He could ring the bell, and that would awaken her. After all. he was expected, and perhaps she was not asleep but merely resting. On the other hand, he felt a certain reluctance about examining her when her husband was not present. It was almost seven, and Avner would no doubt be along in a few minutes. Perhaps it would be best to wait.
Then he remembered his other patient, a certain Memavet whom he had never treated before, only the next street over at 1 Mazel Tov Street. Probably a minor upper respiratory infection from what he had said over the telephone. Aspirin, rest, perhaps a cough syrup to relieve the throat irritation. He could be out of there in ten or fifteen minutes, and by that time Adoumi would be home. And he rather liked the idea of ending up his day at the Adoumis. He could take his time, have a glass of tea and some friendly talk before going on home.
Rather than get into his car and turn around in the narrow, muddy street, he set off down the alley between the embankment and the houses. It was dark and he swept his flashlight ahead of him to light his way.
Halfway down he stood quite still and thought hard. Then he retraced his steps. There was a public phone in the lobby of the apartment house, and he rang Adoumi’ s office number.
"Avner? Ben Ami. I'm here at your house, in the lobby. I mean, No. I haven't seen Sarah yet. The house is dark, so I guess she dozed off.... No, I thought I'd wait until you got home. But there's something important I have to tell you. No. I'd rather not over the phone.
How soon will you be home?.... Half an hour? That's all right...No. it's quite all right. I have another patient in the next block. I'll see him first."
At the corner of Shalom Avenue and Mazel Tov Street, Roy Stedman paused and looked at his watch. It was almost seven o'clock.
It was a cloudy, misty night, and now it began to rain. He turned up his coat collar and trudged down the street. He came to Memavet's house. There was no car there, new or used; there was no car anywhere on the street. His watch still showed a few minutes before seven, so he waited.
By quarter past, there was still no car, and he was quite certain that none would come.
He crossed the street and was about to ring the bell when a man came out of the apartment and carefully closed the door behind him. He looked at Roy in surprise.
Roy saw the black bag. "Oh, you must be the doctor. I’ve got to see Mr. Memavet."
"That's right. I am his doctor. Mr. Memavet is not well. He's in bed and I don't want him disturbed. Besides, I’ve just put him to bed and given him a shot. He'd have to get out of bed to open the door."
"Oh, yeah, well in that case, I guess I can come back tomorrow morning."
"Yes."
"Well, I guess I might as well go. Er— good night."
"Good night."
Roy started up the street. He looked back and saw the doctor standing there, watching him. Halfway up the street he looked back again, and this time the doctor was gone. Roy stopped and then turned and retraced his steps.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The explosion was not loud. Save for the gaping hole in the wall of the Memavet apartment and a few broken windows property damage was not great. But unlike the explosion in which Professor Carmi had lost his life a couple of months earlier, because it was early in the evening, a large crowd had gathered, drawn by the noise of the fire engines, if not by the sound of the explosion itself, and the police were hard put to cordon off the area.
Again, the reaction to the death of the old man was quite different from that to the death of the professor. After Carmi's death, there had been speculation in the press about why he in particular had been selected. And after a few days, it had come out that he was engaged in important agricultural research which might have resulted in a remarkable increase in the yield of certain types of ground crops. The papers had been vague about the precise nature of his research, and while one paper had announced authoritatively that he was engaged in investigating a new miracle fertilizer, another announced equally authoritatively that his work involved using brackish water to open up for cultivation thousands of acres that were now considered useless. In any case, it was generally accepted that he was an important scientist whose death was a major blow to Israel.
But Memavet was not anyone important and was not engaged in anything that could either help or hurt Israel. And this was all the more infuriating because it meant that the bombing was a senseless and meaningless taking of life.
There were other reactions stemming from the irony of the situation as revealed by the statement of the doctor who had visited him just shortly before the explosion. Dr. Ben Ami's statement to the police was widely quoted in the press:
"He was a new patient who had chosen me from the Kupat Cholim list because I lived nearby. I suppose. I had a full schedule of patients for the day even though it was the Sabbath. Sickness keeps no Sabbath, you know. But I was able to squeeze him in since I had another patient in the next street and I was early for my appointment. It was just luck that I was able to see him at all. I got there a little before seven. I rang the bell, and he called to me to come in. that the door was open. He had a bad cold and had been coughing a great deal. He had not slept, for several nights, he said. I gave him something to relieve the irritation in the throat and a hypodermic to let him get some much-needed sleep. I saw to it that he went to bed, and then I turned off the light, locked the door and left, planning to look in on him again in the morning. But evidently he did not fall asleep immediately. He must have got up a little later to get a glass of brandy from the bottle on the living-room shelf. Had he stayed in bed. he would have been alive today, I'm sure, since the main force of the explosion occurred in the living room and his bedroom window was not even broken."
"Imagine, he calls the doctor, gets treated right then and there, and the doctor even sees to it that he goes to bed. Believe me. my doctor wouldn't take the trouble. He looks at you and writes a prescription, and he's gone. You want to talk to him. to ask him some questions? He's too busy. Five minutes— that's his limit. And where you’re going to get a prescription filled on the Sabbath, or any night after seven, that's no concern of his. So after all that, the poor devil gets up to pour a drink for himself— and bang!"
"How do they know he got up to get a drink?"
"That was in the papers. I saw it in Hamaariv. He still had the bottle in his hand when they found him. The way they figured it, the force of the explosion knocked him against this marble shelf he had in the living room. So he must have been standing near it. Smashed his skull."
A shaking of heads and a moment of silent reflection on the tragedy of the human condition.
On the other hand, in certain cafes in East Jerusalem where young Arabs were wont to gather for coffee and cards and heated political discussions and where the report of any Israeli mishap, however trivial, was received with considerable joy, a joke was gleefully circulated that the name of the victim of the explosion should have been Lamavet rather than Memavet— that is. "to death" rather than "from death."
Of course, the terrorists immediately claimed full credit. All the various groups did. in fact. Al Fatah, based in Jordan, issued a statement: "Our brave commandos have demonstrated that they can penetrate the very center of the Jewish stronghold and that no Jew living in Palestine is safe from our vengeance. There will be no letup until the United Nations resolution is implemented and the Palestinian is given justice."