A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ELISHA HOSPITAL

THEY ARE building a new wing, but nevertheless it is quiet. On instructions from the contractor the men work slowly, almost silently. With each board or frame it is as if a decision must be made: shall we tighten this, or shall we let it rest? The old men with shirts wrapped around their heads inevitably continue, although one has the impression that perhaps someday they simply will not work and instead lean on their trowels or sit on the sacks of concrete. At the rate they work, it is hard to tell if they are building or tearing down.

It is the same with us, I suppose, when we treat a dying patient. Like the old Iraqi Jews who pour the cement, we, too, must decide whether or not to tighten our patients dying frame or just to let it dissolve and run away on the light blue air.

Blue is the predominant color at Elisha. It is seen everywhere out the big windows, from their tops to their bottoms, because we are on the summit of a hill—better to say mountain, although I hesitate to call anything a mountain unless it is capped with snow. Most windows look north; the ease of the light is inescapable; a soft clear altitude of blue air flees from all sides. Ships at sea, like small precision engines enameled in red and orange and black, move across a glass of blue. Passengers in a German dirigible would have had it no better than patients here. It is true they could move from place to place, but at Elisha we have no vibration—not even from the construction. Except for the souls that die within, it is a perfect environment.

It is in this hospital that I met my wife. On chill November evenings we made tea in the laboratory, which overlooks the Hadar; the bright orange flame of a Bunsen burner and the tea in a glass beaker made the dark cold and hissing respiratory winds outside less terrible. I remember well staring at a large desk calendar underneath a fluorescent light, trying to fix the time and feeling permanently I did. It was November 15, 1965, and it was ten o’clock. As I have said, the wind was whistling outside and it was dark and we were in love. And the clear light and sounds nearly matched our excitement. We spoke of Switzerland, and California, and Paris, and we have been to those places and we have been back.

We had then grave aspirations, as doctors might. We have achieved some of them, others have been whittled away by the world. We have not been bent by great events so that we are something other than ourselves, with an enemy within. On the contrary, we have been lucky. I have been in war but not in the thick of it. I have been in upheaval but not in the thick of it. I have never been concerned with governments, one way or another, because one way or another they have never been much concerned with me.

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