“If you’re getting bored,” Nakash whispered to me in the middle of the night in his heavily accented Iraqi Hebrew, “think of yourself as the pilot of the soul, who has to ensure that it glides painlessly through the void of sleep without being jolted or shocked, without falling. But also to make sure that it doesn’t soar too high and slip inadvertently into the next world.” I had heard him speak like this about his role before, but now, in the depths of the night, a little groggy after long hours of intent concentration on the changing monitors of the anesthesia machine, with the skull and brain not actually before my eyes but only flickering grayly on the suspended video screen, I felt that his words were true. I had turned from a doctor into a pilot or a navigator, surrounded by nurses, who looked like well-groomed stewardesses in this private hospital, coming in every now and then to draw a little blood to measure the potassium and sodium levels, or to pour cocktails of pentothal or morphine into the suspended infusion bags, with special additions concocted by Nakash to ensure the tranquillity of the “instrument flight.” And for the first time I saw this work, for all its boredom and frustration, as something that possessed spiritual significance, for the thought and attention of the anesthetist were addressed not to the body, not to the matter, not to the greenish tumor which the two surgeons at our side were battling to extract from the depths of the brain, but to the soul, which I suddenly felt was truly in my hands, in its silence and, who knows, perhaps also in its dreams.
When the operation was over we saw that dawn had already stolen through the folds of the drapes. The two surgeons and the nurses left the room, and the patient was wheeled into the recovery room. Nakash sat next to him for a while and then went to see to the arrangements for us to be paid, leaving me to wait for the “landing”—in other words, to watch the respirator for the first signs that the patient was beginning to breathe independently. I now felt no tiredness. I parted the curtains and let my eyes wander from the respirator to the sunrise painting the sea in soft pastel colors. My hands were clean, without any blood or smell of drugs, without the warmth of the depths of the human body, which I was used to feeling on my fingers after an operation, even if I had played a very minor role in it. And although I hadn’t even seen the tumor with my own eyes before it was sent for the biopsy, I felt a sense of profound satisfaction, as if I had truly taken part in the battle. I went up to the patient and raised his eyelids, as I had observed Nakash doing to his patients, but without knowing what exactly I wanted to see there. A new, very pretty nurse, who hadn’t been present during the operation, came into the room and sat down next to me and said, “Dr. Nakash sent me to take over from you, so that you can go and sign for the fee.” I didn’t want to leave the patient; I felt that I wanted to see for myself how the undercarriage of the soul touched the solid ground of the body. The nurse’s frank reference to the financial arrangements between myself and the hospital jarred me. But I was new here and I didn’t want to step out of line. I thus went to the secretary’s office, where a check for eight hundred shekels was waiting for me, together with an elegantly printed page setting out the details of the fee and the various deductions. Nakash examined my check and asked if everything was all right. Then he sent me home. “I’ll see that our patient lands safely,” he said with a smile. I went to the changing rooms, and even though I had not been soiled by the operation, I couldn’t resist the magnificent facilities, and I took a long shower. Then I dressed, tucked my crash helmet under my arm, and prepared to leave the hospital, but before doing so I couldn’t help going into the recovery room to see if the landing was over. It was, and the patient was now alone. Nakash had disappeared. The beautiful nurse was gone too. The anesthesia machine had been wheeled into a corner of the room. The soul had returned to the body. The patient was breathing by himself.
I reached my apartment without any problems, leaving behind me rows of despairing cars struggling to enter Tel Aviv. The check was in my pocket, about a quarter of my monthly salary at the hospital. Now I thought about Dori. Should I wait until my parents had signed the guarantee, or should I try to make contact without any actual pretext for doing so? Children in school uniforms were coming down the stairs. Neighbors examined me suspiciously when they saw me standing in my black leather jacket and crash helmet, opening the door to my apartment, but no one dared to say anything to me. I made myself a big breakfast, and then I let down the blinds and prepared for a sweet sleep without any disturbances, not even the chance ringing of the phone. But while I was fast asleep the line was reconnected, and at one o’clock in the afternoon the phone rang insistently. It was my mother, who was glad to see that her efforts on my behalf with the phone company had borne fruit and who asked me when I intended to arrive the next day. “Early,” I said immediately, because I knew that I had to compensate them for missing their visit to Tel Aviv. And indeed, I arrived in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon before my father came home from work and told my mother about the interview with Professor Levine and my final banishment from the hospital. At first she listened in silence. Whenever I was involved in a quarrel, she was always careful not to get carried away and blame the other party, and even when it was clear to her that they were in the wrong and had treated me unjustly, she would examine what it was in me and my behavior that had caused them to wrong me. Now, too, she tried to interrogate me tactfully but insistently — was I sure that the blood transfusion had been essential? And how had I felt when I was performing it? I felt sorry for her. She was groping in the dark, looking for something that she could never have imagined was actually there. But I was afraid that she might discover something, so I deliberately increased the darkness in which she was floundering. In the end my father arrived. I wanted to spare him the bad news for a while, but my mother immediately told him. At first he turned a little pale, then he recovered and listened with unseemly gratification to Dr. Nakash’s pithy definitions of Professor Levine’s mental illness. The fact that Hishin had not challenged the transfusion appeared to him to confirm my innocence of any wrongdoing, and he seemed satisfied. He was also very impressed by my descriptions of the private hospital in Herzliah, and was amazed at the high fee I had received for one night’s work. “Dealing with the soul is more important and expensive than dealing only with the body,” I said with a smile, “because in the end the legal responsibility falls on the anesthetist. If something happens to the patient, who will they blame? Who’ll have the strength to open up the stomach or the brain again to poke around in there and decide what was cut right or wrong?” My mother sank into a profound silence and gave me a searching look. I felt that for some reason she was dissatisfied with me, but I also knew that she was incapable of putting her finger on the precise source of her complaints.