I suddenly felt calm and wide awake. I knew that I shouldn’t wake my parents at this hour of the night, but I felt that I had to share my feelings with them. I called them up and told them about Lazar’s sudden death. Like all kindhearted people on such occasions, they were shocked and saddened. Again and again they wanted to know how and why it had happened, as if from their home in Jerusalem they could understand what important professors at the hospital like Hishin and Levine had failed to understand. Suddenly I wanted to console them and tell them not to grieve, for Lazar’s soul had already been reincarnated in me, but I knew that they would think my sorrow had driven me out of my mind, and so I only asked them for my aunt’s telephone number in Glasgow so I could get in touch with Michaela. I took a beeper from the emergency room, switched it on, and stole into the administrative wing, which I was sure that the secretary had forgotten to lock up in the commotion. I was right. The door to Lazar’s office was open, and I didn’t even have to put on the light, because there was enough moonlight for me to see the numbers on the telephone. I found Michaela and Stephanie with my family in Scotland. I told Michaela about Lazar’s sudden death and asked her to cut her trip short and come home. There was a silence on the other side of the line. “Look,” I said aggressively, “I know you’re entitled to another week in Britain, but it wouldn’t be right to leave me to cope with the baby alone now in the new situation that’s arisen.”
“What situation are you talking about?” asked Michaela in surprise. For a moment I was angry that she couldn’t understand by herself, but I tried to stay cool. “I’m asking you, Michaela.” I spoke quietly but firmly. “It’s not only Shivi who needs you; I need you too. You’re the only one I can talk to about what’s happening to me. Because nobody else would believe that Lazar’s soul has entered my body.” There was a profound silence on the other end of the line again. But it was no longer the silence of resistance. It was a new, different silence. And I knew that what I had just told her would capture her imagination and excite her curiosity so much that she would cancel her trip to Skye and fly home.
Part Four. Love
Sixteen
Twice during the week of mourning I paid a condolence call to the Lazars’. The first time alone, the day after the funeral, and the second time with Michaela, who returned to the country four days after our midnight telephone conversation. I might have paid a third visit, with my parents, who vacillated between going to the funeral and paying a condolence call until I persuaded them that their relations with the Lazars did not justify either of these measures and it would be enough to send a sympathy letter, which I helped them formulate over the phone. So that I could perform the overt and covert duties imposed on me by Lazar’s sudden death, I asked my parents to keep Shiva with them until Michaela arrived. The overt duties were clearer than the covert ones, and involved the funeral itself, which was scheduled for the day after his death so the hospital administration and his many friends there could organize a dignified ceremony and try to rehabilitate the hospital’s reputation in the wake of damaging rumors about a failed operation and an incorrect diagnosis. I myself was careful at first to maintain medical confidentiality, precisely because I felt that I would be a more reliable source of information than Professor Levine, who was so stunned and grief-stricken by the death of his friend, which had taken place not only in his department but under his personal care, that he retired into a corner and delegated some of his authority to his deputy as a kind of private punishment for himself. In this way he succeeded in diverting most of the darts of criticism from himself to Professor Hishin, who had “stolen” the operation from cardiothoracic surgery and brought in an expert from another hospital. True, patients occasionally died after bypass surgery in the cardiothoracic surgery department too, but these were considered “internal” deaths, while Lazar’s was “external,” brought from outside in an act of treachery. Since I was still convinced that the cause of Lazar’s death was not connected to the surgery but stemmed from a mistaken diagnosis, when the criticism intensified I felt I had to break my silence and defend Professor Hishin from his detractors in the hospital, among them people I hardly knew — physicians, nurses, and members of the administrative staff — who began buttonholing me in the corridor the day after Lazar’s death and questioning me about what had really happened. Dr. Nakash, who happened in on one of these corridor conversations, immediately took me aside and warned me, with uncharacteristic sharpness, to stop letting my mouth run away with me. At the funeral too, which began in the plaza in front of the hospital, I sensed that he and his wife were deliberately keeping close to me and discreetly trying to prevent me from joining the inner circle of mourners, family and intimate friends now surrounding Dori, who was standing at a careful and fearful distance from her beloved husband.
Mourners were packed into the plaza — their numbers exceeded all my expectations, and many appeared to be truly grieving, for throughout the crowd I saw tears sparkling in the eyes of men and women as they listened to the eulogy delivered by the medical director of the hospital, a gray, retiring man who began by reading in a low clear voice from the notes he had prepared about Lazar’s life history. Lazar had been born and brought up only two or three streets away from the hospital. In his youth he had studied medicine, but in his second year he had had to abandon his studies because of his father’s illness and go to work to support his younger brother and sister, recognizable in the circle surrounding Dori by their physical resemblance to their brother. From a distance it seemed that the two of them were careful not to get too close to Dori, as if they feared that this pampered, vivacious woman’s rage at being left alone by her husband might be greater and more violent than her grief. Even her mother kept her distance, standing with her grandchildren on either side of her, the three supporting each other. Only Hishin, perhaps by virtue of his medical authority, which in the eyes of the Lazars was absolute, dared to approach Dori and take her arm as she stood steadily on her straight legs, her left foot even at this difficult time in the lax, slightly out-turned position I always found so appealing. Hishin had honored the occasion by wearing a black suit, but instead of a skullcap he wore an old black baseball cap on his head, which gave him the air of a sorrowful bird. As someone who had stood at his side for many hours next to the operating table and learned to sense every shift in his mood, I felt even from a distance the tremendous tension in his movements, as if he were about to whip out a knife and operate on himself. I did not yet know that he had claimed the right to eulogize Lazar at the graveside and that he was going over the first sentences of his speech in his mind as his little eyes scanned the hostile audience. Dori’s eyes too wandered over the people around her, but it did not look as if any sentences, or even words, were coming into her mind. She was so stunned by the catastrophe that she didn’t even realize how her eyes, encountering the familiar faces of her friends, lit up, even at this terrible time, in the old, friendly smile, although the light was so dim and weak that I thought my heart would break.