I began stitching the big incision, straining my ears to hear what was going on in the intensive care unit, even though I knew that the heavy doors would prevent any sound, encouraging or otherwise, from reaching us. I suggested to Nakash that he pop out to see what was happening, but he waved a dark hand in firm refusal and said, “No, Benjy, let’s wait. We don’t want to disturb them now,” as if he too were afraid to see what was happening next door. And so I continued neatly and carefully suturing the surgical wound, doing my best to ensure that the scar on the young woman’s stomach would be as unnoticeable as possible.
At last I was able to give Nakash the signal to bring our patient around and to ascertain from the state of her pupils, before he got dressed and hurried home, whether she had indeed returned to the land of the living. Outside in the corridor I felt the full weight of the weariness and the anxiety that had accumulated inside me. I decided to sit down for a moment on one of the little chairs, to fill in the anesthesia form and to ask the nurse with the face as pure as an angel’s to find out what was happening in the intensive care unit at the end of the corridor. She came back immediately and said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Rubin.” I jumped up and hurried there myself. My eyes were immediately drawn to the bed crammed between the various instruments, between the respirator and the big old defibrillator. His body was covered with a white sheet, but over his face there was a green sterile cloth, which for some reason brought back in a flash the picture of the two of them in the textile bazaar in New Delhi, standing next to a stall selling silk scarves, where she’d tried on one scarf after another and he’d watched her with an expression of weariness and boredom and had tried to move on; and then she’d held out a green silk scarf, and before he could resist, she’d put it on his head and adroitly tied the ends under his chin, like a granny’s handkerchief, and stepped back to contemplate his embarrassed and amused expression before bursting into peals of jubilant laughter, in which she was momentarily joined by the passersby. And now he was dead. The pain clutched my heart. And his good friends Hishin and Levine would not be able to escape the duty of going, stunned and eaten up with guilt, to give the terrible news to the woman who couldn’t stay a single day by herself. Nakash was now standing beside me in his suit and tie. For a moment he hesitated, and then his curiosity got the better of him and he went up to the dead body lying between the medical instruments and lifted the green cloth off, to look at Lazar’s face and perhaps to say good-bye to him too. In spite of everything Nakash had come to us from the East, and despite his great expertise in anesthesiology and his thorough knowledge of medicine, in the depths of his soul he remained a fatalist, and when death descended on someone close to him, he accepted it completely, without question, without complaint, and above all without trying to blame anyone.
He also did not want to hear my diagnosis, but calmly took his leave of Lazar and of me and went home, switching off the light behind him with his usual economy and casting the entire wing into gloom. I decided not to change my clothes but to hurry as I was to the emergency room, not only because my shift had already begun but also because I was sure that somebody there would be able to tell me what had happened. But the two young surgeons I found there, who had been with Hishin and Levine and the others when they tried to resuscitate Lazar, were still so stunned and upset that despite their eagerness to explain and interpret everything, as eager young doctors will, it was difficult to get a clear picture from them. All I learned was that after Lazar had been declared dead, Levine and Hishin had rushed off to treat Einat, who went into shock when she heard of her father’s death. At first they had wanted to co-opt me to join the delegation bearing the bad news to his wife, but since I was still busy in the operating room, they had called on Lazar’s secretary instead, who went into hysterics and began to scream and cry. Again, unlike the usual practice, the young doctors did not try to blame anyone. Not even Levine, who had been with Lazar when the fibrillation began. Nobody could have expected it — only two hours before an EKG had yielded completely normal results. Arrhythmia was characteristically elusive — it came and went as it pleased. I decided to keep my peace, since nobody could possibly know just how deep my ties with the Lazars went, and I busied myself with the work of the emergency room, which was particularly intensive, with the knowledge of the death of the hospital director breaking over us in wave after stunning wave as we worked into the night. At two A.M., I was called to the surgical wing to assist with a local anesthesia. As soon as it was over I went into the little instrument-packed room again, as if to be certain that the body had indeed been transferred to the hospital morgue, where I had for some reason never been before.
“How do you get there?” I asked the man at the information desk in the entrance lobby, who told me what I wanted to know but insisted that at this hour of night the place was locked and there was nobody there. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I said angrily, “people die at night too,” and I went down to the basement. On the stairs I met three doctors, whom I immediately recognized as Dr. Amit, deputy head of cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. Yarden, the anesthetist who had taken part in Lazar’s operation, and the elderly pathologist Dr. Hefetz. I knew that they were coming from the place that I was going to. To my surprise, they not only recognized me but did not seem surprised to see me there, as if it were only natural that I should be going down to the morgue at two in the morning. “Were you there when it happened?” they asked immediately, as if looking for someone to blame. “No,” I said, “but ever since the operation I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the possibility of ventricular tachycardia.” Dr. Amit shook his head. He didn’t agree with me; perhaps the immediate cause of death had been the arrhythmia, but he suspected that the deterioration in Lazar’s condition stemmed from an infarct caused by an occlusion in one of the bypasses. All three of them seemed very depressed by what had happened. “This death won’t do the reputation of our hospital any good,” pronounced Dr. Hefetz, who agreed to come down with me and show me the body. “But there isn’t much left to see,” he warned me as he turned back down the stairs — for Lazar, like the rest of us, had donated his organs to the hospital research laboratories. It seemed strange to me that the pathologist agreed without any hesitation to my request, as if he, too, understood that I had some special rights here. Had he heard about the trip to India? He opened the door leading to the two adjoining basement rooms. In one of the corners stood a large refrigerator with rows of big iron drawers. He pulled one of them out. I saw a smaller, shrunken Lazar, crudely stitched up after the removal of his internal organs. “Did they take his heart too?” I asked. “Of course not,” Dr. Hefetz answered in surprise.