The Philosopher

Pinchas Altshul, restaurateur and free-thinker, would not let himself be saved.
”The sentence has been passed,” he wheezed through an ironic smile as he watched me adjust the settings of the ventilator beside his bed, “and somewhere the judge is handing over to the executioner.”
”We are morbid, aren’t we?” I answered, laughing as if to deny any such thing as I tested the apparatus. “You’ll be well again yet.”
The murky waters of his wintry-grey eyes called me “liar!” but his blue swollen lips said something else. “I respect you. You are a medical man... a doctor, young as you are. So... so let’s be honest, hm?”
He was a biggish man with a large head and thinned-down hair combed to a side, with shoulders broad and sturdily square and an expanded torso that heaved wheezily with his every laborious indrawn breath. He’d been brought in during the previous night and the yellowish morning rain-threatened light falling upon him from the window beside him gave his complexion a purple hue.
”Why... why I’m in hospital at all, I don’t know,” he said with the flourish of a hand. “It... It only lands you with more work and throws the economy........