“But why? Can’t you give him a pill?” she asked with a naïveté that touched my heart, which was still excited by the sight of her eyes — eyes that I had seen without their glasses only when I had made love to her. “Of course,” I said confidently. “Why not? Even if it’s only a slight temperature, why should he suffer?”
But I was not worried about Lazar’s temperature. My thoughts turned stubbornly around the possibility of ventricular tachycardia, which could suddenly turn into ventricular fibrillation. The charts at the foot of Lazar’s bed contained the records of a considerable number of EKGs that had been done since his operation. I picked them up to examine them in the full moonlight of the autumn night and immediately noticed longer runs of a rapid, ectopic beat, five to six in a row, whose shape was obviously different from the regular and dominant sinus rhythm, which made me think they were of ventricular origin. Imperfect as it was, my knowledge of cardiology was enough to arouse my fears and give me a powerful urge to photograph these EKG strips and take them with me to the library tomorrow to study them, or even to go up to Jerusalem after my night shift and show them to Professor Adler, to hear what the master had to say. Perhaps for the first time since I had begun work at the hospital, I felt so powerfully convinced of something that it was only my youth and inexperience that prevented me from getting in touch with Professor Hishin right then, in the middle of the night, and expounding my interpretation of the data to him, an interpretation that was so obviously right that only it could save us from the catastrophe threatening to descend. But I had left my post in the emergency room for some time and was concerned that I might have been missed. I went to the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor and signed an order for two paracetamols for Lazar and one 5 milligram of Valium for his wife, and after seeing them swallow the pills I left them with the promise to come again tomorrow afternoon, because I knew that in spite of the confidence they felt in their professor friends in the hospital, they had also developed a kind of hidden dependency on the young doctor who had accompanied them to India.
Therefore, after waking up late the next morning, I did not drive to Jerusalem as I had promised to help my parents with Shivi, who, although my mother assured me she had been no trouble at all and was giving them a lot of joy, was still a handful for two older people to look after by themselves. I phoned them and apologized profusely. And since I didn’t know how to explain, even to myself, the nagging anxiety I felt about Lazar and the need I felt to stay close to the hospital, and I didn’t want to lie to them, I told them the truth without going into any medical details, and these two rational and realistic people had to be content with mysterious premonitions and to rely on the trust that they were accustomed to having in me. Six hours before my shift began I was already back at the hospital, where I went to the library to consult the EKG and arrhythmia teaching manuals used by nurses in cardiac intensive care courses. But no clear conclusions emerged from my reading. It appeared that there were atrial beats which could look like ventricular beats. The uncertainty only increased my anxiety, whose source was now less clear than ever. I went to the coronary intensive care unit and looked at the EKG strips of patients with acute myocardial infarction taken over the past few hours, and when there was a quiet moment I asked the doctor in charge to show me EKGs showing clear runs of ventricular tachycardia. Equipped with these strips, I went up to the ninth floor to see how Lazar was doing. In the cafeteria I had already heard from two psychiatrists who had visited him that morning that he looked and acted “like a man-eating tiger,” and that tomorrow or the next day he would probably be sent home, and the week after that he would presumably be back in his executive chair with his hands once again on the reins.
The two psychiatrists spoke about him with anger and bitterness, for Lazar had turned their well-meaning visit into a power struggle over his new initiative to do away with the psychiatric department in the hospital and turn it into an outpatient clinic — a community mental health service. “Let them take their mental illnesses somewhere else, we don’t need them here,” he said, smiling from his bed, when I told him about the psychiatrists’ angry reaction to his ideas for their department. The private room, which I had last seen bathed in moonlight, full of the intoxicating scent of flowers, had already been transformed into a kind of office, with two telephones on the floor and a pile of files next to his food tray. Levine was still trying to keep the stream of visitors at bay, but Hishin, who was standing next to Lazar’s bed as large as life and twice as tall, was perfectly satisfied with the new energy displayed by his patient. Lazar’s temperature had gone down, the bandages had been removed, and through the hospital pajamas the straight row of neat stitches was clearly visible. Dori was sitting in the corner, listening smilingly to Lazar’s secretary’s chatter. She was heavily made up, wearing an elegant suit and high heels; it seemed that she had already spent a few hours in her office and had also done some shopping, judging by the plastic bags heaped at her crossed feet. I suddenly turned to her, rudely interrupting the secretary. “Are you going to spend the night here again?” She nodded her head in surprise, as if I should know that she preferred the discomfort of sleeping in an armchair to being separated from her husband and spending a lonely night in her bed. A consoling thought crossed my mind, light as the touch of a feather. In spite of everything, there had not yet been one ugly moment between us. And a powerful wave of love swept over me for this middle-aged woman, who boldly took out a cigarette and lit it in the closed room, to the horror of Professor Levine, who came into the room at that moment and held out both his hands to her in an imploring gesture, to stop her from poisoning us all.