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Leave
translated from the Hebrew by Alan Sacks

When I take leave of my body for a moment and float overhead I can see all of me from the outside. The body, which is mine but has not me, lies limp on the hospital bed. Everything about it indicates frailty. The legs rest as though someone laid them out, and the hands are turned to the sides, as though someone had spread them that way on purpose to keep some distance between them and the body. The right hand lies exactly in line with the mattress. Its fingers quiver with a strange palsy, as if sliding over the raised seams of the mattress or feeling the sheet cover. The left hand cradles the alarm buzzer as though ready to squeeze it at any instant. It both touches and doesn't touch the buzzer, drawing a small measure of security from the feel of the ringer in its palm. The fingers on the right hand don't move. They're neatly lined up, ready to pounce in a flash on the electric buzzer. And the head, how does the head lie? I rise a little higher above myself for a better view of how my head is propped. And so, well, it's really just as I imagined it. The head is plumped on a pillow, reassuringly close to the oxygen mask and the narrow crack in the dark window pane. A draft of warm but refreshing air blows through the crack into my room. That is the air I have never in my life so yearned to breathe as I have these past days. Many nights have I passed in a ventilation system totally sealed like this one in the hospital. Despite the chilly air-conditioning, it feels terribly stuffy.

I tremble at the memory of the pungent aromas of freshly mown grass wafting in from the garden outside. I remember the story of a young soldier who lived through the Egyptian attack on the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. Luckily for him, he was only lightly wounded and spent a few days at aid stations in the desert. When he got home and took a deep breath of the green grass' new-mown smell, he sank to his knees and threw himself on the cropped lawn. The scratch of the cut blades brought tears of happiness to his eyes and he isn't sure that he didn't weep there on the green turf. That prickly embrace of a patch of mown grass was etched in his memory as the true welcome home to his own bit of Israel. Nothing that happened later touched him so deeply.

Shall there, I ask myself, shall there yet be golden days for me? Will I smell again the aroma of cut grass? The odor of watered earth in the gardens? The scent of ripening fruit? That's why I ask my few visitors to keep a sharp eye on the crack in my window, my escape route to real air and the scents to be smelled outside, even though it's the middle of summer now and no intoxicating smells rise from the sand hills and dunes around the hospital.

Flying over my body lying in the bed below, I can already sense autumn on its the way, the robust smells of the sea, even the odor of life. I will someday return and smell them with all my lungs. Let's suppose I had accepted that I had a weak heart, prone to illness. Let's suppose I hadn't fought them, like a foolish child, to get into an elite combat unit. Let's also suppose that I'd never set foot on a ball field, as I was asked by one doctor who happened to examine me. And let's assume that, having given my word, I hadn't followed one hike with another or exhausted myself on the peaks of the Judean Desert until my breath stopped and my pulse raced in my veins. Could I have spared myself the unexpected heart attack? Would I have been able to live a life of contentment and serenity while everyone around me hopped like madmen from the mountains to the seashores, the wilderness and the running tracks? Who could have guaranteed that if I had lived the most moderate of lives, there would have been no enemy lurking for me, an enemy biding his time, waiting for an unpardonable moment of weakness? Let's assume I had seen the doctors and sought out their advice on schedule and not been scared to death when I felt a sudden shortness of breath high on Mt. Hermon. Would I have escaped what was waiting for me? I doubt it.

I worked hard to convince my wife that I couldn't climb Mt. Sinai, but she wouldn't listen. "You're healthy enough for your activities," she sneered. "Your stupid runs, which wear you out, and your long boring swims; you'll get sick only here, on Mt. Sinai?" When I reached the lofty summit, towing a line of hikers thrilled by the winds blowing east and west, and then the look-out point on the steps above the monastery, I felt the air seeping out of me bubble by bubble. My head spun in a faint, slightly sweet dizzy spell. The mountains seemed to exchange places. Should anyone have been astonished when, as I pointed to the boulders, I mixed up the covenants God made with the prophets in the Sinai Desert? How could anyone have missed the way I fervently and completely blew the whole glorious story on Mt. Sinai's towering summit? But I acted as though I hadn't noticed my blunder. My listeners were polite, and tired from the tough predawn climb. And maybe they hadn't heard everything I had said in my fever. It was only when I finished up quickly, suddenly choking and struggling to breathe, that some of them who knew the story came to me, very discreetly and tactfully so I wouldn't be hurt or insulted, and corrected the mistakes I had made on the mountain. Later, with aching legs and stiff muscles after we had gone down the thousands of steps to the monastery below, I told my wife, "See, the whole climb was a bust. Did you notice the way I disgraced myself?" "Nonsense," said my wife, happily skipping like a long-legged doe. "Do you really think anyone paid attention to your babbling on the mountain-top? The roaring wind drowned out the megaphone and everyone was awed out of their wits. "But I was so dizzy up there." And she glided down the stone steps, just as I was about to tell her how I had suddenly panicked when I'd lost my breath on the mountain. How I'd nearly lost the breath to speak in my terror. And most of all, how I had mixed up the covenants God had made with the prophets. I was forgiven everything. My audience of hikers hadn't hung on my every word. But what did I think of myself? I had never before forgotten my speech on the mountain. It was also too bad that a few religious families, to whom I had planned to apologize that they knew more than I, had made the climb with me. Suppose it was a warning I got on the summit; what should I have done? What could I possibly do? Run to the doctor? Completely change my way of life well into the second third of it? This is the grand, sweet stage of my life. I was so involved in the petty hurly-burly of living that I brushed off the warning my body gave me on the peak of Mt. Sinai. At the tail end of the War, while repairing some fallen wire fences on Mt. Hermon, my body had also betrayed me, to my shame. Just before we began driving in the iron posts with the first swings of our heavy mallets, I went weak. I felt so spent that I had to dismiss the soldiers and look for an officer to take my place. Then I lay down in the shade of a tiny shack, held fast to the stone by cables against the gusting winds, and sucked the air into me. Suppose I'd gone to the battalion doctor with my pounding pulse. "You?" he would have asked in surprise. "An athlete like you scared by a few minutes at altitude?"

In my bed in the hospital, I remember them. I still remember the old teacher who once saw me running breathlessly on one of my romps through the fields as a child. "You know you're heart isn't sound," she told me sternly. "Abuse your body and your body eventually will abuse you." That was many years ago, and she's long since passed on. What a shame I didn't listen to her and take her loving advice. When I take leave of my body and rise I again hear the words of that young soldier, one of the precious few who filled the breach at the Suez Canal: Until that moment when I was surrounded by the smell grass, I didn't believe I was back home. But as soon as I smelled the familiar, rank aroma of the grass, I knew that my painful journey was over. I knew that I really had come out of the desert and was home again.

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