The Tunnel, page 10
“Whose condition?”
“My father’s, of course.”
But because the former legal adviser is reluctant to invite an important man to a house reduced to disorder by illness and isolation, he recommends that the visit be in hospital, on a day when Maimoni goes for his monthly treatment. As toxic medicines drip into his body in a quiet, private room, the two can reminisce about the days when they did more important things.
The suggestion that he get together with Maimoni during his chemo seems right to Dina, who considers joining her husband, but Luria vetoes the idea: “If you’re with us, we’ll only talk about illness and medicines, and I’m planning to entertain him with memories of the houses and fields he expropriated when we built roads and junctions in the North.” After a date is set for the visit, Luria takes out a tiny pad, easily hidden among bank notes in his wallet, marked “Anti-Dementia” on the cover. Here he has listed the ignition code for his car, his home phone number, the mobile phone numbers of his wife and children, and also that of Asael Maimoni, a temporary addition to the family. Just prior to the visit Luria adds to the notepad the name of the philanthropist who endowed the oncology clinic, along with the floor and department and number of the room where chemicals will drip into Yohanan Maimoni. And when Luria parks in the underground parking, he adds the floor and zone where the red car will be waiting for its master.
The “anti-dementia” proves effective as Luria strides through the wings of the hospital, goes to the designated floor, and arrives at the outpatient clinic in late afternoon, exiting the lift as waning sunlight floods through the windowpanes. He buys a bar of Merci chocolate, imported from Germany, and with mild anxiety heads down a quiet, darkened corridor. He doesn’t see a nurse who might give him directions, so he goes from room to room, some of them not numbered, till he arrives at the one where, as recorded on the “anti-dementia” pad, he will fulfil the mitzvah of visiting the sick.
It’s not a large room, and the patient lies in bed, his head slightly elevated, with a carousel of IV bags dangling above him, some already empty and others still filled with a clear fluid, except for one that is conspicuously yellow. The patient’s eyes are closed, with a white silk scarf across his forehead that extends down to his shoulders, its hem embroidered in red. One pathetically thin arm is exposed on the bed, with the IV tube stuck in an invisible vein. Luria momentarily thinks he’s with the wrong patient, goes out into the hall to double-check the room number, which is indeed the number he was given that morning, and there’s no one in the empty corridor to tell him otherwise. Is his legal adviser really in such a dreadful condition? Or has the original person disappeared into one of the black holes of his memory? Maimoni is a few years older than Luria, and retired before he did, and apart from that chance encounter on the street a few weeks ago, they had not seen each other for many years, and if even a healthy person looks different in old age, wrinkled and shrunken, or else fatter, all the more so a person with an aggressive illness that reshapes him altogether. So fear and shock are inappropriate at a time like this, which calls for heightened sensitivity and understanding, and Luria re-enters the room, determined to be at his best, and whispers, “Maimoni,” and glances at his notepad to be sure of the first name, and says, “Yohanan, Yohanan Maimoni, it’s me, Zvi Luria, I’ve come to tell you not to worry, there’s hope.”
But there is no movement in the bed, and the name floats past the sick man like a cloud of dust, not like the greeting of an old colleague. Maimoni doesn’t open his eyes, and it would seem that his deep sleep is blessed with drugs that battle his disease and colour his dreams. If so, I’ll wait till he wakes up, I have time, there are more IV bags waiting their turn. On the little bedside table is a copy of Israel Today, by now the Israel of two days ago, and Luria tosses it in the bin, confident that yesterday’s lies won’t become today’s truth, and in the place of the newspaper he sets down the Merci chocolate in its golden wrapper, folds his hands, closes his eyes, and imbibes the deep silence. But little by little he realizes the silence is incomplete, for a reedy Middle Eastern tune trills from the radio beside the chocolate. Is Maimoni trying, at life’s end, to reassert his roots?
Does visiting a sleeping sick man count as visiting the sick? He stares at the liquid dripping slowly from the intravenous tube. Each drop hesitates before taking the plunge, and for a moment it seems to want to return to the bag it came from. Many years ago, when his father was a similar outpatient, Luria would go to the hospital on the days of his father’s treatment and drive him home, to spare him the stress of public transport. And because he was pressed for time between meetings, Luria would secretly speed up the drip just a bit, so the treatment would be over sooner. He feels a sudden urge to do the same today, but since the bag on the carousel is shrivelling and the nurse will soon arrive to replace it with another, he is wary, and rightly so, as the door flies open and into the room walks an officer wearing the uniform of the Border Police, solidly built and ruddy-faced and bearing a submachine gun, and under his arm a small watermelon. Without delay he wakes his father: “Baba … Baba!” The sick man opens his eyes and answers in Arabic with a heavy sigh: “Aywah, ibni, aywah.”
In that case, this isn’t Maimoni, concedes Luria. But why hurry to apologize to an armed Druze officer, who seems unperturbed by the stranger beside his father, as he sets the submachine gun on the bed, moves the Merci chocolate to a lower shelf, and begins cutting up the small watermelon quickly and efficiently to feed its juicy flesh to his father. Before he, too, is invited to eat, Luria begins his silent retreat, as if he were a paramedic assigned to check the IV drip. Smiling sadly at the ailing man, he walks out without a word, closing the door behind him, and continues down the hall towards the window at the end, towards the sun reflected in the glass, and there is a nurses’ station here after all, and a nurse fiddling with her phone. He asks for Maimoni, and the nurse, without a word, points a delicate finger at the lounge where both father and son are waiting impatiently. With the father sunk in an armchair, bald and depleted, wizened and pale, a walking stick wobbling between his legs, the son irritably wants to know the reason for the delay. “Abba’s treatment was over half an hour ago,” he says coldly, “and we had given up on you.”
“Yes, give up on me,” Luria concurs, frightened by the father’s deathly demeanour. “Yes, give up on me, because I not only got the wrong room, but also the wrong patient.”
“Also the patient?”
“Yes, yes, even the patient.”
He calmly decides to confess to his illness. Yes, this is the hidden truth. Not everyone who looks healthy is healthy. He too is sick, not in his body, or in his spirit, but in his brain. He has been diagnosed with atrophy of the frontal lobe, and first names are escaping him, and lately people get switched too. He arrived at the right hour, and imagined he was going to the right room, but discovered that he was sitting at the bedside of the wrong patient.
A little smile brightens Yohanan Maimoni’s tormented face. The confusion described by his former division chief clearly amuses him. There are many versions of the human tragedy. Would he be willing to trade pancreatic cancer for atrophy of the brain? Yes, his immediate suffering would be relieved, but what if his beloved son turned into a stranger?
“Anyway, how are you?” asks Luria, relieved after blurting out his confession without error or embarrassment. He leans towards the correct patient and peers into his eyes. Maimoni strokes his hand. “What can I say, Zvi? You can see for yourself. I’m dying.”
“No, no.” Luria smoothly segues from impending death to the story of the ribbon of light that leaked from under his office door on the seventh floor, and revealed a young engineer sitting at his former desk, working at night on a project in the desert. “This is the world, Yohanan, generations come and go.” And the father, who knows the story, nods his head and turns towards his son, who looks hard at Luria as if discovering something new.
“Just imagine, my friend,” Luria continues cheerfully, “that my wife, with the arrogance or innocence of a paediatrician, dared to recommend me, a demented pensioner, as an assistant to your Asael on his project. In other words, to suggest a man who easily sits down beside a Druze stranger as if he were an old friend, to help him plan a secret road in the desert.”
The father nods. He is surely worn out not only from the treatment, but also from waiting for the disorientated visitor who oddly imagines himself a cancer patient. And his son, instead of sending the visitor away and readying his father for the drive home, jumps into their conversation.
“No, Luria, your wife is not arrogant, and certainly not naïve. If, as a doctor aware of your condition, she suggests you as a partner or assistant in my project, it means she trusts both you and me.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that despite the confusion, some of us more confused and some less, we still build roads in this country, and if we make mistakes, we can always correct them.”
“In other words?”
“In other words, I am not afraid of you, Zvi Luria. For a senior engineer with extensive experience, dementia can be a liberating and creative factor. And your wife said you would do it without pay—”
“Of course, without pay.” Luria is energized. “My pension is just fine, and my wife earns a good living in her children’s clinic.”
The father closes his eyes as if stabbed by pain. The Druze patient currently reviving his spirit with watermelon cut up for him by his son, is in vastly better condition than the legal adviser. Smooth words of encouragement can never compare with the consolation of a juicy red slice.
“So?”
“So?” Luria snaps out of his reverie. “So yes. Without pay, but a part-time assistant, only part-time.”
the beit kama junction
“Just a minute, before you two get going, listen to me for a moment, young man. You may not realize it yet, but you’ll soon learn that you’ve been blessed with a top-notch assistant, an experienced senior engineer who designed many junctions and bridges, dug tunnels and built roads, all with wisdom and calm professionalism. He is easygoing by nature, with a reputation for finding simple and inexpensive solutions for engineering problems that seemed complicated. That way he saved the State a great deal of money, which became available for myriad corrupt purposes.”
“Dina, what are you saying?”
But his wife is swept up in her monologue, enjoying the moment.
“You’re getting a strong man, in good shape for his age, seventy-two, and these days men like him can be good friends with intelligent women. He has no problem climbing up a hill, or down into a wadi, even a small crater, but as he himself confessed to you, he has lately manifested a few failures of memory and spatial orientation. He will need supervision, so that his enthusiasm will not get him lost in the desert. Therefore do not rely on your mobile phone or shouting out loud, but make sure to maintain eye contact, because if he disappears in some wadi, or crater, or behind a hill, I will have neither the strength nor the hope to find someone to console me for his loss.”
“Enough, Dina,” interrupts her husband, “he gets the idea.”
“Do you get it? Are you sure?” She shoots a motherly look at the handsome young man wearing an old army windbreaker, his eyes dancing in awe of the old folks’ enduring chemistry.
“It’ll be fine, Dr Luria, I’ll look after him like a second father. Zvi should take a warm coat, because out there in the desert, in the evening and especially at night, it can get very cold.”
“Evening? Night?” Dina is uneasy. “When are you planning to bring him back? We agreed he is only a part-time assistant.”
“Of course, only part-time. But if we go down into the Ramon Crater to determine the exit point of the new road, it could take a while.”
“In which case,” says Zvi, “I’ll go and get my old windbreaker.”
“You won’t find it, because Yoavi took it a year ago, but what about the old blue sweater?”
“Just a minute,” says Maimoni, “why a blue sweater, or any sweater, my father’s old windbreaker is in the boot of the car. It will fit your husband too.”
“You sure it will fit?”
Luria finds the conversation between his wife and Maimoni excessive and humiliating, and he interrupts: “Yalla, man, get out the windbreaker and let’s hit the road.” He plants a kiss on his wife to signal to her to let him go, and gets in the car with a jaunty yalla, yalla, yalla: no more wasting time, the desert awaits.
After many years devoted to the roads of the North, he is keen to see the flyovers and exits his colleagues have added to the roads of the South, but Maimoni is in a hurry and takes the quicker, more monotonous Trans-Israel Highway. At first Luria is unnerved by the speed of the old American car, but its size and suspension absorb the shocks of the road. He soon gets used to the velocity, and quietly notes when it exceeds legal limits.
“Your father breaks my heart,” he says softly.
“Yes, others feel the same way. It’s a pity you got him mixed up with another patient, because Abba waited a long time for you, and was proud that after so many years you still took an interest. But when you finally showed up, he was out of it and couldn’t derive any happiness from you.”
“In which case I’ll come again, and next time I’ll be more careful.”
“I doubt there will be a next time, Luria, the doctors are giving him at most another few months, but I think it’s just weeks, which is better for him. He’s determined to wrestle the angel of death, but physical suffering purifies the soul only in philosophy books and second-rate novels. It’s unnecessary and degrading in real life.”
Luria nods his agreement, and the driver glances approvingly at his part-time assistant.
“You do know, Luria, that you’ve been blessed with a sweet wife.”
“Sweet?” Luria is astounded. “What do you mean, sweet? Why sweet? She’s an intelligent and caring woman. At sixty-four, a woman’s sweetness consists only of her love and care.”
“And that’s exactly what my father lacked after my mother abandoned us. That was when he began to decline.”
“As I told you, I knew nothing about his wife. Nor did I want to know.”
“Just as well,” says the son with a smile. “You were wise not to know and not to pry, because otherwise you’d have discovered that your serious and devoted legal adviser was not an innocent victim. He was a man not looking for love and care, but sweetness, and because I lived with him in the same house, he looked for it in all sorts of places hidden from me, including his office at night or on weekends. Just imagine, Luria, that with his master key he had access to the whole seventh floor of the Northern Division, and each time he’d pick a different room to partake of the sweetness.”
“I never suspected,” Luria mutters uneasily.
“That’s just as well,” Maimoni repeats, “you were wise, very wise.”
Luria attempts to adjust the sun visor to ward off the strong rays. The dubious compliment “you were wise” is also beginning to annoy him. So that he shouldn’t wander in the mall, seeking inspiration for new recipes, his wife and the neurologist have conspired with a junior engineer to dispatch him to the desert, the cradle of the sun. The Trans-Israel Highway ended an hour ago, and they are now on Route 40. “Maybe you want to move to the back seat,” suggests Maimoni, noticing his pensioner’s battle with the sun. “There’s a blanket in the boot if you want to get comfortable.”
Best to postpone comfort till the drive back in the evening, Luria tells him. Meanwhile, he will shield himself from the sun with a map found in the glove compartment. After consulting it briefly, he asks Maimoni to take a quick detour to the junction under construction near Beit Kama. A few months ago he caught a glimpse on the nightly news, now he’s curious to see it up close. And despite the delay—a four-kilometre detour from Route 40—and even though their destination is still far away, Maimoni agrees, and on a bumpy dirt road they approach a spidery structure that will straddle the extension of the Trans-Israel Highway. Luria’s desire to inspect the quality of the work is so intense that he rushes from the car and heads off on foot towards a huge steamroller crawling beyond the big flyover. The young man watches the pensioner with wonder as he hops between boards and poles atop a flyover with no guardrail, the inveterate professional who still wants to learn from the work of others. And as Maimoni folds the map and stuffs old papers and empty bottles into a bag, he suddenly recalls the paediatrician’s warning not to let her irreplaceable husband out of his sight, and jumps out of the car for a better look. But with no sign or warning the pensioner has vanished. Is he out there somewhere, navigating his way back, or did he get confused and go off in the wrong direction? Suddenly panicked that he hadn’t noticed the uninsured part-time helper sailing through the air beyond the nonexistent guardrail, Maimoni scrambles onto the flyover, not daring to look down at what’s underneath, just running to the other end, where, in the shade of an elderly eucalyptus, amid a group of project managers and Jewish and Arab workers, Luria is sitting, wearing a helmet, a cup of coffee in his hand.
Maimoni can’t find the right words. He stands in stony silence before the pensioner, who is serenely sipping his coffee, staring at him, apparently without recognition. “I thought you hadn’t noticed there’s no railing and fell down onto the Trans-Israel Highway,” Maimoni says at last, forcing a smile. “There was no railing?” asks Luria and turns to his friends. Now Maimoni cannot contain his anger. “How could you disappear on me like that, and forget the promise I made to your wife?” And the husband quickly mumbles his apologies, gets up, removes the helmet, and gestures at the group watching the scene with amusement: “Sorry, Maimoni, sorry, Asael, I found some old friends here. This is Yosef Barazani, chief engineer of the entire junction.”
