Dimiter (10 page)

Headed for his office, Mayo stopped as he came to a nurse’s station where behind the high counter, head bent low, a pretty, dark-haired nurse in her thirties was entering notes into a patient ledger.

“Good morning, Samia.”

“Good morning.”

Still writing, the nurse had not looked up and her tone of voice was flat and cool. With a sigh, Mayo lowered his head and shook it. He had recently injured the nurse’s feelings by scoffing at the story she’d excitedly told him concerning a patient named Isabell Lakhme, an elderly woman with mild dementia who’d been recently crippled by a fracture of the hip. “I was checking on the burn case in 304 about one in the morning,” the nurse had recounted, “when I hear someone
shnuffling
around in the hall. I look up through the doorway and who do I see walk by? Swear to God? No lie? Mrs. Lakhme!”

“You’re not serious.”

“I swear. Absolutely. It was her. Except she looked—well . . .”

“How, Samia? How did she look?”

“Well, like rosy. You know? Sort of youthful. And she turns and looks me straight in the eye and she smiles. Well, my jaw drops a foot. I mean, I can’t believe she’s walking! Right? So I blurted out, ‘Hey! Mrs. Lakhme!’ I was shocked. She walks on and out of sight, so I go after her, okay? But by the time I’m in the hallway she’s gone. There’s no one there. She’s disappeared!”

“Samia? . . .”

“No, no, wait a minute! Wait until I tell you! I went straight to her room, and . . .”

“She wasn’t in her bed, you’re going to tell me?”

“No, she was. She was there. She was asleep.”

“Tell me, what is the point of this, Samia?”

“It’s this: The next day, I’m in her room when her daughter comes to visit and—”

“You told them that you saw her?”

“Can you stop interrupting? No, Moses. No, I didn’t say a word. So now the daughter takes her hand and she gives it a kiss. I can see she’s kind of shaky. You know? About to cry. And then she says to her mother how she wishes that she weren’t always ‘stuck in this bed.’ And then Lakhme—swear to God, Moses! God’s honest truth!—Lakhme says to her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not stuck here at all. I go traveling with young people all of the time.’ Then she turns to me smiling a little, and she says to me,
‘
And
you
know I’m telling the truth because
you saw me last night, Nurse, didn’t you?’ Oh, my God, I almost fainted, Moses! Can you believe it?”

“No,” the neurologist had answered. “Moreover, you haven’t any right to be delusional, Samia. That’s a privilege reserved for the chief physician and higher ranking hospital staff.” That had done it, Mayo ruefully reflected. He listened to the scratching of the ink-fed pen as the nurse kept writing, head low to her task. She had told him she had seen something else that night. Mayo’s gaze fixed dubiously on the crimson Star of David stitched into her oversized starched white cap. His quest for unwavering faith in her accounts had been less than heroically advanced by the fact that he knew her to be a neurotic as well as a courageously innovative tester of the outermost limits of paranoia. Once she had bitterly and memorably complained that the clerks at a grocer’s near Jerusalem Hills, the inexpensive neighborhood where she lived, had refused to carry her bags to her car because “that whole creepy staff there is anti-Arab,” whereas in fact the store’s owners were Palestinians. Mayo stood patiently, waiting and hoping for the nurse to stop writing, until at last he gave up with a sigh and moved on. Instantly, the scratching of the pen behind him ceased.

Mayo shook his head and kept walking, trudging down a corridor lined with narrow cots and restless sleepers. A breakdown of the hospital’s main computer had delayed the release of dozens of patients who had only come in for routine tests. Mayo shook his head at that, too. At the door to his office he fumbled in a pocket of his jacket for a key and whisked it out, but then as he was slipping it into the lock he turned his head to stare pensively down the length of a dimly lit hallway at whose shadowy end some beckoning mystery faintly glowed.
There
, Mayo thought.
It had happened there
. “Samia, you’re a lunatic,” he murmured. He extracted the key, slipped it into his pocket, and in moments was scuffing through the long windowed hall past idle oxygen tanks and gurneys until he had neared the dead-end wall that marked the beginning of the Children’s Ward. It was filled with brightly colored painted cartoon figures. Mayo stopped. There was something on the floor just ahead of him. He reached down and picked it up. It was a white chef’s cap, very narrow in size. Mayo judged it to be part of a child’s Purim costume and a fond, sad smile warmed his eyes as he carefully placed it on a parked medication cart silently awaiting the squeak of its rounds. He heard a faint
click
behind him, like a sewing needle falling to the ground. He turned around but saw nothing, The hall was empty. What had he expected to see? he asked himself. “Mrs. Lahkme?” he said aloud dryly. He walked on to an observation window, where he stopped and looked in at the ward’s tall gray metal cribs, in each one a sleeping child. Mayo stared broodingly at the dark-haired boy in whom the cancer and dysautonomia had vanished. The double remission was but part of the puzzle. There was yet that other mystery hovering here, that second tale of the improbable as told by Samia.

Mayo thought he detected movement and, shifting his gaze, saw that one of the children was awake, a two-year-old girl with rosy, plump cheeks who was lying on her side with a thumb in her mouth. She was staring at Mayo with a mischievous smile most resembling amused anticipation. The moment the neurologist met her gaze she sat up with a giggly laugh of delight and clapped both hands together in front of her. After that, for a time she sat motionless, squinting at Mayo with an air of expectancy until the smile in her eyes slowly faded and,
slipping her thumb back into her mouth, she gave a sigh, lay back down, and turned her head away. The neurologist continued to study her, puzzled, then at last turned around and shuffled away still gripping the mug half-filled with tea now cooler than his search for the meaning of his life.

At the door to his office Mayo paused. He’d caught an odd flash of motion at the end of the hall, something black and quick, but when he turned to look directly he saw nothing. Mayo sighed, and with a rueful shake of his head he unlocked the door and entered his office.
The deadly Samia Virus is spreading
, he thought.
We must notify the World Health people!
Mayo shuffled morosely to the dark oaken swivel chair faithfully waiting behind his desk, sat down, and briefly scanned the accumulated chaos of the room. When he’d served as chief physician, a post he had mysteriously abandoned at around the time when his weight had begun to so dramatically drop, Mayo’s tight little office was a match for his mind: a silent temple of neatness and organization. But since his resignation the cubbyhole sanctuary had gradually become a mad warren where books and medical reports on shelves jostled humorous trivia and mementoes, while the once-bare walls were now gasping for breath under framed citations, photos, and oddities such as the faded printed label from a jar of a plum-colored liquid substance evocatively identified as “Nos-feratu Beet Juice”—just below the name appeared the word “Imported”—and a pair of quotations from Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon. One was headed “Advice to Patients:”

Don’t be too fussy. If you ask for clear soup and get noodle soup, the nurse will tell you: “So eat the soup and leave the noodles.”

The other Kishon quotation was beside it:

What can you get for a pound these days? A curse from a beggar.

Prominently centered between a travel poster of Carmel, California, and a photo of the fog-shrouded lovers’ farewell at the end of the film
Casablanca,
these advisories steadied Mayo’s walk through the world.

Mayo stared bleakly at the desktop’s clutter: Letters. Reports. Memoranda. Scribbled notes. With the tips of his fingers he pushed a few papers apart until the desktop’s bare stained pine was revealed like a patch of pale sea amid a jumble of floes. He set the mug down on the cleared-out space and gave some thought to his upcoming 10
A.M.
lecture. He knew he needed sleep. But his mind was too agitated, still shadowed by a vague foreboding. He thought of the Band-Aid in his dream. What did it mean? As was his custom he had left his office door wide open, still another quirk in his habits that had started at the time of his weight loss, and now he lifted his head and looked out into the hall with a curiously sad and wistful expression, as if hoping that a long lost love might pass by. But the hall remained empty of life. Mayo sighed. He longed for the distraction of the morning paper, for the balm of immersion in routine, and, grown desperate, he reached into a wastepaper basket that was underneath his desk and hauled out the prior day’s
Jerusalem Post,
spread it out on his desk, and began to reread it, his eye skimming rapidly across the headlines:

“SYRIA MIGHT RENEW THE SIX DAY WAR;”

“WATERGATE GRAND JURY INDICTS 7;”

“U.S. COLLEGE STREAKING CRAZE SPREADS TO EUROPE;”

“22 CHILDREN DIE IN VIET CONG ATTACK;”

and

“PYTHON SWALLOWS BANGLADESHI WOMAN.”

At the last two reports Mayo groaned but said nothing.

He had used up all the worlds he could end that day.

Seeking sunnier fare, Mayo turned to an ad for “C
HUTZPAH
,” a perfume created by Aviva Dayan, the daughter of the celebrated Army chief of staff, and with this Mayo found the wry smile he’d been seeking. Her lips puckered in a sultry and provocative 0; Dayan’s photo stared back smolderingly at the neurologist over copy that declared the scent’s virtues:

ARROGANT! DIRECT! PROVOKING! BUT AT THE

SAME TIME REFRESHINGLY NATURAL LIKE THE

SABRAS IN WHOSE IMAGE IT WAS CREATED!

Near the bottom of the ad another perfume was touted:

MAZELTOV—THE PERFUME THAT BRINGS LUCK!

The rustling of newspaper merged with a chuckle as Mayo turned the page to a daily feature that was headed “What’s On In Jerusalem Today:”

Thursday Daily Walk: Fourteen Stations to Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Free snacks to follow at Mandarin
Chinese Restaurant. Meeting Place: Convent of the Flagellation.

A smile. Then Mayo turned to even deeper and richer heart’s ease in two items on the paper’s back page:

LONDON POLICE IN MANHUNT FOR
UNAPOLEGETIC FLATULENT OFFICER

 

LONDON (REUTERS)
—British police sought a flatulent officer Wednesday after a family complained that a policeman broke wind in their London home during a drug raid and failed to apologize. A Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed tonight that the Department of Professional Standards was investigating the charge.

The other item’s solemn report:

A sex-starved moose in Norway mistook a small bright yellow Italian car for a would-be partner, but apparently defecated on it after it failed to receive a response.

“And so here we have the answer,” Mayo murmured expressionlessly, “to the problem of the frigid wife’s headaches.” His gaze drifted down to two quieter headings that had also caught his eye on the day before, although not for any reason that he could name. One reported that units from the Soviet Union had arrived to replace the Albanian troops who were rotating out of the U.N. peacekeeping force now patrolling the Golan Heights. The other item had to do with the body of a man found dead at the base of the Russian Church Tower. Though the autopsy hadn’t been completed as yet, he was
thought to have fallen down the Tower’s steep steps, “this consistent,” the article went on to report, “with the trauma to the dead man’s body,” although “a homicide had yet to be ruled out.”

The cause of death was a broken neck.

Mayo looked up from his reading. He had heard an odd creak. He stared at a corner of the room where a dust-covered black violin case rested, propped on its end at a woozy angle. Mayo’s inner child regarded it askance: with this reported recent rash of the benignly supernatural, might there also be a darkness prowling the halls?
No, you twit! The violin case slipped and it made a little noise!
It could also be a warning from Maurice, Mayo thought, that having failed to play a note in several weeks he needed to practice more conscientiously; and thus reminded of duty and its obligations, he folded up his copy of
The Jerusalem Post
, dropped it back into the trash, and groped through the litter of papers on his desk until he found the articles he had been studying in preparation for the morning’s lecture.