Eventually there was evidence in the overhead window that the night was giving way. Something was changing inside the hospital, too, or so I thought as I lay on my back on the gurney. A kind of lull had settled over everything. The night shift had come to an end, and the doctors and nurses who’d spent it ministering to so many emergencies would now wash their hands of them and return home, but not before briefing their replacements, going over the charts in a burble of medical shorthand, who was due for what when, until they had at last completed all their duties and were free to change into their street clothes and leave through the automatic doors, exiting into the morning. Who in that hospital didn’t wish to be released? I’d thought of giving up the interminable wait plenty of times and escaping through those doors myself. Once I’d tried, scooting off the gurney with the IV port still plugged into the vein of my arm, but I didn’t get far down the hall before the brusque nurse in triage blocked my path.
At some point my fever began to soar again, and that was what finally got the doctors’ attention. Actually, it was the Arab with the mop and stethoscope who noticed my condition. From where I lay, half-concealed by a curtain, I could look out onto the cubicle occupied by the Ethiopian woman, and the hallway between her liminal space and mine where the hospital staff came and went, as well as the patients, increasingly residents, of the emergency room, who passed by in wheelchairs, gurneys, or occasionally on their own two legs. I remember that the Arab man went past, and I watched him pushing the long rectangular mop that left behind a wet, shiny trail like a slug. A few minutes later he reappeared, pushing the mop back in the other direction, and when he got to my cubicle he stopped and looked in. He had kind eyes, deep and brown, and seemed too old to be doing such work. After a moment he put the mop down and approached me. I thought he might remove the stethoscope from around his neck and use it on me, or maybe I hoped he would, because by then I was in need of an act of kindness. But instead he reached out his hand and pressed the back of it to my forehead and then my cheek, said something quietly in his language, and disappeared, leaving the mop where it was so that I understood that he would return. When he did, it was with a nurse I hadn’t seen before, slender with gray roots in her blond hair. I thought I might have a better chance with her, and so I tried again to describe what had happened to me.
The nurse put a hand on my arm and turned to the computer station on a trolley, making it clear that everything she needed to know would come not from me but from that other, more reliable, source. Once she’d caught herself up, she turned and asked the orderly a question in Hebrew, to which he answered in the affirmative, taking the opportunity to pop into the cubicle and retrieve his mop with its dirty, tangled head, before retreating back to the hallway. He continued to stand there, absently twisting the handle between the hands he’d used to gauge my temperature, and whose accuracy would now be checked against the thermometer in its disposable plastic sheath that the nurse stuck under my tongue. It began to beep wildly, and the nurse snatched it out of my mouth with a perturbed look that soon shifted to surprise.
She went away and came back with some bitter syrup in a paper cup, and then vanished again, presumably to find the doctor. What I remember next is that the orderly, still standing in the hallway, now looked around him furtively, first left and then right, until, judging the coast clear, he approached again, rested the mop against the wall, and again laid his hand on my forehead, this time with the palm down so that I felt the refreshing coolness of his skin. Looking up at his face, it seemed to me that he was listening intently. As if he were straining to hear after all, not with the stethoscope that still hung inert around his neck but with the hand itself. As if the sensitive instruments of his cool fingers could read my mind. And though I know this is impossible—that the memory I invoked under his touch had not yet happened to me—it is there all the same, impervious to reason.
With the orderly’s cool hand on my forehead, I recalled an afternoon the following winter when my lover arrived home and entered the bedroom carrying his bag. Get undressed, he said to me. It was a bright day, so cold outside that his fingers had frozen inside his gloves. I remember that from where I lay I could see the bare branches of the plane tree, with its spiked fruit still hanging on far past their season. I pulled my shirt over my head. Leave the curtains open, I said. For a moment he seemed to consider this. Then he proceeded to close them anyway, and removed four black ropes from his bag. They were very beautiful things, black and silken, but thick enough that a sharp knife would be needed to cut through them. The deftness with which he knotted my wrists to the bars of the headboard surprised me. What did you tell them it was for when you bought it? I asked. For tying someone up, he replied. And do you know what they asked me? I shook my head. A woman or a child? he told me, running his freezing fingers across my breasts and down my ribs, and delicately turning my necklace until he could get at the clasp. What did you say? I asked, shivering. Both, he whispered, and the gentleness with which he touched me, and understood this simple thing, filled me with peace and made me want to weep.
By then, the brief winter war was over. A single missile had fallen through the Iron Dome and killed a man on the corner of Arlozorov and Ben Ezra. The barrier had been broken, a tear in the sky, but the reality of that other world didn’t come pouring through. There was only another incommensurable onslaught of violence in Gaza, and then, at last, a fragile cease-fire. After I was released from the hospital, I spent another week in Tel Aviv, monitored by Dr. Geula Bartov, the petite and forceful GP whose care I’d been placed under while recuperating. Since the fever had come and gone intermittently, Dr. Bartov had been firm about waiting with the flight back to New York until I had been afebrile for forty-eight hours and they received the results of the battery of tests they’d done. It struck her as odd that I didn’t appear more interested in getting to the bottom of what had infected me; she saw it as a symptom, and marked it down as apathy.
The pain had gone, but in its wake I was weak and exhausted, and still had very little appetite. My father had not called Peres, but he had called his cousin Effie, who’d sent the police to bang down the door of my sister’s apartment, which they had left—because this was Israel, after all—hanging half off its hinges. Someone had taken this as an invitation to enter the apartment, rip the TV off the wall, and carry it away, but not before having a roll in the bed and eating the peaches I’d left in the refrigerator.