Читать книгу Track Changes - Sayed Kashua - Страница 10

“Is here, okay?” the cabby asked. “Or do you want me to go all the way to the gate?”

“Here’s great,” I said when I saw that we had reached the entrance to Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba.

The taxi pulled to a stop, facing north, in the direction of Tira. Five more minutes and I could’ve been at home. I looked to the right to make sure that the share taxis connecting Kfar Saba and Tira were still parked in the same spot as they had been fourteen years ago when I last boarded one of the passenger vans. And there they were, only now with an official taxi sign, making the once-unlicensed stop official.

“One hundred and seventy shekels,” the Russian driver said, reminding me that I didn’t have any Israeli currency.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, flipping through my wallet and waiting for a miracle that would transform my American bills into Israeli shekels. “Is fifty dollars okay?”

“Even better,” he said, and I handed him the bill without waiting for change, even though I knew that in Israel drivers are not tipped.

As I crossed the street in its direction, Meir Hospital looked bigger than I remembered: a few new buildings had been added, and there was now a little security hut and a metal turnstile at the entrance.

There was no chance of me getting through the turnstile with my trolley suitcase.

“Wait for the security guard,” a young man with an Arab accent behind me said, and I tried to check and see if he was from Tira or if he noticed that I was from Tira, though he had addressed me in Hebrew. People from Tira recognize one another. “I’ll tell the guard,” he said as he pushed through the turnstile.

“Where to?” the guard asked before clicking open the door to the security hut.

“I’m visiting my father.”

“Which ward?”

“Cardiac.”

“Cardiac Institute’s in the tower.”

“Is that in the new building?”

The guard had no idea what I was talking about; as far as he was concerned the tower had always been there, built before he was even born. I pointed toward the building, which must have been erected more than three decades ago, and the security guard nodded.

Meir Hospital. In Arabic we tweaked the name, never using the word “mustashfa”—hospital—and Arabizing the other word with a long a sound: Maaer. “He got a referral to Maaer,” we’d say, because without a referral from the local health clinic, you couldn’t just show up at the hospital, aside from in true emergencies. And a referral to Maaer, back when we were little, was something to be proud of, a sign that you really had hurt yourself. I was once referred to Maaer after I’d injured my foot. It had turned blue and swollen and the local doctor, saying I needed an X-ray, had printed out a referral to the hospital. The X-ray, though, revealed no sign of a fracture and I was deeply sorry that there were no broken bones and that I had apparently wasted my father’s time.

When I got older I would sometimes accompany him on visits to see hospitalized relatives. Back in the day those visits were obligatory, and relatives would spend days packed into the corners of hospital waiting rooms. The women would bring food and the men would supply fresh coffee. Once, when I was in high school, I was left at the bedside of my maternal uncle, who had been in a bad car accident with his son and was in critical condition. After an all-night operation, my uncle’s condition improved and the next morning he opened his eyes and started to talk. When he asked about his son, everyone told him, “Alhamdulillah, he’s okay.” When he asked to see his son, those at his bedside told him that he was being treated nearby, in Petach Tikva, and that he would be fine and that what was most important now was that he focus on his own recuperation. My uncle didn’t know that his son had been killed in the crash. On the day of the funeral, all of the men from the village had to participate in the ceremony but they didn’t want to leave my uncle alone, so they asked me, as an already-mature and rather smart kid, a “good kid,” to stay by his bedside until the funeral was over and the mourning tent had been built. They said that they trusted me and that my uncle must not know that he had lost his son because his condition was still unstable, and that only once he’d recuperated from the surgery would one of the adults come and tell him that his firstborn child had died.

“Why hasn’t your aunt come to visit?” he asked me as soon as it was just the two of us alone in the hospital room.

“I don’t know, Uncle,” I told him. “She’s probably with Omar in Petach Tikva.”

“If your aunt hasn’t come to see me and is with him constantly then he must be in really bad condition.”

“No, Uncle,” I said. “No, she was here when you were being operated on. She left just before you came to.”

“Have you seen him?” he asked, and I, who only that morning had seen Omar’s body, answered that I had and that he was “fine, totally fine. He even asked about you, and then we played that game that he likes with the chutes and the ladders. He beat me four to one.”

“Yes, he likes that game,” my uncle said and smiled. “You know, you’re the only one I really believe. Now I can relax. I thought the adults were lying to me. Adults always lie.”

“Never, Uncle,” I said. “I never ever lie.” And I swore to God.

I tugged the trolley bag along gently, making sure the wheels didn’t rattle too much as I crossed the entryway to the new wing of the hospital.

It was seven in the evening here, eleven in the morning in Illinois. Sunday morning—my children would all be at home. I hoped they didn’t go out, that my wife wouldn’t put the kids at risk. “How the hell is going to the library putting the children at risk?” I heard her argue with me. Just please don’t let it snow today, I thought, for my wife has no qualms about driving the kids around even when it’s snowing. She doesn’t know about black ice, and she isn’t willing to hear a word about how quickly people die because of it. “Everyone’s driving,” I can hear her say as I walk toward the block of elevators at the entry level, asserting vehemently that were it up to me, the entire state would be shut down at the first sign of snow.

Seven in the evening is when the stores on the ground floor close. A young saleswoman from the gift store was bringing in a metal wagon on which there were balloons that read “Mazel Tov” and “Get Well Soon.” The grate in front of the bookstore was being shut, too, and only the café across the way, a franchise of a larger chain, was still open. It dawned on me that I should have brought my father a present. After all I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years.

“The Cardiology Institute?” a tired woman in her fifties in a pair of green scrubs asked as she came out of the elevator. She looked like a nurse, but I wasn’t sure I was able to categorize hospital employees by their garb. When I was little I thought that in a hospital only doctors wore scrubs, but little by little I realized that even the floor cleaners, who sometimes greeted us in Arabic, or the guy with the limp pushing the empty wagons, wore some sort of scrubs.

“Cardiology’s on the fourth floor.”