Now Nakash asked me when I was starting work in internal medicine. I told him that I was waiting for Professor Levine to recover. “Isn’t he out of there yet?” said Nakash in surprise. “Out of where?” I asked, and Nakash revealed with complete naturalness the secret that up to now everyone had succeeded in keeping from me: “They clean his head out,” he said in his direct, simple way, “and he comes out fresh and new, until he gets depressed and commits himself again. What can he do? His patients depress him, and he can’t cut them open like Hishin does.” After that he asked me if I was interested in having work as his assistant in operations at a private hospital. Lately they had been very strict about the anesthetist having an assistant. The pay was strictly by the hour, without all the extras and under-the-counter payments, but the fee was high, tax-free, and unambiguous. “But I have no training as an anesthetist,” I said, surprised. Nakash insisted, though, that the art of anesthesiology was not beyond my understanding; the technical side was simple and could be quickly learned, and the main thing was not to abandon the patient, to think of his soul and not only of his breathing.
While the surgeon and his team concentrate on a small part of the patient, he explained, only the anesthetist is thinking all the time of the patient as a whole, not as a collection of parts. The anesthetist is the real internist, no matter how much the surgeon pokes around in the patient’s innermost organs. “And you,” Nakash added, concluding his little speech, which surprised me by its eloquence, “want to be an internist.”
“Want? Not exactly,” I said with a bitter smile. “I haven’t got a choice.”
“I thought you were being sincere when you admitted that Hishin made the right decision. Believe me, Benjy, I’ve been through a lot of surgeons in my time. Who knows them as I do? And I’m telling you, I’ve seen you at work, and it’s not for you. Your scalpel hesitates, because it thinks too much. Not because you’re inexperienced, but because you’re too responsible. And in surgery too much responsibility is fatal. You have to take a risk; to cut a person up and still tell him it’s good for him, you have to be partly a charlatan and partly a gambler. Look at Hishin — who, by the way, also performs private operations sometimes, so you’ll be able to stand next to him in the operating room again, if you miss it so much.” The offer was so tempting that I didn’t even ask for time to think it over, and said immediately yes. Nakash was not surprised. “I knew you’d like the idea, and anyway you’re at loose ends until Professor Levine gets out and finds time to cross-examine you about that blood transfusion you performed in India. He’s a difficult customer; he’s always trying to depress his colleagues in the department, and when he doesn’t succeed he gets depressed himself. So if I were you, I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to fall into his hands.” I wrote down Nakash’s phone number at home, and he wrote down mine. “But it’s only temporary,” I warned him. “I’m moving into a new apartment soon.”
That evening I informed my landlady, according to the agreement between us, that I intended to leave at the end of the month. She was very sorry. I knew that I was a highly desirable tenant in her eyes; the fact that I was a doctor apparently filled her with confidence, even though she had never consulted me on personal problems up to now, but only on general medical questions. “May I know why you’re leaving?” she couldn’t resist asking. “I need a change,” I said, with an honesty I immediately regretted, for I saw a shadow of pain cross her sharp face. “But what change?” she insisted, inexplicably angry. “A change.” I stubbornly repeated the word, which I may have chosen by mistake but was now stuck with. “Just a change.” I lowered my head and went away without any further discussion. That same evening when I phoned my parents to tell them about Nakash’s offer, I couldn’t resist telling them about my plans to rent Lazar’s mother-in-law’s apartment as well. They were immediately worried. The idea of transforming the Lazars into my landlords struck them as a very bad one. “Why go and complicate your relations with Lazar now, after having won him over on the trip to India?” said my mother crossly. “But I’ll be reliable as a tenant too,” I argued, “and besides, it’s not exactly with him, but with his wife.”
“That makes it even worse,” my mother burst out vehemently, trying as hard as she could to dissuade me from the idea. “If you break something in the apartment, or if you demand money for repairs, she’ll complain about you, and that will count against you at the hospital too. And believe me,” she added with unexpected venom, “she knows how to look out for number one. Anyway, you should never mix business with friendship.” My father lectured me too. “I don’t understand,” he began in his quiet voice, which revealed signs of emotion. “Are you trying to get a quid pro quo for what you did for them in India?”
“Certainly not,” I retorted angrily. “I’ll pay more for that apartment than I’m paying now.”
“You’ll pay more?” said my father in astonishment. “How much?” When they heard that no rent had yet been agreed on, their disapproval increased. And then a kind of cry of protest burst out of me: “My dear mother and father, I’m twenty-nine years old — do me a favor and trust me to decide what’s best for me!” This outburst silenced them. It wasn’t really fair of me, because in fact they always trusted me, and their anger with me this time stemmed only from the fact that I had confused them by hiding my real motives. I immediately took pity on them. I didn’t know how to appease them without getting further embroiled in lies. “I need a change,” I said gently. “I saw the apartment by chance and I liked it. It’s close to the sea, it’s on a nice quiet street. I won’t make problems with Lazar or his wife. You know me.” They listened attentively, trying to accept my inexplicable decision because of their love and respect for me. “The fact that you want a change,” said my mother finally, “is all to the good, because you definitely need one. Just be careful it’s not more of a change than you bargained for.”