Open Heart (61 page)

“Can I take your mother home?” I asked her, my face flushed, as if the old lady’s authority were not enough. “Of course,” Hishin replied for her, “you’ll be providing an important
service
.” In an intimate tone he said to Dori, “The boy must have forgotten himself with his friends.” She nodded her head and took a sip of tea. I stood hesitating in the kitchen doorway, the straps of Shivi’s sling over my shoulder, and behind my back in the hallway, where the lightbulb had apparently burned out, I heard the granny quickly getting ready to leave. “It’s raining
outside
,” I warned. “But it isn’t cold,” I added reassuringly as I saw Dori reaching out to take another cigarette. Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge to stop her, as if I were being prompted by Lazar, who always tried to prevent her from smoking, and I stepped quickly forward and reached for the pack of cigarettes. At first she was astonished, as if the dead man’s hand had come
back to life. But she immediately recovered, and assuming that I too, like Hishin, wanted to try one of her slender cigarettes, she offered me the pack with a generous, heart-wrenching smile, and I had no option but to take a cigarette and bend down to get a light from her, mumbling something about the strangeness and confusion of the last few days, while Hishin looked at me
affectionately
and nodded his head. As soon as we were outside, I threw the cigarette away and ground it out with my foot. The light rain, which had freshened the air, made Dori’s mother happy, as if only changes in nature could bring some comfort to people so overcome with grief. “Your baby’s not only sweet, she’s also very well behaved,” she announced as I showed her how to buckle the seat belt. “Your Michaela apparently knows how to handle her,” she added. “I do too,” I said, unable not to claim my share of the credit as a devoted husband and father. “You too, of course,” the old lady agreed, although she seemed to have more faith in the inner serenity of Michaela, about whom she now began to question me. But I didn’t want to waste the few minutes of the short drive on pointless chatter about Michaela or Shivi, or even myself. I wanted to talk about Dori and how she was going to manage in the future, and even how she was coping in the grim present, and in this context I mentioned Hishin’s constant presence in the apartment. “Yes, Hishin never leaves us,” she said. “It’s very difficult for him too, of course; he feels guilty about transferring Lazar’s operation from the department where it belonged and bringing in a strange surgeon from
outside
.” Once more I found myself defending Hishin and his acts, as if his guilt were liable to rub off on me. She listened
sympathetically
to what I had to say, nodding her head encouragingly as if she too would like to clear Hishin of any guilt and be
convinced
of the inevitability of her son-in-law’s death. “Of course, for a doctor, no death is completely unavoidable,” I said, trying to convey a more complex thought to her. “How can that be possible?” She sounded astonished, as though I were trying to persuade her of the possibility of everlasting life. “Because if we accepted some deaths as inevitable, we would lose the element of positive competition among doctors,” I explained. Now she seemed really worried by my words. “Is the competition among you really so fierce?” she asked. “Why not?” I replied. “We’re only human. To give you an example, when I changed a couple
of the medicines Professor Levine had prescribed for you, I admit I felt a little triumphant.”

“But in the meantime he’s changed them all back again,” she said sharply, and smiled with obvious enjoyment at my
discomfort
.

The old folks’ home was in darkness, even though it was only ten o’clock at night, but the old lady didn’t seem in the least upset. She thanked me warmly, allowed me to extricate her from her seat belt, put on a white beret to protect her head from the persistent drizzle, and stepped carefully out of the car. I got out too and offered to accompany her inside. In her excellent
physical
and mental condition, she was in no need of an escort, but with her sharp wits she sensed that I was eager to continue the conversation, and she therefore thanked me gratefully, as if I were doing her a great favor. We walked slowly across the
deserted
terrace. I asked her a question or two about the place, and she answered briefly. Now we were standing in front of a big glass door, behind which the doorman was sitting opposite a television screen on which the two of us flickered like a couple of ghosts. Suddenly she shivered, as if she too had finally recognized the lost soul of her son-in-law in some movement of my head or hand, or even in the tone of voice that I had just adopted. The glass door did not open immediately. The old lady looked straight at me, but without realizing that it was my very presence which now forced her to speak of him. “Poor Lazar, my heart aches for him,” she said sadly, and she tugged at the white beret to protect at least one side of her face from the blustering wind. As if she wasn’t sure whether I shared the intensity of her
emotion
, she added, “Do you know how fond he was of you, and how well he spoke of you?” I nodded my head painfully, as if everything I had felt since my return from England had now been confirmed. “But what’s going to happen to Dori now?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulders. “It will be very hard for Dori. Very hard.”

I saw that she still hadn’t grasped the crux of the matter. “But how will she stay by herself?”

“How?” Dori’s mother sighed, still not understanding what I was getting at. “I don’t know how. She’ll have to find a way. It will be very hard for her. As it is for everyone else.”

“But what way? In what sense?” I pressed her, refusing to let
her evade the issue. “She’s incapable of being on her own for a minute. It’s impossible for her.” I saw that my insistence was beginning to confuse her. Her eyes wandered, and she hugged the door for shelter, afraid to meet my eyes lest she admit that I knew something nobody was supposed to know, something that even she refused to acknowledge. But I pressed on, oblivious to her discomfort in my fervor. “How, for example, will she stay by herself at night? Who’ll be there with her?” Finally she
understood
that she could no longer evade my questions, which sprang from a deep inner source, perhaps prompted by Lazar himself. “Don’t you worry your head about that,” she said, smiling in relief. “She’ll find a way not to be by herself. She’ll find someone to be with her. Even when she was a child and we sometimes left her alone in the evening, she would run to find some little friend to spend the night with her. She always knew how to find people to look after her, so that she wouldn’t have to stay by herself for even a minute.” I was flooded with sweetness at the thought of the little girl running in the pleasant evening streets of childhood to find a little friend to spend the night. I suddenly felt as if the worry had been removed from my heart and, more significantly, as if a new horizon had opened before me, full of a reassuring promise. I pressed the button next to the door and asked the doorman over the intercom to open it. He checked his list for the old lady’s name, and after he found it he pressed the buzzer and I left her. But I didn’t leave the place before calling Michaela on a pay phone to apologize for my lateness and to tell her that I was on my way home.

Michaela was indifferent to this announcement, but Amnon, who was still at the apartment and eagerly waiting for my return, wasn’t. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist passing Dori’s house again, and after checking that Hishin’s car was no longer there, I climbed softly up the dark stairs, and stood holding my breath outside the door, with my hand on the lock, to give my beloved the feeling that even if her mother had already gone home and her daughter was asleep in her room and her son had not yet returned, she was not alone.

Has
the
time
come
to
reflect
on
love,
so
that
what
was
impossible
will
become
possible?
The
solitary
bird
—
which
broke
into
the
room
in
the
dead
of
night
and
underneath
the
bed,
among
the
clay
fragments
of
the
broken
statuette,
pecked
crumbs
from
the
heart
of
an
ancient
sandwich,
which
had
been
prepared
for
a
school
lunch
and
for
some
reason
had
found
its
way
there
and
been
forgotten
—
may
spread
its
great
wings
at
dawn
and
fly
away
to
find
where
she
has
disappeared
to,
the
curly-haired
little
girl
in
the
blue
uniform
with
the
school
badge
fastened
to
her
chest
with
a
safety
pin,
who
was
left
to
do
her
homework
at
the
kitchen
table
many
years
ago.

After the official mourning period was over, I found myself drawn to the administrative wing to find out if Lazar’s heir had already been designated. This was, of course, a pointless and ridiculous project, not only because it was only a week since he had died, but also because Lazar was not one of those executives who chose an heir-apparent during their lifetime, but believed that his true heir would have to make it on his own, after stiff competition with his peers. Nevertheless, when I walked down the corridor on my way from the surgical wing, in my green uniform, with the mask still hanging around my neck, my feet would lead me to the administrative wing and I would hesitantly advance toward Lazar’s office, whose door still bore, as if
nothing
had happened, the bronze plate inscribed with his name and office hours. In those days I would find the office quiet, with none of the feverish activity that had always characterized it, as if most of the urgent administrative problems demanding his
attention
had solved themselves with his death. The two secretaries who had always been there had disappeared, replaced by a young Anglo-Saxon typist who appeared not to be typing documents or letters but to be slowly copying material from a thick old medical textbook, presumably for one of the clinical seminars held in the hospital. The absence of Miss Kolby, Lazar’s faithful personal secretary, who had always treated me with particular affection, struck me as strange. I say “absence” and not “disappearance” because sometimes I would find traces of her in her room—a handbag, or a coat hanging on a hook. But when I tried to find out where she was, the secretaries in the adjacent rooms would shrug their shoulders, unable to give me a clear answer. “She’s wandering around” was the best answer they could come up with, referring to the confines of the administrative wing, to other parts of the hospital, and to a space beyond its
geographical
limits. “She’s
still
wandering around,” a friendly secretary tried to explain when I came back to the wing after my day’s work was over, illustrating not only the extent but also the rhythm of this wandering with a circular motion of her arm.

The truth is that I too had been infected by this aimless
wandering
. The women apparently realized this, and accordingly did not bother to ask exactly what I wanted from Lazar’s secretary, or whether I wished to leave a message. They seemed to sense that I had no explicit question or request but only an abstract desire to hang around in one of the many empty spaces left in the hospital by the death of the administrative director. For I had a lot of spare time now, not only because Michaela’s return took Shivi off my hands, but also because I was employed at the
hospital
only on a half-time basis and the private work in Herzliah had not yet been renewed. After my year in London and all the experience I had gained at St. Bernadine’s it seemed beneath my dignity to apply for night shifts at the Magen-David-Adom
station
, but until Michaela found a job and we knew where we stood, at least financially, I had no choice but to request a few night shifts there at the end of the month. Lazar’s departure had deprived me of the administrative patronage I still required. The permanent half-time job I had taken was more administrative than medical, the fruit of Lazar’s manipulations, which were
intended
to compensate me for some undefined injustice done me, in India or here. And although the permanency of the position
was an achievement that most of my peers could only dream about, its partial nature left me in a situation of disturbing
ambivalence
, so that sometimes I wished I had the guts to give it up altogether and look for a full-time job, even on a temporary
basis
, in the surgical department of some other hospital. Because of this, my search for Lazar’s personal secretary was intended not only to give me a chance to rub up against one of the intimate voids left by the energetic director but also to clarify my position and prospects at the hospital as she, an experienced secretary, saw them.

More than ten days had already passed since the week of mourning, and I decided to go and look for the wandering
secretary
again. I was already dressed in my ordinary clothes and on my way home. In the darkness of the corridor her room looked deserted like the others, but I tried the handle of the door
anyway
, and found her sitting alone at her desk with a pile of
accounts
in front of her. I took the faint scream uttered by the pale and wilted Miss Kolby as more than met the eye. True, I had come upon her unexpectedly, at an hour of the evening when the administrative wing was empty and most of the office doors had long been locked. We both apologized immediately, I for bursting in without knocking and she for not having contacted me after hearing that I had been looking for her. She stood up and gripped my wrist, speaking directly and with deep emotion. “Yes, after what happened here I can’t settle down. I keep wandering around and thinking, why weren’t we more careful? Why didn’t we pay more attention? And why did we fail to read the obvious signs? Every day I feel guiltier for not being firmer.”

“Firmer with who?” I asked. “With everyone. Including Dori, who gave in to them in the end. But above all with him. Because he’s definitely to blame as well.”

“He?” I pretended not to know who she was talking about, because I wanted to hear her say his name. “Yes, Lazar is
definitely
to blame too,” she said, going on bitterly and bravely with her accusation. “Why shouldn’t he be to blame? I warned him against the designs of Professor Hishin, who in the end thinks of nothing but himself and his department. And you?” She fixed her eyes on me. “You too, Dr. Rubin, are to blame, because you knew and you kept quiet.”

“What did I know?” I said, my face red. “Everything,” she
replied without hesitation. “Although it’s true that you may not have had the power to stop them. But let’s sit down.” She opened the door to Lazar’s room and led me into it in the most natural way in the world, as if Lazar were sitting there and waiting for us in order to set his administrative seal on the collective guilt that had led to his death.

What did I know, I wanted to ask her again, but I stopped myself, both because I didn’t want to get into a confrontation with her now about the depth of my knowledge and because I felt a need to take on some of the guilt that this good woman was dishing out so liberally. She switched on the light in the large, elegant room, which, apart from the fact that the big sofa had for some reason been removed, taking with it some of the room’s previous coziness, was exactly the same as before. The soil in the big planters was dry and cracked, but the plants themselves were still green. Miss Kolby sat down, with a proprietary air, in the armchair opposite the big desk, her usual place when she took dictation from Lazar, after bringing up one of the chairs standing against the wall for me. But when she saw that she had
underestimated
my height, which forced her to look up at me from below, she changed her mind, rose from her chair, and with a dry,
businesslike
air wheeled Lazar’s big executive armchair out from
behind
his desk so that I could sit not only more comfortably but at her eye level. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, encouraging me to sit in the armchair, although I had not shown any signs of hesitation. In contrast to her pale face and tired eyes, her
movements
became brisker and more alert, as if with my appearance the death had turned from a fait accompli to a kind of
misadventure
, which decisive intervention might still be able to correct. And thus, while a shock of happiness surged through my being, her eyes began to focus intently on mine, as if to prevent the soul already trapped inside me from slipping away. As expected, she began to talk about the deceased and the interest he had taken in me. Even though he had not succeeded in persuading Hishin to keep me on in the surgical department, at least he had found a way to secure my place among the anesthetists. Again I saw how Lazar’s affection and concern had sheltered me over the past two years, like a kind of invisible insurance policy hovering over my head, whose value I was only able to appreciate now that it had been lost. She too, of course, had lost her insurance policy, and
her position as the secretary attached to the source of power in the administrative wing was now in danger of collapsing
completely
. Nevertheless, she did not appear depressed but rather in the grip of an inner enthusiasm—the enthusiasm of a woman no longer young who suddenly discovers that the borders of despair, which she thought she had long ago crossed, have moved.

“But where have you been all the time?” I allowed myself to ask in a mildly rebuking tone, despite the difference in age
between
us. “Where? With Dori, of course,” she answered
immediately
. “Somebody had to help her organize things.”

“What things?” I asked, a thrill of pleasure running through me. It turned out that she meant very ordinary, simple things, such as bank accounts, Lazar’s insurance policy, the papers for the car, and various bills which Miss Kolby had taken it upon herself to settle, for who knew as well as she did that Lazar’s wife was utterly helpless in such matters? “What do you mean,
helpless
?” I protested, leaping to Dori’s defense. “She’s a partner in a big legal firm.”

“Precisely,” said Miss Kolby. “It’s a big firm with a whole battery of accountants and secretaries, who take the practical side of things off her hands. And at home Lazar would take care of everything, of course.”

“And the children?”

“The children are gone,” she announced briskly. “Einat went back to her apartment, and the boy went back to the army. Someone has to help her.”

“She’s alone now?” I whispered, my anxiety mingled with a hint of pleasure. Miss Kolby looked at me curiously, to see if I was aware of the deeper implications of my words, and then she admitted that for the last three nights, ever since the soldier had returned to his base, she had been sleeping in the apartment with Mrs. Lazar. “You’re sleeping there!” I said with a feeling of
relief
. “And it doesn’t inconvenience you?”

“What if it does?” she replied evasively. “Someone has to help her, until a more radical solution is found.”

“Radical?” I sniggered, for the word seemed extreme to me, and it was indeed inappropriate for the simple solutions
imagined
by the secretary, such as Dori’s mother coming to live with her, or Einat agreeing to return home for a while, or Dori renting a room to a student until her son completed his military service
in six months’ time and decided if he too, like his sister, wanted to travel to distant lands. “I thought you had something more radical in mind.” I lowered my eyes and released the catch under the chair so that I could rock slightly to and fro. “Yes, that would make things easier for everyone,” Miss Kolby replied, to my surprise, without hesitation or hypocrisy, in the practical spirit she had gained from Lazar during all their years of working together. But she immediately added a reservation: “But it would have to be with someone like Lazar. Someone who knows how to pamper her and take care of everything for her, so that she can keep her spirits up and go on smiling good-naturedly at everyone and listening to everybody’s troubles. Because even you wouldn’t believe it if I told you how she can sometimes behave like a frightened little girl, but obstinate too, and how helpless and almost stupid she can be when she has to deal with anything technical, even something as simple as a household appliance.” She stopped for a minute, hesitating about whether to confide the secrets she had discovered over the past few days to me. “Even I, who knew them both well, had no idea of how much Lazar took care of everything for her. Would you believe that she doesn’t even know how to work her own washing machine?”