looked back at me. “Oh, no, I would, but . . . it’s just . . . very hard to pronounce.”
“That’s OK. I don’t need to pronounce it.” I picked up my notebook and poised my pen expectantly.
She stared at me a few minutes longer before responding. “I call him Y,” she finally said. “Everyone just calls him Y.”
I let the notebook drop back into my lap. What the hell was she hiding? Was he some kind of notorious criminal whose name I’d instantly recognize? Could it be, even more bizarrely, that she didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce his name? Or, it suddenly occurred to me, was it possible that the husband didn’t even exist?
Our time was almost up and I felt totally disoriented. Maybe it was the effect of sitting on the patient side of the room. Maybe I was just too distracted by my own problems. But I had just sat with this woman for almost an hour with nothing to show for it. I’d gotten almost no essential information, didn’t even have a diagnosis. Maybe I was just getting rusty.
I debated getting an emergency psychiatric consult. The last thing I needed was word getting out that I’d failed to properly treat some psychotic patient. On the other hand, I was on the outs with all the psychiatrists, and any one of them would take perverse pleasure in the shoddy intake I had just done. She was paranoid and delusional, that was clear, but she was also lucid and calm. I decided to take the chance that she could hold on through the end of the holiday. Hopefully, she’d never come back. If she did, I’d be sure and do a full mental status exam, get a proper diagnosis. I decided to let it go.
“Israela, there’s a lot more information I’ll need before I can know how to help you,” I said. “After Passover, I’ll want to get a full life history and a broader sense of your day-to-day life. I’m going to ask the receptionist to schedule you for the first day after the holiday. Will that work for you?”
She nodded, her eyes glistening with new tears. “Passover is a hard time for me—I always miss him terribly during the holiday. I clean the house obsessively, trying to show what a good wife I can be, hoping that will draw him back to me.” We sat in silence for a long minute. “It never seems to work,” she finally said, “but at least the house gets clean.”
I laughed, and she smiled back shyly. A sense of humor was always a good sign.
“Are you sure you’ll be OK over the holiday?” I asked.
She nodded slightly, her whole upper body moving stiffly with the effort. She took her appointment slip and got up to leave, her brow furrowing as she glanced around the room.
“You know, Doctor, you should really speak to the cleaning lady. This office is littered with rubber bands and paper clips.”
She wrapped her head tightly in her shawl and fearfully scrutinized the waiting room before venturing out the office door.
4
I picked up the forms from the now deserted reception area and stayed late to write up what I could remember of the intake, fudging the details I had neglected to ask. That evening, I plucked a cold schnitzel from Yossi’s refrigerator and, seated at his kitchen table, combed the classified ads for cheap rentals, while the twins engaged in a raucous shoot-out in the living room and Elizabeth chided me from the bedroom, insisting loudly to Yossi that I be out before the holiday.
Even in the midst of an intifada, Jerusalem apartments were obscenely overpriced. Most of the secular, middle-class population had already fled to the coastal plain. American and French foreigners had bought up and renovated the vacated apartments, which now rented for outlandish prices—never mind that any minimally habitable flat would already be engaged for the Passover week. I decided to risk infuriating Jezebel and called in sick the next day so I could roam through the city looking at one bleak apartment after another. Desperate, I finally rented the first furnished flat I found that I could move into right away. It was a dark, ground-floor apartment on the edges of Kiryat Yovel, its empty-lot view obscured by black security bars.
I transported my three garbage bags to the new flat that very evening. It was far from both work and home but had the advantage of being a month-to-month rental. It was just a temporary arrangement, I was sure.
Two days later, as I was leaving the office on Passover eve, I found a neatly folded note in my mailbox. It was written in the oversized, boxy handwriting typical of American immigrants:
Kobi,
I appreciate your completing your intake in such a timely fashion. As you can see, the paperwork is less overwhelming when you do it quickly.
Have an enjoyable and productive Passover break.
Jezebel
I crumpled the note and angrily threw it into the trash. Cheap gestures of appreciation were not going to soothe the stinging humiliation of my probation or the sheer degradation of having my intakes instantly scanned as if I were a first-year intern. She had refrained from commenting on the obvious shoddiness of my work—clearly her methods were more subtle and circuitous. But it would take more than a cloyingly friendly note to transform me into her dutiful lackey. I had no intention of having a “productive” Passover break. I had as much right to a holiday as anyone else at the goddamned clinic.
I was back in Kiryat Yovel by 3:00, with just enough time to shower and change before joining the exhaust-choked pilgrimage along the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway. It was an unusually cold and stormy spring, and the dark, low-hanging clouds perfectly mirrored my state of mind. I was in a petulant mood from Jezebel’s condescending note and in dread of the evening ahead. My parents had called to wish us a happy Passover and had been crisply informed by Nava that I no longer lived there. We had always spent holidays with Nava’s family, which had riled my mother for years. I would have been happy to skip the whole rigmarole, but what excuse could I possibly give now? Not that my parents believed in any of this religious stuff, but seder was seder, and without the convenient excuse of pushy in-laws, there was no way to avoid the family gathering.
The nation was on high alert for the holiday, and convoys of soldiers were making the highway even more clogged than usual. Two international peacekeepers had been killed the day before near Hebron, and a major attack thwarted at the Malha mall. After an interminable stop-and-go ride, I finally arrived, just as the first fat drops of rain began to fall, in Petah Tikva, the faceless little city east of Tel Aviv where I’d grown up. In my childhood, the town still retained remnants of its rural past, fragrant with orange groves. But the orchards had long since been paved over, and it was now a featureless suburb, a maze of white stone buildings, indistinguishable from all the other flat, crowded little towns that sprawled across the coastal plain.
Mainly due to my own reluctance, Nava and I had rarely visited the homestead, a comfortable, third-floor flat full of overstuffed furniture. I trotted up the stairs, avoiding, as I always did, the claustrophobic two-person elevator. The door to the flat was wide open, a buzzy commotion emanating from the kitchen along with the greasy smell of frying potatoes. My father sat at a corner of the already-set dining room table grating fresh horseradish, his nose a cartoonish red, tears streaming down his face.
“You can buy that stuff already grated, you know,” I said by way of greeting.
He didn’t miss a beat. “That’s how weak this generation is, even fake suffering is too much for them. A little bitterness in the food is beyond their tolerance. Prepared horseradish? As bitter as life with a bunion. What would they do with a Holocaust, I wonder.”
“Right,” I said.
