— Right, right, exactly, the Intercontinental, the one with all those nice arches. It looked so close from below with the sun shining down on these slabs of white graves, much closer than it really was. It was only after I had started up the path from the old Sephardic cemetery to the Ashkenazic one above it, past all those tombstones whose inscriptions kept getting jumbled in my head, that I realized that it was a steeper, longer climb than I had thought, especially since I had to keep stopping, because the cramps kept coming back. There were still little patches of snow here and there, and I felt I might start bleeding any minute — this whole miscarriage was beginning to seem more dangerous to me than to him. I was getting good and frightened, Mother, and so I walked faster, using every ounce of strength to reach the road in front of the hotel where there were all these German tourists standing around a camel and a little horse decked out in bells and bright saddlebags and some children selling souvenirs. I can’t tell you how exhausted I was. I must have looked a wreck too to judge from how people were looking at me, because before I had even reached his taxi, a driver jumped up to open the door for me. He stepped on the gas while I was still getting into my seat, so that by the time I saw he was an Arab we were already driving off and it would have been awkward to stop him and get out…
— No. I thought it might have to do with my being alone, but I only had to say one word to him, which was “hospital” in English, for him to nod right away, as if that were the very word he had been waiting for, and start saying “Okay, okay” to calm me down, although he drove like such a madman that I thought I would miscarry right there in the back seat of his taxi. It was just a two-minute drive, though, and before I knew it he was pulling into this inner courtyard of a church, that big, massive building the other way from Mount Scopus, I had never known it was —
— Yes, exactly, Augusta Victoria, how did you know? I can see you know your way around there… but it’s not a church like everyone thinks it is, it’s a hospital…
— Right, right. The lower tower, the squat one, with those dark walls, not the tall, thin one…
— Yes, that’s it. Did you know it wasn’t a church but a hospital?
— Yes, a hospital. You enter this huge inner courtyard with trees and stone benches and gardens and fountains and the wings of the building all around them, just like in those TV series about the British Empire in India or Egypt, with these immense, silent corridors and these big rooms with high ceilings. Every movement that you make has this somber echo, and the taxi driver, who was falling all over himself to help, kept saying “Hospital, hospital” to prove that he had brought me to the right place despite the ride’s being so short. He even helped me out of the taxi and began walking me carefully to the emergency room…
— What should I have told him? “Leave me alone, get me out of here, I don’t want your Arab hospital”?
— No, tell me! What should I have told him? You want me to have told him right to his face, “Take your dirty hands off me”?
— Then what are you trying to say?
— No, I know that’s not what you said, but it’s what it’s beginning to sound like. You always give me the feeling that if I tell you anything the least bit strange about myself, you right away think there’s something wrong with me…
— Wait… wait…
— Yes, Mother, I was admitted as a patient…
— Wait… just a minute…
— No. Just until the evening.
— I wasn’t out of my mind at all. I still had these cramps, I felt weak, and something down there was still moving and walking around. I was afraid I might start to bleed any minute. You have no idea how exhausted I was, I had gotten up exhausted that morning, and so the minute I saw some beds in this room the man brought me to, which wasn’t the emergency room at all but just an empty room belonging to some ward that he took me to by mistake, all I wanted to do was to flop down on them. It was so quiet under those high ceilings and those big, arched stone windows that I felt not only back in my story, in that movie or book that went wherever I did, but that the story had ended and I was now being shown or read, which fit perfectly with all that had happened since the minute I arrived in Jerusalem. And so I took off my shoes and lay down on a bed, and the taxi driver, who was wearing this bright cap and seemed to like taking care of me, put a pillow beneath me and covered me with a blanket and went to look for a nurse…
— What’s the matter?
— What was crazy about it? It was actually rather nice to be lying there quietly under that warm blanket, facing this huge stone window that looked out on the Wilderness of Judea. It was like being outside the world. The driver took a while to find a nurse, who realized as soon as she came that I was an Israeli and not just some tourist and gave me this disapproving look. I began to stammer something in English, but that taxi driver was driving me crazy, he wouldn’t leave and just went on standing there — I tell you, it was like out of some comedy, the way he listened without the least embarrassment… and the worst part was that after all those years of studying English I couldn’t get out the simplest word like “pregnant” or “miscarriage” or “bleeding,” so that soon the driver began butting in and explaining things in Arabic, which made the nurse even madder at him for bringing me uninvited instead of taking me to Hadassah…
— Yes, exactly. I could see that she didn’t even want to examine me. She wanted me out of that bed and back into that taxi and out of that hospital. But since her English was no better than mine she had to use sign language, saying “Hadassah” over and over while pointing to the driver, who began making these big, desperate gestures himself, because by now he was frightened of what he had done and kept urging me in this excited voice, “Hadassah, Jewish hospital.” Except that, suddenly, Mother, I had this need to stay put and absolutely not to move, because not only was I exhausted by that whole adventure in the cemetery, I felt that I might start bleeding any minute and musn’t get up if I wanted to keep my baby. And so I just shook my head and curled up like a fetus myself beneath that blanket, holding onto it for dear life…
— Yes, they would have had to tear me away from it, why not? And besides, my feelings were hurt too. Why not? If I had landed up in their hospital, the least they could do was examine me and see what was wrong. What were they so afraid of? That they might have to take care of a Jew for once in return for all the Arabs we take care of in our hospitals…?
— But what kind of complications, Mother?
— But how? That’s ridiculous…
— That isn’t so. There was nothing disturbed-looking about me. Don’t try defending them, they just didn’t want to… Anyway, when that nurse saw I wasn’t budging, she stalked out of the room with the driver, who had this hangdog look. She must have gone to get someone else, but in the meantime an hour went by and there still was no bleeding. I felt cold and fell into this really delicious sleep, opening half an eye now and then to look out the window at the desert, off which this dry eastern light was glinting, while thinking that the worst was over with. I even decided to go to the bathroom to see what had happened down there, maybe there was some sign, and out in the corridor I saw the driver looking depressed. God knows what he was waiting for, maybe to take me to Hadassah or for his fare — and so I went back to the room and brought him some money to cheer him up, after all, it wasn’t his fault, “It’s not your fault,” I said to him with a friendly pat on that bright cap, and he understood what I said and even gave a wave of his hand. From there I went to the bathroom, which was very old and big and full of light. It was incredibly spic-and-span, with these gleaming copper faucets and giant sinks, and I went into a toilet to check my underpants, and there wasn’t any blood but there was this scary stain, Mother — it was black with something smeary in it, maybe some part of him, and I felt so desperate that I began to cry inside of me. I wrapped the underpants in an old newspaper that I found there, and then I put the dress back on and returned to the room. The driver was gone. There was just the echo of his footsteps down the corridor, and so I got back into bed and lay there in despair, dozing on and off, until the nurse shook me a little to wake me. She had a dark young doctor with her who spoke a little Hebrew, and he began asking me questions in this dry manner, and I answered everything and took out the newspaper and showed him the stained underpants, and he glanced at them without a word and took them to the window to get a better look while I went on telling what I felt. All the time he didn’t touch me or write anything down, he just interrupted me once or twice to ask — I couldn’t tell if he was angry or laughing — “But what makes you so sure you’re pregnant? Who told you?” No matter how much I explained it to him, the dates, and missing my period, and everything, he wouldn’t believe me. Not that he was an extremist like you, Mother. He never said it was only my imagination. But he kept aloof and didn’t even take my pulse, although I would have been happy for him to examine me, I knew he was thinking, these Israelis, they only come to our hospitals to make trouble, even if he wasn’t sure yet what kind of trouble I was making. Whatever it was, he was going to avoid it like the plague — and so when I asked him again about the stain and did he think it was dangerous, I saw he wasn’t taking it seriously, “It’s nothing,” he said, “it’s just — “ and I knew he wanted to say “dirt,” but he didn’t, he caught himself and said “mud,” he was so pleased he could say it in Hebrew that he said it over and over…