HE WAS AWARE of light, a white light. He opened his eyes a little, but the whiteness was blinding so he closed them. When he opened them again he tried hard to focus. The white light resolved itself into a fluorescent tube in the ceiling. A machine was bleeping next to his ear. Cautiously, he moved his head. The bleeping was coming from a heart monitor. A cannula in the back of his hand attached him through a tube to a drip hanging on a metal stand.
So it had finally happened, he thought. This time he really was dying. Strangely, he felt very calm.
He heard nearby the by-now familiar guttural tones of Arabic. In the next bed lay a young Arab. Around him crowded men in Arab headdress and women in full-length chador. One of the women saw him staring. He attempted a smile. She turned her head away.
A middle-aged Arab man in a white coat and with a neat grey beard came and stood at the end of his bed.
“So you’ve come back to us,” he said, and smiled. He lifted a clipboard from the end of the bed and thumbed through the notes attached to it.
“Are you…are you a doctor?” said Russell.
The man smiled again. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. el Arish. I am a consultant cardiologist.”
Russell gripped the white cotton blanket covering him. “Have I had a heart attack, then?” he said weakly.
“No, your heart is absolutely fine,” said the doctor. “Of course, we’ve been monitoring it closely. Good news is, everything else seems okay too. You’re in reasonable shape. Need to lose some weight, but still.”
“Where am I?” said Russell, confused.
“You are in Soroka.”
“Sirocco?” Why was he in an Arab hospital? “Am I in the West Bank?”
Now the doctor laughed. “You are in Israel, of course.” He separated the second syllable: Isra-el. “You were at Masada, remember? You collapsed there. Soroka is the nearest hospital.”
An Israeli hospital? With Arab patients, Arab doctors? Russell was bewildered.
“You’ve been unconscious for several hours. A mystery, really: we can’t find anything wrong with you. We’ll do more tests of course, now that you’re awake.”
An orderly brought a wheelchair to take him down to X-ray. He was black, with the delicate oval face of an Ethiopian. A small kitted kippah was clipped onto his hair.
Outside the ward door sat a soldier with a machine gun. The orderly noticed Russell staring at him as they passed.
“That guy in the bed next to you,” he said, bending down to talk quietly into Russell’s ear as he punched the button for the lift, “He’s Hamas. Was on his way to blow up a kindergarten but the bomb went off early and he blew himself up instead. Lost a leg, apparently.”
Russell was aghast. A terrorist killer in the next bed! Christ alfuckingmighty. The guard on the door was hardly a reassurance. What the hell was wrong with this country, that it didn’t keep such people separate but instead treated everyone the same?
Back in the ward, Russell nervously stole another look. The boy, he now saw, was young: around seventeen at most. He was still asleep, his mouth open underneath a faint suggestion of a moustache. Wires and tubes protruded from under his blankets, attached to a battery of bleeping monitors, drips and bottles. Nurses in white smocks and trousers came and went, checking the monitors and reading the printouts that regularly chattered into life.
There were now only two people by the boy’s bed, both young men, swarthy and unshaven. They stood up to go. As they moved towards the door of the ward, the guard outside swiftly rose and gripped his gun with both hands. They passed through the doorway and disappeared towards the lifts.
In due course, another doctor appeared at the foot of his bed. He stood flipping through Russell’s notes without saying anything. Then he moved to the head of the bed and produced a medical flashlight. He flashed it in Russell’s eyes and then took his pulse, all still without saying a word. Russell read the tag hanging on a lanyard round his neck: Dr. Mikhail Ostrovsky, Neurology.
“Turn your head please. Now other way.”
A thick Russian accent; the voice abrupt, impatient. He wrote busily on the clipboard. Then he started to move away.
“Er, excuse me…”
The doctor paused and came back. He frowned down at Russell.
“Could you tell me…have you found anything?”
Dr. Ostrovsky stared at him. “No meningitis or encephalitis. No sign of brain tumor, no evidence of epilepsy.” He shrugged. “A mystery,” he said sarcastically. “Now I have to see patients who really are sick.” He turned and strode out of the ward.
Russell burned with indignation. The implication he was some kind of malingerer stung. He had apparently been unconscious for hours, for God’s sake. There was clearly something very wrong with him.
He dozed off uneasily. He felt something brush against his bed and opened his eyes. A young woman was peering down at him. Dr. Noa Ben-Dror, he read on her lanyard.
“What kind of doctor are you?” asked Russell wearily.
“General physician,” she replied, smiling. She took his pulse. “How’re you feeling now?”
Her Israeli-accented voice was soft. She was slim, with full lips and warm brown eyes.
“Can anyone here tell me what’s wrong with me?” said Russell testily.
“We’ve found nothing,” she said.
“How is that possible? I was out cold for hours, apparently.”
She put her head on one side and looked at him quizzically. “These things happen sometimes. Particularly if you are under a lot of stress. Sometimes the body just needs to take time out and regroup. We’ll keep you in overnight for the final results of all the tests, but if they’re normal you’ll be able to go.” She patted his arm sympathetically.
The Hamas boy was being moved in his bed out of the ward. They both watched as the guard stood up again, gripping his gun.
“Is it normal here for terrorists to be treated alongside Israeli patients?”
Dr. Ben-Dror looked at him coolly. “This is a hospital. We leave politics at the door. If a patient needs treatment, we treat him, we save his life, whatever he has done. Same treatment, same triage system, everyone treated equally according to their level of need. Sometimes we have Arab terrorists lying here alongside their victims. And by the way, some of these terrorists are Israeli Arabs, Israeli citizens. This boy though, he is not. He comes from Gaza.”
“And his family who were here, also from Gaza? They’re allowed into Israel too?”
She raised an ironic eyebrow. “Sure. Unless they’re not allowed; if the crossing is closed because of the terror. Crazy country, this.”
“There was a heart doctor who did some tests on me…el Arish or something…”
“Yes, what about him?”
“He’s an Arab, right?”
“Of course. We have many Arab doctors here, many very distinguished ones including professors and heads of department. You have a problem with that?”
She had drawn back.
“No no no no no, not at all, quite the contrary…”
“You are surprised? You didn’t think Arabs work alongside Jews here? Ah, you come from England, yes?”
She looked at him now as if light had suddenly dawned.
“Mahmoud el Arish is a terrific person, a really nice guy. You should talk to him about it, he won’t mind at all.”
The next morning, the Hamas boy still hadn’t come back. Dr. el Arish materialized soon after breakfast.
“Good news,” he said, smiling. “You’re all clear. We found nothing at all. Just watch those stress levels.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re carrying way too much anxiety. Not for me to pry, but you need to find ways of losing it somehow. Believe me, we have a lot of experience of that here.”
“What’s happened to him?” asked Russell, motioning to the empty space next to his bed.
“He’s been moved to intensive care.” The doctor dropped his eyes discreetly. A vein throbbed in his temple. There was a pause.
“Whereabouts do you come from?” Russell hoped his tone was as neutral and conversational as possible.
“Kalandiya. A so-called refugee camp. Near Jerusalem. That’s where I was born and grew up.”
“So-called?”
He shrugged. “Look, I got out. It’s a terrible place, a place for losers. It suits certain people to keep us permanently as losers. I was very fortunate. I managed to get an education. I studied in Cairo and then in Prague. It opened my eyes. I learned a number of things I wouldn’t otherwise have known. I learned how to think.
“And now I work here where I’m just a regular guy. An Israeli Arab. Actually, you know, these days I prefer just to call myself an Israeli. I look at these guys who are brought in here, kids like this, I listen to the way their minds have been twisted, and then I look at the rest of the Arab world and I give thanks to God that I am here in Israel and not there. These people who hate the Israelis, they have no idea what real oppression is.”
“This boy…” Russell gestured to the empty space, “he’s very young to have done what he did.”
The doctor slowly shook his head. Now Russell saw that his eyes were unfathomably sad.
“Many of them are much younger. They’re taught from the cradle to kill: to kill Jews. I should know: I was taught like this. We’re dealing with a complete madness, total evil. I can hardly bear to think about it. That’s why what we do here is so good. We don’t think about what our patients may have done. We don’t think about anything except treating their wounds or diseases and making them better. We bring a little bit of goodness into the world, all of us here, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian, Druze and Kurd, everyone. This is what co-existence looks like. This is what sanity looks like.”
He had to ask.
“What do your friends, your family make of you working here? Do they also think like you do?”
He flinched at the doctor’s answer. “They call me a traitor to my people. They have disowned me.”
“So where do you feel you now belong?”
Dr. el Arish shook his head sadly and sighed.