Chapter 58
Black Nights
We drove toward Jaffa. Lily asked if we could drive by the sea.
She said that the stretch by the Dan Hotel, going from north to south, reminded her of the shorelines she had seen in films, of cities she had never actually visited.
That’s how we ended up at Younes for lunch with the gang.
It was four in the afternoon, and the restaurant was almost empty.
For a moment, I thought they wouldn’t serve us.
Only at the entrance did I remember the last Arab restaurant we had been to together... It felt as though dozens, maybe hundreds of years had passed since then.
“It was nice,” she said when we returned to the apartment.
“The whole gang was there, and David was so funny. Max was wild as usual, unstoppable. Did you see how he went into the kitchen and brought out a tray of food?”
“It really was fun,” I agreed.
“I’m exhausted. I’m going to rest.”
“And I want to take another look at your political work.”
I went into the workroom, which was relatively tidy. The piece was still on the easel, some of the paint not yet dry.
“I love it!” I shouted toward the bedroom.
No answer.
“I love it!” I slipped into the warm bed beside her.
“What?”
“Your political work.”
“And me?”
I looked at her without answering, wrapped my arm around her back, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Toward evening, we were each busy with our own matters.
I was preparing for the programming course the army had agreed to send me to, so that I – a doctor – would understand what computing was.
Lily was busy with the final touches on her work.
I didn’t want us to go out, since the next morning she was scheduled for dialysis at Pioneer Hospital.
Around eleven, we went to bed. Before we fell asleep, she asked that we make love.
“When we finish, we won’t smoke or drink coffee,” she said.
“What’s with you suddenly talking about that?” I was defensive. I’m sure I blushed.
“Because my girlfriends told me that they, or their boyfriends, always light a cigarette or drink coffee afterward.”
“And we stay cuddled up and talking – is there something wrong with that?”
“No, just a thought.”
“About what?”
“About a conversation we had about four years ago, when you moved in with me in Ramat Aviv, that Friday.”
“What did we talk about?”
“I told you there are things they don’t know.”
“Who doesn’t know?” I didn’t understand what she meant.
“The doctors. Back then, they gave me two years, remember?” For the first time in a long while, Lily brought up the matter of her limited time.
I pressed my head into her shoulder and kissed her. Hardly a day had gone by without that sentence echoing in my mind.
“And then I told you I don’t want to talk about it?”
“I remember.” I kissed her earlobe.
“And I said that I promise I’ll tell you, because everything has to be said in its time.”
“So…?”
“So I want to tell you that the doctors apparently don’t understand what it means to be together, what it means to love.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“That being with you has given me something that the most advanced medicine could never give.”
“I want to tell you that we’ve been together for four years now – twice, twice…” She lifted herself and fixed her green eyes on mine. “Twice the time they gave me.”
“I know!”
“And I feel that we still have many, many more years together.”
I smiled at her.
We fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
Around two in the morning, she stirred. I felt her movements and woke up.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she told me.
Though barely awake, I was alert – a habit from long nights on call in the hospital.
“I’ll wait for you,” I said, noticing her difficulty in getting up. “Do you need help?” I quickly offered.
“No,” she replied. “I’m just very, very tired.”
“Take my hand,” I said, reaching out to her.
“All right,” she said, but got up on her own.
At the door, she switched on the bathroom light, a sliver of it spilling into the bedroom. Suddenly, when the soft creak of the closing door ceased, I heard a thud. It was a strange sound, one I had never heard before.
“Lily?” I called, jumping up.
No answer. I rushed to the bathroom, tried to open the door, but couldn’t. Her leg was blocking it. I realized something terrible had happened. I squeezed myself through the narrow gap between the door and the frame.
“Lily! Lily!” I called in panic. She was crouched by the toilet, her head resting on it. I lifted her quickly and pulled her out, laying her gently on the floor. I felt for her wrist. No pulse. Her neck – no pulse. Calm down, I told myself. You have to bring her back.
“Lily!” I shouted. “Lily!”
No response. No breath. I began chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth.
I had plenty of experience in the ER in Eilat.
There I had saved some, but lost others.
The first rule came to mind: call for help.
I pumped her chest five times, breathed into her twice, and repeated.
In between, I dragged the phone over and dialed 101, First Aid Lifeline.
They answered immediately. I heard the “hello.”
I left the receiver beside me, continued compressions and breaths. When I grabbed it, I spoke quickly.
“I need help right away! My wife lost consciousness; she’s not breathing!” I shouted. I went back to compressions.
“Where? Where? Where?” I heard faintly from the receiver.
“4009 apartment 23.” I grabbed it, spoke into it, dropped it. In my panic, I hadn’t noticed I’d given them our address in Eilat by mistake. The phone stayed on the floor. I kept working on her, to a rhythm deep inside me.
I lost all sense of time. For a moment, I left her, ran to the front door, opened it, and pounded on the neighbors’ door. I knew the banging would wake them up and they’d come. When they arrived, I was still bent over her. She didn’t respond. No pulse. No breath.
“Call First Aid Lifeline!” I shouted to the neighbor as I kept working.
“They’re on their way,” he said. “But you gave them your Eilat address…”
I didn’t understand. I kept going, praying inside for someone above to save my beloved, to let her live.
“You can move aside, I’ve got a tube and ventilation equipment,” a voice suddenly said above me. I looked up and recognized him – a young doctor who had had graduated Medicine a year after me.
“I think I broke a few ribs,” I said.
“That means you did it right. Let us handle it.”
I stood back. He asked me to leave the room. He and the medic went in and closed the door. I walked into her workroom and turned on the light. Her political painting was still on the easel. I stared at it and broke down crying.
“Why, why did this happen to her?” I sobbed. Why was I left as her husband and not her doctor? Why? I blamed myself. Why?
I sat slumped on the bed, unable to stop the tears.
The neighbors stood at the doorway, stunned. I’m sure they noticed the dialysis machine beside me.
“I managed to get her pulse and breathing back,” I heard the doctor say. I had no idea how long had passed.
Suddenly I was flooded with flashbacks from my first on-call night in Eilat. For years, I had buried those images. Now they burst back onto the screen in my mind. I waved my hands as if to clear them, but couldn’t.
A crash of breaking glass from the room jolted me back. A bottle or instrument had fallen.
“Is she conscious?” I asked in fear.
“Not yet,” came the cautious reply.
“Can I try talking to her?”
“Try, but she’s not conscious.”
“Maybe we should hook her up to dialysis?”
“Are you with Pioneer Hospital?”
“Pioneer Hospital,” I answered.
“Then we’ll transfer her there. I’ll ask dispatch to prepare a dialysis machine.”
Lily was placed on a stretcher. Around three a.m., she was taken by ambulance to Pioneer Hospital. The siren wasn’t working, but there was no traffic. The silence was good. We both hated noise.
“What do you think happened?” I asked the doctor.
“Likely arrhythmia from electrolyte imbalance. Very common with dialysis patients.”
He was probably right. In my mind, I pictured potassium ions crowding around her heart muscle. I didn’t tell him about the phone call we’d gotten from Maya on the holiday eve. Nor that in just three hours, she was supposed to be on dialysis at Pioneer Hospital.
When we arrived, the head of the dialysis unit met us in the ER. I didn’t know who had called him. Maybe he insisted on being involved in emergencies with his patients, or maybe only in hers. Who knows.
“Wait outside the ER,” he told me.
I glanced at Lily. She lay completely still on the bed.
That was the last look.
Before leaving, I asked a nurse to call Eli, my brother, David, Max, Serge, and Saul – everyone I could think of.
I sat outside, waiting. Unlike me, I may even have prayed. Through tears, I saw the department head approach.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We tried to revive her. We couldn’t. Her face was peaceful, more than I’d ever seen.”
He had followed her decline closely in recent months. Tears choked me. For a long moment, I couldn’t speak. Then a cry tore from my heart, a question I couldn’t contain:
“How? How could she give in now, just before the surgeries, before the ray of hope she was waiting for?”
I was asking God, I suppose, but the department head answered: “I think she didn’t want so many people to suffer with her. She just gave up. I think she couldn’t bear to see your suffering.”
“I don’t know if you know, but recently she was preoccupied constantly with her own death,” I murmured.
“I saw the photos of her works. It was clear.”
“We even talked about it. She told me which flowers she wanted on her grave.”
“She was extraordinary in life.”
“You don’t have to tell me – I lived with her. I lived her.”
“Which flowers?” he asked. “Daisies?”
“Yes. That was the flower she loved most.”
“Once, when she felt a little better, she brought me a bouquet of daisies.”
I knew she had a special connection with him. And he with her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and turned back into the ER.
It was around five a.m. The sun had not yet risen.
My brother, her brother, and my friends were all beside me on the sidewalk outside Pioneer Hospital in Petah Tikva.
We tried to digest the loss, but couldn’t.
The pain was too great. More than anything, I regretted that at night, just before we fell asleep, I hadn’t told her I loved her. Now it was too late. Or maybe not.
Around six, I went with Saul to bring the bitter news to her parents. When they saw us standing at the door, they understood. My brother went to my parents – I knew he could handle them better than I could.
On October 7, 1979, Lily died, just days before the surgery in which she was supposed to receive her mother’s kidney.
She was buried in Holon, in the plot closest to that of her aunt Mira, whom she had loved so deeply and admired so much.
Perhaps it was that loss, above all, that tipped the scales toward her surrender, her parting from life.