“Yes,” I said, “I thought that Professor Levine had taken her under his wing. He’s more or less their family doctor, isn’t he?”
“He was,” she corrected me emphatically. “He was in the past. But now he’s angry with her because she refuses to put all the blame on Hishin. He isn’t satisfied with what I keep telling him, and what I told you too — that we’re all a little to blame, me, Dori, her mother, and even Lazar himself. But no — that crazy, stubborn man, who was forgiven so many times by Lazar, wants to set up a kangaroo court to sentence Professor Hishin. He’s not like you, Dr. Rubin, and refuses to take responsibility for himself. Yesterday, after you left, I felt a little bad about including you in my accusations.”
“But why?” I reassured her. “You’re right. We’re all guilty, morally at least. Me too. No less than Lazar himself.” But there was no time to elaborate on the moral guilt for Lazar’s death while the patient I had left on the operating table could implicate me in criminal guilt as well. I therefore hurried back to make sure that the numbers flickering on all the monitors were compatible with the smooth continuation of the flight, leaving Miss Kolby with the promise that I would get back to her during the day for a firsthand report on the quarrel that had flared up between the two friends. This secretary was proving herself to be a pillar of support on which we could all lean in the confusion left by her boss’s death. But how much support would she give me, I wondered, when sooner or later she found out about my relationship with his widow? I decided to go on investing in her, for I very much wanted this loyal and lonely woman on whom Lazar had depended, like many powerful executives depended on their secretaries, to be my ally not only in the little battles of the hospital but also in the great battle that had commenced this morning. At the end of the operation, after I saw the clear gleam of consciousness in the pupil of the anesthetized patient’s eye, which meant I could leave him with the nurses in intensive care, and after I received no reply when I called the Lazars’ apartment, I bought two sandwiches in the cafeteria instead of joining the surgeons for lunch and hurried to Lazar’s office.
Miss Kolby flushed with pleasure, not just because of the cheese sandwich I offered her but mainly because I wanted to eat my lunch in her company. “Lazar used to do that sometimes,” she said, and the sweet light of memory touched her delicate, faintly lined face. “When he saw that I was staying in the office because of the workload and refusing to go to the cafeteria for lunch, he would get annoyed with me, and in the end he would go and get me something to eat.”
“Someone who’s become accustomed to taking care of one woman is apparently drawn to taking care of other women too.” I laughed affectionately at the thought of the energetic director, who was probably suffering torments of frustration in his grave because of his inability to take care of things. “He used to take care of me too,” I recalled. “On the trip to India, on the flight from Rome to New Delhi, when I fell asleep and missed supper, I woke up and found a sandwich and a chocolate bar in the pouch of the seat in front of me.” Lazar’s secretary bowed her head in sorrow. Grief for her patron was apparently welling up in her again, especially in view of the changes that had taken place in her office since yesterday, as if the many administrative problems that had seemed to vanish along with the administrative director had not found anyone else in the entire hospital to take care of them and had come back to flood the office in the form of stacks of files piled on and around her desk. Was an heir about to appear and take over? Judging by the arrival of an unfamiliar secretary, who had replaced the vanished typist, it seemed so. This new secretary had apparently been brought in from outside the hospital, and although she had not known Lazar, she listened avidly to every word Miss Kolby and I exchanged, a secret, faintly mocking smile occasionally crossing her face. When she saw that Lazar’s secretary was ignoring her and not troubling to introduce me to her, she waited for a break in our conversation and introduced herself and asked me my name, which I knew she would not forget but would file away for future reference, like all ambitious secretaries. Then she offered to make me something to drink. But Miss Kolby dismissed this offer and took me into Lazar’s office, both to give me the treatment a member of the inner circle of the previous director’s friends deserved and to escape the curiosity of this woman, who might have been hired not only to assist her but to replace her.
When I entered the big room I saw that the sofa which had been missing the day before had now been returned, apparently after undergoing some minor refurbishment or repair. The dry soil in the planters had been watered. Here too stacks of files awaited the attention of the new director, signs of whose imminent arrival were apparent everywhere. “Do you know who it’s going to be?” I asked Miss Kolby, who was putting on the electric kettle. “No.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t even know if they’ve decided on anyone yet. But I can already feel him in the air.”
I suddenly felt a twinge of envy, as if the man who was going to replace Lazar and run the hospital were superseding me too, for I was both willing and able to make decisions regarding these files, one of which I even picked up and paged through, to the evident disapproval of Miss Kolby, who said nothing. “What does the administrative director actually do all the time?” I asked when I saw that the file in my hands was a personnel file, with the photograph of a young woman attached to it. “Personnel problems?”
“Not just those, of course,” she replied, “but they did take up a lot of Lazar’s attention. He was attracted to them. Yes, he took satisfaction in secretly controlling people’s lives.” I took the cup of coffee she offered me and sank onto the sofa with a deep sigh, overcome by exhaustion after standing on my feet for six hours during the surgery, on top of the nearly sleepless night I had spent at the Lazars’.
But this secretary was so devoted to the Lazar family that it didn’t surprise her at all to hear that I had spent the whole night there. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why I had remained awake. “That’s going too far,” she rebuked me, as one who had accumulated a few nights’ experience in keeping vigil over the loneliness of Mrs. Lazar herself. “It would have been enough for her to know that you were there, sleeping on the sofa in the living room.” She settled into an armchair next to me, crossing her extremely thin legs and speaking as if she thought it likely that I might be called on to spend the night again this evening, and other nights to come too. A wave of pleasure flooded through me, and a wish to confess what had really happened. Why should Michaela have the right to spread the news in her Indian version of events while I was sentenced to silence? And the woman sitting next to me wasn’t just a secretary, but a bosom friend of the Lazars. In the depths of her soul she must have realized who was really sitting beside her, because when she saw me yawn and sink back into the cushions, she suddenly suggested that I remove my shoes and use the sofa for a short nap before my next operation, in only half an hour. “Sometimes I used to arrange things so that Lazar could take a short nap between appointments without anyone’s noticing. You deserve a rest too. Why not?” she declared warmly. And while I was hesitating over whether to accept this tempting offer, she drew the curtains to darken the room, took a thin blanket out of one of the bottom drawers, and disconnected the battery of telephones, after which she left the room, saying, “Even fifteen minutes will help to make up for the sleep you missed last night, and in the meantime I’ll phone to find out what’s going on and where Mrs. Lazar disappeared to.” There was no doubt, I reflected with an obscure satisfaction, that Lazar’s sudden death had turned this usually correct and refined woman’s head too, if she could suddenly invite me to take a nap on his sofa. The idea of sleep seemed impossible, excited and intoxicated as I was by the previous night’s events. But I closed my eyes and withdrew like a snail into my thoughts, and wrapped myself in Lazar’s blanket, which was too thin to provide any warmth and apparently intended only to protect him symbolically from the world constantly knocking at his door.