After the official mourning period was over, I found myself drawn to the administrative wing to find out if Lazar’s heir had already been designated. This was, of course, a pointless and ridiculous project, not only because it was only a week since he had died, but also because Lazar was not one of those executives who chose an heir-apparent during their lifetime, but believed that his true heir would have to make it on his own, after stiff competition with his peers. Nevertheless, when I walked down the corridor on my way from the surgical wing, in my green uniform, with the mask still hanging around my neck, my feet would lead me to the administrative wing and I would hesitantly advance toward Lazar’s office, whose door still bore, as if nothing had happened, the bronze plate inscribed with his name and office hours. In those days I would find the office quiet, with none of the feverish activity that had always characterized it, as if most of the urgent administrative problems demanding his attention had solved themselves with his death. The two secretaries who had always been there had disappeared, replaced by a young Anglo-Saxon typist who appeared not to be typing documents or letters but to be slowly copying material from a thick old medical textbook, presumably for one of the clinical seminars held in the hospital. The absence of Miss Kolby, Lazar’s faithful personal secretary, who had always treated me with particular affection, struck me as strange. I say “absence” and not “disappearance” because sometimes I would find traces of her in her room — a handbag, or a coat hanging on a hook. But when I tried to find out where she was, the secretaries in the adjacent rooms would shrug their shoulders, unable to give me a clear answer. “She’s wandering around” was the best answer they could come up with, referring to the confines of the administrative wing, to other parts of the hospital, and to a space beyond its geographical limits. “She’s still wandering around,” a friendly secretary tried to explain when I came back to the wing after my day’s work was over, illustrating not only the extent but also the rhythm of this wandering with a circular motion of her arm.
The truth is that I too had been infected by this aimless wandering. The women apparently realized this, and accordingly did not bother to ask exactly what I wanted from Lazar’s secretary, or whether I wished to leave a message. They seemed to sense that I had no explicit question or request but only an abstract desire to hang around in one of the many empty spaces left in the hospital by the death of the administrative director. For I had a lot of spare time now, not only because Michaela’s return took Shivi off my hands, but also because I was employed at the hospital only on a half-time basis and the private work in Herzliah had not yet been renewed. After my year in London and all the experience I had gained at St. Bernadine’s it seemed beneath my dignity to apply for night shifts at the Magen-David-Adom station, but until Michaela found a job and we knew where we stood, at least financially, I had no choice but to request a few night shifts there at the end of the month. Lazar’s departure had deprived me of the administrative patronage I still required. The permanent half-time job I had taken was more administrative than medical, the fruit of Lazar’s manipulations, which were intended to compensate me for some undefined injustice done me, in India or here. And although the permanency of the position was an achievement that most of my peers could only dream about, its partial nature left me in a situation of disturbing ambivalence, so that sometimes I wished I had the guts to give it up altogether and look for a full-time job, even on a temporary basis, in the surgical department of some other hospital. Because of this, my search for Lazar’s personal secretary was intended not only to give me a chance to rub up against one of the intimate voids left by the energetic director but also to clarify my position and prospects at the hospital as she, an experienced secretary, saw them.
More than ten days had already passed since the week of mourning, and I decided to go and look for the wandering secretary again. I was already dressed in my ordinary clothes and on my way home. In the darkness of the corridor her room looked deserted like the others, but I tried the handle of the door anyway, and found her sitting alone at her desk with a pile of accounts in front of her. I took the faint scream uttered by the pale and wilted Miss Kolby as more than met the eye. True, I had come upon her unexpectedly, at an hour of the evening when the administrative wing was empty and most of the office doors had long been locked. We both apologized immediately, I for bursting in without knocking and she for not having contacted me after hearing that I had been looking for her. She stood up and gripped my wrist, speaking directly and with deep emotion. “Yes, after what happened here I can’t settle down. I keep wandering around and thinking, why weren’t we more careful? Why didn’t we pay more attention? And why did we fail to read the obvious signs? Every day I feel guiltier for not being firmer.”
“Firmer with who?” I asked. “With everyone. Including Dori, who gave in to them in the end. But above all with him. Because he’s definitely to blame as well.”
“He?” I pretended not to know who she was talking about, because I wanted to hear her say his name. “Yes, Lazar is definitely to blame too,” she said, going on bitterly and bravely with her accusation. “Why shouldn’t he be to blame? I warned him against the designs of Professor Hishin, who in the end thinks of nothing but himself and his department. And you?” She fixed her eyes on me. “You too, Dr. Rubin, are to blame, because you knew and you kept quiet.”
“What did I know?” I said, my face red. “Everything,” she replied without hesitation. “Although it’s true that you may not have had the power to stop them. But let’s sit down.” She opened the door to Lazar’s room and led me into it in the most natural way in the world, as if Lazar were sitting there and waiting for us in order to set his administrative seal on the collective guilt that had led to his death.
What did I know, I wanted to ask her again, but I stopped myself, both because I didn’t want to get into a confrontation with her now about the depth of my knowledge and because I felt a need to take on some of the guilt that this good woman was dishing out so liberally. She switched on the light in the large, elegant room, which, apart from the fact that the big sofa had for some reason been removed, taking with it some of the room’s previous coziness, was exactly the same as before. The soil in the big planters was dry and cracked, but the plants themselves were still green. Miss Kolby sat down, with a proprietary air, in the armchair opposite the big desk, her usual place when she took dictation from Lazar, after bringing up one of the chairs standing against the wall for me. But when she saw that she had underestimated my height, which forced her to look up at me from below, she changed her mind, rose from her chair, and with a dry, businesslike air wheeled Lazar’s big executive armchair out from behind his desk so that I could sit not only more comfortably but at her eye level. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, encouraging me to sit in the armchair, although I had not shown any signs of hesitation. In contrast to her pale face and tired eyes, her movements became brisker and more alert, as if with my appearance the death had turned from a fait accompli to a kind of misadventure, which decisive intervention might still be able to correct. And thus, while a shock of happiness surged through my being, her eyes began to focus intently on mine, as if to prevent the soul already trapped inside me from slipping away. As expected, she began to talk about the deceased and the interest he had taken in me. Even though he had not succeeded in persuading Hishin to keep me on in the surgical department, at least he had found a way to secure my place among the anesthetists. Again I saw how Lazar’s affection and concern had sheltered me over the past two years, like a kind of invisible insurance policy hovering over my head, whose value I was only able to appreciate now that it had been lost. She too, of course, had lost her insurance policy, and her position as the secretary attached to the source of power in the administrative wing was now in danger of collapsing completely. Nevertheless, she did not appear depressed but rather in the grip of an inner enthusiasm — the enthusiasm of a woman no longer young who suddenly discovers that the borders of despair, which she thought she had long ago crossed, have moved.