The Devil in Jerusalem Read Online Free PDF Page B

making it impossible for the young doctor to even get close to him. And then suddenly, in the middle of resisting, the young man collapsed, setting off all kinds of bells and whistles and doomsday buzzers, which felt like stone pellets raining down on Daniella’s head.
    The blond girlfriend, who looked fifteen, backed up against the wall and stared, while the family screamed and moaned until they were herded into the corridor to make room for nurses wheeling in machines, followed by senior doctors. Daniella listened to the noises coming from the closed and curtained room, the doctors’ low, frantic tones punctuated by the hiss and pump of machines that seemed to go on forever. And then the door opened and the young intern, no older than the patient, emerged, the bad news written all over his face. A scream went up, a roar of disbelief and raw grief.
    This, she thought, nauseated, was the sound in Egypt during the final plague. The family pushed open the doors, invading the room, circling the dead man’s bed protectively as they hugged each other and wept. The keening went on for hours.
    Daniella was stunned. Just moments before, he’d been alive, a handsome young man. And now he was dead and absolutely nothing could be done about it. No one had been able to save him. Or, perhaps, there had been some mistake, some lapse, that had cost him the remaining fifty years of his life? And if so, who had made that error? Was it the family for not trying hard enough? Or the patient himself, battle-scarred and weary, who had decided he’d had enough of doctors and hospitals and lifesaving techniques? Or in the final tally, had it been the young intern, who hadn’t intubated him fast enough, who hadn’t been wise, persuasive, or simply commanding enough to convince him and his family to do the right thing in time? It was one thing to get a mediocre grade on an exam, but quite another to fail in the actual practice of medicine, she thought, suddenly terrified.
    Slowly, imperceptibly, it began to dawn on her that she couldn’t, mustn’t, do this, take lives into her own hands. She didn’t want that responsibility. She didn’t want to play God. She told no one, because there was no one in her life to tell, no one who would understand and not condemn.
    So when the summer was over, she decided to do what she’d done with her piano lessons: keep plunking away, ignoring her feelings, which she had never been taught to trust. Instead, she went back for her third semester as pre-med. She took seventeen credits, including organic chemistry, well known as the Scylla and Charybdis of all pre-med students, and had been since 1910. She wasn’t overly concerned. Plenty of people still passed it. Why shouldn’t she be one of them?
    But nothing prepared her for the reality of studying how molecules containing carbon interact. For the first time, all her tried-and-true methods of intensive study and memorization simply didn’t work. It wasn’t the same as math or physics, where there were equations you could master. There were too many exceptions to the rule, the same molecule dancing to a different tune in base or acid, dark or sunlight, heat or cold. You needed to use intuition, to extrapolate the answer from specific examples. Someone once likened it to the skill of diagnosis. And as with music, she knew she had no aptitude for it, however hard she tried and however long she studied.
    For the first time in her life, she knew she was headed for certain failure. There was going to be an F in organic chemistry on her record: an indelible black mark that nothing could erase. So deep was her depression and foreboding that she actually decided to spend less time studying.
    For some reason, she found herself wandering into the Sabbath service at Chabad House. It was not really a place in which she felt comfortable; most of the students congregating there were either Hassidic wannabees from secular