Day

  The ambulance drove on to New York Hospital. Here, it seemed, they weren’t afraid of the dying. The doctor on duty, a composed and sympathetic-looking young resident, immediately took care of me while trying to make a diagnosis.

  “Well, Doctor?” Kathleen had asked.

  Through some miracle she hadn’t been sent out of the emergency room while Dr. Paul Russel was taking care of me.

  “At first sight it looks rather bad,” the young doctor answered.

  And he explained in a professional tone, “All the bones on the left side of his body are broken; internal hemorrhage; brain concussion. I can’t tell about his eyes yet, whether they’ll be affected or not. The same for his brain: let’s hope it hasn’t been damaged.”

  Kathleen tried not to cry.

  “What can be done, Doctor?”

  “Pray.”

  “Is it that serious?”

  “Very serious.”

  The young doctor, whose voice was as restrained as an old man’s, looked at her for a moment, then asked, “Who are you? His wife?”

  On the verge of hysteria, Kathleen just shook her head to say no.

  “His fiancée?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “His girl friend?”

  “Yes.”

  After hesitating a moment, he had asked her softly, “Do you love him?”

  “Yes,” Kathleen whispered.

  “In that case, there are good reasons not to lose hope. Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.”

  Then Kathleen burst into tears.

  AFTER THREE DAYS of consulting and waiting, the doctors decided that it was worth trying surgery after all. In any case I didn’t have much to lose. On the other hand, with luck, if all went well…

  The operation lasted a long time. More than five hours. Two surgeons had to take turns. My pulse fell dangerously low, I was almost given up for dead. With blood transfusions, shots, and oxygen, they brought me back to life.

  Finally the surgeons decided to limit the operation to the hip. The ankle, the ribs, and the other small fractures could wait. The vital thing for the time being was to stop the bleeding, sew together the torn arteries, and close the incision.

  I was brought back to my room and for two days swung between life and death. Dr. Russel, who was devotedly taking care of me, was still pessimistic about the final result. My fever was too high and I was losing too much blood.

  On the fifth day I at last regained consciousness.

  I’ll always remember: I opened my eyes and had to close them right away because I was blinded by the whiteness of the room. A few minutes went by before I could open them again and locate myself in time and space.

  On both sides of my bed there were bottles of plasma hanging from the wall. I couldn’t move my arms: two big needles were fastened to them with surgical tape. Everything was ready for an emergency transfusion.

  I tried to move my legs: my body no longer obeyed me. I felt a sudden fear of being paralyzed. I made a superhuman effort to shout, to call a nurse, a doctor, a human being, to ask for the truth. But I was too weak. The sounds stuck in my throat. Maybe I’ve lost my voice too, I thought.

  I felt alone, abandoned. Deep inside I discovered a regret: I would have preferred to die.

  An hour later, Dr. Russel came into the room and told me I was going to live. My legs were not going to be amputated. I couldn’t move them because they were in a cast that covered my whole body. Only my head, my arms, my toes, were visible.

  “You’ve come back from very far,” the young doctor said.

  I didn’t answer. I still felt regret at having come back from so far.

  “You must thank God,” he went on.

  I looked at him more carefully. As he sat on the edge of my bed, his fingers intertwined, his eyes were filled with an intense curiosity.

  “How does one thank God?” I asked him.

  My voice was only a whisper. But I was able to speak. This filled me with such joy that tears came to my eyes. That I was still alive had left me indifferent, or nearly so. But the knowledge that I could still speak filled me with an emotion that I couldn’t hide.

  The doctor had a wrinkled baby face. He was blond. His light blue eyes showed a great deal of goodness. He was looking at me very attentively. But this didn’t bother me. I was too weak.

  “How does one thank God?” I repeated.

  I would have liked to add: why thank him? I had not been able to understand for a long time what in the world God had done to deserve man.

  The doctor continued to look at me closely, very closely. A strange gleam—perhaps a strange shadow—was in his eyes.

  Suddenly my heart jumped. Frightened, I thought: he knows something.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, still looking at me.

  “Yes,” I answered, worried. “I’m cold.”

  My body was trembling.

  “It’s your fever,” he explained.

  Usually they take your pulse. Or else they touch your forehead with the back of their hand. He did nothing. He knew.

  “We’ll try to fight the fever,” he went on sententiously. “We’ll give you shots. Many shots. Penicillin. Every hour. Day and night. The enemy now is fever.”

  He stopped talking and looked at me for a long time before going on. He seemed to be looking for a sign, an indication, a solution to a problem whose particulars I couldn’t guess.

  “We’re afraid of infection,” he continued. “If the fever goes up, you’re lost.”

  “And the enemy will be victorious,” I said in a tone of voice that intended irony. “You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn’t others. It’s ourselves. Hell is the burning fever that makes you feel cold.”

  An indefinable bond had grown between us. We were speaking the mature language of men who are in direct contact with death. I tried to put on a smile but, being too cold, I could only manage a grin. That’s one reason why I don’t like winter: smiles become abstract.

  Dr. Russel got up.

  “I’ll send the nurse. It’s time for a shot.”

  He was touching his lips with his fingers, as if to think better, and then added, “When you feel better, we’ll have a lot to talk about.”

  Again I had the uncomfortable impression that he knew—or at least that he suspected—something.

  I closed my eyes. Suddenly I became conscious of the pain that was torturing me. I had not realized it before. And yet the suffering was there. It was the air I was breathing, the words forming in my brain, the cast that covered my body like a flaming skin. How had I managed to remain unaware of it until then? Perhaps I had been too absorbed in the conversation with the doctor. Did he know I was suffering, suffering horribly? Did he know I was cold? Did he know that the suffering was burning my flesh and that at the same time I was shaking with an unbearable cold, as if I were being plunged first into a furnace and then into an icy tub? Apparently he did. He knew. Paul Russel was a perceptive doctor. He could see me biting my lips furiously.

  “You’re in pain,” he stated.

  He was standing motionless at the foot of my bed. I was ashamed that my teeth were chattering in his presence.

  “It’s normal,” he went on without waiting for an answer. “You’re covered with wounds. Your body is rebelling. Pain is your body’s way of protesting. But I told you: suffering is not the enemy, the fever is. If it goes up you are lost.”

  Death. I was thinking: He thinks that death is my enemy. He’s mistaken. Death is not my enemy. If he doesn’t know that, he knows nothing. Or at least he doesn’t know everything. He has seen me come back to life, but he doesn’t know what I think of life and death. Or could he possibly know and not show it? Doubt, like the insistent buzz of a bee inside me, was putting my nerves on edge.

  I could feel the fever, as it spread, seize me by the hair, which seemed like a burning torch. The fever was throwing me from one world into another, up and do
wn, very high up and very far down, as if it meant to teach me the cold of high places and the heat of abysses.

  “Would you like a sedative?” the doctor inquired.

  I shook my head. No, I didn’t want any. I didn’t need any. I wasn’t afraid.

  I heard his steps moving toward the door, which must have been somewhere behind me. Let him go, I thought. I’m not afraid of being alone, of walking the distance between life and death. No, I don’t need him. I’m not afraid. Let him go!

  He opened the door, hesitated before closing it. He stopped. Was he going to come back?

  “Incidentally,” he said softly, so softly I could hardly hear him. “Incidentally, I nearly forgot to tell you…Kathleen…she’s an extremely charming young woman. Extremely charming…”

  With that he quietly left the room. Now I was alone. Alone as only a paralyzed and suffering man can be. Soon the nurse would come, with her penicillin, to fight the enemy. It was maddening: to fight the enemy with an injection, with the help of a nurse. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh. The muscles in my face were motionless, frozen.

  The nurse was going to come soon. That’s what the young doctor had said, the doctor whose calm voice was like an old man’s, having just discovered that human goodness carries its own reward. What else had he told me? Something about Kathleen. Yes: he had mentioned her name. Charming young woman. No. Not that. He had said something else: extremely charming. Yes: that’s it. That’s what he had said: Kathleen is a charming young woman. I remembered perfectly: extremely charming.

  Kathleen…Where could she be now? In what world? In the one above or the one below? I hope she won’t come. I hope she won’t appear in this room. I don’t want her to see me like this. I hope she won’t come with the nurse. I hope she won’t become a nurse. And that she won’t give me penicillin. I don’t want her help in my fight against the enemy. She’s a charming girl, extremely charming, but she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand that death is not the enemy. That would be too easy. She doesn’t understand. She has too much faith in the power, in the omnipotence of love. Love me and you’ll be protected. Love each other and all will be well: suffering will leave man’s earth forever. Who said that? Christ probably. He also believed too much in love. As for me, love or death. I didn’t care. I was able to laugh when I thought about either. Now too, I could burst out laughing. Yes, but the muscles in my face didn’t obey me. I was too cold.

  It had been cold on the day—no, the evening—that evening when I met Kathleen for the first time.

  A WINTER EVENING. Outside, a wind sharp enough to cut through walls and trees.

  “Come along,” Shimon Yanai told me. “I’d like you to meet Halina.”

  “Let me listen to the wind,” I answered (I wasn’t in a talkative mood). “The wind has more to say than your Halina. The sound of the wind carries the regrets and prayers of dead souls. Dead souls have more to say than living ones.”

  Shimon Yanai—the most beautiful mustache in Palestine, not to say in the whole Middle East—wasn’t paying any attention to what I was saying.

  “Come,” he said, his hands in his pockets. “Halina is waiting for us.”

  I gave in. I thought: perhaps Halina is a dead soul too.

  We were standing in the lobby during an intermission at the ballet in Paris, the Roland Petit Company or the Marquis de Cuevas, I no longer remember.

  “Halina must be an attractive woman,” I said as we crossed the lobby to get to the bar.

  “What makes you think that?” asked Shimon Yanai, who seemed amused.

  “The way you’re dressed tonight. You look like a bum.”

  I liked to tease him. Shimon was in his forties, tall, bushy hair, blue and dreamy eyes. He never wanted to be taken seriously. “You spend hours in front of the mirror mussing your hair, spoiling the knot in your tie, rumpling your trousers,” I would often tell him, ironically but with affection. There was something pathetic about his love for the Bohemian.

  I knew him well because he came to Paris often and gave me tips for the newspaper. He liked to be with journalists. He needed them. He was the Paris representative of the Hebrew Resistance Movement—the state of Israel hadn’t been born yet—and he didn’t hesitate to admit that the press could be helpful to him.

  Halina was waiting for us at the bar, a glass in her hand. She was thirtyish. Thin, narrow face, pale, with the eternally frightened look of a woman fighting with her past.

  We shook hands.

  “I thought you’d be older.” She was smiling awkwardly.

  “I am,” I said. “At times I am as old as the wind.”

  Halina laughed. She didn’t really know how to laugh. When she laughed, she could break your heart. Her laughter was as haunting as a dead soul.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I read your articles. They are written by a man who has come to the end of his life, to the end of his hopes.”

  “That is a sign of youth,” I answered. “The young today don’t believe that someday they’ll be old: they are convinced they’ll die young. Old men are the real youngsters of our generation. They at least can brag about having had what we do not have: a slice of life called youth.”

  The young woman’s face became still paler. “What you are saying is dreadful.”

  I burst out laughing, but my laughter must have sounded forced: I didn’t feel like laughing. Not any more than like talking.

  “Don’t listen to me,” I said. “Shimon will tell you: my words are never serious. I am playing, that’s all. Playing at frightening you. But you mustn’t pay any attention. What I’m saying is just wind.”

  I was going to leave them—on the usual pretext of an urgent phone call to make—when I noticed a worried look in Halina’s eyes.

  “Shimon!” she exclaimed without raising her voice. “Look who is here: Kathleen!”

  Shimon looked where she was pointing and for a second—only a second—his face clouded over. His cheeks darkened, as if from a painful memory.

  “Go and ask her to join us,” Halina said.

  “But she’s not alone…”

  “Just for a minute! She’ll come.”

  She did come. And that’s when it all started.

  Actually I could easily have left while Shimon was talking to her at the other end of the lobby. My phone call was just as urgent then as it had been before. I didn’t at all feel like staying. At first glance it looked like the classic situation. Three characters: Shimon, Halina, Kathleen. Halina loves Shimon, who doesn’t love her; Shimon loves Kathleen, who does not love him; Kathleen loves…I didn’t know whom she loved and cared less. I was thinking: they make one another suffer, in a tightly closed circle. Better not to have anything to do with it, not even as a witness. I’d never been interested in sterile suffering. Other people’s suffering only attracts me to the extent that it allows man to become conscious of his strength and of his weakness, in a climate that favors rebellion. The loves of Halina and Shimon allowed nothing of the kind.

  “I have to go,” I told Halina.

  She looked at me but didn’t hear; she was watching Shimon and Kathleen at the end of the lobby.

  “I have to go,” I said again.

  She seemed to come out of a dream, surprised to see me next to her. “Please stay,” she asked in a humble, almost humiliated tone of voice. Then she added, either to convince me or to stress her indifference, “You’re going to meet Kathleen. She is an extraordinary girl. You’ll see.”

  It had become useless to resist: Kathleen and Shimon were there.

  “Hello, Halina,” Kathleen said in French with a strong American accent.

  “Hello, Kathleen,” Halina answered, barely hiding a certain nervousness. “Let me introduce a friend…”

  Without a gesture, without a move, without saying a word, Kathleen and I looked at each other for a long time, as if to establish a direct contact. She had a long, symmetrical face, uncommonly beautiful and touching. Her nose turned up s
lightly, accentuating her sensuous lips. Her almond-shaped eyes were filled with a dark, secret fire: an inactive volcano. With her, there could be real communication. All of a sudden I understood why Halina’s laughter wasn’t more carefree.

  “You already know each other?” Halina asked with her awkward smile. “You look at each other as if you knew each other.”

  Shimon was silent. He was looking at Kathleen.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “What?” Halina exclaimed, not quite believing it. “You’ve already met?”

  “No,” I answered. “But we already know each other.”

  An imperceptible quiver went through Shimon’s mustache. The situation was becoming unpleasantly tense when a warning bell suddenly rang. The intermission was over. The lobby began to empty.

  “Shall we see you after the show?” Halina asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Kathleen answered. “Someone is waiting for me.”

  “And you?” Halina looked at me, her big eyes filled with a cold sadness.

  “No,” I answered. “I have to make a phone call. It’s urgent.”

  Halina and Shimon went off. We were alone, Kathleen and I.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked me in English, as if in a hurry.

  “I do.”

  “Wait for me,” she said.

  She walked quickly to the man who was waiting at the other end of the lobby, said a few words to him. I still had a chance to leave. But why run away? And where to? The desert is the same everywhere. Souls die in it. And sometimes they play at killing the souls that are not yet dead.

  When Kathleen came back a few seconds later, I saw a fleeting expression of defiance and decision on her face, as if she had just completed the most important act in her life. The man she had just left and humiliated remained completely motionless and stiff, as if struck by a curse.

  Inside, the curtain had gone up.

  “Let’s leave,” Kathleen said in English.

  I felt like asking endless questions, but decided to keep them for later.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s leave.”