she spoke. When she finally hung up the phone, I steeled for the thirty-nine lashes.
“You’ve been at Jerusalem Hospital a long time, Kobi.”
“Twelve years at the clinic. Five as chief psychologist.”
“And I’ve only been here a couple of months. You may think it’s premature for me to make judgments, but that’s what I was hired to do. Things have been very lax around here.”
“Well, that depends—”
“I think you’d better let me finish.”
I wondered what she had looked like thirty years ago, before she’d started stuffing herself into tightly tailored suits. Had she ever had a soft edge? I tried to imagine her as a young woman but could see nothing but this click-heeled harridan.
“There’s a lot of discontent among the staff,” she began, her voice stern.
“People like to complain about their bosses,” I said calmly. “It’s human nature. You can’t take that kind of thing too seriously.”
“I’ve been hired to take it seriously,” she snapped. “Caseloads are far too large. There’s not enough psychiatric support, too much redundant paperwork, and no substantive training. The waiting lists are endless—the entire country is reeling from trauma, and it takes three months to get an appointment. The clinicians and support staff have given me numerous suggestions of how to make this clinic function more efficiently. They say that talking to you is like talking to a wall.”
I nodded. “In this town, people find that quite effective.”
She ignored my lame attempt at humor. “It’s not only inefficiency they complain of. You come in late, you leave early. You disappear for hours at a time. Your caseload is a fraction the size of the other clinicians.”
“Well you know, there’s a lot of administrative work—”
“You’re seen as, let’s see . . .” She lifted her chin to perch a pair of reading glasses on the end of her beaked nose and scanned a long page of hand-scrawled notes. “Inaccessible . . . aloof . . . arrogant . . . not a member of the team . . . out of touch with the field . . .”
“I’ve always wondered what that phrase meant. You know, there’s way too much jargon—”
She took her glasses off with a snap of her wrist. “There are charts that have been languishing on your desk since the Flood.”
“Now in all fairness, that’s well before my time.” I grinned at my own joke, but her face remained stony.
“You showed an Arabic movie at the last staff meeting. Without subtitles. Is that your idea of in-service training?”
“It’s a great film—I thought it would be dubbed. It’s really an interesting case study of the Oedipal urge that underlies—”
“We are overrun with severe grief reactions and post-traumatic stress, and you’re worried about the Oedipal urge?”
“Now look, you can’t just ignore the fundamentals—”
A muscle moved in her jaw. “OK, forget the outmoded theories and utter inadequacy of your in-service trainings. There are other, more serious complaints—rumors of inappropriate relationships with patients.”
“Inappropriate. That’s another great word. If it were eliminated from the therapeutic vocabulary—”
She interrupted me again, her voice steely. “No one has yet filed an official complaint, but there’s a lot of ugly gossip going around.”
“I’m really shocked that you would listen to unsubstantiated rumors,” I said indignantly, my mind quickly flicking through the possibilities.
“The new intern, Dina. She called this morning to say that she’s quitting her internship. She won’t tell anyone why.” That one I hadn’t expected.
“There could be any number of reasons,” I stammered.
“You were the last one seen with her.” She paused, watching me closely.
I regained my composure. If this was her big gotcha moment, she’d blown it. After all, nothing had happened between Dina and me! “Well of course, that must be it,” I said in the no-nonsense tone I used to calm hysterical patients. “We had to hospitalize a psychotic patient Thursday night. Dina asked me to help out—she’d never been involved with a forced hospitalization. You know how stressful those can be; we were there for hours. And it was the same evening as the King George Street bombing. You can just imagine what was going on in that waiting room. By the way,” I added, “we should speak to the ER about finding a more protected location for psychiatric patients. We could see and hear almost everything.” I shook my head. “It was terribly stressful for her. She’s awfully young, you know.” I sat back and let out a world-weary sigh. “My guess is that the experience made her realize that she’s just not cut out for this work. Better to realize it earlier than later.” I looked at her expectantly.
Her expression had not changed. “You expect me to believe that story?”
“Why not?” I sat forward again. “What are you implying?”
“You know what I’m implying.”
“But you have no proof at all . . .” My mind raced. This was insane. Of all the examples she might have given, this was the one she was fixated on?
She glared at me. “You’re right. I have no proof that anything untoward happened. She won’t say anything to anyone. But there’s a lot of whispering going around.”
“Look, this is a big misunderstanding. The receptionists don’t like me very much. They start rumors. You know how that is.”
“And why do you think they don’t like you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. An authority thing. I think there’s some unconscious envy, and—”
“Kobi, I’m putting you on probation.” It took a moment for the words to sink in.
“But . . . I don’t think you can actually do that . . . and . . .”
“Three months. Passover begins Wednesday night. After the holiday, I’ll take over all your administrative duties. You will start coming in on time and leaving on time. You will get the standard hour for lunch. Your caseload is going up by a third, and you’re going to keep on top of the paperwork. Starting today, the receptionists are taking full control over your schedule—I’ve given them explicit instructions in that regard. I want all those charts completed and off your desk. You can use the holiday to get a jump start.” She looked at me sharply. “And make sure the rumors stop. Is that clear?”
I stared at her, my mind in a daze.
“Kobi.” She leaned forward and her voice took on the familiar, exasperated tone of my elementary school principal. “I hope you’ve been listening. You start behaving like a professional or you’re fired. The hospital is undergoing major cutbacks and reorganization; I don’t like it any more than you do. But your squash buddy ran this clinic like a country club, and those days are over. They hired me because I was trained in America, where productivity and accountability are taken seriously. Where people sue if they don’t get appropriate treatment. That’s the model the whole country is going toward, and not only in health care.” She sat back again. “We all have to start getting used to it.”
I continued to stare at her like a dumb kid.
“But it’s not just that,” she continued, her voice suddenly pressured and earnest. “At a time of such extreme collective distress, mental health clinics have a particular responsibility to the nation. We have to function in as professional and efficient a manner as possible. We owe at least that to our fellow citizens. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded my head, still unable to find my voice. She sighed deeply, then got up to let me know I was dismissed.