The Tunnel, page 2
Although she is twenty years older than the neurologist, he interrogates her about her medical experience as if she were not a senior physician at a major hospital, but a young candidate for his own department, about to join him in the fight against her husband’s suspicious atrophy, which will most likely grow.
“Which sleeping pill do you give him?”
She lays a gentle hand on her husband’s shoulder. “I don’t give him sleeping pills, because in general he can sleep without them, but on rare occasions, when he has trouble falling asleep, he takes … what is it you take?”
The patient does not remember the name, only the shape: “Those little triangles …”
“He means Xanax.”
“If it’s only Xanax, no problem,” says the neurologist, “but be sure not to give him anything stronger, because the region in the brain that differentiates between day and night will be sensitive for him from now on, and it’s unwise to disturb it with pills like, say—”
Whipping out a notepad, the doctor jots down names of forbidden pills. She examines the list, folds it, and sticks it in her bag. The doctor presses on:
“Have there been similar symptoms in members of his family?”
She looks quizzically at her husband, but he keeps silent, preferring that she speak for him. “No sign of it … neither his parents, nor his sister.”
“And previous generations?”
Now he has no choice. “I didn’t know my father’s parents,” the patient explains. “They were younger than I am today when they were murdered in Europe, so who knows whether what you say I have was lurking in them too. My mother’s family, all born in this country, were outstandingly sane and lucid till the end, so far as I know, except … wait, maybe, just maybe, a distant relative of my mother’s, who came from North Africa in the late ’60s, and here, in Israel, sank into deep, silent depression … maybe out of anger … or who knows, maybe in her case, only maybe, also this dementia?”
Amazingly enough, the neurologist does not dismiss the ineffable word that the patient has again uttered, but takes another look at the scan before carefully sliding it into an envelope, labelling it zvi luria in big letters, and to avoid any error, adding the patient’s ID number. But as he turns to hand the envelope to the wife, his newly appointed collaborator, Luria snatches it from him and clutches it to his chest. For a moment it seems that the doctor wants to say something more, but the sound of footsteps from his apartment above the clinic silences him, and he stands to see them out. The patient also stands, ready to go, but his wife hesitates, as if afraid to be left to face the illness alone.
“The main thing is to be active,” the doctor says firmly. “Not to avoid people even if it’s hard to recognize them. You must not run away from life, but on the contrary seek it out, take it on.”
As he speaks, the doctor begins turning out lights, but doesn’t hurry upstairs to his apartment. He escorts them to the front door, switching on the little lights in his spacious garden to help them find the path to the street. Before parting he adds final words, in a new and gentler voice:
“You are intelligent, open-minded people, and I can speak frankly to you, without holding back. When I said you must not run away from life, I meant every aspect of it, including the most intimate. Between the two of you, of course. In other words, do not give up on passion, don’t be afraid of it. Despite your age and condition. Because passion is very important for mental activity. You understand what I’m saying, Dr Luria? In other words, not only not give up, but intensify. It works, believe me, from my personal experience.” Suddenly he pauses, as if he’s gone too far. But the patient nods his agreement and gratitude, while his frightened wife whispers, “Yes, Doctor, absolutely, I understand, and I’ll try, I mean, both of us will …”
but what exactly did the doctor say?
As the neurologist withdraws to his flat, the two feel raindrops, tiny but persistent, so he suggests that his wife wait at the bus shelter while he retrieves the car. She refuses.
“Just don’t tell me,” he sneers, “that you’re afraid I won’t find the car.”
“I didn’t say that or think it, but I don’t want to wait anywhere alone.”
“And the rain? You just had your hair done yesterday.”
“If you give me the envelope I’ll put it over my head.”
“You want what’s left of my brain to wash away in the rain?”
She laughs. “Don’t be silly, the rain won’t ruin anything. Let’s run.” With desperate enthusiasm she grabs his arm and pulls him forwards.
“Why did you tell him about the tunnels on Route 6, why them?”
“Because I had a feeling he wouldn’t respect you when you said you didn’t work but only went to the market. I wanted to defend your honour.”
“Not respect me? Why not? Why the tunnels, they weren’t my greatest projects?”
“Because you talked about them a lot.”
“About the tunnels on Route 6?”
“Yes.”
“Then why just two and not three? It was davka the southernmost tunnel, near the exit for Route One to Jerusalem, that was the most complicated.”
“There were three? I didn’t remember, next time I’ll say three.”
“Next time you won’t say anything,” he scolds her, “I don’t care about these tunnels. And I don’t need anybody to honour me. Here, we parked in this alley.”
“You’re wrong, the car is on the next street.”
“No, it’s here. You’re the one confused.”
And the car faithfully winks at its owner from the end of the street.
He tosses the wet envelope onto the back seat and hurries to start the car and turn on the heat. As he buckles his seat belt he is overcome by despair: will he depend on her mercies from now on, and will she be a captive of his delusions?
“In any case, thank you for not telling the doctor what happened at the kindergarten.”
“Thank me why?”
“Because he would have had me committed.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Why? A grandpa who comes to a kindergarten to pick up his grandson, and without noticing takes a different kid instead, shouldn’t he be in a hospital?”
“No, because what happened wasn’t entirely your fault. The boy, what’s his name?”
“Nevo.”
“Yes, this Nevo, according to his teacher, tried once before to latch on to another grandfather. Maybe he’s embarrassed by the Filipino woman who picks him up, or maybe he’s scared of her.”
But in the darkened car Luria decides to incriminate himself.
“He tried or he didn’t try, that’s not the question. The question is, how did I not realize I was trading my grandson for some other kid, and if the Filipino woman hadn’t started screaming, and running to grab him away from me, I might have taken him home and fed him.”
“No way, you would have caught yourself long before that. And anyway, even Avigail admits this kid looks a little like our Noam, who was asleep in the sandpit when you got to the school. Please, Zvi, don’t make a big thing of it, you were slightly confused, but not that much.”
“Not that much?”
“Not that much. Believe me. As the doctor warned you, don’t start scaring yourself and running away from life for fear you’ll do something stupid. Listen to me. I trust you.”
She shivers all of a sudden. Before they drive off, he unbuckles the seat belt, giving her an old-fashioned hug as she grimly faces his decline.
Later, at home, well aware of his wife’s distress, he starts to make dinner while she thaws out in a hot shower. Of late he has preferred the stovetop to the microwave and the oven, the blue whoosh of the flames lifts his spirits, so he lets them burn after the cooking is done. While the two of them, after a long medical day, satisfy their hunger with eggs scrambled with fried potatoes, a tasty dish he prepares with confidence, his mobile phone abruptly comes to life, and their daughter Avigail wants to know if her father’s brain scan has shown up something real. It’s clear to Luria that he himself cannot restore the trust that was wrecked at the kindergarten, so he hands over the phone to the neurologist’s new partner, who can testify as a physician that the atrophy is still minimal, and there’s no reason not to reinstate the grandfatherly privilege of the Tuesday pickup.
But he can’t resist dealing on his own with the concern phoned in from the North by his son, deluding himself that he can amuse Yoav with his early dementia. With feigned cheerfulness he says, “No worries, I still recognize you, my son, but who knows how long it will last, so if you want something from me, you should hurry up.” But flippancy is no match for a medical scan. Over the past year the son has tried, for the sake of his father’s dignity and also his own, to discount the signs of confusion and other odd behaviour that his keen-eyed wife Osnat has noticed. But now his denial has turned into panic, and rather than console his father and pledge love and devotion, he insists on speaking to his mother for an authoritative answer, because Luria’s mischievous remark is not only meaningless, but could be interpreted as the first sign of dementia.
Luria hands the phone to his wife and moves out of earshot, to spare himself the medical details that the paediatrician delicately recites to their son. It’s not merely his fear of the little thing that “might likely” get bigger, it’s also hard to witness the anguish of his son, who certainly understands that his parents’ lives will soon be ruined, as will his. From up north in the Galilee, where he is both the owner and slave of a successful computer-chip business, Yoav asks, over and over again, what the doctor said exactly, and when he hears that the spirit might block the degeneration of the brain or at least slow it down, he seizes on this remark and demands that his mother make an effort to stimulate his father’s spirit, which he believes has shrivelled since his retirement.
And so, instead of being pensive and melancholy, the mother’s phone conversation with her son turns emotional and angry. And when it’s over, his wife turns to him furiously:
“How could you tell him that we fired the housekeeper?”
“Who said fired? I said we reduced her hours.”
“But he accused me: ‘You cannot turn Abba into your servant.’”
“Your servant?” gasps Luria. “What’s wrong with him? He’s apparently so scared of my dementia that he’s looking high and low for someone to blame.”
“No, no,” she fumes, “don’t keep saying dementia. The doctor warned you not to.”
“So what should I say?”
“Say fogginess, fuzziness, confusion … we’ll find better words.”
He looks fondly at his wife. She is still in her bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head like a turban, and despite her age she resembles an Indian or Turkish dancer. Can she endure his dementia if it’s called by other names?
the car
Sleep snatches her from his arms before she can find those “better words”. Drained by the day that began at her paediatric clinic, and terrified by the second clinic, where she was recruited to help treat an incurable condition, she pulls away from her husband and mercifully dozes off. He covers her dangling feet with the blanket, but before drifting into sleep himself he needs a closer look at his cerebral cortex, to decide if the atrophy that escaped his gaze was real or merely possible. The scan is still in the car, now parked in the garage of their apartment building. He goes down in old clothes and slippers to the car, still speckled with raindrops.
It’s a mid-sized car, as opposed to the big, comfortable one that sped along motorways and barrelled down dirt roads, provided to him as a senior engineer at the Roads Authority. Even after retirement the old car remained his, in return for a nominal fee, but when it proved cumbersome in downtown car parks, and its drab grey colour made it harder to find in underground garages, it was replaced by a new one, smaller but taller, easy to get in and out of, bright red in colour, quickly identifiable even with failing eyesight. Lately, once in a while, Luria has been secretly exchanging a few words with it.
Truth to tell, it was the car that talked to him first. After he’d figured out its devices and controls, he thought he heard, when he started the engine, a brief, soft murmur amid the gargle of gears and pistons, the voice of a Japanese or Korean girl, possibly planted in the electrical system to wish the discriminating driver a safe trip in his new car. Obviously he has never told his wife about this female voice, so as not to compound her anxieties, but when he is alone in the car he sometimes hums to the girl: Yes, my dear, I hear you, but I don’t understand.
Yet now, at night, there’s no reason to start the car and break the silence of the garage. He turns on the interior lights, retrieves the envelope, his name and ID number smudged by the rain, and carefully removes the scan to determine if the atrophy, so speedily confirmed by his wife, is indeed real, and if so, where it’s going. But where is it? What does it look like? Many dark spaces are scattered on the image, most of them presumably good and even necessary, disregarded by the neurologist. How to distinguish between good dark and bad dark?
He leans his head back and closes his eyes. If it’s first names that go missing in the new atrophy, there’s a risk that the names of his wife and children and grandchildren could also vanish into the black hole. Was the disgrace in the kindergarten simply a moment of mental weakness? Or was there something stamped in his mind that drew him to this child? Yes, from now on it will be easy to blame every mistake or failure on mental frailty. Will the spirit, as the neurologist defined it, be able to battle his deluded brain, or get swept up inside it?
He decides to test his memory of the ignition code of the car. He remembers it well, but is disappointed that the growl of the engine now lacks the manufacturer’s young womanly voice. That’s good, whispers Luria, the fewer the delusions, the easier for the spirit to reinforce the shrinking brain. The main thing is to be careful behind the wheel. For if his licence is revoked because of an error or accident, his life will lose its purpose. And so, to test his control of the car, he carefully advances a few inches, till it is nearly touching the wall. Then he shifts into reverse, honking rhythmically, and backs towards a car parked on the opposite side. Suddenly a beam of light floods his face, and a car rapidly entering the garage brakes with a screech to allow the red car to complete its turn towards the exit, but Luria doesn’t want to exit, merely to check his competence, so he tries to return the car to its original spot, and the waiting driver gets nervous about Luria’s pointless moves, and as a good neighbour feels obliged to ask if the elderly driver needs help. “No, everything’s fine,” says Luria to the young man knocking on his window, “I forgot something in the car and also checked the engine.” The young man observes the brain scan on the seat, and the feet in old bedroom slippers. “Good night,” says Luria, to get rid of the busybody. “Good night,” mumbles the neighbour, but again asks Luria if he’s sure he doesn’t need help.
You have to be careful in public, even in the garage of a private building. Medical scans, shabby clothes, and slippers raise suspicion of mental infirmity. Even if the neurologist refuses to call it dementia, and his wife seeks more pleasant words, one must appear presentable. He returns the scan to its envelope, and before other neighbours show up he hurries back to his apartment, where his wife has cast off the blanket in uneasy sleep. He turns on a reading light to put things back in order. Dina opens her eyes.
“Where’d you disappear to?”
“I went down to the garage. I was worried that I left the scan in the car.”
“Why worry, there’s a copy in the computer, and anyway they’ll do another one soon, to see if anything has changed.”
“But how will I know what changed if I don’t understand what it is now?”
“There’s not much to understand; what they found barely exists.”
“What’s the name of the neurologist, it suddenly escapes me?”
“Doctor Laufer.”
“No, his first name.”
“Why do you need it?”
“He told me not to give up on first names.”
“I think it’s Nadav, or Gad, but why is that important?”
“Because you surely remember what he said about desire.”
“Of course.”
“That it’s also important for the struggle.”
“Important or unimportant, we won’t give it up in any case.”
“Now?”
“No. Now would be difficult not only for me but for you too. What’s the rush, you know I’ll always be with you.”
tomatoes
The next morning he says to his wife: “Today the car is yours. We’re short on many staples, food and soap and detergent, so I have to get a big delivery from the supermarket. Here’s my list, see if anything’s missing or unnecessary.”
“You won’t go to the shuk?”
“If I do, it’s just for a special vegetable or fruit.”
“On condition they are nice and fresh. Don’t worry about price, just quality. And when you see the flowers, ask Iris for a bunch of poppies.”
“Iris?”
“The older woman, not the young one. She’ll recognize you and make sure the flowers are fresh.”
“But the house is already full of flowers.”
“Wilting flowers, we need fresh ones. So remember, only poppies, they’re in season. Don’t let them sell you a different flower.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll be back by two, at the latest. Don’t eat without me, control yourself.”
“I can hold out till two. But wouldn’t it be good to show my scan to someone in your department, without saying whose it is, of course?”
“There’s nothing to show. Everything is clear. And you should get your head out of your head. What showed up was so tiny and blurry that anyone not an expert in reading such scans won’t see a thing.”
“Excuse me, excuse me, how come you, who are not an expert in reading such scans of adults, were so quick to confirm the diagnosis?”
