Episode 7: Intermezzo: The Transmigration of Souls
In Edinburgh as a young man, he says, he realized that if he didn’t partake of sexual activity the ability might fade, and so, he says, while there he became a “sexual virtuouso.”
A brief non-chronological leap forward to the Fifties and Sixties.
Dr Harry Berelowitz is our family doctor all the years I live in Oranjezicht. His house is in nearby Forest Road, his office in town. When he makes house calls — you can call him day or middle of the night, that’s what doctors do — he arrives in a little grey chug-chug-chug Austin, carrying a worn black leather bag which contains:
his stethoscope;
his dim miner’s lamp that he wears on his forehead, connected by wire to a large battery pack in his trousers pocket;
some wooden sticks to hold your tongue down; and
a leather case with a glass syringe and needle that my mother boils in a pot on the stove before he uses it.
In his ear he wears a single earphone hearing aid, connected by wires to a similar battery pack.
He has strong bony diagnostic fingers, as doctors must have when the only way of looking inside you is a blood test or an X ray that takes days to develop and read. He sticks his curled fingers hard into your belly, taps on your chest and abdomen and listens to the sounds or feels the resistance and makes deductions. He will come to you rain or shine, day or night. When my thumb is smashed by a cricket ball in an inter-school match at age 10, he arrives at night to pierce the nail and let the pressurized blood out. When I have my appendix removed the same year, he is the anesthetist. When my father has a bout of prostate trouble, while I am abroad, my mother calls Dr Berelowitz in the middle of the night to insert a catheter. My mother explains to people that my father’s pain was so great that my father, “you know how he is”, wasn’t even ashamed to be examined in front of her.
Once, playing Batman while hanging from a tree branch in the garbage-strewn field across the street from us in Oranjezicht, I bat-jumped down and crouched on the ground. Then I looked at my right hand: there was blood pouring from the fleshy part above my thumb. I ran back home crying and my mother pushed cotton wool into the cut and she and Shulamit drove me down to Berelowitz’s office in town. There, while they held me down, he poured alcohol into the wound and stitched it.
Dr Berelowitz looks meticulous, precisely put together, a bit frail. His wife is big-boned and younger and refers to him in conversation as “Berelly”. She has a square jaw and looks a bit like an older version of The Woman in Gold in the Neue Galerie. She and Berelly look mismatched. She is social, talk a lot, plays cards. He isn’t.
He is smaller, measured, serious, thoughtful, intellectual, a thin old man with a bald head. In Muizenberg at the each in the Snake Pit his family has a bathing box they rent by the year, and I see him there on weekends. After bathing in the sea he emerges from the cold water with his thin legs sticking out of the loose stretched worn elasticized Speedo-style bathing briefs that don’t keep everything securely in. He flaps his arms back and forth to recover from the cold water, like an Olympic swimmer warming up at the edge of the pool before the race begins. No one snickers at his revealing bathing suit; they know that it is merely a foible, like Einstein’s wild hair or socklessness.
Berelly is not as foreign as my parents, though he is almost twenty years older. He emigrated to South Africa at the age of 18 in 1907, from Lithuania, but eventually went to Edinburgh to study medicine. Now he has an Anglicized accent with just a touch of careful precision and a hint of foreignness in his diction.
In addition to being a GP, he is as an anesthetist. There was a time in Cape Town in the 1920s when Berelly worked at the university hospital and anesthetists were not yet specialists; as that time began to pass and specialists began to take over, Berelly said: I am not a specialist, I am an expert. When I was ten and had my appendix removed, it was he that put me under. During the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, he went to work in Israel as a medic, and helped train anesthetists there.
As I get older and into my late teens he becomes an occasional confidant. Unlike most of my friends’ parents, he is someone you can talk to about really personal things. When I am about to go abroad to study, he tells me about his sensual life by way of giving me advice. In Edinburgh as a young man, he says, he realized that if he didn’t partake of sexual activity the ability might fade, and so, he says, while there he became a “sexual virtuouso.” Before I leave Cape Town in 1966, he cautions me to avoid a certain South African professor in New York whose address someone had given me, says that the man is not suitable company for me. Much later I realize that this is a warning that the professor is gay. That was then.
Whenever I return to South Africa after I leave, until Berelly dies in 1973, I visit him to catch up. I write an aerogram to him occasionally, show him my first published paper while I’m still in graduate school. I still have letters he wrote back to me.
When Berelly becomes terminally ill, I am back home for the summer and go to visit him in bed one last time. He is wearing a colostomy bag, and remarks conversationally to me and the other visitors that someone had told him that when you die you meet all your old acquaintances, and he hopes that will be so. He isn’t insistent, merely suggesting possibilities.
Why my mother comes down with ALS, Berelly is her general doctor, though her treatment, or lack of it, is managed by specialists. We can see that he is sad at her ten-year-long decline and end after witnessing her earlier beauty and spirit through medical ups and downs.
There is one time he misdiagnoses me. I am eleven and grow weak and ill and nauseated and no one can figure out what is wrong with me. I am certain that I have polio, the then prevailing pandemic of daily fear, but don’t tell that to anyone. I worry silently. Berelly visits and prescribes chloromycetin, a new antibiotic. When I still don’t improve, he runs a blood test and discovers a very low white cell count. Knowing that chloromycetin can cause leukemia as a rare side effect, he concludes that I have chloromycetin-induced leukemia. There is a hubbub around my bed which I am aware of without knowing any of these details. Eventually a specialist, Dr Mirvish, come to my bedside. He quickly realizes from another blood test that I merely have glandular fever / mononucleosis. Berelly gives me a series of Vitamin B injections and I quickly recover. I vomit several times during the illness and haven’t vomited since🤞.
There are no people like Berelly any more — a doctor who treats me with affection and seriousness, without patronization and without superiority. He removes rather than crosses boundaries. He had a round bald head with a very small residual fringe of white hair at the back, and when my son is born several years after Berelly’s death, I look at his round bald head and am immediately reminded of Berelly himself. I like to think he has been reincarnated.
My father was one of those GPs who qualified in the UK , did house calls, did surgery, delivered many babies. Your story reminds me of him.
Berelly comes across as a colourful character, humane and caring. The role he played in your family, active and responsible. Thanks for sharing!