From the second floor came the sounds of piano, violin, and cello being played by the three elderly women who lived there and gave private music lessons. They also probably gave recitals and played at memorial meetings, at the presentation of a prize for Yiddish literature, at the inauguration of a community center or a daytime center for the elderly. Although Fima had worked at the clinic for several years now, their playing still wrung his heart, as though a cello deep inside him responded with its own mute sounds of longing to the one upstairs. As though a mystic bond was growing stronger with the passing years, between what was being done down here to women's bodies with stainless-steel forceps and the melancholy of the cello upstairs.
The sight of Fima, pudgy and disheveled, smiling sheepishly, with his hands and knees covered with mud, filled Dr. Wahrhaftig as usual with good humor mingled with affection and a strong urge to reprimand him. Wahrhaftig was a gentle, rather shy man, so emotional that he had difficulty holding back his tears at times, especially when anybody apologized to him and asked to be forgiven. Maybe that was why he cultivated a severe manner, and always tried to terrorize those around him by shouting rebukes at them. Rebukes that turned out to be mild and inoffensive.
"Hah! Your Excellency! Herr Major General von Nisan! Straight from the trenches, I see! We should pin a medal on you!"
"I'm a little late," Fima replied bashfully. "I'm sorry. I slipped on the path. It's so wet outside."
"Ach so!" roared Wahrhaftig. "Once more this fatal lateness! Once again force majeure!" And he recounted for the nth time the joke about the dead man who was late for his own funeral.
He was a stocky man with the build of a basso profundo, and his face had the florid, flabby look of an alcoholic, crisscrossed with an unhealthy network of blood vessels that were so near the surface, you could almost take his pulse by their throbbing. He had a joke for every occasion, invariably introduced with the phrase "There is a well-known story about." And he always burst out laughing when he got close to the punch line. Fima, who had already heard ad nauseam why the dead man was late for his own funeral, nevertheless let out a faint laugh, because he was fond of this tenderhearted tyrant. Wahrhaftig was constantly delivering long lectures in his stentorian voice about such subjects as the connection between your eating habits and your worldview, or about the "socialist" economy and how it encouraged idleness and fraud and was therefore unsuited to a civilized country. Wahrhaftig would utter these last words in a tone of mystical pathos, like a true believer praising the works of the Almighty.
"It's quiet here today," Fima remarked.
Wahrhaftig replied that they were expecting a famous artist any minute now with a minor obstruction of the tubes. The word "tubes," in its medical usage, reminded him of a well-known story, which he did not spare Fima.
Meanwhile, stealthily as a cat, Dr. Gad Eitan emerged from his office. He was followed by the nurse, Tamar Greenwich, who looked like an early pioneer, a woman of forty-five or so in a light-blue cotton dress with her hair pinned neatly back into what looked like a small ball of wool at the base of her skull. As a result of a pigment peculiarity one of her eyes was green and the other brown. She crossed the reception hall supporting a pale patient, whom she escorted to the recovery room.
Dr. Eitan, lithe and muscular, leaned on the counter, chewing gum with a leisurely motion of his jaws. He replied with a jut of the chin to Fima's greeting or to a question from Wahrhaftig, or perhaps to both at once. His watery blue eyes were fixed on a spot high above the reproduction Modigliani on the wall. With his self-satisfied expression and his thin blond mustache, he looked to Fima like an arrogant Prussian diplomat who has been posted against his will to Outer Mongolia. He allowed Wahrhaftig to finish another well-known story. Then there was a silence, after which, like a lethargic leopard, almost without moving his lips, he said quietly:
"Let's cut the chatter and get on with it."
Wahrhaftig obeyed at once and followed him to the treatment room. The door closed behind them. A sharp, antiseptic whiff escaped between its opening and closing.
Fima washed his hands and made a cup of coffee for the patient in the recovery room. Then he made another cup for Tamar and one for himself, donned a short white coat, sat down behind his counter, and began to look through the ledger in which he kept track of patients' visits. Here too he wrote the numbers out in words, not figures. He noted down accounts that were settled or deferred, dates for laboratory tests and their results, and any alterations to appointments. He also managed the file cabinet that contained patients' medical records and details of prescriptions, ultrasound tests, and x-rays. This, with answering the telephone, was the sum total of his job. Apart from making coffee every couple of hours for the two doctors and the nurse, and occasionally also for a patient if her treatment had been painful.
Across the hall from his counter there was a small coffee table, two armchairs, a rug, on the walls a reproduction Degas and the Modigliani: the waiting area. Sometimes Fima would help a patient through the difficult period of waiting by engaging her in light conversation about some neutral subject such as the rising cost of living or a TV program that had been shown the previous evening. Most of the visitors, however, preferred to wait in silence, leafing through magazines, in which case Fima would bury his eyes in his papers and minimize his presence so as not to cause embarrassment. What went on behind the closed doors of the treatment rooms? What caused the groans that Fima sometimes heard or thought he heard? What did the various women's faces express when they arrived and when they left? What was the story that ended in this clinic? And the new story that began here? What was the male shadow behind this or that woman? And the child that would not be born — what sex was it? What would it have grown up to be? These things Fima tried at times to decipher, or to invent, with a struggle between revulsion and the feeling that he ought to participate, at least in his imagination, in every form of suffering. Sometimes womanhood itself struck him as being a crying injustice, almost a cruel illness that afflicted half the human race and exposed it to degradations and humiliations that the other half was spared. But sometimes a vague jealousy stirred inside him, a sense of deprivation or loss, as though he had been cheated of some secret gift that enabled them to relate to the world in a way that was barred to him forever. The more he thought about it, the less he was able to distinguish between his pity and his envy. The womb, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, breast feeding, even menstruation, even miscarriage and abortion — he tried to imagine them all, struggling over and over again to feel what he was not meant to feel. Sometimes, while he was thinking, he absently fingered his own nipples. They seemed a hollow joke, a sad relic. Then he was swept by a wave of profound pity for all men and women, as though the separation of the sexes was nothing but a cruel prank. He felt that the time had come to rise up and with sympathy and reason do something to put an end to it. Or at least minimize the suffering that resulted from it. Without being asked, he would get up, fetch a glass of cold water from the refrigerator, and with a faint smile hand it to a woman waiting her turn, and murmur, It'll be all right. Or, Have a drink, you'll feel better. Usually this provoked only mild surprise, but occasionally he generated a grateful smile, to which he replied with a nod, as if to say, It's the least I can do.