In the stillness of the room I suddenly became aware of the steady dripping of the rain, and it began to oppress me, as if it too were joining in the general hostility that would confront me as soon as Michaela’s departure for India and my love affair became known. But if, in addition to taking Lazar’s place with the woman who was only a few years younger than my mother, I was called upon to fill his chair, which I could see looming behind the desk, and to administer the hospital in his place, the hostility might be seriously diminished. And why not? I might be only a young doctor, but I felt that I had the ability and the strength to make decisions. With my medical education, I would even be able to improve the quality of the decisions taken in this room. Prompted by a sudden urge to examine the file I had previously glanced through, I got up and walked over to the desk in my stocking feet, only to discover that the picture of the young woman on the cover had misled me and that the file belonged to the head nurse in the surgical department, who had written to ask Lazar to postpone the date of her retirement and added a recommendation from Hishin. But while I was deliberating over what I would say if the decision were up to me, Lazar’s secretary, who had overheard the rustle of the papers in the next room, knocked on the door and came in to announce the good news that Dori was at home, her temperature had gone down, and she was feeling fine. She had gone out to do some shopping and was about to go in to her office for a few essential meetings. She sounded altogether more cheerful, and tonight her son the young soldier would arrive for a few days’ leave, so we could all relax. “Didn’t you tell her that I was here?” I asked. But, faithful to her principle of never betraying anyone’s presence without their explicit permission, she immediately replied, “Of course not. We’ve already given you enough trouble. Now her son’s with her, and Hishin has also promised to get in touch with her. You’ve already done more than enough.”
With this confirmation, I left the administrative wing for the surgical wing, where I was scheduled to assist Dr. Joubran, who was soon to replace Nakash as anesthetist in the intensive care unit, in a thyroidectomy. But when I arrived, there was nobody there except for the patient, an elderly man with a lot of red hair, who had just been brought down from the ward to the operating room. In spite of the premedication he had been given in the ward, he was still very alert, sitting up restlessly on his bed in a short white open gown, his naked legs swinging in the air, listening to the sound of the storm raging outside, his eyes wide open and terrified. I went up to him, introduced myself, and urged him to lie down. I gently rubbed his neck and shoulders, as if I were calming a frightened animal. His medical file and the brown envelope with his X-rays were lying at the foot of his bed, and although it was not my duty as the assistant anesthetist to study them, I took out all the documents and X-rays and spread them on the bed and examined them one by one. Then I asked him a few questions about himself. He was a quiet, modest man of about seventy, a member of a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, who was proud not only that he still worked six hours a day in one of the regional factories but also that his son, who had brought him down from the ward and was now waiting outside in the waiting room, was also a loyal member of the kibbutz. I talked to him a bit about his illness and asked him to tell me how he felt and where it hurt. He said that he had hardly any pain, and his main feeling was fear at being left alone in the operating room. His face was flushed and his breathing heavy and noisy. I decided to examine him, in order to pass the time and also to set my mind at rest. First I measured his blood pressure, which as I had suspected was alarmingly high, and totally unsuitable for the lengthy surgery he was about to undergo; his pulse and heartbeat were irregular too. It was impossible to tell if these findings were temporary, caused by the panic raging inside him, or if there was some organic cause which nobody upstairs had noticed. I called the internal medicine department and asked to speak to one of the doctors. When they put me through I recognized the voice of Professor Levine. At first I wanted to put the receiver down, but he had already recognized my voice and called me by my name. Ever since Lazar’s death we hadn’t exchanged a word, and so I tried to be as careful as possible and to give him only the dry facts, without interpretations or suggestions. He listened to me attentively and did not try to belittle any of the details I mentioned or dismiss my speculations. Instead he inquired, with a very uncharacteristic anxiety, what I would recommend doing, as if I, not he, were the true source of authority here. “I thought maybe one of your people could come down and discuss it with the surgeons,” I suggested cautiously. “There’s no point in talking to the surgeons,” he said with inexplicable anger. “Once they’ve got their hands on the patient, they won’t let go. No, the best thing would be for you to get him out of there right away and bring him back to the ward, and after that perhaps we’ll decide what to do together.” Now I knew that I had made a mistake by interfering. The terror of the patient, and the anxiety that had been floating around inside me since the morning, had already fanned the flames of Levine’s paranoia. But I had no option now, and I went out into the corridor to look for the patient’s son, a sturdy kibbutznik who was sitting and reading a newspaper, to ask him to take his father back upstairs. I refrained from accompanying them, not only because I had to wait for the operating team to explain the disappearance of their patient, but also because I didn’t want to meet Professor Levine, who I knew wasn’t interested in discussing the patient’s condition but in denouncing Professor Hishin and his role in Lazar’s death. The surgeon soon arrived, and as I had imagined, it was none other than my old rival, Dr. Vardi. I told him dryly about my examination of the patient, my phone call to Professor Levine, and the decision to postpone the operation. He listened quietly to my explanations, his blond head slightly bowed. I knew that he was dying to come out with some crushing remark about the strange new collaboration between myself and Professor Levine, but he restrained himself and said nothing, as if he realized that I was not myself and did not want to upset me any more. Finally he shrugged his shoulders and said, “In that case, we can all go home.”
Since I didn’t have the car with me, I thought of getting a ride part of the way with Dr. Vardi, but when I stood in the entrance to the hospital and realized how heavy the downpour was, I was overcome by a desire to wash away all the tension and tiredness that had accumulated inside me with the pure water filling the air. I said good-bye to him and went out into the storm, occasionally taking shelter under a store awning or in the entrance to a building, vacillating between the need to go home and rest and the intense desire to go to Dori’s office in the south of the city and see for myself if she was as well as she said she was. But my problem was solved when a deluge soaked me to the skin, forcing me to go home and change my clothes. The apartment was empty, and judging by the few plates in the rack over the sink, Michaela and Shivi had not even come home for lunch. I switched on the hot water heater and got undressed and into bed, where I covered myself completely with the quilt. The thought of sending the red-haired patient back to the ward without his operation now filled me with remorse. Who would have imagined that the mere sound of my voice would throw Levine into confusion? If he was really tormented by guilt over Lazar’s death, I would have to be particularly careful in any future contact with him. The telephone rang. For a moment I was afraid to answer in case it was a summons to return to the operating room, but it was only Hagit, Michaela’s childhood friend and the mother of our young baby-sitter. She was looking for Michaela, who was supposed to have arrived at her place with Shivi an hour before. “They must have been held up by the rain,” I said, without feeling worried, and I asked her to tell Michaela that I had come home early from the hospital. “Do you want her to call you when she gets here?” she asked. “Only if she wants to,” I replied, and after I put the phone down I called my parents. They weren’t at home, but they had installed a new answering machine, which I knew they had been considering buying. My father’s slow, excited voice answered first in Hebrew and then in English and asked the caller to leave a message after the beep. I congratulated them on their new acquisition, which was intended to improve communication between us without making it too burdensome, for ever since Shivi had arrived in the country their craving for daily contact had increased. I added something about the storm raging in Tel Aviv, told them how their granddaughter had accidentally smashed the Indian statuette to smithereens this morning, and promised to call again during the evening. Now that I had fulfilled all my duties to the world, I snuggled up under the granny’s big down quilt and dove into my soul to discover what remained there.