supreme rationality. I had, in fact, been accused of being phlegmatic at times by various women I had dated. Had I really shown signs of hysteria at the Varanasi airport? If so, perhaps they could be considered portents of what had happened four nights later in the hotel in Rome, when I suddenly realized I was in love with the heavy woman who only a few weeks ago had been lying next to me on this big bed, where a bunch of giggling strangers were now sprawling, giving off a faint smell of sweat as they talked softly to each other and looked benevolently at me and Einat. Einat sat with her legs crossed, small and withdrawn into herself, nervously folding the bedspread between her fingers, staring at me intently as if she wanted to say something to me, and finally saying it: “You know, I’m very happy about you and Michaela getting married, I even feel a little responsible for it.”

“Of course,” I laughingly agreed, “it’s all your fault. You were our secret matchmaker.” And after a pause I added, “And your parents too.”

“My parents?” she said, startled. “How come?”

“Perhaps they infected me with the virus of their
relationship
—there’s such a special bond between them.” She laughed, an unpleasant, spiteful laugh. Suddenly I was afraid that she would tell her father that I had called his love a virus. I had to watch the words that came out of my mouth more carefully. “Do they know that I’m getting married?” She shrugged her
shoulders
; she had left home a few weeks before to live in a rented room. “I’ll have to invite them,” I said. “Why should you?” she asked sadly. “Because they deserve it,” I replied shortly, and her
face fell, as if I now had taken away whatever little happiness I had given her.

I still didn’t know if my decision to give Dori the invitation personally stemmed from a sincere desire to have her and her husband at my wedding, or whether it was just an excuse to see her face to face again, so that I could say to her, You see, I’m a serious man who keeps his promises; I’m going to get married to protect you from this wild, impossible passion that sets my thoughts on fire, but also so that you’ll permit me to be with you from time to time and to lay my head on your soft, round belly. But I didn’t want to turn up at her office without warning and be squeezed in like a beggar between one client and the next, so I called her to ask for an appointment. I sensed a slight hesitation in her voice, but also excitement and happiness. She knew, of course, about my marriage, and perhaps she also understood its significance without my having to tell her, but when I suggested that we meet in the apartment, she immediately said in alarm, “No, no, not there.” We arranged to meet at her office, after working hours, when the secretaries had already left and the
offices
of some of her colleagues were already dark. She wasn’t alone in her room when I arrived, but with a young couple who were discussing some criminal matter with her, and I sat behind the half-open door and listened to her patiently holding forth in her clear voice. I felt my muscles stretching delicately with the sweet pain of the lust beginning to stir inside my body. This time I restrained myself from bringing a gift, in order not to alarm her again, and when her clients left and she went on sitting silently in the room, I got up and knocked softly on the door, and
without
waiting for an invitation I went inside, ducking my head so she wouldn’t see the violent blush spreading over my cheeks.