BigB Publications

 

Ralph Novak

 

The reception took up the majority of the Grand Hall of the Milwaukee County Medical Complex. That was the first eye opener. In Beer-Sheva there was no grand hall, and if there was it would never be reserved for the welcome of the incoming interns and residents. Residents were cheap labor, tolerated at the behest of the Head of Department, the Professor, to be hired and fired at will. Socialism and job security were for the bus-drivers, the bank-tellers, lab-techs, not for young doctors. Interns were taken in, or kicked out, on the whims of the Professors, therefore no Welcoming Parties.

In Milwaukee, it was different. The hall was bedecked with flowers and ornamentation, and great emblems of the Medical College were hung overhead, with bright cheerful lights illuminating the festive hall and festive people. The new physicians were inducted with fanfare into the fold of the great order of Medicine, and for a few hours they would be celebrated for the achievement of having made it to Internship on the one hand, and of graduating the Programs on the other hand. Oved, who had never worn a tie in his life, found himself seated with a group of complete strangers around a table, dressed in a Kmart white shirt, sober tie, a basic blue blazer, Flyers pants, and shiny shoes, all of which if bought in Israel would have cost him a month intern’s salary. Not that the clothes were great or expensive. His intern’s salary in Israel had a fourth of the buying power of the comparable eight hundred and sixty five dollars every two weeks he would get in Milwaukee.

They all spoke in English, and although Oved had studied in English in Med School, read all the research articles in English, listened in on the BBC World Service whenever he was tired of the scripted Israeli news, and passed the rigorous exams of the ECFMG, still it was a foreign language to him. So he sat primly at the assigned table, where his name-tag was placed on his plate, and surveyed the surroundings, much as he had done when taking a new outpost for reserve duty in the West Bank, or the Golan Heights.

The table settings were a wonder unto themselves. The catering company provided a fabulous setting with ice-white china, sparkling wineglasses, glittering silverware, starched folded cloth napkins, and tastefully arranged round tables for eight. And all for Interns for God’s sakes!  Interns were the most downtrodden species on earth, but not here and not tonight.

The luminaries of the faculty were on the dais, distinguished doctors addressed the incoming Interns and cracked easy-going jokes, and dispensed MVP awards and impressive-looking  diplomas to the graduating classes. The graduates had an almost uniform look of self-satisfaction for a job well done, of stepping out to the grateful world with all the tools of the trade firmly installed in their minds.

 

 

The Pediatric Interns, all fourteen of them, were seated around two neighboring tables. They were a fair approximation of the United Nations. Young men and women. Chinese and Indian and Pakistani and African and Israeli. Only half of the interns were American, almost all Caucasians.  The Americans hailed from different locations, and a few were married, but not the women. Besides Medicine the Interns did not share a single point of reference, though in a few weeks they would all become a fighting platoon, fighting disease, pages, nurses, day and night. 

The interns looked generally apprehensive, eyes darting around the company of strangers, searching for support. All excepting one, seated at the next table.

She was tall and slim and black. Not brown or chocolate or any other dilution. A deep rich ebony. Her hair was anthracite glistening black, short and tightly curled on her perfectly shaped scalp. Thin black eyebrows arched in half-egg lines over her hooded lids. Long, long black lashes. The startling white sclerae encircled the coal irises, so the pupils could not be discerned. The whole eye took on the appearance of a giant watching pupil of immeasurable depth. Her nose was short and delicate with wide flaring nostrils and her mouth was full but not thick, and the lips were almost purple. The full chin had just a suggestion of a cleft dividing it in the precise center. The symmetry of the face was simply astounding, and the skin over the high cheek-bones was smooth, chiseled, and refined, and reflected the light like two black pearls. Her neck was long and graceful, clad in the same seamless black velvet, and her bosom was carried high under an ice-white shimmering blouse, with the utmost contrast generated between the black arrow diving into the white vee-line. Not a hint of cleavage, but one knew it had to be there. Her arms were resting easily on the table, long fingers laced, no ornamentation, her nails long and perfectly peaked, sharp as fangs, light pink against her deep-black skin. Her back was straight, effortless, a sensuous line of the spinal column leading the observer from the flaring hips, to the lordotic depression, over the dorsum, to the black neck and the curly hair in one unbroken perfect regal sweep. This Intern was not apprehensive. She was assured, confident, and she was spending the time observing, just as Oved was. Their eyes met, and Oved felt those huge pupils, large as a barn owl’s at night, scoping him from the exterior to the interior, all the way back to the posterior cortex where his visual memory was stored, taking in his whole visual experience for a minute examination. Then she smiled, a blinding flash of white searchlights from the black lighthouse, for an instant, and turned away. Oved almost reeled back when the black gaze released its hold on his psyche.

 

 

Oved watched her covertly when the food was served. Utterly controlled and refined, not a motion wasted, delicate sips at the white wine, slow relaxed breathing pattern, and completely lonely. The Chinese intern, Doctor Lee on one side, a male, and the Indian  Doctor Ramesh on the other, a female, short, and awed by this Black Queen, said almost nothing beyond presenting themselves briefly. She applauded politely when the awards were presented, and when the band came on for the dinner-dance part of the evening, she stood up and made to leave, placing the strap of her small leather purse on her shoulder.

Oved, a tall cadaverous olive-skinned individual, stood up and looked across the chasm between them. His heart hammered and he chided himself for being childish. He was a mature man, with the experiences of war, and marriage and betrayal and murder behind him. He should be aloof and untouched. Instead his hands were sticky with sweat despite the chilling air-conditioning and he felt his face flush. With a rush of decision he crossed the chasm and took up position a foot away. Her name plate said Doctor Ralph Novak, Chicago, and it was placed at an angle over her left bosom, rising and falling slowly with her breath.

Ralph turned on him, giving Oved the full benefit of her huge, wide open iris-pupil force-beam.  She was eye to eye with Oved, which made her 182 centimeters tall, slim and powerful. So different. Letting her short grey jacket stay on her shoulders she extended her hand.

“Doctor Ramon?”

  Oved noded mutely.

“I am Ralph, nice to meet you.” She said with finality, indifferently, her voice sharp and silky at the same time.

Oved found his hand firmly shaken and released before he had the chance to flex his own muscles. He cleared his throat. The band struck up a waltz.

“Would you like to dance, Miss Novak?” He sounded to himself utterly foreign and ungainly, his syllables cut square and jagged around the English language.

The temperature of the force-beam chilled.

“Doctor Ramon, around here, there is a very short, infinitely small distance between a proposition and sexual harassment. Don’t make the same mistake again. Goodnight Doctor.” Leaving his hand in the air she spun around and walked away, regally, like a female tiger, daring him to get his face slashed if he tried again.

Oved was left rooted to the spot, struck by her beauty, her scorn and mainly by incomprehension of her declaration. Sexual harassment? What La’azazel was that?

 

 

 

Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin is a modern cube-like structure set in the middle of the Milwaukee County Medical Complex. Architecturally, the building is bland as a gallon of Wisconsin Vitamin D homogenized milk. Internally it is designed to offer the best possible medical and psychological care to the sick children it serves. On July one, the rotations switched at noon. The whole system was entirely foreign to Oved and the rest of the Foreign Medical Graduate contingent. Oved was team Blue, and accepted seven patients from the Interns who were becoming Residents. Vicky Lehmann checked the patients out to him, showed him how to work the beeper and the telephones, and disappeared. Two seconds later the pager began its infernal beep that would accompany Oved for the rest of the three year Residency. He was Team Blue representative for night call  and one hour later Oved was called for his first admission.

Every admission took forever, and included more paperwork and administration than Oved believed possible. Dick O’leary, the team leader, grilled him mercilessly about the admission, diagnosis, birth history, social, travel, exposures, measurements, vitals, physical exam, laboratory, assessment, plan, orders, redo orders, call the attending. The rigor of every admission was astounding. By six thirty AM Oved had received seven patients and had not slept a wink.

All the children but one were black. They had various diagnoses, some that Oved was familiar with, like Asthma and Pneumonia, and some which were entirely new to him, outside of the Books, such as Sickle Cell Anemia and Neuroblastoma. When he made his early morning rounds prior to the work rounds only three of the children had someone sleeping beside or keeping watch over them, despite the excellent couches and parent’s lounges the hospital provided. He could not but draw the comparison. In Beer Sheva, if any of the mothers of the sick kids wanted to go home to wash up, she would either get someone else to watch the sick kid, or would implore the nurses to be allowed to go home for a few minutes. On the Ward Seven West of the Children’s hospital of Wisconsin, only half the kids had kin watching over them as they endured the nurses and the doctors and the blood draws and the invasive interventions required for effective clinical management. The rest were abandoned.

 Weird.

Ralph Novak was on call for team Yellow. On the first of July, the most dangerous night in the calendar of American Medicine, when the fresh class of Interns sweeps through the nation’s teaching hospitals, the fate of the children of the Children’s Hospital was placed in the hands of doctors Chinese, Indian, Israeli and Black. True days of the Messiah. During the long night and the early July morning Oved passed by Ralph answering her pages, or going into an exam room, or discussing an admission with Dick at the nurses station. He passed by and avoided her eye, looking straight ahead, not even nodding in acknowledgment.

The nurses had turned off all the un-essential lights in the wee hours hoping to simulate night in a hospital active twenty four hours a day, and in the gloom he almost bumped into her as she came out of a dictation cubicle, a black wraith.

“Pardon me” he said awkwardly, and moved aside to let her pass.

She flashed him her pearly grin. “Scared you, didn’t I?”

Oved stopped, directed his level gaze into her eyes, and held them.

 

 

“No” he replied evenly  “I have an admission on Five east, excuse me.” Sharp and dark and gaunt he continued on his way down the corridor, quick time army forced march, with no troops to lead.

 

Rounds were at eight fifteen sharp. The Blue team assembled on the Seven West conference room, for teaching rounds. It was a small room which held the contingent of four interns, two Pediatric and two Family Practice, students and a member of the faculty. This month it was Jim Kaushanski, from Hematology. Dick O’leary expected his team representative doctor Ramon, which he pronounced as Ra-Mon with a rolling RRR, to be destroyed by the long grueling night. He was not, he was not even overwhelmed by the new hospital, rotation, and the torrent of new information which had been flooding him in the last twenty four hours. Oved knew he could stay focused. As an engineering and infantry officer it was up to him to set an explosive charge or to defuse a mine after a full night on the march. The night was the infantry-man’s friend. Roaming the corridors of the Children’s Hospital at night, Oved felt almost at home, on patrol.

“Let’s hear the numbers” Dick said.

“Excuse me?” Oved asked in his heavy Israeli accent.

“The numbers, patient is a what, admitted when, the vitals, urine input and output, the numbers!!” Dick grinned at him.

That was Oved’s first jolt into the world of American rigor. No approximations, no ‘looks OK’, no ‘Hafeef’ the Hebrew/Arab word for glossing over. Hard numbers and facts and then a truthful assessment of those numbers and facts. 

There was one aspect where the numbers did not tell the story.

“The patient is a black male...” Oved began to read from his notes.

“Stop right there” Dick commanded.

Oved looked up at the blond, thin faced, blue eyed genial leader.

“African-American. Color is not a factor, ancestry is!” Dick explained.

“Ahuh, OK, three year old African-American, admitted due to exacerbation of Sickle Cell Anemia pain crisis” Oved proceeded into the admission, slow at first then with increasing confidence. Doctor Jim Kaushanski contributed by giving the new interns a basic understanding of the fascinating disease, where a single substitution of one base of the DNA strand, inherited from both parents, turns a young life into living hell, with early death in the offing.

“What I don’t understand is where is the child’s mother?! According to the ER she brought him in. But when I got to his room no one was there, only the kid and the IV. I got all the history from the charts” Oved said, puzzled.

“She probably left before you came in” Dick said indifferently “Next admission.”

 

 

“Seven month old black... excuse me, African-American female admitted for an acute exacerbation of asthma” Oved droned, a short discussion of asthma followed.

“I don’t understand this admission from the ER. First, the baby wasn’t very sick, not so sick she could not be sent home.” Oved said, puzzled again, “I know I took some time to get to the baby, but ER told me she was stable and I had to replace an IV which went bad on four-east, and by the time I got to four-west the mother was gone. The nurse told me she had left!”

“So what’s the big deal, doctor Ramon?” Dick asked innocently.

Oved was even more puzzled at this indifference. “The big deal is the baby staying alone in the hospital, left to the tender mercies of Interns like me who may not know right from left, up from down with no one to watch them or calm them down, or something!”

“Well, if you think there is neglect involved then we should call Child Protective Services, but there is nothing unusual about the baby being left in the Hospital for days on end. Especially just before the weekend.  Mother wants to take a break from the kid, especially if she is sick. Let's move on.”

Oved went back to his notes, puzzlement deepening. “Twelve year old African-American female, admitted for observation for severe abdominal pain, rule out appendicitis. She was admitted at four AM” he explained to Dick, who had been relieved by the rotating senior resident Doctor Folsom at midnight. Which explained why he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning. The perks of graduating from Internship. “The pain began at 10 PM....”

“Do you have her preg test back?” Dick interrupted.

“She’s only twelve!” Oved protested mildly.

Everyone snickered. The Blue team happened to be all-American, Lynn Dwyer was the Pediatric resident, from Ann Arbor,  Tim Purdy and Rafael Gomez were the Family Practice residents from St Mike’s. They all seemed to share a joke which Oved and the third year students did not get. Even Jim Kaushansky was grinning.

“She is in room 446, right?” Dick asked archly.

“Yes” Oved said.

“So who is in the crib in the same room?”

“A baby, but he is not my patient, I supposed someone else admitted him” Oved said with rising panic. Had he forgotten to round on a sick baby in the morning rush? And he thought he had done so well in this new system.

“It’s her baby, Doctor Ramon, we are boarding it because Grandma is not in town” Dick said with relish, knowing Oved would not understand.

 

 

Oved put his clipboard down, glancing at the broad grins all around. If this was a joke, he did not get it. And anyway, Oved had lost what little sense of humor he ever had with the events of the last years.

“What about the Preg Test?” Dick pressed.

“I am sorry, I did not order one” Oved said with some distress. Distress because he had ordered an abdominal X ray, which was essentially normal, as much as he and Jeanette Folsom could determine, pending Radiology consult. Irradiating a fetus was one of the most obvious, and serious, no-nos. Doctors got fried for this kind of an error.

“Jeanette did and it’s negative, this time, but you have to remember, and I stress this to all of you, any female who appears to be Tanner two and above is suspected pregnant till proven otherwise!”

“But she’s only twelve!” Oved objected weakly.

“Welcome to Big City America. At this time Milwaukee is the nation’s leader in teen-age pregnancy. Sounds like a PID, we’ll do a pelvic together later, put that on your to-do list for this morning.”

“PID?” one of the students, a tall fair girl with flowing blond hair and gold rimmed glasses, asked.

“Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, it comes from precisely where babies come from. It’s more common than Strep Throat in our Emergency Room. Let’s move on.”

 

The twelve year old girl appeared just that, twelve going on thirteen, with a girlish figure and stretch marks on the abdomen that Oved had missed in his early morning examination. She submitted to the pelvic examination without a murmur. Oved guessed it was not her first, and her medical records which had arrived later showed this to be her third visit. Pelvic turned out to be a code word for a thorough examination of her genital tract, and categorizing the bacterial zoo that dwelt within. She had everything, Chlamidia, Gardnerella, and Gonorrhea.

“When was your last period?” Oved asked, trying to fill the gaps he had left in the History and Physical. Obviously, he had been very naive.

“My what?”

“Period, you know, when you bleed once a month?”

The girl looked mystified. She shook her head in despair with this foreigner.

Oved turned to Dick. “Is my English all right? She did not seem to understand me.”

“Oh it’s fine, much better than most of the FMGs we get.” Dick  signed off on the H and P. “She does not understand what you are talking about because she never had a real period.”

Oved was flabbergasted “but if she can get pregnant then she must be able to have a period!!”

 

 

Dick grinned his most avuncular. Age wise, he was younger than Oved. He had gone from high-school to College to Med school to Residency uninterrupted by inessentials such as fighting for his life and his country. But at this time Oved was like a babe in the woods, immersed in a new and strange culture, where the rules bore no relation to his previous life.

“Not, if the very first ovum she ever had met with a cohort of sperm already waiting for it. Not if after delivery of a baby she had a series of PID’s. As I said earlier, Welcome to America.”

 

Lunch time was Noon Conference. The American residency wasted not a moment. Even after call, when the mouth was sticky and the eyes gummed with the film of fatigue, the residents and interns trooped into the auditorium to take in the lectures provided by the faculty as Core Curriculum. Oved strode in with his food tray, pasta and a salad bereft of dressing, balanced on the clipboard, and looked around for a place to sit. The only place, in fact two of them, were on either side of Ralph Novak, in the middle of the third row. She sat there, queenly, and munched on a sandwich. Even when munching she appeared to be performing that mundane function in style. Doctor Ruth Heimler, neo-natologist, took her place at the lectern, so Oved had no choice bu to climb to the third row and take a seat by Ralph.

“May I?” he asked, indicating the empty seat.

“You may.”

Oved took his seat and paid attention. Heimler seemed to be a refugee from the same place, Israel, and she appeared to be well installed in Milwaukee. 

    

He was about to rise and leave at the end of the lecture, hurriedly, because her aroma assailed his nostrils, delicate and exciting, when Ralph turned, training her huge irises upon him.

“You don’t scare easy, do you?” She said simply, her voice low and husky, with none of the cutting ice he had heard at the welcome dinner-dance. 

Oved was too tired to be jolted.  “I am beyond scaring” he replied, and exited the lecture hall.

 

Two days later he found himself in the same situation. All the seats occupied, save for those flanking Ralph. She was staring straight ahead at the screen, white prior to the lecture, but he had the distinct impression this was an expectant stare. Ralph, what kind of a name was Ralph?  For a woman, anyway. He noticed another black face, sitting over to the left and higher row. They stood out in the sea of white faces. The lecture hall was packed so again he had no choice. He made his way over.

“May I?” he asked belligerently.

 

 

Ralph looked up at him, and again he had the feeling those pupils could reach back into his tortured brain and tell all.

“This is practically your assigned seat, especially if you consider the subject matter.”

Oved leafed through his overloaded clip-board. In the rush to get to the auditorium he had never looked up the topic.

 

 

Sexual harassment in the workplace

mandatory attendance

 

“Mah zeh La’azazel?” he muttered to himself.

“I comprehend Azazel” she said soto-voce, giggling like a little girl, not at all scary or intimidating.

Oved loosened up. “It means what the blazes is this?”

“It’s a PC bull-shit session” Ralph asserted.

“From the frying pan to the fire” Oved quipped bookishly.

“It’s a Politically Correct way to say that the feminist movement has been able to make any normal discourse between men and women subject to nasty and arbitrary interpretation by women only.”

“Now I am in the fiery pit. I understand nothing” Oved declared.

“Let’s talk when the lecture is over.”

“Is that a promise or a threat?” Oved tried to crack a joke, something he had not done in two years.

Ralph smiled, she had a wonderful smile that lit her face up.

“Take it as you will.”

 

Oved was shaking his head slowly as he exited the lecture hall into the wide corridor.

“You seem to be shaking your head a lot” Ralph said, standing beside him.

Oved eyed her curiously. The black male resident who had been sitting on the higher row, filed past them. A spectacular physical specimen, at least 190 centimeters tall, broad-shouldered and clean shaven, he scowled at them. Ralph did not even deign to glance at him.

“I guess there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this place.”

“That’s reasonable, you are a stranger in a strange land” Ralph replied reasonably, her voice absolutely nothing like the arctic she had blown on him the week before.

 

 

“But it should not. I read American books, watched American movies, spoke to American students and tourists, American culture is projected all over the world, especially Israel, the fifty first dependent state. So it should not be strange. But this lecture about Sexual harassment is ridiculous, and contrary to the whole idea of equality!”

“You’ve read too much and understand too little. This is a zealous country, and right now the zeal is to over-correct any previous injury perceived by the Minorities!”

“But women are the majority, not he minority”Oved objected.

Ralph smiled “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Her beeper went off. She slipped it out and took in the message. “Four South, probably an admission, see you around.”

 

It became a ritual after a while. Ralph was organized and dedicated, and she was always one of the early birds to the auditorium. There was always a seat free next to her, even when the hall was crowded to capacity. The tall scowling guy never approached her, and everyone else seemed to avoid her. Oved saw a Family Practice intern, one of the many who rotated through the Children’s Hospital, try his luck at obtaining a seat. Ralph just fixed him with her deadly gaze and the poor guy moved on hurriedly. A glance is a glance, Ralph directed the same at Oved when he asked the usual “May I?” but with a tiny crinkle at the corners of the mouth, fleeting, almost imaginary, that negated the inscrutable Look. Seated close together for months they listened, and scribbled notes, and posed questions, and even though seated inches away from each other, did not exchange a physical contact.

 

 

 

There was one item Oved internalized from the Sexual Harassment lecture. Total avoidance of the Female gender. If he understood correctly the drift of that presentation, any approach, however superficial and well intended, could be construed as Sexual Harassment by any female so inclined. Consequently the most dangerous persons in the hospital were the nurses, who were almost uniformly female. Fellow female residents were almost as daunting. Any complaint, however frivolous, from Nurses or female residents could potentially disrupt or terminate a Male Intern’s work and advancement. In a way it was worse that the overwhelming power the Professors wielded at home. One could learn a Professor’s character and find ways of staying on his/her good side. But a nurse could interpret anything as harassment, an order she did not like given as Voice Order, a complaint about an un-necessary page-call, looking over a nurse’s shoulder at the paperwork, an unintended brush-by, even a friendly good-morning. Horror stories circulated about how nurses, in concerted action, had caused the ousting of perfectly good residents and even fellows. Oved, betrayed as he perceived it by his former wife, found no difficulty in adopting a completely gender-phobic attitude. He addressed each nurse with utmost formality, as needed only, never smiled or grinned at any of them, knocked loudly at each door lest someone was changing her clothes, and avoided any altercation which  might be raised due to the almost constant badgering the nurses exerted on the vulnerable Interns. He knew he was even more vulnerable as a single male, notoriously driven by raging, evil, male hormones.  

And the most dangerous were, reportedly, the Black Females, whose gender sensitivity was compounded further by the other live-wire, Race relations. One absolutely had to avoid any in-essential discourse with African American females, any complaint from them was devastating.

The seats on either side of Doctor Ralph Novak were almost always empty. Oved could count on it.

 

The three month old African American girl was admitted from the ER with a diagnosis of Lymphadenopathy, fever and rule-out-sepsis. She looked pretty sick to Oved as he worked on reinserting the IV which a careless nurse had jerked out of the vein. Big, black terrified eyes, her mother was gone, the exam room was awash in bright light that illuminated the exam table where Oved jammed his merciless needle again and again in an effort to find a vein in the tiny wrist, arm, and foot. Every time he was sure he had it, the tiny veins blew open. He was becoming discouraged.

Ralph walked in, regal and commanding at two AM in scrubs, as she was at ten PM in an evening gown. One of the nurses must have accosted her in the corridor and told her of the torture chamber just behind the closed door.

“Hi Ralph” Oved acknowledged her. It was too late, too early to do the respectful Doctor Novak.

“Hi Oved, trouble?”

“Yeah, poor thing, three months old. Multiple pokes, I can’t get it.”

“Mind if I try?”

“Be my guest. All I can do is hurt her” Oved said dejectedly.

Ralph lowered herself gracefully to the vacated metal stool, and searched the abused hands and wrists and arms and legs.

“Get me a shaver please” she addressed the nurse who was hovering by.

“Are you going to shave her head?” Oved asked warily.

“Of course, that’s the best option, virgin territory.”

“Vicky said this was an absolute no-no. The Black, sorry, African American...”

“Doctor Ramon, cut the bull!” Ralph said sharply, derisive.

“OK, some of the Black parents go berserk when we shaved the babies’ scalps, its some kind of a religious or faith...”

“I know all that, tell the mother, in case she ever shows up, that the Black Doctor did it, that lets you and Vicky off the hook.”

 

 

Oved stood back and let Ralph do the right thing. The IV went in, was secured, and the fluids were run into the dehydrated waif.

“What’s her diagnosis?” Ralph asked Oved as the nurse set up the IVAC.

“Rule out sepsis, but she has the worst lymph-adenopathy and splenomegaly I have ever seen. Reckon it could be some congenital Leukemia?”

Ralph stood over the frightened babe, thinking.

“It’s AIDS” she pronounced finally.

“No shit!” Oved had learned some American idioms.

“No shit” Ralph reaffirmed, “I saw a couple in Cook County. How old is mom?”

Oved glanced at the sheets that came up from the ER.

“Seventeen, and she had a couple older kids with her.”

Ralph’s beautiful face twisted with a rue-full grimace that made it sad and sneering at the same time.

“Typical”she spat. “Just add CD-4 to CD-8 ratio to the morning labs.”

As usual, Ralph was right. Oved’s respect grew and waxed.

     

Ralph broke the mold six months into the Internship. Overnight she had been clobbered with thirteen admissions, it was the toughest month of the year, January, and she was late to the lecture. Others were late too, so there was plenty of room during the presentation of Jaundice in the Newborn. By now the residents had developed territorial behavior and seated themselves in the same places every time. Oved was at his assigned seat, in the middle of the third row, and was feeling somewhat deprived. Habit was habit. Ralph came in when the hall was already darkened and wove  her way through and over the occupants of the row all the way to Oved. Even though there were plenty of available seats in the same row.

“May I?” she asked formally.

Oved looked up at the dark wraith with the pearly grin.

“You may” he responded in the same tone.

Weightless as a ghost she settled down at the adjoining seat. Pictures of jaundiced babies flashed on the screen. Oved noticed that Ralph’s scent was getting stronger, enveloping. He glanced at her, her  eyes were closed and her head was drooping slowly to the side in ludicrous slow motion as sleep overtook the exhausted intern. In the backwash off the screen he saw how beautiful she really was. Her head rested lightly on his shoulder, and then more heavily, and Oved  was totally overcome by the intoxicating scent. He did not move a muscle through the lecture.

She jerked her head up as the lights came on. Oved kept his face impassive.

“Did I fall asleep?” she asked, almost angry, at herself.

 

 

“Ahuh.”

Everyone was up on their feet and shuffling away, some casting strange glances at Oved and Ralph who were still sitting.

A smile crossed her lovely features. “Best sleep I’ve had in months” she said.

“You must be in deep trouble” Oved said sardonically.

“Doctor Ramon, you don’t have to be a cynic with me. I don’t scare you and you don’t scare me” Ralph said, very seriously, in a voice just above a whisper, lost in the general shuffle and hubbub.

Oved felt contrite. She had spoken her straight-forward, simple impression of a good nap, and he had snapped at her, churlishly. “Sorry, but I better go to Clinic.”

“Me too, after this nap, you can throw the worst title nineteens at me.”

Oved furrowed his brows again, and got up. After six months she could still throw some riddles at him. Clinic was the Down Town Health Center, where the Children’s Hospital academic faculty oversaw the medical care given to the indigent population of the city by the residents in training.

 

Oved had acquired an middle aged V6 Ford Ranger, so he could load his Yamaha XT250 on the back of the truck and go bushwhacking and trail-blazing in the forests, come the summer. He did not expect any companionship in the truck, and accordingly it was rather messy. As he exited the parking structure he noticed an old Delta 88 which was being cranked over, but was not starting. He intended to pass by, it was none of his business, when the lovely profile he knew so well by now became apparent. Oved jammed the brakes, the reflex quicker than his reason. Then he exited the truck and stepped over to the car. The reek of gasoline was overwhelming. He came over to the window. Now, that could be construed as Harassment, the thought crossed his mind. She wound the window down, by hand.

“Hi there Doctor Ramon.”

“I think your motor is flooded.” he assessed.

“You’re probably right, it’s been giving me some trouble.”

“Want a lift?”

Ralph grinned from ear to ear. “Taking a risk with a Black Female, aren’t you?”

Oved had to smile back. “It may be worth it. Come on, our patients are waiting.”

 

“Pretty messy in here” Ralph indicated the collection of cans and wrappers and lecture handouts which Oved had shoved unceremoniously on the floor.

“It’s the single life.”

 

 

“Really single?”

“Divorced, with rancor, clean break, messy car.”

“Ahuh” and she lapsed into silence.

“So why the name Ralph?” he asked as he drove down Wisconsin Avenue.

“Anything wrong with Ralph?” she countered.

“No, but in my ignorance it thought it was a boy name.”

“My mother was too drunk at the time, she called me by her boyfriend’s name, I think.”

Contrary to his inclination Oved turned his eyes on her. She was serious. His mind flashed back to the comfortable and loving Finkelstein household, before the disaster.

“Where is your dad?” he inquired.

“What’s a Dad?” she replied bitterly.

Oved was taken aback. Dad was the man who raced you on the beach, covered you with kisses at night, played soccer with the kids in the park, warned you sternly about leaning out of the window, gloated over a good report card. Dad... I have not said a Kaddish in so many years!!!!

“Watch the road Doctor Ramon!!”

Oved slewed the truck back into the lane. The tears streamed down his face, silently.

“I guess you have a dad.” said Ralph, sadly, envious.

“HAD a dad, in the past tense.”

“What did he die off?”

“He was murdered, indirectly, but he was.”

“Better having had a dad than none at all.”

“Try it.” Oved replied sullenly.

“I can’t, never had a real one, never will have one, turn left here, cut into the parking lot.”

“But it’s the patient’s parking lot!” Oved protested, his tears drying off.

“Yeah, I know, observe!”

Oved parked his six year old vehicle in the patient parking lot. It was half full, and half of the cars were either brand new or younger than his. An Eldorado swooped into the lot, cast about for a spot, and parked two spaces away. A black woman, grossly obese, breathing white vapor into the cold air, lumbered out and opened the back door. Two young girls came out, and each dragged a safety seat baby carrier. The woman led the small retinue into the Clinic, heckling the young girls in the ghetto twang Oved had not mastered yet.

“What did you see, doctor Ramon?” Ralph asked, her voice venomous.

 

 

This woman was full of surprises. Shifting from one mood to the next in a twinkle. “A woman, leading four children into the Clinic. It’s the Flu season.”

“No, Doctor, your interpretation of the facts before you is wrong. What you saw is a lowdown way of making a living off society by producing unwanted, fatherless children.” The venom deepened as she spit out the words.

“Doctor Novak, you’re tired, let's go and see some patients” she was incomprehensible.

Ralph grinned again, changing her mood faster than zapping the remote. “Right again Oved, you have your priorities straight.”

Oved. There was an intimacy in that voice he had not experienced in years. Must find a synagogue in this city, to say Kaddish.

 

Oved’s beeper went off. He fumbled for it and hit the button. Then glanced at his bedside alarm. Just after midnight. He wasn’t on call, mah La’azazel is going on? The phone number on the small screen was not the hospital number. Oved dialed it.

“Hello?”

“Hi this is Doctor Ramon, I was paged.” Oved said, a conditioned reflex.

“It’s me. Want to come over?”

Oved sat bolt upright. He had rented a tiny apartment on Brady street, in the heart of East Side Milwaukee. It was the closest thing to Tel Aviv in this wide-open city. Unlike Tel Aviv, it was dark and brooding and cold outside. It was Ralph.

“Are you sure about that?” he asked.

“You are beyond scaring, remember?” she chuckled.

“Where are you?”

“Danny’s, on Brady and Fifth.”

 

She was the only black patron at midnight and a half in the bar. She was dressed in jeans and sweats that tried hard, without success, to hide her elegant figure. There were a fair number of other patrons, mainly students, probably UWM. They were pretty drunk by now. Ralph was sitting on her own, with an almost full glass of beer, and, just like at lecture-time, with a free seat on either side. Oved walked in and stood behind the free bar-stool.

“May I?”

“You may.”

“Sounds almost like Arabic” Oved said while assuming his seat.

 

 

“What is like Arabic?”

“Our greeting. May I? You may. Marhaba? Marhabtein.”

“Any other languages up your sleeve?” She crooked her finger at the bar-woman and indicated the same for Oved. A frothing Miller Lite came up.

“Hebrew, and Russian swearwords.”

“Why Russian?”

“No swear words in Hebrew, so we borrow from Arabic and Russian.”

“Happy country, happy people, no swear words. Where I come from” she made it sound as if she hailed from the dark side of the moon “every second word is a slur on female genitalia and the act of forceful penetration of those organs.”

“Succinct.”

“Your English is improving.”

“Not a happy country, not a happy people, if you consider six million killed off by industrial means, and my own family wiped off at the hands of Freedom Fighters.”

“Freedom is in the eyes of the beholder” she asserted.

“You seem pretty free!” Oved remarked.

“I worked for it, and nothing like the occupants of that Eldorado!!” the venom again.

“What do you have against that poor woman and her four children?” Oved was curious.

“I am ashamed of them. They are my people, the descendants of the freed slaves, and instead of confirming their freedom, they would rather continue the servitude.”

“Ralph, can I call you Ralph?”

“You may” she replied regally.

“What La’azazel are you talking about?”

“Oved, how many men did you see in the Clinic, bringing their kids in for well-child checks, or sick-visits?”

Oved wrinkled his forehead, and was surprised by her hand which came up to smooth the furrows.

“You add on a decade by wrinkling so” she said gently.

“OK, precious few.” he replied, making a conscious effort to keep his hands to himself.

“That is because those kids have no fathers, only sperm donors. It’s a whole fatherless society” Ralph said solemnly “and instead of the parents feeding their children, it is the children who feed their mothers.”

“Come again?”

 

 

“The woman was Grandma. She has two daughters. She gets these two teen-age daughters pregnant, encouraging young men from the neighborhood to come over and donate sperm the old-fashioned way. Even better, the daughters may be doing it in school, in the bathrooms, in the closets, with dope, with alcohol. Then the babies come out premature and sick. After discharge from the Neonatal Intensive Care unit they need a foster home, because their biological mothers are eleven and twelve years old. Grandma gets custody, and the road to riches is open. Rent assistance, WIC, food stamps, social security checks, free medical care, that’s title nineteen, on the button, every month, guaranteed by the great slave owner, Uncle Sam. Four babies and Grandma can go to the dealer and buy a new Caddy. Her checks are better than yours, you working stiff you!!” She finished her tirade breathlessly and took a dainty sip of the beer. Even beer she drank as if it were Dom Perignon.      

 Oved was shaking his head again. Then he smiled, a full smile as he had not done in years. “Are you green with envy?”

“No, I am Black with rage. I am Black, they are Black, they are giving me a bad reputation, they make me sick of my own people, they are making me a racist!”

“I can sympathize with your feelings.” Oved said lightly.

“How?” Ralph demanded belligerently.

“Because, I have had the same feelings about my people. They consider certain jobs Arab Work, and would rather go on the dole than work at perfectly good trades. Then they expect the Arabs to be thankful for their slave-labor status. When I worked as a roofer I was the only Hebrew speaker for miles around. Part of the reason I left.”  Oved concluded.

“You see” Ralph explained earnestly  “its not just one, or two, or twenty. It’s a whole society made up of parasites, fatherless, unscrupulous, undisciplined dope-pushers, and the women are the worst. They have given up freedom for the servility of the food stamps, and lend their bodies to be used as money-printers. It’s disgusting. Will you lend me the use of your body?”

Oved was jolted, and the beer spilled.

“No fear” Ralph said, and directed her black pupils into his soul.

Oved’s body ached, but his brain ruled.

“I will pass up this generous offer” he said.

“The offer might not come again” she warned evenly.

“Then it may not be an offer worth pursuing” Oved pushed off the barstool and extended his hand formally.

“Doctor Novak, see you in the morning.”

Ralph gave him a wide, guile-less smile and shook his hand, strongly.

 

 

“Goodnight Doctor Ramon, finally a man worth pursuing.”

 

Oved debated very hard whether to go to lecture the following noon. The decision was made up for him by the tall black family practice resident who had returned to Children’s for an additional two month stint. The Family Practice residents hated their rotations at Children’s with a vengeance, and  Peter Williams was especially pissed at the Children’s Hospital and the uppity foreign resident who seemed to be finding favor with Ralph.

Peter caught up with Oved in the pitch dark of six thirty AM February arctic cold. The sidewalk was slippery and Oved had trouble keeping his footing, even though the approach to the side-door was clean and salted.  He had been aware of the quick shuffling behind him, but had paid no attention, it was just before shift-change time. A big hand landed on his rather scrawny shoulder and spun him around. He faced the eyes which glowered at him from that smooth brown face from three inches above. He shook the hand off, but it stayed on, firmly.

“Yo, are you listening to me?” Peter said, trying to sound menacing.

“I listen better with your hand off me” Oved replied, unconcerned by the man’s stature and size.

The hand remained on, and tightened some more, seemingly testing the amount of muscle in the deltoid, and the flimsiness of the delicate collar-bone. It was beginning to hurt.

“Stay away from Ralph, d’you hear, she is not your kind, she is above your kind, so stay away from her.”

“OK, I heard, now let go” Oved said evenly.

Doctor Peter Williams, opened his large hand and stepped back slightly. Oved spun around and went through the door.

At noon conference his assigned seat was open, as usual. Oved  shuffled through the rows and sat down. The black face four rows higher darkened with fury.

“Marhaba” he said.

Ralph smiled, with pleasure. “Marhabtein” she replied.

Oved flopped down into the seat. The big Peter would be paralyzed by the presence of the crowd in the rapidly filling auditorium.

“I see you don’t scare easy” she repeated the set line.

“Who is Doctor Williams to you?”

“Nobody” she said guardedly.

“Nobody just threatened me this morning if I spoke to you again.”

 

 

A sharp indraw of breath. Then a deliberate damping of her breath. “He tried to hit on me in Med School.” She said finally.

“So, are you his girl friend?” Oved inquired.

“Never” with lightning vehemence.

“Why don’t you tell him that?”

“He does not listen” she said in a whisper. Fear? Did Oved detect fear in the voice of the assured Black Queen? Roger Goldstein, Pediatric Cardiology, made his way to the lectern and the lights went down. Oved stole a quick glance. Peter was keeping his station. Today Roger was presenting a child with Pulmonary Stenosis, but Oved was caught up with Ralph’s fear.

“He tried to force his way, back in Med School” she said in a low voice. With the timbre of fear.

“What about Sexual Harassment?” Oved whispered sardonically.

“It can only be used against white guys. A Black who makes it to Med School is sacrosanct, he is the fig leaf of Equality the faculty can wave against the accusations of Academic Racism. Especially since he was a basketball star for Loyola Stritch.”

“So he thinks he owns you?”

“Yes, that’s why everybody stays away, even the girls. You are the only one with either the cojones or the ignorance to appear interested.”

“Now you tell me?” Oved whispered, even more sardonic.

“I tried to scare you, you don’t scare easy!!”

“All right, Pulmonary Insufficiency, I am an ignorant foreigner so I better listen now.”

 

Oved was ready the next morning at six fifteen, even earlier and colder. The quick shuffle, and the heavy hand on his shoulder. He counted on the confidence of the taller and stronger man to defer a back-blow for the satisfaction of a faceoff, and he was right. He spun around, unresisting. The raging face was above and two inches away. Face-to-face, mano-a-mano, the arrogant way, the stupid way.

“I told you to stay away, you fucking Jew, and you did not listen” the cultured and well enunciated English was in ugly contrast to the snarl on the handsome face.

Oved kept his face impassive and jerked his hands up, a flashy move. Peter reacted to protect his face. Oved’s shin hit the unprotected testicles with tremendous force, it was the speed, not the mass that counted. A wave of nausea engulfed the tall man, so powerful his knees buckled, and his hands went down to nurse the organs which felt like they had been driven all the way to his kidneys. In his basketball career Peter had lived through some tough injuries and pains, but this was beyond his ken, a pain inflicted with the savagery of a killer.

 

 

Swiftly Oved’s left hand shot out and the fingers curled around the thick fuzz of tight curls which adorned Peters’s handsome head, and held fast. His right drove two fingers in a jabbing motion right into the quaking man’s tear filled eyes, jerking the skull forward with his left, and stopped half-an-inch away. The training in empty-hand combat with Sayeret Matcal paid off, and Oved was as lean and dangerous as ever.

“Now you listen, Doctor Williams. I am a killer. I have killed Arabs a thousand times tougher than you are. One killing, ten killings, it makes no difference. Next time you’re dead” all in an even, reasonable voice. Oved pushed the head back, forcefully, so the man keeled over backwards, then spun around and entered the hospital.

 

Th subject was Cystic Fibrosis, very common in the North European population, but present in all races. Oved made it into the auditorium early and prepared his clipboard. He kept his face impassive and waited. Silently he hoped that Ralph would show up, would thread her way to his side. Suddenly it was important, and his heart hammered in his chest, slowly, as he waited.

Ralph walked in, hesitant, and first she looked up to the top rows. Then she searched further down. A look of pure relief crossed her lovely features, and a few glances were thrown her way by the residents who trooped by. She hurried into the narrow passageway, completely uncharacteristic for her, for her usual mode of locomotion was efficient speed devoid of hurry. Then she scowled.

“Marhaba” Oved said, deadpan. More curious glances from the neighbors.

“Doctor Ramon, have you checked your beeper lately?” Ralph demanded angrily

Taken aback, Oved fumbled for the beeper. It was dead. Ralph regained her composure and seated herself in her effortless regal way.

“I guess it died on me” Oved said lightly.

Ralph waited for the commotion and shuffling to wax to the maximum.

“He called me, early this morning. He said, snarled, that no one  and nobody is going to get near me, it was him or nobody.” she whispered urgently.

“So?”

“I tried to page you, and by the time I got your telephone number from the operator you were gone!” She said fearfully.

“Are you worried about Doctor Williams?” Oved fibbed.

“Yes, damn you!!”

“I am the damned. Don’t worry about Doctor Williams. Cee eF is much more important.”

Ralph drew back. This time he was the enigma.

 

 

It was two AM, and Oved was trying to ascertain who was the attending physician for his latest admission with a bad skin reaction to Phenobarbital. The problem with the Title Nineteen patients was that no one knew who the hell was responsible. Afterhours it became a challenge to find out who the patient was assigned to by the powers that be in Madison, and who was covering for him or her. In the end those physicians who were willing to practice Indigent medicine trusted the Interns and their supervising residents to do the right thing, so that finding an attending at two AM was purely a formality. And who started Phenobarb on this patient anyway? 

His new beeper went off again and Oved was getting frustrated. The door to the cubicle flew open and Ralph walked in and closed the heavy door behind her. Oved put the phone down and looked up inquisitively.

Ralph placed her clipboard on the desk, deliberately, and then she leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth, long and deep and forceful, eyes huge and open and searching, infinitely close. Oved responded, he had no choice. Their tongues met, and they drank each other thirstily.

An eon later she came up for air. Oved was still sitting down, and Ralph towered over him. A huge smile broke on her face.

“What?” Oved managed to croak.

“Definitely worth pursuing.” Ralph picked up her clipboard, and yanked the door open. Just before it closed she blew him an air-kiss.

After years in sexual and personal limbo Oved felt alive again.

 

The courtship progressed slowly, neither was in a hurry to get somewhere, and their first obligation was to the program where they were working their butts off. They maintained their different abodes and came together when time allowed.

“Are you Jewish?” she asked languidly one night, after a long bout of love making.

“I think so.”

She turned over, stark naked and glistening black, and looked at him curiously.

“Think so?”

“I mean, I am, but beyond having been born in Israel, I haven’t had much to do with it, with being Jewish. It's like saying are you French to a French-man. In Israel you don’t have to think about it. We are mostly Jewish and the meat is Kosher whether you like it or not.”

“Am I Kosher?” she teased.

“Probably not, that’s why I enjoy you so much. It is the forbidden fruit that tastes the sweetest. Do you know at which time of the year do the Arab Pita makers enjoy their briskest business?”

 

 

“Tell me.”

“It's in Pesach, Passover” Oved chuckled “when the Jews are commanded to abhor any leavened bread and eat only unleavened Matzos. This commandment was so important, people made Matzos even when the Christian Majority was running a Blood-libel every year, claiming the Jews needed blood for the Matzos, with huge pogroms following every Passover. And now in the Jewish State they flout it. Jews are a weird bunch.”

“Who are your friends?”

“You are the only friend I have.”Oved said solemnly, and planted a kiss on her breast.

“No, I meant who are your friends, as a people?”

“That’s a tough one. Maybe the Americans. Everyone else doesn’t really care if we get snuffed.”

“Which Americans?” she queried.

“Black Americans. We had a bunch of them in Be’er Sheva, a cult, complete vegans, self-contained, very colorful, great singers. They claimed to be the real Jews, and we were the impostors.”

“There is a bunch of Black Americans who hate you, as a people” she informed him.

“Really?” Oved was surprised.

“Really. The Nation of Islam, they have a huge presence in Chicago, they view the Jews as their main enemies, the representatives of white oppression. Peter is a great disciple of the Nation. He prays five times a day.”

“Does he bash his head against the floor on a Persian rug five times a day?” Oved tried a dose of banter.

“That’s right. The only concession he did not make is growing a beard. I know they fronted some money for his med school. Do you know why he looked for a residency in Milwaukee?”

“Obviously because you went here.” he chuckled

“I had broken with him way before. He said that Chicago was full of godamn Jews.”

“That did not get him very far, Children’s is full of godamn Jews too. Now hush, we both have to be at work at six AM.”

 

“Let's cruise the streets.” Ralph offered, after a dinner at her place. She lived in a modern efficiency in West Alice.

“Where to, and is it my car or yours?”

“Mine, it’s the ghetto cruiser, and we are going to the ghetto.”

 

 

“Some ghetto” Oved scoffed a little later. The Delta 88 was gliding low in the dark streets, scantily lit, half the bulbs were blown. The houses were typically Midwestern, elevated with wood steps leading up to the wrap-around porch, but the driveways were broken, or rutted, and the vegetation ran riot between the broken concrete plates. People, mainly women and old men were sitting on the sagging porches, blowing the breeze. Young children, all black, were playing in the street in the prematurely balmy spring. Young men congregated at the corners and exchanged packages, throwing furtive glances around.

“What’s this scoffing superior tone?” Ralph asked, as she peered around a darkened street corner. The overhead light was blown and a small huddle of people were at some negotiations under the eaves of a boarded up house.

“My idea of a ghetto is Ghetto Warsaw, or Ghetto Lodz, quarters of town suitable for twenty thousand where up to half a million Jews were crowded so as to kill them off by hard labor hunger and disease prior to shipping to mechanized killing factories. You know, barbed wire, guard dogs, Nazi helmets, long-coats and jackboots. That’s a ghetto. I don’t see any of this here, not even a police-car. This is essentially a nice neighborhood, with spaces between the houses, two story homes, big cars, shops full of beer-signs, and matrons fat enough to roll both you and me into their bellies!” Oved was still scoffing.

Ralph remained serious. “Look at the houses boarded up, and each is likely a crack-shop” she said, “a ghetto is anywhere people are compelled to live in by either by force or by the realization they are unwelcome everywhere else. Try riding this car in West Alice if you are a black youth. You’ll have the police stopping you in two seconds flat, just to ask you what you are doing out of your natural habitat.” They came up to a corner, where a small grocery store was emblazoned “Miller” and “Pabst” and “Food-Stamps”, and stopped the car. A small gaggle of black youths watched them curiously. They were ten to twelve years old and they were drinking beer out in the open.

“Let’s go and buy some bread and milk.” Ralph suggested.

The shop was garishly lit by the beer-signs. Oved found a half-gallon of milk in the refrigerated case, which was rather dirty, and a loaf of bread.  Tiers of 24-packs of beer lined the store, floor to ceiling. Then he looked at the prices.

“Wow, this is expensive!!” he muttered at Ralph. Ralph produced a twenty dollar bill and paid for the groceries and made her way out, followed by the proprietor’s snide eyes, and the inscrutable looks of two twenty-something women.

“No wonder people are poor. Look how much they pay here” Oved observed.

“Oved, you are missing the entire point. Where do you shop for food?”

“At Kohl’s, or Pick’n’save. With coupons, necessities are very cheap in this city.”

“Don’t you think the customers on the West Side know that?”

“I guess they do” Oved conceded.

 

 

“But at Kohl’s they can’t exchange their food stamps for liquor. In the grocery they can and they do. Uncle Sam gives the Black Indigents food stamps so their children can eat good, wholesome food, and instead they get converted to beer for the pubescents and milk becomes  too expensive to buy. And then they say there is hunger on the street in America!!”

Oved was gazing at Ralph in wonder.

“You really despise them, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But then you despise yourself!!” he pointed out.

“No, I reject them and their way of life. It’s un-American, it’s parasitic. I may share the same skin-color, but this is as far as it goes. Did you see how these gals were looking at us?”

“Sorry, I can’t read them” Oved said lightly.

“Resentful, They are the least accepting of any mixed-race relations. So if a nice black man wants to live with his nice white woman, then he has to leave here and go elsewhere.”

“So who is your hero?”

“Martin Luther King of course.”

“Of course. He has a national holiday and a zillion avenues named after him.”

“Don’t scoff. What he said was the basic truism I really believe in. Not the color of our skin, but the strength of our character.”

“Under the skin we are all red” Oved quipped, unwilling to be taken up by her vehemence.

“That’s right, and sometimes the abuse of the system makes me see red. Let's go home to bed. Rhymes pretty good.”

 

“There’s more shooting here than in Lebanon” Oved remarked as the evening news of West Side violence concluded.

“Who shoots who in Lebanon?” Ralph asked. She was toweling her tight curly scalp vigorously, which shook her breasts under the bathrobe, and made Oved instantly aware of his bodily response.

“Who knows? The Christians shoot the Druze who bomb the Sunnis, who booby-trap the Shiites, who backstab the Palestinians and they all hate the Jews and are scared of the Syrians.” Oved shrugged, and zapped the TV.

 

 

“Well, here it is much simpler. Sixteen year old mother of two gets formula from WIC which she sells to the middlemen through the summer and substitutes two percent milk or water for formula. With the money she could buy forty winter coats for ten dollars each at Goodwill, or eight new winter coats at Venture, but instead she elects to buy a four hundred dollar triple-goose-F.A.T long coat which gouges out the eyes of another sixteen year old. That other sixteen year old gets her boyfriend to shoot the first one with a ten-dollar Saturday-night-special and strip that minimally damaged coat from the corpse, so that his girl-friend will be happy to let him in her favors again and make baby number two for her too.”

“Wow. At least it’s for gain, not just for endless revenge” said Oved, recalling some such coats in the ER. He himself had bought a perfectly good parka at Goodwill for twelve-fifty. 

“Substitute Nike Air Jordan shoes or a swanky leather jacket in the above story and you have additional good reasons for wanton murder” Ralph said sarcastically, and placed his hand on her belly, revealed by the gaping bathrobe.

“Must I concern myself with death while we are here celebrating Life?” Oved quipped.

“I guess not. You are the first really good sounding board for my frustrations.”

Oved became very serious. He slithered closer on the bed, avoided kissing the exposed breasts and locked her eyes.

“Ralph, I love to hear you talk, vent, whatever. When I’m with you, I feel lighter, life is not all bad, it can be rather good, I can be a little goofy. So, even when I seem to belittle your concerns, it is only because I love the way you express them, get worked up over them. OK?”

Ralph smiled her most loving and grabbed his thin tush with both hands. 

 

“I bought you a big supply” Ralph chortled and handed him a nylon bag from Walgreens.

“Of what?” he asked suspiciously.

“Rubbers.”

“Pardon my ignorance, O exalted one, what are rubbers?”

“I am off the pill for a month, Doctor’s orders.”

Oved’s face twitched slightly.

“OK, what’s the scoop?” she asked, levity gone.

“I am one hundred percent sterile” Oved said in sepulchral tones. This time Ralph was deeply jolted.

“I have a mild form of CF. Lousy fat absorption and no seminiferous tubules, ergo, no sperm. You are completely safe” he added sadly.

Ralph came around the dinner table, solemnly she took Oved’s hand and led him to her bedroom. Fully clothed she pulled him down on top of her, and sank her black irises into his brown.

“I don’t care. I love you anyway.”

“Ralph, you don’t know me, I am alien, I am dangerous, I could be your worst nightmare.”

“No, you made my worst nightmare disappear. He tried to rape me once. He would have tried again.”

 

“If he tries, I’ll kill him” Oved said sincerely.

“What happened to you in Israel? You are a part of the most ancient people and culture on earth, the most eloquent, the people of the book, yet you are so rootless.” Ralph twisted her fine long pink-black fingers into his brown hair and shook his head, holding his gaze.

Oved told her, omitting nothing. Suddenly it was important that someone would understand him, and accept, if not condone, the death of baby David Gibreel.