Sotah (47 page)
“We’ll think of a way, Chaya Leah,” he murmured just above the sound of the water lapping against the rocks.
Despite everything, she felt a small kernel of hope begin to grow.
And then, incredibly, the hours passed and he had no choice but to get back to the base. They agreed to part at the central bus station. His bus came first. He held her close for a moment, then kissed her softly on the lips. She watched him walk away, jaunty, handsome, a young Israeli soldier going back to the business of defending his tiny country against the heartless old enemies who never grew tired of death and killing.
Then she remembered. She ran to the bus and tapped on the window. It was already moving. He opened it and leaned out recklessly. She threw the shopping bag into his arms. “It’s a sweater,” she told him, “a green sweater, with little fish on it.”
“Fish is my favorite color,” he yelled back at her as the bus swept him away.
She stood watching until even the tiny trail of smoke from the exhaust was no longer visible.
T
he young doctor wove his way through the crowded cafeteria, his eyes hunting through the lunchtime crowds, his face registering disappointment. Then all of a sudden he grinned and waved urgently. “Hey, Charlie, over here!”
A face in the crowd looked in his direction, puzzled, until his eyes focused. He grinned back and made his way in the direction of the voice.
“I’ve been looking all over for you for weeks. Where’ve you been, Charles?”
“Well, hello to you, too, Dennis. Wisconsin. There was a three-week course with Dr Shelton on process conception in psychotherapy.”
“I’m impressed. How’d you get the department to loosen its claws on you for that long?”
“I promised to work through August.”
Dennis shook his head in disbelief. “August in Prince County nut ward. You’re a braver man than I.”
Charles raised his eyes and mouth in an impish smile that was full of good-natured self-mockery. He was in his late twenties, on the short side, with increasingly thin golden-brown hair that fell across his forehead and into his eyes with an annoying frequency he found helpless to prevent. He wore gold, wire-rimmed frames and lenses that grew thicker every year, hiding eyes that were a bright sky blue. They were eyes filled with a child’s unfeigned curiosity and only a hint of the intelligence and perception that had made him both a top medical student and a top resident specializing in psychotherapy. In fact, his whole demeanor was so modest and unassuming that the nurses and even the orderlies regularly bossed him around.
“Well, Charles, learned colleague, have I got a case for you.”
Intense interest immediately filled Charles’s whole face.
“It’s a girl, a woman, actually, but she seems like a little kid, she’s so fragile and small.”
Charles waited patiently. He could understand why Dennis was always getting reprimanded for long-windedness at staff meetings. He would no doubt be one of those who finished a grueling decade of medical training and then decided to write novels in a house in the country.
“Well, anyway,” Dennis continued, “the cops brought her in eight days ago. They picked her off the street in midtown half-naked and totally nonresponsive. Thought she’d OD’d, but the blood work-up turned out cleaner than Perrier. Catatonic is as close as we’ve gotten to a diagnosis. Doesn’t talk or respond. Minimal physical movements. Heck, she’s lain in bed like a teddy bear for the entire time she’s been here. Now listen to this. Yesterday this woman shows up, frantic, and says the girl is her Israeli maid and she wants to take her home. I explained to her that in this state she wasn’t going to be much use in mopping the floors, unless she used her for the mop.” Dennis stopped, waiting for some sign of appreciation of his wit.
Charles sighed. “Go on.”
“Well, that’s about it … So I started thinking: Didn’t you once tell me how your parents were super-Orthodox and sent you to this private boys’ school to learn Talmud in Hebrew when you were a kid?”
“A yeshiva, Dennis.” The other man grinned. “And it’s true I know Hebrew, but not the kind they speak in Israel. The biblical kind.”
“How is it any different?”
“Well, they didn’t exactly have words for cars, or neckties, or CD players in biblical times.”
“How would you say ‘CD player’ in Hebrew?”
“
See Dee
,” Charles replied, grinning.
“No joke?”
“At least they did last summer when I was in Israel. But I guess I’m still way ahead of the rest of you guys no matter how much I know. When can I take a look at her?”
“After lunch?”
Charles took big bites out of an egg-salad sandwich, which swiftly disappeared. “Just so happens I’ve finished eating.”
“But I was just about—”
Charles put a firm hand over the other man’s shoulder, steering him through the crowd. “Dennis, do you know how many calories you’re saving yourself, not to mention cholesterol and triglycerides …” He handed him a candy bar. “This should keep you.”
They rode up the huge, crowded elevator, then walked purposefully down the endless gray corridors. The air was thick and foul with cigarette smoke and bathroom odors. But worse than that was the noise: television sets tuned to silly cartoons, phonographs blaring horrifying rock group noise, a woman out of control screaming obscenities. Fighting. Crying. People walking in hopeless, aimless circles. A woman clutching her knees, rocking back and forth, banging against a wall. The wretchedness. The aimless, mirthless laughter. And always the sense of danger, of pent-up violence just waiting to explode.
Charles tried to fight against the numbness that seeped into his soul each time he entered this place. No matter how much time he spent here, he would never grow used to it. So many failures, so few successes. Prince County was a short-term facility. Most cases admitted were simply emergencies who would remain only a few weeks at the most before being shipped off to some upstate facility that would make Prince County seem like the Plaza. They would enter an inexorable cycle that would rapidly erode all their basic human rights and pleasures, condemning them to a lifetime of ugliness; a lifetime where each day, every day they lived, would be spent smelling these smells, listening to these noises, and watching these scenes of bedlam. Day after day after day.
It was only the idea, the small hope, that he, through some personal skill or knowledge or plain, sheer luck, might succeed in plucking one out of the cycle for a different fate that gave Charles the determination to continue.
“Well, well, the natives are restless today,” Dennis said cheerfully.
He had the right attitude, Charles thought with a touch of envy. Never let it get to you. It was a job, like welding pipes or laying bricks. What happened happened. That didn’t necessarily make Dennis a bad doctor, only a successful one who would live to enjoy his success.
The two young men walked into the room. It smelled of urine and sour disinfectant. An older woman wandered dancing around the floor, another sat by the window, staring.
Dennis walked over to the foot of a bed in the corner. He pulled the sheet down a little. “Here she is. Must have been a pretty little thing, don’t you think?”
Charles walked over to the bed. He crouched down until his head was level with that of the woman in the bed, who lay facing the wall. He held the chart in his hand, reading. “G-d damn it, Dennis, nothing at all has been done for her! She’s been pumped so full of drugs most of the time, she probably couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to!”
Dennis cleared his throat. “I did stop all that.”
“But only after a week!”
“Well, we were just following standard procedure for suicides.”
“Suicide?” He flipped through the chart. “I don’t see any evidence of suicide, not in the admitting report.”
“Don’t you?” Dennis grabbed the chart, flipping it over with haste. “Well, I think, then, someone, maybe the cop who brought her in, must have just said he figured it was something like suicide.”
“So they pumped her full of antidepressants. Great. Who the hell brought her in, anyway?”
“It’s in here, it’s all in here.” He flipped the pages nervously. “Ah, there it is. Johnson, Alex … something, writing’s not the clearest, but no matter, a cop from midtown.”
“And do we have the address and phone number of the woman who claims to know her?”
“Uhm, wait a second. I think I wrote it down.” He checked his pockets, looking over little pieces of paper.
Charles watched him, the muscle in his jaw flinching.
“Here it is! Joan Rosenshein. Good address.” He handed it to Charles, who copied it over to the chart.
“Shalom,” Charles whispered to the back of the golden-brown head. “
Korim le Chaim. Ani rofay. Bati la’azor lach.
”
“What was that you told her?”
But before Charles could reply that it meant “They call me Chaim. I’m a doctor. I’ve come to help you,” the small head turned over and he found himself staring into the two most beautiful, most tragic eyes he had ever seen.
F
rom the personal notes of Dr Charles E. Shulman:
Dina G., a white female aged nineteen, an immigrant domestic worker from Israel. Admitted through emergency. Response to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli almost zero. Uncertain as to depth of psychological trauma. Could be true psychotic episode or simply deep depression. The discovery of a language barrier was the first step toward some initial progress. Addressed in her native language, Hebrew, she responded with a body movement in the direction of the speaker.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1
Sat with patient for several hours. I spoke in a crude form of Hebrew, filled with expressions from the Bible and Talmud that I remember from my lost yeshiva days. She continued to watch me alertly, her eyes moving as I changed positions around the room. I asked her her name. No response. I asked her if she knew where she was. No response.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 2
Found patient with her eyes open, as if waiting for me. I spoke to her of memories from my own childhood, the holidays, Shabbat, the trip I just took to Israel. I showed her pictures of Israel and asked her some questions. There was no verbal response, but her face registered some strong emotional response, especially at the pictures of Jerusalem. Still, she hasn’t said a word. But I’m encouraged by the movement of her face muscles, the change in her expression.
Phoned Joan Rosenshein, supposedly her employer. She seemed genuinely concerned, in fact, agitated, much more than what one would expect from an employer with a recent employee. Perhaps there is something more to all of this? Has agreed to meet with me this afternoon. Actually she was ready to come over immediately, but I want some more time to think this through. The meeting should be enlightening.
Charles expected to see some aggressively thin, hair sprayed matron with color-coordinated eyelids. Joan expected an imposingly tall older man, with distinguished graying sideburns.
“Dr Shulman?” she asked, looking over the short young man’s unruly hair.
“Mrs Rosenshein?” Charles responded, taking in her paint-stained fingers, curly hair, and jeans.
“You’re not what I expected,” they said together, then laughed.
“Can I get you something? Coffee?”
“You have no idea how horrible it’s been!” Joan burst out, holding back tears. Her passion took Charles by surprise. “When I came home that night and saw she’d just vanished, I was just sick about it! I kept thinking I hadn’t really told her about how dangerous New York is. You see, I’d kept trying to make the city sound like fun, like she could learn something from her time here. And I didn’t want to scare her. I thought she’d been … Oh! The thoughts in my head! The idea of that poor kid out there by herself … I’ve been just sick about it! Simply sick! I went to every emergency ward, every police station. You have no idea how many there are! And then finally someone, an officer at midtown, called me back. He said they’d picked up a young girl fitting her description and brought her here. When can I see her? Is she all right?”
“Well, it’s hard for us to tell. She hasn’t been physically or sexually abused …”
“Thank G-d!” Joan covered her face, shaking.
“But something serious has happened to her, and we’re trying to find out what it is. Could it be something that happened while she was working for you?”
“Well, there was all this problem with food at first—she would only eat
glatt
kosher, Jewish milk … But I finally found out where to get it for her, so we kept the kitchen stocked. And then there was the business with Saturdays. She seemed very depressed that we didn’t take it more seriously. I mean, I once asked her if she wanted to go to the movies with us. It couldn’t be that, could it?”
As she spoke, Charles found his hypothesis of cruelty, abuse, and exploitation quickly dissolve. There was sincere concern here. Genuine affection. Kindness. All the more impressive because the speaker was not conscious of it. If anything, she had an exaggerated sense of guilt and responsibility. He found himself wanting to comfort her. “It sounds like you were model employers.”
She shook her head. “I blame myself. I should have realized how desperately unhappy she was. I kept thinking that it would pass, that it was just normal homesickness …”
Charles leaned back and tapped a pencil to his forehead. So if it wasn’t something that happened in the last month, then it must predate her coming to the States, “Who would have some background information on her before she arrived here?”
“Well, I suppose Bertha, the agency person, might. It’s really confidential information. At least, she didn’t share it with me.”
“Shall we call her now and see if she can join us?”
“She’s also upset. I think she’ll be happy to come.”
